Minimum Wage Fairness Act

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I rise today in defense of the U.S. Constitution, the separation of government powers it established, the rule of law it enshrined, and the legitimate prerogatives of the legislative branch--and this body in particular--under our constitutional system of government.

I am very concerned about what has been going on. Last week the Justice Department announced their plan to extend clemency consideration to a large new class of drug offenders.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post estimate that the Department's new guidelines will potentially apply to tens of thousands of cases, with clemency likely to be granted to perhaps thousands of current Federal inmates.

This surprise announcement by the administration marks a worrying shift away from the longstanding norm requiring individualized determinations based on the particularly compelling circumstances of specific cases. Instead, the Justice Department has laid the groundwork for mass clemency based on a few widely shared and broad criteria.

Of course, the Constitution gives the President the power to grant clemency in individual cases. No one disputes this authority. It has been exercised by Presidents throughout our Nation's history, and it is properly used on a limited, case-by-case basis to ameliorate specific instances of injustice experienced by particular individuals.

By contrast, it is the rightful province of the legislative branch to establish broader sentencing policy through duly enacted Federal statute.

There is sentencing law on the books and Congress periodically revisits and revises this sentencing policy. But in our constitutional system, changing the law requires legislative action by Congress.

In the face of this most basic constitutional requirement, the President has apparently instead decided to use--or, rather, abuse--the clemency power in an attempt to rewrite sentencing law unilaterally. His invocation of clemency is merely a fig leaf to disguise a blatant effort to usurp legislative authority.

The President's clemency power is not a vehicle by which the executive branch may effectively revise or discard lawful statutes with which the President disagrees. But that is precisely what President Obama and his Justice Department have promised to do.

The amount of time that entire classes of drug offenders spend in jail will no longer be based on uniform sentencing law passed by Congress and administered by the Federal court and Judiciary. Instead, it will be determined by the President's personal views of ``justice,'' by the Attorney General's subjective notions of what he considers ``fair,'' and by some Justice Department bureaucrat's sense of ``proportionality.''

Such a result turns our system of government on its head, and it represents an abdication of the President's core constitutional duty.

Instead of faithfully executing the law, President Obama is simply seeking to enforce his personal ideological preferences. It is precisely this sort of unchecked and unaccountable rule that our Nation's Founders sought to prevent.

The Obama administration's unilateral action on drug sentencing is especially troubling since Congress is actively considering a number of potential sentencing reforms. Indeed, an ideologically diverse, bipartisan group of Senators has demonstrated they are eager to legislate on this issue. Several sentencing reform bills have been drafted and introduced. Legislation has been considered and reported by the Judiciary Committee.

Although a President should never expect to get every single idea he wants through the legislative process, bipartisan agreement here seems well within reach--especially if the administration chose to focus on working with Congress to change the law rather than acting alone to undermine it.

Yet even in an area where constructive action is achievable, the President has decided to go it alone, and in doing so he violates the most basic constitutional principles he once taught to his law school students.

Examples of such executive abuse have become all too common under this administration, especially since President Obama announced his new ``pen and phone'' strategy of unilateral action specifically designed to bypass Congress and evade constitutional restraints.

Just last week the Associated Press reported that, under orders from the White House, the Department of Homeland Security is considering limiting deportations to only criminal aliens with felony convictions.

Using the excuse of prosecutorial discretion--another executive tool limited to individual cases and particular circumstances--the administration is seeking to frustrate duly enacted immigration law and instead implement its own broad immigration policies.

Whatever our thoughts on the sensitive questions of immigration policy, everyone can agree that such an act requires legislative action and should not be brought into effect through executive fiat.

I am struck by how far this approach contrasts with the President's own judgment as recently as last fall. If the administration continued broadening enforcement carve-outs, he said, ``then essentially I'll be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally.''

Given the lawlessness of broad enforcement carve-outs, the President stated flatly, ``that's not an option.''

President Obama went on to acknowledge that he does not in fact have the authority to halt most deportations. In his own words:

If in fact I could pass all these laws without Congress, I

would do so. But we're also a nation of laws, that's part of

our tradition. The easy way out is to . . . pretend that I

can do something by violating our laws, but what I'm

proposing is the harder path, which is to use our democratic

process to achieve the same goals.

I wish to associate myself wholeheartedly with President Obama's exhortation last fall that we are a nation of laws, and that substantive changes to the law must come about through the democratic process.

As public servants, our common allegiance must first be to the rule of law under the Constitution, as it--more than anything else--is what secures the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

I fear that President Obama's frustration with an inability to win broad support for every aspect of his legislative agenda has caused him to ignore clear legal and constitutional obligations. He now seems to view the longstanding rules, requirements, and traditions central to our system of republican self-government as irritants--mere suggestions that he is willing to bend past their breaking point in order to advance his controversial agenda.

Concern about the potential for executive overreach has animated American political life from the very beginning. Indeed, it predates our Republic, and shaped its founding.

Centuries ago, absolutist monarchs such as the Stuart dynasty of England, seizing on the powers of the medieval popes as a model, claimed a ``royal provocative'' to suspend the application of the laws, and used this power to justify their oppressive rule.

The Stuarts' unchecked reign in England--the nation that pioneered the modern conception of the rule of law--ignited a long and bloody struggle that eventually brought about the Glorious Revolution. Thereafter, the 1689 English Bill of Rights confirmed the ``ancient rights'' of Englishmen and enshrined the notion that the monarch had no ``dispensing power'' to waive the application of the laws of the realm.

As many noted historians and legal scholars have observed, the American Founders were well versed in these 17th century English constitutional struggles. Viewing themselves as heirs to the English political tradition, the Framers of our new Nation set out to establish a system of government with an eye toward preventing similar abuses.

With the old monarchy's abuse of the claimed dispensing power fresh in their minds, the Founders' initial plan of government in the Articles of Confederation did not even include an executive. When that framework proved unworkable, the Framers drafted and the States ratified a constitution that avoided either historical extreme: an all- powerful executive that claimed the power to dispense with the bounds of law or a powerless executive lacking the capacity to govern effectively.

The structural features of our Constitution navigate between these two poles, creating an energetic executive but carefully cabining his power. It vests legislative authority in Congress, not the President.

While the precise line between enforcement discretion and lawmaking may sometimes seem blurry, the Constitution makes clear that changes to the law are the province of the legislative rather than the executive branch, and that when Congress and the President have enacted statutory laws, the executive cannot unilaterally displace it.

The Constitution also requires the President to ``take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.'' This clause does not suggest or invite the President to enforce the law--it obligates him to do so. And he is bound by the text of the Constitution to do so ``faithfully.''

To execute the laws faithfully, as defined by the great Samuel Johnson, author of the most definitive dictionary of that age, is to do so ``honestly, . . . [w]ith strict adherence to duty and allegiance, . . . and [w]ithout failure of performance.''

As a diverse array of legal scholars have noted, it is ``implausible and unnatural'' to read this clause to allow the President authority to deviate from the loyal enforcement of Federal statutes.

James Wilson, the original proponent of the take care clause, put it this way:

[The President has] authority, not to make, or alter, or

dispense with the laws, but to execute and enact the laws,

which [are] established.

He continued:

To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to

see the laws faithfully executed, implies a power to forbid

their execution, is a novel construction of the constitution,

and entirely inadmissible.

There are certain situations in which the Executive may in fact legitimately ignore or even contravene a duly enacted Federal statute. But such circumstances are few and far between.

The Presidents of both parties have long claimed authority not to enforce unconstitutional statutes.

According to this view, if the considered view of the executive branch determines that a statute clearly violates the Constitution, the highest law, then that statute is no law at all and does not warrant enforcement.

Presidents have also sought to justify partial nonenforcement based on a lack of sufficient resources. As the Supreme Court has explained:

The President performs his full constitutional duty, if,

with the means and instruments provided by Congress and

within the limitations prescribed by it, he uses his best

endeavors to secure the faithful execution of the laws

enacted.

In other words, the Constitution still obligates the President to do his best to ensure that duly enacted laws are faithfully executed, even when he and his subordinates are working with limited resources. In such cases he is obligated to ensure that those resources

are optimally allocated to achieve as faithful execution as is possible.

Sadly, political expedience and ideological fervor has led our current President to disregard his fundamental obligations to `` . . . take care that the laws be faithfully executed.''

Take, for example, the Nation's drug laws, an area where the Obama administration has decided it disagrees with the criminal statutes on the books and wants to implement a different policy, no matter the governing Federal law.

As I noted earlier, the administration's massive clemency push seems to employ the President's specific constitutional power--one limited to relieve individual instances of injustice--to provide relief to large swaths of criminals who fit a few broad criteria.

The President also directed major changes over which Federal drug crimes are charged and at what level, citing prosecutorial discretion, a limited authority derived from the power to adapt enforcement to an individual's specific circumstances, to implement broad criteria affecting thousands of prosecutions. Given the scope of this Executive action, compared to its narrowly tailored authority, the administration's invocation of prosecutorial discretion has become a transparent excuse used to try to justify flouting existing Federal law.

Much of the same is true in the context of immigration. The administration has advanced a growing number of enforcement carve-outs to increasingly expansive classes of illegal immigrants. First, the administration exempted those brought here as children, then veterans, then their families. Now the administration may seek to exclude from application of duly enacted immigration law anyone who has not committed serious felonies.

While, of course, no one disagrees that violent criminals should be our highest priority, the administration has come much further and essentially made current immigration law a dead letter for virtually everyone else. Last week I joined 21 of my colleagues in a letter to the White House highlighting this Executive abuse. How can the administration even claim it was attempting to faithfully execute immigration law when almost all deportations last year were limited to convicted criminals and recent border crossers, when ICE agents were forced to release 68,000 potentially deportable aliens last year alone? Think about that. When the administration took disciplinary action for ICE officers for making lawful arrests, when the President of the National ICE Council felt compelled to testify before Congress that although `` . . . most Americans assume that ICE agents and officers are empowered by the Government to enforce the law, nothing could be further from the truth.''

Another egregious example of this administration's willful failure to faithfully execute the law involves education. The Department of Education has given 42 of the 50 States waivers from application of No Child Left Behind. Rather than seek a legislative reauthorization of the statute to set realistic goals going forward, the administration has chosen simply to establish their preferred education policy by attaching their own conditions to the waivers that the States need to receive Federal money.

Recently, the State of Washington became the first to lose its waiver, primarily because it did not meet the administration's mandate for teacher and principal evaluation--a mandate that has no grounding in the actual statute. When the vast majority of States receive waivers by meeting conditions that bear little resemblance to provisions of the law itself, is the administration faithfully executing the law as required under our beloved Constitution? To the contrary, the President is using waiver conditions to bring about an entirely different set of education policies, and he is doing so to avoid spending his energies and political capital on a legislative process that might expose divisions within his own party or force his administration to compromise with those who do not share all of his policy preferences.

Of course any discussion of Executive overreach by this administration must include ObamaCare. Back when the administration was writing that 2,700-plus page monstrosity, the bill's proponents argued that its length and complexity were necessary evils, that its many intricate parts were essential to achieve the bill's promised objectives. The individual mandate, the employer mandate, the minimum coverage requirements, the cuts to Medicare Advantage, and the limits for subsidies to State-run exchanges--we were promised that these provisions and others were both critical and carefully timed to expand coverage and rein in costs. Yet when the time came to implement the law, the administration's tune changed.

To justify violating a number of clear statutory mandates, the administration has mustered a weak and unconvincing hodgepodge of legal acrobatics all for the purpose of allowing the administration to avoid enforcing the central provisions of its own signature law. When we in Congress adopted legitimate legislative fixes to provide hard-working Americans relief from ObamaCare's disruptive effects, the White House displayed shocking audacity in threatening to veto lawful delays to some of these cuts and mandates.

I don't know if anyone could imagine a better example of an administration allowing political expediency and ideological commitments to trump the President's constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Equally troubling, where the President's legislative efforts have failed, he has decided simply to regulate, seemingly undeterred from stretching his existing statutory authorities past their breaking point. Again, this is the very definition of Executive abuse.

For example, a hallmark of the President's so-called pen-and-phone strategy was to sign an Executive order forcing Federal contractors to raise their minimum wage. He issued this directive despite the fact that there is already a Federal statute that governs the minimum wage for Federal contractors.

Although a different statute gives the President some discretion in the area of Federal procurement, its plain language demands--as courts have long held--that there be a sufficient nexus between the President's orders and the statute's stated goal of efficiency and economy in Federal procurement. Increasing a contractor's labor costs by hiking their minimum wage is wholly inconsistent with this statutory goal, demonstrating there is no legal basis for the administration's Executive order.

Yet another area of grave concern is the effort by this White House to establish new institutional arrangements that fail to respect the separation of government powers and the basic principle of checks and balances enshrined in our Constitution. Take the Dodd-Frank bill, another signature piece of the President's agenda.

All Americans should be concerned with the unchecked institutional form of the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This administration's unwaivering devotion to expanding the scope and reach of Federal regulation was made manifest in efforts to place the CFPB beyond Congress's constitutional power of the purse. The CFPB Director is empowered to collect a certain percentage of the Federal Reserve's operating expenses, indexed to inflation, thereby denying Congress its rightful authority to allocate Federal spending and keep the agency in check with respect to its overweening regulatory ambitions. What the White House sought was unaccountable Executive power, a CFPB that could regulate with virtually no meaningful restraint.

When a number of my colleagues and I expressed a desire to address the serious objections to the CFPB structure before confirming the President's choice to lead the agency, the White House decided that abiding by the appointments process established by the Constitution was too inconvenient. Determined to press forward with the administration's agenda at all costs, the President simply installed his choice for CFPB Director as well as other key Federal officers without the advice or consent of the Senate--again, the height of Executive arrogance.

The administration sought to justify this move by citing the President's power under the Recess Appointments Clause, but all the relevant legal authority suggested otherwise. The original public meaning of the clause, well-established historical practice, the constitutional requirement for the

House of Representatives to consent before the Senate may adjourn for more than 3 days, the Senate's constitutional authority to set its own rules, and the Senate's own determination that it was not in recess at the time, all of this made clear that the President had no authority to make the appointments unilaterally. Yet as an indication of its willingness to simply ignore the law and Constitution, that is precisely what the President did.

This brazen lawlessness cannot stand, and it will not. Already several Federal appeals courts have ruled that these appointments were unconstitutional, and most observers expect the Supreme Court to agree.

Yet the Obama administration remains undeterred. Having decided to bypass Congress and go it alone, the White House has likewise sought to remove meaningful accountability by means of the Federal judiciary. As in the recess appointments cases, Federal courts have rejected a variety of this administration's lawless actions and vindicated critical constitutional rights. No court has served as a greater check on Executive overreach than the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees most Federal regulatory actions. So the White House has sought to remove even this modest restraint.

After the DC Circuit rightfully invalidated several key administration actions as outside the bounds of Federal law, the President then sought to pack that court with compliant judges in order to obtain more favorable decisions.

The President's allies in this body, in their own words, ``focused very intently on the D.C. Circuit'' determined to ``switch the majority'' on the court, and were willing to ``fill up the D.C. Circuit one way or another.''

In the rush to eliminate any possible judicial obstacle to unilateral progressive advances, they ran roughshod over the rules and traditions of this body, working untold and permanent damage to two venerated institutions of our constitutional system.

This whole episode demonstrates a brazen willingness on the part of this administration to ignore virtually any legal or constitutional constraints and even tamper with the judiciary simply for the sake of advancing its own ideological goals or objectives.

I have only had time today to scratch the surface of the pattern of Executive abuses in areas as diverse as EPA, and NLRB regulatory actions, inappropriate IRS targeting, net neutrality rulemaking, and the refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. Such executive lawlessness should be troubling to all Americans regardless of political stripe or partisan affiliation.

It is the Constitution, the political institutions it established, the legal framework it enshrined, the checks and balances it requires, that ensures we remain a government of laws and not of men. Absent these essential restraints, we will all become subject to increasingly arbitrary rule, a government that knows no bounds and seeks to regulate and control virtually every aspect of our lives.

President Obama once spoke of the necessity for such restraint. He warned of the dangers associated with unilateral executive action, and he highlighted the critical importance of adhering to constitutional procedures.

While campaigning for President in 2008, he said:

I taught constitutional law for ten years. I take the

Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems we're

facing right now have to do with [the President] trying to

bring more and more power into the executive branch and not

go through Congress at all, and that's what I intend to

reverse when I am President of the United States.

How far we have come since Candidate Obama made those empty promises.

I have been a Member of this body for nearly four decades. I have worked with half a dozen Presidents. On many occasions we have been able--working together--to accomplish great good for the American people. My concern today is not partisan. My criticisms are not ideological, nor is my interest as a Member of the Senate simply institutional. Throughout my years as a Member of this body, I have acknowledged and defended the power of the President when he acts lawfully--he or she. In the national security context in particular, where the President is at the height of his constitutional and statutory authorities, I have defended the prerogatives of the President no matter the party occupying the White House and no matter the political unpopularity of doing so.

The concerns I have expressed today are about legitimacy. What authority to govern does the President or any of us have except that which we derive from our Constitution? My criticisms are about restoring accountability. How are we going to keep this or any administration honest when it seeks to cut out Congress's legitimate role in the governing process?

Above all, my observations today are about liberty. Yes, that is right--liberty. If we are to maintain our freedoms, which so many of our fellow citizens have fought and died to preserve--including my own brother and two brothers-in-law--we must always remember to heed James Madison's warning in Federalist 47:

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and

judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many,

and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may

justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

It is essential to the continued well-being of our Nation, to the legitimacy of our government, and to the liberties of our citizens that the exercise of Executive power is kept within lawful bounds. Doing so requires continual vigilance by the court, by Congress, and by the American people to uphold the standards of the Constitution, and that includes the President as well.

I will close with a word of warning from President George Washington which is perhaps even more true today than when President Washington spoke it way back when.

If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or

modification of the constitutional powers be in any

particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the

way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no

change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may

be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by

which free governments are destroyed.

I thank the Presiding Officer and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I think people listening to the debate on the minimum wage issue may be a little bit confused, because we all want to see hard-working American families work their way toward the American dream, but we are not going to be able to do that with the Federal Government setting wages for restaurants, small businesses, and other people across the country.

I have no objection, obviously, if Massachusetts or Minnesota or some other State wants to raise the minimum wage. That is their choice. But what my colleagues are now asking for is the Federal Government, or the Nation, to set a minimum wage at a level which will destroy between \1/ 2\ and 1 million jobs. That is not just me talking, that is the Congressional Budget Office, which is the official scorecard for the Congress.

Think about this: You are a small business and your biggest expense is wages for the people who work there. Now the Federal Government comes in and says: Forget about your local conditions in North Dakota or in Texas. We are going to say, from Washington, DC, that everybody has to raise wages by 40 percent. I can't imagine there will be many businesses, small businesses in particular, that can absorb a 40- percent increase in their overhead.

This is going to hurt low-wage earners who are currently employed. That is what the Congressional Budget Office has said. And it is going to hurt the economy.

I heard the distinguished Senator from Minnesota say the economy is doing great. Well, I guess he must have missed the latest report on the first quarter of 2014. Because of the bad weather--we had an unseasonably cold first quarter--the economy grew at .1 percent. In other words, it almost went into what would be a negative growth or a recession. Of course, recession is defined as two quarters of negative growth, but my point is this strong growth he is talking about in the economy is a figment, it is not the fact, and we need to deal with the facts on the ground.

I wonder sometimes why public opinion holds Congress and Washington in such low esteem. Actually, I don't wonder why. My conclusion is they think we are out of touch. We are out of touch with regular American families--people who are working hard to make ends meet, getting the kids ready for school and living their version of the American dream. The latest statistic I saw says that 27 percent of the American people think we are on the right track. That is a shocking number. That means 73 percent think we are on the wrong track.

What is the old saying, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome? Well, let's not do the same thing over and over again--keep America on the wrong track and engage in a policy decision here on this minimum wage, this 40-percent increase in the minimum wage, which will actually hurt more people than it helps.

This is not just my view. There was a poll that came out yesterday which said, basically, once people understood that people would be put out of work by increasing the minimum wage, 58 percent said it is not worth it. So 58 percent of the respondents said it is not worth it.

You know, it would be nice--it would be great--if we lived in a world where Washington could dictate what wages will be and all of a sudden peace, love, and happiness would break out--the age of Aquarius-- because Washington is somehow distributing free money that didn't come from somewhere, that didn't come out of somebody's pocket or as part of someone's overhead or it didn't have any negative impact. But that is not the world we live in.

Again, this is not just public opinion, it is not just my opinion, it is not just the opinion of the Congressional Budget Office about the job-killing nature of this dramatic 40-percent increase proposed in the minimum wage. Back in 1998, President Clinton's economic adviser Gene Sperling--who just left the Obama administration--wrote a memo to President Clinton when a similar proposal was being made to raise the minimum wage 41 percent at that time. The Harkin bill we will vote on here shortly proposes to raise the minimum wage 40 percent. This was back in 1998 that Gene Sperling is writing to President Clinton on a proposed increase of the minimum wage by 41 percent, but for all practical purposes it is the same sort of proposal. This is what Mr. Sperling wrote to President Clinton:

Your entire economic team believes that this approach is

too aggressive and are concerned that Senator Kennedy's

proposal could prove damaging to the employment prospects of

low-skilled workers . . .

This was Senator Ted Kennedy's proposal back in 1998. Again, that is what the Congressional Budget Office has said about this bill. He goes on to say, ``as well as to the general macroeconomic performance of the economy.''

So what are our friends across the aisle proposing we do when the economy grew at .1 percent this last quarter? Well, administer a body blow to this anemic economic growth. And this is not just my opinion. It is deja vu all over again, as they say. I guess if you are around Washington long enough, you are going to see this movie replayed over and over.

The fact is that our economy is weaker today than it was in 1998. Sure, unemployment is coming down slowly, but the economy is growing too slowly and the number of people in the workforce is the lowest it has been for the last 30 years, the so-called labor participation rate.

So what did President Clinton do when his economic advisers said: Don't do it, Mr. President. While it is good politics, perhaps, it really will hurt the economy, and it will put people out of work.

President Clinton, to his credit, decided not to pursue that particular 41-percent increase in the minimum wage.

I mention that as a sad contrast with the current situation where President Obama, seeing his favorability ratings at the lowest they have been since he became President, is trying to change the subject and basically make a political point when the fact is that making the political point will actually hurt a lot of hard-working Americans.

So the majority leader has decided that rather than spend the week debating legislation that would actually create jobs, we should spend it debating a proposal that would destroy jobs.

We all know that a massive minimum wage increase such as this can be a job killer. So it really wasn't surprising when we saw that quantification by the Congressional Budget Office saying this proposal could destroy up to 1 million jobs. Yet, when I was listening here, I didn't hear the distinguished Senators from Massachusetts or from Minnesota talk at all about the Congressional Budget Office report. They want to ignore that. They want us to believe that this increase in the minimum wage would have little or no effect on employment and that maybe it would have a positive effect. I heard the Senator from Massachusetts make that claim, but the people who actually run America's businesses know better.

I had dinner the other night with some folks in the restaurant business, and I will mention some examples in a moment. Most of these folks I happened to have dinner with are pretty successful, but they started out washing dishes or bussing tables or waiting on tables. They started at the bottom and worked their way up because they could find a job, get their hand on the first rung of the economic ladder and then put the other hand on the next one and work their way up to where now they are very successful businesspeople. But they understand how businesses work. They understand the negative consequences of this bad policy coming from Washington, DC.

Just ask Robert Mayfield from Austin, TX, where I live. Mr. Mayfield has been in business for 35 years now, and he is pretty successful. He also knows a thing or two about the consequences of rising labor costs. This is what we are talking about. For a business, this is the overhead. This is the labor costs they have to pay out of their income.

Mr. Mayfield wants Members of Congress to know that he strongly opposes this proposal because it will cost people jobs. Here is how he describes it:

What's most devastating about an increase in the minimum

wage is that costs go up, and as a business owner, I have to

raise prices--

So if we think we can pay somebody $10.10 an hour to work in a McDonalds and it won't have an impact on the cost of a Big Mac, well, we are living in a fantasy world. And that is what Mr. Mayfield says.

I have to raise prices, and sometimes the market [won't

bear it]. In the end, jobs will be lost and service will

suffer . . . The people in Congress wanting to pass a minimum

wage bill don't know any more about how a business works than

a hog knows about Sunday School. What makes it worse is

Obamacare hanging over our heads. It's a job killer.

I heard this again today from a friend of mine from San Antonio. Louis Barrios, whose family has run Mexican restaurants in San Antonio for many years, talked about the combination of ObamaCare and now this proposed minimum wage increase.

He said: Right now, we would like to pay a single mom who is working in our restaurants to take orders. If Congress lifts the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, we will have no choice but to replace that server, that waitress, with an iPad.

That is what is happening in a lot of fast food restaurants these days.

Again, Congress shouldn't operate in a vacuum without knowledge or an awareness of what the consequences might be.

I am not suggesting that any of our friends who are advocating this minimum wage increase want to put that single mom out of work, but if we embrace that policy, that is what Louis Barrios told me this morning would likely happen. And people like Robert Mayfield and Louis Barrios are supported by countless economists.

So we have folks who are actually doing the work, and then we have the big thinkers like the economists who studied this issue and concluded that this size minimum wage increase is a really bad idea in terms of the economy. More than 500 of those economists, including several Nobel Laureates, recently signed an open letter to several policymakers expressing their opposition to this 40-percent minimum wage hike. Their letter said:

Many of the businesses that pay their workers minimum wage

operate on extremely tight profit margins, with any increase

in the cost of labor threatening this delicate balance.

That is also what Robert Mayfield said: I can't absorb it without passing it along to customers, increasing the prices they have to pay or I may have to lay some people off or I may just have to close my business altogether.

They are operating on tight profit margins.

When so many economists and so many folks who are working across America are telling us the same thing--and the truth is that it makes perfect common sense--it would be the height of arrogance for us to ignore their concerns. But that is what President Obama and Majority Leader Reid are asking us to do today.

I made this point at the beginning. I fully share our colleagues' concerns about the stagnant wages being earned by American workers all across America. Indeed, since the Obama economic recovery--that was after the recession of 2008, but after the Obama economic recovery started kicking in in June 2009, the median household income in this country has gone down by $1,800. So I understand the concern, but I find it a little depressing that Congress's only answer is to raise the minimum wage by 40 percent, which will put people out of work and shut down small businesses, when there are a lot better ways for us to address it, and I will talk about that in a moment. Raising the minimum wage by 40 percent will not grow the economy and it will not create jobs. It will do the opposite.

Of course, the truth is--and we read this in newspapers a couple of weeks ago--we all know what is happening here, so let's talk about the 800-pound gorilla here in the Senate Chamber. The truth is that the President and Majority Leader Reid don't expect this bill to pass because they actually are very intelligent people and they know the facts as I have just described them here on the floor of the Senate. This is all about politics. This is about trying to make this side of the aisle look bad and hard-hearted to try to rescue this midterm election coming up in November. They see the President's approval rating going down, they see a number of midterm races for the Senate in play, and they have to do something. They are desperate. ObamaCare didn't work out the way they thought it would. You can't keep what you have if you like it. Your premiums didn't go down $2,500 if you are an average family of four. And, no, you can't keep your doctor in too many cases under the health insurance exchanges. So they are desperate.

We know from reporting in the New York Times and elsewhere that this minimum wage bill--this show vote we are going to have here shortly--is part of a larger messaging package created in collaboration with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. That is not me talking; that is the admission by the leadership on the other side of the aisle. This is not about actually solving the problem; this is about political theater, courtesy of Majority Leader Reid.

The real tragedy is that millions of Americans don't have any time or any patience for this sort of political theater and partisan gamesmanship because the numbers are very troubling. The Obama recovery is 5 years old. Yet 10.5 million people are still unemployed--including 3.7 million people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months-- with an additional 7.4 million people working part-time because they can't find full-time work or, because of ObamaCare, their employers have taken them off full-time work and put them on part-time work in order to avoid the employer penalties.

It is true that the hard-working American family needs some help, but the truth is that this remedy being offered today--this medicine--to try to supposedly solve the problem will just make things worse. So I have a proposition to make to our friends across the aisle. If they would work with us, if they would leave these games by the

wayside, and if they would focus for a minute on trying to work with us to engage in solutions that would help grow the economy and help reduce unemployment and help raise wages across the Nation, then we would gladly embrace that, and we have introduced a number of bills that would do exactly that.

I know the distinguished Senator who is presiding comes from an energy-producing State like mine, and this is no mystery to her, but in Texas, like North Dakota, there are a lot of really good jobs, but people don't have the skills necessary to qualify for those good jobs.

I was in Fredericksburg, TX, recently, where they are training welders at the community college. A welder can make $100,000 or more a year. In the Permian Basin in Midland and Odessa, TX, truckdrivers can make $100,000 a year. It is unbelievable what this renaissance in American energy has done to our economy and job creation.

One thing we could do that would be a heck of a lot more constructive than this kind of show vote and partisan gamesmanship would be to improve our workforce training programs, the Pell grant program, and try to find ways to get people the training they need in order to qualify for these good, high-paying jobs being created by this wonderful renaissance in American energy.

We could do some other things. We could try to rein in some of the regulations that I hear about day in and day out from my constituents are constraining businesses. We could approve the Keystone XL Pipeline, which makes a lot of sense and would create about 42,000 jobs. It would give us a safe source of energy from a friendly country such as Canada. We could do something else constructive. We could provide some relief for those people who have had full-time jobs turned into part-time jobs because of ObamaCare. Senator Collins from Maine and Senator Scott from South Carolina have a bill that would do exactly that.

Unfortunately, while I am an optimistic person, I am not particularly optimistic about the majority leader and the President changing their tactics in this election year. So that is why, tragically, under these circumstances we find ourselves here today debating a jobs bill that will actually kill jobs rather than one that would create jobs. What a terrible lost opportunity that is.

I see my friend from Maryland is here ready to speak.

I ask unanimous consent that several letters that have been provided to us by organizations such as the American Hotel & Lodging Association, the Wholesale Marketers Association, among other business organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my comments. All of these letters are opposing this 40-percent minimum wage increase.

I would finally ask unanimous consent to make as part of the record a column written by a gentleman by the name of Michael Saltsman in the IndyStar newspaper entitled ``Wage hike cost is no myth.'' This is the source for the information we got about the Clinton archives and this memo that Gene Sperling wrote to President Clinton advising him that even though it might be good temporary politics, it would actually hurt a lot of low-wage workers. I ask unanimous consent that they be made part of the Record.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Arkansas (Mr. Boozman), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Wicker).

Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Wicker) would have voted ``nay.''

Before the distinguished Senator from New Jersey leaves, I wish to thank him for his diligence and advocacy on behalf of a distinguished American. I can say, as chair of the agriculture committee, without the work of Cesar Chavez, without those who toiled in the fields picking the fruits and vegetables and providing the backbone of the agricultural workforce, we would not have an agricultural economy in many places in this country.

To say on the date of his birth that we recognize Cesar Chavez is something that is straightforward and ought to be happening and should have happened 8 years ago.

Community Mental Health Care

Mr. President, today marks the culmination of a long fight to improve community mental health care in our country. Last Thursday the House of Representatives passed the Protecting Access to Medicare Act, which includes a demonstration project based on the Excellence in Mental Health Act that my friend and partner from Missouri Roy Blunt and I authored.

I wish to recognize Senator Maria Cantwell, who is one of our cosponsors who is on the floor, for her wonderful, passionate support and voice helping us get this done. I wish to thank our House sponsors. This is a House-Senate Republican-Democratic initiative. Who says we cannot work together when we want to get things done?

Congresswoman Matsui, a Democrat from Hawaii; Congressman Lance, a Republican from New Jersey, were our sponsors. We also had significant partnership and advocacy from Congressman Tim Murphy, a leader in mental health in the Congress, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

I wish to thank Susan Collins who, as a Senator from Maine, has been a passionate advocate as well and Senator Jack Reed, who has worked with me for years on this legislation. He and I were partners for a long time to get this done. I wish to thank the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House, Chairman Camp, and Chairman Upton for working with us, both from my home State of Michigan--for working and partnering with us.

I wish to thank the Speaker and Majority Leader Reid, who put together a proposal, not what most of us would have liked to have seen in terms of permanently fixing this issue of the SGR or Medicare reimbursement for physicians, but even in looking at a fix for just 1 year, they came together and supported our vision for positively moving forward on a demonstration project to increase community mental health services.

Certainly, last but not least, I wish to thank Senator Ron Wyden, who has been there since day one and now as chairman of the Finance Committee has been unequivocal in his passionate support for what we are doing. I wish to thank Chairman Wyden for his leadership and support.

Our legislation is a landmark step forward for community mental health funding, one of the most significant advances we have seen in decades. This bill will improve the lives of people all across the country by providing funding to create 24-hour emergency psychiatric services and higher standards and funding for community care.

We authored this bill because mental illness touches all of our families in some way, one out of four Americans. For me, it was my father who suffered from bipolar disorder and was not diagnosed for at least 10 years when I was growing up. I saw the impact on my dad, the most loving, wonderful father someone could have, on my mom, on my brothers, our whole family, as we struggled to figure out what was going on and get him the help and support he needed.

When he finally was accurately diagnosed and received the right treatment and support, got the right tools to manage this disease, he was able to go back to work and live a happy and rewarding life for the rest of his life. Similar to my dad, too many people who need treatment do not get it, including one-third of all people living with mood disorders and more than half of those with severe mental diseases.

That is because in this country we treat mental health and physical health differently. If you have diabetes, you monitor your sugar levels, you take insulin to manage your disease. You go on with your life as you are managing your disease. If you are bipolar, meaning you have a chemical imbalance in the brain, you may receive zero treatment, maybe lose your job or worse your family, maybe end up in jail or on the streets.

Diabetes and bipolar disorders are both chemical imbalances in different

parts of the body. Both deserve treatment. People deserve to be able to get effective treatment for both. Both are treatable--both are treatable. The same is true for schizophrenia and many other behavioral diseases. There is hope when people get help.

There is treatment available and from that the ability to manage diseases, as we do for so many physical diseases that people have. This bill which we just passed in the Senate will make it more likely to happen that people can get the treatment and support they need. This bill makes great improvements in the way we treat mental health care as well. It will expand access, make sure people get treatment at a higher quality level, because just as we do with federally qualified health centers, we are now creating federally qualified behavioral health clinics.

If you meet higher standards, you get higher reimbursements and therefore more services available. This legislation authorizes eight States to be designated to receive enhanced funding for community mental health services, based on meeting high-quality standards for services, as I said before, for the designation of federally qualified behavioral health clinics.

This is voluntary. States will compete to be designated as one of the eight demonstration States. I expect many States and communities across the country to be working together to do that. I fully expect this demonstration project will save lives and save money to communities in every State that is housing people in jails who should be getting the treatment they need in the community in order to manage their diseases and live productive lives.

It has taken a long time to get here. The fight began 50 years ago, when President John F. Kennedy called on Congress to create a new type of health care facility that would improve the quality of mental health care in the community--in the community--and reduce stigma. He pushed Congress to take action on mental health care because he had a vision to bring mental health treatment out of institutions and into communities across America.

Following his lead, Congress sent him the Community Mental Health Act. It was the last bill he signed before he was murdered in Dallas. It is one of the most important bills that he signed. Senator Blunt and I spoke on the Senate floor last fall to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that bill's signing because it marked a major change in the way we treat mental health.

Unfortunately, over the past few decades, instead of increasing funding for mental health services, we have seen cut after cut after cut. We are seeing the consequences. Inpatient facilities all across the country have closed their doors, but they have not been replaced by services in the community. Too often we are turning the emergency room or worse to jails or prisons as our primary mental health treatment facilities.

As Cook County, IL, Sheriff Tom Dart testified in the House of Representatives just last week, ``The unfortunate and undeniable conclusion is, that because of dramatic and sustained cuts in mental health funding, we have criminalized mental illness in this country.''

The ER and the jails are not the place to treat mental illness. We can do better than that in this country. We have now taken a major step to do that. Our families deserve better. That is why our former colleagues Senator Pete Domenici and Senator Paul Wellstone, a dear friend to so many of us and whom we miss dearly, and later another dear friend, Senator Ted Kennedy, whom we also miss dearly, a towering figure on so many issues, joined together with Senator Kennedy's son, Representative Patrick Kennedy, and wrote the bipartisan Mental Health Parity and Addiction Act. They wanted to make sure we had parity in how insurance companies treat mental and physical health. That bill became law finally in 2008. It was a huge step forward.

I was proud to offer mental health parity in the Affordable Care Act, which was the next big step forward. Today we voted on the final step in mental health parity in the community, the ability to get funding for quality mental health care services the same way we fund quality community health services.

I have met and heard from so many people who personally felt the effects of mental illness and who wanted us to pass this bill so they and others could get the treatment they need.

One of those people who joined us--in fact, today at a press conference, flew in from Michigan--is Malkia Newman, who lived for over 30 years with undiagnosed bipolar disorder. She finally got the treatment she needed through the Oakland County Community Mental Health Authority in the Detroit suburbs.

She recovered, is now managing her illness, and is the board chair of the very same mental health board community she turned to for help so she can help others. Her message to Congress is: ``Please pass this bill so everyone can get the mental health help they need.''

Not everyone is as lucky as Malkia, though. There are many who still need our help, which is why what we have done today is so important.

Today, one in four returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan is in some need of some form of mental health care treatment. I recently heard from Marcia in Dearborn about her friend.

She said:

My friend bravely served two tours in Iraq for this

country. Before he left for war, he was so outgoing and all

he wanted was to put a smile on everyone's face. He had the

biggest heart of anyone I know.

But when he came home from war with PTSD, her friend was in trouble.

Marcia writes:

What is done for these men and women when they come home?

They go to war, they see things no one should ever see and do

things no one should ever do, and they're expected to return

home and live normally?

Her friend killed himself after suffering from PTSD for 8 years. Marcia's friend is only 1 of the 22 veterans who take their own lives every single day in America. This is where our bill comes in. This bipartisan bill expands access to mental health care, working with outpatient VA clinics, working with community mental health centers, and federally qualified mental health centers, all working together. I thank so much the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans for being with us every step of the way, advocating, all of the veterans organizations that have been so supportive. This bill will create a broad range of mental health services, such as 24-hour crisis psychiatric services in communities that are selected, integrated preventive screenings, integrated treatment for mental illness and substance abuse, and expanded peer support and counseling for families and patients alike.

It allows community mental health centers to finally be reimbursed the same as physical health providers. We are finally saying that as a country we are going to treat illnesses from the neck up, the same way we treat illnesses from the neck down.

Instead of merely talking about mental health in the wake of tragedies such as the Navy Yard in Washington last fall that took 13 lives or the tragedy at Sandy Hook, we have taken action this evening.

Mental health isn't a partisan issue. Senators Domenici and Wellstone understood it just as Senator Blunt, Senator Cantwell, Senator Collins, and I understand.

Senator Wellstone isn't here to see the progress we have made, but he once said:

Politics is not about power. Politics is not about money.

Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning.

Politics is about the improvement of people's lives.

That is exactly what we are doing, improving people's lives and creating hope and opportunity for people to get the help they need to live long, successful lives.

I thank all of our colleagues for working together to get this done. It will be something, as we move forward, of which we can all be proud.

I announce that the Senator from Arkansas (Mr. Pryor) is necessarily absent.

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

Madam President, the World Health Organization has deemed this week ``World Immunization Week.'' Every year the WHO designates a whole week to promote the world's most powerful tools in public health--the use of vaccines to protect people of all ages against disease.

Immunization is one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions ever introduced, preventing up to 3 million deaths a year from diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, polio, and measles. Thanks to decades of research, there are 25 diseases that can be prevented by vaccines, including some forms of influenza, meningitis, and even certain types of liver and cervical cancer.

The theme this year is ``Are you up-to-date?'' This year one in five children worldwide will not receive the vaccinations they need, some because their parents choose not to and others because it is just not available. Through the Global Vaccine Action Plan, the WHO and other members of the World Health Assembly are working to close this gap and promote equitable access to vaccines for every adult and child in the world. The aim--their goal--is to have all people vaccinated against preventable diseases by 2020.

One of the diseases the WHO is targeting is polio. I have a few years on the Presiding Officer, but I can recall growing up in the 1950s. When you grew up in that era, polio was a real concern. In some years 60,000 kids would come down with polio, and at that time nobody knew why. They could not figure out where it was coming from or how to stop it.

Parents--my mom included--had their theories. Some of those theories were based loosely on health and others on legend. My mother used to say: Don't you go play in that rainwater outside in the street after it rains; you could get polio. I can remember hearing that.

When we were kids, I remember the earliest television shows showed people in iron lungs and surviving in that machine that kept them alive and looking at the world through a mirror that was perched above their heads. Many people were afflicted by polio. Some of my closest friends growing up had polio. Our Republican leader, Senator McConnell, suffered from polio as a child. It was not uncommon. It was way too common.

Then came the day in 1955 when Jonas Salk came up with the Salk vaccine. It was such an amazing piece of news. It was shared in every classroom across the country. They had a vaccine. It involved a shot, and none of us were excited about that, but the idea of being protected for life from polio was worth it.

Then came along the Sabin oral vaccine, which we were even happier to hear about.

It was an indication to a lot of people that with hard work and research cures could be found.

It was April 12, 1955, when Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr., an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan and a mentor to Salk, announced that Salk discovered a polio vaccine that was safe and effective. When that announcement was made, families across America celebrated. We couldn't wait to get in line. April 12 was deliberately chosen for the announcement because it marked the 10th anniversary of the death of the most famous polio survivor of all--President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt also founded the March of Dimes Foundation in 1938, without which Salk may not have had the resources to complete his research. A massive field trial led to the release of the vaccine, the first of its kind. It was conducted on 1.8 million children in America, and it was proven 80 to 90 percent effective. We achieved this victory over polio. It really was a big deal. As a result, polio was eradicated in the United States of America in 1979.

In February the Senate passed a resolution I cosponsored with Senator Kirk of Illinois supporting World Polio Day. This resolution commended not only the work of Jonas Salk but also the Rotary Club, WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and UNICEF for their work to eradicate polio. These organizations have joined with the United States and other national governments to successfully reduce cases of polio by more than 99 percent. We now believe there are only three nations on Earth where there is evidence of polio: Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The success of the polio vaccine showed the public what medical research could accomplish and encourage.

Yesterday Chairman Mikulski of the Senate Appropriations Committee had a hearing on research, and we had some great witnesses. Among them was Dr. Francis Collins, who is the head of the National Institutes of Health. They came to talk about America's investment in research and innovation. You would think that with the success of the Salk polio vaccine and all the other things that have followed, that America would have learned a valuable lesson about this investment. Sadly, today, some 60 years after the discovery of the Salk polio vaccine, we are not making progress as we should. In fact, in some respects we are falling behind.

Because of our failure to adequately fund the National Institutes of Health over the last 10 or 12 years, we have seen a 20-percent decline in the awards for medical research.

I talked to Dr. Francis Collins about this 2 or 3 months ago. He heads up the NIH. He is a brilliant, wonderful man who was in charge of mapping the Human Genome Project. He did it ahead of time and on budget and produced a wealth of information that is now being used to find cures for diseases.

A month or so ago, the National Institutes of Health introduced their AMP Program where they engaged the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in America to join with the NIH to use the human genome to find cures for the following diseases: Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. Those are the first three targets they are going to go after. We need to go after more, and we need to encourage them for several reasons:

First, if we don't make an investment in medical research that future generations of researchers can count on, young people will not dedicate their lives to medical research.

Think of this for a moment: 30 years ago 18 percent of all the NIH medical researchers were under the age of 36. Now it is 3 percent. Younger people are not moving toward medical research because they are uncertain of our national commitment in this area. Shame on us. At a time when we should be enticing the best and brightest in the world to get involved in biomedical research, our indecision and lack of leadership at the governmental level is failing to fund these entities and this effort.

I asked Dr. Collins: What is the kind of commitment we should make as a nation in medical research that can make a dramatic difference?

He said: Senator, if you could give us 5 percent real growth a year beyond inflation, 5 percent a year for 10 years, I will promise you we will make dramatic progress.

So I did a calculation. I asked my staff what it would cost us as a nation to increase medical research 5 percent a year for 10 years. Well, they added the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Defense medical research, and the Veterans' Administration medical research. They said: All right. Put them all together. If we gave them a 5-percent raise each year, how much would it cost over 10 years? The answer: $150 billion.

That is a huge sum of money, but in that same period of time we are likely to budget over $18 trillion in spending for the government. It is a very tiny piece of the overall spending of our government.

Some people who are budget hawks will step back and say: Great idea, Senator, but we just can't afford it. We can't afford to commit to coming up with $150 billion over 10 years.

I would ask them to consider two things:

First, last year in the United States of America, the Federal Government spent, through the Medicare and Medicaid Programs, over $200 billion treating one disease: Alzheimer's. If through our medical research we could find some blessed cure for this terrible disease or even delay its onset, it would more than pay for the amount of money we would have to invest in medical research. It is that important.

Secondly, there are things we can do which I will stand up and say I am prepared to do which would fund a major part of this research. If we increased the Federal tax on tobacco products by 95 cents a package, it would pay for more than half of the medical research I just suggested. Over a 10-year period of time, 900,000 American lives would be saved because children wouldn't be able to afford to buy these tobacco products.

So this medical research commitment is not only a good one in terms of reducing our costs of medical care, but it also is something we ought to achieve in order to make sure there will be breakthroughs in the years ahead to eliminate and treat many of the diseases which haunt us and our families across America.

The American Cures Act is a bill I have introduced. I am happy to have a number of my colleagues cosponsoring it. It has the support of virtually all of the major medical research organizations. It should be bipartisan, and I hope those on the other side of the aisle who share my commitment to medical research will join me.

Discovering the polio vaccine won Jonas Salk the Nobel Prize and allowed him to create the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, one of the premier institutes for biomedical research. If he had done nothing else, Salk's place in history would have been honored and assured. But Jonas Salk wasn't content to rest on past achievement. After all, he was an American. In the last years of his life, he spent his time searching for a cure for AIDS. When his early efforts failed, he was undeterred. When asked why, he said: You can only fail if you stop too soon. This is a decisive moment in the history of our Nation. We have to continue to invest in order to reap the immense rewards of decades of work by the best scientific and medical minds in the world. The only way we can fail is by stopping too soon.

Shah Nomination

Madam President, I rise to speak in support of Manish

Shah, who has been nominated to serve as a Federal district court judge in the Northern District of Illinois. Mr. Shah is an outstanding nominee. He has the experience, qualifications and integrity to serve with distinction on the Federal bench.

Mr. Shah was nominated to fill the seat that became vacant when Judge Joan Lefkow took senior status. He has been reviewed by my judicial screening committee, and he was chosen by Senator Kirk's committee to serve and I supported the selection.

He is a Federal prosecutor in the Northern District of Illinois. He is currently chief of the criminal division of that office and he has a lengthy resume of achievements in this field.

Mr. Shaw has won numerous awards and recognitions for his work in the U.S. attorney's office, including the FBI Director's Award for Outstanding Criminal Investigation. He graduated from Stanford University and the University of Chicago Law School. He clerked for 2 years for Judge Jim Zagel of the Northern District of Illinois.

Incidentally, his nomination in the Northern District of Illinois is historic. Upon confirmation, he will be the first article III judge of South Asian descent to serve in the State of Illinois. He appeared before the Judiciary Committee last November in a hearing that I chaired. He was reported out unanimously from that committee.

I am sorry it has taken so long for us to get to his nomination on the calendar, but I am certain he will be an excellent addition to the bench for the Northern District of Illinois.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

I ask unanimous consent to address the Senate as in morning business for less than 15 minutes.

Mr. President, first I wish to address legislation that passed the Senate earlier this evening. The sustainable growth rate is such an important issue to the people from the

State of Kansas. I come from a State in which senior citizens are a very prevalent portion of our population, and access to health care is so dependent upon whether Medicare reimburses a physician, a hospital, a home health care agency or a nursing home in an adequate amount. I fear that in the absence of that adequate Medicare reimbursement we will see a lot fewer doctors, and hospital doors will close.

I have been an advocate of and in fact I never voted to create the sustainable growth rate, and I suppose I should explain what that is. In the broadest of terms it means there is a formula that ultimately reduces the reimbursement a physician receives under Medicare. It has become a very dramatic issue. This year I believe it is around a 24 percent reduction that will occur April 1, tomorrow, if the sustainable growth rate formula is not altered.

The reality is that Congress has altered that formula to avoid those reductions, because we know when a health care provider is not compensated in a way that covers the cost of providing the service, most likely we are going to have fewer health care providers. Hospitals will not be there, physicians will no longer be in practice, and, particularly in areas of our country that are rural where, again, a significant portion of the population is senior citizens whose medical bills are paid, in part, through Medicare.

My discouragement, my dissatisfaction, is once again the Senate has demonstrated its dysfunction by passing a very short-term fix to this long-term problem. If history is any indication, we will be back 1 year from now in the same predicament. We have made alterations 16 times previously. This is the 17th time in which we have done a short-term fix to a long-term problem. To me, it is one more symptom of our inability as a Senate to function in a way that benefits the American people: in this case, patients who are served by physicians who will be harmed.

In instances across Kansas, our hospitals are now employers of physicians, and so they have entered into a contract with a physician. When the reimbursement rate for the physician is reduced, it means less revenue to the hospital and a tighter squeeze to the many hospitals that barely hang on by a thread.

I express my appreciation to Senator Wyden, the chairman of the Finance Committee, for his efforts to find a long-term solution, a permanent repeal of the SGR and again express my willingness to him and to others to work with Democrats in the Senate, to work with Republicans in the Senate, to find the necessary numbers of us who will come together to support legislation that would permanently end the SGR, and that we would not be then asked a few months from now to come back once again to solve the problem.

We know the problem is there. We know we will have to find a solution. The consequences of failing are so great, but we were unwilling to take the necessary steps today to pass a permanent repeal and an elimination of the SGR formula.

Again, to Senator Wyden, he and I have had conversations since last Thursday about my willingness to have conversations with Republican Members of the Senate to find the necessary votes to pass legislation for a permanent repeal. I expressed that offer again to Senator Wyden, that we are still interested in doing that, and that the country, its health care providers and their patients, deserve better than what we were able to do today.

Remembering the Mull Family

I turn to a story about a very special Kansas family. Unfortunately, it is a sad story.

I often describe to my friends and colleagues in Washington, DC, how special Kansas is and in a special way how we live our lives there.

Families are important. The values of family run deep in our communities. We have neighbors who care for each other and we all know each other one on one, name by name, family by family. We know where they go to church, we know what schools their kids are in, and we know how their families are doing. When tragedy strikes, the entire community is shaken.

I pay tribute today to a family from north central Kansas, the Mulls. Glenn Mull and his wife Elaine, their daughter Amy Harter and their granddaughter Samantha Harter were traveling to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association trade show in Nashville on February 3 when the plane they were in crashed during its second landing attempt. The jet went down about 10 miles from the airport in Bellevue, TN.

I saw on the Internet a Bellevue resident, who I don't know. She wrote this tribute to Glenn Mull, the pilot.

She said:

Glenn had reached the most bustling section of our

community at the busiest time of the day. . . . He would have

seen hundreds of homes with cars in the driveway. A Kroger

packed with shoppers. An assisted living community. And an

enormous YMCA, where hundreds of families were streaming in

and out to swim in the indoor pool, exercise and take

classes. Glenn didn't know this, but school was cancelled for

our kids . . . so a larger number than usual were at the Y

with their parents. Some experts are saying now that the

last-second sharp turn Glenn made in the seconds before the

plane crashed indicates that he made a heroic decision to hit

the one spot in the immediate vicinity where no one on the

ground would be hurt. . . . Glenn managed to spare all of

their lives.

The Bellevue resident went on to describe her own community as one which is ``filled with people who shared Glenn's obvious affinity for family.'' She said that Bellevue residents:

. . . are all talking about Glenn Mull, the hero, who we

believe had the extraordinary courage and presence of mind to

save our families, even as he realized he couldn't save his

own.

Glenn was born in Great Bend and raised on his family farm near there, where his parents instilled in him a strong work ethic and a sense of integrity. He went on to graduate from Kansas State University with a business degree, and K-State is where he met his wife Elaine. They moved back to north central Kansas to grow the three-generation family farm and eventually to raise their three children. He promoted his life's work through representation of Kansas farmers and ranchers in organizations such as the Kansas Livestock Association and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

Glenn and Elaine were well respected not only in the cattle industry but also in their community for their generous commitment to improving the lives of their neighbors. As a founding board member of Pawnee Valley Community Hospital Foundation, one of Glenn's top priorities was improving health care in Larned, KS. Their hospital was faced with potential closure in 2009 until efforts were made by the city of Larned and community members such as Glenn to solve the problem and to keep the hospital doors open. For rural communities such as Larned, access to the types of health care facilities offered by Pawnee Valley Community Hospital is essential to their community's future.

Elaine, his wife, had a tireless heart for service and volunteered in a number of organizations, including the Fort Larned Historical Society, the Larned Hospital Auxiliary, the Santa Fe Trail Center, Larned Music Club, 4-H, Girl Scouts, and was a K-State trustee, just to name a few of her activities.

She played the piano and taught Bible study classes at Grace Community Church in Great Bend where the pastor said that he loved to talk with Glenn about the weather, which is a very common Kansas conversation, and that he always used the farmer's expertise to analyze the day.

The pastor said:

He knew exactly how much moisture we had and what we

needed, whether this was good for the wheat versus the milo

and how it might affect the feed yards.

The pastor continued:

There has been talk that Glenn behaved in a very heroic

way. I have no idea whether that is true, but I will tell you

that he is the kind of guy who would absolutely have done the

right thing.

Glenn and Elaine's legacies of selflessness, philanthropy, and leadership undoubtedly live on. I have met many people in my life, and I don't know that I have ever met a couple with more optimism, with more care and concern for other people, with a sense that things will be better tomorrow, and that the idea that hard work and living your life with integrity and as a companion to your Creator, would mean that good things would happen for you and your family.

Amy Harter, their daughter, and her family lived in a house on the Mulls' land and worked in the family business, while she and her husband Doug raised their children, Chase and Samantha.

Sixteen-year-old Samantha, the granddaughter, was killed in that plane crash. She was described by one of her classmates at Larned High School, which has a student body of about 300, as a silly girl but a serious enough one to be a member of the honor choir. She would have the most energy in the honor choir practice at 7 in the morning. She would either be there--tired--with caramel rolls her mom had made or laughing and having fun.

Kansans know what it means to persevere, and certainly the Mull family has persevered through many difficulties. No farmer or rancher escapes that in our State. We embrace our State's motto--``Ad astra per aspera''--``To the stars through difficulties.'' During difficult times we often see the very best in people--as in Glenn's decision to save lives in Tennessee when he couldn't save himself or his family.

Amidst the loss of Glenn and Elaine, their daughter and granddaughter, and the suffering of this Kansas community, what stands out is the outpouring in Larned and Great Bend in central Kansas of care and compassion shown by their friends and neighbors but also by the residents of Belleview, NE, who were united in their care and concern for this family they never knew.

Glenn, Elaine, their daughter Amy, and granddaughter Samantha will be greatly missed, and all we can do now is model our lives after the lives they led and ask that God comfort them, their families and be a source of support for all who knew them as we go through this continued time of grief.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I thank my colleague.

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