A resolution to express the sense of the Senate regarding the importance of preventing the Government of Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability.

Mr. President, I thank the leader for yielding. I want to applaud him for asking to bring the legislation that passed unanimously out of the Banking Committee to the floor because there is no one in this Chamber who has been stronger on pursuing sanctions on Iran and trying to defer Iran from achieving nuclear weapons. I support and am on Senator Lieberman's resolution.

But time is of the essence. We must send to the Iranians a clear message that they cannot just forestall negotiations and have negotiations thinking that they are buying time. We must show them that notwithstanding their intentions to buy time, there are consequences.

The consequences of those sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran that are already moving forward and that the administration is fully seeking to enforce, and the continued perfecting sanctions that the Banking Committee sent out unanimously is incredibly important to send the Iranians a message.

I look at what the legislation will do in part. It, in essence, closes loopholes that the Iranians have figured out. It creates sanctions on the national Iranian oil company and the national Iranian tanker company, making them agents of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and imposes sanctions on financial institutions that would facilitate transactions.

This is important. The Iranians are using this as a way to get around it. It has sanctions on satellite companies that impose human rights sanctions on those companies that provide satellite services to the Iranian regime but fail to prevent jamming by Iran of transmissions by others of the same satellite service company. It has sanctions on financial messaging services, and even though Swift, the largest of them, already pulled the plug on the Iranians, we don't want any other messaging service to fill that void. We want to make sure that noose is as tight as possible.

Originally, when we sent a 100-to-0 vote out of here, they said: We are in trouble. But now they are saying to themselves: Well, buying time seems to succeed.

We cannot allow the Iranians to believe, as they head into these negotiations next week, that there is anything but a foot on the head of the snake and that we will continue to do that and drive every possible sanction and close every possible loophole, which is largely what the legislation the leader was seeking to pass accomplishes. That is why it passed unanimously out of the Banking Committee.

Even as we talk about the resolution, there is no reason to stop the very essence of what would send a message to the Iranians--that it will hurt them in their economy and undermine their ability to continue in Iran as a government, and that it is going to be the very strongest set of sanctions we can levy from one government to another. It will have a multilateral effect, which is when sanctions take place the best.

I am beside myself. Are there amendments that I might want to offer? Of course. But I find it far more important to move now and get passage and send this strong set of sanctions so that the Iranians will get the message rather than to linger and ultimately have those negotiations take place and not send a message.

I appreciate the majority leader's efforts. I applaud them. I am certainly for Senator Lieberman's resolution. I don't believe in containment as a policy, but moving the set of sanctions to ensure that the Iranians don't do anything but come to the table and say they are ready to follow a course of disarmament in terms of their nuclear production is incredibly important.

Sometimes things can wait. This is not one of those times in which waiting produces the desired result. On the contrary, it produces a negative result because they believe we will not continue to pursue tightening the noose and closing every loophole and being of one mind. I hope we can achieve that before we leave.

Yes.

Yes, the legislation came from the Banking Committee.

That is correct.

It is.

She did until the majority leader took her from me.

We have thought at various times that we would be on the Senate floor and have it passed, and

there has always been an additional desire or objection. I just think what we have before us, especially in timing, doesn't mean we cannot continue to perfect it as we move to the future, as we are doing in this legislation.

But this legislation, now passed unanimously out of committee, is supported by the major advocates of those who share our vision that we cannot have a nuclear-powered Iran and an Iran with nuclear weapons, and believe that it is important to move now so we can achieve that goal and send a message to the Iranians.

So I think time, in this case, is of the essence. That is why I came to the floor to support the leader's efforts.

Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of both my colleague from South Carolina and my colleague from Arizona. They are leaders in this regard in terms of the national defense. And if I ever had a case, I would want Senator Graham to argue it for me because he is a fine lawyer. I have seen that on the floor and I have seen it in his role as a reservist in part of, as I understand, the Judge Advocate General program. So he does a fantastic job.

Let me make some observations that I think are critically important.

No. 1 is that I share Senator Graham's and Senator Lieberman's concern and the desire to have the Senate on record as saying we do not and cannot accept an Iran that has nuclear power and nuclear weapons. That is why I signed on to their resolution. And I think their resolution moving exactly in tandem, parallel with the sanctions legislation that I played a significant role with the chairman of the Banking Committee, Chairman Johnson, and others to bring to the floor is incredibly important.

But let me make some observations.

First of all, in the committee itself, when it passed unanimously, all of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle had the opportunity to offer an amendment and/or language that would have done exactly what the Senator wants, and no one on either side of the aisle sought to do it because the focus was on the jurisdiction of the committee, which is economic sanctions--economic sanctions that have proven in their first iteration to begin to have real consequences to the Iranians: devaluing the rial by over 50 percent; creating challenges in their economy; closing the financial institutions they can deal with in the world; looking at their oil, having major discounts on their oil and finding it increasingly difficult to sell. And we have the opportunity to perfect that, to make it even stronger, even more viable before they head into negotiations and think they can buy time.

Now, it was silent when it came out of the Banking Committee. And, yes, in the managers' amendment there is that provision because, in fact, in order to deal with one of the objections of our colleague on the other side of the aisle, Senator Paul, provisions saying that this was not a direct military authorization were included so that we could ultimately find the opportunity to pass it on the floor with unanimous consent--the same unanimity the Banking Committee had, the same unanimity we had when we passed the sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran. That unanimity sends an incredibly strong and powerful message to the Iranians.

So it was in the process of accommodating that Senator Reid talked about over the last 2 months to try to get us to a point that we could pass legislation, that in the process of accommodating that, that language comes forward.

The concern is ultimately taken care of by Senator Lieberman and Senator Graham's resolution; that, in fact, the President has said, as the Commander in Chief of the country, that a nuclear-armed Iran is not an option; that containment of a nuclear-powered Iran is not an option.

This President has put all of the military assets that are necessary that did not exist before in the Persian Gulf to both respond to any incident or to initiate any action he thinks may be necessary. Therefore, those actions more than any words have made it very clear to the Iranians that is a real possibility if the national interests and security of the United States are ultimately challenged.

So I really think that insisting on the sanctions part of the legislation, that has the full force and effect of law and real consequences to the Iranians in their economy--which is the most significant way that we undermine their march toward nuclear weapons-- is important to move, while you move independently the legislation that Senator Lieberman and Senator Graham have talked about, which is making the intentions or amplifying the intentions of the President crystal clear. But you should not hold hostage the sanctions legislation in order to accomplish a goal that should be taken care of by the Lieberman-Graham resolution, and you shouldn't hold it hostage when, in fact, you have a powerful tool to exercise before the next round of negotiations.

The Iranians must know that we are one of purpose, and that oneness comes by passing the sanctions unanimously through this Chamber and achieving, ultimately, their effects.

So that is the only point of disagreement with us. Don't hold the sanctions legislation hostage. None of our colleagues sought to include that language. And the language that is included is in response to a colleague from the other side of the aisle in order to be able to move the legislation. So you can't have your cake and eat it too. But we do need to have our ability to move the sanction before the Senate adjourns this week, and I think that will meet our collective interests as a nation.

There is only one piece of turf we should be fighting for; that is, the collective turf that is our country. That is what we can do by passing the sanctions legislation.

I hope Senator Reid will have the opportunity to clear the way and to move it by unanimous consent and in doing so send a very powerful message on behalf of the Senate.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, what is the pending business?

Madam President, I have a cloture motion at the desk.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the mandatory quorum under rule XXII be waived.

Madam President, I have spoken before about the importance of the FDA bill. It is something we have to get done. Literally, people's lives depend upon it. It addresses so many things with the FDA to make it a better organization. We have to get this done. As I said before, if my Republican colleagues don't like the bill, offer an amendment--offer an amendment. Take that out. Put something in if you don't like it. But I hope we don't have to go through voting on cloture on this Monday night. We should be legislating on this on Monday. So I am stunned that once again, on a motion to proceed, when there has been an agreement that we would proceed to this with relevant amendments-- everybody says that is what they want to do. It is not germane amendments, which is very narrow, it is relevant amendments. It gives people a lot of opportunity to change this legislation in many different ways. So I hope we do not have to have that cloture vote Monday night.

Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 1905

Madam President, I now ask unanimous consent that the Foreign Relations Committee be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 1905, the Iran Threat Reduction Act, and that the Senate proceed to its consideration; that the Reid-Johnson(SD)-Shelby substitute amendment, which is at the desk and is the text of Calendar No. 320, the Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human Rights Act, as reported by the Banking Committee, be considered; that a Reid-Johnson(SD)-Shelby amendment, which is at the desk, be agreed to; that the substitute amendment, as amended, be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed; that the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table; that there be no intervening action or debate; and that any statements related to this matter be printed in the Record at the appropriate place.

Mr. President, is there an objection by either Senator Kyl or Senator Blunt?

This is such an interesting conversation here on the floor this afternoon. I did not have the papers. Now, I do not blame my friend from Arizona for not having the documents. I do not blame my friend from Missouri for only having a half hour to look at this. This was given to the Republican leader yesterday, midday. The language they are objecting to was in the base bill, so unless they did not read the base bill, they have a problem here. Now, they said they want to get it done--strange way of showing they want to get it done.

This has been a classic example of rope-a-dope. I try to be a patient man. I have been very patient with my staff working with Senator Kirk's staff, the minority leader's staff. I have tried to be as patient as I can be.

No, not right now. This is absolutely untoward, what is happening here. We have tried to get this done every day. Oh, it is just we have to do a little bit more. We have this agreement that was agreed to by all of the parties, but, of course, now there is no agreement.

I am deeply disappointed that my Republican colleagues are preventing the Senate from passing additional critical sanctions against Iran. If they want to embarrass the President, this is a strange way to do it. Two months ago I came to the Senate floor and said we needed to pass these sanctions immediately. The fastest way forward was to pass the bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Johnson and Shelby, which passed out of the Banking Committee unanimously. But Republicans then said no, as they are saying today. Republicans said they wanted to include ideas from Senator Kirk, Senator Paul, and wished to move forward with S. Res. 380 on containment.

We heard their objections. We have tried mightily to address them, with the goal of getting this bill passed and protecting our own national security and that of our ally Israel. This deal includes a bipartisan managers' package sponsored by Senators Shelby and Johnson, with items of importance to Senators Menendez, Kirk, Paul, and Johnson.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has expressed strong support for this package to Senator McConnell and to me. In a letter today, AIPAC urged us to move forward with this package as quickly as possible. I ask unanimous consent that letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, Democrats are ready to move forward and vote on an amended S. Res. 380, the bipartisan Graham-Casey-Lieberman legislation. This amendment would put the Senate on record, along with President Obama, ruling out a policy of containment on Iran. Yet Republicans have objected again. We cannot afford to delay these sanctions and slow them down any longer. On May 23 there is a round of international negotiations taking place with the Iranians on subjects related to this resolution we have.

Democrats are ready to move forward. We are ready to pass both the Iran sanctions bill and the containment resolution now--not later, now. We cannot afford any more delays. Sanctions are a key tool in our work to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, threatening Israel, and jeopardizing the national security of the United States.

I am to the end of my patience. I usually never raise my voice with a Senator. I apologize to my friend from Arizona. I did a few minutes ago. The conversation was between him and me. But I am really upset about this. I feel that I have been jerked around--that is a pretty good understanding of the language people have--because we can never quite get there. The Republicans have kept us from moving forward on this for 2 months. We should have done what Shelby and Johnson told us to do. So I hope something will happen on this in the near future, but I have to be honest with you, I do not have much faith that it will.

Mr. President, when my friend indicates, why is there any problem, and that they agree--it is just like the issue of student loans when they

say they agree, except they will not let us legislate on that bill. They think this is a great thing to do, but we cannot do it. They say they need more communication. How about 2 months? How much more do they need?

I will not get into getting anyone in trouble, but the Republicans were given this in mid-afternoon. Maybe they were busy, but that doesn't matter. The point is we have tried to get something done, and we cannot get it done.

I think it is too bad for this institution. I am not outraged; I am upset because I feel I have been used as a tool to try to adversely affect the President in some way. I will continue to keep an open mind, but I have to say that I am terribly disappointed. It looks as though we are going to arrive at May 23--and the Iranians have people around who are watching this. They are laughing at us. We cannot even come up with a simple resolution. It has no force of law--I should not say that; it does have some. But they are laughing at us.

Here is the U.S. Senate quibbling over a sentence that has been in this resolution since it was drafted.

No matter how many times you say it, the language we are told they are complaining about was in the initial bill.

Mr. President, I appreciate my friend saying most people work 5 days a week. I work more than 5 days a week, and I have been working the last 2 months trying to get this done. Every time we tried to do it in the last few weeks--and Senator Kirk is ill, and I gave him every benefit of the doubt. Let's try to do what Senator Kirk thinks is a good idea. If we can agree, we will do it.

Mr. President, we have been trying to get this done for a long time. It is not just today at 1 o'clock; I wanted to move forward on this a long time ago. They say: Let's just give it another day or so and we will take care of this. But that is not how it has worked.

I yield to the Senator from New Jersey.

Mr. President, if my friend will yield, I want to make sure the record is clear. When I talked about it having no force of law, we were talking about the containment resolution.

I ask this question to my friend from New Jersey: What does he think the Iranians are doing watching this performance today? How does he think they are feeling about what we are doing today--that we cannot pass this resolution?

Before my friend leaves, I direct a question to him. Is it true that he is a member of the Banking Committee?

It is true that this resolution came from the Banking Committee?

The matter about which we talk, the Iranian sanctions legislation, came from the Banking Committee. It was reported unanimously from the committee, right?

During the last 2 months, the Senator from New Jersey and his staff have been heavily involved in what is going on during the negotiations that have taken place; is that fair?

Jessica Lewis, who is seated by me, my foreign policy adviser--is it true that she worked for the Senator from New Jersey?

And it is true that we have worked over this period of time--our staffs, working with Republicans--very hard to try to get something done. I say to my friend, is it true that each time we were there, were not there the next few minutes, the next day--it has taken forever, 2 months, right?

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

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

Madam President, I have high hopes that in the days immediately ahead the Senate will proceed to the consideration of the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act of 2012.

I am pleased to report to my colleagues that the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee has produced an excellent bill, the product of nearly a full year of bipartisan collaboration and good- faith negotiation. The bill reauthorizes critically important FDA user- fee agreements and systematically modernizes FDA's medical product authority to help boost American innovation and ensure that patients have access to the therapies they need.

In this era of often extreme partisanship and legislative gridlock, this bill is truly a refreshing exception. That is why I am hopeful and confident that there will be no objection on the Senate floor to moving to this bill next week.

Frankly, all of us on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee are proud not only of the bill but of the remarkable bipartisan process that produced it. I am especially grateful to the committee's ranking member, Senator Mike Enzi, for his own insistence on a bipartisan process, and for his leadership in moving this very complex legislation forward.

This afternoon I will review the bipartisan process--at every step marked by openness and transparency--that produced this legislation.

More than 1 year ago, beginning in early 2011 for some issues, my office and the office of Ranking Member Enzi convened six bipartisan HELP Committee working groups. Each working group was tasked with developing consensus policy proposals on key issues, such as drug shortages and the integrity of the drug supply chain.

These bipartisan working groups met weekly and, in many cases, biweekly, over the whole course of 2011, discussing and developing draft consensus proposals.

While this consensus process was ongoing, my staff would often meet many times a week with staffers representing both Democratic and Republican members of the HELP Committee.

As I said, every single working group was bipartisan, and staff from my office worked closely with Senator Enzi's office to solicit priorities from other members of the committee. In many cases, we invited all HELP offices to join the groups.

We even invited staff of noncommittee Members who have been leaders in a particular policy area to join the groups. For example, our bipartisan drug shortage working group had staff members from 18 Senate offices, including the staffers for two Senators who are not even members of the committee.

While developing the consensus drafts, each of these bipartisan working groups met with key stakeholders throughout the year to solicit their input. For example, the drug supply chain integrity working group met with more than 40 stakeholders over a period of 9 months.

In addition to the working group meetings, beginning in late 2011, my staff met twice a week for almost 18 weeks with all Democratic HELP offices to brief them on the reauthorization process and update them on the progress of all of the policy proposals.

To further engage committee members, the administration, stakeholders, and the public, we held a total of five full committee hearings on the user-fee reauthorization over the last year. After our first public hearing in July of 2011, we held three hearings on distinct policy issues surrounding user fees, as well as a hearing on the actual user-fee agreements.

As a result of the excellent work of these bipartisan working groups, in March of this year my staff and Ranking Member Enzi's staff released five bipartisan consensus drafts and solicited further stakeholder input. Bipartisan staff conducted stakeholder briefings on the release of each draft, and the drafts were available on the HELP Web site for more than 3 weeks prior to markup.

In response to the five discussion drafts released to the public, our staffs received more than 160 comments and held more than 30 stakeholder meetings on a bipartisan basis over 3\1/2\ weeks.

Bipartisan staff worked to incorporate stakeholder feedback into the drafts, and then the committee publicly released a managers' package on Wednesday, April 18, 1 week before markup.

On April 25 of this year, the committee met to consider the bill. Committee members voted nearly unanimously, by voice vote, to send the bill to the full Senate.

As I said, this entire process has been a model of bipartisanship, openness, and transparency. Believe me, it was tough to achieve consensus on many of the complex and controversial provisions in the bill. At every step, it required difficult and sometimes painful compromise. Even as the committee chair, I did not get some of my highest priority proposals, since I could not get consensus among members and stakeholders.

Compromise and sometimes sacrifice were essential. I was acutely aware, as were other members of the committee, that it is imperative that we pass the user-fee agreements in this bill. We were determined not to allow partisanship to slow this package down or to jeopardize our goal of consensus.

As I said, the end result is an excellent bill. In addition to authorizing the critically important FDA user-fee agreements, this legislation makes it possible for the FDA to keep pace with the ever- changing biomedical landscape.

Here are some of the major provisions of the FDA Safety and Innovation Act, which will be on the floor next week:

It authorizes key user-fee agreements to ensure timely approval of medical products. It streamlines the device approval process, while enhancing patient protections. It modernizes FDA's goal of drug supply chain authority. We spur innovation and incentives for drug development for life-threatening conditions. The bill reauthorizes and improves incentives for pediatric trials. It helps prevent and mitigate drug shortages. It increases FDA's accountability and transparency.

With this bipartisan bill, I think we have a bill, I hope, we can all support and that we can move forward on expeditiously. Neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted. On every issue, we sought consensus. Where we could not achieve consensus, we didn't allow our differences to deflect us from the critically important goal of producing a bill that everybody could support. As a result, this is a truly bipartisan bill, and it is broadly supported by the patient groups and industry.

This is the chart showing over 100 different associations and groups, patient groups, consumer groups, pharmaceutical groups, and research organizations all over America that have come out in support of this legislation. So everyone from the pharmaceutical industry, your drugstores, research institutions, and consumer organizations have all now supported this bill to reauthorize our user-fee agreements.

I am also very pleased that today the Obama administration issued an official statement of administration policy asserting that ``the administration strongly supports passage of S. 3187.''

Lastly, I will mention that the CBO scored the bill as fully paid for and estimates that the legislation would reduce the deficit by $363 million over the next 10 years. Again, not only are we enhancing patients' rights and protections, we are ensuring better integrity for the drug supply chain. As we know, more than 80 percent of the products that go into our drugs manufactured in this country come from

abroad. There have been many stories written, and many television investigative stories included, on problems in that drug supply chain. Well, this bill enhances our ability to ensure the integrity of that drug supply chain from where they get the raw materials to where they put it together in this country.

This bill, as I said, not only does good for our patients, we enhance FDA's authority to streamline and make sure that we bring drugs to market in more rapid order. We save $363 million over 10 years doing it.

I look forward to bringing the FDA Safety and Innovation Act to the floor in a few days. The House has had a similar bipartisan process, and they are also scheduled to take up their version of the bill next week. If the Senate acts quickly, I am confident we can go to conference and get a final bill on the President's desk this summer.

To that end, I am hopeful and confident we can move without objection to consideration of the bill. It is important that we do so. This is absolutely must-pass legislation. It is critically important to the FDA, to the industry, and to our patients to get this done.

I urge all of my colleagues to join in the bipartisan spirit of cooperation we have engineered and witnessed in the HELP Committee over the last year. Let us come together, Democrats and Republicans alike, and get this legislation on the floor and pass it because of its critical importance to the American people.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

The Senator wishes to speak now?

Madam President, last week my colleagues on the other side of the aisle blocked a vote that would have eased the burden of debt for millions of college students in Minnesota and across the country. My Republican friends disagreed with us about the best way to pay for this legislation, so a minority of Senators kept us from helping millions of families and taking a step toward keeping our Nation's workforce globally competitive. But this debate is not just about helping students pay for college. I want to talk a little bit about the two competing proposals to pay for this critical legislation. I wish to talk about our national priorities and our national values.

On one side, the Democratic proposal would close a loophole that allows some of the wealthiest Americans to avoid paying taxes they should owe to the Federal Government. This fix, our fix, would only apply to Americans making over $250,000 a year and would not create any new taxes on businesses or individuals. It would close a loophole that allows high-income people to get out of paying taxes everyone else in America is already expected to pay. This is what it is.

You see, some people making a lot of money talk to their accountants and tax lawyers who have figured out that the law was written in such a way that you could use an S corporation to get around paying some of your payroll taxes. Payroll taxes are your Social Security taxes and your Medicare taxes.

S corporations are basically a passthrough. Whatever profits your company makes, you at the end of the year pass it through to you and claim it as income--and you pay regular income taxes on it. It is income. But although the law was never intended to allow this, this is the loophole: You can pay yourself an artificially low amount of money sometime earlier in the year and call that a salary, say, $40,000. Thus you will pay enough to qualify for Social Security later when you retire. You will only pay FICA on this amount. But then at the end of the year you take the rest of the business's profits as income. Remember, this is considered income--but you do not pay FICA taxes on the amount. That is the loophole. You still pay income tax on it because it is income but, because of an accident in the way the law is written--this was not intended--you avoid paying FICA taxes on the part you did not initially call salary.

All of the money you pocketed, both the so-called salary and the profit at the end of the year, again, is income. It is income. It is not capital gains so you should be paying, like everybody else, Medicare taxes on all of it and Social Security taxes on income up to $110,000, like everyone else. There is simply no excuse, no reason for not paying taxes, paying your FICA taxes on the $110,000 Social Security, and all the rest for Medicare, except for an anomaly that was accidentally written into the Code.

This is exactly the type of loophole we should be closing. It is not something that Congress created intentionally, for a reason--to help people buy homes or to encourage investment in research and development. There is no reason this loophole exists. There is no purpose to it. There is no reason to keep it there.

The Democratic legislation would close that loophole for those individuals making more than $250,000 in a year and we would use that savings to prevent the doubling of interest that students pay on Stafford subsidized loans.

By contrast, the Republican proposal which passed the House a few weeks ago, would eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which is our national investment in preventive health care. This proposal would undermine the health of our Nation by cutting funding for cancer screenings, child immunizations, and diabetes prevention, among others. It would be fiscally irresponsible to boot, since according to a study for the Trust for America's Health, every dollar invested in proven community-based disease prevention programs yields a return of $5.60.

My home State of Minnesota leads the country when it comes to providing high-quality low-cost health care. When I was elected to represent the people of Minnesota, I put together a series of roundtables with experts around Minnesota to learn more about our health care system. I heard the same thing from leading national experts at the Mayo Clinic, the University of Minnesota, from providers, from doctors and people in public health and rural health, insurance--everyone said the same thing: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

There is no question that if we catch cancer early the patient will be much more likely to make a full recovery. If every child has access to immunizations, we will prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases and our kids will grow up stronger and healthier. And if we can prevent someone from getting diabetes they will be healthier than if we wait until they have it and then treat them for the rest of their lives.

Not only will people be healthier if we prevent disease but we will save a lot of money too. That is why the health care law included the Prevention and Public Health Fund. The fund already is investing in community-based programs such as the diabetes prevention program, a program that Dick Lugar and I fought to include in the health care law. This program was pilot-tested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Saint Paul, MN, and in Indianapolis. It involves structured nutrition classes for 16 weeks and 16 weeks of exercise at community-based organizations such as the YMCA, with people who have prediabetes.

Guess what. The program, the diabetes prevention program, has been shown to reduce the likelihood that someone with prediabetes will be diagnosed with full-blown type 2 diabetes by nearly 60 percent. Those are pretty good odds.

The program doesn't just make people healthier, it also saves everyone money. The diabetes prevention program, the program I just described, costs about $300 per participant, as compared to treating type 2 diabetes which costs more than $6,500 every single year.

That is why United Health, the largest private insurer in the country--that happens to also be headquartered in Minnesota--is already providing the program to its beneficiaries. In fact, the CEO of United Health told me that for every dollar they invest in the diabetes prevention program they save $4 in health care later on. The money in the Prevention and Public Health Program in the affordable care act is there to scale up this program around the country so everybody in the country, every person who has prediabetes, can have availability to it. It can be available to them.

This homegrown program is exactly what the Prevention and Public Health Fund was designed to support. It is not the only one like it. In Minnesota the fund has gone to support tobacco cessation programs. It has helped prevent infectious diseases. It has expanded our desperately needed primary care workforce. I think we can all agree these are worthwhile investments.

Unfortunately, many of my friends on the other side of the aisle are trying to end this important work, calling the Prevention and Public Health Fund a waste of money or worse. Last week, one of my colleagues on the floor inaccurately claimed that ``a health clinic was using the fund to spay and neuter pets.''

Let me take this opportunity to set the record straight. That is not true. The Department of Health my friend accused of using prevention funds to pay to spay pets has not and will not spend prevention fund money for this purpose. I ask that in these debates we confine ourselves to facts.

This all comes down to priorities. My friends on the other side of the aisle would rather cut the Prevention and Public Health fund than close a tax loophole for wealthy Americans which serves absolutely no purpose. In fact, they would rather keep us from voting on a bill to ease the burden of debt for students across the country than close this loophole. I hear them sometimes talking about closing loopholes so we can bring the marginal rate down. If you cannot close this loophole which has no purpose, I don't see any loophole we can possibly agree to close.

I ask my friends on both sides of the aisle one favor: Talk to your constituents. Talk to the people who have been saved from the affliction of diabetes or who have quit smoking or who have

immunized their children because of the Prevention and Public Health Fund. Talk to your State and local departments of health which are working to prevent outbreaks of the next dangerous strain of flu thanks to the infectious disease prevention fund. Stand with me in support of the Prevention and Public Health Fund.

I thank the Chair.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask consent the Senator from Delaware, Senator Coons, and I could have a colloquy for up to 15 minutes.

The Senator from Delaware is not yet on the floor but I know he is coming. Because I know other Senators wish to speak at 2 o'clock, I am going to go ahead with my remarks. When he comes I will let him go ahead with his.

Each year, approximately 50,000 foreign students receive advanced degrees from universities in this country in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We call those in shorthand STEM degrees--science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Of those 50,000 students, at least 17,000 go home to other parts of the world. These are some of the brightest men and women in the world. They are attracted to the best universities in the world. I always say our universities, our great research universities especially, are our secret weapons for job growth. Since World War II, many estimates by the National Academy of Sciences suggest that more than half of our new jobs have come from increases in technology. It is very hard to think of any important new innovation in biology or in the sciences that has not had some sort of government-sponsored research over that time. So our research universities are job factories and our advanced degree holders are the ones who come up with the great ideas.

As a former president of the University of Tennessee, which is a fine research university, I know that increasingly in the science, technology, engineering, and math programs in those universities many of the students are from other countries. These students line up in India and compete, hoping they will get a chance to come to the United States. They have done the same in China. They do this everywhere in the world. About 17,000 of those 50,000 who come for advanced degrees go home each year.

Yesterday, Senator Coons and I introduced legislation that would help those 17,000 students, and we hope more who may come, to come to the United States, get their advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math, and then stay here and create jobs in our country instead of going home and creating them in other countries.

I will have to admit there is a value to students who go home. It is probably our best foreign diplomacy, to have someone come from another country, live here, learn our values, go home and explain those at home. But we want the next Google to be created here, not in China. We want the brightest people in the world. If we are going to attract them here and provide education for them, we want to give them every opportunity to come here. And today we make them go home because of our immigration policy.

The legislation Senator Coons and I introduced yesterday now has the support already of at least two other Senators, Senator Lugar and Senator Isakson, who have asked to cosponsor. It would, No. 1, create a new student visa for citizens of other nations who want to come here and pursue a master's or doctoral degree in science, technology, engineering, and math. No. 2, once they get that degree, the new visa created in this bill would allow them to remain here for 12 months, to look for a job. And, No. 3, once they are employed, the bill establishes a procedure to allow students to change their immigration status and to receive a green card. Finally, these new green cards would not count toward any existing green card limit.

This idea is not new. It has as much support outside of the Senate Chamber as any idea I know about--from companies such as Microsoft, which tells us they have 2,600 jobs available that require computer science degrees that start at $104,000 a year. They would like to have these students work here and create jobs for us. We know from our own experience the importance of these green-card holders.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN, is probably the greatest engineering laboratory in the world. Who runs it? Dr. Jeffrey Wadsworth ran it. He had a green card from the United Kingdom. Dr. Thom Mason, who is there now, had a green card from Canada. Thomas Zacharia, the current Deputy Director at ORNL and the father of supercomputing, has a green card from India.

We want them here, not in India, not in the United Kingdom, not in Canada.

I greatly appreciate the leadership of Senator Coons of Delaware on this issue. He has worked hard on it. He has been a leader on it.

I only have one more thing to say about it before I step aside and let him talk about his ideas. In 2005, we began to work on something called the America COMPETES Act in this body. In 2007 we passed it. It was sponsored by the Democratic leader and the Republican leader. It had 35 Democratic sponsors and 35 Republican sponsors. It passed the House. It was reauthorized last year. We asked the best minds in our Nation to tell us what would be the 20 things we could do as a Congress to make sure we are competitive in the future so that we can keep this high standard of living we have come to enjoy. It is a very high standard of living. We have about 5 percent of all the people in the world. We have about 25 percent of all the wealth in the world that we produce each year. How can we keep doing that?

They gave us these 20 ideas and we passed many of them. It is one of the great successes of our Congress over the last several years, working together. One piece of unfinished business from the America COMPETES Act of 2005 and 2007 was to pin a green card on the foreign student who gets a graduate degree in science, math, technology,or engineering.

The legislation Senator Coons and I offered yesterday would do that. I greatly value his leadership and his approach. I hope we can work with our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take this idea, turn it into a law, and give our country more of an opportunity to create new jobs as we move forward.

I already asked permission for the next 15 minutes that Senator Coons and I would be in a colloquy. I wish to defer to him for his comments at this time.

Mr. President, Senator Coons is one of the most eloquent speakers we have in the Senate. He did a beautiful job in explaining the bill. I hope it attracts support from both Republicans and Democrats. He mentioned the fact there are other immigration issues--and there are. There are a number of ones I wish to work on and get something done. I was here when we tried to get a comprehensive immigration plan a few years ago. It had strong bipartisan support, but one of the lessons we learned in that effort was that we do not do comprehensive well here in the Senate. Sometimes it is better to go step by step. That has been true for a long time.

We remember Henry Clay as the Great Compromiser, but Henry Clay's greatest compromise was not passed by Henry Clay. He failed. It nearly ruined his health and he went to Massachusetts to recover from it. A Senator named Stephen A. Douglas, from Illinois, the home of our assistant Democratic leader, came to the floor and introduced the Clay compromise section by section and each section passed with a different coalition, with Senator Sam Houston being the only Senator who voted for each one of them. So my hope is that with the broad support we have for this very simple idea--pin a green card on the lapel of a gifted graduate of an advanced program in science, technology, engineering, and math, and allow them to stay here and create jobs here instead of forcing them to go home--I hope we have such strong support for this idea that we can go ahead and pass it, and then we can follow that up with the other necessary steps we need to take on immigration, and hopefully we can do that with a coalition that represents Democrats and Republicans as well. This is a great idea.

Somebody might say: Well, why don't they just do it the way we do it now? Right now, it is H 1B visas. As everyone who is an employer knows, they are complicated, burdensome, and there are not enough of them. This is simple. It is a new visa. They get it if they are admitted, and they get to stay 12 months while they look for a job. If they get a job, they get a green card, and there is no cap on the number, and that is the idea.

I thank Senator Coons for his leadership. I look forward to turning this good idea, this piece of unfinished business in the bipartisan America COMPETES Act, into law.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

I thank very much Senator Alexander. I cannot think of a better person to partner with, to seek advice and guidance and leadership from, on the issue of STEM immigration and education reform than Senator Alexander, a national leader on education policy. Like me, Senator Alexander is the son of a former classroom teacher, but also served as the U.S. Secretary of Education and president of a prominent university, the University of Tennessee. He knows firsthand of the challenges, of the opportunity lost when tens of thousands of foreign nationals, who come here and seek the opportunity to get STEM master's and doctoral degrees in some of our best universities, are then forced to return home to their nation of origin rather than being able to stay here, if they choose, to create jobs, grow businesses, and contribute to our country and our economy.

As someone who, before running for public office, worked with a highly motivated materials-based science company that employed over 1,000 researchers, I too have a sense of what great contributions immigrants have always made to this country, but particularly in these areas of innovation and how they can contribute to our competitiveness.

Senator Alexander's closing comments about the America Competes Act is where we start this conversation. I came to this Senate knowing that my predecessor from Delaware, Senator Kaufman, had been a strong supporter of the America Competes Act, one of the few engineers to serve in the modern Senate. I was happy to take up the cause and press for its reauthorization in the waning days of the 111th Congress.

I met with Senator Alexander last year and we talked about this as one of the most promising unfinished pieces of business in that critical report, ``Rising Above The Gathering Storm,'' and in that vital piece of legislation, the America Competes Act. As Senator Alexander had referenced, the America Competes Act was passed with strong bipartisan support. That was the sort of thing that was focused on moving America forward by identifying strong ideas that had support across the whole country and a lot of different sectors and from both parties. It is my hope this is the beginning of building a strong bipartisan coalition on moving forward on immigration reform.

Let me talk for a minute, if I could, about our history and tradition of immigrants contributing to our country, being a strong part of job creation and growth here, and in particular immigrants who come to this country to be educated in STEM disciplines--science, technology, engineering, and math.

If you think about it, for most of the last century we had some of the strongest universities in the world. For much of the last 50 years, anyone who came here from a foreign land to get a doctorate in a STEM discipline, if they chose to go home, was going home to a country that wasn't a competitive environment. The United States--because of our advances in workforce and infrastructure and our legal system, our entrepreneurial culture, our capital markets--was the world leader in innovation and competitiveness. This is no longer the case. We still have the strongest universities in the world, 35 out of the top 50, but today those 17,000 STEM doctoral and master's graduates that Senator Alexander referred to, when we force them to go home to their country of origin rather than allowing them to compete for those jobs here and contribute to the American economy, are finding open arms in nations such as India and China, which are vigorous competitors. They are providing the capital markets, the infrastructure and the workforce, the resources to take advantage of those opportunities. We need an immigration system that responds to the modern economy and the opportunities of a highly competitive modern world. Rather than hemorrhaging these highly skilled folks and having them return home, we should give them an opportunity to participate in being job creators here.

The numbers bear this out. If you take a look at the Fortune 500 companies today, more than 40 percent of them were founded by immigrants or their children. Folks who had come to this country recently from other parts of the world have established companies that employ more than 10 million people worldwide and have combined revenues of more than $4 trillion, a figure greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the United States, China, and Japan. Immigrant-founded startup companies created 450,000 jobs in the United States in the last decade, and collectively they have generated more than $50 billion in sales in a single year.

Let me give one example that has meant a lot to me. I became friends with the founder of Bloom Energy, KR Sridhar. In his native India he got his undergraduate degree, but he came to the United States to get his doctorate in mechanical engineering and then went on to be a researcher at NASA's Ames Center and made a critical invention in solid oxide fuel cells. He runs Bloom Energy, which has already created 1,000 jobs. Last week the Governor of Delaware and my senior Senator, Tom Carper, joined others at the site of a former shuttered Chrysler plant for the groundbreaking of a facility that Bloom Energy will make possible.

Why would we want a capable, bright contributor to our economy like KR to be forced to go home to his country of India, rather than welcoming him here and giving him a chance to participate, to contribute, and potentially become not just an American business leader but an American citizen? We need to make it easier for the next generation of inventors and innovators to create jobs here.

This bill, as Senator Alexander has laid out, is relatively simple. It creates a new class of visas for foreign students to pursue STEM master's and doctoral

degree programs, and allows us to continue a conversation about how do we recognize the longstanding central contribution to our economy, our culture, and our country of immigrants.

I believe there are other areas of immigration reform that have to be on the table, that we have to move forward on. I am eager to move forward on family-focused reform and on other areas as well, where I am a cosponsor of other immigration bills, but my hope is this legislation will get the attention it deserves, will get the broad support from Members of both sides of the aisle it deserves, and that it will form part of a compromise that will address the needs of all the stakeholders in immigration reform in a responsible and balanced manner.

This legislation is not the end of the road, but it is a critical step forward in making sure we continue a bipartisan, thoughtful, and constructive dialog on how do we deal with an immigration system that is broken and that doesn't make America as competitive as it could be.

If I could, I want to close by thanking Senator Alexander for his leadership, for allowing me to work with him and to produce a bill that is streamlined, that is simple, that is accessible, and that I think can contribute to making America a land that continues to welcome and celebrate the real job creators, inventors, and innovators from all parts of the world.

In closing, I will just say that the economics of this legislation are simple, but, as Senator Alexander and I recognize, any step toward immigration reform is complicated. Making it easier for foreign-born, American-educated innovators to stay in the United States is just one aspect of many of the urgently needed steps to reform our outdated immigration system.

I see that Senator Durbin has come to the floor. I am proud to cosponsor the Dream Act. I also support the Uniting American Families Act. There are other pieces of legislation that are essential to allow us to recognize and to strengthen the role immigrants play in the fabric of our country. I think this opportunity today to move forward on a bipartisan bill that focuses on this one area without caps, with a new class of immigration visa, is an important contribution to moving this discussion forward for all of us.

I thank Senator Alexander.

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

Mr. President, today the Postmaster General announced that the Postal Service would begin the process of consolidating about 140 processing facilities around the country. Despite the harsh realities of this announcement from the Postmaster General, there are a few bright spots in Illinois.

The processing facilities in Springfield and Fox Valley, which the Postmaster General had originally slated for closure, will remain open. Additionally, I am glad that the Postmaster General has heeded our calls to keep Illinois jobs in Illinois and other jobs in the States where the processing facilities currently exist. The Postmaster General's original plan would have potentially sent over 500 Illinois postal jobs to surrounding States, along with the mail they have processed so efficiently for so many years.

Beyond the postal employees, the Postal Service supports tens of thousands of private sector jobs in Illinois, which is the center of the mailing and printing industry.

Certainly, today's announcements are difficult for my constituents who live in Quincy and Rockford, Carbondale and Centralia, Bloomington and Effingham. I have consistently insisted--and the Postmaster General assured me--that we are going to avoid layoffs and that all of the employees in these facilities will have the opportunity to pursue another role in the Postal Service or to accept, if they wish, early retirement incentives. I am told none of these facilities will close before the end of the year.

As I said, today's news is disappointing and difficult for many in my State, including postal customers, postal employees, and small businesses. Still, I think it is important to note how far we have come from the Postmaster General's original plan to where we are today. Originally he sought closure of 250 processing facilities nationwide-- today's announcement, 140--and called for the closure of 3,700 mostly rural post offices.

In Illinois, the Postal Service originally targeted 9 plants for closure which employ over 1,800 people. After countless hours of meetings and hard work and a great deal of floor debate, we have moved off the potentially destructive path.

Let me say this too, Mr. President. You know this subject better than any other Member in the Senate. We met in my office with the Postmaster General--I believe in November or early December--sat down with him and said that his proposal to reduce the number of post offices and processing facilities could be the death knell of postal service as we know it today.

You will remember that we challenged them. We said: Mr. Postmaster General, do not make any of these changes until May 15. Give Congress an opportunity to come up with a way to save money for the Postal Service, to preserve the Postal Service, and to do it by way of legislation, which is why we were elected.

He reluctantly said he didn't want to do it. Reluctantly he gave us a letter and said: I won't do anything until May 15. I will give the House and the Senate a chance to do their work.

If you will remember, Mr. President, I called Senator Lieberman, chairman of the administration committee--the government operations committee, and said to him: With this jurisdiction, we have to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

He said: We are ready. Senator Collins and I and Senator Carper and others will work together to pass a Senate bill that achieves Postal Service reform in a fairer way.

And he did.

The same day, I called Chairman Darrell Issa, the California Republican chairman of the House committee with the responsibility for the Postal Service. I said to Chairman Issa: We now have until May 15 to do our job, to pass a bill in the House and the Senate and get it to the President, and now the clock is running.

Mr. President, you will remember that we had a break over the holiday, and when we came back we were anxious. We didn't want to waste any time. Let the record show that at the end of the day, the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, passed the postal reform bill. Thirteen Republicans joined 49 on the Democratic side and passed a bipartisan bill.

Well, what happened in the House? The answer is nothing happened in the House. The House of Representatives failed to do their job. They failed to pass Postal Service reform. To my knowledge, they didn't bring a bill to the floor. And then May 15 came. The Postmaster General kept his word and waited, and then he made this announcement.

If the Senate bill that we passed had become the law of the land, today's announcement would have never taken place. We set up a process for post offices and processing facilities to be evaluated in terms of their efficiency and costs that I think was sensible, reasonable, and would have saved money. We didn't get to that point because the House failed to act. That is the harsh reality of why we face what we do today.

Only the Speaker of the House and his majority can explain why they didn't accept the challenge to legislate. My question to them is, If you are not here to legislate, why are you here? An issue of such national importance as the future of the Postal Service should have been done, as it was in the Senate, on a bipartisan basis in the House of Representatives. We did it here. We worked together. I cannot even remember how many amendments we considered, but we labored through every single one of them and got it done.

Now I look around my State and see six or seven major processing facilities closed, and it breaks my heart because what we did in the Senate would have avoided some of those. It would have at least put a process in place that was a lot fairer.

Well, my last word to the Members of the House is that it is not too late. It is not too late to accept the responsibility and to pass the Senate bill if you can't pass one of your own. Call our bipartisan Senate postal reform bill to the floor. At least give it a vote in the House of Representatives.

If they can pass it, let's send it to the President, and perhaps before the end of the year we can actually save some of these postal facilities.

I don't want to create false hope because I couldn't believe that May 15 would come and go and the House wouldn't act, but that is what happened. So let's hope that changes for the better.

I am going to continue to work with the Presiding Officer as well as the President of the United States and all of the committee members. The Postal Service is something special.

I will close by saying this. When they ask Americans what they think of people who work in the Federal Government, they don't always have the highest opinion--including Members of Congress. But when you ask them about what branch of the Federal Government they have particularly positive feelings about, it is the Postal Service. You know why, and I do too. It is that letter carrier who is looking in the window and waving at your mom to make sure she is OK each day, and she looks expectantly for the delivery of the mail even if it is just some circular. That is that visitor each day who keeps her in touch with the world and our Nation in touch with itself. That is the Postal Service.

I just went into the Springfield post office, my local branch, recently, and they couldn't have been kinder or more courteous, helping all the people who were there. Our postal employees are some of the best Federal employees in America, and I am proud of what they have done. I am sorry they are going through this change. It is not something we wanted to see happen.

We are going to do this in a way that is good for the future of the Postal Service. I hope the House will join us in this bipartisan effort.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to join me in passing a critical bill that keeps the faith with the men and women of our Reserve Forces.

Representative Kline, a Republican Congressman from Minnesota, has led this effort in the House. I am leading it in the Senate. It affects troops from all over the country, a promise that was made to them that must be kept.

My home State of Minnesota has no large Active-Duty bases, but we have a long and proud tradition of military service in our National Guard and our Reserves.

Throughout every military engagement since the Civil War--including the two wars we have fought over the past decade--Minnesota's National Guard members and reservists have served with courage and honor to defend our Nation overseas.

In fact, it was a ragtag group of workers and farmers who signed up for the precursor of the National Guard during the Civil War, who went to the Battle of Gettysburg and had the highest percentage of casualties of any unit in the Civil War. There is a big monument for them honoring the fact that they had that high rate of casualties. In fact, they held the line for troops to come in in the Civil War.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the importance of our brave citizen soldiers across the country and the unprecedented sacrifice they have been called upon to make. The National Guard and Reserves were not built to serve as an active-duty force for prolonged periods. Yet at times as many as 40 percent of the American forces fighting in these wars have been Guard and Reserve troops. I say to the Presiding Officer, I know you know that, being from Vermont, where you have many National Guard troops who have served our country.

Just last month, about 3,000 members of Minnesota's National Guard First Brigade Combat Team--our Red Bulls--returned home from a year of service in Kuwait assisting the drawdown in Iraq. Some of these men and women were not serving for their first, second, or third time. I met these soldiers. Some of them were serving for their fourth time, for their fifth time, some even for their sixth time.

The repeated mobilizations and overseas deployments of Guard and Reserve units have profoundly affected families and communities in Minnesota and across the Nation. That is part of the reason we pushed so hard to bring those troops home from Iraq. That is also why, in 2007, in recognition of the extraordinary sacrifices our servicemembers and their families have made, the Department of Defense created the Post Deployment/Mobilization Respite Absence--or PDMRA, as it is called--Program.

The PDMRA Program awards extra leave days to servicemembers who deploy beyond the standard rotation cycle. The motivation is simple: Troops who serve multiple deployments above and beyond the call of duty--who are basically being deployed as Active Duty even though they are not; folks who have raised their hands and stepped forward time and time again to volunteer and support our country--deserve leave time at home with their families as some compensation.

When they signed up to serve, there was not a waiting line. When they come home to the United States of America and they need a job or they need health care or they need an education or they want some time with their families, they should have that.

Well, one can imagine the concern the Red Bulls felt and I felt too when we learned all of a sudden the leave benefits our troops were promised under the program were being reduced as they were serving overseas. They were promised one thing when they left, and the program changed when they were gone.

Here is what happened. Until last fall, members of the Reserve Component who served more than 1 year out of 6 could be awarded up to 4 extra PDMRA leave days for each extra month of service. Then on September 30, 2011, the Defense Department changed the policy, reducing the 4 days down to 1 or 2, depending on the location of service.

But here is the problem: Instead of grandfathering in the troops who had been promised the 4 days of leave under the old policy, the Defense Department implemented the change immediately, applying it to all troops on the ground.

I can understand having a new policy, I really can. But do not do it to the troops who have already been promised one thing. That meant in the middle of their deployment, 49,000 reservists deployed around the world, who had been promised up to 4 days of leave for their service each month and who had earned that leave, were told, with little warning, that the days they were promised under the PDMRA Program were going to be cut, starting October 1, 2011.

Well, as you can imagine, this was a real setback for our troops, and for many reasons. First of all, it means they would get less time at home with their families, whom they have not seen--their kids, their spouses, their parents.

Second, it means our troops and their families are forced to cope with unexpected financial challenges as their leave benefits are cut without warning.

Finally, the change has meant that our reservists--who, unlike the Active Component, do not necessarily have a job to come back to when they separate from duty--are faced with an increased and unexpected urgency to find employment.

Well, our economy is on the mend, it is stable, but we are still seeing, as the Presiding Officer knows, record numbers of unemployment among our veterans of the past two wars. Now is not the time to cut the leave benefits of people who have been promised the leave and push them out to find their own way.

When the men and women of our armed services signed up, they did it for the right reasons. They are patriotic. They put their lives on the line for our country. The least we can do is keep the promises we made.

That is why my colleague in the House of Representatives, Congressman John Kline--himself a decorated veteran--and I introduced legislation that makes a simple fix to this program.

Our bill does not reverse the new policy change that the Department heads made after careful review of the program. Our bill simply grandfathers troops deployed under the old policy so they receive the leave benefits they were promised.

I want to take a few moments to share just a few key points about this bill.

First, it has bipartisan support in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. In fact, it passed in the House on Tuesday night with the support of all Representatives.

Second, the cost of this bill is fully offset. No new spending is created in this bill.

Finally, this bill is now supported by Secretary Panetta himself. It is supported by the Department of Defense, after they realized what the effect of this policy would have if troops were not grandfathered in.

This is a country that believes in patriotism, and patriotism means wrapping our arms around those who have served and sacrificed for our country. I

think all of my colleagues here today agree that nobody needs and deserves our support more than the men and women who have offered their lives in defense of our Nation.

For 10 years, the men and women of our National Guard and Reserves have done their duty. Now I believe it is for us in Congress to do our own duty to make sure our troops receive the benefits they are due.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.