Victims Protection Act of 2014

Would the majority leader yield for a question?

I would like to ask the majority leader through the Chair for clarity: Is the Senate Republican filibuster holding up unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans?

Again, addressing the majority leader through the Chair, so the refusal of the Senate Republicans to allow us to vote on the extension of unemployment benefits is denying, on average, about $300 a week to 1.4 million or 1.5 million Americans; is that a fact?

I would like to ask the majority leader this question: Is it not true that the initial complaint of the Senate Republicans was that this payment of unemployment benefits was not paid for?

Is it also true that Democrats came up with a pay-for that would have paid for the unemployment benefits, as the Republicans requested?

I would like to ask the majority leader: After the Democrats came up with the pay-for, the first demand of the Senate Republicans to stop their filibuster, did the Senate Republicans then join us in calling this measure for passage?

After we came up with a pay-for, which the Senate Republicans insisted on, did they stop their Senate Republican filibuster on unemployment benefits and allow us to move forward?

I would like to ask the majority leader if this followed: It was my understanding the Senate Republicans then came up with a new demand, and the demand was they be allowed to offer amendments to the unemployment insurance benefit package before they would drop their Senate Republican filibuster that was stopping unemployment benefits for 1.4 million Americans.

I would like to ask the majority leader this question: Is it not true that yesterday, in response to this Republican demand, the majority leader offered a unanimous consent that would have given up to 10 amendments on each side of the aisle--Democrats and Republicans--to this measure and that the Democrats did not specify what the amendments would be; that it would really be the decision of the Republicans to offer those amendments? Did the Senate majority leader offer that to the Senate Republicans so they would stop their filibuster of unemployment benefits?

So the Senate Republicans insisted on a pay-for, and the Senate Democrats provided it. The Senate Republicans still refused to stop their filibuster. Then the Senate Republicans insisted on amendments. We offered up to 10 amendments on each side.

Can the Senate majority leader say, after offering that unanimous consent, whether the Republicans agreed to it and stopped their filibuster of unemployment benefits?

I ask the majority, at this point in time what are we waiting for? What are the Senate Republicans now demanding to stop their filibuster of providing unemployment benefits to 1.4 million people across America?

I would say to the Senate majority leader that it strikes me as unfair, if not cruel, that we are holding 1.4 million unemployed Americans hostage to this continued political negotiation where each day the Republicans come up with a new demand before they will stop their Senate Republican filibuster.

I ask the Senator from Nevada, our majority leader, does he believe that a majority of the Members of the Senate would vote for the extension of unemployment benefits to these 1.4 million Americans if the Senate Republicans would drop their filibuster?

I thank the majority leader.

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

Madam President, first, the state of play in the Senate is that we want to pass an unemployment insurance benefit bill for 1.4 million Americans who, on January 1, had their unemployment checks cut off. Unemployment checks are sent to those Americans who have lost their job through no fault of their own and who have to prove to us they are trying to find another one. So while they are looking for a job, they receive unemployment benefits.

These benefits come from a fund which employers and, in some way indirectly, employees, pay into while they are working. This insurance policy is there so that if you lose a job there will be, on average, $300 a week to keep you and your family together while you look for your next job. It turns out that on January 1, 1.4 million Americans saw those checks cut off. In my State of Illinois, that affected 83,000 people.

These are people who have been unemployed for a while and are still looking for work. They have to because that is what the law requires. But here is the problem: The average period when someone is out of work when they lose a job in America is 38 weeks. That is the average. We cut off benefits at 27 weeks. That means that for 11 weeks a lot of people out of work get no unemployment benefits. What do they do? They turn to their friends, to their savings, and then they are out of luck. They may find themselves unable to make rent payments or mortgage payments, put food on the table, gas in the car to go look for work or pay for that cell phone they absolutely positively need if they are going to find a job.

So we came here and said: That isn't right. We are getting better. The economy is getting stronger. But the unemployment rate is too high. The national average is about 6.7 percent. It is over 8 percent in my State of Illinois, and in some States even higher, unlike the State of North Dakota, incidentally, which the Presiding Officer lives in and so doesn't worry about this at the present time. We came in and said: Let's extend unemployment benefits to these 1.4 million unemployed people in America so they can get by while they are looking for work.

This isn't a new idea. This is an old idea. It has happened over and over. In fact, under President Bush we did it five times, and the unemployment rate was even better than the one we have today. So it used to be bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans would say: Come on, give these folks a helping hand. These are workers facing tough times. We hear from them. They tell us their stories.

I ended up getting an email from a lady. For 34 years she had worked for the same company. She must be a pretty good employee, right? But now the company has laid her off and she can't find work. Another person had 9 years with the same company and lost his job. When he applies for a job, they look at his resume and say: Wait. You are way overqualified for this job. If we gave you this job, you would leave the first chance you get to get a better job. So there he sits, unable to find a job. He is trying, but he can't.

So these people are asking us: Can you help us keep our families together while we go through this tough period? And I think we should. So we want to call this bill to the floor of the Senate and pass it and extend unemployment benefits for 3 months. I would like to see it for 1 year, but even for 3 months we should extend these unemployment benefits so folks in this circumstance can get a helping hand.

The Republicans come in and say: No. We object to that. You cannot extend unemployment benefits unless you pay for them.

Well, that is new. Five times under President Bush they voted for their President's extension of unemployment benefits and didn't pay for it. Now they insist we pay for it. I don't like that. I think this is an emergency expenditure. But we live in a divided Congress, Democrats and Republicans. We have to find some common ground. So we came up with a pay-for. We came up with a way to pay for the benefits for this unemployment.

Then they said: No. We are still going to filibuster. We are still going to stop it unless you allow us to offer amendments. We have some ideas we want to bring to the floor and get them to a vote. Yesterday, the majority leader came to the floor and said: OK. We will give you amendments, up to 10 amendments on each side, to this unemployment issue. You pick the amendments. We are not going to pick them. They said: No. We still object.

So today we sit in the middle of a Republican filibuster stopping unemployment benefits for 1.4 million Americans. What used to be a bipartisan effort has now turned into an extremely partisan effort. That happens too much in this town. It happens too much on Capitol Hill. But it shouldn't happen at the expense of 1.4 million unemployed Americans.

That is why this floor is empty today. That is why we are giving speeches on a lot of different subjects. We are stuck in another Republican filibuster stopping unemployment benefits. I don't think that is right or fair. A lot of us believe we ought to extend these benefits and move on to deal with our economy and putting people to work, trying to find ways to make sure those who are working get a decent wage.

These are some of the things we ought to be taking up. But again, we are stuck in this filibuster, and so that is why I come to the floor to give a speech on two unrelated issues.

Tobacco

Madam President, there is an issue that is very important to me personally, but it turns out it is important to a lot of people: Tobacco. I lost my father to lung cancer. He died when I was 14 years old. He smoked two packs of Camels a day and developed lung cancer at the age of 53 and died. I have to tell you it is one of the most profound events of my life, to be a high school student and to live through a parent dying slowly of lung cancer. My attitude toward tobacco and smoking, I am sure, is a product of that.

When I came to Congress, I decided that in some small way I was going to try to do something about it. I didn't believe I could solve the problem, but I thought I could help. So over 25 years ago I introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to ban smoking on airplanes. It is hard to believe--young people still don't believe it today--there was a time when half the airplane was smoking and half wasn't smoking. In fact, everybody was breathing secondhand smoke. We were successful. We passed the bill in the House of Representatives on a bipartisan vote. It came over to the Senate, before I was here, and Frank Lautenberg, the late Senator from New Jersey, took it up and did a great job, and the two of us together made it the law of the land.

We didn't know what we had done, other than to make airplane flight a little more convenient, safe, and comfortable. But it turns out it was a tipping point. It turns out that when we banned smoking on airplanes, people started asking questions 25 years ago: If it is not a good idea to smoke on airplanes, why is it a good idea to smoke on trains and buses and offices and hospitals and schools and restaurants and taverns and everyplace we go? So today, if you walked into a room and did what people did normally 25 years ago--pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up--people would say: Stop. What are you doing? You didn't say a word to me. You are going to smoke in front of me?

That used to be normal. Thank goodness it isn't any longer. What happens is Americans have a different attitude toward tobacco. The actual debate on this issue began 50 years ago--serious debate--because it was 50 years ago the Surgeon General of the United States of America issued a landmark report that for the first time conclusively linked tobacco to lung cancer and heart disease. Remember this: Tobacco is the No. 1 preventable cause of death in America today, and it has been for more than half a century.

When this report came out, it was at a time when people smoked in offices, airplanes, elevators, even in congressional hearings. In 1964, 42 percent of American adults smoked. It is hard to imagine, but until a few months before the report was released the Surgeon General himself was a smoker. We have certainly come a long way since that time, and the Surgeon General's report played a big role in changing America.

Today we expect measures such as warning labels on cigarettes, keeping cigarette commercials off television, taxes on cigarettes, and now ``no smoking'' signs almost everywhere. Thanks to these commonsense tobacco control measures, smoking among U.S. adults in 50 years has been cut in half. The report released by Surgeon General Luther Terry in 1964 was a turning point.

We still have a long way to go. Approximately 44 million Americans, nearly one out of every five, still smokes, and more than 440,000 Americans die each year from tobacco-related causes. Last week the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that showed over the last 50 years about 8 million premature smoking-induced deaths were avoided thanks to tobacco control measures. However, the study also noted that despite this progress, more than 17 million Americans died prematurely from tobacco over the last 50 years.

According to the Surgeon General's report, released in March 2012, tobacco use among kids is a pediatric epidemic and is the No. 1 cause of preventable and premature death in America. The report also found that every day 700 young people become new regular smokers, and of these new smokers one-third will eventually die from it.

We have young people who come and visit us in our offices, in the Senate galleries, and other places. These young people are the targets of tobacco companies. If they can get a kid to start smoking at an early age, before they have the maturity to understand the seriousness of that decision, they become addicted. Nicotine is an addictive drug and it is in tobacco and so they are picking up new customers by recruiting kids.

I have yet to meet the first parent anywhere, any time, anyplace who has said to me: I have great news for you, Senator. My daughter came home from school and she started smoking. I have never heard that. I don't think I ever will because we know intuitively it is a terrible thing and it could affect that young person's great young life.

The tobacco industry gets it. Our Nation pays the financial burden of tobacco use through $96 billion in annual medical costs, $97 billion in lost productivity of workers and, at the same time, these tobacco companies invent new ways to lure in these young customers and to entice people to buy their products.

Ninety percent of adult smokers began smoking before they graduated from high school--they were just teenage kids--which is why the tobacco companies continue to prey on children. They push products such as e- cigarettes. They just had the Golden Globe Awards, and some of these red-hot actors and actresses, whom we all love to watch in movies-- Leonardo DiCaprio and others--were sitting there puffing away on their e-cigarettes. I looked at that and thought: You are killing the next generation of fans of your movies.

We have to bring an end to this. E-cigarettes--available in shopping malls--that release appealing fruit- and candy-flavored vapors so it is more of a candy experience than a tobacco experience is one of the new tactics. Unfortunately, it is working. Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control released new data showing the use of e-cigarettes among the Nation's kids is rising.

The report raises concerns that for young people, e-cigarettes could be a gateway to traditional cigarettes. More than 3.6 million kids under the age of 18 currently are smokers, and each day more than 3,500 kids try smoking a cigar or cigarette for the first time.

This graph I have shows how far we have come in reducing the use of cigarettes but also how much we have left to do. Between 2000 and 2011, the consumption of cigarettes in the United States decreased 33 percent--by one-third. During the same time, the use of loose tobacco and cigars increased 123 percent. Cigar smokers--why in the heck would a kid want to smoke a cigar? Because it is similar to smoking a candy bar. They flavor these cigars with cherry flavoring, sweet chocolate or grapes, and they are trying to get kids to start smoking.

Over the past 50 years we have seen the growing popularity of these candy-flavored tobacco products such as smokeless tobacco, e- cigarettes, and nicotine candies that look like breath mints. All these products are geared to luring the young into this addiction.

I have called on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to expand and assert its authority over tobacco products, including e-cigarettes and flavored cigars. Unlike traditional cigarettes, e-cigarettes are not subject to Federal age verification laws. Kids can legally buy them in most places across

America. Although we do know that most e-cigarettes contain nicotine, we don't know what else is in them. Without FDA regulation, we will not.

This Congress Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut joined me in introducing the Tobacco Tax Parity Act, a bill that closes the loopholes in how tobacco products are defined and taxed. It will end the exploitation of these loopholes by tobacco companies. It means taxing the roll-your-own loose tobacco we talked about and pipe tobacco at the same level. It means raising the tax on a container of smokeless tobacco from today's 11 cents to $1, the same as a pack of cigarettes.

I would like to show this as well. This is a story about Sharon, a 52-year-old woman from my home State of Illinois. Sharon started smoking at the age of 13. She said it seemed as though everybody was doing it. After her first puff, she quickly went from being a casual user to a full-blown addict with an expensive tobacco habit. When Sharon reached the age of 37--37--she was diagnosed with stage IV throat cancer. Thankfully, radiation and surgery saved her life, but she had to have her voice box removed and now speaks through an electrolarynx.

Last year Sharon was courageous enough to allow her story to be used as part of the Centers for Disease Control's 12-week antismoking campaign, a federally funded national antitobacco campaign with hard- hitting ads. It sounds like a pretty good effort by the government. But compared to the $10 billion a year the tobacco industry spends on marketing, the CDC campaign spent only $50 million; the tobacco industry, $10 billion.

CDC expects the campaign to help 50,000 people quit. One of those who called in to the quit line at CDC was a woman named Kim in Rockford, IL. She was watching an ad which showed the devastating effect on smoking on a North Carolina woman named Terrie. Kim said the commercial scared her, and that her son turned to her and said: Mom, you have just got to quit smoking. Kim called the Illinois tobacco quit line run by the American Lung Association and was connected to the nicotine replacement-patch program.

CDC's anti-smoking campaign is one of the many tobacco control and prevention measures that saves lives and shows we must continue investing in effective tobacco control measures.

This is a tough habit to break. One of my best friends in politics happens to be the President of the United States, who used to be a smoker. He is not now, thank goodness. His family is thankful and we are all thankful. But he still takes a little nicotine gum to chew from time to time to deal with the craving that is there. It is tough. But if people work hard, they can get it done.

This week we commemorate the importance of the first Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health and many other legal and cultural changes in this country. But as we look around at the proliferation of new and dangerous products luring kids to tobacco, we still have a lot of work to do. With the right commitment, we can spare future generations from this deadly epidemic of tobacco use.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I come to the floor this morning to talk about another very important bill. There was an hour exchange about unemployment, which is extremely important for the Nation. I think people got to hear arguments on both sides. They can continue to try to process that.

I came to the floor this morning to talk about another very important piece of legislation that we do have very deep and very genuine bipartisan support for; that is, the flood insurance provision, the Homeowner Affordability Act, which will correct some of the more egregious provisions of a bill that passed a year-and-a-half ago called Biggert-Waters.

The bill, Biggert-Waters, that was passed, named for the two Members of the House who led that effort, was well intentioned. In fact, I have had many wonderful conversations with Maxine Waters, the absolutely distinguished Congresswoman from California whose name is carried on that bill.

She had wonderful intentions because California, like Louisiana, depends on a program to work that is sustainable and affordable, but she even recognized and has been so gracious with her time to come to Louisiana to say we intended for this to fix the problem, but I admit we made it worse; the way FEMA has interpreted some of the things we have done has made it worse and the fact that the Federal Government continues, despite our efforts, to recognize levees people have built. So she has agreed to help lead our effort to reform a bill she and Congresswoman Judy Biggert passed a year-and-a-half ago.

I wish to start by commending the leadership. In the House, the effort is being led by Congresswoman Waters and Congressman Grimm. There are chairs of standing committees, working with them as we speak, to figure out how to move forward in the House.

But in the Senate we have been working so well together. Despite all of the commotion and adversarial positions on other issues, we put together a very excellent coalition of about 200 organizations. I am going to read those names in just a minute--200 organizations that have been working with us to fashion a reform bill that meets these objectives.

The Presiding Officer has spoken on the floor of the Senate now at least a half dozen times that I have listened to her speak on the floor, so she knows all this that I am going to say because she said it even better than I can. But the provisions that are in our reform bill for flood insurance meet important goals. First of all, it is affordable to the middle-class people who are required to have it. That is the most important thing about flood insurance, that it be affordable to the people required to have it.

Yes, there are some very wealthy families who live in mansions on beaches that are required to have it. They will have no problem paying a substantial premium. But there are millions of middle-class families--many of them in Louisiana--who do not live anywhere near the water and they most certainly do not live in mansions on the beach. They live in middle-class, blue-collar, working neighborhoods far from lakes, a distance from rivers, and nowhere near the ocean. They have found themselves caught up in paying premiums they cannot afford.

If we do not fix this, the premiums coming into the program will be less and less. People will be defaulting on homes. Banks, communities will take a downward economic spiral and the program itself will collapse.

We cannot have this program collapse. So even though our critics--and this has been in the newspapers--are saying we are trying to saddle taxpayers with a huge debt, nothing could be further from the truth. We are trying to save taxpayers from a big bailout by reforming a program that needs to be reformed and fixed so middle-class people can afford it, banks can operate well with it, homebuilders can build homes with it, realtors can sell the homes with the program, which they are not able to do now. Everyone can get back to work, anxiety can be reduced and give us some time to figure out how to reach those two important goals: so the taxpayers do not have to bail us out and homeowners and businesses can afford it. Is that too much to ask? I don't think so.

Happily, Senator Menendez and Senator Isakson, two veteran leaders of the Senate, have put a very good bill together. We are ready to vote. We are ready to vote. We could vote, actually, right now if we could just get a few matters worked out.

I would like to talk about what those few matters are publicly so people can start working them out because I think the more things that are transparent around here the better off we all are and things that are done in secret are usually problematic.

Let me say to the many people following this that the base bill is still basically in the order that everyone understands it to be. It is printed. It has been visible, public, for weeks now. That bill that is the basic essence of the compromises worked out by Senator Menendez and Senator Isakson and, I might say, with Senator Merkley's extraordinary leadership as a subcommittee chair, that is the base bill. There are amendments that Senators want to offer. Happily they are all related to flood.

To my knowledge--and Senator Isakson has worked through this, as I have, and Senator Menendez--there is a Hagan provision about escrow requirements that we think we should vote on. We are not sure how that vote will turn out, but we are happy to vote on it. There is a Blunt amendment the National Association of Home Builders has suggested we have an amendment on. We could vote on that as well. There is a Crapo amendment that is in the works. Some of these amendments have been filed and have language. Some of them are just in theory form. There is a Crapo amendment that would adjust the rate increases in the underlying bill. We could vote on that. There is a Reed amendment, Senator Reed of Rhode Island. This would require FEMA to conduct a study on the viability of offering community-based flood insurance policies. My notes say there is broad support for that.

There is a Coburn amendment, which is an alternative to the NARAB. That amendment will probably not receive the votes required, but we are happy to talk about his amendment and have him offer it. There is a Merkley amendment that will subject NFIB policyholders to force-placed insurance policies if they let their policies lapse--it is a technical amendment--and also a Rubio-Nelson amendment that is being discussed.

Those are the only amendments we know about. If there is anybody else who has an amendment on flood who would like to offer it or have it considered, the next couple of hours would be the last opportunity to get those amendments in. I know everybody is busy. I cleared my calendar. I had meeting. I cleared my calendar to do this today because it is very important that we not just get so busy with other things that we leave this place and not get this done. We are working transparently, openly, so there are no games to be played by either side.

Again, I wish to repeat, there is a Hagan amendment pending--not pending but that we know of--a Rubio-Nelson, a Reed of Rhode Island, a Coburn, a Merkley, a Blunt, and then Toomey, who was just on the floor, the Senator from Pennsylvania, has indicated he wants to offer a substitute to what we are proposing.

I am not the manager of this bill so it is not my authority to make these definitive statements. Senator Menendez and Senator Isakson will ultimately decide the strategy. But as far as I understand, because we have all been working very hard together to move this bill to final passage--as far as I understand, these are the only amendments people would like to offer and there does not seem to be any objection to offering them.

In addition, if people want 51 votes or if they want 60 votes, we are very open to that as well. We could pass the bill with 51 votes, we could pass the bill with 60 votes, so we are open. That is the game that is played here. You say we want 60, no, we want 51 or 51 and 60-- we can take it in any arithmetic anyone wants to give us. You want 51 votes, we can deliver them. You want 60 votes, we can deliver 60 votes because we have done the homework on this bill, working with coalitions, working with homeowners and businesses from South Dakota and North Dakota to New Jersey and New York, Mississippi, Louisiana, California, and Oregon. There is no disagreement.

Well, there is some disagreement, but there is not enough disagreement to overcome the great coalition which was put together, which was evidenced by an extraordinary press conference a couple of days ago, where almost 20 Senators showed up, or they were represented by their staffs, saying we are ready to go. My message on the floor--I don't know how many more minutes I have.

I would like another 5; I ask unanimous consent.

What was evidenced earlier--and the coalition knows this--there is broad consensus. There are a few Senators who want to vote against this bill. There are a few Senators who want to offer amendments. Fine. Let the record show these amendments could be offered--these amendments, germane to this bill and any that would come to us in the next hour or so that are germane to this bill, we can take these amendments and have a 51-vote, a 60-vote requirement, and final passage on 51 or 60. Let's just get this done.

There should be no confusion at all. I am glad no one on the opposite side is here debating me on this. That is a good sign for us that there truly is only one side to this story and this is the side.

I am trying to be as fair as I can. I have named the people who have amendments, to our knowledge. We, the Democrats, have said we have no

objection to them offering those amendments. If they want 51 or 60 votes, just let us know. I feel confident that our coalition can hold against any amendments that would try to gut this bill.

We will let people know what those amendments are and who has offered them because we think this is absolutely right for the country, for the States we represent, and for the taxpayer. Give us a little time to work together to figure out how to strengthen the National Flood Insurance Program without bankrupting 5 million families. If we don't stop this train that has already left the station--we have to stop it, reverse it, and put it back in the train barn because it is going down the track pretty fast. This is not a good place to be.

As I said, we probably should have never passed this bill, but it was put in a conference committee report that was unamendable and some provisions of it were indecipherable at the time. That is a little strong of a word, but they were not well understood. It wasn't that it was indecipherable; it was not well understood. After the bill was read and implemented, people thought, oh, my gosh, what have we done? This is not going to work. And they were right.

I am going to stay on the floor this morning. If anyone on the Republican side wants to come down and disagree and challenge what I have presented, please do so because I want this to be a very open process. There is nothing for us to hide from, and that is what a democracy is about.

There are some people who want to vote against our bill. Fine. Go ahead and vote against it. We have the votes to pass it. As I said, we have 60 votes. We may even have more than 60 votes. If we don't have the votes, all I can say is we tried our level best and we don't have the votes to correct it. I don't think that is the case.

I am not going to allow the smoke and confusion and all the hot air around here to confuse the coalition that has worked too hard, and they need to hear my voice very clearly, which is why I am here. There is clarity. There is no opposition on the Democratic side to this bill. We are waiting for a few clarifications from the Republican side. We hope to get those clarifications. The only Democrats who have amendments that I know of are Senator Hagan, Senator Reed from Rhode Island, and Senator Merkley. We have no objection on the Democratic side for this bill and there are only three Members who have amendments, and we are happy to have a vote on those amendments. They are not controversial. Somebody might have a problem with them and might vote no. Fine, but they don't gut the bill. There is no problem with the bill.

We are waiting on the Republican side for clarity. Again, I know how busy everyone is. I know the Senator from Pennsylvania is working very hard. He was just here speaking about unemployment insurance, and I know that is a very important issue to the people he represents, and to Louisiana. If he could get a little time to work on the amendment that we think he wants to offer on flood whenever he can, we are happy to have his amendment, and we will vote on it.

Senators Isakson and Menendez will decide when and how and what the number is--51 or 60. As far as I am concerned, it doesn't matter. If his intention is to gut the bill, the bill will not be gutted. If his intention is to strengthen the bill, then that is a definite possibility. People are desperate to get an answer from Congress now. We should have done this 4 months ago before these rate increases. Escrow accounts are being collected. Some people were paying $500 a year and now they are paying $5,000. According to the Biggert-Waters law, the banks have to get that $5,000 and put it in the bank now to pay that insurance. That is a real hardship on people. We need to stop that and figure this out.

Madam President, I ask for 1 additional minute. I think I have extended my time already.

We have delayed this fix too long, and we need to go ahead and take care of it. I am going to stay on the floor this morning. I will periodically bring everyone up to date.

I will close by reminding people what we are talking about. These are the new flood maps in the United States. The purple shows where it is in effect, green shows the proposed areas, and yellow shows the new flood map. There is not a State that is exempt from what I am speaking about. The amazing thing is to see this cluster in Pennsylvania, New York, and in Ohio. Everyone thinks about this as a Texas, Florida, or Louisiana issue. But when we see the inland States being affected by flood maps--States that have never been issued before are being issued without good data because FEMA doesn't have the science, technology, or resources to do this correctly yet. The affordability study has not even been done, and they didn't do it even though the last bill asked them to do it.

We need to put this train back in the station. It is not ready for prime time. We need to bring it out in a way that, yes, rates may have to rise. No one is opposed to that. But rates have to rise in a way that people can afford them and can be notified.

From our standpoint, Louisiana would like levees to be recognized. Since we spent billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money building them, we would like them to be recognized. If you are behind a levee, you don't have to pay $15,000 a year because you already paid for the levee. You don't pay twice. Taxpayers should not have to pay three times. They are happy to pay their fair share. Most everybody I know is happy to pay their fair share. But under Biggert-Waters, it is not fair, it is not shared. It has to be not completely pushed back but it has to be delayed, which is what our bill does.

I will stay on the floor, and if someone comes to the floor, that is fine. I will talk about this. It is important to get this done. I am an appropriator. I am chair of Homeland Security. This is a big, important bill for our country. This bill is almost as important--don't get me wrong, it is not as important as the whole Appropriations bill, but there are 5 million people who are getting ready to lose their home or business, and it is really important to them. It is important for us since there doesn't seem to be any real objection to work hard to get it done.

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

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the time during the quorum call be equally divided between the Republicans and the Democrats.

Madam President, may I say, before the Senator from Georgia leaves, how appreciative this coalition is of his leadership. He has been literally--I am not making this up--extraordinary in his time and effort to work through the final amendment process because this process has been going on for over a year.

We just did not start talking about this last week. He has given over a year of his time, and as the chief cosponsor he has been phenomenal. I think he would agree with me--if he doesn't, then we could respectfully disagree--that it is time now for the Members that have been hearing about this and have been told about this for weeks, weeks and months, to get their amendments to Senator Isakson so that we can make some decisions about how many amendments we can have. We could have four. We could have six. We could have ten. We can have a 51-vote threshold. We are ready. The Democratic side has, for the most part, cleared the amendments we know about.

So the Senator is terrific. I thank him for coming. I do not intend to ask unanimous consent at this point. The leaders are still working together, Senator McConnell and Senator Reid.

I know the Senator from Georgia is trying to work through this. Would that be a generally good description of where we are?

I am aware that we are not quite there yet. But I am also aware that the clock is ticking, that it is Wednesday, that we may be out of here on Saturday, and we need to pass an appropriations bill. This is something that also deserves a tremendous amount of attention.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum and ask that the time in quorum calls be equally divided.

I yield 8 minutes to the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Reed.

I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Michigan, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mr. Levin.

Madam President, I rise, together with my colleagues Senator Graham and Senator Ayotte, and ask that the Chair advise when we have used 20 minutes of time. We are going to engage in a colloquy about this important decision that is in front of the Senate.

It is, in fact, with great humility that I come to this policy debate. I don't think anyone in the Senate has spent more time in a courtroom putting perpetrators in prison who have committed sexual crimes. I don't think anybody has spent more time with victims of sexual assault. There is an incredible amount of pressure that you feel when you walk into a courtroom knowing that victim has placed trust in you to bring the evidence forward, and I am forever marked by that experience. It is with that experience that I have become convinced that the policy changes that are being advocated will not work for victims.

In fact, it is clear that when these changes have been enacted other places, reporting has not increased. It is clear that right now we have more cases going to court-martial over the objections of prosecutors than the objections of commanders. Today there is a court-martial ongoing where a prosecutor walked away from the serious charges and the commander said go forward. There have been almost 100 cases over the last 2 years where prosecutors said this case is too tough and the commanders have said, no, we have to get to the bottom of it. We can't let the commanders walk away. We cannot let the commanders walk away.

There is nothing in the Gillibrand proposal that provides additional protection from retaliation.

I ask Senator Graham: If someone walks back into their unit after being victimized and the unit knows the commander has said this case is going forward, how would that contrast to walking back into his or her unit when the unit knows some lawyer in Fort Belvoir--hundreds of miles away--has said whether this case should go forward? I am trying to figure out how removing the commander provides any additional protection from retaliation to that victim.

I would say to Senator Ayotte, I am also struggling with some of the practical problems in this policy, and one of the things I can't figure out is why the amendment limits the ability to add any additional resources. It strictly prohibits the military from bringing additional resources to bear on this problem, which is counterintuitive to me. If the goal here is to do our very best job to protect victims, and the practical problem is we do not have enough of the level of JAG officers right now to set up these offices on a global basis, which means things are going to slow down because we don't have enough--I know the Senator from New Hampshire has been a prosecutor. Certainly there is nothing harder for a victim than justice delayed.

So in addition to it not increasing reporting, in addition to it not protecting from retaliation, in addition to removing commanders from their accountability, we also have some real practical implications.

We have hard data on that. In fact, I think that is one of the reasons, if we look at this quote:

I went into this thinking Senator Gillibrand's legislation

made sense, but when you hear the facts, it doesn't hold up.

That is an important quote, but even more important when we realize who said it. This is the woman who runs the National Center for Victims of Crime for our entire Nation. She heard 150 witnesses, representing many of the groups that have been referenced in this debate. She realized that when they looked at the data, our allies have done this, and not in one nation, after years of experience with changing the system, has the reporting increased.

The way we increase reporting is to give the victim a safe harbor, which we have done, to report outside the chain of command, and to have their own lawyer, and to make sure they have power and deference in the process, which we have done, along with the reforms, on which I am very proud to have worked with Senator Gillibrand.

I have great respect for the Senator's time and for working in the trenches as a military prosecutor in the JAG corps. I will tell my colleagues honestly, I am less concerned about the commanders than I am the victims. The Senator and I maybe don't see it exactly the same way in that regard. I believe there are commanders who deserve to be held accountable for their failure to act, for their want to sweep this crime under the rug throughout history, but I think we are handing the broom to the prosecutors at this point based on the data we have.

One of the things I wanted to go over and mention to Senator Ayotte is the systems response panel. I think it is important to understand-- the DACOWITS panel was mentioned. I want everybody to understand the difference between the DACOWITS panel and the systems response panel. The DACOWITS panel has been in place for years, and they took up this matter and heard no witnesses from the JAG corps. In fact, I think they heard two witnesses or three witnesses and two of them were me and Kirsten Gillibrand. They took no time to really go deeply into this very complex subject.

The systems response panel was created by Congress, and it was for the purpose of giving us their clear eye of

advice on the best way to deal with this problem in the military.

This is a majority of civilians and a majority of women who made up this panel. They heard 150 witnesses over months. They heard from all of the people who are advocating for the Gillibrand proposal. They heard from the JAGs. They heard from victim organizations. They came out overwhelmingly rejecting this proposal.

One of the most interesting members--and I will be honest; when I went to testify in front of this response panel, I was very worried that Elizabeth Holtzman maybe would not agree with me. She has a long history in Congress. She wrote the Federal rape shield statute. I assumed she would begin this process assuming that in the simple equation of victims versus commanders, I take victims. If only it were that simple. What the response panel figured out is that it is not that simple.

Judge Holtzman, the judge who wrote the decision overturning DOMA, said:

Just turning it over to prosecutors doesn't mean you are

going to get the results you are looking for.

And Elizabeth--this is what Elizabeth Holtzman said: ``Just turning it over to prosecutors doesn't mean you are going to get the results you are looking for.'' That is what Holtzman said.

Judge Jones: ``There is no evidence that removing the convening authority is going to improve any of the parts of the system.''

That is startling, this response, from a panel that looked at it over months, 150 witnesses, majority civilians, majority women. This is not a bumper sticker. It is not as simple as it sounds. I would never oppose anything that I thought was going to help victims or put more perpetrators in prison--ever. This will have the opposite impact that many of the advocates are indicating that it will.

Isn't it true that, in fact, our reporting is up?

One minute.

Thank you, Madam President.

Madam President, I yield 5 minutes to my friend from Arizona, Senator McCain.

I yield 3 minutes to the Senator from New Hampshire, Senator Ayotte.

Madam President, I will take a couple of moments at the close of this very difficult debate to express my deep respect to the Senator from New York, Mrs. Gillibrand.

While many aspects of this debate have been hard, perhaps the hardest part of this debate has been that this disagreement on policy has overshadowed the amazing work so many have done this year to enact a different day in the U.S. military when it comes to sexual assault and victims of sexual assault.

When the Sun sets today, this body will have passed 35 major reforms in less than 1 year, making the military the most friendly victims organization in the world, giving victims more power, more leverage, holding commanders accountable, and holding perpetrators accountable. It will eliminate the ridiculous notion that how well one flies a plane should have anything to do with whether they committed a crime, professionalizing the process so that victims no longer endure a ridiculous amount of inappropriate questioning at what should be something like a preliminary hearing to establish probable cause, as opposed to some kind of rendering of questioning, torture to a victim who has come out of the shadows and is willing to go forward.

I know I can speak with confidence for Senator Gillibrand that she and I have walked lockstep on those 35 reforms. We have disagreed on one. I know in the future she and I will work very hard together to make sure our military does the right thing by victims and puts perpetrators where they belong--in prison--and out of the ranks of the military where they stain the good name of the bravest men and women in the world.

I thank all of my colleagues for their patience during this debate. I know this has been tough for everyone. But I stand with years of experience, holding the hands and crying with victims, with many victims, who have spoken to me and other organizations, knowing that what we have done is right for victims and right to hold perpetrators accountable.

I respectfully request that people support our amendment today and reject the one area of policy on which the great Senator from New York and I disagree.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, first let me thank Senator McCaskill for her terrific leadership on this matter and Senator Ayotte and others on our committee who worked so hard to strengthen our laws against sexual assault and strengthen the ability of our commanders to act, as we did in our defense authorization bill and in the second bill we will be voting on today.

We will be voting today on two bills regarding sexual assault in our military, and I believe the strongest, most effective approach we can take to reduce sexual assault is to hold commanders accountable for establishing and maintaining a command climate that does not tolerate sexual assault. In order to do that, we must maintain the important authority to prosecute sexual assaults that our military commanders now have, and we must add greater accountability for those commanders.

The evidence shows that removing this authority from our commanders would weaken, not strengthen, our response to this urgent problem. That is why I believe the bill offered by Senator Gillibrand and others, though offered in the hope that it would strengthen our efforts against sexual assault, will in fact have the opposite effect.

In the last year we have learned that in scores of cases during the period study, commanders prosecuted sexual assault cases that civilian attorneys had declined to prosecute. We have learned our military allies, whose policies have been cited in support of removing commanders' authority, generally made their changes to protect the rights of the accused, not the victim. We have learned there is no evidence that their changes resulted in any increase in reporting of assaults. So when the allies made the change--not to protect victims but to increase the rights of the accused--it did not lead to any increase in the reporting of assaults.

On January 29, we received the conclusions of a report from the Response Systems to Adult Sexual Assault Crimes Panel--an independent panel of legal and military experts of diverse backgrounds that was established by Congress to advise us on how to respond to this issue. A subcommittee of the panel addressed the role of commanders in prosecuting sexual assaults, the very issue we will be voting on today.

Here is what that subcommittee concluded:

There is no evidentiary basis at this time supporting a

conclusion that removing senior commanders as convening

authority will reduce the incidence of sexual assault or

increase sexual assault reporting.

The subcommittee reached that conclusion, despite the fact that many members began the process sympathetic--if not outright supportive--of the notion that we should remove the commanders' authority.

Here is what one member of the subcommittee, former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, said:

I've changed my mind, because I was just listening to what

we heard. I started out . . . thinking, why not change it and

now I am saying, why change it. . . . Just turning it over to

prosecutors doesn't mean you are going to get the results you

are looking for. . . .

Congresswoman Holtzman authored the Federal rape shield law when she was a Member of Congress.

Another member of the subcommittee, former Federal Judge Barbara Jones, said that if you remove this authority from commanders ``there is no empirical evidence that reporting is going to increase. . . . If I were persuaded that removing the convening authority would encourage victims to report then this would be a different story. But I am not persuaded of that.''

Listen to Mai Fernandez, the executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime. She was a member of the panel, and this is what she said about the proposal to remove commanders' authority to prosecute:

When you hear it at first blush, you go, ``Yeah, I want to

go with that.'' But when you hear the facts, like you would

in a case, it just doesn't hold up.

The women making those statements had no stars on their shoulders; they are not Pentagon insiders. They are members of the independent panel that we in Congress tasked with reporting to us on these issues.

Underlying the crisis of sexual assault in our military is a problem of culture, a culture that has been too permissive of sexual misconduct, too unaware that a person who is successful in his professional life may also be a sexual predator. It is a culture too prone to ostracize or even act against those who report sexual assaults.

The military has unique tools to address those problems. Foremost among those tools is the authority of the commander to establish a command climate by giving orders and enforcing discipline. At every time in our history when our military has faced such cultural challenges--such as the challenge of ending racial discrimination in the 1940s and 1950s or the challenge of ending don't ask, don't tell in our time--commanders with the authority to initiate courts-martial have been essential in achieving change.

But we are not going to achieve change if--at the same time we demand of our commanders that they change the military culture to take on the sexual assault problem--we remove their most powerful tool to achieve that change.

Senator Gillibrand's bill creates a new, separate disposition authority to deal with the sexual assault and other serious crimes. Our focus throughout this debate has been, rightly, on how to improve our approach to sexual assault. As a matter of fact, sexual assault would make up just a fraction of the cases this new disposition authority would deal with.

In a letter to me, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Jessica Wright recently reported in fiscal year 2012, the Department of Defense estimates it handled more than 5,600 cases that would be referred to this new disposition authority if it were created, but two-thirds of those cases did not involve sexual assault. The Gillibrand bill would shift dozens of our top military lawyers to a new authority that would spend only one-third of its time dealing with the problem we are trying to solve, the problem of sexual assault.

The National Defense Authorization Act, which we enacted just a few months ago, provides our commanders with additional tools to meet this challenge and important new protections for victims. It provides victims of sexual assault with their own legal counsel specially trained to assist them. It makes retaliation a crime when that retaliation is against victims who report a sexual assault. It requires that the inspector general investigate all complaints of retaliation. It requires that any decision by a commander not to prosecute a sexual assault complaint will have an automatic review by a higher command authority--in nearly all cases by a general or flag officer and in certain cases by the service Secretary, the highest civilian authority in each service.

The second bill we are going to vote on today--offered by Senators McCaskill, Ayotte, and others--provides additional protections to those we just added in the National Defense Authorization Act. The McCaskill- Ayotte bill ensures victims have a voice in deciding whether their cases will be prosecuted in the military or civilian justice system. Indeed, it requires that special victims' counsel established by the National Defense Authorization Act advise victims on the pros and cons of those two approaches. It requires that commanding officers be graded on their success or failure in creating a climate in which there is no tolerance for sexual misconduct and in which victims can come forward without fear.

These additional protections in the McCaskill-Ayotte bill help us answer

the key question of how can we best strengthen our protections against military sexual assault. I believe we do so by empowering victims and by holding our commanders accountable, but we threaten to weaken those protections if we undermine the authority of the very commanders who must be at the heart of the solution. Powerful evidence should lead us to the conclusion that we should not remove the authority of commanders to prosecute these cases.

I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.

That is a very good question. The commander in the military is just not somebody. The man or woman in charge of that unit is the person to whom we give the ultimate authority to decide life- and-death decisions for that unit. So if we deal the commander out, we have a rape in the barracks. The worst thing that could happen in a unit is for the commander to say, This is no longer my problem. It is the commander's problem. Every commander I have met wants it to continue to be their problem, because when we have one member of a unit assaulting the other, it affects everybody in that unit. And the person we as a nation choose to run the finest military in the world--the commander--has the absolute authority to maintain that unit for readiness. If we don't give that commander the tools and hold them accountable, that unit will fall apart right in front of our eyes, because some lawyer somewhere is no substitute for the commander who is there every day.

Madam President, if we wanted to find the definition of leadership in 2014: McCaskill, Ayotte, and the great Senator from Nebraska, three women taking on an issue head on. To those of my Democratic colleagues who are going to stick with making reforms without destroying a commander's role in the military: You deserve a lot of credit because people have been on your butt in the donor community to vote the other way.

To these ladies--and there have been plenty of people helping--they don't know how much it will be appreciated in the military. This is not a legal debate here. How many of my colleagues have done courts- martial? How many of my colleagues have court-martialed anybody in the military? I have done hundreds, as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney. This is not some casual event to me.

What Senator Gillibrand is doing is way off base. It will not get us to the promised land of having a more victim-friendly system to report sexual assaults. That is being accomplished because of the people I have just named: Senators Fischer, Ayotte, McCaskill, and Senator Levin. They have brought about reforms in terms of how a case is reported in the military, allowing a lawyer to be assigned to every victim. I cannot tell my colleagues how proud I am of what they have been able to accomplish. The U.S. military is going to have the most victim-friendly system of every jurisdiction in the land, including New York and South Carolina.

But this is about the commander. How many of my colleagues believe we have the finest military in the entire world? Every Member of this body would raise their hand. The question is why. Because we have the best lawyers in the world? No. Because we have the best commanders--men and women who are given the responsibility to defend this Nation and have power and responsibility that most of my colleagues could never envision. And if this is about sexual assault, why the hell are we taking barracks theft out of the commander's purview?

This is about liberal people wanting to gut the military justice system--social engineering run amok. I want to help victims, but I also want a fair trial. But the one thing I will not say to our commanders who exist in 2014: You are fired, because you are morally bankrupt. You don't have the ability to render justice in your unit because there is something wrong with you; your sense of justice is askew, so we are going to fire you and take away an authority you have had traditionally to make sure that your unit is ready to go to war, because we feel as though you are morally bankrupt. What other conclusion can we come to?

The next time we see somebody in the military who is a senior member of the 3 percent that Senator Gillibrand speaks about--it is only 3 percent who make these decisions. Who are these 3 percent? They are our wing commanders, our squadron commanders, our fleet commanders, our brigade commanders--the people we entrust and hold accountable for fighting and winning the war.

I say to my colleagues, if we care about what military lawyers think, every judge advocate general is begging us not to do this. The people we are going to give the power to don't want it because they understand that the commander is different than the lawyer. The first female judge advocate general of the Army has made an impassioned plea: Do not do this.

This is not a legal issue alone; this is about how to maintain the best military in the world.

I would conclude that if we want to create confusion in the ranks and if we want to tell every enlisted person who has to--should be--looking up to the commander, the Senate just fired your boss when it comes to these kinds of matters, but you should still respect him, that is a very confusing message.

I wish to end my speech with this: We have had some bad commanders. However, to those who command the military, I have confidence in you. You will take this system to a new level. You have to up your game, but I am not going to fire you. Thank you for commanding the finest military in the world. I will do nothing to say you are morally bankrupt, because I don't believe that.

Will the Senator yield for just a second?

Why is it nobody seems to think taking the commander out of the loop is going to help the problem? Because you cannot solve the problem in the military unless the commander buys in. I cannot think of any change in the military that is major and substantial that can happen without the chain of command being held accountable and buying in.

I would like to say this. To those who believe our military is set up where a victim's case is never heard because you have some distant figure called the commander and they just put this stuff under the rug, O-6 commanders--the O-6 level are special court-martial convening authorities. General court-martial convening authorities are flag officers.

It is not rampant in the military, folks, where a JAG will go in to the commander and say: This is a case that needs to be prosecuted, sir, madam; and the commander says: I don't want to fool with this.

The opposite is true, where the JAG will say: Tough; and the commander says: Move forward.

Well, what have we done here. We have said to the command that if your judge advocate recommends prosecution in the four areas in question--sexual assault--and the commander refuses to prosecute, that decision is appealed to the Secretary of the service.

So if you are wondering about rogue commanders--and there are bad commanders--you are indicting the whole chain of command here, folks. That is why I am so emotional about this. You are indicting a class of Americans who deserve praise and a chance to get their act together where they failed.

But the bottom line is, if a commander refuses to--I ask unanimous consent for 1 minute--2 minutes.

OK.

If the commander refuses the JAG's recommendation, it goes to the Secretary of the service. If the JAG and the commander both say this is not a case we want to prosecute, when it is in the area of sexual assault, it goes to the commander's commander. So there are built-in checks and balances.

The key to fixing this problem is the commander. The key to maintaining a well-run military is the commander. The key to fighting and winning wars is the commander. The key to bringing justice to victims is the court-martial panel, the lawyers, the judge and the juries, and the commander. But the key to American military success over time has been the commander.

Madam President, 800 trials in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11. This is a nondeployable military justice system that Senator Gillibrand is trying to create. Please do not change the structure of the military because of this issue. Fix this issue. Preserve the structure of the military that has served us so well, and keep reforming.

To the Senators I have named, you have done those in the military-- victims--a great service. For God's sake, Members of the Senate, do not change the structure of the military at a time we need it the most. Hold it more accountable, not less.