Internet Tax Freedom Forever Act

Madam President, I see two of my colleagues who are here, and I want to ask unanimous consent that Senator Barrasso be given 10 minutes, then Senator Sessions be given 3 minutes, and then the remainder of the time be turned over to me.

Did the Chair rule?

Madam President----

I was supposed to speak here at 2:15 p.m.

Madam President, I understand there will be 3 minutes for the Senator from Alabama and then I will be able to deliver my full remarks.

Madam President, in recent days I have twice spoken here on the floor--not about a particular issue, bill, or nomination pending before the Senate, but about the Senate itself.

While issues, bills, nominations, and even partisan majorities come and go, the Senate as an institution must remain--and remain not only in some tattered form, some distorted shadow of its former self, but, rather, the Senate must remain as it was designed to be. The political winds may blow, but the institution must stand strong.

Unfortunately, in my 38 years of service in this body I have never seen it weaker than it is today. There once was a consensus here not only about the need to keep this institution strong but also about how to do it. That consensus evolved from how the Framers designed this body so that it could play its unique role in the system of government they inspirationally crafted.

James Madison, for example, remarked at the 1787 Constitutional Convention that the Senate's proceedings could have more coolness, more system, and more wisdom than the House of Representatives. He was not talking about coolness in the way our teenagers talk about it today. The House is designed for more or less direct expression of the popular will and operates by simple majority. By contrast, the Senate is designed for deliberation. For more than two centuries it has operated by a supermajority and even unanimous consent. This fundamental difference between the House and the Senate is by express design and not historical accident. It is the conjunction of the two that makes the legislative branch work in the manner the Framers intended. This basic principle of bicameralism is above politics and above party.

This longstanding consensus about the importance of the Senate's unique design and how it must operate to fulfill its constitutional role has all but fallen apart over the last few years. I began addressing this problem in earnest last week and will continue to do so in the weeks ahead and, I might add, in the months to come, urging my colleagues to heed history's wisdom and change course.

I am not alone in this endeavor. My friend the senior Senator from Tennessee has also spoken with great passion on this issue and developed a thoughtful assessment of the Senate's institutional decay. Two longtime colleagues in this body--one Democrat and one Republican-- offered similar critiques when leaving the Senate in the last few years.

For 30 years I served in this body with my friend from Connecticut, Senator Christopher Dodd. In his final speech on the Senate floor on November 30, 2010, he observed that the Senate was established as a place where every Member's voice could be heard and where a deliberation and even dissent would be valued and respected. Senator Dodd explained that ``our Founders were concerned not only with what was legislated, but, just as importantly, with how we legislated.'' He urged Senators to resist the temptation to abandon the Senate's longstanding traditions to make it ``more like the House of Representatives, where the majority can essentially bend the minority to its will.''

Two years later Senator Olympia Snowe concluded her three terms in the Senate representing the State of Maine in this body with a reflection on the state of the Senate. She observed that a commitment to the rights of the minority helped ensure that the Senate would be a body where all voices are heard. Senator Snowe concluded, however, that ``the Senate is not living up to what the Founding Fathers envisioned,'' in large part by ignoring the minority's rights.

Senator Dodd concluded his Senate service in the majority while Senator Snowe concluded hers in the minority, but their assessment was the same--a leading Democrat and a leading Republican. That is what a consensus looks like. They shared an understanding of the unique role the Senate was designed to play in our system of government, and they knew from experience that the Senate is not operating by that design today.

Diagnosing our current institutional ills and prescribing a path back to health must begin by recognizing the primacy of the Senate's purpose, design, and place in our system of government. Without the anchor of these principles, which have throughout the Senate's history been shared throughout this body, across all partisan and ideological lines, the gamesmanship of politics and the quest for power will decimate our deliberate contribution to the legislative process. Unfortunately, that is exactly what is happening today.

In my previous remarks, I noted that many of the sage students of the Senate--from Vice President Adlai Stevenson in the 19th century to Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia in our time--all identified the same two features as critical to the Senate's proper functioning: the right of amendment and the right to debate. It is not difficult to see how they serve the critical function of setting the Senate apart from the House. These rights temper majority rule. They emphasize individuals over parties and factions. They ensure that all voices can be heard. They encourage deliberation and, yes, even beneficial compromise. These rights secure a substantive role for all Senators--even those in the minority--in how the Senate legislates, a feature that does not exist in how the House operates.

During my service throughout the past four decades, the Senate has often lived up to these ideals. For example, I worked with the junior Senator from Iowa on the Americans with Disabilities Act, which the Senate in 1989 passed by a vote of 76 to 8. At that time Democrats held 55 Senate seats, just as they do today. This body addressed

amendments on the floor offered by both Democrats and Republicans on issues ranging from tax credits for small businesses to accessibility of buses. On a single day in September of 1989, the Senate adopted nearly twice as many minority amendments to this single bill than the Senate today has adopted in more than a year.

Today the majority leader uses his right to priority recognition to eliminate virtually all opportunities for amendments unless he agrees to them, and even then he generally stops amendments. He has used this procedural maneuver--called filling the amendment tree--more than twice as often as the previous six majority leaders combined.

There is a time when you can fill the amendment tree, and that is after there has been a full and fair debate on all the reasonable amendments Members have brought to the floor and it is when a reasonable time has been given to a bill and there have been a number of votes.

Yet, when he was in the minority, even he condemned this tactic as ``a very bad practice.'' He explained that ``it runs against the basic nature of the Senate.'' He was right then, but he is wrong now. Perhaps the majority leader has reconsidered what he believes to be the basic nature of the Senate. Perhaps he now believes that denying the minority's right to offer amendments is a very good rather than a very bad practice. If he does, then I think he, of all people, owes the Senate an explanation. I don't think he believes that; otherwise, such an about-face is nothing more than a desire to rig the rules so he can win all the games, and in the process he is destroying the Senate itself. When I say games, I don't really mean games. It is so he can win all the votes. He can put the Senate on any motion he wants to without any real rights for the minority, and in the process he is destroying the Senate itself, destroying the institutional characteristics the Founders thought critical to our government's design, and destroying precisely those practices and traditions that have enabled the Senate to serve the common good throughout our Nation's history.

The other defining feature of this body--the right to unlimited debate--is also under attack. By empowering the minority, that right has always annoyed the majority whether we have been in the minority or whether we have been in the majority and vice versa. But a little history can provide a lot of perspective for us today.

For more than a century, ending debate on anything required unanimous consent. A single Senator could prevent a final vote on a matter by preventing an end to debate. The Senate adopted a rule in 1917 that lowered the threshold to two-thirds. Not until 1975 was the threshold lowered to three-fifths, where it stands today.

It is easier to end debate today than ever before in the Senate's history, but that is not enough for the current majority. Urged on by many of the 34 Senators who have not yet ever served in the minority, the majority apparently does not want any obstacle whatsoever to stand in its way--not even full and fair debate.

Last November the majority leader used a parliamentary maneuver to lower the threshold for any debate on most nominations from a supermajority to a simple majority. It took him only a few short minutes to end more than 200 years of Senate practice and effectively eliminate the minority's role in the confirmation process.

As I have detailed here on the Senate floor and in print, the minority leader's reasons for this revolution amounted to filibuster fraud. At the time he invoked the so-called nuclear option, the Senate had confirmed 98 percent of President Obama's nominations, and filibusters, of course, were on the decline. But 98 percent was not good enough for the majority.

I noted the current majority leader's about-face regarding the right to offer amendments. He defended that right when in the minority and actively suppressed it when in the majority. Similarly, when he was in the minority, he voted more than two dozen times for filibusters of Republican judicial nominees. The Democrats were the ones who started that. Then, last November, once in the majority, he abolished the right to debate nominations.

While the majority leader effectively neutralized the Senate cloture rule to stop the minority from debating nominations, he has also used that rule to stop the minority from debating legislation. He again uses his right of priority recognition to bring up a bill and, at the very same time, file a motion to end debate. But it makes no sense to speak of ending debate--ending what he wrongly characterizes as a Republican filibuster--when such debate had no chance to begin with. The majority leader uses this cloture rule not to end debate but to prevent it altogether.

Just like the practice of filling the amendment tree, the majority leader is using his position to prevent debate far more often than any of his predecessors. Unlike the current majority leader, most Senators on the other side of the aisle have never served in the minority. Most Senators in both parties--56, to be exact--have served here only under the current leadership. Unfortunately, this means that most Senators serving today have only witnessed leadership that prefers power to principle and is rapidly dismantling the longstanding practices and traditions of an institution that took centuries to build. The only leadership that most Senators serving today have experienced uses parliamentary maneuvers to deny senatorial rights so that the partisan ends justify the procedural means.

The current Senate leadership is wrong. The road we are on today leads only to one destination. Just as maintaining the integrity and foundation of the Senate's design and operation is essential to its proper role in our system of government, attacking that integrity and dismantling that foundation can only destroy that proper role. Since the Senate's proper role is essential for protecting the liberties of the American people, destroying those longstanding practices and traditions puts our liberties at risk.

The minority leader spoke here in January about the state of the Senate and noted that what many call partisanship today is nothing new. But what I have been addressing in recent days is not the result of that ideological competition but how that competition is conducted.

At the beginning of my first term, there were only 38 Republican Senators--not even enough to end debate under Senate rules. Democrats have not been in such a small minority in nearly 60 years.

According to the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute, 42 percent of all rollcall votes during my first 2 years here were so-called party unity votes, in which a majority of each party sticks together and votes in opposite ways. That means a majority of votes involve Senators reaching across the aisle.

In the last several years under the current leadership, however, even though the margin between the parties is narrower, the percentage of such party unity votes has risen to 62 percent. This trend of retreating to partisan corners is yet another indication that this body is becoming like the House and, therefore, abandoning the tradition of unlimited debate and amendment at the core of the Senate's identity.

The way Senator Snowe described it, the great challenge is to create and maintain a system ``that gives our elected officials reasons to look past their differences and find common ground if their initial party positions fail to garner sufficient support.'' The Senate's design provided those reasons and those incentives, and undermining that design destroys them.

Building is much harder and takes much longer than destroying. The current leadership's recklessness in choosing power over principle is dismantling what took centuries to establish.

That does not, however, mean it cannot be changed. Senator Dodd suggested a formula for a better course when he distinguished what we legislate from how we legislate. Restoring the Senate as the world's greatest deliberative body requires recommitting ourselves to the principles of how we legislate so that we can properly discuss and debate what we should legislate.

We must first restore the longstanding consensus about the rules, procedures, and traditions governing how the Senate is run. Only on that firm footing can we discuss, deliberate, and legislate in a constructive manner.

In addition to restoring many of this body's fundamental rights for amendment and debate, the minority leader spoke in January about restoring a vigorous and meaningful committee process. These elements of our legislative process are related and they are complementary.

Increasingly, bills are drafted in the leader's office and taken directly to the full Senate for consideration where the majority leader will immediately fill the amendment tree and file a motion to end debate. In my 38 years in this body, I have never seen a consolidation of so much power in so few hands.

America's Founders were right in the principles of government they laid out and in the institutional design they built on those principles. But they did so at the beginning of this journey, creating the blueprint before anything had been built. I fear that returning to the right path may be even harder than embarking on it.

The majority today has engaged in a hostile takeover of the Senate for one simple reason: aggrandizing power. But remember the axiom that power tends to corrupt. It makes principle harder to see, fainter to hear, and tougher to grasp, and it makes principle very difficult to restore. Restoration will require believing in something greater than power, something more important than the bill or nomination on the calendar, something more significant than the latest polling numbers. It will require holding fast to a system that can provide power today but take that power away tomorrow.

Winston Churchill famously said, ``Democracy is the worst form of government except for those other forms that have been tried from time to time.'' There is certainly wisdom in that, but consider when Churchill said it. He was speaking on the floor of the British House of Commons on November 11, 1947, 2 years after his party lost half its seats in Parliament and the Labor Party led its first majority government. Churchill expressed his faith in the very form of government that had turned his party into a small minority.

We continue on the path the current Senate leadership has charted at our peril, not just the peril of this institution but the peril of our system of government and the liberties it makes possible for the American people. This may sound like a grand statement, but remember what Senator Byrd repeatedly told us--remember what he said: ``So long as the Senate's defining features such as the rights of amendments and debate remain intact, the liberties of the people are secure.''

There is perhaps no greater statement of principle regarding this Nation than our Declaration of Independence, which asserts that the government exists to secure the inalienable rights of the people. That is why we are here, and that should be our reason to change course--not simply partisan advantage or ideological superiority but liberty. The liberty we enjoy in America did not occur by chance. It will not survive by neglect, and it cannot thrive by preferring power over principle.

My staff and I recently visited the National Archives and saw the words engraved beneath in one of the statues at the entrance: ``Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.''

I hope we can turn this around. I hope the leadership of the majority will wake up and realize that some day they may be in the minority. I don't know when, but some day they will be. If they were treated as we are being treated, I can just hear the fulminations up and down in the Senate. All I can say is that these principles are more important than either party. They are more important than either party, and whether Democrats or Republicans like them or not, the fact is, this is the greatest deliberative body in the world that is no longer the greatest deliberative body in the world, and that is because of what is going on. I hope we can end that and begin anew.

I think everybody enjoyed the debate over the highway bill. For once, we were able to have at least four amendments--on both sides, by the way. And I have to say it was kind of a thrill to vote again on amendments. It was kind of a thrill to pass a piece of legislation the right way. Whether a person likes or doesn't like the legislation, it was thrilling to be here. I would like to see more of that happening so that everybody here will feel that not only are they a part of the Senate but they are helping to keep the Senate the vibrant place it always has been up until now.

I yield the floor.

I thank my dear friend for his kind remarks, and I understand how much zeal he has for the things he does here on the floor. He is a fine man, and I really appreciate it.

Madam President, earlier today--just a little while ago, in fact--the House of Representatives once again passed legislation extending funding for the Federal highway trust fund. This is the latest step in the process for which the final outcome has been known for some time. The bill the House passed today is virtually identical to the one they passed last week. It is basically the very same bill.

Earlier this week the Senate passed its own version of the highway bill and sent it to the House. Of course, we did so knowing full well the House would not accept the Senate bill. I don't think there was ever any real doubt in this Chamber as to what was going to happen, but in my view it is good that the Senate acted.

I was particularly pleased to see that the version of the highway bill reported by the Senate Finance Committee received such strong bipartisan support when it came up for a vote. Senator Wyden and I worked hard on that bill. The effort was bipartisan from the outset, and in the end we produced a product that both parties could support. Of course, I was a little less pleased that the Senate on the very next vote opted to strike the Finance Committee's language and replace it with what is, in my view, a less viable vehicle for funding the highway trust fund, but in the end that is the direction a majority of the Senators decided to go, and I accepted it and am proud of everybody who participated.

As I said, it is good that the Senate acted. But now the House has acted again. It is good that the Senate had some amendments for a change, and I think we all felt good about that. I felt a renewed spirit in the Senate because of this since it had been a year without having real amendments in a real process. Of course there were only four of them, but compared to what we have had over the last year, that still was an amazing occurrence. But now the House has acted again, and although there are likely to be a number of Senators who do not like the House bill, there doesn't appear to be enough time for the Senate to try once again to go in a different direction.

As we all know, we are on the verge of a crisis with regard to funding for the highway trust fund. Congress needs to act immediately to prevent a shortfall in the trust fund and to ensure that the States can continue to plan and implement their highway projects. Thousands of jobs are at stake. If Congress doesn't pass a bill and get it to the President before we leave for recess, we will be doing a great disservice to a lot of people. We all know this. It is not a secret. It is not a surprise.

As far as I can see, the only viable solution before the Senate today is to take up the House bill and pass it as is. Once again, we have all known this was the most likely outcome for some time now. It is time we accept it and move on. That is not to say that I am disappointed that we have to pass the House bill. As I said a number of times, if you compare the House bill with the one reported by the Senate Finance Committee--which, once again, received broad bipartisan support when it was voted on in the Senate earlier this week--you will see that the bills are not all that far apart in terms of policy. The core funding mechanisms are the same.

The principal difference is that the Senate bill raises some revenue through some tax compliance provisions that are not in the House bill. The House bill goes a little further on pension smoothing than the Finance Committee bill does, and this has brought heartburn to a number of us in both bodies.

These are not fundamental differences. Any Senator who supported the Finance Committee's bill should be able to support the House bill, which is a good thing, because as I said we don't have many other options if we want to get this done before the recess.

I plan to support the House-passed highway bill. I urge all of my colleagues in the Senate to do the same.

Finally, I wish to take a moment to address a major setback we encountered with regard to the temporary highway extension that passed in the Senate earlier this week. As we learned yesterday, the Senate- passed bill has a shortfall of about $2.4 billion due to a drafting error. Some have suggested that this error originated in the Finance Committee's version of the legislation. However, anyone who takes the time to compare our language with that of the subsequently passed substitute amendment will find this is not the case.

I am not here to point fingers or try to embarrass anyone, but I will say these are the types of mistakes that happen when tax policy is written outside of the tax-writing committee, and we should all be careful of that.

The Finance Committee has an open and transparent process that allows for all of our numbers to be scrutinized well in advance. The committee has all the necessary expertise at its disposal to prevent these types of mishaps.

I am well aware that mistakes happen. I would just like to suggest that fewer of these types of mistakes will happen in the future if the Finance Committee is allowed to do its work when it comes to writing tax policy. That is all I have to say on that matter.

Once again, we are at a critical juncture. We need to get a temporary highway bill over the finish line. As far as I can see, the only way to do that is for us to take up and pass the House bill. As I stated earlier, this should not be a difficult lift. I think we can get this done in short order.

It was a lot of fun to be on the floor--for the first time in about a year--where anybody who wanted to at least had a shot at being able to bring up an amendment for a vote. Four of our colleagues did get amendments up, and they were thrilled. Isn't it amazing we were thrilled about something the Senate ought to be doing every time we bring up a bill? We can get both sides together on a limited number of amendments, but we should not have either side demanding to approve or disapprove the amendments in advance, and that has been happening all too often in the Senate with the way it is being run.

I love all of my colleagues. I love my friends on the other side. There is no use trying to kid about it, I care for everybody in this body, and I cared for everybody I have served with. I admit that occasionally there have been Members whom I cared a little less for than most of the others, but the fact is this is a great body. We have had some great people on both sides of the aisle over the 38 years I have been in the Senate.

We need to allow our committees to work. Let's allow our individual Senators to work too. Let's understand that we don't all come from the same State or the same jurisdiction. Each of us has a desire to represent his or her jurisdiction in the best possible manner. Frankly, we need to get this Senate back to where it is the greatest deliberative body in the world rather than just something that is run for the benefit of the majority. I don't want it to run for the benefit of the minority either.

We can get together--just as we did on this bill--and do much better around here than we have been doing. I hope that as we go into the future, everybody in this body will want to work better together and quit playing politics with everything.

We understand this is a political body, and we understand there will be politics played from time to time. It is kind of fun sometimes but not on everything, and especially not when it prevents what the Senate is truly all about, which is wide-open debates and wide-open amendments, and we certainly need to find a bipartisan way of working together.

I particularly enjoyed working with Senator Wyden. He has made a distinguished effort to try to make things as bipartisan as he can, and that is hard to do around here anymore in both the House and Senate. The House is supposed to be a body that fights over everything, I guess, because it is a majoritarian body. But even then the House has had many Democratic amendments they could have stopped. While they have had many amendments, we have basically been stopped from being able to act as the Senate should act, which is to allow people the right to bring up their amendments and try to make points that maybe all of us would do well to consider from time to time.

I am grateful I am a Member of this body, and I am grateful for the people I have served with all these years on both sides of the aisle. In all the time I have been here, there were only two people whom I thought had no redeeming value. I should not have said that, I guess, but there were two people whom I thought truly didn't have the Senate at heart and truly didn't do what I thought they should do. I have loved all the rest and appreciated them very much.

I appreciate the leadership on both sides, but I just hope we can get past all of this bickering and start running the Senate as it has always been run. A lot of it started when you break the rules to change the rules, and this is what happens. It was a real mistake on the part of the majority to do that. They might not think so because they are packing the Federal courts with judges--most of whom would have gotten through. About 98 percent of the President's nominees were getting through and very few were even contested. The fact is that some have gotten through and others should never have gotten through to the Federal bench, and it is because of breaking the rules to change the rules. It is not right for either side to do that, but it has been done. Let's overcome it, and let's be the most deliberative body in the world today, and I think we can do it.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, the people of the United States have truly begged and pleaded with their lawmakers for years to create a lawful system of immigration--one that works, one that is fair, one that serves the national interest, one that we can believe in. They have been justly and rightly convinced of that fact, and they have demanded it of their elected officeholders to secure their communities and protect the integrity of our national borders. Some say there is something wrong with that. I say there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. That is the right thing. That is the moral thing. That is the responsible thing. That is the decent thing. That is what any great nation should have--an immigration policy that serves its national interest and is fairly and lawfully conducted.

But these pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Our border is absolutely not secure. It is in a state of crisis. Our communities are not safe. Preventable crimes occur every day because our laws are not being enforced and our sovereignty, at its base level, is not being protected. And, we have a President planning to issue sweeping executive amnesty in violation of law, in ways in which he has no power, and threatens the constitutional separation of powers. Congress passes laws; the President must execute the laws. The President is not entitled to make laws, to conduct actions contrary to plain laws. The President simply cannot say Congress didn't act, so I have to act.

Well, Congress decided not to act in a way he wanted. They considered legislation, rejected it, and now he is going to--it appears from article after article--go forward and carry out an action anyway. It would be fundamentally wrong. This cannot stand. It will not stand.

My position has been and remains that Congress should not pass border legislation that does not foreclose the possibility of these unlawful Executive orders. As an institution, this Congress has a duty to protect this institution and our constituents.

Currently, the President has issued approximately half a million grants of administrative amnesty and work permits to individuals unlawfully present in the country up to 30 years of age. Now the President wants to issue another 5 to 6 million work permits to illegal immigrants of any age, despite a clear prohibition in the Immigration and Nationality Act. He is not entitled to do that. Plain law says you cannot employ someone in the country unlawfully.

People think: Well, it is one thing to say you will not deport somebody. But, colleagues, what was done previously was to provide, under the DACA legislation, an ID card with the words ``Work Permit'' across the top, ``Work Authorization'' across the top.

So the President is providing, in violation of plain law, the ability of people in the country to work who are not entitled to work, who will be able to take jobs from any American today. We have a lot of Americans today struggling for work. At a time when millions of Americans are out of work, the President's plan is a direct affront to them--to every single unemployed American, to people around the world who have applied to come to the United States and have not been admitted, so they did not come unlawfully. What do we say to them when this happens?

It is particularly damaging to those in the poorest and most vulnerable communities in America. So who is speaking for them? Who will give them a voice in Congress? Will Members hear? Will we hear their pleas? I have been shocked that we have not seen a willingness in the Congress to resist more effectively than what we are seeing today.

So let's consider a bit more deeply for a moment what the President's Executive action would do to immigration enforcement in America. Let me say clearly, colleagues, we are not making this up. We are not having some idea that he might do something for 5 or 6 million more people. It has been repeatedly leaked from the White House--not leaked; they have discussed it. The President has promised it to activist groups like La Raza and the ACLU that he has been meeting with. He has told them he intends to do this. It is only a question of how and the time. The latest article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal--a big article-- said it would happen shortly after Labor Day. Well, this is not something we are making up. It is a direct threat, a direct promise, a statement, it appears, from the White House.

I hope they will not go forward with it. Surely cooler heads in the White House will push back. Surely his Attorney General will say: Mr. President, you cannot do this. His legal counsel in the White House will say: Mr. President, do not do this. This is not lawful. The Department of Homeland Security needs to be saying: This would be devastating, Mr. President. How can we enforce any laws? Please do not do this.

I do not think it is absolutely certain to happen. But it seems to me that by every indication it is an absolute intention right now of the President to go forward with this or they would not have had at least a half a dozen articles on it--the National Journal, Time magazine, and others.

I have spoken many times with a great American by the name of Chris Crane, a former marine. He is also an ICE officer and president of the officers' ICE Council--the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council. He has explained how his officers are ordered not to do their job. They have even sued the Secretary of Homeland Security for blocking them from fulfilling their oath to enforce the laws of the United States of America. Can you imagine that? I was in Federal law enforcement for 15 years. I have never heard of a situation in which a group of law officers sue their supervisor saying, in Federal court: Mr. Judge, my supervisor is ordering me not to do what my duty and my oath requires on a daily basis.

That is a stunning development. Their morale for years has been one of the lowest in the Federal Government. Now I think it is the lowest because they have been demeaned and rejected in a duty they believe is worthwhile for them to carry out.

One of the things Mr. Crane explained is that the President's previous Executive amnesty for the so-called DREAMers basically halted enforcement for anyone who asserted protections under that new administration policy. Mr. Crane would report that ICE officers would come into contact with individuals unlawfully present in the country-- individuals they would encounter in prisons and jails. They would be called by a local police department that they have arrested someone for a serious crime. They would tell the ICE officers. Routinely they are supposed to go and pick them up and deport them. They would encounter people in jail--that is one of the big jobs they have--and they would be forced to release them simply because they assert: I came here as a youth. Nobody is going to do any investigation on this. How do you investigate it? The effect is to demoralize and make it difficult, and almost impossible, to enforce the law.

Now imagine, then, what would happen if the President expands this administrative amnesty and work authorization program to cover millions of unlawful immigrants of all ages. Everyone ICE comes in contact with will assert these protections: I am qualified under the President's amnesty. And any who fail the application will say they are eligible for this amnesty.

So what then? Will the FBI open investigations, check when they entered the country or whom they entered the country with, and where they came from? They are not going to do that--of course not. The officers are going to be totally unable to resist false claims from applicants, who happen to be the people they have arrested. It is going to demoralize immigration enforcement officers. ICE officers will again be

issued orders basically to stand down. No enforcement is going to occur. It will be the effective end of immigration enforcement in America, in my opinion.

You cannot maintain an effective, lawful, consistent, fair immigration enforcement policy with these kinds of regulations occurring and these kinds of orders from the White House, who is the Chief Executive Officer of America, who is empowered and directed to ensure that the laws of the United States are carried out--not empowered to violate the laws of the United States.

We have also heard from officers who have processed immigration applications. These are people who receive applications to come to the United States in a lawful way. These dedicated folks at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are people who have to process all of these millions of applicants if the President issues his order.

So let me read at length from a statement from the President of the USCIS Council, who represents these CIS officers who have an awesome duty. He wrote last year--this is what he said:

USCIS adjudications officers are pressured to rubber stamp

applications instead of conducting diligent case review and

investigation.

This is the officers saying that their bosses are pressuring them to just rubber stamp applications right now--not to investigate, not to ask questions--just approve them. He goes on:

The culture at USCIS encourages all applications to be

approved, discouraging proper investigation into red flags

and discouraging the denial of any applications. USCIS has

been turned into an ``approval machine.''

That is what the top CIS officer said in a statement last fall. They have been turned into an approval machine. No wonder the American people are unhappy with what goes on here. Does anyone really know how serious this is? It is amazing that we would undermine the very integrity, really, of the entire process, and that is why they have protested. That is why they have come forward. It hurts them. They feel bad to see the great laws of the United States being routinely eviscerated.

He went on to say this:

USCIS has created an almost insurmountable bureaucracy

which often prevents USCIS adjudications officers from

contacting and coordinating with ICE agents--

Who know something about these people, perhaps--

and officers in cases that should have their involvement.

USCIS officers are pressured to approve visa applications for

many individuals ICE agents have determined should be placed

into deportation proceedings.

That is a very serious charge, and that is happening. He is not making that up. It goes on:

The USCIS officers who identify illegal aliens that, in

accordance with law should be placed into immigration removal

proceedings before a federal judge, are prevented from

exercising their authority and responsibility to issue

Notices To Appear.

This is a notice to appear in court. They are being obstructed and told not to do it. He goes on to say:

The attitude of USCIS management is not that the Agency

serves the American public or the laws of the United States,

or public safety and national security, but instead that the

agency serves illegal aliens and the attorneys which

represent them. While we believe in treating all people with

respect, we are concerned that this agency tasked with such a

vital security mission is too greatly influenced by special

interest groups--to the point that it no longer properly

performs its mission.

What a devastating critique. Does anyone care? Has the President done one thing to respond to these allegations? Is the Senate bill that is offered by Senator Reid and our Democratic colleagues, with the blessings of the President--does it do one thing to fix one of these problems? No. They have no intention of fixing these problems. They do not want to fix these problems. This is their policy: to foment more lawlessness and to see that the laws are undermined in such a way they cannot be effectively enforced.

It is just wrong, colleagues. Republicans and Democrats need to stand up to this. Don't we need to respond to the desires of the American people for a lawful system of immigration? Isn't that right and just and decent that they ask of us? Yet we go along in total ignorance and ignore these kinds of statements from our own enforcement officers, which anybody who looks at the border and sees what is happening could believe every bit of. And indeed it is true.

It goes on to say:

This agency is tasked with such a vital security mission is

too greatly influenced by special interest groups--to the

point that it no longer properly performs its mission.

In virtually every article we see the President is meeting with some group, such as La Raza, which has very extreme policies on immigration--basically an open borders policy. They have opposed every policy of lawfulness. Another similar group, the ACLU, was commenting recently on what they thought the President had told them he was going to do about not enforcing the law.

These are the kinds of groups he is meeting with. He is not meeting with the law officers. He never sat down with them to ask: Tell me what it is like on the border. Let's see if we fix this thing. Let's make this system work. He has never done that. That is very indicative. This legislation that would spend $2.7 billion, proposed by the Democratic leadership in the Senate, and totally blessed by the President. This is the President's bill and it does nothing to fix any of the problems. It just asks for more money.

The President of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services wrote last year:

DHS and USCIS leadership have intentionally established an

application process for DACA--

That is his first amnesty for DREAMers that the President issued.

--that bypasses traditional in-person investigatory

interviews with trained USCIS adjudications officers. These

practices were put in place to stop proper screening and

enforcement,--

He is saying that these practices were put in place to stop proper screening and enforcement.

--and guarantee that applications will be rubber-stamped for

approval, a practice that virtually guarantees widespread

fraud and places public safety at risk.

This is the head of the USCIS Officers Association. He is laying out event after event, action after action, that demonstrates we are dealing with an administration that does not want the law enforced. Can you believe these words?

The president of USCIS goes on to say:

U.S. taxpayers are currently tasked with absorbing the cost

of over $200 million worth of fee waivers bestowed on

applicants for naturalization during the last fiscal year.

This is in addition to the strain put on our Social Security

system that has been depleted by an onslaught of refugees

receiving SSI benefits as soon as their feet touch U.S. soil.

So the story that there are no Social Security benefits is not correct. The refugees who enter our asylum system through the refugee program are entitled to these benefits when they hit the soil.

He goes on to say:

Large swaths of the Immigration and Nationality Act are not

effectively enforced for legal immigrants and visa holders,

including laws regarding public charges as well as many other

provisions as the USCIS lacks the resources to adequately

screen and scrutinize legal immigrants and non-immigrants

seeking status adjustment. There is also insufficient

screening and monitoring of student visas.

These are breathtaking reports from our top officers, from the front lines of law enforcement, from people who screen and review applications every day for the United States of America.

Now think--just imagine what will happen to our system if the President goes forward with his executive action. It would overwhelm a system that is already buckling under the weight of massive illegality on our southern border.

We must end this lawlessness. We can end this. We can do so. Let me repeat. I know it can be done. But to do so, we must first stop doing more damage. We must prevent the President's massive executive amnesty from going forward. The public, once riled to these issues, will not be ignored this time, in my opinion. They will not let the representatives of either party acquiesce to lawlessness. That is why I have said that Congress as an institution must not support any border bill that come forward that does not expressly prohibit the President's executive amnesty ideas that he has been talking about, and would block him from spending any money to execute an unlawful plan of this kind.

How can we not take this position, colleagues? What basis do we have to

say we will not take any action when we were being told on a daily basis what the President plans to do? Are we ready to go to recess for August having done nothing, said nothing, offered nothing to oppose the stated intentions of the President in this way?

There is currently no legislation pending for a vote in either Chamber, House or Senate, which passes this test. Senator Cruz has offered language, but they are not willing to allow it to come up for a vote. As a result, both the House and Senate packages should not be supported. Congress should not adjourn until it has firmly stood against the President's unconstitutional and dangerous action.

The American people are asking for us to help. They are pleading with us to help. We must answer their call. We must fight for the lawful and just system of immigration that we can be proud of. Let's put this into a bigger picture. Wages are down. Labor force participation is declining. The percentage of people in the working ages who are actually working has been declining steadily. Indeed, it has not reached a level this low since the 1970s.

Since 2000, the Federal Government has lawfully issued nearly 30 million immigrant and foreign work visas--for people to come to this country to work--almost 30 million visas to legally work in the United States or permanently reside in the United States. During this time, the number of Americans with jobs--Americans with jobs--declined on net. On net, fewer U.S.-born workers ages 16 to 65 had jobs in 2014 than in 2000. Amazing.

There are fewer people working today--even though the population has increased--than in 2000. The President's planned work permits for illegal immigrants is in addition then to the already huge flow of low- wage labor into the United States.

We have a problem, colleagues, with Americans needing jobs. We do not have too few workers. We have too few jobs. I would contend that that is pretty clear because wages are down.

If we had a shortage of workers, wages would be up. When you have a surplus of labor and surplus of workers, wages decline. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2007, a family income of 4 would amount to about $55,000, on average. It has now dropped to $50,000. That represents a huge diminishment of the wealth of America. Is it not time we did something for American workers? Who do we represent? Do we not represent the people of this country? Do we not know we cannot--while we believe in immigration, we respect and admire and love immigrants, we ought to have a lawful system. The number of people who come ought not to be so large that it destabilizes our labor market. Is that not the right policy for a great country to pursue? The American people have begged and pleaded for this system. I believe we ought to give it to them.

Let me sum up one more time here. What we are seeing in the bill presented by the majority, and demanding that it pass the Senate today, is a bill that just provides money. It does not deal with any of the policy problems in any real way that would end the lawlessness and end the belief by people around the world that if they can just come to the United States, particularly if they come as a young person, they will be allowed to stay. We have not acted to end this belief in any effective way.

It could easily be done. We do not need a law to fix that. We have looked at it. Some legal changes could help. But, first of all, the President needs to act.

The House is putting up some money. They are saying it has got to be used for some of the things that would be beneficial to ending this flow. But even then, we have seen the President does not have to use it and does not have to comply with their vision to end immigration into America.

So the President has set this up. He issued his amnesty documents, his policies, and encouraged more people to come to America. If he does this new Executive order amnesty, it would encourage more adults to come to America. It just will. It will weaken the moral authority of all our immigration laws. You cannot take these kinds of actions--as somebody who has been in law enforcement for a long time, you cannot take these actions and think there are not ramifications on them, that there are not impacts throughout the entire world and throughout the entire law enforcement community, for our ICE officers and our USCIS officers working every day dealing with hundreds of these cases.

You have to have clarity. You have to have integrity. You have to have consistency. You have to mean what you say. You cannot say: I am for strong borders, and I am for legal immigration, and then present a bill that is going to do nothing to change the path we are on. It is something I hope our people will look at and pay attention to it.

This bill is going to go down. It is not going to pass. It should not pass. It will be blocked. It will have no chance to pass in the House if it were to get out of the Senate. What I want to say to colleagues is: It is indicative of the lack of seriousness from the majority party when they produce such a poor piece of legislation.

I wish to remind my colleagues of one more thing. The only way the administration can run out of money is if it refuses to spend the money that is currently available to it for the border disaster. There is no law, no regulation preventing the administration from spending money in the current fiscal year. Even the bill they submitted to us, when it was examined, showed it only asked for $25 million for this fiscal year, through September 30. So it is not the kind of crisis we have to rush out and pass a bill today, tonight, or the country is going to shut down. They can reallocate funds. But what we need is, and what Congress needs to do as a representative of the American people, is to say: We are prepared to provide some money, but we need to know, Mr. President, that you are serious. We need to know, Mr. President, you are going to let your officers do their duty and not block them from doing their duty. We need to know, Mr. President, you are not, in a few weeks, going to issue a massive administrative amnesty to millions of people who will be given work permits to compete in America for any job that is out there--any job.

We need to know where you stand on this. We represent our people. We cannot just throw money at this problem, which is what this legislation does.

Let me take a moment to go back and discuss how we got here. We have had the current law basically in effect for a number of years: 5, 6, 7 years. We did not see a spike in entries of young people until the President issued an Executive order basically legalizing people of youth--up to 30 years of age--who came to America. That was seen around the world as an invitation for young people to come. They have come in extraordinary numbers, overwhelming our system.

In 2011, it was 6,000. This year it is going to be 90,000. What a huge surge that is. It should never have happened. Now we are reduced to being here in the Congress and having the President come to us demanding billions of dollars to fund this program and deal with the crisis his policies created. Because it is true, and has been true, the young people who come to America turn themselves in to the immigration officers, who then take them to the Health and Human Services officers and turn them over to them. They go out and find housing. That is why we have seen this all over the country. Find housing for them. Months go by, or, if anyone comes to pick them up, they are turned over to them. They do not inquire if they are legally here, those who come to pick them up. They expect no proof that they are related to the child.

Maybe it is a 17-year-old. Most of them are older teenagers who pick them up, and they are released on a permiso or bail and they never show up. Nobody has the time or the numbers or the capacity to begin to go look and see why they didn't show up in court. But if we get a traffic ticket and don't show up in court in Alabama, California, Texas, somebody is coming after us.

This is the way the system is being collapsed in America today. It is just a tragedy. It breaks my heart. The American people have never approved of this.

So word got out and we had this surge, and now the President, without any real plan to fix it, comes forward and says: Give me $4 billion-- the bill here I think is $2.7 billion--without any clear commitment or proof that we have any plan or any commitment

from his leadership to alter the dynamics of the situation we are in.

This is not acceptable. The bill before us now is not acceptable. It will not pass. It will not become law. We need to insist--the American people will continue to insist--that this Congress and this White House do their duty to make sure we have good, sound immigration laws and then ensure they are faithfully and fairly executed to serve the national interests of the United States.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I just want to say how much I appreciate the work by all the Members who worked on the veterans bill. We had some difficulties of a very serious nature, and all of us wanted to fix that. I was not able to support the bill that came out of the Senate.

We learned minutes before the vote that the average cost in the out years would be $50 billion a year if the program was funded, and there was no money to pay for that. It would really just be adding to the debt. It was sort of avoided by saying it would be a 3-year bill, but once you start these kinds of motions rolling, they never seem to end, and in the end we would be faced with a difficult situation financially.

The conference committee went to work, and I salute all the people who worked on this legislation. It has some good policy issues in it. Senator Tom Coburn, who spoke earlier, was engaged in that conference. He is a doctor. He understands these matters, he cares about them, and he was actively engaged, as we all know. In Tom Coburn we have one of the Senate's finest, most committed Senators. He loves this country. Every day he tries to save us money and make us more productive. There is nobody here who works harder or is more effective in addressing that issue than he is, and he says we need to do better. He is not able to support the conference report because it will add at least $10 billion to the debt in 3 years. I will acknowledge that it is better than before. As a result, he will raise a point of order against it, and I have to say I will support that.

Our doctors there do not carry the kinds of patient caseloads private doctors do.

While we have some policy changes that are good, more are needed. We are going to have a new Administrator, and I am very impressed with him. He is a military academy graduate from West Point, spent 5 years in the military, and was a Procter & Gamble CEO. He has bipartisan support in the Senate. A lot of confidence and a lot of hope is being placed in him.

I think the better action for us today is to not try to establish big policy changes that continue indefinitely at great expense. The better choice for us today is to wait a bit, see how effective this new leader is, and see how much he can save without reducing benefits. Maybe we can get some ideas from this top-flight, world-class businessman, who can help us develop policies that serve our veterans. We have an absolute commitment to serve our veterans and fulfill our responsibilities.

I will support the budget point of order, but if it were to be sustained--and it probably will not be sustained because people want to go forward and do this--I am confident we would be able to work with the new Administrator and develop an even better plan for securing the benefits which our veterans have earned and to which they are entitled.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

If the Senator would yield for a unanimous consent request.

I ask unanimous consent that following the remarks of the Senator from Oregon, the Senator from Kansas be recognized, following that I then be recognized, and then Senator Sanders from Vermont would be following me.

Madam President, the unanimous consent would be the Senator from Oregon, the Senator from Kansas, the Senator from Texas, and the Senator from Vermont.

Madam President, later on today I expect we would be voting on the emergency supplemental appropriation that the President had requested to deal with the humanitarian crisis on the Texas border. Over the past few weeks I have spoken about

this and made several trips down to the valley. I will be leaving tonight along with colleagues. There is a bipartisan congressional delegation going down again to the valley and to Lackland Air Force Base where about 1200 children are currently being housed by the Department of Health and Human Services pending their placement with their relatives in the country.

As part of this discussion we have been having in the search for solutions to this unexpected flood of humanity in the form of unaccompanied children coming across the southwestern border, many of us are trying to figure out exactly what the cause of this flood is. In fact, I think it is probably more than one cause. I think perhaps it is the President's statements that he is going to defer action or refuse to enforce our current immigration laws against a certain class of immigrants that is known as the President's deferred executive action order of 2012.

But there is also another cause that has been recognized on a bipartisan basis, and this is a 2008 human trafficking law that passed essentially unanimously in 2008, because we were focused on one problem; that is, human trafficking, but the unexpected consequences or unintended consequences of that created a business model that is being exploited by the transnational criminal organizations, or cartels, as they traffic in human beings coming from Central America through Mexico up to the Texas border.

Together with my colleague in the House, Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, we have introduced a bipartisan, bicameral reform, something we call the HUMANE Act, and it has been cosponsored by people who have supported the so-called Gang of 8 bill in the Senate and people who opposed the Gang of 8 bill.

I raise that point to note that this isn't about comprehensive immigration reform. We have a lot of work to be done. But this is actually intended to solve this immediate problem right in front of our eyes and to stop this hemorrhaging on our southwestern border. My hope is once we address that problem, we can come together in a bipartisan way and address the larger defects in our immigration system, of which there are many. This is, simply put, an attempt to tackle a national emergency.

Let me briefly recapitulate what I am talking about. Since October of last year 57,000 unaccompanied children have been detained on the southwestern border. Under current law--this 2008 law I mentioned-- these children are processed by the Border Patrol and they are placed with the Department of Health and Human Services, as it turns out an average of 35 days, and then placed with a family member in the United States or, if not a family member, some sponsor.

Part of the problem is that they are given a notice to appear at a future court hearing and very few of them appear. Thus, they are successful in making their way from Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala up through Mexico into the United States, and end up successfully immigrating to the United States illegally, outside of our broken immigration system.

What we need to do in order to fix that gap in the law, that loophole which was unintended by those of us who voted to pass the 2008 law, is to require that these children be held in protective custody and given a speedy hearing in front of an immigration judge for those who want to make the claim for asylum or some other relief. But the truth is the vast majority of these children, like the adults, will not have a claim to stay under existing law and our bill doesn't change that existing law. But for those who do, they have a speedy opportunity to appear in front of a judge and make that claim. Those who do not have a valid claim will simply be returned to their home country, to their family.

This morning I was invited, along with Members of the House and the Senate, to visit with the President about national security matters. He talked about Ukraine, he talked about Syria, he talked about Gaza, and all of the hot spots around the world. I used the opportunity to ask the President what he proposed that we do when this emergency supplemental bill goes down this afternoon.

The reason this bill will fail is because the majority leader simply is asking us to appropriate money and do nothing to fix the problem we have attempted to address in the HUMANE Act with Congressman Cuellar that I mentioned a moment ago.

In essence, the President asked for a blank check, when he himself acknowledged this morning in my presence and the presence of a bipartisan group of Senators and Congressmen that he knows we need to address this problem or it will just get worse if we don't address it.

It is quite remarkable to me that the President of the United States acknowledges we have a problem we need to address. When the Secretary of Homeland Security, who is trying to use the tools available to him to solve this crisis but knows he needs more tools and more authority, at the same time the President makes that acknowledgment, and at the same time his Secretary of Homeland Security identifies the need for additional authority in order to address the problem, the President has reported he wants to actually expand this deferred action Executive order he issued in 2012 and say to the people who are coming to our country outside of our immigration laws: It is OK. You can stay here. There are no consequences associated with that.

The problem with that is the message that is being sent to the cartels who traffic in human beings and make a lot of money off of it-- like I said a moment ago, this is part of their business model--by exploiting this loophole in the law.

What sort of message does this send to the families who would send their children on this horrific journey from Central America through Mexico on the back of a train called The Beast? They are willing to send their children on this journey even though they could be injured, sexually assaulted, kidnapped or held for ransom. We don't know how many of them start the journey but don't make it because of the horrific conditions by the criminal organizations, not to mention the exposure to the hot weather and difficult environmental circumstances.

By failing to address the root cause of the problem, what we are saying is: That is OK. Keep coming. Indeed, that is why it is projected that of the 57,000 unaccompanied children who have made it here so far and have been detained--by the way, they are not trying to evade detection by Border Patrol. They are turning themselves in because they realize they will be processed and placed with Health and Human Services, and essentially, by and large, they will be able to stay. That is what we need to address.

Unfortunately, the House tried to work together today to pass a bill that would, I believe, have provided more money, as the President requested--not as much as he requested, but an emergency appropriation, together with the reforms to that 2008 law which would have addressed this problem.

Unfortunately, because the House of Representatives could not get any Democratic support, that bill failed and so the Speaker of the House pulled the bill from the floor. As a result, they will not be able to pass any legislation to send over to the Senate. That should not cause any of our colleagues here in the Senate much joy because the fact of the matter is the House has its independent duty to act and we have our own duty to act, and we can and should do that this afternoon.

We should do what the House attempted to do, which is to pass a slimmed-down appropriations bill on an emergency basis to help surge resources to the border but at the same time find a way to come together and plug the hole in this 2008 law, which is necessary to stop the problem--at least on this surgical basis.

What is so confusing is to listen to the President talk in his conference room at the White House about this and acknowledge the nature of the problem, and then to see that the White House threatened to veto the legislation that the House was considering. There are a lot of mixed messages, to say the least, with regard to the President's commitment to actually enforce the law. We know that in too many instances he has simply refused to enforce the law, and our immigration law is just one of those. But to hear such mixed messages out of the White House and the administration that yes, we need to act--we should not

just write a blank check. We ought to do the policy reforms with it that would solve the problem.

I will just add that in talking to Secretary Johnson--I don't think I am disclosing any confidence he himself wouldn't repeat--there is actually an earlier experience we had in 2005 and 2006 which I think is very instructive and which we have discussed.

Secretary Chertoff was Secretary of Homeland Security when President Bush was in the White House and we had a surge of people coming from countries other than Mexico, so-called OTMs--in this case Brazilians. In 2005, we saw a surge of 30,000 Brazilian immigrants at the southwestern border. Upon investigation, they realized the reason we saw a surge in these numbers was because of a policy known as catch and release--colloquially.

In other words, people came to the country, were caught, given notice to appear at a future court hearing, and they simply disappeared and melted into the great American landscape, knowing they would successfully immigrate illegally into the United States.

It is the same policy of catch and release that is causing this surge of unaccompanied minors, not to mention single adults with young children. We don't have adequate detention facilities for them, so they are released, given a bus ticket, and told to come back for their court hearing a year or more later. And they simply never show up.

We have all been noticing with great concern this humanitarian crisis at the border and the conflicting and contradictory messages and actions coming out of Washington, DC. So it was not really all that surprising to me to see a new poll that was reported this morning where 68 percent of the respondents disapproved of the President's handling of the immigration issue--68 percent. According to the Washington Post this morning, no other single issue trumps immigration in terms of Presidential disapproval. That is a shocking number.

Unfortunately, when I asked the President today: What

happens, Mr. President, when we leave for the August recess

and nothing happens to address this problem? He said: Well,

one thing we are going to have to do is reprogram money from

other programs and use that money to address this hole and

this surge needed at the southwestern border.

I was disappointed the President didn't say what I was hoping he would say, and that is: I am going to call majority leader Harry Reid, and I am going to tell him he needs to allow a vote on some of the amendments we are going to offer, such as the Humane Act, on this emergency supplemental, and give the Senate an opportunity to vote for a solution and not just another blank check. Unfortunately, I didn't hear that commitment from the President.

As a result, this afternoon we are going to leave this city and go back home without doing anything to address what the President himself has called a humanitarian crisis. The problem is just going to get worse. As long as the magnet exists, as long as this business model that the cartels have figured out continues to be lucrative and they continue to make money exploiting it and we don't do anything to fix it, the numbers will get worse and worse. And as we see children being placed in literally warehouse-type settings around the country, we are going to continue to see more and more backlash from the American people as they realize the Federal Government is failing in its most basic function, which is to secure our border and enforce our laws.

Unfortunately, this is what Presidential abdication of duty looks like. The President identified a national emergency, but has done virtually nothing to address it. Indeed, he said: We have a problem, and we need to fix it. He then threatened to veto the very legislation the House proposed would fix it.

This is what happens when a President openly and proudly is contemptuous of his obligation to faithfully enforce the law of the land by not only issuing an Executive order in 2012 that is beyond his legal authority to do but also by saying that because Congress has not done what I want them to do as far as reforming our immigration laws, I am going to further expand my Executive order and refuse to enforce the law with regard to more and more people. That is not a secret. It is well reported in the newspapers and on television, and it is not lost on the people who make money exploiting this system nor the people who want to come to the United States outside of our immigration laws.

Sadly, I can only conclude that although the President plainly knows what we need to do, as do his cabinet members, and although prominent Democrats have plainly identified what we need to do to fix the problem, when he doesn't demand that the majority leader allow a vote and a solution to that problem, I can only conclude that he is listening to his political advisers and not making the best judgment that is in the best interest of the American people. I can't explain it any other way.

So on in one last attempt this afternoon to address this crisis, I, along with several of my colleagues, am introducing an alternative to this blank check that the President has requested and Majority Leader Reid will set for a vote. It will include many of the reforms I mentioned earlier in the Humane Act, but specifically our legislation would treat all unaccompanied minors the same under the law. It would correct that loophole in the 2008 law that treats unaccompanied minors from Mexico differently from unaccompanied children from noncontiguous countries. It would give Federal, State, and local authorities the resources they need in order to manage the crisis. It would improve our detention capacity so we would end this catch and release which is being exploited, and it would ensure safe repatriation by filing for protective custody for all those children who don't qualify for an immigration benefit under current law.

Our bill would prevent the Obama administration also from unilaterally creating yet another deferred action program that would further add gasoline to this fire and cause these numbers to continue to grow and the humanitarian crisis to expand. In other words, our bill would help resolve the current crisis and would help prevent a similar crisis from occurring in the future.

Under the Senate procedures, the only person who can make the decision whether the Senate will have an opportunity to vote on such a reform is the majority leader, and he has already announced that he intends not to allow us to offer that reform. So I expect we will end up leaving here today having done nothing, in spite of the fact there is bipartisan and bicameral recognition that we are experiencing a crisis and the President and his own cabinet have identified the causes but refuse to do anything about them. To me that is the very definition of dysfunction and the very reason that the American people are absolutely disgusted with the refusal of Congress and the executive branch to do what we know needs to be done--and it is a tragedy.

I hope the majority leader will reconsider and give us a chance to vote on this reform to help solve the problem, and then we can move on and address other important problems that face our country.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I rise today to speak in favor of a principle that should unite us all--the principle of Internet tax freedom. One of the great blessings of our modern economy is the productivity, the entrepreneurial spirit the Internet has created, the ability of anyone with an idea to jump online, to communicate, to create a business, to reach the world.

One of the reasons the Internet has been such an entrepreneurial haven is that Congress has wisely decided to keep it free from taxation, not to subject the Internet to taxation. Well, unfortunately, we are at the precipice of that long tradition changing. If the Senate refuses to take action, the Internet will be taxed this November.

For a decade and a half, Americans have been able to use the Internet all across the country free of taxes, and Republicans and Democrats have agreed on this basic principle. There is not a lot of agreement in this town on much of anything, including what time of day it is. Yet on Internet taxes--in 1998 President Bill Clinton signed the law banning Internet taxes. Congress has extended it three times--in 2001, 2004, and 2007.

Today there is a bipartisan coalition on the record to keep the Internet tax free. The senior Democratic Senator from New York and the senior Democratic Senator from Wisconsin both publicly support keeping the Internet free from taxation. Conservatives in the Senate, such as the junior Republican Senator from Utah, the junior Republican Senator from Florida, and the senior Republican Senator from Louisiana, agree as well. There are 52 cosponsors in the Senate on the bill by the senior Democratic Senator from Oregon, who is here with us, to keep the ban on Internet taxes.

This should be easy. This should be a matter of easy agreement because rarely is there an issue that has united parties so broadly as keeping the Internet tax free. Yet, unfortunately, this session of the Senate is also seeing politicians who want to extend sales taxes to the Internet, who want to subject small businesses, mom-and-pops, businesses started by people just wanting to build a business, to crushing sales taxes from 9,600 jurisdictions nationwide.

I am passionate in saying we should fight against taxing the Internet, and we should not open the door to Internet taxes. The average tax rate right now on telephone services and other voice services is 17 percent. The average tax rate on cable and video services is 12 percent. If this Senate does not act, you are going to see consumers in States such as Montana and South Dakota and Massachusetts, on November 1, begin paying taxes for having basic Internet service. Those State laws are already in effect and will go into effect on Internet services.

I would note for the Senators who represent Montana and South Dakota and Massachusetts that come November 2--which, I might note, is right before an election day--anyone in those States should be prepared to answer questions from their citizens on why the Senate stood by and let taxes be raised on their citizens just for having an Internet connection.

Americans are struggling to pay their bills in the Obama economy. Life has gotten harder and harder for working men and women in this country. Life has gotten harder and harder for the most vulnerable among us--for young people, for Hispanics, for African Americans, for single moms. The last thing we should be doing is playing politics and jacking up taxes on people accessing the Internet.

I would note that the U.S. House of Representatives has already acted. On July 15 the House voice voted H.R. 3086, the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act. It had 228 cosponsors. My friend Senator Wyden has introduced the Senate version of it, S. 1431. It has 52 cosponsors, including 18 Democrats. This ought to be something where we stop playing games and say let's all come together and agree: Do not tax the Internet. Yet, unfortunately, we are not in that situation. Unfortunately, we are seeing an objection to the House-passed bill, to a bill that has the support of a majority of Senators. Why? The only reason is because there is hope that by holding the Internet Tax Freedom Act hostage, it can become a vehicle to impose sales taxes on transactions over the Internet, to impose sales taxes on every small business.

I would note one of many wonderful things. It used to be that if you were a single mom and you wanted to start a small business, you wanted to make something, you wanted to sit down and make something, whether it was a computer program or sweaters for dogs or anything else, it used to be that to create a small business took time, it took money, it took infrastructure. You had to have in place warehouses and distributors. You had to have a mechanism to sell your products.

Do you know the great thing about the Internet? If you are a single mom and you have an idea to start a business, you can put up a Web site, and with FedEx you can deliver anywhere in the country.

Anyone all over the country can do it, if you have an idea. Let me tell you, my cousin had an idea to sell scarves. She thought she had some good design ideas. My cousin Beatriz worked with her best friend to design scarves.

If you put up a Web site, suddenly you can sell all over the country. Well, what would the Internet sales tax do? It would say that when you start your business, if you start getting customers, you have to collect taxes in 9,600 jurisdictions all over the country. If the school district across the country changes its tax rate from 4.5 percent to 4.75 percent, you have to know that and collect that differential tax. This does not make any sense.

We should stand together united in protecting the entrepreneurial haven that is the Internet. We should stand united against taxing the Internet.

I would note that my friend the Senator from New Hampshire has a long and passionate record on this issue as well, and I am happy to yield to her for a question on this important topic.

I thank my friend from New Hampshire. I would note that she is exactly right. We have the ability to do something productive, something that does not happen in Washington an awful lot. We have the ability right now to come together in a bipartisan way for the Senate to demonstrate that it can function productively to address the economic challenges in this country the way the House has.

The House is doing its job. The House has passed this bill. It is the Senate that has refused to take it up for a vote. It is the Senate that is refusing to do its job. We have an ability not just to protect the Internet from taxes but also to honor our word. How many Members of this body, on both sides of the aisle, go to the tech community and say: We want to stand with tech. We want to stand for the entrepreneurial vibrancy of tech?

Yet I would note anyone objecting to this right now is setting the stage for a massive Internet tax. How many of us make the case to young people that we are standing for the future for young people, we are standing for greater opportunity, we are standing for the chance to help young people achieve the American dream? You know, young Americans, 18 to 29 years old, oppose an Internet sales tax by 73 percent to 27 percent.

Yet if this body refuses to stand together in a bipartisan manner, we are telling young people: What we say on the campaign trial is not backed by action on the floor.

We ought to come together on what should be an uncontroversial bill, a bill that has passed three times before, a bill that was signed by President Bill Clinton, a bill that in this body is introduced by a senior Democrat. We ought to come together in a bipartisan way to say: We stand in unison protecting Internet tax freedom.

Accordingly, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 3086, which was received from the House. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Madam President, I wish to briefly explain to people watching the back-and-forth that just occurred what is going on here, because it is easy to not understand everything that is happening. There are three things going on here:

No. 1, what we are unfortunately seeing is the Senate holding one bill hostage in order to try to force through another unpopular bill.

There are two bills concerning the Internet. The first is the Internet Tax Freedom Act. That has been in place for over a decade. It has had bipartisan support. It has been championed by the Senator from Oregon who has been an outspoken and passionate advocate of making sure that when you and I go and sign up for the Internet, we don't face taxes for getting Internet service, and it has worked very well. That law has always been an area of bipartisan agreement.

But there is a second law that has been proposed in this body but not passed. The second law is the Internet sales tax, what its proponents call the Marketplace Fairness Act. The Internet sales tax is not focused on taxing someone just for signing up to the Internet. Rather, the people being punished by the Internet sales tax are all the small businesses trying to sell their wares online, and there are a number of Senators who very much want to impose taxes on those small businesses in 9,600 jurisdictions nationwide.

What is happening here, right now, is even though no one has serious objection to the Internet Tax Freedom Act, we are, unfortunately, seeing our colleagues from the Democratic side of the aisle hold that bill hostage in an effort to try to force through the Internet sales tax.

I would note the reason my friend from New Hampshire had no choice but to object to the 2-month proposal is the 2-month time period was not picked out of a hat. Two months means the Internet Tax Freedom Act would expire during a lameduck session. And why is that? Because in a lameduck session there are a bunch of Members who have been defeated, who aren't going to face voters ever again. A lameduck session is the session most likely to raise taxes.

So why is it there is an effort to extend this just 2 months? So when the Internet Tax Freedom Act expires in the lameduck, the Members of this body who lost their election and are immune from democratic accountability will all come together and say: OK, now let's pass the Internet sales tax. We shouldn't be holding the Internet hostage to the rapacious desire of tax collectors.

A second point I want to make about what is going on here--this is about discriminatory taxes, not about federalism. My friend, the Senator from North Dakota, was a learned attorney general who talked about the 10th

Amendment and federalism. I welcome seeing friends of mine on the Democratic side of the aisle embrace the 10th Amendment. I look forward and hope aspirationally that friends on the Democratic side of the aisle will embrace the 10th Amendment on other issues.

I would note, however, that the constitutional history we were told was a little bit off, because if we look at the history of our country, originally we had the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation allowed States to enact discriminatory taxes against each other, and it led to chaos. It didn't work. One of the reasons our Constitution was adopted was to prevent discriminatory taxes, one State picking on another State.

So when Congress was given the authority to regulate interstate commerce, it is precisely to prevent a little mom and pop selling online from being forced by 9,600 jurisdictions nationwide to collect all of those taxes. If someone is living and working in the State of Texas, they shouldn't have to collect taxes for New York or California--for politicians they don't get to vote for. For politicians they don't get any input on, they shouldn't be forced to collect their taxes.

Indeed, for the approach of Members of this body who want to pass the Internet sales tax, recall President Reagan's famous admonition:

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a

few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,

regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Why don't we stop it at the outset? The Internet is moving. It is generating entrepreneurial steam throughout this country. We haven't been taxing it. Let's not start now.

The third and final point I will make about what this exchange is about is, more than anything, this exchange is about crony capitalism.

I would note the Presiding Officer today has been quite passionate discussing the corruption in Washington that favors big business. What we just saw on this Senate floor illustrates that as powerfully as anything that has happened this year. Because what is the Internet sales tax all about? It is about a coalition of big businesses coming together, both big bricks-and-mortar retailers and big online retailers coming to their elected officials, saying: You know what. We don't like competition. These little guys, these little upstarts, these single moms who start businesses and compete with us, we don't like that. So let's go to our friends in Washington--our friends, mind you, whom we hold campaign fundraisers for, whose campaigns we contribute to--and let's get the Congress to come together and hammer every small online business we can.

That is what we are seeing. This is crony capitalism. This is a law designed to benefit big companies and hurt small startups.

The beauty of our country is that anybody can come to this country with nothing but a hope and a dream and a vision and achieve anything. It is because the entrepreneurial vibrancy of this country gives the little guy a chance. Yet I am sorry to say Washington more and more behaves as though it is for sale to the highest bidder.

Right now, today, the top 1 percent in our country earns a higher share of our income than any year since 1928. We ought to come together in a bipartisan way and say: Stop being the handmaidens of big business. Stop using government to make it harder for the little guy, for young people, for single moms, for Hispanic and African-American entrepreneurs. Stop making it harder for them to achieve the American dream. Stop pulling up the ladder so the big companies can say: We have got ours; nobody else gets theirs.

When big business comes to Washington and says: We want government's help stifling small business, both parties should stand together and say: Sorry. That is not what the Congress is for. We work for the American people. But, I am sorry to say, what we just saw was a powerful demonstration that this Senate right now is more interested in preserving crony capitalism than it is in protecting mom-and-pops, in protecting opportunity, in protecting Internet tax freedom.

But the great thing about our system is at the end of the day, the American people don't work for the 100 Members of this body. It is the other way around: All 100 of us work for the American people. And I will tell you, the American people are getting fed up. They are getting fed up with Members of both parties who spend more time giving in to the corruption of Washington and entrenching power than they do removing barriers to people achieving the American dream.

I am hopeful and confident that the voters are waking up, are standing up, and will hold every one of us accountable. Democrats and Republicans, every one of us, will be held accountable: Have you fought to make it easier to achieve the American dream or have you simply preserved the corrupt crony capitalism of Washington?

I hope we can together aspire to our better angels. I hope we can come together and keep and preserve in a bipartisan manner Internet tax freedom.

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

Mr. President, I know the Senate is now considering whether we should vote on the motion to proceed to the emergency supplemental bill. That means under our rules of another century we actually don't get to the bill. We have a debate or even have a filibuster on whether we should even move to the bill. It was designed to cool the passions of the time so the Senate could be the greatest deliberative body in the world. However, these procedures now have been distorted. We are no longer the greatest deliberative body in the world; we are the greatest delaying body in the world. Delay has become not only a tactic to come up with better ideas, delay has become an outcome unto itself.

We are facing a serious problem in our country, and I hope we would vote on the motion to proceed so we could actually get on the legislation for the urgent supplemental funding to deal with three crises facing our country, one of which is wildfires burning in the West, in which property, communities, and livelihoods are being destroyed and first responders are being exhausted. While they are being exhausted, local and State funds are being exhausted, along with the Forest Service of our own government.

We need to stand with our neighbors in these Western States because this is a calamity. The Presiding Officer was the mayor of a great city in New Jersey--Newark. He knows what happens when a hurricane hits the city and hits a State. He could tell me and I know he has spoken frequently about how New Jersey is still trying to recover from Sandy.

Well, the fires raging in the Western States are their hurricane. It is their tornado. It is their Sandy. I hope we would pass the $615 million to help our own fellow citizens in the 8 Western States.

Then we have a treasured ally that is under attack by a terrorist organization and needs to defend itself using technology called the Iron Dome. They defend themselves by shooting interceptor rockets. It is not an offensive rocket, shoot to kill, it is shoot to defend. They are using up these rockets at an unprecedented rate, and the Secretary of Defense sent a letter to the Congress asking for $225 million to be able to replenish their arsenal.

We also have a crisis in Central America and the violence by the narcotraffickers--or the narcoterrorists--that is causing a surge of children to come into our country. I hope we will pass the legislation which will allow us to get the money that is needed to address that situation, and I will elaborate on that in a moment.

After all is said and done, I hope this will not be another day where more gets said than gets done. We need to respond to the needs that are presented to us.

I wish to talk about the children at this time. Much has been said on the floor about the current situation, and much has been said about President Obama's failed immigration policy; we need to give the National Guard police powers.

I am proud many Senators went down to the border. I myself went to the border. I went to see the situation, as chair of the Appropriations Committee. No. 1, I wanted to see if there was an urgent need; No. 2, what would it take to meet that need; and No. 3, how we can work together on a bipartisan basis to protect the children and protect our own country. Well, I got an eyeful, and I have to tell you about it.

I traveled with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of HHS, Secretary Burwell, down to the border. We went to the McAllen Border Patrol station. We also went to Lackland Air Force Base, where children are temporarily housed. I had the opportunity to meet with great Border Patrol agents, a wonderful faith-based organization that is caring for the children, and fantastic young lawyers from the University of Texas at Austin campus and St. Mary's Law School. The law students and professors are there to make sure the kids have legal services on a pro bono basis. They are doing it on their own time. We saw a lot. I also had a chance to talk to the children.

First, I will talk about the number of children. There was talk on the floor that made it sound as if we were under siege rather than facing a surge. I think there is a big difference between feeling as if we are under siege and facing a surge. As of this minute, we are talking about 60,000 children. That is a lot of children, but if you went to Baltimore to the Ravens stadium, the Ravens stadium holds 60,000 people. We are not talking 600,000 or 6 million children; we are talking about 60,000 children. Maybe it will swell to 90,000 children. All 90,000 children could still fit in the new Dallas stadium.

We are talking about a number so small that it could fit into an American stadium.

We are a country with 300 million people. We can certainly deal with 60,000 children who are fleeing traffickers, drugs, and sexual slavery. Are we not big enough, tough enough, and strong enough to be able to deal with that? I think we are. If you could see what has been going on, you would know what I mean.

Let's talk about these 60,000 children. It is literally a children's March across Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, through Mexico, and coming up the Rio Grande. They are not coming across all 1,900 miles of the border. They are going to a specific area, and they are crossing the river on rafts, swimming, and doing whatever they can to get to the border.

It starts like this: The children either come on their own or they come because a smuggler or coyote brings them here. That means some mother, father, or aunt in the United States of America, making minimum wage, is scraping together the $3,000 to $5,000 the smuggler is charging to deliver--kind of like a FedEx or UPS for human beings-- these children to the Rio Grande border. The violence is so bad that they are willing to trust a crook to bring the children to this country.

These children trek through a jungle, through filth and dirt and danger. They stop at what they call safe houses. That is an oxymoron; there is nothing safe about a safe house. There are children with all kinds of different people on that road. These people take advantage of the children. I won't describe it.

From this safe house, they finally make it to the border by a train called The Beast. The Beast is a cargo train. This is not a lovely train that goes up and down our coast from Boston to Savannah. This is a train called The Beast. The children ride on the top of these trains, holding and clutching to each other. I talked to a 9-year-old girl who said that she rode for 2 days and had to stay awake for 48 hours because she was worried about falling off and losing an arm or leg or death itself.

Why would children risk this? Why would parents risk this? It is because of the danger, danger, danger in Central America. We are talking about arming the border more. We need to go after these criminals and arm our law enforcement officers so they can fight the narcotraffickers in Central America. We need to deal with our insatiable appetite for drugs that fuels and is driving this movement.

When they send the children back, what are they going to send them back to? We are sending them back to countries that are recruiting boys to engage in criminal activity, and girls are recruited into human trafficking. It is not as though we are going to send them back on a plane and Juan Diaz will be there with yellow roses saying: Welcome back, children of Honduras and El Salvador. They will go back to the very danger from which they ran.

When I went to the McAllen Border Patrol station, which is really a detention facility--it was designed to detain adults--underline that word. It was designed to hold up to 300 people, usually illegal immigrants trying to cross the Rio Grande. These really look like cells. They are cement cinder block facilities that were designed to hold 10 or 12 adults, and they hold as many as 20 or 30 children who are sleeping on the floor.

The Border Patrol is doing the best they can. The Border Patrol is taking care of children because we can't move them to humanitarian facilities as the law requires. The children are taking turns sitting on a cement block to even be able to rest. There are 20 or 30 in a room sleeping on the floor and using empty water bottles for pillows. They

have blankets that look like aluminum foil. These are the lucky ones. They are able to come in from the overfilled outdoor area, where the boys are often put in a covered area where they sleep outside. The girls can be ``inside,'' but they are in these holding cells. They have very limited showers and very limited hygiene.

The Border Patrol is doing everything they can. It is not something we are used to seeing in the United States.

I know there is another codel going to the border. Go, go, go, go. Go and see this.

I talked to a 12-year-old girl. She was in charge of bringing her 6- year-old sister to the border. Their parents sent them here to escape the gang violence. The mother told the older girl to watch out for her younger sister. They said to her: Don't let her out of your sight until you get to America, and then try to get to your aunt.

I talked to a 15-year-old girl from Honduras. Both of her parents had been killed by gang violence. She worked in a restaurant to save enough money to pay the coyote. It took her 2 months to get to the United States. She escaped violence along the route to get here.

Are you going to send her back? Are you going to send the 6-year-old back? Wow.

I then had the opportunity to see what the conditions were like for these children. If you talk to the border law enforcement agents, they want to be law enforcement guys. Gee, are they terrific. They know the surge at the border has been caused by the criminal activity here. They talked openly about it. There are seven organized crime syndicates that are sparking a lot of this. They know about the false recruitment of young people who are promised a new way and new day to get to the United States of America. They know about that, and they want to be able to do what they were hired to do--law enforcement. But in order for them to be able to do what they need to do, we have to have the facilities for the children to be housed, clothed, and fed while their legal status is being determined under the law.

I went up to Lackland Air Force Base. The children are being cared for in unused dormitories that once housed our Air Force. We have new facilities for our enlisted personnel. Did you know we pay for that? The Department of Health and Human Services has to pay the Department of Defense to house those children. It is on a military base with all the rules and regulations associated with that. It is the most expensive housing we have, but it is the best housing we have right now because of this rejectionist fear that is being promulgated through our country that somehow or other these children pose a danger to us. It is the best we can do.

I will say that it is a very nice facility. It is operated by a faith-based organization, the Baptist Conference. My hat is off to them. I speak now as a professionally trained social worker. It is one of the most outstanding child welfare service organizations I have seen, from the nurses to the social workers.

They are doing a fabulous job, but they are under a contract. Although they are a voluntary, faith-based organization, they are being compensated for their time and services because that is what we should do. We want to be able to use such groups all over America. What was so heartwarming to me was that Catholic Charities, based in Oklahoma, came to Texas to see what the Baptists were doing because they were getting ready to take care of the kids. That is the American way--Catholic Charities learning from the Baptists.

They were all concentrating on the welfare of the children. They know these are all children in God's eyes and should be treated with dignity.

I then talked to the legal services people--the lawyers, law professors, law students from the University of Texas at Austin and St. Mary's College. The services they were providing were on their own time and their own dime. They are using their money and their summer vacation to help these children. There was no compensation, even for expenses, so they could begin the interview process to determine if any of these children had the opportunity to voluntarily return home. It is clear the coyotes misled them.

Well, we can't keep doing this on this emergency patchwork basis. We need the urgent supplemental, No. 1, to help Homeland Security's law enforcement and help Health and Human Services. They need to crack this backlog, and they need to be able to place these children in a proper facility. They need to determine if they have a right to refugee status.

Even when you have volunteer legal services such as the outstanding work I saw in Texas--outstanding. I know the Presiding Officer is a lawyer and would have been proud of these volunteers and the way they were responding to these children. They also offered bilingual services. They need more help, for example, from paralegals.

They need help to pay for the backlog of cases. We need to make sure we have enough immigration judges.

There is so much myth, so much misinformation, and so much distortion out there that I am afraid we will end this day and still not have had a vote to proceed to the urgent supplemental. Debate it, discuss it, and then let's vote on it or else it will languish.

As a social worker, I want to say that what I have seen these children go through is unimaginable. They have come here to escape violence and death. They deserve to be treated with compassion and integrity, and they deserve for us to do our job. Anyone who thinks we should just deport these children without giving them every right afforded them under our law should go down to McClellan and look into their eyes and listen to their stories.

The time to act is now. Let's put together a comprehensive program, and I believe we can meet this surge, deal with the root cause, and be able to function in a way in which we are all proud.

I yield the floor.