A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to permanently extend the depreciation rules for property used predominantly within an Indian reservation.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Massachusetts be recognized for 5 minutes and that I follow with my comments until I complete them.

Madam President, to comment on my colleague from Massachusetts, he is correct that the tax credits for wind energy are expiring, but he is incorrect in his ascertainment that all tax credits are the same. The tax credits in the oil and gas industry are deferred tax payments, and the $7 billion they collect this year, in terms of deferred payments, in terms of intangible drilling costs, will, in fact, be made up for with $7 billion of payments from 10 years ago. So the net-net is zero, whereas the wind industry has a tax credit which the American consumer subsidizes to the tune of a significant amount, the value of the electricity that we get there. So it is viable--if we were to put the wind energy tax credit the same as we have in the oil and gas industry, I would happily support it, where it was a delayed capture of later revenues flowing back to the Treasury. But that is not what we want. We want to give a refundable tax credit directly to wind energy. It is not the same. The apples are not the same.

I came to the floor this evening regrettably having to come and make this statement I am making. In the last month we have seen a lot of things happen in the Senate, which have led to other things happening in the Senate. I do not think anybody is happy about it. But today, the leader is taking the unprecedented step--I say that underlining the word unprecedented--of having the Senate vote on a nominee who is currently under active investigation.

I have no premonitions or knowledge about the specific facts of that investigation. But what I do know, in checking with the Senate historian, the Senate library, and from the history of the Senate, is that it has never been done before. It has never been done. So my reason in coming to the floor is, No. 1, to defend my position and what should be the position of the Senate, and to make the case to my colleagues that we are doing a disservice both to this nominee and to the position he will fill.

By all letters of recommendation, Alejandro Mayorkas is an honorable man. President Obama is nominating him to be Deputy Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. Under the new Senate rules, the minority has essentially no right to stop the majority from forcing through a nominee who possibly, just possibly, may be unfit for office on the basis of this investigation. Nobody is saying he is.

They are not saying no. They are saying wait. This is, in fact, the very act the Republicans were afraid of when Leader Reid facilitated the change in the Senate rules by breaking the Senate rules.

The Senate is going to cast this vote without knowledge, full knowledge, of advice and consent on his fitness for his position. We can do nothing to stop that. We realize that.

The precedent we are talking about is historic. Holding this vote in light of an active investigation into serious relevant allegations of misconduct by any nominee appears to be virtually without any precedent in this body. We searched extensively for any precedent, for the decision to hold a vote on this nomination.

The Congressional Research Service studied this. It has never happened before. Never. In fact, they discovered the opposite. The Senate has established a history and followed a practice that should lead us to postpone consideration of any nominee under investigation. Here are some examples they found.

In January of 2005, President George Bush nominated Ken Tomlinson to be Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. An active inspector general's investigation into allegations of unethical behavior by Mr. Tomlinson led the Senate panel to delay action on the nomination for over 18 months. He was never confirmed.

Later that same year, President Bush nominated Roland Arnall to the post of U.S. Ambassador to The Netherlands. At the time Mr. Arnall's firm was being investigated by regulators in 30 States for predatory lending. Then-Foreign Relations Committee chairman Republican Senator Richard Lugar consented to a request by Democrats that October to delay voting on the nominee because of the investigations. Senator Joseph Biden spoke out in favor of the delay, as did Senator Paul Sarbanes, who cited longstanding precedent for delaying a vote until the nominee was ``clear.'' Mr. Arnall was eventually voted out of committee, after Republicans concluded the investigation did not target the nominee personally, but he was not confirmed by the full Senate until the following February, 7 months after he was nominated, when his company agreed to end the investigations by settling the cases against him.

My friend President Obama, who nominated Mr. Mayorkas, was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee at that time. Then he seemed to agree that nominees facing investigations should not receive a vote. A 2006 LA Times story on Mr. Arnall's confirmation quoted then-Senator Obama's spokesman as saying: Because a settlement has been reached, Senator Obama will not seek to block his nomination.

A vote on another Bush nominee, Lester Crawford, was delayed for 2 months in 2005 while the inspector general of the Food and Drug Administration probed claims, allegations, that Mr. Crawford had an affair with a coworker and gave her preferential treatment. Once again, the OIG's review was complete. The OIG concluded that the allegations could not be substantiated, and the HELP Committee voted to confirm him.

In 2004, the Senate Banking Committee did not schedule a vote on Alphonso Jackson to serve as Chairman of the Department of Housing and Urban Development until the HUD inspector general determined Mr. Jackson had not violated the Department's workplace violence policies as subordinates had alleged.

All of this advises us strongly to delay a vote on Mr. Mayorkas until the OIG investigation into his alleged actions is concluded. I would suggest that we should learn from history and not move forward with this nomination. If it was true for the Senate then, and if it was true for Senator Biden, if it was true for Senator Obama, if it was true for their colleagues and many Senators who maintain this precedent until today, it should be true for us now.

Last week, when Mr. Mayorkas was considered by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, my chairman justified moving forward with the nomination by asserting that the DHS OIG had not identified any criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Mayorkas. At present, the DHS OIG is only considering allegations of conflicts of interest, misuse of position, mismanagement, and appearance of impropriety. In none of those situations I identified were the nominees under criminal investigation. Yet the Senate delayed its vote until each investigation was finished. Since the DHS OIG has not completed its investigation, we do not know if there will ultimately be any criminal findings. I doubt that there will.

We do know, based on the precedent that I cited, an investigation into any potential wrongdoing, whether criminal or not, is enough for the Senate to delay a vote on an important nominee, or at least it used to be.

Of course, the Senate recently changed. The majority leader exercised the so-called nuclear option, changing the rules by breaking the rules, granting my colleagues the new power to push administration nominees through the confirmation process with a simple majority.

The leader is attempting to use this new power to push through scores of nominees in the last few days this session. But scrutiny and judgment should not be diminished in a partisan rush to get one's way. Forget the rest of the nominees; this is one where an open investigation is currently underway. With this nominee before us, Mr. Mayorkas might do well to wait for all the facts.

As we all know, the DHS OIG is also currently under investigation. This office is reviewing the leader who recently resigned. They are reviewing allegations of conflict of interest, misuse of position, mismanagement of EB-5 investor visa program, and an appearance of impropriety. They are all serious concerns. I hope they aren't true, but right now we don't have all of the facts.

While I understand OIG is not currently aware of any criminal activity, since the investigation is still open and several interviews remain, that could possibly change.

As I understand, however, the OIG plans to complete its investigation and release its findings in a few short months. Until then, we won't know what is only an allegation and what will be proven by evidence and facts.

Most concerning to me is the fact that the White House failed to alert me or the committee chairman to the fact that Mr. Mayorkas was under investigation, which they had an obligation to do. In fact, the letter from White House counsel conveniently doesn't confirm or deny whether the President was aware Mr. Mayorkas was even under investigation. It is unclear to me why Chairman Carper wasn't troubled by the White House being less than honest with him about a nominee he was expected to fast track for nomination.

I have spoken to a number of whistleblowers within DHS who have concerns about Mr. Mayorkas' fitness for position. These whistleblowers have made serious allegations about how Mr. Mayorkas has overseen and influenced the EB-5 program. They are only allegations, but they do raise questions. They raise questions about his allegiance to DHS's core mission to prevent terrorism and enhance security.

A number of the allegations extend well beyond the EB-5 program and raise concerns about the fitness for the No. 2 position in DHS. They include the following: attempts by Mr. Mayorkas to obstruct the investigations by Congress; allegations of preventing program integrity measures requested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; intimidation of employees who questioned agency policies; susceptibility to political influence; failing to properly enforce program integrity mechanisms, resulting in potential threats to national security.

Whistleblowers who spoke to the Wall Street Journal said that Mr. Mayorkas fast-tracked approvals of certain EB-5 applications over objections regarding the suspicious source of funds to rebuild the casino in Las Vegas which, in fact, was noted in a recent article by the Washington Times.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article by the Wall Street Journal.

I understand that some of my colleagues on the other side are frustrated that whistleblowers have not come forward to speak to them. To be clear, I have communicated this request to the whistleblowers and have invited those whistleblowers who have spoken to come to my office to speak to the majority, twice. But they have told me that they have the fear they will face retribution if their identities become known and that they will lose their jobs. Putting myself in their shoes, I can't blame them. I cannot provide them with protection.

They have also heard Members of this Senate dismiss their serious allegations. For example, the Senator from Delaware referred to the whistleblower allegations as rumor and innuendo. If you were an official who had come forward with serious concerns about improper behavior, potentially putting your livelihood at risk, would you feel comfortable speaking with somebody who has already dismissed your allegations as rumor and innuendo?

So we will leave it to the inspector general's office to consider whistleblower allegations and all of the evidence to determine whether any inappropriate or criminal activity took place. Again, we will know that judgment in a short 2 months.

However, we do have other information that raises serious concerns about this nomination. The committee's business meeting last week to consider Mr. Mayorkas is a perfect example of why the Senate should wait for the OIG's investigation to be completed. At that meeting the chairman gave a lengthy opening statement that made a number of concerning and inaccurate statements which served to denigrate the 650 employees at the Office of Inspector General at Homeland Security.

The office deserves some criticism, that is for sure, as our Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight has determined. Rather than rely on their insights, he came up with some of his own. There are actual misstatements of fact, and they only serve to further obscure a complicated and difficult situation.

For example, the chairman claimed that 3 days before the confirmation hearing on July 25, information about the OIG investigation was leaked to Congress and the media in a highly irregular manner.

As he knows, and his own committee record should indicate, the existence of the investigation was not leaked to Congress in a highly irregular manner, it was emailed to his staff, as well as mine, as an official communication by the DHS OIG congressional liaison office. If there was anything irregular about the situation, it was that the White House had not already confirmed there was an investigation ongoing. We had a right to that information, and it had been improperly kept from us.

In the face of the White House's inappropriate omission, the OIG chose to inform us. I am sure it was a hard choice, but I believe it was the right one. If they had not done so, we would not have known of the investigation of the sort which the Senate, in normal times, would have given great weight to and not moved forward on.

As DHS often tells us: If you see something, say something.

The chairman also repeatedly faulted the OIG for refraining from interviewing Mr. Mayorkas until the end of its investigation. This appears to be a criticism borne from a lack of experience and knowledge of the investigative process.

Quoting:

To my amazement, Director Mayorkas has never been contacted

about this EB-5 investigation.

Later he said:

I cannot understand why they [OIG] have not talked to Mr.

Mayorkas.

It is common practice to investigate the central figure in an investigation closer to the end of an investigation after evidence has been reviewed and collected. There are many reasons for this practice. One is that you do not know what to ask the subject until you have gathered all the information you can about his or her alleged misconduct. Another is that it minimizes the impact of the investigation on the subject, which can be an understandable concern when investigating a busy top official such as our present nominee. Early meetings can result in having to hold several interviews with the same official, asking questions about topics or allegations which could eventually be dismissed without their testimony by not identifying exculpatory evidence beforehand.

While the scheduling for this interview was upsetting to the chairman, it should not be to Mr. Mayorkas. He is a seasoned prosecutor and familiar with the process of the investigations, and he knows what to expect.

The chairman also claimed at the committee vote that the OIG has repeatedly given him deadlines and had missed them. The chairman inferred that we could not trust their word on when this investigation could be completed.

Specifically he said: ``I was . . . informed that the investigation was likely to conclude in October.''

Later he claimed: ``We have no guarantee this investigation will simply not drag on and on . . . it has already slipped several times.''

Later he added:

Each time we get an estimated timeline for completion, the

date slips. First we were told October, then perhaps

December. And as of last week, the IG said there were at

least several months of work remaining.

None of this is true. According to my office records of the conversations with the inspector general, we have no record or recollection that the inspector general ever promised a date certain of completion in October. Neither do we have any record indicating the IG suggested December. Unless the IG communicated to the chairman these deadlines in the private conversations which he arranged without my knowledge or involvement, these statements appear to be simply false.

I would also say I cannot imagine the chairman or staff would engage in a private conversation with the inspector general regarding a sensitive investigation into a political official. Such conversation would be a breach not only of our practices but could raise ethical concerns of exerting undue influence upon an official proceeding.

I urge him to correct the Record or show us in detail the conversations where the IG made these points and promises.

The chairman also stated this fact, and news outlets erroneously reported this inaccurate claim, that the investigation was being handled by only one investigator and two assistants.

His quote was: ``We learned that there is one investigator assigned,'' he claimed, ``one investigator and two research assistants.''

This is not true. The OIG has told our staff the case has a lead investigator--and that is true, an absolute common practice for investigations and most investigative and sensitive endeavors--but they were further told that the OIG had a rotating team of investigators, experts, research assistants, and staff help on various aspects of the investigation. This is a common practice, assigning leads to individual investigations but sharing a larger pool of assistant investigative resources. It is followed, to a great extent, by our own Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. I don't understand why the chairman's characterization would stray so far from the facts established in conversations involving both our staffs or from common sense.

I am also disappointed that it characterized the investigation as having a ``lack of progress,'' which was ``unacceptable'' and ``unfair, not just to Mr. Mayorkas but to a Department full of people who need leadership, and to a nation that is counting on the Department to help protect them.''

The truth is it is not uncommon for investigations of senior officials to last a year or longer and is not a matter which should be rushed by anyone, certainly not the chairman of the authorizing committee.

This is the kind of rhetoric which causes concern in some quarters that the chairman and others are applying inappropriate pressure on an agency's internal processes and deliberation. Political pressure is simply not helpful to anyone. In fact, it can actually hinder the investigation and weaken public acceptance for the findings, particularly if they exonerate Mr. Mayorkas. People may allege, as they have already, that the Office of Inspector General waters down and weakens its finding in response to political pressures such as this.

If the OIG investigation results in a clean bill of health for Mr. Mayorkas, how many Americans, how many DHS employees, will wonder if the chairman's repeated disparaging remarks were indicative of a political pressure applied which improperly swayed the results? No one is served by his comments. What is more, they are not a reflection of the shared concern he voiced with me in our joint correspondence to the inspector general. I simply do not understand why he would intervene in such a vocal, public way, which could cast doubt and suspicion on the results of the investigation.

The other thing about this vote is it is unfair to Mr. Mayorkas. I have

talked a lot about process and the need to know the findings of the DHS OIG report before we vote on Mr. Mayorkas. But no one seems to understand just how unfair this vote is to the nominee. By pushing his nomination through both the committee and the full Senate, Senator Carper and Leader Reid have denied Mr. Mayorkas a chance to win bipartisan support.

I have only voted against one nominee who has come through our committee, only 1 out of 20. I would like to be able to vote for Mr. Mayorkas if, in fact, OIG shows him a clean bill. The reason it is sad that he can't win bipartisan support is that under the new Senate rules it is possible for my colleagues to confirm him without a single Republican vote. When they do that, they will be delivering to the Department a nominee who arrives with only his party's support, and he will be trailed by a cloud of doubt and discontent.

The allegations against Mr. Mayorkas relate mainly to his management of the EB-5 immigrant visa program in his role as Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. As I understand it, the investigation into Mr. Mayorkas began in an unconventional way by one person speaking out after their heavily documented concerns were dismissed. To me, this only adds validity to the allegations.

In the course of its investigation, the DHS OIG discovered other allegations of impropriety, including conflicts of interest, misuse of position, mismanagement, and the appearance of impropriety. Those allegations could speak to a candidate's fitness for public service, especially if he is not fully cleared to help lead the Department of Homeland Security. It is wholly unreasonable to ask Senators to endorse the nominee's fitness for service until those questions are answered.

In an attempt to discredit the investigation, some people have cited the problems plaguing leadership in the DHS OIG office, the inspector general in particular. In fact, the Financial and Contracting Oversight Subcommittee of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is currently conducting and will release soon their bipartisan investigation into a number of allegations.

While I agree those allegations surrounding OIG leadership are troubling, the problems of one person do not invalidate the work done by an office of over 650 people. OIG work in every agency should be taken seriously.

In January of this year, Senator Carper joined me and members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in sending a letter to President Obama urging him to fill the vacant inspector general positions at a number of key agencies, including DHS. In that letter, we said, ``Inspectors general are an essential component of government oversight.'' We do a disservice to that statement when we preclude the opportunity to, at a minimum, review the work done by the DHS OIG, draw our own conclusions, and then vote accordingly without all the facts before us.

Even more concerning, by denigrating the open DHS OIG investigation, the Senate is sending a message to other OIGs that their investigations don't matter. Obviously, that is incredibly significant given our dependence on these watchdogs to oversee the huge government agencies and bureaucracies created by this body. We must respect and support the work done by inspectors general. In my opinion, the damage being done to the DHS OIG and the respect of IGs throughout the government by holding this vote is far worse than any damage done by the office's current leadership.

The results of this investigation are not the only unknown regarding Mr. Mayorkas's service as Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Despite a number of concerns regarding national security and criminal vulnerabilities in the EB-5 program, we know the program expanded drastically under the nominee's hand and we have not yet seen evidence that he pursued significant regulatory changes to address the weaknesses that were known.

Two months ago I personally asked DHS and other agencies for an answer on how the administration is dealing with the concerns, and I have received no response as of yet. These include an October 18 letter in which I requested information from Acting Secretary Rand Beers on EB-5 national security concerns identified by the agency itself in a draft report. I received no response.

The same day, I also asked Acting ICE Director John Sandweg for the same information. I received no response.

I also requested information from National Security Adviser Susan Rice regarding known national security concerns created by the EB-5 program. To date, I have received no response.

Just last month, on November 1, Senator Grassley and I requested information from Acting Secretary Beers on how the agency is addressing the known national security concerns with EB-5. Again, silence. No response.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record these letters requesting information.

Given that we are considering promoting Director Mayorkas to be second-in-command at DHS, it is appropriate that we consider how he managed this program and whether he addressed criminal and national security concerns, including exploitation of the EB-5 regional center program by terrorists, spies, and other threatening actors. These weaknesses were apparently the subject of repeated examinations by the administration.

I have repeatedly pressed the administration for more information regarding the weaknesses in the EB-5 program under Director Mayorkas and what actions it has taken to remedy those weaknesses. The chairman has declined to join in this inquiry. Why is that? Why would the chairman decline to join in finding out the truth? I have not received documents or any of the information I have requested.

At the same time there is no public record of steps Director Mayorkas has taken to address EB-5 concerns. For example, to date, USCIS has failed to promulgate any regulations shutting down regional centers being exploited by criminals or terrorists. This raises serious concerns with me.

When Congress created the EB-5 program in 1990, the goal was to stimulate

the U.S. economy through job creation and capital investment by foreign investors. To that end, the original program--called the basic immigrant investor program--required immigrant investors to invest $1 million in a commercial enterprise that would create or preserve at least 10 jobs. The investor was initially granted conditional permanent residency, but after 2 years and proving the creation of 10 jobs, they were eligible to become a permanent resident.

In 1992 Congress authorized a second EB-5 pilot program allowing immigrants to pool investments through DHS-approved regional centers. In seeking approval from DHS, the regional center submits a proposal to DHS detailing how it plans to promote economic growth in that region. By investing in a regional center, immigrant investors can take advantage of relaxed job standards to measure both direct and indirect job creation. While direct jobs are actual identifiable jobs for qualified employees, indirect jobs are considered those created collaterally by the investment.

While the regional center program was set to expire at the end of 2012, last September it was reauthorized for 3 more years. Despite known national security concerns, no changes were made to the program by the Judiciary Committee.

In total, over 25,000 people are currently in the United States through the EB-5 program. Since its inception, the EB-5 program has been plagued with wide-ranging problems. Mr. Mayorkas took over this program in 2009. There has been a notable expansion of the program since he took it over. It now sees $3.3 billion passed from foreign investors in exchange for visas to reside in our country. Yet the serious security weaknesses have persisted, as well as alarm among senior officials. These problems include the agency failing to determine if the program is meeting its basic goal of creating 10 jobs per investment and defrauding would-be immigrants with breaches of national security with suspected terrorists using the program to enter the United States.

In 2012 the national security staff coordinated a review of the EB-5 regional center program by five agencies focused on vulnerabilities relating to the financial flows and securities offerings that routinely accompany the investment component of the EB-5 program. That draft report raised major concerns with the investments being made by EB-5 investors. For example, the investigation found one regional center filed false documentation in an attempt to support the creation of jobs. The same report also noted investments being made to a business that never existed and could never exist, headed by an individual using a pseudonym due to a criminal record of importing counterfeit products into this country.

The draft review noted the high risk that EB-5 program participants may attempt to use the program as a tool or a channel for money laundering, tax evasion, or other illicit financial activity. This type of activity was aided by the fact that known criminals are not statutorily prohibited from owning, managing, or recruiting regional centers. We just reauthorized that.

This national security staff draft review also references another interagency review looking at the national security threats associated with the EB-5 program, stating that the vulnerabilities relating to possible infiltration by terrorist groups or foreign operatives are also before the NSS and are being addressed by the interagency task force.

Understanding we have only seen a draft of the national security staff's forensic audit and have not seen information about the interagency review of possible infiltration by terrorist groups or foreign operatives, I wrote to Susan Rice, the National Security Adviser, on October 18 requesting that information. She has not addressed any concerns. She has not answered our letter.

The Department of Homeland Security also conducted its own internal assessment of the EB-5 regional center program, examining criminal and national security vulnerabilities. In response to an apparent tasking from DHS Secretary, ICE prepared a review of the program. Here are the vulnerabilities they noted and identified: export of sensitive technology, economic espionage; use by foreign government agents, espionage; use by terrorists; investment fraud by regional centers; investment fraud by investors in this country; fraud conspiracies by investors and regional centers; illicit finance and money laundering.

The agency's own draft analysis makes clear that the EB-5 regional center program can be exploited by terrorists, criminals, and foreign operatives. Further, it identified regional centers as a means for facilitating espionage at the highest levels by foreign governments. To that end, the review by ICE proposed that the regional center program be sunset--be done away with--because there can be no safeguards that can be put in place that will ensure the integrity of the regional center model.

As I stated before, I sought more information about DHS and ICE's internal review of the EB-5 program. I wrote to Acting Secretary Beers on October 18 requesting information about the findings of this review and what actions were taken in response. I have not yet received a response to my inquiry.

Recently, we received a draft DHS OIG EB-5 regional center audit. It is my understanding that we are soon to get this final report. In the draft, it includes the following statement: USCIS--under Secretary Mayorkas--fails to ensure regional centers meet all program requirements. USCIS--under the nominee, Mr. Mayorkas--inconsistently applies program regulations and policies. USCIS doesn't always properly document decisions and responses, giving the appearance the program is vulnerable to inappropriate influence.

This is all under the guise of a nominee whom we will vote on late tonight.

Since the program is so poorly run by USCIS, the draft DHS OIG determined USCIS is limited in its ability to prevent fraud or national security threats that could harm the United States, nor could the agency see where the EB-5 program was improving the U.S. economy and creating jobs for U.S. citizens, as intended by Congress. This draft report also outlines a number of recommended actions for the Director.

Last week Senator Carper asserted it was Congress's fault that the EB-5 program was susceptible to fraud and national security threats because it hadn't provided the proper statutory authority and that new statutory authority which was included in S. 744, the immigration bill, would have solved the problem. But the draft DHS OIG report makes clear that under its existing authority, the agency has the ability to issue regulations to deny and even terminate regional centers identified as fraudulent or national security risks but has failed to do so.

They also recommended that the Director provide USCIS with the authority to deny and terminate EB-5 regional center participants at any phase of the process when known connections to national security or fraud risks are identified; that they should make explicit that fraud and national security concerns can constitute a cause for revocation; that he should give USCIS the authority to verify that foreign funds were invested in companies that create U.S. jobs and to ensure requirements for the EB-5 regional center program are applied consistently to all participants. None of these recommendations request any additional congressional authority; therefore, it is at least arguable that the action could have been taken by Director Mayorkas to prevent national security vulnerabilities in the EB-5 program. That hasn't happened.

The draft report also recommends that other corrective action should be taken by Director Mayorkas as well.

Since USCIS failed to properly apply its existing EB-5 policies and procedures, DHS OIG recommended developing a memorandum of understanding with the Departments of Commerce, Labor, and the SEC ``to provide expertise and involvement in the adjudication of applications and petitions for the EB-5 regional center program.''

A third recommendation in the draft report related to the failure of the agency to maintain any metric as to whether the program was actually achieving its intended purpose. The DHS OIG asserted that Director Mayorkas should ``conduct comprehensive reviews to determine how EB-5 funds have actually stimulated growth in the U.S. economy in accordance

with the intent of the program.'' That hasn't been done.

Finally, the draft report directs Mr. Mayorkas to ``ensure quality assurance steps to promote program integrity and ensure that Regional Centers comply with the Code of Federal Regulations.'' The implication there is that they don't.

All of these recommendations raise serious concerns about the way Director Mayorkas was overseeing the EB-5 program and, in turn, should be considered as a qualifying factor to determining his fitness to be second in command in charge at the Department of Homeland Security.

To summarize, we know the national security staff and the Department of Homeland Security conducted reviews of the investor visa programs Mr. Mayorkas has been overseeing since 2009. These reviews found that the program created a danger to national security--including the threat of exploitation by spies, criminals, and other national security threats. I and others have asked for more information about the potential national security vulnerabilities in the EB-5 regional center program, and we have received no answers.

What we do know is that Director Mayorkas dramatically expanded a program that the administration and even DHS itself apparently believes to be a threat to national security. And according to a draft report by the inspector general, he did not take all of the actions which he should have taken and which were at his disposal to fix these vulnerabilities and to make sure this visa program wasn't bringing spies, terrorists, or other terror threats into the country.

Finally, I would say this vote is not fair to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS is the agency we trust to secure our borders, make our skies safe, and to help our Nation protect us from terrorism. We know the Department has faced many challenges and has often struggled to execute its responsibilities over the past 10 years since its inception. And DHS has some of the lowest morale in the government.

This week the Senate voted with strong bipartisan support to approve Jeh Johnson's nomination to be Secretary of the DHS. I was proud to support his nomination. He is the kind of leader DHS needs to help it address its many challenges and to fulfill its mission of making our Nation safe. He needs a strong second-in-command in whom he and all employees can have full confidence.

It is this body's job to vet those leaders and ensure they are beyond reproach. With the cloud of this investigation and with many of our unanswered questions about Director Mayorkas's tenure as the Director of USCIS, we do not have full confidence that he should be in second command at DHS.

By voting on him now, this body is sending the wrong message to all DHS employees. Right now, we cannot--let me repeat--we cannot determine whether Mr. Mayorkas is fit or unfit for this important position.

Finally, I would say this vote is not fair to the American people in confirming a nominee for such an important position who has not been properly vetted. The American public depends on us to fulfill our constitutional mandate to properly advise the President on certain executive branch nominees. Here, we are not doing that. We are not doing that. In fact, we are voting to install a nominee who could be seen as unfit to serve in the No. 2 position at DHS. Now, he may be fit, but this agency is tasked with protecting our country from terrorists. It is our responsibility to guarantee to the American public that the leaders at DHS are beyond reproach.

In this vote, Leader Reid is not only ignoring the rights of the minority but the longstanding precedent of the Senate. He is ignoring history, and he is inviting us all to do the same. But history has a difficult way of teaching its lessons. It was long the purpose of the Senate's procedures to remember these lessons so the country does not have to suffer such lessons again and again.

My final comments are these: Those who are going to vote for Mr. Mayorkas do so at the risk of not knowing what the investigation shows. They also do so at the risk of obviating the oath they swore when they came to this body: to fairly and appropriately evaluate their decisions about advice and consent.

My hope is that Mr. Mayorkas is cleared. But, unfortunately, he won't have my vote and that of several of my colleagues because we don't have the information with which to make that judgment.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I had not anticipated coming to the floor tonight to talk about health care in this country, but I feel compelled to do so after listening to a number of our colleagues share with us letters and messages from folks whose lives have been adversely affected apparently because of changes made in the coverage of their health care through the Affordable Care Act.

I regret any of the consequences that have been shared with us here this evening. My hope is that we will find ways over the next coming weeks and months to address the kinds of concerns that have been raised.

I just wish I heard some of that concern in past years as we prepared to take up the Affordable Care Act. As a member of the Finance Committee, I wish I heard those kinds of concerns about the tens of millions of people in this country who really don't have any health care coverage tonight--some 40 million. For a lot of them, this health care is a chance for them to go to the emergency room of a hospital. When they get really sick, they can be admitted to the hospital and get the care they need. Without health care coverage, it is hugely expensive ultimately for the rest of us because we pay for it. Where is the outcry on behalf of those tens of millions of people?

Where was the outcry 4 years ago when we had several million people who signed up for the Medicare prescription drug program and found that when their purchases of prescription medicines reached a certain level--$3,000 or $4,000 a year--instead of Medicare paying 75 percent of the cost for their medicines beyond that in a year, Medicare paid nothing, which is known as the doughnut hole? A lot of people fell into it--a lot of older people fell into it--and they could not afford the medicines they needed to stay well or stay out of the hospital. Where was the outcry on behalf of fixing that problem?

Where was the outcry on behalf of the millions of young people who were dropped off of their parents' health insurance plans when they aged out at 22? Where was the outcry in those cases?

We have had Republican and Democratic Presidents who have had a chance for years--for decades to do something about the fact that we spend twice as much money for health care as the rest of the world but don't necessarily get better results and don't cover everybody. Frankly, I didn't hear a lot of outcry from our friends on the other side of the aisle during all those years.

As much as we feel for the people whose stories they shared with us here tonight, I wish that same sympathy and empathy had been extended to some of the people who now don't fall into that doughnut hole when their

prescription drugs exceed a certain amount during a year.

Now we have people who are 22, 23, 24, 25 years old who don't age off of their parents' health care coverage. They are covered until their 26th birthday.

We will add to the number of people who have health care coverage. Somewhere between 5 and 10 million people will have health care coverage either because they are able to qualify under the Medicaid Program or because they will get coverage through one of our State exchanges across this Nation.

Is the Affordable Care Act perfect? No. Are there problems with it? Sure. Anything that is this big and this difficult to do, there will be problems. I think the implementation of the startup in October and November was totally unacceptable. We are trying to work our way through it and provide the kind of access and explanation for this coverage that people deserve, and eventually we will get this right.

The outcry we now hear attributed to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act reminds me a lot of the outcry we heard--I want to say 2006 and 2007--when we were beginning to implement the Medicare prescription drug program. To put it bluntly, it was a mess. People were confused by it. The information technology didn't work. The headlines in the newspaper looked a lot like the headlines in October and November and even now. But a year or two later, guess what. We fixed the program with everything but the doughnut hole. And now we fixed the doughnut hole--it started about 4 years ago--through the Affordable Care Act. People don't fall off that cliff anymore the way they used to.

So rather than simply criticizing the provisions of the Affordable Care Act that are troublesome or problematic, why don't we fix them? That is what we did with the prescription drug program, Part D under Medicare, and that is what we should do here.

I did not come here tonight to respond to our colleagues. I just felt somebody needed to say something, and I am pleased I had that opportunity.

Mayorkas Nomination

Madam President, I rise tonight to speak again in strong support of the nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas to serve as the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. I spoke yesterday about Director Mayorkas' impeccable credentials and experience that has prepared him for this important position. My colleague from Louisiana Senator Landrieu did the same yesterday.

Today I would like to address some of the concerns about Director Mayorkas that have been raised by our friends on the other side of the aisle and seek to set the record straight.

I understand that some of our Republican colleagues believe we cannot move forward with consideration of Director Mayorkas' nomination until the Office of Inspector General finishes its investigation that it began--get this--in September of 2012. There was an investigation as to his management of the complex EB-5 program some 15 months ago.

Well, I must say I disagree with my Republican colleagues. I think we have waited long enough, and let me explain why.

As I said before, the Department of Homeland Security has been without a Deputy Secretary since April of this year--8 full months--and 6 months have passed since Director Mayorkas was nominated. For many of those months, we did not have a Senate-confirmed Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Three days before Mr. Mayorkas' confirmation hearing in July, information about the OIG investigation was leaked to Congress and the media in a highly irregular manner. The information that was leaked indicated that in September of 2012, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security had received allegations about conflicts of interest, misuse of position, and an appearance of impropriety by Director Mayorkas and other agency officials. We also now know that the OIG did not actually begin investigating these allegations for almost 1 year after receiving them.

Importantly, the OIG confirmed that this was not in any way a criminal investigation. Let me say that again because some of our friends on the other side of the aisle seem to be confused about this. The OIG confirmed in July of this year and reconfirmed in December of this year, earlier this month, that this is not and never has been a criminal investigation.

To my amazement, Director Mayorkas has never been contacted nor interviewed by the OIG about this investigation. There was no phone call, no letter, no email. There was nothing in 15 months. Director Mayorkas only learned of this investigation after its existence had been leaked to the Congress in July, just days before our committee hearing on his nomination. Even then, Director Mayorkas ably and vigorously disputed the allegations in his interviews with committee members who would meet with him and staff who would meet with him as well at his confirmation meeting in July.

Unfortunately, rather than question the nominee about this matter and give him a chance to refute these anonymous allegations, Republican members of our committee boycotted his confirmation hearing and have refused to meet with Director Mayorkas to give him an opportunity to respond to these allegations from people whose names and faces we don't even know.

Senator Grassley said this week that Director Mayorkas has been given a chance to defend himself and has ``utterly failed'' to respond to Senator Grassley's letters. On the contrary. Director Mayorkas did, in fact, respond to Senator Grassley's letters this past August 20. In fact, he would have gladly spoken with Senator Grassley or any other Senator, Democratic or Republican, about the allegations face to face. That is the way we do things in Delaware. I can't imagine it is not the way we do things in other States.

I am perplexed that an even better option--speaking to Director Mayorkas himself--was not taken advantage of by Senator Grassley. In fact, I offered to fly to Iowa with Director Mayorkas in August to meet with Senator Grassley face to face so that Senator Grassley could have his questions answered face to face, but, sadly, Senator Grassley declined.

So I think the record shows that Director Mayorkas has been eager to meet with Senators on both sides of the aisle to answer their questions--not to duck them but to answer them. But our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have been unwilling to give him what seems to me should be a common courtesy.

Again, we are not talking about a criminal investigation. We are talking about the mismanagement of a program and allegations brought by people whom, again, my staff has never been able to interview.

Getting back to the OIG investigation, of course, in a perfect world, I would prefer that it be completed before moving forward. At one point, I thought it would be.

First, let me make it clear to all that there is nothing improper about the chairman of a committee asking for an update on the status of a pending investigation. There is nothing improper about that. Accordingly, in July Dr. Coburn joined me in inquiring about the status of this investigation. I was told it would be completed in October. Again, this investigation started a year earlier--in September of 2012.

In October of this year, I inquired again about the status and was told it would be completed in December.

On December 2 a bipartisan group of committee staff participated in a telephone call with the head of investigations at the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security to receive a status update. They were told it would likely take 2 or 3 more months to complete the investigation. In fact, every time we have spoken with the IG staff, we have been told they are just 2 or 3 months away from completing an investigation that began some 15 months ago.

I respect that the OIG must do its job, but we have to do our job too, and the President has to do his job. We cannot wait another 2 months--every other month--especially for a position as critical as this one.

Lest we forget, the Department of Homeland Security is charged with helping to protect our Nation and its citizens from all kinds of attacks, foreign and domestic--terrorists from abroad, homegrown terrorists from within--securing our borders, our aircraft, you name it. They respond to all kinds of natural disasters whether they

happen to be hurricanes or tornadoes. There is a lot going on. It is a busy and tough neighborhood to run and manage, and we need confirmed leadership.

I thank our Democrat and Republican colleagues for their vote earlier this week on behalf of Jeh Johnson to become Secretary of the Department. He needs a team, and he needs a team that includes Alejandro Mayorkas.

During the call I mentioned a little bit ago with the bipartisan committee staff in December of this month and trying to find out the status of the investigation, the OIG confirmed that to date they found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by anybody at DHS, including Director Mayorkas. That is right, no evidence, none, nada.

Given that the investigation appears to be months away from conclusion and that its completion date has already slipped several times and given the confirmation by the OIG that there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, I believe it is time to move forward. In fact, it is past time to move forward.

The allegations that have been made public cluster around Director Mayorkas' administration of the EB-5 visa program. It is an extremely complicated program that provides foreign investors an opportunity to immigrate to the United States in exchange for significant investments in job-creating enterprises right here in America. The Department of Homeland Security OIG just completed an audit of this program, as a matter of fact, but I will get to that in a little bit.

The primary complaint about Director Mayorkas concerns an EB-5 related application by Gulf Coast Funds Management, the regional center which has ties to Virginia Governor-elect Terry McAuliffe.

Anonymous sources have reportedly alleged that Director Mayorkas improperly intervened to help change a draft legal decision so it would come out in favor of Chairman McAuliffe's former company, Greentech Automotive.

First of all, I think it is important for everybody to understand upfront that Greentech Automotive did not get what they wanted. Let me say that again. The final decision in this case did not come out in Greentech Automotive's favor, from the agency run by Director Mayorkas.

Second, it is important to note that the author of the Greentech decision, the former head of the Administrative Appeals Office at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Mr. Perry Rhew, told my staff last week that he strongly disputed the allegation that Director Mayorkas had inappropriately influenced his decision.

Many of the other allegations that have been made public about the Director's management of the EB-5 program contend that applications appear to have been processed without regard to security concerns. However, in reviewing the leaked emails that were attached to these accusations, Director Mayorkas actually says the exact opposite.

I found this disconnect between the allegations and the emails presented as evidence so striking that I am going to read exactly--I want my colleagues to hear exactly what Director Mayorkas said in this email to support his contention on January 30 of this year concerning his application for a regional center in Las Vegas. This is what he said:

We will take the time needed to resolve the security issue

and we will not act until we have achieved resolution. I

agree that we need to run enhanced security and integrity

checks.

This email directly refutes the claim that Director Mayorkas was pushing to expedite applications despite the security concerns raised by his subordinates.

In another email attached to one of the letters making accusations against Director Mayorkas, he forwards a question about Mr. McAuliffe's company to subordinates and he notes--this is how he does it: He says-- Mr. Mayorkas' words:

I want to make sure that we are providing customer service

consistent with our standards, but that we are not providing

any preferential treatment.

I would ask: Are these the actions of someone who is trying to exert improper influence or subvert security checks? I think any fair-minded person would agree the answer is no. No. Even our committee's ranking member, my friend, Dr. Coburn, indicated that the allegations against Mr. Mayorkas, although serious, are most likely not grounded in reality. I don't want to mince his words, so I will quote him directly. In reference to the allegations against Mr. Mayorkas, Dr. Coburn said in a committee meeting--again, this is a quote: ``I doubt they are true, but we do not have the facts.''

I agree with Dr. Coburn. We don't have any facts pointing to any sort of wrongdoing by Director Mayorkas at all, as best I can tell. None of the anonymous sources or so-called whistleblowers have presented information to the majority regarding their concerns, something I think is unprecedented in these types of circumstances for our committee. We have been unable to question those bringing these anonymous concerns on the majority side, and our Republican friends on the committee--and maybe largely in the Senate--have refused to talk to the accused, and he has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing. That doesn't add up to me. Maybe it does to some people. That just doesn't add up. We don't get to talk to the people who raised these concerns and our Republican friends won't talk to the accused who has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing.

On the one hand, we have over 30 people from both sides of the aisle who are well-known and hugely respected citizens who have gone on the record with glowing support for Director Mayorkas. On the other hand, not one person--not one--has stepped forward publicly opposing Director Mayorkas.

Some of the people who have written in strong support of Director Mayorkas include the last Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Jane Holl Lute; the last Senate-confirmed inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, Richard Skinner, who is a Bush appointee; and the three most senior border security officials in the George W. Bush administration, Robert Bonner, Al Ralph Basham, and Jason Ayhern.

The fact is that Director Mayorkas has been proactively addressing national security and fraud concerns in the EB-5 program for years. Soon after being confirmed, he took a number of administrative and operational steps to address national security concerns. Where he lacked the administrative authority to improve the EB-5 program, he repeatedly appealed to Congress for the legislative authority he needed.

Unfortunately, Congress dealt Director Mayorkas and his entire agency a bad hand when we authorized the EB-5 program in 2012. We failed--we failed--to give the agency any of the legal authorities that Director Mayorkas and his team at CIS had specifically requested in order to enable them--and they just requested in 2012, made a request--in order to enable them to address the national security and fraud vulnerabilities they could not address on their own. It said: Congress, we would like to do this. We need the authority; please give it to us. They started asking for that in June of 2012.

Earlier this year, during the Judiciary Committee's debate on S. 744, the immigration reform bill, Senator Leahy introduced an amendment that made virtually all the national security fixes that Director Mayorkas had requested. While the comprehensive immigration reform bill passed the Senate with strong bipartisan support, it is unfortunately stalled in the House.

Fortunately, Senate Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy is working on a stand-alone bill to address these national security and fraud concerns, much of what Director Mayorkas and his team asked for in June a year ago. I urge all of my colleagues concerned about security issues in the program to join me as a cosponsor of that bill.

It strikes me as grossly unfair to punish Director Mayorkas for the inability of Congress to address the vulnerabilities in the EB-5 program that Director Mayorkas and his team brought to our attention and asked us to fix over a year and a half ago. In essence, those of us in Congress failed to do our job. Yet Director Mayorkas is taking the fall for our failure. How is that fair? I will tell my colleagues: It is not.

I mentioned previously that the OIG completed an EB-5 audit, and although that report has not been publicly released yet, some of my colleagues have

been discussing the OIG's findings earlier today. In light of that, I think this is a good time to get some facts straight because this audit, remarkably, misses some key facts.

First of all, the report says the EB-5 program is vulnerable to fraud and national security risks and that the legislation that created the program makes it difficult to fully address those risks. That is something that has been well-known by Congress and the administration long before this report and long before Director Mayorkas took over the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in August of 2009. The emails I just discussed demonstrate that Director Mayorkas did not take national security and fraud matters lightly. In fact, a review of the legislative history of the last year and a half might suggest that we take them lightly.

Despite the widespread knowledge about the national security and fraud vulnerabilities in the EB-5 program--and all visa programs, for that matter--CIS did not and does not have the authority that it asked Congress for in order to adequately police regional centers and the EB- 5 program. I find it incredible that the OIG audit report makes no mention of Director Mayorkas' efforts to get Congress to pass legislation to address this problem since June of 2012.

In the absence of being granted those authorities by Congress, Director Mayorkas took it on himself to implement other reforms. Yet many of these reforms took place before or during this audit--and yet, incredibly, those reforms are not even mentioned in the audit report.

One of his first actions as the Director was to elevate the Fraud Detection and National Security Office to a director reporting directly to Mr. Mayorkas. This ensured that national security professionals had a seat at the management table and a voice in all major decisions.

He expanded reporting requirements and security checks for regional centers, which led CIS to increase the number of national security investigations in the EB-5 program by more than 50 percent in the last 4 years.

He increased EB-5 staffing from 9 people in 2009 to more than 80 today, and hired senior economists and national security officers to work side by side with immigration specialists.

He positively engaged other agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI, and the Treasury Department to help police the program. In fact, Senator Grassley himself noted this week that Director Mayorkas convened a national security staff working group to examine the problem last year.

The actions I have described are not the actions taken by someone who does not care about national security.

The audit report says the EB-5 adjudication process is ambiguous. CIS has recognized there was a need for a consolidated adjudication manual and they published one in May of this year--one more fact that was not even mentioned in the audit report.

The audit report says the program is fraught with the perception of outside influence. There is no denying the fact that this program gets a lot of attention, including from us--from Congress. In fact, the USCIS receives 1,500 queries about the EB-5 program each year from Congress, from Senators, from U.S. Representatives--1,500. As it turns out, almost half of our Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle have inquired about the EB-5 program since 2009. That is an enormous amount of interest from Congress in this one program. In many cases-- most cases--that interest was provided or demonstrated to CIS on behalf of our constituents, from States from one corner of America to the other.

But let me be clear: The fact that this program garners a lot of attention from a lot of Members of Congress and a number of high-level officials from all parties about the frequency and status of pending applications does not mean that the Citizenship and Immigration Services adjudicators are swayed by the attention. Perception is not always reality. Contrary to what some have suggested or assumed, the OIG reported that all the files they reviewed in their audit--including the ones associated with Terry McAuliffe's company--appear to support the final decision.

Let me say that again. The OIG audit concluded that the evidence it reviewed in these cases supported the final decision.

Based on the evidence we have before us, I believe it is clear that Director Mayorkas has taken strong steps to improve the EB-5 program. These are the actions of a dedicated, thoughtful, and committed public servant. They are the actions of a leader who is willing to make tough but necessary decisions in order to shake things up and improve a program that needed improving. That is exactly the kind of leadership we need at the Department of Homeland Security. I think we need it across the Federal Government.

I also believe we need leaders who are committed to doing what they believe in their heart is the right thing to do. At his confirmation hearing in July, I specifically asked Director Mayorkas about the allegations raised by some of these anonymous sources. Director Mayorkas testified before this committee under oath that he has never put his finger on the scale of justice, and I have seen no evidence since then that would lead me to question his veracity.

I do not believe that we can allow rumors spread by anonymous sources to rule the day.

Some of our colleagues have been very critical of DHS shortcomings and they are quick to point out its failures. However, one of the major reasons the Department fails to live up to expectations more than they and the rest of us might like is because their top leadership ranks have been riddled with vacancies for much of this year, and the same is true of many other agencies. Again, it is not fair to criticize the agency on the one hand and yet seem content on the other to leave them without Senate-confirmed leadership for months on end. We can't have it both ways. We have some responsibility here as well.

It is time to stop playing political games. It is time to vote to confirm Ali Mayorkas for the Deputy Secretary position at DHS.

There is something else that came to my attention today that I thought was interesting. It is not from an anonymous source. It is not rumor or innuendo. It is actually a report from the Partnership for Public Service. One of the things they do at the partnership is issue, I think maybe on an annual basis, the rankings of the best places to work in the Federal Government in 2013 and, as it turns out, also maybe the worst, because they do a ranking from top to bottom.

I was dismayed to find out this week that the Department of Homeland Security ranked last--ranked last--on their list of Cabinet Departments in terms of employee morale--last. It is not the first year. It has happened for a number of years in a row. However, although the Department ranked last among all the Departments, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, led by Director Mayorkas, was one of the highest ranked components within DHS, coming in at, I think out of 300 Federal agencies, No. 76, which, if my math is good, that puts them in maybe the top 25 percent of all agencies.

After Mr. Mayorkas took over in 2009, employee satisfaction with senior leadership there increased by over 20 percent. It has increased by over 20 percent since he took over in 2009.

Every now and then, in driving on my way to the train station in Wilmington to catch a train to come down here to start our day, I listen to the news. Usually I arrive at 7 o'clock. About a year ago I heard a report on NPR of an international study that was done involving thousands of people across the country. In the international study, they asked the same question of thousands of people from all walks of life with different kinds of jobs in different locations. The question that was asked of each of those thousands of people was, what is it about your job that you like? What is it about your job that you like the most? Not surprisingly, those people who were asked the question had different responses. Some people said they liked getting paid. Some people said they liked getting a pension. Some people said they liked having a vacation or having health care. Some people said they liked the environment in which they worked. Some people said they liked the folks they work with. But do you know what most people said? Most people said the thing they like most about their job is they

felt the work they were doing was important and they felt they were making progress. Think about that. The reason most people cite for liking their job, the work they do, is because they know it is important and they feel they are making progress.

It is ironic to me--if you rely on the anonymous sources the majority side has not been permitted to talk with, it is ironic to me that in a department where morale has been low and a problem and a concern for years, at this agency that Mr. Mayorkas has led now for 4 years, employee morale is, by comparison, fairly high. He does not get any credit for that. But if employees really do care that the work they are doing is important and they are making progress, maybe that belief is reflected in these numbers. Maybe that is reflected in these numbers on behalf of the leadership that Mr. Mayorkas has provided for Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Let me close, if I could. My friend from Kansas has arrived.

There are a couple things I want us to keep in mind. This is one that is hard for me to understand. People whom we do not know, whom we on the majority side have not talked to and have not had an opportunity to hear from to hear their story--it is maybe unprecedented for that opportunity to be denied the majority or for the majority to deny that to the minority in a case like this. We have been denied that opportunity.

I think the person who is maybe best able to provide or to rebut or to respond to concerns that have been raised by these anonymous folks whom we have not been able to talk to is Mr. Mayorkas himself, but our Republican colleagues have refused to talk to him. Even though there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, they refuse to talk to him to give him a chance to rebut or to respond to the accusations from anonymous sources we have never heard from. That one just blows my mind.

If the shoe were on the other foot, if Democrats were in the minority and Republicans were in the majority, if I were the ranking member on the minority side and we had a Republican President who nominated somebody for office and the chairman of our committee asked me as the ranking minority member to meet with someone whom the Republican President had nominated, I would meet with them in a heartbeat. I would want to hear that person's story. That is what I would want to hear.

If the anonymous sources were talking just to us, I would encourage them to talk to the other side as well.

By the way, the one person we did talk to--and we got this person, Mr. Rhew--I think we got his name out of a statement given by Senator Grassley on the floor. We talked to him. He set the record straight. He set the record straight. I have already cited that in my comments. But we have never had the chance to talk to any other, I think, half a dozen or so sources.

The other thing I would say is that there is nothing inappropriate about the staff of a committee chairman inquiring of an OIG about the pace and the resources provided to conduct an investigation. This is just not any Department that has lacked Senate-confirmed leadership from us; this is the Department of Homeland Security. Americans have a lot riding on that Department doing their job well. They need senior leadership, and they have not had the kind they need.

But despite the repeated efforts to get the OIG to expedite their efforts, begun in September 2012--a joint letter from Dr. Coburn and me to the OIG in July of this year; 2 months later, get a response that, oh, maybe we will have something in October. Two months later, it is December, and bipartisan staff--Democratic, Republican; majority, minority--have a chance to be briefed by the OIG, and rather than say, well, this investigation we started 15 months ago is done, is ready to wrap up, they say, a couple more months, maybe 2 or 3 more months.

Are we supposed to continue to wait? We have the leadership we need at the Department of Homeland Security. At some point you just say: Enough already.

What we have learned is that in terms of full-time people working on this--I think there are about 650 full-time equivalent people at the Office of Inspector General at DHS, about 650, and as I understand it, 3 full-time people--1 investigator and 2 research assistants--have been devoted to this investigation. No wonder it is taking 15 months.

I would ask us to keep in mind our failure--our failure--to act on the recommendations made to Congress for reforms in the EB-5 program to address national security concerns and to address concerns about fraud.

Mr. Mayorkas did the right thing. He and his staff pulled together a long list of changes they need, legislative changes they need so they would be authorized to address his concern. We dropped the ball. We did not include those changes when we reauthorized the EB-5 program for 3 more years--a straight reauthorization. We did not make any reforms. We did not make any changes despite the fact that he had suggested them months before we acted.

Finally, those changes ended up in the immigration bill. We passed it here. Most Democrats voted for it, some Republicans. It is over in the House. It is languishing and not moving. If we are really concerned about giving this agency, CIS, the tools they need, the authority they need to address these security concerns, fraud concerns, why don't we join Senator Leahy in the legislation he is going to introduce that largely is taken from the immigration reform bill? When he introduces it, let's cosponsor that bill.

Finally, if we are going to accept as gospel criticism about the way a person has run a particular agency--and not of a criminal nature but criticisms about the way it has been run--why not give that person a chance to defend himself? Why not give him a chance to say: Well, there is another side to this story or maybe there is not, but at least give him that opportunity.

Lastly, the morale at the Department of Homeland Security--they do some great work, important work, the Department of Homeland Security. And they do a lot better work. I will mention a couple things, if I can.

Remember the response of FEMA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security? Remember their response to Katrina? It was deplorable. How about the response of FEMA to Hurricane Sandy? All around--for the most part, all around kudos were won.

How about TSA? TSA has been a whipping boy for a lot of folks. All of us who have the opportunity to fly commercially, we have seen TSA make changes. They have taken criticism they have taken to heart. Among other things, they have created the Trusted Traveler Program so a lot of people do not have to take off their shoes or their belts or do all kinds of things to get through a security check. The TSA has done a number of things. Some of the technology they are using is not intrusive, as it was before. Security is actually strong.

For 10 years, our friends at GAO, the Government Accountability Office, have, every 2 years, on their high-risk list at the beginning of every Congress, cited that the Department of Homeland Security needs to be able to earn a clean financial audit of its books. They said: 10 years; that is enough time.

Well, it turns out the Department of Defense, which has been around for, gosh, about 70 years--over 60 years--is still not auditable. The Department of Defense is not auditable, much less to have a clean audit.

Last week the Department of Homeland Security, for the first time in their existence, received a clean financial audit. They did it in 10 years. DOD, also a big operation--it is 60 years and counting, and they are not even audited yet.

So for those who want to constantly criticize the Department of Homeland Security, I would just say that the people who work there work hard. They have tough jobs. They need our help. One of the things they need our help in doing is securing the kind of leadership they have not had, and that is Senate-confirmed leadership.

We have had some very good people who have been acting as the Secretary, acting as the Deputy Secretary, but, friends, it is not the same. They need leadership that is going to be there with not just the blessing of the President but the blessing of this body and that is going to be there today, tomorrow, next month, next year, and provide the leadership that is needed.

The most important element I have ever seen in my time in the Navy-- 23 years Active and Reserve--my time as Governor, my time here in the Senate, the most important element I have ever seen in any organization to determine whether it is going to be successful is leadership. Show me a school with a great principal, I will show you a school that is on the way up. I do not care how ineffective the teachers might be, I will show you a school that is on its way up. Show me a business with a strong leader, and the same thing is true. Show me a body like this or a military unit, leadership is always the key. And it is the key at the Department of Homeland Security.

If the improvement that I have noted, that I mentioned here just a minute ago, is to continue and actually be strengthened, they need Senate-confirmed leadership. We will have the opportunity in a couple of hours to give Jeh Johnson, the newly confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security, a key player in the leadership team that he is trying to build at that Department. He deserves our support, and so do the people at that Department. And if they get it, they will provide the support we need in this country to be safer in the days ahead.

With that, Madam President, I thank you for allowing me to give this statement.

I see my friend from Kansas on the floor. I thank him for his patience, and I am happy to yield the floor.

Mr. President, first let me commend my colleague from Minnesota and tell him that I proudly cosponsor his legislation. I have had visits throughout my State with community colleges and have watched this work, where they literally bring employers and future employees together at a community college--an affordable community college--they get the very best training, really focused on the job opening, and when it is finished, they go right to work and they make a good salary.

I tell you, I think this is the future. This is an excellent idea. I was happy to support it. I have shamelessly stolen it and said it was my idea in a few places, but I will confess to the Senator on the floor----

I want to tell him that I am going to admit this on the floor and give him credit but be happy to join him in this effort.

I thank the Senator very much.

The DREAM Act

Mr. President, maybe we will be in session 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, and then we are finished, the year 2013 comes to a close. The unfortunate thing from where I am standing is we have missed an opportunity. About 6

months ago, we passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill. It had been 25 years in the making.

We know our immigration system is broken. We know it is unfair. We know people are suffering because of it. And we know we can do better. So we came together and 68 of us voted on the floor of the Senate, about 6 months ago, to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

I worked on that bill with seven colleagues--four Democrats, four Republicans. We came up with a good bill, not a bill I agree with in all of its specifics, but one that I think is a good, fair compromise.

We sent it to the House of Representatives. They have done nothing-- nothing. They made some statements--some encouraging, some discouraging. The fact is, they never called this bill.

Mr. President, 2014 is another opportunity for the House of Representatives to rise to this challenge, and I hope they will.

There are many parts of that bill that are so essential-- strengthening our border, a very important issue to all Americans, particularly on the other side of the aisle; a pathway to citizenship, just a matter of simple, elemental justice, which is a passion on our side of the aisle. We brought those two concepts together to make the bill work.

But included in those concepts is an idea which I introduced into legislation about 13 years ago. It was called the DREAM Act. It basically said if you came to the United States as a child, were brought here in undocumented status or overstayed a visa and were here undocumented, finished high school, had no serious criminal background, we would give you a chance, a chance to earn your way to citizenship-- legality and citizenship.

Last week, I visited a group on the Mall who were fighting for immigration reform. Since the middle of November, these immigration, faith, and labor leaders have been fasting, urging the House of Representatives to take up this responsibility and pass the immigration bill.

Their commitment to fighting for immigration reform has inspired people all across this Nation to join the movement and to tell stories about families torn apart by the broken immigration law in America.

We cannot ignore the injustice of this system and the suffering that millions of people in our own country are living with.

I want to urge Speaker Boehner to move forward on immigration reform in 2014. I understand there is a small, very vocal, very negative minority of his caucus that refuses to support any change in immigration law. But that is nothing new. In our Nation of immigrants, there has always been that force at work. In the time of Abraham Lincoln's Presidency, they even had a political party. It was the Know- Nothing Party. They opposed immigrants. They opposed Catholics. They were virtually against everything. Lincoln campaigned against them, and eventually they disappeared from the American political scene. But their sentiments can always be found at every point in our history.

The one part of this immigration bill, as I mentioned earlier, that is near and dear to me is the DREAM Act. I fought to pass it for 12 years. There were times when we called the DREAM Act on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and I would look up in the gallery and it would be filled with young people, men and women wearing graduation gowns and mortar boards, to remind people that they were undocumented, officially unwelcome in America, and yet their heart was here and their lives have been spent here and they were just asking for a chance to be part of our future. Some heartbreaking moments when the amendment was defeated on the floor of the Senate and I met with them; some encouraging moments when the comprehensive bill passed and included the strongest DREAM Act language that we have ever written.

For most of their lives, these young people have been trapped in the shadows, fearing they could be deported at any moment and facing obstacles to developing their talents in this country. Isn't it ironic that we have invested so much already in their lives--educating them, giving them an opportunity to thrive in this Nation--and then, right at that moment when they are ready to go to college or go into a job--we tell them: Leave. We do not want you. That is not right. It is not fair. It does not make any sense.

Last year, President Obama did something that was significant. He announced his administration would grant temporary legal status to these immigrant students who grew up in the United States. This historic program is known as DACA. DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It gave the DREAMers a chance to come out of the shadows and be part of America. In the last year, more than 567,000 people have applied for this DACA status; 460,000 have received it.

Later today or tomorrow, the Senate will vote on the nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas to be Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which I will support.

As Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Mr. Mayorkas has been charged with implementing DACA, the President's Executive order.

It was a complicated job, but Mr. Mayorkas did it in an outstanding way.

Earlier this week my colleague and friend Senator Grassley of Iowa spoke on the floor about Mr. Mayorkas and the DACA program. I wish to take a moment to respond to some of the things he said in the Congressional Record.

Senator Grassley initially questioned the legality of this DACA program. I want to be clear. DACA is entirely appropriate and legal. Throughout our history, our government has decided which persons should be prosecuted and which ones would not be prosecuted based on law enforcement priority and available resources. Past administrations of both political parties have stopped deportations of low-priority cases. Courts have long recognized their authority to do that.

In a decision last year striking down Arizona's immigration laws, the Court reaffirmed that the Federal Government has broad authority over who is going to be deported. Republican-appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion, said: ``A principle feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials.''

The President's action is not just legal, it is smart. It is realistic. Today there are millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. The government has to set priorities. Those with criminal records, serious criminal records, should leave. They should be deported--no excuses. Under the Obama administration's policy, that is a high priority. That is the way it should be.

Senator Grassley also claimed on the floor that the immigration service has not released adequate information about the DACA program. I disagree with my colleague and friend. USCIS has been transparent about this process, publishing data on its Web site showing the number of applicants who applied and those who have been accepted and rejected.

For the past few years I have come to the floor of the Senate regularly to tell real-life stories of those DREAMers. I have done it over 50 times. We actually had a reunion of the DREAMers I have spoken of on the floor of the Senate. I want to take some time today to update the story of one of those DREAMers.

This is a photograph of two brothers, Carlos and Rafael. They are siblings who were brought to the United States by their parents when they were kids. Carlos grew up in suburban Chicago, graduated from Palatine High School, where he was an honors student. In high school Carlos was captain of the tennis team, a member of the varsity swim team. He volunteered with Palatine's Physically Challenged Program, where every day he helped feed lunch to special needs students.

Listen to what one of Carlos's high school teachers said about him:

Carlos is the kind of person we want among us because he

makes the community better. This is the kind of kid you want

as a student, the kind of kid you want as a neighbor, the

kind of kid you want as a friend to your child and, most

germane to his present circumstance, the kind of person you

want as an American.

It is good news. Last week Carlos graduated from Loyola University in Chicago, majoring in education. His lifelong dream was to be a teacher. It almost did not come true. You see, last

year Carlos and his brother Rafael were placed in deportation proceedings. They were going to be expelled from the United States. I asked the Obama administration to reconsider. They decided to suspend the deportation. That was the right thing to do. After graduating from Loyola University, Carlos was offered a teaching position starting in just a few weeks. Carlos will be teaching at Schurz High School, a Chicago public school on the northwest side. In addition to his teaching duties, Carlos will also be helping with the school's DREAMers organization and the tennis team, a sport he knew well from high school.

There is no question that we need the best and brightest to teach in our schools. We need people like Carlos who are committed to the next generation of tomorrow's leaders.

Teach for America knows that great teachers can come from all walks of life, from graduating seniors in our Nation's most elite colleges, to former investment bankers and veterans. Last week Teach for America announced that it plans to actively recruit DREAMers who have received DACA deferment, so more DREAMers like Carlos will be able to give back to the country they know. They will be in classrooms not only teaching the important subjects, but with their very lives they will be teaching the next generation of Americans what immigration has always meant to this country.

I ask my colleagues who stand on the floor critical of the administration's deportation policies, would America be better off if Carlos had been deported last year? Would Chicago be better if this bright, idealistic young teacher was not headed to the classrooms in a few weeks to try to help educate the next generation of leaders in this country? Of course not.

To hear Carlos's story is to realize the benefits immigration reform will bring to America. Imagine what is going to happen when 11 million undocumented immigrants have the opportunity to step out of the shadows, like these DREAMers, and contribute fully to America. Imagine what it will mean to them to no longer live in fear of a knock on the door, to be able to declare who they are, where they live, who is in their family, to be able to work without any fear, to be able to travel, to go back to important family events in other countries and return to the United States.

Legalization will unleash the earning potential of millions of people. They will be able to pursue jobs that match their skills instead of working in the underground economy.

It is the right thing to do. It will make America stronger. I am confident that wiser voices will prevail in the House of Representatives.

Just the other day I had a conference call with Catholic bishops. They have made this a special effort on their part to support comprehensive immigration reform. They were from all over the United States. In addition to their prayers, I asked them to reach out to their congregations, tell stories like Carlos's story and Rafael's story, and tell people this is really very fundamental and basic when it comes to issues of justice.

For-Profit Colleges and Universities

Mr. President, I have come to the floor I cannot tell you how many times to talk about an industry in America--the for-profit college and university industry. I have talked about the basics. Most people could not tell you what for-profit colleges are or which ones are for-profit. Well, the major colleges--I will start at the top with the Apollo Group, the University of Phoenix, and DeVry out of Illinois is second. Kaplan, which was owned by the Washington Post, is third. There are a lot of other ones.

What is interesting about these colleges and universities is they could not exist without generous subsidies from the Federal Government. Here is what happens. They lure students into enrolling in their schools. The students, often because they are low income, qualify for Pell grants and student loans. The Pell grants and student loans flow from the government through the student into the for-profit schools.

It turns out there is a 90-10 rule. Imagine this. These for-profit schools cannot take more than 90 percent of their revenue from the Federal Government--90 percent. They are 10 percent away from being a total Federal agency. But they make amazing amounts of money, huge amounts of money. They pay their CEOs millions of dollar because this is a very lucrative undertaking.

But there are three things you should remember about for-profit schools--three numbers. You will know what the challenge is if you remember these three numbers:

Twelve. Twelve percent of all the graduates of high school go to for- profit schools.

Twenty-five. Twenty-five percent of all the Federal aid for education goes to these schools.

Forty-seven. Forty-seven percent of all the student loan defaults are with students who have enrolled in these for-profit schools.

So 12 percent of the students, 25 percent of the Federal aid for education, and 47 percent of the student loan defaults.

Why are these students defaulting? There are several reasons. One reason is that the diplomas from these schools are not worth much. I will tell a few stories in a moment. The other reason is that once the school enrolls these students and brings in their student loans, they really do not care that much as to whether they finish. It is not that important to them. The money has already flowed to the school. A third reason, of course, is that many of these students finish school, and with their questionable or worthless diplomas, they cannot find jobs. What happens then? They cannot make their student loan payments.

I will tell some specific stories when I talk about one of these for- profit school operations. It is called Corinthian Colleges, which is a publicly traded corporation that owns for-profit schools in the United States and Canada. It is now in the spotlight for engaging in manipulative marketing and deceptive job-placement practices.

Earlier this week, a Huffington Post article called attention to these abuses. It was entitled ``How a For-Profit College Created Fake Jobs to Get Taxpayer Money.'' The headline says the whole story. The article reports that Corinthian has been encouraging the manipulation of job-placement rates to entice students to sign up for programs and to avoid the scrutiny of the government and the accreditors.

Corinthian College subsidiaries--Everest College is one of them--have been criticized in the past for having high dropout rates and some of the highest 3-year loan default rates in America even while its tuition rates are higher than community colleges or even flagship State schools for an equivalent degree. In spite of the bad press, Corinthian Colleges--such as Everest--have managed to come out on top, increasing enrollment, increasing profit margins, and increasing payments for their executives. It would appear these gains were at least in part due to the manipulative marketing practices and a corporate culture of deceit toward its students.

According to this article, Eric Parms enrolled in Everest College's heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning repair program in the summer of 2011. Eric had been laid off from his job. He was attracted to Everest because of the promise from its advertisements and recruiters that their HVAC program would lead to a good job and a decent living. So Eric picked up his family--his wife and two sons--and he moved from Ohio to Georgia to enroll in this Corinthian school, the Everest College program. He was a good student. Eric received all A's, only missing one class on the day his 7-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia. After completing the 9-month program, Eric Parms was left with a $17,000 student loan debt and could not find a job.

What Eric did not know was Everest College was paying more than a dozen local employers what they called an on-boarding allowance of $2,000 a head to secure 30 days of employment for their graduates. These were not real jobs; these were jobs which Corinthian Colleges-- Everest College--were frankly bankrolling so it looked as if their graduates were going to work. The money was purportedly a fee to help pay for things such as training and uniforms. In reality, by paying companies to take graduates for temporary jobs, the Everest College was able to boost

its official job-placement rate unrealistically. This helped Everest College continue to fly under the radar of its accreditors.

However, Corinthian paid companies for jobs without considering the long-term effects on students. The fact that they would sign them up for 30 days and then turn them loose really did not mean that much to Corinthian; they just had to show that they went to work at some point.

Well, after he graduated Eric had to beg the school's career service counselor to even set up interviews. Even then, he would arrive at interviews supposedly set up for him, and the potential employers would tell him they had never heard of Everest College. Remember, Eric Parms was on the hook for $17,000 in student loans for this course he took.

Finally, Eric was set up by career services to work in a contract position with ADG Enterprises laying electrical wires. After less than 2 months on the job, he was laid off and cut off from career services from Everest. Everest had used him to get $17,000 in student loans and turned him loose without a job, without a future.

In fact, managers discouraged career counselors at Everest from re- placing people who had already been placed in a job. They were instead encouraged to send graduates to companies with high turnover rates, to provide temporary positions just so they could show that their graduates went to work even if it was just for a few days. The school had effectively placed Eric in a short-term internship program. Once it was over, there was no incentive for them to keep him. They turned him loose to vacate a space for another graduate and another $2,000 check. Then Everest would shuffle another graduate into the same position to artificially maintain that they were placing students in jobs. This was fraud--not just a fraud on the public, not just a fraud on the students, but a fraud on American taxpayers by Corinthian Colleges.

Eric lost out on the deal--a $17,000 debt for a training degree he could not use. To get a Georgia HVAC contractor license, he needed to have significant work experience and references, and no one would hire him because they did not take his degree from Everest--part of the Corinthian College system--seriously.

The practice of paying employers to hire graduates from this Everest campus ended in 2011, but it was not the only Corinthian school engaging in these practices. The California attorney general recently filed suit against Corinthian for using fraudulent marketing, paying companies to temporarily hire graduates, and using other tactics to meet accreditation standards and job-placement rates. These other tactics included paying temporary agencies to hire graduates for temporary positions while basically counting a 1-day volunteer event for dental assistant graduates as a job placement and, worse yet, ``placing'' graduates at nonexistent businesses they created as part of a class project to design business cards.

It was a big game for Corinthian, and they got paid off handsomely by Federal taxpayers and these unsuspecting students.

Corinthian has also outright misrepresented job placement rates to students by advertising numbers substantially higher than their actual rates. These deceptive practices give the illusion that this is a successful undertaking. Go to Everest and get a job. It turns out that it is a charade.

In addition to manipulation of job placement rates, recruiters for Corinthian colleges and schools withhold pertinent information from students to get them to enroll.

Lindsay Ryan, another student at Everest College who contacted my office, studied criminal justice online and was 12 weeks away from graduation when she learned that Everest was not regionally accredited and that she wouldn't be able to find a job in her field in the State of Illinois.

One would think that a college offering courses to people in Illinois would have some obligation to tell them whether or not a degree or certificate from that school could lead to a job in that State?

In Lindsay's case it didn't.

Do you know what Everest College suggested to Lindsay after she had been duped into this so-called education? They suggested she move to Florida where she might be able to use an Everest College degree. That wasn't an option for Lindsay and her family.

Now she sits, unemployed, supporting three children, her husband, and a $24,000 student loan debt to this Corinthian college, Everest College, for a worthless degree.

Over the past decade Corinthian colleges have received from the Federal Government nearly $10 billion in student aid--$10 billion. That makes up more than 80 percent of the total revenue of this college. These schools, these for-profit schools, are sucking on the Federal Treasury to come up with billions of dollars to get rich at the expense of taxpayers and these poor exploited students.

Corinthian grew during our recession, reaching a peak enrollment of 93,000 students, doubling revenue up to $1.7 billion in 2011. This is in part due to a persuasive but deceptive marketing plan promising a better career to people such as Eric and Lindsay who were looking for a way out during difficult times.

Toya Smith, a former Everest career counselor who was interviewed by Huffington Post, recognized that for-profit schools burden students with large debts, a questionable degree, and poor job prospects--while the company was profiting on Federal dollars.

She said: ``You're selling a dream to a student that you know, in reality, they are not ever going to realize.''

Did I mention Toya was a former counselor at Everest? She told the truth.

How many more times will Corinthian end up in the news for deplorable stories such as these? I have asked the CEO of Corinthian to explain these practices. His name is Massimino. He was paid more than $3 million in total compensation the last year that was reported by this corporation. I have asked him not to engage in this conduct again.

I have also written to Everest College's national accreditors, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools and the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, asking what steps they are going to take to sanction Everest for these egregious abuses of the public trust.

Finally, I have asked the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, to look into these allegations and to use whatever authorities the Department may have to hold Everest and its parent company, Corinthian, accountable.

If no authorities exist, I have asked him to work with me in Congress to give the Department the ability to respond more aggressively to abuses such as the ones I have outlined for Corinthian.

It is time to put an end to the corporate culture of deception and data manipulation that pervades the for-profit school industry. They are wasting taxpayers' dollars. They are abusing students and their families. We in Congress are not doing what we should.

We have to protect these students and their families. We have to protect America's taxpayers from for-profit schools that are taking advantage of the law.

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

Mr. President, I rise for two purposes. No. 1, to discuss the National Defense Authorization Act and the fact that we cannot offer amendments to it and the process that has deteriorated in the Senate for deliberation. Second, I will speak very shortly about the nomination of Mayorkas, one of the first nominees we will be voting on this week.

The Senate is poised to vote on a final National Defense Authorization Act after considering only two amendments. The Senate has not been functioning like it should for some time, and the way that the National Defense Authorization Act has been handled is one example. I have served in the majority and the minority, with Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents. So I have seen it operate from every perspective. What is unique about the Senate is that the rules as well as the traditions force Senators to work together. That leads Senators to understand where the other side is coming from, resulting in mutual respect and scrutiny.

I hear from a lot of Iowans who are upset at the tone they hear in Washington and the lack of bipartisanship. I have often said that the Senate functions best when no party has more than about 55 seats. If you have much more than that, there is less of a tendency to want to work in a bipartisan fashion. That was true for most of my time in the Senate but not now. Despite a current margin of just 5 seats in the Senate, there has been very little bipartisan cooperation. I suppose some Democratic Senators really believe it when they say that this is all Republicans' fault. I think anyone who remembers how the Senate used to operate and has paid attention to how the current majority leadership has been running things in fact knows better.

In fairness, quite a few Members of the Senate do not remember how the Senate is supposed to operate because it has been dysfunctional ever since they were elected. Some Senators previously served in the House of Representatives, where the majority party controls everything that happens. In the House of Representatives, the Rules Committee sets out the terms of debate for each bill. If you want to offer an amendment in the House you have to go, hat in hand, to the Rules Committee and say: Mother, may I. If the House leadership does not like your amendment, frankly, you are out of luck.

If that sounds familiar, that is because it is how the current Senate leadership has been running things lately here in the Senate. We have seen an absolutely unprecedented use--or I should say abuse--of cloture motions paired with a tactic called filling the tree to block amendments from being considered.

That not only affects the minority party, but Democratic Senators are affected as well. I would say to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: How many times have you had an amendment you wanted to offer, that was important to your State, but you could not do it because amendments were blocked? The Senate majority leader has effectively become a one-man version of the House Rules Committee, dictating what amendments will be debated and which ones will never see the light of day. This strips the ability of individual Senators to effectively represent their States, regardless of party.

It also virtually guarantees that any legislation the Senate votes on will be more partisan in nature. I would ask my colleagues across the aisle: Isn't your first responsibility to the people of your State, not to party leadership? Are you really content to cede to your party leader the trust and responsibility placed in you by the voters of your State? How much longer can you go along with this proposition?

The people of Iowa sent me to the Senate to represent them, not simply vote up or down on a purely partisan agenda dictated by the majority leader. Everyone complains about the lack of bipartisanship these days, but there is no opportunity for individual Senators to work across the aisle when legislation is drafted on a partisan basis and amendments are blocked. Bipartisanship requires giving individual Senators a voice regardless of party. When Senators are only allowed to vote on items that are preapproved by the majority leader, those Senators lose the ability to effectively represent their State and, in the end, become mere tools of party leadership. It is no wonder Americans are so cynical about government right now.

In the last decade, when I was chairman of the Finance Committee and Republicans controlled the Senate, we wanted to actually get things done. In order for that to happen, we knew that we had to accommodate the minority. We had to have patience, humility, and respect for the minority--attributes that do not exist on the other side anymore. We had some major bipartisan accomplishments, from the largest tax cut in history to a Medicare prescription drug program to numerous trade agreements. Those kinds of major bills do not happen anymore.

The Senate rules provide that any Senator may offer an amendment regardless of party affiliation. Each Senator represents hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans, and each has an individual right to offer amendments for consideration. The principle here is not about political parties having their say but duly elected Senators participating in the legislative process, as imagined by the Constitution. Again, as part of our duty to represent the citizens of our respective States, each Senator has an individual right to offer amendments. This right cannot be outsourced to party leadership.

The longstanding tradition of the Senate is that Members of the minority party, as well as rank-and-file Members of the majority party have an opportunity to offer amendments for a vote in the Senate. That has historically been the case with the annual National Defense Authorization Act, the very bill that we are debating now. But not this year. It typically takes a couple of weeks to consider the National Defense Authorization Act. This year the majority party leadership chose to wait until a week before the scheduled Thanksgiving recess to bring it up, leaving little time for the customary open debate and amendment process.

Once the Defense bill was brought up, rather than promptly starting to process amendments, the majority leader immediately blocked amendments so that he could control what came up for a vote. Obviously, the Senate ground to a halt, wasting time that we did not have when we could have been considering amendments from both sides of the aisle.

This process, as everyone here in the Senate knows, is called filling the tree, where the majority leader offers blocker amendments that block any other Senator from offering their own amendment unless the majority leader agreed to set aside his blocker amendment so other amendments can be offered.

Filling the tree does not appear anywhere in the Senate rules. It is based upon combining two precedents, the precedent that the majority leader has the first right of recognition by the Presiding Officer and the precedent that only one first-degree and one second-degree amendment can be pending at any one time. Basically, the majority leader abuses his prerogative to cut in line and offer an amendment that does nothing more than simply change the enacting date by 1 day, for instance. That then blocks any other Senator from exercising his right to offer an amendment.

This so-called filling-the-tree tactic used to be relatively rare, but it has become routine under current leadership. This way the Democratic leadership can prevent other Senators from offering amendments that they do not want to have to vote on. Then, with amendments blocked, the majority leader makes a motion to bring debate to a close. Around here that is called cloture. When cloture is invoked, it sets up a limited time before a final vote must take place. By keeping amendments blocked while running out the clock, the majority leader can force a final vote on a bill without having to consider any amendments other than amendments that the majority leader might approve.

It should not be a surprise to anyone that Members of the minority party

who wish to offer amendments will vote against a motion to end debate until their amendments have been considered. When Republicans vote against the Democratic leader's motion to end debate, we are accused of launching a filibuster. In other words, unless we give up our right to participate fully in the legislative process, the other side says that we are filibustering.

Does that really count as a filibuster? No. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service answers this question, and has a very helpful report on cloture motions and filibusters that make this point very clear. The CRS report is entitled, ``Cloture Attempts on Nominations: Data and Historical Development,'' by Richard S. Beth. It contained an entire section called ``Cloture Motions Do Not Correspond With Filibusters.'' It starts out:

Although cloture affords the Senate a means for overcoming

a filibuster, it is erroneous to assume that cases in which

cloture was sought are always the same as those in which a

filibuster occurs. Filibusters may occur without cloture

being sought, and cloture may be sought when no filibuster is

taking place. The reason is, cloture is sought by supporters

of matters, whereas filibusters are conducted by its

opponents.

It then goes on to explain various scenarios to illustrate this point. Several Members of the majority have made a point of trying to confuse cloture motions with filibusters. We hear constantly that there have been an unprecedented number of Republican filibusters. They often point to a chart that purports to tally the number of filibusters and say that this is evidence of abuse of the Senate rules by the minority. The number they quote is the number of cloture motions, not the number of filibusters. It is true that there have been a record number of cloture motions, and I also agree that the number amounts to an egregious abuse of Senate rules, but, again, there is a very significant difference: Cloture motions do not correspond with filibusters. Cloture motions are filed by the majority party leadership, not by the minority party. This abuse of cloture is a major cause of the Senate's current dysfunction.

Again, this abuse of cloture, often combined with the blocking of amendment also prevents all Senators from doing what they were sent here to do, not just Members of the minority party.

It has gotten even worse. Even where the majority leader has decided he is going to be open to amendments, he has created out of whole cloth new restrictions to limit Senators' rights. First, he normally only opens the amendment process if there is an agreement to limit amendments. This is usually only a handful or so. Then he has magically determined that only germane or relevant amendments can be considered.

Of course, nowhere do the Senate rules require this, other than postcloture. Senators elected in the last few years appear to be ignorant of that fact. You will hear some Senators here argue against an amendment saying it is nongermane or nonrelevant. They have totally fallen for the creative rulemaking of the majority leader, thus giving up one of their rights as a Senator with which to represent their State. I cannot count on how many nongermane or nonrelevant amendments I had to allow votes on when I processed bills when Republicans were in the majority. They were usually tough political votes, but we took them because we wanted to get things done. We wanted the Senate to function.

You do not see that nowadays. The current majority leader avoids tough votes at all costs and that is why we don't get much done around here. The American people sent us here to represent them. That means voting, not avoiding tough votes.

We sometimes hear this is a question of majority rule versus minority obstruction. Again, that ignores that each Senator is elected to represent their State, not simply to be an agent of the other party. While the majority of Senators may be from one party, they represent very different States, and the agenda of the majority leader will not always be consistent with the interest of their States.

When one individual, the Senate majority leader, controls what comes up for a vote, that is not majority rule. In fact, there are policies that have majority support in the Senate that have been denied a vote.

What happened during Senate debate on the budget resolution this year seems to prove that point. The special rules of the budget resolution limit debate so it can't be filibustered but allow for an unlimited number of amendments.

A Republican amendment to support repealing the tax on lifesaving medical devices in President Obama's health care law passed by an overwhelming 79-to-20 vote, with more than half of the Democrats voting with the Republicans rather than with their party leader.

A Republican amendment supported the approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline to bring oil from Canada and passed 62 to 37.

Those are two examples, because votes such as these that split the Democrats and hand a win to the Republicans are exactly what the majority leader has been trying to avoid by blocking amendments.

That is why the Senate didn't take up a budget resolution for more than 3 years. Still, the budget resolution isn't a law, so unless legislation on those issues is allowed to come up for a vote, nothing will happen despite the support of the vast majority of the Senate as demonstrated by those two rollcall votes I just mentioned.

As a case in point, now we are on the National Defense Authorization Act, and one of the amendments the majority leader blocked would have imposed sanctions on the Iranian regime. Everyone knew this amendment enjoyed broad bipartisan support and would have passed easily had a vote been allowed to take place. It had majority support. But the Senate was not allowed to work its will.

Why? The Iran sanctions amendment was blocked because the President opposed it and it would have been a tough vote that divided the majority party. Is that a valid reason for shutting down the traditional open amendment process for the Defense bill? I don't think so.

Until we put an end to the abuse of cloture and the blocking of amendments, the Senate cannot function properly and the American people will continue to lack representation that they are entitled to.

Mayorkas Nomination

As I said, I have a few short remarks on the Mayorkas nomination. I spoke at great length on this yesterday and I won't speak at great length today, but I have concern with Mr. Mayorkas' nomination, so I have additional information today for my colleagues.

Today the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security released an embargoed version of its audit of the EB-5 immigrant investor visa program. The report states that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service has difficulty ensuring the integrity of the program and does not always ensure that regional centers meet all eligibility requirements.

Specifically, the report said:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service did not always

enforce its own regulations and procedures to assist with

managing the regional center program.

Another quote:

Until improvements are made, U.S. Citizenship and

Immigration Service is unable to prevent fraud and national

security threats . . .

Another quote:

[I]t cannot report the results of the program accurately or

ensure the EB-5 program is benefiting the U.S. economy and

creating jobs for U.S. citizens as created by Congress.

We understand Mr. Mayorkas is in charge of these programs. The IG said the agency needed to improve coordination and rely on the expertise of other agencies.

The IG had several recommendations for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service that, frankly, should have been in place before now, if the Director was doing his job. In his comments on the draft report, Mr. Mayorkas claimed that he was already addressing the issues the inspector general raised. He said his agency had ``dramatically enhanced collaboration with key government partners,'' meaning he was cooperating with the FBI.

He also wrote that when his agency has concerns with EB-5 cases, it doesn't decide the cases until it has ``fully coordinated its approach with enforcement and intelligence partners.''

I have seen examples of this so-called coordination that Mr. Mayorkas talks

about. But, again, his words don't comport with the actual practice.

When Homeland Security's law enforcement database, TECS, has a hit on someone applying for a regional center, the Citizenship and Immigration Service sends an email to the law enforcement agency that put the record in. But the problem is that the Citizenship and Immigration Service isn't waiting for law enforcement to make an investigation. In fact, information has come to my attention that CIS employees are told to move forward if law enforcement doesn't respond within 5 days. That is just 5 days to find out what sensitive security or fraud information caused that person to be flagged. If law enforcement doesn't get back to the Citizenship and Immigration Service soon enough, then that agency goes ahead and the person's application is approved.

That is not coordination. That coordination is a sham. That should be simply unacceptable to any of us who are concerned about the national security of our country. It is not the sort of way to run a program with national security vulnerabilities. Everybody should wait until law enforcement responds. We need to know who is coming into this country and not, and particularly when they are involved in a program where you buy your way into the country by buying a visa because you are supposed to be investing in this country and creating jobs in this country. But for some people who may want to get into this country for ulterior motives, they may violate our national security; they don't care about creating jobs. But if it gets them inside the country, they get here. So we have to know whether they are a threat to our national security.

The only reason the Citizenship and Immigration Service even does check on regional centers at all is because of a push within that agency that Mr. Mayorkas and his management resisted. Now they are trying to take credit for it.

More important is what his agency has not done. They refused to kick out regional centers that invite national security problems. Mr. Mayorkas claims he doesn't have statutory authority, but the inspector general audit recommended that Mr. Mayorkas should make clear on his own that fraud and national security concerns are a reason for regional centers to be kicked out of the program.

The bottom line is Mr. Mayorkas has not taken the steps that were within his power to guard against security vulnerabilities in the EB-5 program. The inspector general's audit report concludes:

Currently, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service cannot

administer and manage the EB-5 regional centers program

effectively.

Mr. Mayorkas has had ample notice of these problems for years. He has failed to take adequate action.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, like my colleagues, and as I have done several times before, I come to the floor to share the voice of one of many Iowans who have contacted me over the sticker shock that they are experiencing under the Affordable Care Act. This time I quote a constituent from Sioux County, IA, northwest Iowa. That constituent writes:

I am a pastor in rural Iowa and early this past summer,

trusting naively in the integrity of our President's repeated

promise that ``If you like your health insurance you can keep

it. Period[,]'' I made a change in my policy, moving to a

higher deductible to save the church money. Now I have been

informed that because of that change, my policy is no longer

grandfathered and therefore I will be forced out of it in a

year and compelled to purchase a much more expense

(un)Affordable Care Act-compliant policy.

I am young, male, healthy, and will not qualify for any

subsidy. In effect, because of legislation Democrats

supported, my government is kicking me off from health

coverage that I carefully researched, chose and like a lot--

and is forcing me to buy coverage that I do not need at a

price I scarcely can afford.

And the Government has the audacity to resort to Orwellian

doublespeak and call such a draconian policy the ``Affordable

Care Act.''

Please convey to your Democratic colleagues that I grew up

on a dairy farm and now pastor a church of farmers. I am the

epitome of middle class America that they claim to champion.

This bill is unjust. It is based on lies to Americans like

myself. It hurts real people, including the church I serve.

I have done my job. I have shared this constituent's message with my colleagues as he asked me to do. I hope they were listening.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, there has been considerable controversy in recent days over a provision in the recently passed spending package that became known as the Bipartisan Budget Act which cuts pensions for military members, including wounded warriors.

There was bipartisan agreement. People on both sides of the aisle believe that it ought to be fixed, that it was an error and should not go forward, and that there were better ways to find the money--if you have to have money to spend somewhere else--than taking it from military retirees.

But Majority Leader Reid and every single Member of his conference save one stood together to block an effort which I proposed to restore the pensions for the military and also find better offsets. They blocked us from making any alteration to this spending package that was before the Senate, including my amendment to close an egregious tax welfare loophole--a tax credit, a payment directly from the United States of America to illegal aliens--that could pay for these cuts itself. Indeed, the inspector general of President Obama's Treasury Department has said this loophole needs to be closed and would save a substantial sum of money. It is an open gate, allowing massive fraud and illegality.

So we simply wanted to close that loophole. We asked to pay for this new spending by closing this loophole that the Treasury Department asked us to close instead of reducing the retirement benefits by as much as $70,000 for a sergeant who served to age 42 in the U.S. military.

How can this blockade be defended? How did it happen? Why would we be in such a position? Is there any Member in the majority who would really defend the practice we are now undertaking where legislation that clearly needs an amendment to fix a problem in it is not allowed to have amendments, and the legislation is rammed through the Senate?

This has been the pattern around here for far too long. The majority leader is eroding the Senate's historic role as the great Chamber where the issues are debated and changes and amendments are voted on, and he is being enabled and supported by his conference.

Consistently, time and again, when objections are made to try to stop this practice and get amendments and votes on important bills, his conference has stood with him. In other words, his conference is saying: We choose to stand with Majority Leader Reid and his procedural actions which block other colleagues; we choose to stand against even our own Members having amendments and against the right of individual Americans to have their Senator be held accountable--to stand up and be able to offer amendments to legislation to improve it. And if you don't do that, you are accountable for voting for the final bill--which is imperfect and should be fixed.

That is the way the voters hold us accountable. They need to be able to see us vote and look at our voting records and decide whether we are serving their interests, some Wall Street interest, some special interest, or some political group instead of the national interest. That is what this whole system is about.

Now we have before us the Defense bill that is so important for America. I serve on the Armed Services Committee. I have been on that committee for nearly 17 years. We moved this bill out with a big majority. I voted for it

in committee, although I expressed great concern about its budgetary problems that needed to be fixed. Unfortunately these problems have not been fixed. But I wanted to see the bill move forward, and I tried to be cooperative.

The bill moved to the floor. The budget problem hasn't been fixed, and there are other problems with the legislation that need to be refined. The bill before us, the Defense bill, spends approximately $500 billion--for the largest single agency in the U.S. Government. Are we to accept that it should pass in this body without a single person having a single idea that ought to be made a part of that bill? Can it not be made better?

The majority admits it is not a perfect piece of legislation. We certainly know that. The American system is designed so that when an imperfect bill moves forward, a Senator can offer an amendment. Maybe it is not a good amendment. Maybe it will be voted down. Maybe it is a good amendment and will be accepted. But no more, not with what is happening here today.

What is happening here today is when Republicans want to offer an amendment, Senator Reid basically says no. He doesn't want any amendments. He then uses a device called ``filling the tree''--because he gets to be recognized first--filling it with a series of amendments, leaving no place, then, for any other Member of the Senate to call up an amendment. And the majority leader won't remove the amendments from the tree unless he decides he wants to.

On this Defense bill, we had two votes on amendments when the bill was up for an entire week. We could have easily had 30 or 40 votes that week had we chosen to do so. So only two votes were held, and none now, and we are moving to final passage. The tree is filled, and we have not been able to force even a single vote to fix matters.

Senator Cornyn offered an amendment this afternoon. He filed a motion to table some of the amendments Senator Reid had placed on the tree, and it was voted down by the supporters of Senator Reid on the other side of the aisle. We have been talking about this for a long time. This is contrary to the history of the Senate.

Senator Cornyn laid out how year after year for 51 years we moved a defense bill through the Senate, and there have been multiple amendments nearly every time but this one. It is unthinkable that the great Senate of the United States would not allow amendments to a bill as significant as a defense bill.

So what does the majority leader do after he fills the tree? Republicans said: Wait a minute, Senator Reid. There were no amendments allowed on the bill. We have amendments.

He said: Oh, you are being obstructionist. I am going to file for cloture. I am going to file a motion to shut off debate, and we are not going to have any amendments.

And then if the Republicans resist and say, we are not going to vote to end debate because we haven't had any amendments, he says, you are obstructionist.

This is the pattern that has been going on. He files cloture virtually immediately with the filing of the bill, and he claims that is a filibuster by the Republicans. So by filing cloture immediately, he contends that Republicans are filibustering a bill; he counts up these filibusters and says: There are too many filibusters in the Senate. You are obstructing the business of the Senate. In truth, Majority Leader Reid is the one who is obstructing the Senate. He is the one who is blocking debate and amendments.

If you ask a schoolchild somewhere in America, if you ask a senior citizen, a World War II veteran who loves this country and has studied the great principles of America, you say there is a piece of legislation on the floor of the Senate and there is something in it that is wrong--they want to cut benefits for wounded warriors, veterans who served and have been wounded in combat and disabled--and you do not want that to happen, what would you do?

Why, they would all answer, you would file an amendment to the bill to fix this problem.

But not in the Senate today. That is the classical understanding of the way this body ought to operate. That is what James Madison, I am sure, conceived and the way it has worked for so many years. But not any longer. This bipartisan Budget Act is just like the Defense bill-- no amendments. No matter how important the bill is, no matter how many problems there are in it, no amendments.

Oh, you want to go back to that old Senate where people could actually debate and have amendments and offer changes and improve it? No longer. That is obstructionist. That is delaying tactics. We won't have it anymore. You are slowing us down. It is unacceptable.

When I vote not to end debate on this Defense bill that is before us, I am not voting to not have a defense bill. That is so obviously wrong it is hard to believe you have to explain it. But we are not voting to do that. We are voting to maintain the classical principle of the Senate where individual Senators from whatever State there is can come to the floor and make a contribution to the country. They were elected by their people. There are almost 5 million Alabamians who elected me. Do I not get to offer an amendment to the Defense bill of the United States? It diminishes my role. It diminishes the role of every single Senator. So I am asking my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have been lemming-like, I call it, defending this abuse of power, to begin to consider what this may mean to them and whether this is the right way the Senate should operate.

There will be some tough votes. We will all have to take tough votes. Probably most people can explain their votes if they know what they are doing. Maybe some cannot and they will be voted out and sent home. So be it. If you cannot defend your vote and you are not casting good votes on bills and you cannot respond effectively as to why you voted for or against a certain amendment, then you ought to be sent home. We are not entitled to these jobs. We have to be elected to them.

I am concerned about it. I believe it goes even beyond the significance of this important Defense bill. I think it goes beyond this grave error in which we are reducing the pay of military retirees when we are not reducing other retirees' pay.

This is not a belt-tightening across the board. It seems to me to be a targeting of one group of Americans, perhaps those who served more than any other group.

Majority Leader Reid continues to complain that the trains are not running on time, not running with enough ruthless efficiency to suit his ideas. So he then uses a filling-the-tree tactic. But that is not all. Although President Obama has had judge after judge after judge confirmed, and Cabinet people and sub-Cabinet people confirmed in large numbers, the Senate refused to approve one appointment recently and refused to fill three Federal judgeships at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit because they were not needed. The average caseload for those judges was 149. Of the 8 judges who are there now, there are authorized 11 judges. So the 8 judges there now have 149 cases per judge, whereas my circuit, the 11th Circuit, sitting in Atlanta, has over 700 cases per judge. The national average is around 350 cases per judge.

We do not need to fill three judgeships for which the caseload is not there. The caseload for the DC Circuit is almost half that of the next lowest circuit in the country. So we do not need these judges. The caseload continues to decline. So the Senate refused to give cloture, refused to confirm those judges. So in an act of pique or calculation or deliberateness, the majority leader altered the rule of the Senate about how we ought to conduct business here. He did so by breaking the rules of the Senate.

This is what happened. U.S. Senate rule XXII says in order to bring debate to a close, three-fifths of the Senators duly sworn would need to vote to end the debate. There were not sufficient votes to end the debate on the DC judges because they were not needed. This irritated the majority leader. So he petitioned to the Presiding Officer and the Parliamentarian and he asserted that it only takes 51 Senators to vote to end debate. But rule XXII explicitly says it takes three-fifths, 60 Senators, to end debate. It goes on to say, except when you change the rules of the Senate, and that takes two-thirds, 67. So it takes 67 votes to change the rules of the Senate and 60 votes to end debate.

What did Senator Reid do? He asked the Parliamentarian to say it only took 51. The Presiding Officer, the President pro tempore of the Senate, Senator Leahy, our longest serving Member, and the Parliamentarian said no, Senator Reid, the rule is it takes 60 votes to shut off debate.

So what did Senator Reid do? He used the ability to appeal the ruling of the Chair and he asked his colleagues to overrule the ruling of the Chair, which by any plain reading of the rules of the Senate would be without dispute requiring 60 votes to shut off debate, but he wanted it to be 51 and his colleagues supported him. His colleagues supported him, they supported him and he overruled the Chair, his own Parliamentarian whom he selected and the Presiding Officer that he put in the Chair. They voted to change the rules of the Senate. It is in plain language--with 51 votes, not 67.

This is dangerous, colleagues. This is the kind of thing you see in Third World republics or would-be republics. This is the kind of lawlessness that will endanger the American system of government at its most fundamental basis. It is endangering us. The President says whatever he wants to--you can keep your doctor, the President says your plan is going to save you $2,000 a year, the President says all these things and he gets his bill passed and none of it is true.

I don't see any Members on the floor who voted for this bill, ObamaCare, down here apologizing to the American people, saying I am sorry, the bill I voted for did not do any of the things I promised you it would do and I am willing to have an amendment process on the floor to fix it. No, we are not going to get a vote on ObamaCare. They are going to block that too. If any attempt is ever made, he will fill the tree and block that vote. So we are not able to bring it to the Senate floor and require Senators to vote on serious issues involving health care for millions of Americans because Senator Reid doesn't believe in it and he is backed by his colleagues.

I guess the President probably says, oh, don't let them vote on ObamaCare, they might change some of it. You know, they are finding out what is in it. We don't want them to actually think they have enough muscle to actually pass a law to fix it or change it or alter it. That would be terrible. Who do they think they are? Do they think this is a democracy or something?

That is where we are. This is huge and significant. We have to confront what is happening. It is very important that we cool down and we get some sort of work going on, but I am not confident at all on that. This effort should result in a retreat from this breaking the rules to change the rules, this nuclear option.

The reason a nuclear option was called that is because once you do that, it blows up the entire Senate. Senator Levin explained the problem very succinctly, one of two Democrats who voted against Senator Reid's attempt to execute the nuclear option and to change the rules of the Senate. He said if a majority can change the rules of the Senate, there are no rules. It is simply what the majority says. There are no standards, there are no rules, there are no procedures. If we can change them whenever we are frustrated by a majority vote in the Senate, there are no rules, there are no protections. That is so true.

That is why what has happened here is so significant. I believe this late-night work and this process to consider nominations is healthy, because it requires us to go through a painful period of introspection as to what is happening to us and how we ought to conduct this great Senate.

This afternoon we did not have the support for Senator Cornyn's resolution. Yesterday, when I made the motion to clear a place off of the tree so my amendment could be heard and voted on, my colleagues, a majority of them, voted no. Only one broke with Senator Reid, actually; one Democrat did. Every Republican voted to allow amendments to go forward, allow my amendment to be heard. The rights of all the Senators in this body to defend their State, to defend equal representation, was undermined.

The two Independents in our Senate, delightful individuals for sure who caucus with the Democrats and vote with the Democrats, maybe sometime they will be willing to prove that the letter ``I'', independent, means something and maybe they will help us stand and defend the heritage of the Senate. We need to make this thing change. We cannot continue to aggregate more and more power into the majority leader where no longer--where the right to demand 60 votes to shut off debate could be further eroded, where we will continue to see bill after bill brought up with no amendments being allowed.

They say oh, well, we are at the end of a year. We must do that. We do not have time. But the Defense bill has been on the floor since June. That is awful. There have been huge amounts of time for us to bring it to the floor. It has been out of committee since June and it should long ago have been brought up and, in fact, it could have been voted on last week with full amendments and we would already be through with that and be gone today.

The Armed Services bill, the Defense bill is an important bill. I am very disappointed we are at a period of impasse, very disappointed that I cannot support going forward with it to final passage because there is no ability to amend it and fix some of the obvious flaws that are in it. It is outside the budget spending limits we agreed to.

The Bipartisan Budget Act was also rammed through the Senate with no ability to offer amendments. This legislation will not allow us to prevent the cut of veterans retirement pay and disabled wounded warriors retirement and benefit pay.

It is a disappointment for me to be in this position. I have tried to be supportive of the Defense bill every year. I worked in committee to do so. I believe last year we got a unanimous vote, Republicans and Democrats, quite a number of times in the committee. A lot of that is due to Senator Levin and Senator Inhofe's leadership. This time we have a problem, and it is not going well, and I am deeply disappointed. I believe we can do better, we must do better, and I will not be able to vote to support this bill tonight.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.