A concurrent resolution commending the Boys & Girls Clubs of America for its role in improving outcomes for millions of young people and thousands of communities.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I come to the floor of the Senate to speak about an issue that is of urgent concern to me and should be of urgent concern to all of us. That issue is global warming or climate change.

This is a personal issue for me. As the father of three, along with any other parent, my kids are never far from my mind and my heart. This is true for me as a father as well as a Senator, where every day I have to ask the question: What kind of example am I setting? What kind of a world are my actions going to lead to? What sort of a world will I leave my children, and will it be better than the one my parents left to me?

Last summer I experienced one of the great joys of parenthood--a family trip. My wife Annie and I took our three children Maggie, Michael, and Jack on a visit to one of our Nation's most spectacular places: the mountains and glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana. There was one hike in particular on our summer trip that I will never forget. It was our hike up to visit historic Grinnell Glacier. If we had taken this hike more than 60 years ago, here is what we would have seen, as this picture shows: mountains deep in glaciers, thick with ice and snow, covered in the glaciers that gave this national park its name. Yet last year as we took a long and winding hike up the trails, we came up and over the last rise, and what we saw was noticeably different--strikingly so--because most of what is left of the iconic Grinnell Glacier in the summer is a chilly pool of water in a largely empty valley pool. We can see the difference in these two pictures, and this is just in one lifetime.

Since 1966, Grinnell Glacier has lost half its total acreage, and as we continue to warm our planet, these changes will only accelerate. My children--our children--will not just lose the chance to see beautiful glaciers and an iconic national park but the chance to live in a world as robust and safe and healthy and vibrant as the one their parents were born into. As our global population keeps growing toward 9 billion and developing nations keep seeking higher living standards and climate change accelerates, this is the foundational challenge of the 21st century.

Climate change impacts everything: human health, agriculture, national security, migration patterns for animals and fish and birds. As parents and as a nation, I think it is our responsibility, our challenge, and our opportunity to lead the way, to show that prosperity does not need to mean doom for our future.

I also think in my view that, simply put, there is no alternative to action. The world where we don't act isn't a world of vibrant economic growth, it is a world with more frequent and extreme natural disasters, with increased droughts and famine, with displaced populations and cities--even regions and in a few cases even nations--plunged under water.

I represent the lowest mean elevation State in America, the State of Delaware. It has been documented in a broad study led by our Governor's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control that rising sea levels could put up to 11 percent of my home State of Delaware under water by the end of the century. We know these changes are coming. They are slow. They are gradual. They are cumulative. At times they are hard to perceive, but they have already started and will only get more extreme and more expensive the longer we wait to act. The cost of our inaction will be borne by our children and generations to come.

We are not the only ones seeing these impacts, and although the debate over science raged for many years, and I think is settled, I have also had an opportunity to hear from folks who live well outside the Western scientific world but have a profound insight into what these impacts are and how they are seen in the world.

Several years ago, along with the senior Senator, a friend of mine, our President pro tempore, Senator Leahy, I visited the Kogi tribe in the remote Santa Marta Mountains of Colombia. These equatorial mountains have massive glaciers up at the very top of very high mountains but are also right at the edge of the Caribbean Sea. The folks who make up this pre-Colombian tribe, the Kogi tribe, don't have sophisticated technology that monitors and tracks climate change, but as they sat with us they shared with us what they see as starkly as our best weather-monitoring satellites. By observing changes in migratory patterns and weather and the snowpack on the glacial mountains they worship, they see,

more every year, that there is a fundamental change happening in our environment, in our climate. Their purpose in calling us to meet with them was to warn us that climate change is impacting the way of life that has passed down from generation to generation for centuries in their people, and it has moved them to speak out to the world, to tell their story, and to urge the rest of us not to hurt Mother Earth and to understand the consequences of the changes we are making.

Whether the voices we listen to come from our own children, from our science community or from remote corners of the world, all of them call us to act, to act in a way that prevents the worst from happening and to ensure that the benefits outweigh the costs.

This isn't just wild-eyed or rosy thinking. It is possible for us to make meaningful change in a bipartisan way. We have done it before. Back in 1990, when acid rain was a real and pressing challenge that was threatening the vitality and the vibrancy of many of the lakes and the mountain places in the American West, I remember well that under then- Republican President George H.W. Bush, Congress came together in a bipartisan way and passed the Clean Air Act amendments. These were designed to reduce the contributing elements to acid rain: powerplant emissions that produce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide that in combination caused acid rain, damaging historic property, monuments, injuring forests and lakes and ecosystems all over our country.

So Congress came together to create a novel, market-based, flexible cap-and-trade program that allowed powerplants to find cost-effective alternatives, solutions to limit pollution. Rather than tanking our economy, that cap-and-trade plan to fight acid rain ended up finding new ways to power our country and to improve energy efficiency without so much pollution. We adapted, we changed, and in some ways we thrived.

As a study done 13 years later shows, those standards adopted in 1990 have saved lives at a cost well worth it: $70 billion in health benefits every year, cumulatively, compared to $1.7 billion in costs--a 40-to-1 tradeoff that I think most Americans would take any day of the week as a return on their investment.

More recently, in my own State of Delaware and eight of our northeastern neighbors, we showed how we can act together to begin to curb climate change and grow our economies at the same time. In 2003, a bipartisan group of regional leaders, this time led by New York State's Republican Gov. George Pataki, built a regional cap-and-trade system, similar to the Acid Rain Prevention Program I just referenced. But the one in our region was called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI for short. It is flexible, market-based, and it has been effective. States choose to cut pollution in a number of ways, from closing older coal-fired powerplants or opening renewable energy projects to investing in important and valuable energy efficiency.

As the New York Times reported just last week, since that program started in 2009, our economies in these regional States have actually grown more than the 41 other States that are not part of RGGI--by several percentage points--while we have cut our emissions over four times more than the rest of the Nation.

We have created jobs, we have invested in innovation, we have cut pollution, and we saved millions of families money on their energy bills. That is why I think we should feel optimistic about the important steps the administration has just taken. The President's strong standards for vehicle fuel efficiency were a great start. At first many argued that pushing car companies to make cleaner, more efficient cars would end up costing a huge amount of money with little to show for it. But the opposite has happened.

We set more aggressive national standards. Engineers have gotten to work. They have innovated. They have invented. America's leading car companies have met the challenge, and the improvement in fuel efficiency has been dramatic. Although there is a cost in upfront research and development, it is well worth it, as drivers save money at the pump, America becomes less dependent on foreign oil, and we all get to breathe cleaner air.

Just last week the Obama administration took another step and proposed our Nation's first rules to limit carbon pollution from existing powerplants. Although they will not be finalized for another year, these limits represent the most significant action that any country has taken to halt the devastating warming of our planet.

They will have real and lasting health benefits. By cutting powerplant pollution over the next 15 years, we will be able to prevent 100,000 asthma attacks in children, 2,100 heart attacks, and thousands of premature deaths. That will mean nearly 500,000 fewer missed days of school and work and will save $7 in health costs for every $1 required of new investment.

Over the long term, curbing climate change will make large, lasting, and meaningful differences--from reduced hunger and heat waves, to reducing the spread of infectious diseases or conflicts over scarce resources.

Cynics will argue that even with these limits we will not stop climate change, and that is true. They will point out that renewable energy technology is not yet ready to fully replace fossil fuels. They will say that America acting alone cannot solve the problem, and that is true. We need global action, especially from large developing nations such as China and India that are on pace to pollute the most going forward.

As an exercise in cynicism, they get a lot of things wrong. These rules alone, yes, will not halt our rising seas. But, then again, no one is claiming they will alone. But they are a crucial step, and we owe it to posterity, to our country, to our future to take what action we can to send a powerful signal to America's entrepreneurs and engineers, our innovators and inventors, that this is a challenge we intend to take on. By acting now, we can begin to birth the innovations that will be at the heart of our planet's clean energy future.

Innovation in America has never stood still. We have done incredible things that even a few years before we might not have predicted. Remember, just a few years ago, natural gas prices were volatile, unreliable, and solar power was too expensive for most households. Yet in just the last few years new technologies have flipped those on their head and we are seeing remarkable changes. Solar prices have fallen 60 percent in just the last 3 years, and natural gas is today cheaper than coal. There are dramatic changes in our energy future going on because of a huge resurgence in natural gas production in this country. We have every reason to believe that by focusing our greatest minds on this challenge, American ingenuity can change and even save the world.

If the United States is going to lead the 21st century, we have to be at the forefront of combating climate change. Although we know meeting this challenge will take global action, the United States needs to lead the way. This is our responsibility. We cannot expect other poor nations to act if a leading, wealthy nation such as the United States is not willing to take even the most minimal responsible actions. We are the second largest polluter of greenhouse gases on the planet, only just eclipsed by the Chinese in the last decade.

For more than a century our economic growth and our strong middle class--built on American industry and innovation--made us the envy of the world, but they have also contributed to putting our planet in a dangerous position.

As developing nations work to lift hundreds of millions of people out of desperate poverty, they are looking at us to show that it is possible. Also, a great but urgent opportunity here lies before us. We have a moral obligation to lead because others are looking at competing examples and are not waiting around.

China, our greatest economic competitor, now and into the future, is itself choking on the byproducts of coal and investing heavily in cleaner air and cleaner energy. The country that figures out how to prosper without deadly pollution is the country that will dominate the technologies that our world uses and depends on in the decades to come. Are we really going to miss out on this chance to be the country that makes the clean cars, the

clean powerplants, the clean technologies of the future? I hope not.

We in Congress have the opportunity and the obligation to pull together and to act responsibly as well. We can pass the bipartisan Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency bill today, create great jobs, and make it easy for families to spend less on energy and save money while doing it. We can put clean energy on a level playing field by passing the bipartisan Master Limited Partnership Parity Act, of which I am a cosponsor, to stop giving coal, oil, and natural gas a leg up without an even playing field for renewables and energy efficiency. We can invest in the research that will unlock the energy innovations of the future.

These are actions we could take today. There will be costs. But if we act now, they will be far outweighed by the benefits today and into the future. If we wait, these costs will only grow.

I understand this is a difficult issue politically for us to take on. Many of the most dire consequences of global warming are still into the future. As I know, as a person who struggles to make long-term, delayed decisions--whether it is investing for retirement or losing the weight my doctor keeps suggesting would help improve my long-term health-- humans are not really good at taking the small but powerful steps today that over time will lead to a healthier, more secure future. Even if the costs are low, when the benefits are farther out, it is so hard for us to take action.

What will we say--what will we say--when our children ask, what did we do, when the science was clear, when the options were before us, and when we had the chance? Just as we rightly worry in this Chamber about the financial debts we are going to leave to future generations, leaving this debt, leaving the burdens of unaddressed, unresolved global warming and climate change to our children and future generations is a debt too deep for us not to address.

We are in danger--if we do not act--of leaving behind not only a worse off world but of leaving ourselves a future where we cannot look our children in the eye and say that we stepped up to the greatest global challenge of this century.

What will it mean when my own daughter, at some point in the future, goes to Glacier National Park with her future family? Will it even have glaciers? How will she explain to them how that amazing national park has changed? And what will she say about what this Senate and her own father did to take action? It is my hope, my prayer, that on that future trip they will reflect on how we found the will, how we found the determination, to act together to change the trajectory of our future and to save it for everyone's future.

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

Mr. President, I thank my friend from Indiana for his remarks about our military service men and women and our obligation to provide them the care they have earned for their service. I look forward to voting, along with everyone in this Chamber, on this bipartisan legislation this afternoon, which represents the first step--not the last step but the first step--toward the systemic failures that have been disclosed as a result of the comprehensive VA audit.

I come to the floor to speak again about a growing humanitarian crisis in South Texas, the State I represent, where authorities are struggling with waves of unaccompanied minors--children--coming through Mexico into the United States. The numbers are pretty staggering. So far 47,000 minors have been detained at the southwestern border since October. The Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol estimate that there could be as many as 60,000 unaccompanied minors, mostly from Central America. If we look at the map from Guatemala City to McAllen, TX, it is roughly 1,200 miles.

Unfortunately, this influx is a direct consequence of the perception that this administration will not enforce our immigration laws. Interviews with more than 200 of the migrants who comprise some of these individuals confirm their impression, which is reinforced by Central American news media outlets--primarily newspapers--that if children can get to the United States, they will have a free ticket and be able to stay.

We had a chance to question and discuss this humanitarian crisis with Secretary Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, this morning before the Judiciary Committee, and to his credit, he has taken an all- hands-on-deck attitude, but the truth is the Federal Government's resources are overwhelmed by this humanitarian crisis.

By creating a powerful incentive for people to come to the United States illegally, we have effectively encouraged children and their parents to make a treacherous and threatening journey from Central America, one of the most dangerous parts of the world today, through Mexico--large swaths of Mexico are controlled by drug cartels--and then all the way into Texas.

Secretary Johnson conceded this morning that somehow we are schizophrenic about this issue. When we look at the victims of human trafficking and other people, we all agree we need to do more on a bipartisan basis to deal with this scourge of human trafficking, but the fact is that the transnational criminal organizations--trafficking people for economic reasons, such as for sex, drugs, and weapons--will do anything for money. They are criminals, and that is what they do.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of innocent children who are now being swept up in this humanitarian crisis, as I said, committed by their parents to take this trek across Mexico into the United States. We have no idea how many children start that journey and how many simply drop off along the way because they have been kidnapped, injured, murdered or perhaps they just become ill as a result of exposure and die during this long trek.

It is a journey that often begins in cities, towns, and villages scattered throughout Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The first major checkpoint is the Mexican border with Guatemala. It is about 500 miles long. Before arriving there, many families and children pass through regions of northern Guatemala that are controlled by the Zetas cartel, one of the most violent criminal organizations in the world.

When they reach Mexico, many illegal immigrants jump onto a network of freight trains known by the ominous nickname ``The Beast.''

I encourage anyone who is listening to me to go online and Google or Bing or use some other search engine and type in ``The Beast'' and read some of the horrific stories about transportation from southern Mexico up to northern Mexico on The Beast. NPR, National Public Radio, repeatedly reported The Beast train is ``just as likely to spit them out as it is to shepherd them safely to the border.''

Indeed, people riding on The Beast are frequently robbed, raped or killed by the drug traffickers and gang members who control the smuggling corridors. This is organized criminal activity by transnational criminal organizations. As one former Beast passenger told CNN, ``almost everyone gets assaulted.''

If there is anybody who thinks illegal immigration and trafficking involves some sort of benign experience of traveling from a country where people don't have an opportunity to a country where people do have an opportunity, that part is true, but what they don't tell you is the horrific, life-threatening, and sometimes life-destroying experience of getting to the United States because people are committing themselves to the tender mercies of some of the most violent criminal organizations on the planet.

In recent years, Mexican authorities have discovered mass graves containing the bodies of Central American migrants--those who did not make it to our southern border. Among those who are not murdered by the cartels, many passengers on The Beast simply fall off the train. For example, they try to jump on it while it is moving. If they are lucky, they might just end up with a few broken bones, but if they are not lucky, they might end up losing a limb or being crushed to death underneath its wheels.

In short, no one should be traveling to the United States this way and least of all young children, some of whom, according to published newspaper reports, are as young as 3 and 5 years old. Can any parent comprehend the idea of a 3- or 5-year-old coming unaccompanied or perhaps en masse with drug cartels and criminal organizations transporting them from their home country to the United States?

The Border Patrol reported that 180 convicted sex offenders have been arrested since October while coming across the southwestern border. Can you imagine this trip with convicted sex offenders mixed into the mass of humanity coming across the border?

Some children who ride The Beast are kidnapped or forced to become drug mules or forced into sexual slavery. In fact, some who make it all the way to Texas and north remain prisoners of organized crime after crossing the U.S. border.

I remember talking to one young woman. About 1 year ago I had the chance to visit with her. She came from Central America. She was brought by a coyote, they called him--a human smuggler--into Houston, TX. She had family in New Jersey, but that didn't work out, so she came back to Houston where she was essentially held as an indentured servant and prostituted and forced to turn over the proceeds of that money to the coyote--the smuggler.

When people operate in the shadows of the law, they have no protection of the law, and the people who are the most likely to get hurt are the immigrants themselves or certainly the immigrant community. We need to keep that in mind. We have to remember that Mexico's biggest and most violent drug cartels are heavily involved in this trafficking, as I mentioned earlier.

Time magazine reported last year: ``Cartels control most of Mexico's smuggling networks through which victims are moved, while they also take money from pimps and brothels operating in their territories.''

The cartels, gangs, and sex traffickers are only too happy to prey on the poor, vulnerable migrants, including children, transiting through their terrain. Experts believe the Mexican drug cartels may earn as much as $10 billion a year from sex trafficking and sex slavery alone. These are not nice people.

According to Amnesty International: ``Some human rights organizations and academics estimate that as many as six in 10 women and girl''--and one-quarter of these unaccompanied minors are girls--``migrants experience sexual violence during the journey'' through Mexico--6 out of 10.

A new CRS--Congressional Research Service--memo reports that based on apprehension data provided by Customs and Border Protection, ``there has been an increase in the number of [accompanied alien children] who are girls and the number of [unaccompanied alien children] who under the age of 13.''

They are not exactly able to defend themselves against the monstrosities they encounter along the way.

I hope it is clear to everyone listening and to the President and every other person of good will, that we should be doing everything possible to discourage people from risking their lives in the first place, and especially their children's lives, on such a dangerous journey.

Before I came to the Senate, I happened to be the Attorney General of Texas, and before that I had a career in law and the judiciary. It is standard criminal jurisprudence that not only should law enforcement enforce the laws in order to maintain the law, but the law serves another important function; that is, deterrence.

In other words, it stops people from doing things they know they should not do in the first place rather than just catching them after they do it. This is one of the elements that is missing and unfortunately was encouraged by the impression that you got a free ticket if all you had to do was get on the train and show up in South Texas. As I have said, this is very dangerous stuff, and it has backfired in unexpected ways.

Yesterday, I listed five simple suggestions to the President that he could take to start fixing the problem. I was glad to hear Secretary Johnson talk about some of the ad hoc measures he has begun to implement, but the truth is they are struggling to catch up.

I urged the President, No. 1, to publicly declare that his 2012 deferred action program will not apply to children currently arriving at the border. Let me stop there to say that this morning some of my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee could not resist the temptation to take a partisan shot. They said if the House had just passed immigration reform, this never would have happened.

My point is the President's deferred action program doesn't even apply to these children, so it is still against the law for them to enter. But they realize, as a practical matter, although the resources and capacity of the Federal Government are overwhelmed, there is no way we can turn them back, and they will have to be handled compassionately and in a humane sort of way.

It would help if, No. 1, the President would make clear he has not issued a free ticket to anyone who wants to enter the country illegally.

No. 2, I encouraged him to publicly discourage people from attempting the journey through Mexico, and it would help if our Mexican counterparts would do a better job--maybe with our help and assistance--securing their southern border, since that would stop a lot of people from coming from Central America through Mexico on this dangerous journey which I have tried to describe.

I also encouraged the President to enforce all of our immigration laws regardless of political needs or any frustration he might feel or anyone else might feel on the current stalemate in which we find ourselves. Sometimes these things take a little time.

My hope is, if not before, then by next year, Congress--the Senate and the House--can begin to move a series of smaller pieces of legislation that are more transparent, consensus based, and begin to repair the broken immigration system. I don't think anybody believes on the right or the left that the status quo is acceptable, and indeed it is dangerous to the people I have described.

So I mentioned the fourth item, which is to work with the Mexican Government to improve security at the border with Guatemala. I was recently in Juarez, Mexico, right across the river from El Paso, which used to be one of the most dangerous places on the planet because of all of the conflict between the drug cartels. Things are getting better. It is still pretty rough, but things are getting better thanks to strong leaders, such as the mayor, whom I met with there, and thanks to the assistance the U.S. Government is providing through the Merida Initiative to help train law enforcement and to provide equipment and the like. So we could step up our work with the Mexican Government to help them secure their own southern border, which would eliminate more than half of this migration from Central America.

Finally, I urge the President to take the step of making sure that Texas and other U.S. border States and communities have the resources they need to address the ongoing crisis.

Today I reiterate those calls, and I also call on the President to please act as soon as possible. Make no mistake. The actions we take and sometimes the actions we don't take have unintended consequences. But in the days and weeks ahead, there will be life-or-death consequences to an untold number of vulnerable children, perhaps in the misperception that they can come to the United States if they can just get here, without understanding the treacherous journey that will befall them. We are doing no one a service by allowing that.

Because the impression created by the President has resulted in this problem, at least in substantial part, I believe he has the unique authority and power to begin to fix it. But first he will have to send the message that I mentioned a moment ago, which is that there is no free ticket into the United States. We have to deal with the humanitarian crisis of these children and make sure they are safe, but then we need to get about the business of enforcing our laws and not just giving the impression that anybody and everybody who wants to come to the United States can come here.

Perhaps in a perfect world everybody could live in America. But the fact is that we need to have our immigration laws for our protection and for the protection of legal immigrants. We need to do everything we can to send a message that we are a caring country, but we are also a country that believes in the rule of law. We need to restore order out of this chaos, while dealing with the immediate humanitarian crisis of this wave of children that is overwhelming the capability of the Federal Government to deal with it. We need to do everything we can together to address all of these issues.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran), and the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Scott).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran) and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran).

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

Madam President, I rise to speak on a matter of great importance that seems to have slipped through the cracks of the public's consciousness. However, with the growing furor over the recent scandal at the Veterans' Administration, I expect more and more people will be made aware of it.

I don't think it is unreasonable to argue that most Americans would be outraged to learn the Federal Government pays tens of millions of dollars every year to pay hundreds, if not thousands, of government employees not to work. This practice used to be called featherbedding. ``The term `featherbedding' originally referred to any person who is pampered, coddled, or excessively rewarded.''

It was later used to describe certain labor relations practices. According to Wikipedia:

The modern use of the term in the labor relations setting began in the United States railroad industry, which used feathered mattresses in sleeping cars. Railway labor unions, confronted with changing technology which led to widespread unemployment, sought to preserve jobs by negotiating contracts which required employers to compensate workers to do little or no work or which required complex and time- consuming work rules so as to generate a full day's work for an employee who otherwise would not remain employed.

Congress tried to put an end to the practice in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act amendments, which defined and outlawed featherbedding. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has narrowly defined the terminology, leaving most practices undisturbed.

The featherbedding-like practice I am referring to today is most often called official time, wherein government employees--who are highly compensated, often including overtime pay--are paid to perform no work for the government, only work for the benefit of their unions. These ``employees'' are not union employees, nor are they paid by the union. Instead, they are union members paid by the taxpayers to work full time for the union while working for the Federal Government.

Of course, this practice also goes on in the private sector. However, in the private sector, the featherbedding comes off of the bottom line and is negotiated as a measure of ensuring labor peace and in exchange for other union concessions. In the Federal Government, where the bottom line is the taxpayer and where unions are not permitted to strike, this practice is a way for weak managers to use government funds to reward public sector union political supporters and financial contributors, passing the costs along to the unknowing taxpayer for services not rendered. In the private sector, official time is carefully monitored and controlled. In the Federal sector, managers generally look the other way.

According to the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, during fiscal year 2011 unions represented 1,202,733 nonpostal Federal civil service bargaining unit employees--an increase of more than 17,000 employees compared to fiscal year 2010. In that same year agencies reported that bargaining unit employees spent nearly 3.4 million hours on official time--an increase of nearly 10 percent compared to the previous year. How much money are we talking about, and why should American taxpayers shoulder the entire burden if the official time is only for union work?

Some may wonder what this has to do with the VA scandal. I don't think it is a coincidence that the VA--which is plagued by incompetence, dishonesty, and bureaucratic ineptitude--utilizes the practice of official time more than any other Federal agency, according to OPM. In 2011 the VA reported paying out nearly 1 million hours in official time--an increase of more than 23 percent over the previous year. The cost of official time in 2011 amounted to nearly $43 million. That is $43 million paid out to VA ``employees'' to do union work full time. Wall Street Journal Editorial Board writer Kimberley Strassel noted a few weeks back:

The VA boasts one of the largest federal workforces, and VA

Secretary Eric Shinseki bragged in 2010 that two-thirds of it

is unionized. That's a whopping 200,000 union members,

represented by the likes of the American Federation of

Government Employees and the Service Employees International

Union.

I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record following my remarks.

Union supporters often lament that under Federal law Federal employee unions are relatively toothless, especially when compared to the very powerful State employee unions. However, as Ms. Strassel noted, given its size and influence, the VA union may be an exception to that rule.

Once again, two-thirds of the VA workforce is unionized, and the agency has paid more than $40 million in salaries to full-time union workers in a single year. That has to have an impact on the VA's efficiency. And that is for workers who don't even work--except for the union.

Obviously, the inefficiency of the VA has recently been the subject of a very high-profile public debate. However, the impact unions have had on the VA's operation was being talked about well before news of the recent scandal broke. For example, Senators Portman and Coburn sent a letter to former VA Secretary Shinseki in 2013 noting that the vast majority of VA employees on official time were trained nurses, instrument technicians, pharmacists, dental assistants, or therapists. In other words, these were employees hired specifically to fulfill roles in direct support of veterans. Yet, instead of caring for veterans, processing claims, and helping to eliminate the horrendous backlog, these employees were being paid to do union work full time-- all at the expense of taxpayers. On top of that, union-negotiated work rules over things such as seniority and job classification have contributed to the bureaucratic nightmare at the VA. In addition, the unions have been the most vocal opponents of any reform proposals that would give veterans access to outside health care.

While it may be overstating the unions' influence to assign to them the blame for the entire VA scandal, it is clear that these unions have at least contributed to the problems we are now seeing at the agency. They are at least partially to blame for the backlog in veterans' claims. They are at least partially to blame for the failed VA bureaucracy. They are at least partially to blame for the failure of reasonable attempts to reform the agency in the past, and it is almost impossible to reform it the way it is currently run.

I wish I could say this problem is isolated at the VA. Unfortunately, there is at least one other scandal-plagued agency with a similar union problem. I am talking, of course, about the IRS.

We are all pretty familiar with the IRS targeting scandal. By its own admission, the agency was targeting Tea Party groups in the runup to the elections in both 2010 and 2012.

Like the VA, the IRS consists of a heavily unionized workforce. About 66 percent of IRS employees belong to the National Treasury Employees Union, or NTEU.

It shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that the NTEU is extremely active in politics, having twice endorsed President Obama. During the 2010 election cycle, when the IRS first began targeting conservative groups, the NTEU raised over $600,000 through its PAC, almost all of which went to Democrats. In the next election, in 2012, the NTEU PAC raised more than $700,000, 94 percent of which went to Democrats. In other words, during the same campaign cycles in which the IRS was targeting conservative organizations--organizations that were critical of the President, his administration, and in many cases the IRS itself--for harassment and extra scrutiny, the union that represents nearly two-thirds of IRS employees was busy raising and donating well over $1 million to Democratic candidates. And we wonder why the IRS-- which should not be partisan in any way, shape, or form--is filled with partisanship. We should not have unions at the IRS or at the VA. Is it any surprise that the agency found itself predisposed toward harming conservative organizations or their causes?

Of course, the IRS has its own issues with the practice of paying out official time. Indeed, as of 2011 there were at least 200 IRS employees working full time for their union--all at taxpayers' expense. In that same year, the agency paid out more than 625,000 hours of official time. The total cost of these union activities was roughly around $27 million. But that is only the beginning. That is $27 million in a single year paid

to ``employees'' of the Federal Government who did nothing but union work. That is simply preposterous.

As I said, if the American people understood that this type of fleecing of the taxpayers goes on every day, they would be outraged.

Current law allows most Federal employees to be represented by a union. There are, however, some exceptions--and good reasons for these exceptions. Most of these exceptions are for agencies that perform a national security function or other highly sensitive work. One would think the IRS would fit in that category. One would think the VA would fit in that category. For example, we don't allow employees at the FBI, the CIA, or the Secret Service to be unionized. There is good reason for that: We don't need partisan political activities in those agencies. But we don't need them in the IRS or the Veterans' Administration either. We also don't allow employees at the GAO or the Federal Labor Relations Authority to unionize.

In days to come, Congress is going to have to take a hard look at reforming both the Veterans' Administration and the IRS. One of the questions we are going to have to ask ourselves is whether these agencies, with their important and sensitive missions and their poor performance in the recent past, should be added to the list of agencies not permitted to unionize, not permitted to be partisan. And anybody who doesn't understand that doesn't understand anything about politics.

In addition, as we continually look for ways to improve the efficiency of our government, we will need to examine the overall practice of official time and determine whether it should be eliminated entirely. I, for one, don't believe taxpayers ought to be footing the bill for union work. I think the majority of the American people, if given an opportunity to fully understand this practice and the abuse it entails, would agree with me.

One thing is for sure: If what we have seen at the VA and the IRS is in any way representative of the influence unions have on government agencies, drastic changes are going to be necessary. How can any American citizen feel the IRS is above politics when it is run by a union? And we all know that unions support almost 100 percent one party over the other. How can we feel the VA is going to be handled right when it has a union representing it and determining all the workloads?

I have talked to the IRS Commissioners since I have been on the Finance Committee, and they admit that to try to correct or punish an IRS employee who is out of control and not doing what is right takes upward of a year if you are lucky. That is why there are all kinds of politics in these agencies and they act with impunity in advancing what really are liberal causes.

If there are any two agencies that should not have unions in them, one ought to be the IRS and the other ought to be the Veterans' Administration.

I was raised in the union movement. I learned a trade. I went through a formal apprenticeship program, and I became a journeyman. I am proud of that. I believe unions have a place in our society, but they have become more and more partisan. It is reported that 40 percent of union members are Republicans. Yet almost 100 percent of every dime that is given in politics is given to Democrats. So by any measure we have to say that these folks are partisan, which I think is their right. But should we have partisan control of agencies such as the IRS, which everybody has to deal with at one time or another in their life, and the Veterans' Administration, which is in dire jeopardy right now because of the way it is being run?

I have been very much trying to do a straightforward investigation of the IRS and these accusations that have been thrown at it, many of which are true. The more I get into it, the more I realize it is being run in a partisan way for one party when it should be run in a nonpartisan way--for neither party. I am going to do something about it, and I hope the American people pay attention to it because I think most people, including younger Members, would be outraged to know that there is partisanship at these agencies that is not just average partisanship. It is blatant partisanship. The more I get into it, the more I realize that is true.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the Wall Street Journal article that I previously referred to.

Madam President, last week our Nation commemorated the 70th anniversary of D-day. Leo Scheer of Huntington County, IN, is one of those courageous veterans who survived the outlying assault on the beaches of Normandy, and last month he made the trip to Washington, DC, through the Honor Flight Network to receive a hero's welcome from a grateful Nation.

My office had the honor of greeting Leo and this group of heroes upon their arrival to the World War II Memorial, and Leo made an unforgettable impression with his humility, demeanor, and strength of character. Leo is a member of what we have come to know as the ``greatest generation.'' They easily deserve that title, where duty comes as second nature, where braggadocio is not present, where simply standing up and serving your country in a time of crisis is responded to overwhelmingly without complaint and with true honor and dignity.

Sadly, there are a dwindling number of those not only who arrived on the shores of D-day in Normandy but those who served throughout the world's largest military conflict in history. While those great service men and women are still here to share their stories--at least a few--we must remember the sacred promise that we as a Nation made to them to give them the care they deserve when they come back home.

As a veteran myself, my hope is that our Nation will carry out this promise not only to our World War II vets but to all who have served in conflicts from that point forward--from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places. We must live up to the promise for all who were called to serve and answered that call.

Regrettably, in recent months we have seen this promise broken and shattered. Just this week an internal audit by the Department of Veterans Affairs revealed that the department's problems have affected 76 percent of VA facilities. Nearly 100,000 veterans continue to wait for medical appointments. These are staggering figures.

In my home State of Indiana confirmed audit findings show that veterans endured unacceptably long wait times. Some Hoosier veterans never even received an appointment. This is unacceptable. That is why today I stand here to support the bipartisan Sanders-McCain veterans bill that would implement key changes to the existing VA health care system.

This is not a perfect bill, and there are parts of it that I wish were different. I hope that we can manage some needed changes as it moves over to the House of Representatives and then to conference. I hope the final bill will make our veterans proud and begin the process of reform that the VA so desperately needs.

Let me address three key reforms in this legislation that I think are essential to moving forward and the primary reason why I have agreed to support this. First, giving veterans more choices in care--perhaps the most important provision in this legislation--is allowing veterans who cannot be scheduled within a reasonable time the option to receive care from non-VA facilities or private sector facilities outside of the VA. This also applies to veterans that reside more than 40 miles away from a VA facility, many of them not in a condition to be able to secure the transportation they need for that care, so they don't have to endure long drives to get care. We must ensure that veterans receive timely care, and if the VA cannot provide it, then our veterans should be free to go elsewhere for care, including Medicare providers.

Second, the removal of bad actors--there are a lot of good people working at VA. Their hearts are in the right place. They are talented and provide good care and good service. I don't mean to demean their contributions to veterans' health care, but we do know that there have been mistakes, mismanagement, and there has been some outright fraud, it appears. We will have to prosecute that. This reform would authorize the Secretary of the VA to demote or fire senior executive service employees based on their performance. That is not present now, and if we are going to change the management it takes more than just asking the first top person to resign as has happened. We need to look at the management team and those that oversee those that are providing the care and what their responsibility is in that role. Passage here would shake up the leadership of the VA so those people can be held accountable for their actions.

The third provision I want to mention is providing more VA locations. It is clear that some of our veterans have to travel very long distances. Also it is clear that the facilities currently in place are short of help and there are not enough to address the needs of the many veterans that are entering the system. So this bill would establish 26 new VA medical facilities around the country. As I said, while this legislation is not perfect, it is an important start but it should not and will not be the end of our work to live up to our promises to veterans.

Ultimately, as I stated before to our body of Senators, the VA needs a change of culture. Too many bureaucrats view our veterans as a list of numbers rather than the heroes worthy of our very best care. We have to look at our veterans through a different lens, one that sees them clearly as defenders of our freedom and as the heroes they are.

We must continue to investigate and reform the culture within the VA and ensure that this crisis doesn't happen again. That is why I called for an independent investigation. This bill authorizes the process of beginning these independent evaluations. Also the committee has provided additional funding to specifically allow the inspector general to conduct an independent investigation into the VA, and I join my many colleagues to ask the Department of Justice to join in this investigation. Now, unfortunately, this culture of indifference at the VA is not new. For years veterans have faced excessively long waits for disability claims. When I returned to the Senate in 2011, these waits were over 600 days in Indianapolis. Veterans were waiting over 2 years to have their claims adjudicated. Once we shined a light on the problem, the situation improved somewhat, but our veterans still face waits that are far too long both for medical visits and to receive their disability benefits.

My staff in Indianapolis currently have over 550 active cases that we are working on for Hoosier veterans who are seeking help and have not gotten satisfactory responses from the VA. So they call us and say: Can you help? We do everything that we can to help expedite the process. In many cases these veterans are just trying to assess the benefits that they have rightfully earned and they just want an answer.

Reflecting on Leo Scheer's service to our Nation on D-day reminded me of the opportunity that I had to visit the beaches of Normandy while I was Ambassador to Germany. It was, to say the least, a powerful and extremely emotional experience standing on the bluffs overlooking the spread of beaches from Utah to Omaha, and it made me reflect on the countless lives lost in service to our Nation.

I was standing there on a perfectly calm day. The water was gently lapping on the shore. The beaches were empty. A soft warm breeze was blowing. The sun was shining--just a beautiful day--and I was overwhelmed by the violence that must have taken place that I could only have imagined. We have all seen the movie ``Saving Private Ryan,'' and I give Mr. Spielberg great credit for making that a very realistic picture of what happens. But I don't think Hollywood, or those of us who weren't there, could imagine the violence that was taking place on that beach when our troops went ashore. The silence was not there. There must have been a cacophony of noise with hundreds of ships offshore unloading our soldiers into landing vehicles. Many of them were shot down by the German bunkers up in the bluffs, built-in concrete fortifications--an almost impossible task. Many of them never even got out of their landing craft. When the doors opened, many were shot before they reached the water. The water was red with the blood from our soldiers who never

made it to the beach. The beach was littered with bodies of those who never made it to the edge of the cliff. And the sacrifice that was made in climbing those cliffs and getting to those German bunkers took many, many hundreds if not thousands of more lives.

So visiting the graves of soldiers afterwards, pausing to say a prayer of gratitude for their sacrifice leads us to this point where we have to understand what it is we are trying to provide and why we need to provide it. That is in a response to those who put their lives on the line and sacrificed those lives--and many ended up with lifelong disabilities--a commitment to those that we would take care of them when they came back.

They have come back and run into a government-run bureaucracy that has run amuck. If it proves anything, it proves that government just simply doesn't do big stuff very well, without confusion, without bureaucracy, without duplication, without excessive costs. It is not efficient and not effective, nowhere near what the private sector can offer. That is why there is the provision for veterans who cannot get care at the VA on a timely basis to have the opportunity to use our private system.

They deserve our utmost care. They served on the frontline, but when they go for benefit decisions and when they go for health care, they are not in the front of the line, they are at the back of the line, and that is not right.

We cannot let the sun set today, and I am glad we are not, because we are voting to move this legislation forward. In doing so we are going to make a statement that we are going to try to live up to that promise and do the best that we possibly can. As I said, as a veteran I expect my country to fulfill the promises to my fellow service men and women, and as a Senator I will seek to hold the Veterans' Administration accountable and to do everything I can to help in the reform of the system. That reform is so desperately needed.

The leader of the D-day effort, GEN Dwight D. Eisenhower called the invasion of Normandy ``a fight in which we would accept nothing less than full victory.'' It is in that spirit that I call upon my Senate colleagues to immediately take up and pass this legislation on behalf of our veterans and then to continue the work of changing the culture of the VA so that we don't have to come back years from now and repeat this process all over again.

Let's get it right this time. The fight to restore trust to our veterans is one we are waging, and to paraphrase General Eisenhower, we should accept nothing less than victory.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Senator from Texas just spoke on the floor about the number of children coming across the border into the United States, and the numbers are frightening, they are so large.

We had a hearing today with Jeh Johnson, who is the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. A lot of questions were asked, such as if actions by our government or statements by our President are luring these children into the United States. Let me make the record clear. There is nothing--nothing--about the President's Executive order involving those we call DREAMers--children brought to the United States--which would lead any of these families of the children to believe they could qualify to be treated as qualified for docket--that is, deferred deportation--because they would be eligible DREAMers. None--none--of these children would be eligible, period. So the suggestion that this Executive order has anything to do with luring these children to the United States is wrong.

Second, there is turmoil in Mexico and Central America. That is a fact. I am sure that is a factor in decisions being made by some to leave. But there is an issue that has been overlooked here time and again which needs to be addressed. There is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book entitled ``Enrique's Journey.'' The author is an L.A. Times writer named Sonia Nazario. She started following the paths of children-- children--coming into the United States from Mexico and Central America and even South America. Here is what she found after her investigation: 48,000 children a year coming across the border into the United States, some as young as 7 years old, half of them without any escort. How do they get in? Well, many of them jump on freight trains. Can my colleagues imagine, 7-, 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds jumping on a freight train to come into the United States, trying to get here by themselves--half of them by themselves? Why? Seventy-five percent gave the same reason: To find my mother. To find my father.

That is what is bringing so many of them into the United States. What happened? Mother left that village in Mexico or somewhere in Central America and came to the United States. She works hard now and sends money home and occasionally will send toys at birthdays and Christmas and exchange photographs. And heartbroken children get on these trains and try to find them.

They found a 9-year-old boy walking around Los Angeles. They asked him why and where he was going. He said: Where is San Francisco? He was trying to find his mother.

That is the reality and the heartbreak of what is happening at our border when it comes to children, so many times over. The lucky ones make it. Many don't. A survey done by the University of Houston found over and over these kids on their way are starving, they are beaten, they are robbed, they are raped over and over. Some are pushed off of the train. Some die. Some are maimed. That is the reality.

What does it tell us? As we step back and look at this, what does it tell us? It tells us what we already know: Our immigration system in America is broken. It is flat-out broken. I know this, and everyone else does too. Twelve million people living amongst us, some of whom have been here for decades, worried about being deported tomorrow, with a household where the wife and mother may be a citizen, the children may all be citizens, but one person in the household is not--that is our broken immigration system.

Well, Congress, stop talking about it. Do something about it. So we did. We did. And the Presiding Officer was here. It was a little over a year ago. We put together a bipartisan coalition of Senators--four Democrats, four Republicans, and I was one of them--and we sat down and for months worked out comprehensive immigration reform to finally fix this broken immigration system and start to end some of the tragedies we know are happening to children and to their parents all across America. We worked on it for months.

It was a pretty interesting coalition. It included John McCain, a well-known Republican Senator from Arizona; Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator from South Carolina; Marco Rubio, a Republican Senator from Florida; Jeff Flake, a Republican Senator from Arizona; and on our side, Chuck Schumer of New York, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Michael Bennet of Colorado, and myself.

We worked on it for months, and we produced a comprehensive immigration reform bill that was endorsed by virtually every major labor organization and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We go through the list of virtually every religion in America, and major religions endorsed it. It was an amazing bipartisan product, and I was proud to be a part of it and even more proud when the day came that we passed it on the floor of the Senate with 68 votes--Republicans and Democrats. We did it.

What happened to it? We sent it to the U.S. House of Representatives, where it has languished for over a year. For over a year they have refused to call this bill.

Now Senators who come to the floor, who voted against the reform, who don't acknowledge the obvious--that the Republican House will not even call this bill for debate and a vote--and who criticize the current immigration system in America, aren't telling us the whole story. The whole story is that we need to fix this system top to bottom--yes, a path to citizenship but a path to citizenship that eliminates those with serious criminal records--we don't want them--makes those who want to enter this path pay a fine and learn English and make sure as well that they are paying their taxes to our country. Then we will put them on a path to citizenship, where they can be at the back of the line. Under our bill, it would take a person 13 years before they become a citizen. All that time they are paying their fines, they are learning English, they are doing what they are supposed to do, and they are subject to regular questioning as to any problems that might be in their lives that we should know about. That is what the bill does.

So when I hear people come to the floor and say this immigration system is broken, I agree completely. It is a tragedy to think thousands of children are crossing the border in search of their parents, as young as 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, and teenagers, being preyed upon.

I just had in my office the Ambassador of Ecuador to the United States of America. We talked about this issue. She told me the story of a 12-year-old girl whose mother and father were in New York, and this heartbroken girl decided she had to at any cost be reunited with them. She jumped on one of those trains, and she was apprehended by Mexican authorities. The parents found out about it and tried to find her. They put her in an orphanage. She was going through the Mexican legal system. The next thing: It was announced that this 12-year-old girl had committed suicide--questionable but still a tragedy. And this Ambassador from Ecuador said: I can't tell you what that did to our country. It broke our hearts to think that little girl was just trying to find her mom and dad.

We can do better. We can be better. All of the excuses in the world don't count when it comes to this issue because we are a nation of immigrants, my friends, all of us. We may have to go back several generations--in my case, not very far. My mother was an immigrant to this country. I am lucky to be standing on the floor of the Senate representing a great State such as Illinois. That is my story. That is my family's story. That is America's story. That is who we all are.

Why can't we, in our generation, embrace the reality of immigration and fix this broken system, make sure we have security on the border to stop, as much as we physically can, the flow of illegal immigration, and make sure those who are here are reporting to our government so we know who they are, where they are, and where they work? All of these things will make us a better and stronger nation.

Let me tell my colleagues something else about these immigrant folks, and I speak with some authority. The first wave of immigrants to this country, by and large, take the toughest, hardest jobs available-- anything--and they will work hard on those jobs. But they are also looking over their shoulder at their kids and they are saying to their kids: We expect more from you. We

want you to stay in school. We want you to succeed.

That dynamic of the hard-working immigrant and the first-generation American, striving to prove they can succeed, gives our country the energy it needs. It gives our economy the energy it needs.

I see my friend has come to the floor, Senator McCain, and I mentioned his name earlier in a positive way because we worked together so closely on immigration reform. He has a special challenge I don't have. Yes, we have many undocumented in Illinois, but being a border State, Arizona has tougher challenges than most. We tried in our bill to be sensitive to both States and all States in what we were putting together.

So I wanted to come to the floor and say a word about children coming across the border. I see two of my colleagues here, and I will yield the floor in just a second.

We need to acknowledge the obvious. These children are vulnerable. They are being exploited. Many of them are being hurt. Some are being raped. Others are being killed. And that has to come to an end. To bring it to an end in a sensible, thoughtful, American way, we ought to pass comprehensive immigration reform. No more excuses in the U.S. House of Representatives. Call the bill. For goodness' sake, call the bill. Debate it. Vote on it. I will accept whatever comes, but what I won't accept is ignoring these problems, blaming them on someone else, and putting off to some time in the future the reality of the responsibility we should face today.

I yield the floor.

I announce that the Senator from Missouri (Mrs. McCaskill) and the Senator from Oregon (Mr. Merkley) are necessarily absent.