Minimum Wage Fairness Act

Madam President, we are now debating legislation that will be up for a vote tomorrow. It will be a cloture vote on bringing a minimum wage increase bill to the floor.

Let's be clear about this. It is a cloture vote. This means it is going to take 60 votes, and that will happen tomorrow. I assume most of the day we will be discussing that. I hope so. I know others have come to the floor previously to discuss this.

As the chairman of the committee and as the chief sponsor of this bill, I intend to be back on the floor later today to respond to some of the allegations made by Senators on the other side of the aisle regarding this bill and minimum wage as a concept, but I wish to take a few minutes to sort of set the stage for this legislation and what it is going to mean for our economy and for working Americans.

What I would say at the outset is that the minimum wage bill is about a lot of things: It is going to give an economic boost. It will increase the GDP of our country. It will do a lot of good economically for our society, but basically it is about economic fairness. It is about what kind of society we want America to be.

Keep in mind, the Fair Labor Standards Act which set the minimum wage was passed at the end of the Depression, 1939, when we were still in the Depression, and it was immediately to give a raise in wages to hard-working Americans. That is what it did.

Since that time, actually on both sides of the aisle, we have raised the minimum wage a number of times. This is just another step in making sure that those at the bottom of the economic ladder in America also get a hand up, to get help to make sure they too have a fair shot at the American dream.

So that is what this minimum wage bill is truly about. It is about core American values; the value that no one who works full time all year long should live in poverty. That is what this is about.

The fact is the value of the minimum wage has eroded so much over the last few years that the minimum wage right now is way below poverty. In other words, someone can work full time every day, all year long, and they are still in poverty. But they are working every day. That is not fair. The American value system is one that if someone puts in their work and works hard, they ought not to be living in poverty.

Right now, tens of millions of Americans are struggling just to keep a roof over their heads, to pay the heating bill, to find some money for an extra pair of shoes for a growing child, even getting money together to take the bus to work. Think about this: A minimum wage worker's paycheck has stayed the same since 2009. This chart illustrates what has happened.

If we go back to 2009, the minimum wage has increased zero percent. But

look what has gone up: Electricity has gone up 4.2 percent; rent, 7.3 percent; auto repairs, 7.6 percent; food at home, 8.8 percent. This is since 2009. Childcare has gone up 11.7 percent. Mass transit, which is how people who make minimum wage get back and forth to work, has gone up 17.8 percent since 2009. Yet their paycheck has not gone up.

What does this chart tell us? This tells us that people making minimum wage are falling further and further behind because these are things that low-income Americans have to spend money on: lights, rent, fixing up their old car, food, childcare, and mass transit. Look how much they have gone up. Yet the minimum wage has stayed the same. That is why this is a value issue.

When people who work hard and play by the rules have to rely upon food stamps and food banks to feed their children and the minimum wage has them trapped in poverty, it is unacceptable. It is un-American. It is not what our Nation is about.

So Americans deserve a raise. That is why this bill raises it from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour in three annual steps. It will link the minimum wage to the cost of living in the future. In other words, we index it for the future so we don't have this prospect that as other things increase in price, the minimum wage stays the same. It is time to index it in the future.

Our bill also provides for a raise for tipped workers--the people who serve your food, push the wheelchairs at the airports, and park cars. Every time I tell somebody this, they tell me I can't be right; I must be mistaken. I tell them the tipped wage today is $2.13 an hour, and it has been that way since 1991. Not a 1-cent increase since 1991. People find that hard to believe. It is hard to believe, but it is very true.

So our bill would increase tipped wages from $2.13 an hour up to 70 percent of the minimum wage over a 6-year period of time, the first increase in tipped wages in 23 years.

An increase in the minimum wage benefits everyone. Twenty-eight million workers will get a raise--15 million are women, so over 50 percent of the increase--4 million African-American workers; 7 million Hispanic workers; and 7 million parents will get a raise. And we forget about this. How about our kids? Fourteen million kids will benefit from a minimum wage increase. That means their families will get an increase in the minimum wage. This benefits the kids. So think about the children in America. They are going to get a raise too.

Again, raising the minimum wage helps our families and it helps our economy. This is why we had a press conference this morning with a group called Business for a Fair Minimum Wage. One thousand businesses across the country representing every State in our Nation have signed on saying: Yes, we need to increase the minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour. They understand and Main Street businesses understand this.

If we increase the minimum wage for people in the community, they are not running off to Paris, France, to spend the money. They are going to spend that money on Main Street, and that helps our small businesses. This is why so many small businesses get it. They understand that if we raise the minimum wage, that helps them. That helps the local economy on Main Street.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that our minimum wage bill will put $35 billion in the hands of millions of workers, and that money will be spent on Main Street. It will pump an additional $22 billion into our GDP, supporting 85,000 new jobs as the raise is phased in over 3 years.

There is another issue I think we need to address, and that is what happens with low-wage workers and how they do sustain themselves. They are in poverty from the minimum wage. So what do they rely on? They rely on food stamps, Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program. They rely upon the earned-income tax credit and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program. That costs taxpayers in America $243 billion a year.

Again, I am not saying that by increasing the minimum wage we are going to knock that down to zero. I can't say that, but what I can say is that a study was done just on food stamps, and if we raise the minimum wage, in the first year we will save $4.6 billion in taxpayers' money because people will now have enough money to go out and buy their own food. They will not rely on food stamps.

A lot of these other things will be cut back too, such as TANF and Medicaid or CHIP. I can't say how much, but people understand that this is what we are paying as taxpayers to support a minimum wage below the poverty line.

Again, people understand how important this minimum wage is. That is why it is so broadly supported by such a cross-section of American people.

Here is a poll that has been done. A USA Today and Pew Research Center poll this year indicated that 73 percent of all voters support raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour--90 percent Democrats, 71 percent Independents, and even 53 percent of Republicans believe we ought to raise it to at least $10.10 an hour.

So the American people get it. There is overwhelming support for raising the minimum wage. But I am just mystified by how vehemently my Republican colleagues oppose this modest increase. I just don't understand it. But what I hear is the same old outdated, disproved arguments against giving working Americans a raise.

There are some on the other side who believe we should do away with the minimum wage. There should be no minimum wage at all. Try that one on for size. Talk about a race to the bottom. Four dollars an hour maybe? Three dollars an hour? Two dollars an hour? You see, I have always said that without a strong minimum wage and without a good, strong Wage and Hour Division at the Department of Labor to make sure people adhere to it--if we don't have that, then there is always someone a little worse off than you who will bid lower than you for that job.

So someone says: We will pay $7 an hour. There is always somebody that just needs the job a little more, they are desperate, and they say: I will take it for $6 an hour. Then there are some a little worse off than that who say: We will take it for $5 an hour, and we get a downward spiral.

That is why I say our American value is to have a strong minimum wage, whereby people who work hard--and some of these jobs are hard work. People are on their feet 8 hours a day or they are doing some manual labor or they are doing the kind of jobs a lot of people don't do. Yet they live in poverty. It is not right. Raising the minimum wage is common sense that adheres to our American values and gives everyone a fair shot at the American dream.

I hope my colleagues will do the right thing and vote for cloture, allow us to get on the bill. We can have some amendments offered, and we can vote to give working Americans a raise after all these years.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, tomorrow about noon we will be voting on something in the Senate that I daresay a lot of Americans will be paying close attention to. The reason they are going to be paying close attention is because that vote will affect them and their families in the future in a very big way. That vote will be on whether we will actually bring debate to a close and vote on increasing the minimum wage in America.

If we were to bring that to a vote, we could pass it, the President would sign something like that into law, and in 6 months the minimum wage would go up by 95 cents an hour; then next year it would go up by another 95 cents; and the year after another 95 cents from where it is now at $7.25 an hour.

What we are going to vote on tomorrow will have a drastic effect on millions of American families--and it is going to have a big effect on our economy, because it will boost our economy and get the wheels going again, because people will have more money to spend. They will spend it on Main Street. And that is what is lacking right now--consumer demand--consumers with enough money to spend on Main Street. All the economists will basically tell you it is the lack of aggregate demand that is keeping our economy from moving ahead. Tomorrow at noon we will have a vote on that.

Tens of millions of American families are struggling, trying to make ends meet to give their kids a little bit better life. And, quite frankly, a lot of them on low wages are on public assistance which is costing American taxpayers nearly $250 billion every year--in food stamps, earned income tax credits, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and Medicaid. Add all those up and it is about $243 billion a year.

Taxpayers are subsidizing a lot of these companies that are paying very low wages. Many of the companies that pay such low wages are large, multibillion dollar companies raking in big profits and showering their CEOs with wealth. The average CEO pay of a Standard & Poors 500 company was 21 percent more last year than in 2009. In other words, from 2009 until the end of last year, CEO pay at these 500 companies went up an average of 21 percent. However, since 2009, the minimum wage has not increased 1 penny. The CEO pay averages now about $11.7 million a year, while a minimum-wage worker today makes $15,000 a year. That is working full time, all year, no time off.

It was pointed out to me that a CEO earns that $15,000 by about 11:30 a.m. on the first day of work of the year. Imagine that. By 11:30 a.m. on January 2--assuming they don't work on January 1--they make $15,000. The minimum-wage earner has to work the rest of the year to make that $15,000. And many of these companies are paying the minimum wage.

It is the families who are getting hurt. This is wrong. This is not what America is about. We want people who get up and go to work every day to be able to rely on that work to support themselves. Working families want that, too. They want a paycheck which supports them, gives them a fair shot at being a member of the middle class, and a fair shot of achieving the American dream.

So now we can do something about it. We know that raising the minimum wage will help tens of millions of workers. When we raise it to $10.10, as our bill does, the bottom fifth of the workforce--nearly 30 million workers--will get a raise.

By the time this fully phases in at $10.10 in 3 years, nearly 7 million people will be lifted out of poverty. If we want an antipoverty program, we have it tomorrow when we vote on raising the minimum wage. Seven million people will be lifted out of poverty, and it won't cost the American taxpayers one single dime, and taxpayers basically

will save money because we won't be putting as much money out for public assistance such as food stamps.

I thought it was kind of interesting that the Ryan budget the House passed cuts more than 3.8 million people off of food stamps. In raising the minimum wage, our bill would save billions of dollars--about $4.6 billion a year--not by cutting people off of food stamps, but by getting their income up so that over 3 million people don't have to rely on food stamps. So under the Ryan budget, people are kicked off of food stamps and they still get minimum wage. Under ours, you get a raise in the minimum wage and you don't have to rely on food stamps, and you save about the same amount of money.

Again, I am mystified by how vehemently my Republican colleagues oppose raising the minimum wage. Certainly they must know the polling data, that the vast majority of Americans support raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. But it seems my friends on the Republican side are sort of locked into some philosophy or ideology that says there shouldn't be a minimum wage. In fact, some of my colleagues on the Republican side actually believe there should be no minimum wage. None. Nothing. Well, we got over that 70 years or more ago, in 1938, when we first passed a minimum-wage law in America.

Again, we hear from the other side that by raising the minimum wage there will be this massive loss of jobs. That is simply not true. It is a myth. But it is brought up every time.

I have been in Congress now 40 years. We have raised the minimum wage several times during that period of time both under Democratic and Republican Presidents. Every time it has come up, we hear that same old song: It is going to cost jobs. Guess what. Every time we raise the minimum wage, there has been no big loss of jobs. So there are no historic facts my Republican colleagues can point to to show that raising the minimum wage costs jobs.

They do refer to the Congressional Budget Office study. Actually, that is wrong. It was not a Congressional Budget Office study. They didn't do a study themselves. What they did is looked at the literature out there going back many years on potential job losses. Some of the old studies showed there would be a job loss; under a new study they said there wouldn't be. What CBO did is they averaged them all and said: Here is the average. They didn't say specifically 500,000 jobs would be lost. They said somewhere between zero and 1 million jobs will be lost, so we will pick the midpoint at 500,000. But, again, there is no historical evidence for this in terms of looking back.

We can go back and look at what happened to our economy every time we raised the minimum wage, and there has not been a massive job loss. There has been shifting of jobs. People have been raised out of poverty. Working families do better. But there has been no massive job loss. So this is another myth.

As I said, the historical evidence is there has not been any job loss generally--not among teenagers, not among restaurant workers. In fact, this year there has been more job growth in the 13 States that raised their State minimum wages at the start of this year than in the States that didn't raise their minimum wage. Let me repeat that. There has been more job growth in States that raised their minimum wage beginning in January of this year than in the States that didn't raise their minimum wage. A lot of businesses are now understanding this. They understand that, as economists will tell you, it is the lack of aggregate demand: not enough customers. People don't have enough money.

My Republican friends want to give more money to the top, more tax cuts for the wealthy. They get more money--millions more--a year. They don't necessarily spend that on Main Street. They may go to Paris, they may buy a new jet, a new big yacht. They do things like that, but it doesn't really put money right on Main Street.

What small businesses and most economists know is that when you raise the minimum wage, those people who get that raise aren't going off to Paris. They aren't buying a private jet. They are spending it on Main Street in their local stores and local businesses, and that gives a great economic boost to our whole economy.

So when we focus on the best research, the latest research that has been done, it unequivocally shows that raising the minimum wage does not cause a job loss. Again, 600 economists, including 7 Nobel prize winners, have endorsed a minimum wage hike of $10.10 an hour. Six hundred economists, including 7 Nobel prize winners, signed a letter supporting $10.10.

We urge you to act now and enact a three-step raise of 95

cents a year for three years--which would mean a minimum wage

of $10.10 by 2016--and then index it to protect against

inflation . . . these proposals will also usefully raise the

tipped minimum wage to 70 percent of the regular minimum.

The evidence now shows that increases in the minimum wage

have had little or no negative effect on the employment of

minimum-wage workers. Even during times of weakness in the

labor market research suggests that a minimum-wage increase

could have a small stimulative effect on the economy, as low-

wage workers spend their additional earnings raising demand

and job growth and providing some help on the job front.

So, again, forget about the job loss. That is not going to take place. What will take place is we will lift 7 million people out of poverty and 14 million children in America will be in families who will get a raise. That will be good for our kids.

We also hear from Republicans that some of the people who are going to benefit from a raise in the minimum wage aren't the poorest of the poor. It is not just people below the poverty line, but a lot of other people will make more money, so therefore it must not be a good policy.

First of all, I want to dispel the myth that raising the minimum wage does not affect poverty. It does. Whether you use the CBO estimate of close to 1 million workers lifted out of poverty or the results of more sophisticated economic research showing that up to 7 million workers will be lifted out of poverty by the time the bill is fully implemented, the evidence unequivocally shows that raising the minimum wage is an effective poverty-reduction tool.

But I will be the first to admit--and gladly, proudly--that this bill doesn't just help people in poverty. It also helps low-income families who are above the poverty line, and that is a good thing. That is a good thing. A lot of low-income working families will get a raise. Here is basically the breakdown: 52 percent of those who will get a raise have family incomes under $40,000; 31 percent, $60,000; and 17 percent, $40 to $60,000. So, again, it is for the people. Families making $40,000 a year will actually get a boost. How could that be? One person may be making $20,000 and the other person may be making $15,000 or $18,000. They get a boost in the minimum wage, and they benefit. Is that wrong? I don't think that is wrong at all. These are still struggling families, struggling to make sure they get enough for their kids, make sure they put a little away for a rainy day, help their kids get a good education.

Evidently, our friends the Republicans are saying: Look, we should only have something that benefits those who are in extreme poverty. Then they turn around in the Ryan budget and cut food stamps. What are they saying? You know what they are really saying: Tough luck. You are on your own. If you are a minimum wage worker, tough luck, and we don't want to raise your minimum wage.

Well, 69 percent of the workers who would get a raise under this bill have incomes that are under $60,000. So, yes, not everybody who is going to get a benefit from this is in poverty, but it will raise nearly 7 million people out of poverty and will also help some of our lower and middle-income families in America. I say that is a good thing, and I am proud that it does.

Consider an example. Jane and Joe--those are not their real names-- are from Buchanan County in Iowa. They have two young boys. She is a waitress and earns a few dollars an hour plus tips. He works at a gas station for $7.25 an hour. They rely on food stamps and Medicaid. They have applied for assistance through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. They work opposite shifts, so they don't have to pay for childcare--and it is difficult to find adequate care for their younger son's medical needs--but this means they hardly ever see each other. A minimum wage increase would allow them to be together more as a family.

David is a pizza cook in Iowa. He is getting married soon and has a child on

the way. He earns $9 an hour at his pizza job. So what did he do? He took on another job framing houses. He is working about 65 hours a week, no overtime. He has two jobs, so he is working 65 hours a week. That is still not enough. If he worked an entire year at 65 hours a week, he would only earn $30,400 a year. He is working 65 hours a week. That is technically above the poverty line, but no one would say he is making plenty of money and he couldn't use a raise. He is starting a family.

When we raise the minimum wage, David will get a raise at both of his jobs. At one job he is making $9 an hour, and at the other job he is making $9 an hour. He gets a raise at both. He told the Quad City Times that a minimum wage raise would mean quite a bit to improve his life and help his growing family. So, yes, he is making 30,400 bucks a year working 65 hours a week--two jobs.

You say: No, he shouldn't get this minimum wage increase.

That is what I hear from my Republican colleagues. But these are the types of families who are struggling. They need a boost, and we want to give them a boost. We want to help them earn more money--not get more in food stamps or government programs but earn more money to provide for their families and build a better life and have a fair shot at the American dream.

My Republican friends are not only opposing a raise, they are proposing drastic cuts to programs that low-wage workers must rely on to survive. As I said earlier, the Ryan budget cuts more than 3.8 million people off of food stamps, leaving them without any lifeline to put food on the table. By contrast, raising the minimum wage would reduce the food stamp rolls by almost the same amount--as many as 3.6 million people--because it would allow them to earn enough money to buy food for themselves. Both proposals save the taxpayer money, but under our proposal people get to eat. They get to put food on the table.

I have a hard time giving a lot of credence to people who say the increase of the minimum wage doesn't really help people who are in poverty. It is untrue. The professed concern about the poorest of the poor stands in stark contrast with a Republican agenda that would increase poverty and sacrifice a program that helps low-wage working families survive.

Now I want to dispel another myth--that it would hurt small business. We hear about this all the time, but every small business I have talked to says their biggest problem is not payroll costs; it is lack of demand, lack of customers. They don't have customers with money to spend. So raising the minimum wage would help their bottom line.

A lot of small businesses I talk to also tell me they are frustrated, infuriated by the fact that their competitors--the Walmarts and McDonalds and other big businesses--pay rock-bottom wages that force their workers into public assistance. Well, this places responsible small businesses at a competitive disadvantage. It forces them to subsidize their competitors' low wages through their tax dollars. That is not fair. It is bad for workers, small business, and our economy. Small business owners understand this, and that is why the majority of them support this bill. Again, opinion polls--small businesses support the minimum wage 57 percent to 43 percent because they understand that a raise in the minimum wage means their customers are going to have more money to spend on Main Street.

That is why today I received a letter from Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, and 1,000 businesses, large and small, across the country support raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour--1,000 all across America. I ask unanimous consent to have this letter printed in the Record following my remarks.

So this letter and the polls show that most small businesses get it. They know that increases in the minimum wage will increase consumer demand. They also know they will have loyal, productive workers who will stay longer and save businesses from having to constantly hire and train new people. Experienced workers who have been on the job longer are more efficient and deliver great customer service that keeps customers coming back.

Finally, some of my Republican colleagues have suggested that we shouldn't raise the minimum wage because they are better served by the earned-income tax credit. I support the earned-income tax credit, and, unlike many of my colleagues on the other side, I actually want to see it expanded so it better serves young and childless workers. Right now, if you are under the age of 25 and you are making the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, you are making too much money to qualify for the earned- income tax credit. If you are over age 25 and you make the minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, and you have one child, you get $3,250 in earned- income tax credit, plus your childcare tax credit. That gets you up to 19,300 bucks a year. What a deal. But if you are childless, you get no earned-income tax credit.

The veterans who were mentioned earlier--let's say a vet went into the military when he or she was age 18. They got out after 3 years, 21 or 22, and they went out and got a job, a minimum wage job. They do not get the earned-income tax credit.

I am for expanding it. Let's expand the earned-income tax credit to cover childless workers under the age of 25. My Republican colleagues won't support that. They won't support that.

The earned-income tax credit does provide some good support, but think about this: It only does it once a year. The only time you get the earned-income tax credit is after you file your taxes--then you get a refund. That is once a year. Families don't live like that, especially low-income families. They have a budget month after month for heating, for electricity, for fuel, for car repairs, for clothes for the kids. They cannot count on what is going to happen next year. Their income tax credit is good, but it only happens once a year. That is not very good for budgeting purposes for any family. After all, the gas company will turn your gas off in the winter even if you are going to get an earned-income tax credit next April or May. They don't take that into account. They take into account the fact that you cannot pay your bill then. So the best way to help low-income families--minimum wage-earning families plus low-income families--the best way to help them throughout the year is to increase the minimum wage.

Again, all the arguments we hear from the other side of the aisle don't hold water. Today, while what I heard from the other side of the aisle is more talk about the Keystone Pipeline--as if that is going to solve all our problems--all we have to do is build the Keystone Pipeline, and that solves all of our problems. It does? The restaurant worker in Maine, the hospital orderly in South Carolina, the parking lot attendant in Mississippi--they are all going to benefit from the Keystone Pipeline? I don't think so. Somehow that is going to take the place of raising the minimum wage.

So they are trying a little diversion on this Keystone Pipeline. We will provide some jobs, yes, for a couple of years, and when that is over, then what are you left with? And those kinds of jobs are not the kinds of jobs low-income workers would get, which would be pretty high- skilled, high-paying jobs for the Keystone Pipeline. So it doesn't really hold water that the Keystone Pipeline is going to be the end-all and be-all for the economy. It just won't.

Raising the minimum wage is the most commonsense, practical thing we can do right now to help low-income families, give a boost to our economy, and save the taxpayers money. So I hope all my colleagues will do the right thing.

So I hope all of my colleagues will do the right thing tomorrow, allow us to proceed to debate, and vote on increasing the minimum wage. Millions of American families will be watching this vote tomorrow. If they are working hard during the day, they won't be tuning in to C- SPAN, but they will read about it, and they will know what this Senate did about their paychecks and what we did about their desire to have a better life for their families, for their kids, and for their future.

I will also say this. If my Republican colleagues will join with us-- at least five or six of them because we need 60 votes to get over the filibuster--if we get five or six, then we can move to the bill. I hope we will get 5 or 6 or 8 or 10 Republicans who will join us. If not, we

will be back. This issue is not going away. I can guarantee we will be back. We will be back again and again and again.

The American people need a raise. CEOs are getting their raises: a 21-percent increase since 2009--a 21-percent increase, an average CEO is paid; zero increase for minimum wage workers. It is now time to play a little catchup ball and provide fairness for low-income workers in America. So that is the vote tomorrow--a values vote, American values, family values, sound economic values. That is what the vote is about tomorrow. I hope and I trust that some of my colleagues on the Republican side will join with us so we can move ahead to give working Americans a raise and a fair shot at the American dream.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

process to achieve the same goals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

which [are] established.

He continued:

To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to

see the laws faithfully executed, implies a power to forbid

their execution, is a novel construction of the constitution,

and entirely inadmissible.

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

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

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

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

The President performs his full constitutional duty, if,

with the means and instruments provided by Congress and

within the limitations prescribed by it, he uses his best

endeavors to secure the faithful execution of the laws

enacted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While campaigning for President in 2008, he said:

I taught constitutional law for ten years. I take the

Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems we're

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

bring more and more power into the executive branch and not

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

reverse when I am President of the United States.

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

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

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

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

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and

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

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

justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

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

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

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

modification of the constitutional powers be in any

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

way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no

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

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

which free governments are destroyed.

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

Madam President, I have listened, as my friends--and they are my friends--and colleagues have come to the floor to talk about the Keystone XL Pipeline.

It turns out that what America needs more than anything else--more than an increase in the minimum wage, more than paycheck fairness so that men and women are paid fairly in the workplace--more than anything else, we need one more pipeline coming in from Canada.

If you listen to the other side, you would think the jobs that will be created by the Keystone XL Pipeline will finally turn this economy around.

How many jobs are we talking about? Madam President, 2,000--2,000 construction jobs? That is at the high end of estimates I have heard. How many jobs at the refineries in Texas to process this oil and ship it overseas? It is not for sale in the United States. I am not sure. But it really is amazing to me that they continue to focus on Keystone XL as if it is the only issue when it comes to the American economy.

Here is what I find particularly curious. For the record--and I am glad my friend, the Senator from North Dakota, is still in the Chamber--the Keystone XL Pipeline is not the first Keystone Pipeline. The first Keystone Pipeline, from Alberta, came into the United States and ended up in Wood River, IL, at the Conoco refinery. It is shipping Canadian tar sands down to be refined at the Conoco refinery. And then, after it is refined, in a pipeline it is distributed all across the United States.

If no Keystone XL Pipeline is ever built--and I do not know whether it will or will not be--there will still be a steady flow of Canadian tar sands into America for refining.

Just this week, Senator Kirk and I met with the North American president of BP. They have a huge refinery in Whiting, IN, at the south end of Lake Michigan. They are refining Canadian tar sands into oil that can be sold in different products.

I asked the head of the North American operations for BP what is going to happen to that refinery when it comes to Canadian tar sands? He said: We are going to triple--triple--our capacity to deal with Canadian tar sands. He did not say contingent on the Keystone XL. Because, you see, there is a vast network of pipelines moving Canadian tar sands to the United States already, and they are already going through a refinery--many of them--even the BP refinery in northern Indiana.

So this notion that we are somehow turning off the Canadian tar sands coming into the United States--if someone is suggesting that, I would ask them to bring proof to the floor. We are not.

What the President is doing is trying to make a decision on what is best for this country and our economy. He is trying to weigh it in a thoughtful manner. There is an element that needs to be part of this record. The President is trying to take into consideration the environment. I think he should. I think it is his responsibility.

We had a debate several weeks ago on the floor of the Senate. It was about global warming and climate change. It went on through the night. Many of my Democratic colleagues stayed up all night to talk about it. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island spoke at great length with their colleagues about the issue.

I came up early in the debate and simply made one point. I believe the Republican Party of the United States is the only major political party in the world--in the world--that denies climate change and global warming. I have asked my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to give me an example. Tell me where I am wrong. Somebody said there may be a party in Australia. That is where they have to reach to find any other political party in the world that agrees with their position on global warming and climate change. So it is no wonder when we discuss energy and the future they do not want to talk about what is happening to our environment, the extreme weather situation we are even seeing this week, the devastation from storms in a magnitude we have never registered since we kept records.

What the President is trying to do is to take into consideration not just energy but also our environment, so ultimately we leave a world to our children and grandchildren which is safer and cleaner than the one we have today. My friend the Senator from Wyoming, Mr. Barrasso, came to the floor and talked about what he called a highly secretive, high- level meeting in Chicago, and then he proceeded to say at what hotel it was being held. It is not much of a secret if he knows where it is being held.

It is true there are meetings of people who oppose the Keystone Pipeline and support candidates who oppose it, as there are meetings of those who support the pipeline and support the candidates who join in their position. That happens to be the nature of the political scene. He even suggested that the person opposed to the pipeline was going to put $100 million into this campaign.

I, for one, would like to see an end to big money in our political campaigns. I would certainly like to see transparency and where it is coming from and how it is being spent, but the reality is, the Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court across the street changed the rules and people can play with big money now, a lot of their own.

What he did not mention were the Koch brothers. I would like to mention them for a moment because they are relevant to this discussion about Canadian tar sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Koch brothers are very wealthy, billionaires. They come to play when it comes to the American political scene. In the last cycle, we were able to identify over $248 million these two brothers spent on political causes and campaigns around the

United States, and we are told they are going to spend considerably more than that this time around.

Do the Koch brothers have an agenda when it comes to this issue? Let me give an illustration. It was about 3 months ago that I went into the southeast corner of the city of Chicago, an old steel mill neighborhood, which happens to be in the neighborhood where Barrack Obama, fresh out of college, was a community organizer. They are modest homes, frame homes, primarily Hispanic and African-American populations.

They called me down to this section, the southeastern section of the city of Chicago, to show me something. What they wanted to show me were piles of black soot. It is called petcoke. Petcoke is what is left after you take the Canadian tar sands, ship them through the pipeline to a refinery, making diesel fuel, aviation fuel and gasoline. What is left over, this black gunk substance called petcoke.

It turns out that the BP refinery was selling the petcoke to a company owned by the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers were shipping this petcoke into the neighborhoods of Chicago. The mothers with their kids were calling me to their homes and schools to show me what happened when the wind blew. When the wind blew, this nasty black stuff flew through the air. It was all over windowsills and buildings, nasty as can be.

The city of Chicago is doing something about it. They are kind of changing the equation in terms of petcoke and what you have to do to store it. But if the other side is coming to the floor and saying our people are pure of heart, they just want to see the Keystone XL Pipeline, the fact is, the largest benefactors to the Republican Party in the United States today, the Koch brothers, have a financial and commercial interest in these Canadian tar sands, at least in the disposal of this petcoke. The way they were doing it in the city of Chicago was the height of corporate irresponsibility--just pile it and let the wind blow it across the neighborhood. It is going to be criminal when it is all over after the city of Chicago changes its laws to prohibit this kind of conduct.

But those are the things that are at stake in this conversation. I hope at the end of the day the President makes the right, thoughtful decision, not just in terms of energy but in terms of our environment, does the best thing for America. I hope we also understand that if we do nothing with the Keystone XL Pipeline, we are still going to face the challenges with Canadian tar sands, coming down through the United States, being refined and sold in our country and around the world. It is a challenge we have to face honestly.

I may disagree with some of my colleagues on the other side. I believe that if we want to leave a world for future generations--our kids, our grandchildren--that is a cleaner and safer world, we have to accept some responsibility in our generation, in our time, to clean up the mess of this environment. It may call for some sacrifice as individuals, as families, as businesses, but I do not think it is too much to ask.

God gave us this great world and asked us to keep an eye on it for the next generation. Are we going to do it or will we ignore it and say: If there is money to be made, we can start bringing in any source you wish. That to me is irresponsible.

Tribute to Dr. Jerry Umanos, John Gabel, and Gary Gabel

Madam President, Robert Kennedy once said, ``The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to make things better.'' Around the world and here at home, dedicated American citizens are living by this principle, trying to improve the lives of those in greatest need. Sadly, on April 24, we lost three Americans from my home State of Illinois who were killed at the Cure International Hospital which focuses on maternity and pediatric care in Afghanistan: Dr. Jerry Umanos, John Gabel, and his father Gary Gabel.

Both John Gabel and Dr. Jerry Umanos were working to help the Afghan people receive health care. In a country still coping with the legacy of decades of terrible conflict that devastated the medical infrastructure of Afghanistan, they were helping by volunteering to address the real needs of the Afghan people and improving the lives of those whom they assisted.

This is Dr. Jerry Umanos. His picture is an indication of this young, dedicated, idealistic man who lost his life. He was dedicating to helping kids. After he finished his residency at the Children's Hospital of Michigan, he could have made some money with his training, but instead he decided to help those who needed a helping hand.

He worked for years at an amazing place that I have visited, the Lawndale Christian Health Center in the city of Chicago. It is one of those neighborhood health centers which makes you feel good about the world, where great professionals, such as Dr. Umanos, give of their time, make very little money, and help the poorest of the poor.

He was an important part of that community. They loved him, not only his patients but his colleagues as well. He worked to help so many in Chicago who otherwise did not have a chance for quality health care. He followed this calling to Afghanistan where the needs of people were even greater. He was dedicated to making a difference there by helping the Afghan people, by teaching, by making certain that the next generation of Afghans had a better life. The breadth and depth of his work is a testimony to his love for and commitment not only to the people of Afghanistan but to the needy. What a loss that his life was taken from us.

John Gabel was a man who cared for others and made a real difference in the lives of those he touched. He used his skills to run a health clinic in Afghanistan and to help address the glaring needs of health care with the Afghan people. John was working in other ways to help build a better tomorrow for the people of Afghanistan. He used to teach at Kabul University, where he was remembered as a great teacher and a great friend.

He used his expertise in computer science, not to enrich himself but to teach others. Perhaps it is not surprising that John was so focused on helping those in need when we consider the example of his parents Gary and Betty Gabel, who also dedicated their lives to others. Tragically, Gary Gabel, who was visiting his son and his family in Afghanistan, was lost as well in the senseless shooting.

Gary Gabel helped his community in and around Arlington Heights, IL. He was an active member of his church. He had a commitment to helping those most innocent and vulnerable members of society, our children. He worked with church youth groups. He provided a strong model to his community and his family of a man committed to helping others. I am sure my colleagues join me in expressing our heartfelt condolences to the families and loved ones of those lost and injured in this tragic attack, as well as the countless people whom they helped, all of whom join us in mourning their loss. They represent the best of who we are as a people and make this world a better place.

Minimum Wage

Tomorrow, we are going to have an important vote. It is a vote that is going to be watched carefully by over 1 million workers in the State of Illinois and millions across our Nation. The question is whether the United States of America and its government will increase the minimum wage for workers all across the country.

It is an important vote. It would raise the Federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 in three steps of 95 cents each. If we pass it this year, the final increase would occur in the year 2016. This is a 39- percent increase in the minimum wage, roughly the same percentagewise as the last minimum wage bill we enacted over the same period of time. It provides for automatic future increases in the minimum wage based on the cost of living so we do not have those lurches from one level to $2 or $3 above it.

It raises the minimum wage for tipped workers for the first time in more than 20 years. People find it hard to believe that under Federal standards, tipped workers receive $2.13 an hour as their base wage. They are expected to make up the difference with their tips. We raise it to 70 percent of the minimum wage, phased in over 6 years. We extend some business expensing rules to help businesses invest in their equipment and what they need to grow the business. We do this in a fashion to incentivize small businesses to grow.

This increase in the minimum wage brings us down to a very fundamental

question as Americans. The fundamental question is this: If someone is willing to get up and go to work and work hard every single day, should they receive a compensation that lets them get by so they do not have to survive from paycheck to paycheck or should they be put in a position where the only way they can survive is with government assistance--food stamps, SNAP program, child care subsidies--things that we provide as a government to people in low-income categories?

Keep in mind, we are talking about workers. You see them in Chicago early in the morning. They are the blurry-eyed travelers on those buses heading off to the workplace. They are the ones we see on the trains, quietly moving from their homes to where they work and repeating the reverse journey every single day as they head back home at night.

Can you imagine the frustration of going through that day after weary day and never, ever catching up, living paycheck to paycheck, falling further and further behind? That is what is happening to too many of them. It is amazing to me when we hear the critics of minimum wages step forward. In our State of Illinois there are two prominent politicians, both of them happen to be multimillionaires. Their views on minimum wage are amazing to me. One of them, who made $53 million last year, said he adamantly opposes raising the minimum wage. He made $53 million last year. He adamantly opposes raising the minimum wage.

Another one of them who is worth millions of dollars himself has said: I will agree to raise the minimum wage but only for people over the age of 26.

He just eliminated half of the people earning the minimum wage in America today who happen to be under the age of 26.

Let's think about the people whom he wants to keep on a subminimum wage. It would include all college students under the age of 26 trying to work their way through school. He would want to give them a subminimum wage. It would include single moms raising their kids--the moms being under the age of 26, they would get a subminimum wage--and it would also include veterans coming back, struggling to find a job. If they haven't reached the age of 26, he would give them a subminimum wage.

I have one basic question: What are these politicians thinking? Have they ever left where they live and where they work and met up with some people who are struggling paycheck to paycheck to get by?

Tomorrow we have a chance on the floor of the Senate to raise the minimum wage, but we cannot do it with Democratic votes alone. If there will not be five, six or seven Republicans who cross the aisle and join us in this debate, it will fail--and that will be a sad day--because for a lot of these workers this is their only hope that they will get a decent increase in the minimum wage through the law.

I hope my colleagues on the other side will take into consideration that so many of these workers are women and so many of them are even over the age of 35 and still rely on minimum wage jobs. These are not lazy people. These are hard-working people, people who are working hard every single day for a paycheck that they know is not going to cover their expenses every single week.

It is time we give them a chance and give them a break. It used to be--and I can remember it very well--a bipartisan issue to raise the minimum wage.

President Ronald Reagan, when he was President, raised the minimum wage. He understood it. If you value work and you value working people, you should give them a wage which respects the integrity and decency of work. That is what this is about. That is what this minimum wage is about tomorrow.

Without the help of Republicans, it will fail. If it isn't done on a bipartisan basis, it will not go forward.

I might add one other item. A minimum wage is injecting into the economy literally millions of dollars of purchasing power. People who are living paycheck to paycheck spend those checks as fast as they can for food, clothing or shoes, paying the utility bills, paying for a cell phone, putting gas in a car. That money goes right back into the economy.

I ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, tomorrow break with some of the extreme people in your party, join us in a bipartisan fashion and raise the minimum wage. It is only fair.

I yield the floor.

I respond through the Chair to the Senator from Alaska.

There was a time when there wasn't that much controversy associated with this. We knew that we waited too long. People had fallen behind in their earning potential. We had to pick the right number. We came up with it and moved forward on a bipartisan basis. But now things are so partisan and so poisonous in the Senate that even something as basic as raising the minimum wage for hard-working families turns out to be a political lift.

It basically does for some, but what I found though is if you are a family with two kids, for example, you have to make almost $15 an hour to get beyond the poverty level. We are talking about $10.10 phased in, and many of those people will still qualify for a helping hand from the government because they are still in very low- income categories.

Madam President, I rise today to address the idea of raising the Federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour. But first I wish to spend a few moments talking about the state of the Senate and why the latest push for a higher Federal minimum wage isn't an issue that appears to be driven by solving the underlying economic problems our Nation faces.

Over the past few weeks, the Senate majority leader has relished in making personal attacks on two private citizens, David and Charles Koch, on this Senate floor. He has used the Senate floor for the purpose of attempting to assassinate their character. They have committed no crimes, although the majority leader appears to treat it as a crime that they don't support him politically. Many political observers can see this for exactly what it is: a desperate political strategy designed to distract from the economic misery that is being visited on the American people by a failed economic agenda. The Senate majority leader is using the Senate floor to run a political campaign against entrepreneurs and philanthropists who have dared to stand and speak out against the failed Obama economic agenda. The reason he is doing so should not surprise anyone. On substance, the record of this administration cannot be defended. They can't talk about how great ObamaCare is working because millions of Americans have lost their health insurance plans and lost the doctors they like, despite the President's repeated promises to the contrary. Health insurance plans have skyrocketed in States all across this country, especially for young people in the individual market who are seeing their rates sometimes double or triple. And they certainly can't talk about the state of the economy.

Today, we have the lowest labor force participation since 1978. The official unemployment rate is 6.7 percent, but that doesn't capture the millions who are underemployed. When we include them, the number rises to 12.7 percent. The rates of poverty in the United States are right now at historic highs--15 percent. As CNN recently noted, this is ``the first time the poverty rate has remained at or above 15 percent 3 years running since 1965.''

Among full-time workers, there are more than 3.8 million fewer employed today than there were before the recession. The number of people not in the labor force today is at its highest level since 1978. Over 91 million people are not in the American workforce. Roughly three of five working-age Americans have jobs today. This is a travesty. It is a denial of the American dream to millions of people across this country.

Long-term unemployment persists. Nearly 36 percent of the unemployed are long-term unemployed. When President Obama took office, the average number of weeks that an individual was unemployed was 19.8. Today, the average duration is 35.6 weeks.

It is also a good thing the President has begun to talk about income inequality. It is a good thing because income inequality has increased dramatically under President Obama. Today, the top 1 percent in our economy earn a higher share of our income than any year since 1928, and those who are being hurt the most in the Obama economy are the most vulnerable among us--the people who are struggling. The working class Hispanics, African Americans, and single moms are the ones paying the price for the great stagnation in which we find ourselves.

According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as middle or upper class fell 8 points between 2008 and 2012. President Obama's terrible economy doesn't discriminate. It hurts Americans from every demographic. On the President's watch, women have lower incomes today. The median income for women has dropped by $733 since President Obama took office, and, indeed, poverty among women has gone up markedly under President Obama. The poverty rate for women has increased from 14.4 percent when the President took office to 16.3 percent. In real terms, that means 3.7 million more American women are in poverty today than when the President took office.

The President is not responding to any of this. Instead, we see the President, we see the Senate majority leader shifting to the topic of a mandated Federal minimum wage in an effort to change the subject. But the undeniable reality, the undeniable truth is that if the President succeeded in raising the minimum wage, it would cost jobs for the most vulnerable. The people who have been hurt by this Obama economy would be hurt worse by the minimum wage proposal before this body.

In 2013, the President, in his State of the Union address, proposed raising the minimum wage to $9. A year later, the request has magically changed to $10.10. There is no economic justification. The only reason is politics. I suppose if the approval ratings of Democratic Members of this body continue to fall, in another month we will see a proposal for $15 an hour and then maybe $20 or $25 an hour.

But I think the American people are tired of empty political show votes.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that raising the minimum wage could cause the loss of 500,000 to 1 million jobs. I want the American people to realize, and every Member of this Senate, that votes for the minimum wage is voting to tell up to 1 million Americans: Your jobs don't matter to me because I am voting to take away your job.

By the way, this view is not only the view of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. On March 12, 2014, over 500 economists, including three Nobel Laureates, sent a letter to Congress that said the minimum wage is a poorly targeted anti-poverty measure. I will give one example from my home State. GO-Burgers, which is a Texas company with six Burger King restaurants, analyzed the effect of the minimum wage increase on their employees and their businesses. The last minimum wage increase we have seen was from $5.85 an hour in 2007 to $7.25 an hour in July of 2009, and 2010 was the first complete calendar year that GO-Burgers had to analyze the impact

on their workers. GO-Burgers discovered that raising the minimum wage by 23.93 percent caused these Burger King restaurants to reduce the available hours worked by 24.98 percent, for a net sum loss in hours and wages for the typical employee.

Let me repeat that. The experience in these Burger King restaurants was the employees were worse off after the minimum wage was raised because their hours got cut in direct response to the increase. These six restaurants eliminated over 40 jobs and reduced the average number of hours worked per employee. In total, these six Burger King restaurants reduced the man-hours allocated by over 60,000 hours in 2010. Sadly, the people that bear the brunt of that are not the rich and powerful. They are not those who walk the corridors of power in Washington, DC, and have gotten fat and happy under the Obama administration. The people who would bear the brunt if this bill were passed would be, to a substantial degree, young African American teenagers and young Hispanic teenagers. Right now, young minorities, if we look at unemployment rates by race--just looking at the official unemployment rates, Anglos have an unemployment rate of 5.8 percent; Hispanics, 7.9 percent; African Americans, 12.4 percent--nearly double that in the white community. It is even more heartbreaking among teenagers. White teens currently have an unemployment rate of 18.3 percent, but African American teenagers have an unemployment rate of 36.1 percent--36.1 percent. Every Senator who votes yes is voting with an absolute certainty that hundreds of thousands of workers, including a great many African American teenagers and a great many Hispanic teenagers, will be laid off as a consequence of their vote. I would challenge any of the Senators in this Chamber to look in the eyes of those African American teenagers, those Hispanic teenagers who are looking for a better opportunity.

If my colleagues detect a note of passion in my voice as I discuss this, it is because in my family this is not an abstract, hypothetical situation. Fifty-seven years ago, when my father fled Cuba and came to Texas at the age of 18, penniless, not speaking English, his first job was working in the restaurant industry as a dishwasher making 50 cents an hour. The restaurant industry had been such a terrific avenue for climbing the economic ladder, for achieving the American dream. My dad washed dishes at 50 cents an hour to pay his way through college to go on and start a small business to work toward the American dream. If the majority leader had his way, if the minimum wage were jacked up, if back in 1957 the restaurant where my father worked were forced to pay every worker $2 an hour, the odds are very high that restaurant would have fired my dad and bought a dishwasher instead. It was that entry- level job that gave him the grip on the first rung of the economic ladder that led him to pull to the second and the third and the fourth. This bill, if it were to pass, would hammer those on the bottom of the economic ladder and would take away jobs from the most vulnerable among us.

So what should we do instead? We can talk about the problems we have in this country, but we need to talk proactively about better solutions. Fortunately, we are on the cusp of a great American energy renaissance.

I have introduced legislation to remove the barriers to developing the abundant energy resources we have in this country--barriers that, if removed, would allow the creation of millions of high-paying jobs.

The discussion before this Chamber is whether to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. But even if it passed, that is not the Obama minimum wage. Rather, the real Obama minimum wage is $0.00 an hour. We have right now the lowest labor participation rate since 1978.

To the millions of Americans who have lost their job because of $1.7 trillion in new taxes, because of crushing regulations, this is the Obama minimum wage: $0.00--not the political window dressing of $10.10; the reality, the hard, brutal reality.

Last week, I was in Nebraska at a rally. A woman named Barb came up to me. She hugged my neck. She said: Ted, I am a single mom. I have six little kids at home. My husband left me, and he is not paying child support. I am working five jobs, trying to keep my kids fed, trying to keep them with clothes on their backs. Barb had tears in her eyes.

One of the most brutal consequences of ObamaCare is it has forced millions of Americans like Barb into part-time work because the threshold for ObamaCare is 30 hours a week.

So instead of having one or two jobs, Barb and millions of other single moms are going from one job to another, to another, to another, and they are not spending the time with their kids. This is the brutal reality of the Obama minimum wage.

But, Madam President, I am happy to tell you, there is a better alternative. The better alternative, I would note--far better than zero, far better than the promise of $10.10 an hour--is $46.98. Madam President, $46.98--that is the average hourly wage in the oil and gas industry in the State of North Dakota.

Every one of us should want to see millions more jobs at $46.98 an hour, and we should want millions rescued from the Obama minimum wage of $0.00 an hour. That is the choice before this body--of expanding this American energy renaissance, creating opportunity.

Let me tell you, in the State of Texas--Texas is an incredible example--there is a reason why 1,400 people a day are moving to Texas, moving from high-tax, high-regulation States, represented by many of our friends on the Democratic side of the aisle. They are coming to Texas because Texas is where the jobs are and Texas is where the salaries are.

Oil and gas industry jobs in Texas paid, on average, 150 percent more than other private sector jobs in Texas--$128,000 a year compared to $51,000 a year--in 2012.

In the 23 counties atop the Eagle Ford shale in South Texas, average wages for all citizens have grown by 14.6 percent annually since 2005.

The top five counties in the Eagle Ford shale region have experienced an average 63-percent annual rate of wage growth.

How many millions of Americans would love to see 63 percent annual wage growth?

In Texas, the average pay for an entry-level truckdriver ranges from $36,000 to $45,000, but it rises to $50,000 to $70,000 in the oilfield. These are kids straight out of high school making $70,000 a year.

As reported in an AP story from March 28, 2014: ``James LeBas, economist for the Texas Oil and Gas Association, said the industry directly employed 416,000 employees in 2013 and they averaged $120,000 a year in wages.''

As a separate nation, Texas right now would rank as the ninth largest oil-producing country in the world.

Not only can energy development bring good-paying jobs, it can also help our children and schools. Cotulla, TX, was once one of the poorest districts in Texas, but now--because of the Eagle Ford shale energy development--it is one of the richest. The taxes that are coming from the energy development mean money for fixing schools, for hiring teachers, for paying them more, and for purchasing technology in the classrooms.

One thing that is striking is what has happened across the country. If you look, this is a map I have in the Chamber of changes in median household income by county from 2007 to 2012. Madam President, 2007 to 2012 is a long time.

On this map, green indicates that the median household income has gone up; yellow indicates no statistically significant change; and red indicates it has gone down.

Overlaid on this map is an overlay of the geological shale formations in this country. What is striking about looking at median incomes in the United States is where median incomes have gone up. This is almost exactly a geological shale map of the United States.

You can see median incomes have gone up up here in the Bakken shale in and around North Dakota. You can see the Permian Basin shale, the Eagle Ford shale, the Barnett shale. You can see the Marcellus shale. Green, green, green, green--median income going up--for everyone in the county median income going up where energy production is occurring.

Now, strikingly, the Marcellus shale extends north to New York, and yet for

the entire State of New York, you can see there is not a county in the State of New York where median income has gone up. Why? Well, one of the main reasons is the Democratic politicians in New York have prohibited developing those natural resources because they ban fracking.

So in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvanians apparently would like jobs, would like higher median incomes. They are seeing the benefits. But in New York, New Yorkers are not because Democratic politicians in New York have prohibited developing those resources.

I would note that one of the most promising areas is the Monterey shale in California--abundant resources--and you would note, in the entire State of California there is not one green county. That is because California, likewise--even though they have those resources, the Democratic politicians there have concluded Californians do not want jobs, they do not want higher incomes, and they are going to prohibit developing their natural resources rather than providing for the very real suffering that is being caused.

I would note, there is one striking exception from this pattern being largely a geological shale formation of this country, and that is the bright green on the map that is located right here where we are standing--the District of Columbia and the surrounding areas.

Let me tell you, it is a good time to be in and around government. The lobbyists, the consultants, those who make money on the growing and growing and growing Federal Government spending and debt, are getting fatter and happier every day. You look at the rest of the country, and you see stagnation, you see median income falling.

Rather than engaging in political games--driven by polling done by the Democratic Senatorial Committee on this minimum wage bill that, if passed, would only hurt low-income African-American and Hispanic teenagers--instead, we ought to come together with bipartisan unanimity to say: We will stand with the American people to bring millions of jobs. We will stand with the American people to raise median income. We will stand with the American people to make it easier for people who are struggling to achieve the American dream.

Therefore, I have proposed an amendment to replace the text of S. 2223, the minimum wage act, with the text of the American Energy Renaissance Act that I have introduced, S. 2170.

We should all come together and vote on removing the government barriers, opening new Federal lands and resources, developing high- paying, promising jobs that expand opportunity.

In conclusion, let me say this debate comes down to two numbers. It is not a complicated debate. This debate comes down to two numbers. On my left, the real Obama minimum wage: $0.00 an hour. I am sorry to say, in this Democratic Senate, this Chamber is largely empty. There is no discussion of fundamental tax reform or regulatory reform, of removing the barriers that have caused the lowest labor force participation since 1978.

Instead, we are debating a bill to increase unemployment. This minimum-wage bill--the nonpartisan CBO has told us more people would be paid $0.00 an hour under the bill before this Chamber. No wonder Congress's approval rating is 8, 10, 12 percent, when you take the greatest challenge facing Americans right now--the need for economic growth and jobs--and the U.S. Senate in Democratic control will not even talk about providing real relief there. No wonder people are disgusted with the U.S. Congress.

You want to know what this debate is about? Compare $0.00 an hour to $46.98 an hour. I want to see millions of Americans making $40, $50, $60 an hour, providing for their kids, having a better future.

As I travel this country, over and over again, men and women come up to me. They look me in the eyes and say: Ted, I am scared. I am scared that we are bankrupting this country. I am scared that my kids and grandkids are not going to have the future, the opportunity, the freedom we have been blessed to have.

This U.S. Senate has an opportunity to address that. We should pass the American Energy Renaissance Act. We should stop making it harder for working Americans, but, instead, we should come together for jobs and economic growth.

Thank you, Madam President.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your entire economic team believes that this approach is

too aggressive and are concerned that Senator Kennedy's

proposal could prove damaging to the employment prospects of

low-skilled workers . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's most devastating about an increase in the minimum

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

raise prices--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many of the businesses that pay their workers minimum wage

operate on extremely tight profit margins, with any increase

in the cost of labor threatening this delicate balance.

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

They are operating on tight profit margins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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

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