Delay Until Fully Functional Act of 2013

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, this afternoon the 2013 farm bill conference committee will finally convene for the first time, bringing us one step closer to finishing the farm bill. I know the Presiding Officer, being from Wisconsin, understands how important this is to our country's future, and certainly the farmers, businesses, and families in Minnesota understand how important this bill is. We have waited a long time to go to this conference committee. The Senate has passed two farm bills now that continue the strong policies of the last farm bill but in fact reduce the debt by $24 billion over the farm bill that is currently in place. I am part of the group that negotiated the details of the bill to help finish the process which started over 2 years ago.

Before I go on about the details of the Senate bill, I thank Chairman Stabenow for her incredible leadership and perseverance in getting us to this point that has been so long awaited. Under Chairman Stabenow's leadership, the Senate Agriculture Committee put together a farm bill that strengthens the safety net for our Nation's farmers and ranchers, reforms and streamlines our agriculture, conservation, and nutrition programs while still keeping them strong, and, as I mentioned, reduces $24 billion from the Nation's debt.

Throughout the process we faced unprecedented challenges and delay. We had the lack of a dance partner over in the House, but then of course we had the traditional issues--regional disputes about how certain crops and commodities should be handled, a few partisan issues here and there, but somehow we were able to come together to the point where the Senate bill was supported by 68 Senators, including 18 Republicans. I believe this is a testament to the open process we had, the endless amendments we voted on on the floor, as well as the strong committee that was brought together to work on this bill.

No matter where I go in my State--and I am sure the Presiding Officer has seen this in Wisconsin--I am always reminded of the critical role agriculture plays in our economy. Minnesota is No. 1 in turkeys-- something we think of a lot as we head into the Thanksgiving season. We are No. 1 in sweet corn, green peas, and oats, and No. 2 in hogs. I don't think people would think about that with our State, but we have surpassed some other States. But we are No. 2 in hogs and spring wheat, and No. 3 in soybeans, and No. 4 in corn.

But we don't just grow the crops and raise the livestock. We are also home to a number of major agricultural companies which have kept our economy strong, and is one of the reasons our unemployment rate is down to 5.1 percent in Minnesota. These companies include Hormel, Cargill, General Mills, coops such as CHS, and Land o' Lakes. That is why one of the first things I did when I came to the Senate was ask to be on the Agriculture Committee. I am honored to serve on this conference committee and to team up with my friend and House colleague, Representative Collin Peterson, who will be

leading the Democratic side in the House, as well as Congressman Tim Wells who represents the southern part of our State.

The expiration of the current farm bill on September 30 is hurting our agricultural economy and is creating a huge amount of uncertainty for our farmers and for our consumers. Last week I visited with Minnesotans from across the State who want Congress to pass a farm bill. I was in Kiester, MN, where I got to ride in a combine and see the good work of our farmers as they harvested the corn. I have to say that sitting in the combine after the 3 weeks of the shutdown was actually quite rewarding, as I saw firsthand you could actually get results very quickly in a combine, which I hope will happen in Congress as we move ahead.

From farmers in Redwood County to the Red River Valley to volunteers at a food bank in Minneapolis, where we also had a joint event with hunger groups, conservation groups, including Pheasants Forever, which is based in Minnesota, and the Farm Bureau and the Farmers Union, we all came together to say we had to get this done.

I journeyed up to the Moorhead area and joined Senator Hoeven in Fargo. We like to call it Moorhead-Fargo in Minnesota instead of Fargo- Moorhead--two towns divided by a river but joined by many common interests. We met there with farmers about the importance of sugar beets and about the importance of a strong farm bill for that region of the country.

Through my week I quickly heard--as I am sure the Presiding Officer did in Wisconsin--that the people of this country are sick and tired of gridlock politics, they are sick and tired of people standing in opposite corners of the boxing ring and throwing punches. They are sick and tired of the red-light, green-light game that has been played with policy. It is time to come together and get this done.

I am convinced if there is any silver lining or hope that came out of the chaos of last month, it is that the American people saw firsthand why we need change and why we need to work together. That is why in fact Senator Hoeven and I came together across the river, to make a very strong statement that we thought we had to get this bill done.

As a member of the conference committee, I know that if we don't pass a new farm bill, farmers will not be able to sign up for crop insurance, something that is so central to this new bill and is part of the $24 billion in debt reduction. They won't be able to sign up for a conservation program at a time when we need more conservation, when we see a decline in our pheasant population, where we have seen the signs that we need to have strong conservation programs. We would also see a skyrocketing of dairy prices as we would be going back to the farm bill that was passed in 1949. As I like to say at home, we don't want to party like it is 1949, and we certainly don't want to farm like it is 1949.

The failure to come together and resolve the differences between the two bills now would likely result in either 1949 prices or some kind of extension. And guess what. Ask the farmers and ranchers about that in South Dakota who just saw a decimation of their cattle because of the sudden cold weather and blizzard they experienced in South Dakota. This current bill that is in place does nothing to provide a safety net for them that used to be in place but isn't in place because of the fact we haven't passed a permanent farm bill.

It does nothing, if we simply extended it, about energy programs or about changes we need to see in the milk program or about reforms or the streamlining of our conservation programs. We simply cannot afford to do that again.

Finally, it does nothing to reduce the debt if we simply extend the current program.

Farmers and ranchers do not want another extension like the one we saw last year that left out the programs I just mentioned, the livestock disaster program, any significant deficit reduction. I believe the Senate bill lays a strong foundation for a conference agreement that can be supported on a bipartisan basis and signed into law by the President. To put it more directly, over the weekend I got a call from Greg Schwarz, who works with the Minnesota corn growers. He was hard at work, bringing in the harvest. He actually was calling me while driving his combine. His words offer some perspective, as they were passed on to me, about where we have been and where we need to go. He said:

We have been working on this farm bill for over 2 years

now, and we just want to get it done. Farmers are working

around the clock on this year's harvest, and if you don't

hear from us, it is not because we don't care, it's because

we have work to do.

Greg is right. Members of the farm bill conference committee have work to do as well. I believe that Washington should strive to be more like the farmers and ranchers that we represent who work and hope they get the job done. They can't leave a bunch of corn or soybeans in the field just because they get sick of it or they don't like their neighbor. They have to finish the job. If it starts getting cold or if it is raining, they have to bring that harvest in before there is a blizzard. That is what they do, and that is what we need to do. We have a time deadline here, an important reason we need to get moving on this bill.

I would like to highlight some areas of the Senate bill that I believe need to be preserved as part of the final agreement as near as possible to the way they are right now. I recognize there will be some compromise, but I think whatever compromise needs to be worked out should be closer to the bipartisan Senate bill that, as we know, had the support of 18 Senate Republicans, including Senators in my part of the country such as Senator Grassley and Senator Hoeven.

I know that important differences need to be worked out, especially in the areas of nutrition. I think we can do that. But, again, given what we are seeing in terms of the cuts over on the House side, we have to get them much closer to where we are in the Senate bill, which is something that will keep a safety net not just for our farmers, not just for our conservation and our pheasants and our wildlife, but also for the people of this country.

I believe the people who grow our food deserve to know that their livelihoods cannot be swept away in the blink of an eye, either by market failures or by natural disasters. That is why in the Senate farm bill the foundation of the safety net is a strengthened crop insurance program. We made the program work better for underserved commodities and specialty crops.

In recognition of the importance of crop insurance, we extended conservation compliance rules to this program to ensure that all producers benefiting from this safety net play by the same set of rules and keep our water clean and soil productive for future generations.

This agreement has the support of agriculture, environmental wildlife leaders, including the National Farmers Union and the National Corn Growers Association, as well as the Environmental Defense Fund and Ducks Unlimited. That is quite a crew.

In our charge to do more with fewer resources, the Senate bill pulls back on crop insurance subsidies for the wealthiest farmers, while ensuring that everyone can still participate in the program, keeping the risk pool strong. We also eliminated direct payments and further focused commodity title programs on our family farmers by strengthening payment limits on rules that ensure that farmers and not urban millionaires are eligible for farm payments.

We continued the successful sugar program, funded the livestock disaster programs, which I mentioned earlier, and put in place a new safety net for dairy producers to address the wild volatility in that market. No one knows that better than those in the State of Wisconsin, the home of a lot of cheese, the home of a lot of cows and a lot of dairy.

We streamlined conservation programs from 23 to 13. Specifically, I worked with Collin Peterson to ensure that local communities such as those in the Red River Valley have tools they need to address conservation challenges like flooding. The bill funds energy title programs to extend homegrown renewable energy production.

When you look at our reduction in dependence on foreign oil, from 60 to 40 percent in just the last few years--yes, you look at the increased domestic drilling and natural gas; yes, you look at the facts that we finally increased

gas mileage standards that made a big difference in this country, but you also look at biofuels which are now 10 percent of our Nation's fuel supply.

These bills ensure that we are working to support our farmers and workers in the Midwest and not the oil cartels in the Middle East. That is why I strongly support mandatory funding for the energy titles to help provide incentives for homegrown energy production from the next generation of biofuels to blender pumps. This is a vital industry in States such as mine, supporting thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in economic growth. I appreciate the support of my colleague Senator Franken for this important industry. As many of us understand, we want an ``all of the above'' energy approach that includes oil, includes natural gas, but also includes biofuels.

The Senate bill ensures that our energy innovators have the certainty and stability they need to develop the next generation of American energy.

The Senate bill also includes a number of initiatives for beginning farmers and ranchers, including two of my provisions. The first provision I produced with Senator Baucus, which would reduce crop insurance costs for beginning farmers by 10 percent. The second provision that I have introduced with Senators Johanns, Baucus, and Hoeven would allow beginning producers to use conservation reserve program acres for grazing without a penalty. I believe that both of these provisions will go a long way in building the next generation of farmers who will grow our food supply. Both of these provisions should be included in the final bill.

I believe that if we want to recruit a new generation of farmers and ranchers we must take further action to improve the quality of life in our small towns and our rural areas. That is why I worked with Senators Hoeven and Heitkamp, and I led the amendment to provide additional resources for critical priorities in the farm bill, including research--something the Presiding Officer knows something about from the University of Wisconsin--as well as rural development, conservation, and energy.

Our provision funds the new nonprofit foundation, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, to leverage private funding with a Federal match to support agricultural research. It provides additional funds to address the $3.2 billion backlog of water and wastewater projects in rural America. You literally cannot go to a region of any State in rural America without hearing about this backlog of rural wastewater and water projects. This amendment that we passed helps with that.

It also increases funding for a regional approach to conservation to address a variety of challenges, including the flooding that we saw in the Red River Valley. The provision also added an additional $100 million to the energy title to help farmers, ranchers, and rural businesses produce homegrown energy. I was pleased to get the strong support of our committee for that amendment, and I am pleased it is included in the final Senate bill.

In the Senate we also preserve the essential nutrition programs that millions of families and children rely on every day. In recent years, programs such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, became especially important as hard-working families and seniors were suddenly cashed-strapped but still in need of groceries. One of my predecessors--in fact I have his desk--Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, was an early champion of the food stamp program now known as SNAP. As one of the founders--Humphrey was one of the founders of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota--he understood the importance of a stable government policy for both agricultural producers as well as families struggling to put food on the table.

That is why we have always seen this combination of these programs. It makes sense--food comes from farms. Food is a safety net for the people of this country, as are the farm provisions, which are actually a minority of the provisions in this bill. The farm provisions provide a safety net for those who provide food. What we have done with this bill, of course, is reduce some costs and made it more efficient but still kept a strong safety net.

For more than 40 years we have linked together food and farm policy in 5-year farm bills. Nearly 72 percent of the SNAP participants are families with children, and more than one quarter of participants are in households with seniors or people with disabilities. This is not the time to make the deep cuts, as proposed in the House bill, to programs that provide important nutritional support for working families, low- income seniors, and people with disabilities with fixed incomes.

Yet what we have seen is that those cuts--which we will be discussing--on the House side include 170,000 veterans who would be cut off from food assistance if the House bill were to pass. The Senate bill, on the other hand, makes reforms that were necessary, that bring the debt down by $4 billion, reforms that were necessary. So it is not like there were no reforms to this program in the Senate bill. As I noted, 68 Senators voted for this bipartisan bill, including 18 Republicans.

The cuts proposed by the House are in addition to the $11 billion cuts to the program that will go into place this Friday, when the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act supplemental nutrition payments expire.

This program is already moving in the right direction. As the economy has improved, nutrition assistance has been further focused on families in areas with the greatest need. In fact, the CBO projects that without any changes to the program, the number of people eligible for nutrition assistance and the cost of nutrition programs will continue to fall as the economy improves. In this way, nutrition programs operate a lot like the farm safety net for agricultural producers. Just as agriculture payments spiked during the 2012 drought, which was the worst since the 1950s, the need for nutrition assistance, for example, similarly increased when our economy was struck with the worst recession since the 1930s.

When farmers are blessed with a strong harvest or when workers bring home a paycheck from a new job, we have designed agriculture and nutrition programs to adjust accordingly and be reduced.

I believe that instead of trying to find ways to make people ineligible for nutrition assistance, we need to focus on real solutions that put people back to work. This farm bill is an opportunity to do that, as are a number of these efforts--Innovate America, workforce training--and bringing in other things we should be focused on, bringing the tax reform in, bringing the corporate tax rate down and paid for. But if we continue to engage in the brinkmanship as we did in the last month we will never get to the core issue. I believe our country is on the cusp of economic expansion. I believe we have so many opportunities out there when you look at how we are situated with the increase in manufacturing and exports. We need to do work with the immigration bill to help the economy move forward, instead of what we went through last month.

I think this farm bill is the first chance to show that, out of this chaos, came something positive. It is a 5-year farm bill. It worked in the past. It brings the debt down by $24 billion. It is a bipartisan bill. Let's show the people of America that we mean business about working across the aisle.

I see my colleagues here from Tennessee. I have just about 3 minutes more on a very different topic, and that is the nomination of Patty Millett to the DC Circuit Court.

In the past few weeks, as I mentioned, we have made some efforts to come together and get work done on behalf of the American people. There are many of us who work together in relationships of trust, and I hope that continues with regard to nominations.

Patty Millett would make an excellent addition to the court on the DC Circuit, and I urge my colleagues to vote for cloture and to confirm her without delay.

Patty Millett has extensive Federal appellate and Supreme Court experience. She previously served 15 years as an attorney on the appellate staff of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, and then as an assistant to the Solicitor General. She has argued 32 cases in the Supreme Court--32--in addition to dozens of cases in other appellate courts across the country. In addition to her work for the Justice Department and in private practice, she has also devoted substantial time

to pro bono work. Ms. Millett clearly has an impressive professional background, but even outside the legal world she volunteers as a literacy tutor and for the homeless in the DC area.

She was given the Attorney General's Distinguished Service Award for representing the interests of the United States before the Supreme Court and the National Association of Attorneys General award for assistance to the States in preparation for their appearances before the Supreme Court. Ms. Millett is the kind of woman we should have on the bench. It should be no surprise that the nonpartisan American Bar Association committee that reviews every Federal judicial nominee unanimously gave her its highest rating, and over 100 leading lawyers and law professors wrote a letter in support of her nomination. This letter included 7 former Solicitors General who served under Democratic and Republican Presidents alike.

Clearly there can be no question she has the experience and ability to sit on the Federal bench. She also has the support of the Fraternal Order of Police, the Police Executive Research Forum, the National Women's Law Center, the Women's Bar Association, and the National Congress of American Indians.

Ms. Millett is well qualified, and we should confirm her now.

One justification--and there is only one that I have heard and I don't think it is a good one, and I am about to debunk it. The only justification I have heard is not about her at all, it is about the DC Circuit. Some of my colleagues think they should remain with three openings on the bench. I don't think this argument squares with the facts. Currently, 3 of the 11 seats on the DC Circuit are empty. According to the Administrative Office of the Courts, senior judges-- judges who are partially retired--are now involved in over 40 percent of the cases that are decided on the merits.

Before he was our Supreme Court Justice, John Roberts was confirmed to sit on the DC Circuit. Ten years ago when Chief Justice Roberts was confirmed to sit on that circuit, the average judge on that court had only 125 pending cases. Today, with 3 vacancies on the court, that number is 185 cases. Those are the complex cases that are pending. Even if we fill all the empty slots, the judges on the DC Circuit will still have more pending cases on average than John Roberts did when we confirmed him to sit on the DC Circuit back in 2003.

There are no excuses. We have a finely qualified nominee, with 32 Supreme Court arguments, support of the nonpartisan group that looks at these nominees, someone whose spouse served in the military for 22 years, someone who raised her kids while he was over in Kuwait, and we are going to turn her down? That makes no sense to me at all, and I urge my colleagues to help Patty Millett get into this job to do what she says is the highest honor you can have; that is, public service.

She should be confirmed without delay. The Senate should have confirmed her this week. We heard from the American people--we all heard this when we were home--how they are sick and tired of this kind of delay and partisanship. She is a fine, highly qualified nominee. She should get an up-or-down vote.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the majority leader says it is time to cut off debate and vote on the President's nominees to fill three vacancies on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. I will not vote to end debate now because I think such a vote would be premature.

Before the Senate has an up-or-down vote on the three judges, there is something else we ought to do first. We should first consider the bipartisan proposal that was made 10 years ago to have the right number of judges on this Federal appellate court. For more than a decade, Senators of both parties have argued that this court has more judges than it needs and that other Federal appellate courts have too few. In 2003, 2005, and 2007, with a Republican President in the White House, Republican Senators Sessions and Grassley introduced legislation to reduce the number of seats on the DC Circuit.

In 2006, they were joined by a distinguished group of eight Judiciary Committee Democrats who made the same argument. These included the chairman, Senator Leahy, Senator Schumer, Senator Feingold, Senator Kennedy, Senator Feinstein, Senator Durbin, Senator Kohl, and Senator Biden. When President Bush nominated Peter Keisler to the DC Circuit, the Democrats wrote Senator Specter, the committee chairman, a strong letter.

The letter says:

We believe that Mr. Keisler should under no circumstances

be considered--much less

confirmed--by this Committee before we first address the very

need for that judgeship . . . and deal with the genuine

judicial emergencies identified by the Judicial Conference.

The Democratic Senators argued, first, the committee should--before turning to the nomination itself--hold a hearing on the necessity of filling the 11th seat on the DC Circuit, to which Mr. Keisler has been nominated. They cited a number of objections by Senators to the need for more judges on that circuit.

They then argued 6 years ago:

[That] since these emphatic objections were raised in 1997,

by every relevant benchmark, the caseload for that circuit

has dropped further.

Only after we reassess the need to fill this seat and tend

to judicial emergencies should we hold a hearing on Mr.

Keisler's nomination.

That was the Democratic Senators' position in 2007. These distinguished Democratic Senators were not only forceful in 2006 and 2007, they were persuasive. They worked with President Bush and Congress agreed to reduce the DC Circuit by one seat and add it to the Ninth Circuit, where the caseload was 526 filings per judge--well above the caseload average for all the judicial circuits.

In 2007, Senator Feinstein, a Democrat, and Senator Kyl, a Republican wrote:

It makes sense to take a judgeship from where it is needed

the least and transfer it to where it is needed the most.

Mr. Keisler, by the way, was never confirmed. For 2\1/2\ years his nomination was held in the Judiciary Committee, from June 2006 until January 2009. The same arguments made in 2006 and 2007 should be persuasive today.

Today, the average caseload for the DC Circuit--even if it were reduced by three judgeships to the eight seats currently occupied-- would be less than one-half the national average for circuit courts. The national average is 344 cases filed per judge this year in Federal appellate courts. The DC Circuit average, if it were reduced to the 8 current judges, would be 149 per year. The national average is 344 cases per year. The DC Circuit average--even if it is reduced to 8-- would be 149 per year, less than half.

Since 2005, there has been a decrease of 27 percent in the number of written decisions by an active judge on the DC Circuit. Since 2005, the number of appeals filed in the DC Circuit has fallen by 17\1/2\ percent.

Before it considers any of the President's nominees for the DC Circuit, the Senate should do in 2013, today, what Republican President Bush and the Democratic Senate did in 2007; first, consider the appropriate number of judges for the DC Circuit, and then, as Senator Kyl and Senator Feinstein wrote, ``take a judgeship from where it is needed least and transfer it to where it is needed most.''

I heard the argument that the cases in the DC Circuit are more complex than in another circuit, and therefore the caseload ought to be lighter. With eight judges, it will be a lot lighter--half the national average for circuit courts. That ought to allow plenty of time to write decisions in complex cases.

Other circuits have complex cases as well. For example, the Second Circuit, including New York, regularly handles many of the most complex cases that come to the Federal courts. Finally, there are a number of senior judges who are active in the DC Circuit--that is true in almost all the circuits, and that is part of the way our system works today. They can carry some of the workload when that becomes necessary.

I think it is striking that even if this court only has eight seats, that the average caseload is less than half of the national average. So why does it need three additional judges? That is the question Democratic Senators asked in 2007, and that is what the Senate and President Bush addressed. That is the question we should be asking today before we fill any more seats for an underworked circuit court.

So I will not vote to end the debate on the President's nominees until the Senate does in 2013 what Democratic Senators suggested and what the Senate did in 2007: Assess the need for judges on the DC Circuit and transfer judges from where they are needed least to where they are needed most. That means that before we act on the President's three nominees, the Judiciary Committee and the full Senate should consider Senator Grassley's legislation that would transfer one judge to each of the overworked Second and Eleventh Circuits and eliminate one judge, leaving the DC Circuit with a caseload that still is less than half the national average for the eight remaining judgeships. Then, if there are still vacancies to be filled in the DC Circuit, the Senate can consider them one by one.

The Senate has treated President Obama very well in considering his nominations. According to the Congressional Research Service, as of August of this year President Obama's Cabinet members were, on average, 54 days--moving from announcement to confirmation at about the same pace as those of President Bush and President Clinton.

As far as President Obama's judicial nominees, President Obama has had 38 article III judges confirmed at this point in his second term, including 9 circuit judges, 25 district judges, and 4 judges to other article III courts. By comparison to those 38, President George Bush had 16 article III judges confirmed, 7 circuit judges, 7 district judges, and 2 judges to other article III courts.

What about a waiting list of judges who are waiting to be confirmed by the Senate? Is there a big backlog? The answer is no. As of today, only two circuit judges have been reported by the committee and await floor action. Remember, the committee is controlled by Democrats and they can report whomever they want. Both of these are for the DC Circuit and are not judicial emergencies. Only seven district court nominations await floor action. None have been waiting long. Three were reported in August, and four were reported in September.

So while there are always a few nominations that provoke controversy and take a while to consider, one of the Senate's most important and best known powers is the constitutional authority to advise and consent on Presidential nominations. That is a part of the checks and balances our Founders set up so we didn't have a king, we didn't have a tyranny. We made it slower. We gave the President the right to nominate, but the Senate has the right to advise and consent. Sometimes that takes a while. Sometimes those nominees are rejected.

I believe and have argued consistently that with rare exceptions, Presidential nominations deserve an up-or-down vote after an appropriate time for consideration. President Obama's nominations have been receiving timely up-or-down votes. But first, as Senators of both political parties have argued for 10 years, we should make certain we have the right number of judges on the court. We don't have money to waste in this country with the debt we have today. We should transfer judges from where they are needed the least to where they are needed the most. That is the sensible thing to do. The President's nominees for the DC Circuit will receive up-or-down votes insofar as I am concerned unless there are exceptional circumstances.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the letter of July 27, 2006, from eight Democratic Senators to Chairman Arlen Specter suggesting that the hearing on Mr. Keisler be postponed until the Senate had considered the number of judges on the DC Circuit. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record as well ``Additional Views of Senators Feinstein and Kyl'' which were written at that time.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to give thanks and show respect to World War II and Cold War heroes who served in our Nation's nuclear weapons programs on this fifth National Day of Remembrance. They weren't serving in the heat of battle but in the laboratory, handling materials on a daily basis that ranged from benign to toxic and highly radioactive. These materials posed risks that many scientists did not understand at the time.

Today in Oak Ridge, TN, the American Museum of Science and Energy, and Cold War Patriots are gathering to celebrate former workers and view a quilt that honors nuclear workers for their contribution to America's safety. This one-of-a-kind remembrance quilt has 1,250 commemorative handwritten quilt squares that form an American flag that measures 17 feet by 11 feet.

I want to specifically remember Bill Wilcox for his service to our country and passion for preserving Oak Ridge history. Bill passed this September. Bill was a former manager of the K-25 operations, a Manhattan Project veteran, and the official historian for the city of Oak Ridge.

In 1943, Bill was hired by Tennessee Eastman on a ``Secret, secret, secret!'' project in an unknown location. When he started at Eastman he was told:

As chemists you'll have to know that you'll be working [on]

this project with a substance called uranium. That is the

last time that you will hear that word or you will speak it

until after the war. And if you are

ever heard speaking the word you will be subject to discharge

from our employment immediately, and very likely prosecuted

by the United States government, and may end up in jail. Is

that clear?

In Oak Ridge ground was broken for the Y-12 plant in February of 1943, and by the end of the summer they started installing complex physics machines, called calutrons. About 1,000 calutrons were installed at Y-12.

How were these calutrons operated? Tennessee Eastman said that the calutrons couldn't be run as an experiment but should be run like an industrial plant. Rather than manuals, there should be a simple red line on meter A. The operator would turn knob A until the needle is on the red line on meter A.

However, General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, along with physicists disagreed. So they took five calutrons and ran them for a week with the best physicists and then another week with girls right out of high school that kept the needle on the red line of the meters. ``After a week the girls had won hands down in terms of productivity.''

These women were called the ``calutron girls.'' One calutron girl first learned of the war effort in Oak Ridge when she was at a cafe in Sweetwater, TN. She was working in a hardware store at the time. The store had a big window where people from the surrounding counties put photos of their sons who went away to war. She had the job of straightening up the photos when the heat from the window caused the cardboard frames to buckle. With great dignity, the families would take down the pictures of their fallen soldiers.

Wanting to help the war effort, she went to Oak Ridge, where there was ``mud everywhere, and green Army trucks, and vehicles, and soldiers, and that was just inside the gate.'' As a calutron girl, she wore a blue uniform. The chemical workers wore white. She said:

You weren't allowed to go in the other room . . . you'd

stick out like a sore thumb, a blue something in a white-

uniformed place . . . But they let us go over--towards the

end . . . they told us to take all the bobby pins out of your

hair before you go out there because it would yank your bobby

pins out.

She remembers:

You couldn't talk. You couldn't say anything to anybody

about where you worked, what building, when you left the

plant. In fact, there were huge banners up all over the

plant: `When you leave here what you see here stays here.'

And you weren't allowed to tell even . . . somebody [that]

worked on the same thing you did.

There were signs everywhere: ``Keep your mouth shut!'' ``Loose lips sink ships!'' ``See no evil; hear no evil; speak no evil'' with posted fines of $10,000 and warnings of jail time.

One of the things that was curious about Oak Ridge was that these rail cars came in every week, but nobody ever saw any product going out. The reason was that the product went out in a standard-sized briefcase every week chained to the wrist of a military officer, in plainclothes. He would get on the train and go to Chicago to exchange the briefcase.

During 1945, a different process at the K-25 building was surprisingly successful and cost less than 10 percent of the cost of the Y-12 process. The K-25 building was a mile-long U-shape--once the world's largest buildings under one roof. The operators had to use bicycles just to get around their building.

The successful K-25 process ran full blast for another 20 years, while the Y-12 plant received a new mission.

These efforts along with others by our nuclear weapons workers across the country won World War II and the cold war. At the peak of the Cold War, nearly 600,000 workers across the country were involved in the research and production of nuclear weapons.

Today, many former nuclear weapons workers are retired. Many of them are sick. Some are dying. The government is helping these sick nuclear workers through the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program created by Congress in 2001.

This program provides compensation to those who were exposed to radiation and toxic materials while building our nuclear weapons, especially those that were instrumental in our winning the cold war. This program receives claims from all 50 States nearly 100,000 individual workers.

This program is especially important to Tennessee. Tennessee has the highest number of claims than any other State--over 14,000 workers. Tennesseans, mostly former workers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Y- 12 and K-25, have received over $1.7 billion in compensation and paid medical bills, according to the Department of Labor.

Today, the nuclear workers across the country continue this heroic legacy to advance nuclear power, nuclear medicine and other technology that continues to make our lives better and keep our country safe.

So I am privileged to work with Senator Mark Udall in honoring these patriots who worked countless hours with little-understood hazardous materials to build our country's nuclear deterrent.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Ohio for his tireless and engaged leadership on manufacturing, on fighting for access to foreign markets on fair terms, for fighting for skills and increasing the skills of our manufacturing workforce, and in this instance, in this strong bipartisan bill, for working with our colleague from Missouri on a national network of manufacturing innovation centers.

My own work of 8 years at a manufacturing company in Delaware in a materials-based science company that makes things helped make it clear to me how important research and development and continuous innovation are for manufacturers at all levels. I have seen this across the State of Delaware. Our Presiding Officer--long owner and leader of a manufacturing business in his home State of Indiana--knows this better than any of us: that if we don't innovate, if we don't invest in research and development, in improving the skills in the workforce and improving the productivity and the operating efficiency of any manufacturing company, we can't survive in the tough headwinds of the global marketplace today.

One of the programs I championed here in the Senate that has bipartisan support is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. It is a long-established program that takes the latest cutting-edge research and development work at universities and moves it to the shop floor. I have visited companies up and down Delaware, from FMC in Newark to Speakman in New Castle, where they have taken those innovations from the university to the shop floor.

One of the things I am grateful to Senator Blunt for is his leadership in taking that insight that in order to have the most productive manufacturing workforce in the world, in order to continue to compete globally, we have to find ways to continue to invest in demonstrating the power of innovation and we have to find ways to do that in a bipartisan way.

I thank the Senator for being willing to work with Senator Brown and others here. This is exactly the sort of stuff I hear from Delawareans they want us to be doing. There is lots that divides us. This is something that unites us: working together to strengthen our manufacturing sector, to make it more competitive, to bring jobs back to the United States, and to grow this sector.

We have grown half a million jobs in the last 3 years in the manufacturing sector. These are good jobs, at high wages, high benefits, high skills. But we can and should do more, pulling together to sort of lift further this ongoing manufacturing revival.

If Senator Blunt would share some more with us about this specific bill and about his experience in what else we can and should be doing together to strengthen manufacturing in Missouri, I would be grateful.

I thank Senator Blunt for his work on this bill with Senator Brown. There are other bills that I hope this body will take up and discuss and debate where I hope we can find ideas that are out there, with progress that is being made and policy innovation that is being made, and that we can take them up, debate them, and find bipartisan sponsors who will carry them forward.

I absolutely agree with the Senator's point that we are seeing in manufacturing a revival in this country for a variety of reasons. One of them is less expensive energy. The shale gas revolution is reducing the feedstock costs for chemical manufacturing and reducing the energy costs broadly for manufacturing of all kinds.

We are also seeing that lots of American companies fear the loss of their inventions, their innovations, if they move offshore. So some of the attractiveness of operating in other countries has dimmed a bit, as they have recognized that the United States is one that has a rule of law that protects their inventions and innovations.

There is also less of a wage gap, frankly, as wages have come up in the developing world. In China, the wage gap is less. So that combination gives us a window, gives us a moment of opportunity. We lost millions of manufacturing jobs in the first years of this century, but in the last three we have been growing them and growing them steadily. If we can work in partnership across the aisle on manufacturing skills, on access to credit, on innovation, on a coordinated strategy, I cannot imagine a community in this country that would not rather have high-quality manufacturing jobs.

As Senator Blunt was mentioning, for every manufacturing job that is created, there is 1.6 new support jobs created. For every $1 spent in manufacturing, there is $1.34 spent in the local economy that moves around. It is the sector that has the most positive secondary impact in our communities.

I do think there is broadly in our country a sense that we have sort of lost our leading edge in manufacturing because of the large-scale layoffs and the large plant closings. But in my State, and I presume in the Senator's State and in the Presiding Officer's State of Indiana, and others, there are dozens and dozens of small and medium-sized manufacturers who have seized this moment, who are growing, and who simply want us to help facilitate their access to the market, their access to innovation and new research, their access to a skilled workforce.

If we can pull together, I think we can do great things for the United States going forward.

Also, before we close, I thank Senator Blunt for being a cosponsor with me of the startup innovation tax credit--something Senator Enzi and I and many others--Senator Rubio, Senator Schumer, Senator Stabenow, as well as Senator Moran--have cosponsored and introduced and discussed over time. It would help with access to capital for early stage startup manufacturers.

There are lots of good ideas we can and should discuss on the floor, in hearings, and going forward. But for today I am grateful to Senator Blunt for his leadership with Senator Brown on this bill that would help strengthen the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation centers. The Senator is a strong leader for manufacturing in his home State of Missouri, and I am grateful for a chance to spend some time with him on the floor today discussing that good bill and his good ideas.

I thank Senator Blunt. I thank the Senator for his enthusiasm for manufacturing and for his enthusiasm for working together with me on the startup innovation credit bill, as the Senator referenced, and with Senator Brown on the national network of manufacturing innovation centers as he spoke about.

Manufacturing is the center, the beating heart of the middle class of America. Manufacturing jobs are good jobs. We do need to get back to being a country where inventing, growing, and making things is an area of bipartisan, sustained, purposeful focus. I know for the folks who watch us at home and for the folks here in this Chamber, nothing could meet the demands and the needs of our communities and our States more than for us to come together in a bipartisan, balanced, and responsible way to advocate for a stronger manufacturing sector in the United States.

I thank Senator Blunt very much.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I rise today to speak in favor of Ms. Patricia Millett's nomination to the DC Circuit Court. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have the opportunity to closely examine each of the judicial candidates nominated by our President. I did so with Ms. Millett, attending her nomination hearing and speaking to a wide range of the practitioners and colleagues who have direct knowledge of her professionalism and experience. Without exception, at every stage of her career and with every personal and professional colleague with whom she has had work experience, Patty--Ms. Millett-- has distinguished herself as a person of integrity, intelligence, and dedication. She is a person whose capability and devotion to a family is an inspiration to those around her. She is unanimously recommended by former living Solicitors General, and received the ABA's highest rating.

Some of my colleagues here have argued that President Obama is trying to ``pack the court'' by nominating Ms. Millett and two other nominees to fill three current vacancies on the DC Circuit Court. These charges of court packing strike me, frankly, as without foundation. Court packing is an historical term used to describe when politicians try to change the size of a court, expand a court, in order to control its expected outcome. That was the cause of the objection to President Roosevelt's plan to add up to six Justices to the U.S. Supreme Court back in 1937.

In fact, a current legislative proposal to strip the President's ability to fill three vacant seats on the DC Circuit could better be called court stripping. In this particular case, making nominations to vacant judicial positions is not court packing, it is a President doing his job. Confirming highly qualified nominees to serve on this circuit in this vacancy would be this body doing its job.

The charges of court packing are absurd on their face. They are even more absurd when put in context.

Ms. Millett has been nominated to the ninth seat of the 11 authorized on this court. There are currently three vacancies on this vital circuit court.

I held a hearing earlier this year on judicial staffing levels in my role as the chair of the Subcommittee on Bankruptcy and the Courts of the Judiciary Committee. I invited the chair of the Judicial Conference Committee on Judicial Resources, Judge Tymkovich, to come testify. For those who ascribe significance to such things, Judge Tymkovich was nominated by President George W. Bush to sit on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Tymkovich testified--convincingly, in my opinion--that the Federal judiciary needs more judges, not fewer. Every other year, the Judicial Conference submits to Congress a report on recommendations on judgeships. That report did not conclude that any judgeships should be removed or remain unfilled on the DC Circuit.

Judge Tymkovich also explained why the caseload statistics used by some of our colleagues to argue that the DC Circuit has a low caseload--and thus need not have its vacancies filled--are, in fact, unconvincing. The DC Circuit hears a unique caseload, with four times the number of complex administrative appeals than other circuit courts around the country.

The DC Circuit is the circuit from which all the Federal agencies' actions are repealed. More than any other court in the country, its caseload is made up of very complex, very difficult cases with far- reaching consequences and that require a great deal of time. Simply looking at the raw number of cases filed, opened, and closed is not an accurate predictor of whether a vacant seat on the DC Circuit should, in fact,

be filled. The DC Circuit's caseload has remained steady over the past 10 years, so the Judicial Conference has seen no reason to recommend any alteration in its staffing level.

The court packing argument made by some is also at odds with history, especially when one considers that caseloads lower than they are now on the DC Circuit were sufficient when all Republican Members then in office voted to confirm then Judge Roberts to the 9th seat, Janice Rogers Brown to the 10th seat, Thomas Griffith to the 11th seat, and Brett Kavanaugh to the 10th seat when it became vacant. When Ms. Millett is confirmed, the DC Circuit will still have more pending appeals per active judge than after the confirmations of any of those four earlier Bush nominees I just referenced. The caseload on the DC Circuit would also remain above that of the current 6th Circuit and 10th Circuit, to which courts the Senate has confirmed Republican supported judicial nominees this year.

A filibuster of Ms. Millett on caseload grounds would bring the Senate to an unprecedented and regrettable place. It would destroy comity and trust at a time when our Nation needs it most, when we need to demonstrate to the people of the United States that this Congress can function and that this Senate can fulfill its constitutional role.

It would not only facilitate the administration of justice by our courts, but also allow us to tackle other issues if we could move past endless and needless filibusters on issues such as this. It would allow us to move forward to the broader issues of the day, tackling long-term debt and deficit challenges, the fight against global terrorism, reinvesting in our future, and working together to invest in manufacturing and grow our economy. There are so many other issues that call for the time of this body.

With that, I wish to urge my colleagues to look at Ms. Millett's nomination on its merits and to not be distracted by what I think are groundless arguments that this is an instance of so-called court packing by this President.

This President is doing his job. He is nominating supremely qualified candidates to serve in the highest courts of this land, and this body should do its job and confirm those qualified nominees.

National Technological Innovation Day

If I might, I simply wanted to comment to this body that something passed with little notice here yesterday. October 29, 2013, was National Technological Innovation Day. This was recognizing the role that technological innovation plays in the United States economy.

We know that innovation is absolutely essential to developing new medicines, treatments, and cures to help us live longer and more healthy lives. Innovation is essential to strengthen the manufacturing sector of the American economy and make us more competitive. Innovation is essential to allow us to take advantage of new materials and new opportunities in the world and to access new export markets overseas. Innovation overall is what has brought all that is best about modern life and the modern world.

Yesterday, in a bipartisan way, we recognized that on October 29, many years ago, was the very first day that DARPAnet was able to exchange communications from one computer to another. It was literally the dawning of the modern Internet age. This was made possible in part by Federal investment and innovation.

I am grateful that Senator Moran, Senator Isakson, Senator Heinrich, and Senator Kirk joined me in recognizing the unique and important role that technological innovation has played in America's past, America's present, and America's future.

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

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think it is pretty clear that this motion is inappropriate. This is not what we should be doing and how we should potentially change the act. Actually, the effect here is to disrupt implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act is a law. It has been in place for several years. The Supreme Court has upheld it. Attempts to repeal it failed. I think the House has voted up to 20 times to try to repeal the ACA. They have all failed. The act is here. So the goal here is to make it work, make the act work. Then later on we can ask questions about what happened, why it didn't work, why wasn't implementation of the exchanges as good as a lot of us would have liked it to have been. Then find out who is responsible, et cetera. Right now it works.

The effect of this motion is severalfold. One, it will deny people having health insurance, people who otherwise would get health insurance. If you delay the individual responsibility requirement, it is going to cause a delay. People will not have insurance.

Second, it is going to increase the cost of health insurance for a lot of people. Why? Because fewer people will be signed up. The individual responsibility requirement will not be followed as much as otherwise would be the case. The result is fewer people will be in the insurance pool, and therefore prices will be higher.

Another consequence is it lowers the quality of health insurance, especially for those individuals who are seeking to be insured. They are going to have a lower quality product as a consequence of this request. It is an attempt to destabilize, it is an attempt to undermine the ACA.

I think for those reasons it is inappropriate and again is another effort to obstruct. We should not proceed in this way, so I object.

The famed author George Bernard Shaw once wrote:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the

unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to

himself.

A few weeks ago, lost among the headlines about shutdowns and showdowns was another very important news story. This story didn't receive big headlines. It didn't make the evening news, and it wasn't trending on Twitter.

Yet the story in the October 8 edition of the New York Times has serious implications for the future of our economy and our ability to adapt to the modern world. The eye-opening article discussed the merger of a California-based chip maker called Applied Materials. Applied Materials merged with a Japanese company called Tokyo Electron.

Applied Materials is one of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, an industry leader with a global presence. They have more than 13,000 employees across 18 countries. Their headquarters, where they got their start 46 years ago, is in Santa Clara, CA. In addition to 8,000 workers in the Bay Area of California, Applied Materials has employees at research, development, and manufacturing facilities in Texas, Utah, Massachusetts, and in my home State of Montana.

Now, with the merger with Tokyo Electron, what is this all-American company doing? It is shifting its corporation, not to Japan, but to the Netherlands. That is right. This new American-Japanese company will be incorporated in Holland.

Why are they moving to the Netherlands? What is going on.

In the New York Times article on the merger, reporter David Gelles wrote:

Executives at Applied Materials highlighted a number of

advantages in announcing a merger recently with a smaller

Japanese rival, but an important one was barely mentioned:

lower taxes.

The merged company will save millions of dollars a year by

moving--not to one side of the Pacific or the other, but by

reincorporating in the Netherlands.

The article goes on to note that Applied Materials' effective tax rate will drop from 22 percent to 17 percent as a result of the merger. For a company that had nearly $2 billion in profit in 2011, that amounts to savings of about $100 million per year.

Mergers resulting in U.S. companies being owned by companies in tax haven jurisdictions such as Ireland, Bermuda, or the Cayman Islands, are a new spin on the old ``inversion'' problem, and it is becoming an increasingly popular practice.

The Times article highlighted the following additional examples.

Last year, the Eaton Corporation, a power management company from Ohio, acquired Cooper Industries from Ireland for $13 billion and then reincorporated in Ireland. The company expects to save $160 million a year as a result of the move.

In July, Omnicom, the large New York advertising group, agreed to merge with Publicis Groupe, its French rival, in a $35 billion deal. The new company will be based in the Netherlands, resulting in savings of about $80 million a year.

Also in July, Perrigo, a pharmaceutical company from Michigan, said it would acquire Elan, an Irish drug company, for $6.7 billion. Perrigo will also reincorporate in Ireland, lowering its effective tax credit from 30 percent to 17 percent, and saving the company an estimated $150 million a year, much of it in taxes.

Earlier in the year, Actavis, based in New Jersey, bought Warner Chilcott, a drug maker with headquarters in Dublin, and said it would reincorporate in Ireland, leading to an estimated $150 million in savings over 2 years.

It would be easy for us to attack these companies by calling them immoral and unpatriotic, but it is much more constructive to step back and ask: What's motivating these companies? Why are they moving their headquarters abroad? How can we keep them in the United States? How can we adapt to the world and fix the problem?

It is a very simple issue. Globalization has made America's Tax Code system out of date.

The United States is stuck with a 35 percent corporate tax rate--one of the highest in the world--and a maze of incentives that only an army of tax lawyers can navigate. Some of these tax incentives are extremely costly but are much less valuable to businesses than a rate reduction with the same price tag.

When U.S. companies look abroad, what do they see? They see other countries with more modern, more efficient, and more competitive tax codes. Then, what do they do? They reincorporate overseas by acquiring or merging with another business.

They are not necessarily breaking laws. In fact, many of these companies are following the rules that America's outdated, overly complicated Tax Code provides.

The United States is losing hundreds of millions in revenue as a result. Even worse, it is losing jobs. When headquarters moves abroad, good-paying jobs often go abroad too. We need to reverse that tide. We need to bring our tax system into the 21st century to make the United States more competitive. That is what tax reform can do. It can help America overcome the competitiveness crisis that is driving businesses and jobs overseas.

This competitiveness crisis was made very clear in a Harvard Business School study last year with the sobering title: ``Prosperity at Risk.'' This indepth report examined the risks that threaten to undermine U.S. competitiveness in the global marketplace. It also looked at what action we could take in the United States to restore our country's economic vitality.

Harvard Business School surveyed 10,000 of its graduates who live and conduct business worldwide. They asked about the challenges of doing business in America. These individuals are leaders on the front lines of the global economy. They are CEOs, CFOs, business owners, and presidents. They are personally involved in decisions about whether to hire, where to locate, and which markets to serve.

Unfortunately, these business leaders are pessimistic about America's economic future. They think America's prosperity--our success, our growth, and our economic status--is at serious risk. The vast majority of those surveyed, 71 percent, expected U.S. competitiveness to deteriorate over the next several years.

A survey found that the U.S. fared poorly when competing to attract business and pointed to increased competition from emerging markets. According to the survey: ``For the first time in decades, the business environment in the United States is in danger of falling behind the rest of the world.''

What did they identify as the root of America's competitiveness problem? Respondents--remember, these are 10,000 Harvard Business School graduates working all around the world and in the United States--pointed to America's Tax Code as the root of the problem. Specifically, they pointed to the complexity of the code as one of the greatest current or emerging weaknesses in the U.S. business environment.

The Harvard study made clear that our Tax Code puts American businesses at a competitive disadvantage on the world market. That obviously concerns us.

Where do we go from here? I believe we have to reform our Tax Code. We have to adapt. We have to help make America more competitive. It is very clear. It is very simple. We have to give companies such as Applied Materials a reason to keep their headquarters in the United States.

We have been through a difficult and counterproductive period on Capitol Hill. The recent shutdown and the threat of default undermined confidence in the U.S. and did $24 billion in unnecessary damage to our economy.

According to a report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the shutdown cost 120,000 jobs in October alone.

I spent last week home in my State, as others were in their States. I was meeting with my bosses, the folks and citizens of Montana. They are not too happy with the antics going on in Washington, DC--and rightly so.

Fortunately, that battle is behind us and the government is back to work. It is time for us to come together to tackle the challenges facing our country.

Right now there are more than 11 million unemployed Americans looking for work. Our economy is expected to continue growing at a sluggish rate for the next year, less than 3 percent.

We have to ask: How do we create jobs? How can we spark faster growth in our economy? How can we boost our competitiveness and keep American companies at home in America?

Tax reform must be part of the solution. It is not the whole solution, but it is part of the solution.

That was the clear message I heard traveling around the country this summer with my friend Dave Camp. Dave is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Dave and I met with families and businesses, large and small, to hear about their experiences in dealing with the Tax Code.

We visited a family-owned bakery in Minneapolis, a small appliance store in New Jersey, a tech start-up in Silicon Valley, and a farm in Tennessee. We visited some large companies as well, companies such as 3M, Intel, FedEx, who employ thousands of people in the United States and around the world.

At every stop Dave and I heard the same message. U.S. companies and workers, companies large and small, workers employed at large and small companies, want a more simple, more fair Tax Code that closes loopholes and helps them compete and strengthens our economy.

This issue is not going away. It is too important. With so many people out of work, with economic growth still too slow, with a competitiveness gap costing us jobs and revenue, it is time for us to act. It is time for us to reform our Tax Code.

The chairman of the House and Senate Budget Committees brought their conferees together for the first time today. They have come together to try to find common ground on a budget and a plan to rebuild confidence in our economy. Patty Murray and Paul Ryan are incredibly smart and hard-working people. They care. And I am confident they can craft a compromise to help get America back on track.

I look forward to working with Chairman Murray and Chairman Ryan in the tax entitlement components of their discussions, but at the same time I will continue to work on a parallel track with the Finance Committee advancing tax reform.

We are working hard--in Bernard Shaw's words--to adapt to the world and build a tax code that works. And Dave Camp is doing the same thing in the House. We are going down separate paths but coming together with a common goal--reducing the deficit, creating jobs, and promoting economic growth. We are coming together to put America back on track.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all time on both sides be yielded back.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I rise to speak on this nomination and to oppose it because of the recent actions of the Office of Personnel Management with regard to the Washington exemption from ObamaCare. I voted just now against cloture on the nomination, and I will vote against the nomination itself later today because of these very serious matters.

OPM, the office to which this nominee is nominated and which she would head, has issued an illegal rule that is very offensive and flies in the face of the ObamaCare statute language itself, and this nominee has pledged to continue to enforce that illegal rule and illegal policy.

Furthermore, OPM has completely stonewalled Members, including myself, my colleague Senator Heller, and others regarding how they came to that decision and, importantly, whom they talked with, whom they e- mailed with, and whom they met with in coming to the decision to create this illegal Washington exemption.

Let me back up a little bit and explain exactly what we are talking about. Really, this story started several years ago in the ObamaCare debate. During the original debate on the ObamaCare statute, several conservatives, including myself, pushed an amendment that said every Member of Congress and all of our official congressional staff have to use the same fallback plan as is there for all other Americans-- originally, it was called the public option, and then it became known as the exchanges--no special rules, no special treatment, no special subsidy. In fact, that is one of the very few battles in that debate we won because that provision was adopted during the consideration of the ObamaCare statute. It was adopted right here in the Senate.

So in the statutory language as it finally passed into law is that section, and that section says very clearly that every Member of Congress and all of our official congressional staff have to go to the ObamaCare exchanges for our health care--the same fallback plan as is there for all other Americans--no special rules or privileges or subsidies or exemptions. We go there. Well, I guess this became an example of what Nancy Pelosi was talking about when she famously said: Well, we have to pass the law in order to figure out what is in it-- because the law did pass. It had that specific statutory provision. Then people on Capitol Hill started reading it, and they came to that section and a lot of them said: Oh, you know what. We can't live with this. We can't have this. We can't be pushed to the same fallback plan as all other Americans. We can't stand for this.

From that moment on, a furious lobbying campaign and scheming behind the scenes started to avoid that provision fully going into effect, to avoid the pain of that provision, the pain of ObamaCare that millions of other Americans are facing as we speak. Meetings happened, leadership meetings happened, Member meetings happened, furious scheming behind the scenes, and a lot of lobbying. Ultimately, that lobbying of the Obama administration paid off because in early August of this year, right after Congress got out of town for the August recess, conveniently right after Congress left the scene of the crime, the Obama administration issued a special rule with no basis in the law, in my opinion, no basis in the ObamaCare statute. This special rule was a special exemption for Congress, a carve-out to take all of the financial sting out of that ObamaCare section.

What this special OPM rule is--and, again, OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, was the agency that came up with this illegal rule after this furious lobbying, after President Obama became personally involved, literally personally participated in the discussions leading to this rule. What this illegal rule does is essentially two things. First of all, the rule says: Well, ``official congressional staff''--we do not know who that is. We cannot possibly determine who official congressional staff are, so we are going to leave it up to each individual Member of Congress to figure out who is their official staff.

Well, I would submit that is just ludicrous on its face. Congressional staff is congressional staff. Official staff is anyone who works for us through the institution of Congress versus outside entities and institutions, such as our campaign staff. So leaving it up to each individual Member of Congress is contrary to the statute on its face. It is outrageous on its face. But under this OPM rule, that is exactly what they do. So an individual Member of Congress can say: Well, these 10 people are not official staff. They are on my staff, but for some magical reason they are not official for purposes of this mandate. In fact, under this rule a Member can say: Nobody on my congressional staff is official staff for purposes of this mandate. And we see Members doing that as we speak. We see examples of that being reported in the press as we speak--Members deciding, ``Well, nobody is official staff. I do not have official staff'' because it will mean they will have to go to the ObamaCare exchange and live by the same rules through the same experience as other Americans. That is flatout ridiculous.

But that is not the only thing the OPM rule did. It did a second thing that is perhaps even more outrageous. It said Members of Congress and staff who do go to the exchange--they get to take along with them a huge taxpayer-funded subsidy that no other American at similar income levels has, enjoys, going to the ObamaCare exchanges. This is a huge subsidy worth at least $5,000 for individuals and $10,000 or $11,000 for families. Again, no other American at similar income levels is privy to that sort of subsidy.

Again, I believe this part of the OPM rule is flatout illegal. It is not in the ObamaCare statute. There was discussion of it. There were drafts that allowed that to happen, but the language that was put in the law did not include that subsidy. It was specifically left out. And, in fact, magically transforming what was, under previous law, a Federal employees health benefits plan subsidy, magically transforming

that into some ObamaCare exchange subsidy--that is contrary to law, and that is beyond OPM and the administration's legal authority, but they just did it because they could to bail out Washington, to bail out Congress. Well, this is outrageous and it is illegal.

As soon as I heard of this proposed rule in early August, I joined with many colleagues, House and Senate, and I appreciate all of their leadership. I am joined by many colleagues in the Senate whom I specifically want to acknowledge, who are fighting for this change: Senators Enzi, Heller, Lee, Johnson, Inhofe, Cruz, and Graham. We are also joined by House Members, led by Representative Ron DeSantis of Florida. All of us quickly got together and said: This is illegal, this is wrong, and we have to stop it.

So we came up with language to do just that, to reverse this illegal OPM rule and to make sure that every Member of Congress and all of our congressional staff go to the ObamaCare exchanges and that we go there just like other Americans go there--no special exemption or special subsidy or special treatment. Our fix also expands that to the President, the Vice President, their White House staff, and all of their political appointees because that is appropriate as well. So our language says to all those folks--Congress and the administration--you have to get your health care the same way other Americans are in the backup plan, in the fallback plan, in the so-called exchanges. You go to the exchanges, and you get no special treatment, no special exemption, no special subsidy.

This is very important for two reasons. First of all, basic fairness. It should be the first rule of American democracy that what Washington passes on America, it lives with itself. Washington should have to eat its own cooking. It is like going to a restaurant and hearing that the chef in the kitchen never eats there. Something is wrong with that restaurant. Something is wrong with that picture. And something is wrong with Washington when Washington exempts itself over and over from eating its own cooking.

The second reason this is important is a very practical one because the sooner we demand that Washington live by exactly the same rules it imposes on America, the sooner Washington will start getting things right on ObamaCare, on taxes, on regulation across the board. So for that very practical reason, we need to make sure the same rules apply to Washington the same way they apply to the rest of America.

Let me come back to OPM because what we are debating is the nominee to head the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, the bureaucracy that came up with this illegal rule. That nominee has pledged to continue to enforce that illegal rule, to continue to defend that illegal rule.

Also, OPM, to date, has been completely unresponsive-- ``stonewalling'' is the more appropriate term--to all of my and other Members' inquiries about the process they used to come up with this illegal rule. I have written OPM several times. I wrote them immediately after their draft rule was issued. I wrote them very soon after their final rule was issued. I specifically wrote them demanding all emails and other correspondence and other documentation and information they had from Members of Congress, from leadership, from the administration with regard to the work and discussion that went into their rule.

Other colleagues of ours here in the Senate and also in the House have done the same. My distinguished colleague from Nevada Dean Heller talked to the then-OPM Director face to face. He asked the OPM Director: Did you speak with, were you lobbied by Members of Congress or the administration about this rule? That Director said: No, absolutely not. It now turns out that apparently is a lie. According to other sources, there absolutely were discussions, communications, emails, and the like between congressional leadership and the administration and OPM. So Dean Heller was lied to face to face about this by OPM.

I have asked for all of the emails, all of the correspondence, all of the discussions that happened leading up to this rule involving Members of Congress, leadership, and also the President and the Vice President and members of their administration. That request for information has been completely stonewalled.

So, first, OPM caves to intense lobbying from Washington insiders. Second, it caves and issues an illegal rule contrary to the statutory language of ObamaCare. Third, it stonewalls regarding the process and the conversations and the emails that led to that illegal rule.

We cannot stand for that. That is precisely why I am opposing this OPM nomination and why I voted no on cloture and why I will vote no on the nomination. We need answers. We need to reverse this illegal rule. Yes, we need a vote on the Vitter amendment the distinguished majority leader and others have blocked for months now. We need that vote. We need that vote that has been actively blocked by the majority leader for months.

Let's do things right. Let's get that information from OPM. Let's reverse this illegal rule. Let's vote on this important matter.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Baldwin.) The clerk will call the roll.