A resolution to express the sense of the Senate that Congress should establish a joint select committee to investigate and report on the attack on the United States diplomatic facility and American personnel in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.

Mr. President, I can't disagree there is politics here. This is the Senate. But let me say one thing. I strongly support this amendment. Let me ask in the order of things right now, does the Senator from Texas still have the floor?

Very good. I appreciate that.

One thing, as I read this resolution that my good friend Senator Cruz has, I thought it really does not go far enough. I think all that people are talking about now is how can we preclude this from happening again, what happened and all that. To me that is not even the issue. The issue is the coverup.

I sat there as the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. I watched the day that this happened, 9/11, then of course the annex came after that, 9/12, the next day. When that happened there was never any doubt but that it was an organized terrorist attack-- never any doubt.

I happened to know Chris Stevens. He happened to be in my office right before he was deployed there. He was telling me in my office how dangerous it was over there. He said, you know, there are threats, there are terrorist threats. Al Qaeda has a presence over there and we do not have a lot of security, and he started requesting security. This is a long time before this happened. I have all the dates. I did not bring them down with me because it would be redundant. It has been in the Record so many times, that he knew this was happening. We knew there was this kind of activity in that part of the world and he wanted to do something about it, offer more security.

He is dead now, and he knew what he was getting into at that time. When the threats came for what happened on 9/11, people were aware of that. Remember the Brits, they left and several others just up and left because they knew what kind of threat was out there.

Anyway, what we did right after 9/11--and it is just a matter of hours after that they attacked the annex. They cannot say for certain that the original attack was organized. I think it was; it was an organized terrorist attack. But they can say with certainty, and I will not use my words, I will use their words, it was ``unequivocal,'' unequivocal that we knew at that time it was an organized terrorist attack.

I remember when Secretary Panetta came forward and he used the same word ``unequivocal.'' Then the CIA Chief Brennan, at that time--that was his job--said, sitting in my office and then again before a hearing, it was unequivocal that we knew it was an organized terrorist, Al Qaeda-related attack. We knew it.

The coverup is this. I have studied coverups for a long time. Iran- Contra, I went all the way through that. I remember that well. The Pentagon Papers, Watergate, all of these things were coverups. But this one, where 5 days after all of our people and the top security people knew it was an organized attack, to send Ambassador Rice to the talk shows to say, for purely political reasons and cover up the reality of it, that this was due to some video--I will only say this. I would like to pursue this in terms of the coverup, which is not covered in the resolution we are discussing right now. I think it should be--it should have been. I was not part of drafting it. I strongly support it. I know where we are coming from, and I think we need to get to the bottom of it. All the questions need to be answered. But the big issue that needs to be discussed, that nobody likes to talk about, is the coverup.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be acknowledged as if in morning business.

I do want to accommodate the Senator from California. I have three different subjects I want to talk about----

I need 9\1/2\ minutes.

Is that a unanimous consent request?

The Senator from California would follow the Senator from Washington?

Mr. President, point of inquiry: Is this after I speak now or is that starting now? In other words, we would have four Democrats before I speak?

The Senator already had one and then Senator Coons.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, if two of them speak now and then let me speak and then the Senator can speak after that, that is still 2 to 1.

Mr. President, when we were establishing our time, I would say to my good friend and colleague from California, I was joking around a little bit about using 9\1/2\ minutes. Is it all right if I make that 19\1/2\ minutes, maximum?

OK. I will do that. I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of the remarks of the Senator from California I be recognized for 15 minutes.

Mr. President, first of all, I wasn't going to do this, but since my good friend from California is on the floor and it is our favorite subject to talk about, I thought I would. I wish to take the opportunity to talk about the first round of the major global warming regulations the President is set to release this week. These rules will govern the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted from powerplants and they are the first round of rules following the President's major speech on global warming in June.

The rules represent the most aggressive representation of the war on fossil fuels we have seen in this administration, and we have seen a lot of them. We know the rules will require any coal-fired plant to have carbon-capture and sequestration technology; that is, CSS technology. While the Clean Air Act only allows feasible technology to be mandated, the CSS technology is not feasible. It is really not there yet. No powerplant has ever been built with the technology unless it has been supported by massive taxpayer subsidies. The rule would kill the coal powerplant industry.

While the rules may be constructed in a way that allows natural gas- fired powerplants to meet the mandate, we have to know that is coming next. After all, natural gas is a fossil fuel as well. There have been several statements of people saying, Well, wait around until fossil fuel, which is going to be next. The only thing these new rules will do is cause energy prices to skyrocket. I expect the rules to be one of the key issues covered by the media this week.

While the exact details of the rule will not be known until it is published later this week, there are a few things that we know right now. First, the science behind global warming is now more uncertain than ever. I spoke about this this morning in our hearing. Just last week it was reported all over the media--the Telegraph--this is in London, one of their largest publications--the Guardian, also in London, the Wall Street Journal, and others, that this year there has been 60 percent more ice coverage in the Arctic than there was this time last year.

My colleagues might remember the hysterical people were saying at one time that there would be no more icecaps by 2013. Instead, we find out it has actually increased by 60 percent. This is the equivalent of almost 1 million square miles, and this is being observed before the winter refreeze has even set in.

What makes it more interesting is that in 2007, the BBC reported that global warming would leave the entire Arctic ice-free in the summers by 2013. The scientist who made this claim, Professor Wineslaw Maslowski, said, in the typical bravado we have come to expect from climate scientists, that ``This is not a cycle; not just a fluctuation. In the end, it will all just melt away quite suddenly.'' That is in 2013. Well, here we are in 2013 and guess what. They are wrong again. There is 60 percent more ice than there was at

this time last year. A lot of the yachts and the ships that expected to use the Northwest Passage can't use the Northwest Passage; it is closed, closed because the ice is there.

This follows reports earlier this year, notably from The Economist, showing that global warming has been on a pause for the last 15 years. The Economist wrote: ``Over the past 15 years, air temperatures and the Earth's surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar.''

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did not expect this development to occur, nor did its models predict that there would be a 15-year stall in global warming.

Professor Anastasios Tsonis, at the University of Wisconsin, recently concluded that:

We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will

continue for the next fifteen years at least. There is no

doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.

This reminds me of all the hysteria in the 1970s that a global warming trend is coming. I can't tell my colleagues how many times on the Senate floor I have talked about how these cycles come and go about every 25 years, and here it is, right on schedule, going into a cooling period. Starting back in 1895, every 15 to 20 years, they start out with the new Ice Age is coming, everyone is hysterical, and then in 2007--1970--1919, they went into a period of warming, and then in 1995--or 1945--they went into another cooling spell and that happened to coincide with the year they had the greatest surge in CO2 on our planet.

I only want to say this finally has come to our attention that we are looking at a situation that is quite different than we have seen in the past. I mentioned that later in this month the long-awaited event is going to happen. It comes up every 5, 6, or 7 years. That is when the IPCC comes out with its assessment. This just came up--I saw that it is dated today in the Wall Street Journal, and I will read this:

Later this month, a long-awaited event that last happened

in 2007 will recur. Like a returning comet, it will be taken

to portend ominous happenings. I refer to the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fifth assessment

report.

That is what we are talking about. They go on to say they have learned from some leaks what is in that assessment. ``There have already been leaks''--I am reading now--``from this 31-page document which summarizes 1,914 pages of scientific discussion, but thanks to a senior climate scientist, I have had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document.

Keep in mind, this is IPCC, United Nations. The big news is that for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of manmade emissions from carbon dioxide is lower than the IPCC expected.

This is something we did not anticipate would happen just as recently as a few days ago.

Real quickly, it is my hope we get to some of these amendments, and I am going to mention one that is a very significant amendment.

A few months ago, when we were debating the continuing resolution, the Senate adopted amendment No. 29, which prohibited the EPA from enforcing this Spill Prevention, Containment, and Countermeasure Rule. That is the SPCC rule.

As we all remember, they were going to enforce this against farmers. The reason we did this is clear: EPA first threatened to enforce this rule against farmers at the beginning of the Obama administration, but they did very little outreach. Most farmers do not even know today about this rule or what they would have to do to comply. The only reason other Members know about this rule is because of the work Senator Pryor and I have done to highlight the problem for what it is.

This rule was originally drafted for compliance by major handlers of oil--refineries, pipelines--players such as the ones that are shown on this chart I have in the Chamber.

This chart actually shows part of Cushing, OK, which is a major hub of oil pipelines. Millions of barrels of oil are transported through and stored in this small town each day, and it is incredibly important that the handlers of the oil follow appropriate regulations to make sure accidents do not cause significant environmental damage. They understand why the regulations are in place, and they follow the rules with precision. And we are talking about the people in the adjoining towns.

These refineries and tank operators are who the rule was designed for in the first place, and that makes sense. But now EPA wants to enforce that rule against farmers.

What would it look like if we did this?

First, take a look at this second chart. This is a diesel fuel container on a farm. It is small. It does not hold that much fuel. But right now it is subject to the same regulations you would have for oil companies and refineries.

I asked a friend of mine, Keith Kisling, a wheat farmer in western Oklahoma, what it would take for him to comply with this rule that was designed for refiners.

He said: First I have to purchase a new double-wall container that would cost thousands of dollars. EPA justifies this by saying it would prevent leaks. Keith, like all other farmers I know in Oklahoma, thinks diesel is expensive. So Keith is not going to let his tanks leak, whatever kind it is. You would sit on a farm and realize that is leaking money. Obviously, they do not want to do that.

The next thing he would have to do is build a berm all the way around his tank to contain a spill if all of the diesel fuel came out of it. This would be expensive and difficult to operate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have 3 more minutes and conclude.

Finally, Keith would have to hire and pay a professional engineer to certify his spill plan, if he can find one. In Oklahoma, farmers cannot find professional engineers because they are all working for oil and gas companies, which makes compliance with this particular requirement virtually impossible. All told, Keith would have to pay somewhere between $10 and $30,000 to comply with the rule, and the environment is not any better for it.

After we secured the amendment prohibiting the EPA from enforcing the rule back in March, Senator Pryor and I worked to secure a permanent exemption, and we did this. We put it in, as the Senator from California will remember, the WRDA bill, and, of course, it is not final law yet. This is the amendment that we have right now.

Last month, during the August recess, I received word from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association that producers in Kansas and other areas out West were hearing from EPA enforcement officers that they were at risk of having the SPCC rule retroactively enforced against them once the prohibition on enforcement expires on September 23. This comes despite the clear actions Congress has been taking to provide relief to farmers. I honestly do not know of anyone who wants to subject our farmers in the United States of America to the same requirements that refineries and oil companies and these operations have.

So I do have an amendment that would go on. It is my hope we will be able to get to the amendments on the bill, the underlying bill that is under consideration today, and I think this is one of two amendments I have that should be accepted unanimously.

With that, I thank the Senator from California for giving me that additional time, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I sat through the speech given by the junior Senator of California. I have a long list of things with which I disagree and I am going to get to as many of those as I can in a minute. I feel an obligation to make a statement about some important policy issues that nobody talks about, certainly not partisan in any way. I wish to get that out of the way first and then I will have time, on the time that I have been given, to go back and cover as many of the issues that were misrepresented by my good friend, the junior Senator from California.

Sri Lanka

I wish to encourage the Obama administration to review its current policies regarding the country of Sri Lanka and seek further engagement to assist them as they continue their progress toward reconciliation and reconstruction after 30 years of a bloody civil war against the Tamil Tiger terrorists.

Just 4 years ago Sri Lanka defeated the Tamil terrorists and is currently recovering from economic, political, and social upheaval caused by this destructive civil war. I think there are a lot of people who didn't expect this to happen with this new administration, but it is. Good things have happened. Peace has brought historic postconflict recovery and Sri Lanka is bringing the dividends of peace in an exclusive manner, particularly to those in the north and to the east of the country, from where Tamil suicide bombers and other terrorist attacks were once launched.

Specifically, since the war ended, those two areas have seen an economic growth of 22 percent compared to an average of 7.5 percent for the rest of the country.

Sri Lanka has removed half a million antipersonnel mines, resettled 300,000 internally displaced people, and reestablished vital social services in the areas of health and education.

It is also conducting local elections in the formerly Tamil- controlled north on the 21st of September. I see this as an important step toward political reconciliation. Such processes take time, as we learned from our own Civil War.

It seems to me that Sri Lanka is developing into a key economy, both in its own right and as a gateway to India. A lot of people don't know where Sri Lanka is. It is that little island at the bottom of India and that part of the world.

Sri Lanka's geostrategic location, the deepwater ports, could be vital to the long-term financial and national security interests of the United States. We want them on our side. Some 50 percent of all container traffic, for example, and 70 percent of the world's energy supplies pass within sight of Sri Lanka's coast.

U.S. diplomatic efforts there, however, have lagged. As a result, I believe our long-term economic and national security interests are suffering. At a time when the United States is pivoting or rebalancing toward Asia, we may be giving this island nation reason not to consider the United States a friend and strategic partner.

Understandably, the policies of the United States toward Sri Lanka have focused on accountability for what happened during the last phases of the civil war, as well as on steps toward political reconciliation and respect for human rights. While these aspects are very important and deserving of support, I also believe there is the opportunity to engage in a wider simultaneous approach that also takes into account economic and national security consideration. Maybe this wider, dual- track approach would have a positive influence overall and make up for lost ground.

I have expressed these views in letters to both Secretary Kerry and Secretary Hagel in recent months. While both of them agree with me about Sri Lanka and its economic and geostrategic importance to the United States, both still point to the lack of political transparency and poor human rights record to reject a review of the administration's position, which restricts military-to-military relations and foreign assistance funding.

I take Secretary Kerry and Secretary Hagel at their word and believe the upcoming September 21 provincial council elections in the north can be a meaningful act of political reconciliation that would be between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minorities. If they are conducted in a free and fair manner, free of human rights violations, I will strongly renew my request to the administration to reassess our current policies toward Sri Lanka.

I know it is a little bit controversial, but we have watched what has happened over the years. We have watched the civil war. Then when you consider the very strategic location of Sri Lanka, it is very important, in my view, that we establish these relationships and recognize them.

Let me mention a few things I took issue with. Some of them I had a hard time understanding what the junior Senator from California was talking about when she was singing the praises of this administration.

First, I agreed with her on the tragedy at the Navy Yard. I have been down there many times. I was envisioning as I was coming from Tulsa up here on Monday--at that time they said Ronald Reagan Airport was going to be closed. They thought it was going to be closed down because of the proximity to the Navy Yard. It didn't turn out that way and we ended up landing there.

When I went down and I saw the scene, which I have seen many times before, and I looked at it, it was gut-wrenching to think that one deranged person could do this. We saw it before in Waco. We have seen it in Boston. We have seen it in other places. It is something that I assume is going to be with us. I don't know how it can be precluded.

I will say this, though. I fully expected several of my liberal friends would use that to try to come up with an excuse for more stringent gun regulations. I would only suggest that the District of Columbia has the most stringent anti-Second Amendment gun control laws anywhere in the country, and that is where this took place. You can't say this has anything to do with it, but I knew it was going to happen.

Another thing my friend talked about was the debt, all of this, talking about the other administrations. I would only remind you, this is something that is incontrovertible, the amount of debt this President has had up to today. He has increased our deficit by $6.1 trillion, which is more than all of the other Presidents from George Washington on up through recent administrations combined. You wonder where is all of that money, where did it all go? It went to his social programs.

My major concern--the Presiding Officer may have heard I was making quite an issue out of the fact the President wanted to send cruise missiles into Syria. I don't think there is anyone naive enough to believe you can do that and not have repercussions.

We have heard from Iran, which I consider to be the greatest threat to the United States, in that our intelligence has told us since 2007 Iran would have the nuclear weapon and the delivery system in place by 2015. That is a year and a half from now. Yes, it is something where we would be going in.

However, in the disarming of America, as I have referred to, I remember going to Afghanistan 4\1/2\ years ago. It was after the President's first budget. I went there because I knew what was going to happen to the military in spite of all this spending that has given us new debt, $6.1 trillion. Where did it go? I can tell you a lot of places where it didn't go. It didn't go to defending America.

I went over there. In that very first budget the President had, the first thing he did was do away with our only fifth-generation fighter, the F-22. He did away with our lift capability, the C-17. He did away with our future combat system, the only advancement of ground capability in some 60 years. He did away with the ground-based interceptor in Poland, which now puts us in a position where we are hustling all over trying to figure out where we can get a third site to protect the United States of America against a missile coming in from the East. We have 33 of them out there but they are all on the west coast. That doesn't help us here.

On top of that, this administration, in its extended budget, has taken now already $487 billion out of our defense

budget and is talking about another $\1/2\ trillion through his sequestration.

I know nobody believes this, and that is why none of the Members on this floor will talk about it, but this disarming of America puts us in a very serious situation.

The junior Senator from California was praising this President and all of the things she felt he has been doing, but it is time to hear the truth. She was praising him on ObamaCare and how wonderful this is and how thankful everyone is. Why is it the most recent polling showed 88 percent of the people in America want to do away with the individual mandate, and the vast majority of them say it is a bad idea? Those are the words they use. So it is not working.

I can remember back when we were going to have Hillary health care, back during the Clinton administration, and we asked the question--and you can ask any liberal who wants to get to a single-payer system or ultimately have socialized medicine, which I think will be down the road in the vision of this administration--if this hasn't worked in Great Britain, it hasn't worked in Denmark and it hasn't worked in Canada, why would it work here? They will never tell you this, but they were saying if they were running it, it would work here.

Anyway, this is something that is not popular, as was misrepresented by the junior Senator from California. Then she said: ``The news is great coming out of Detroit.'' That is fine, except they filed bankruptcy last week.

So when we hear all the things that are stated, just keep in mind this is still America, we still have certain values that have been completely reversed by this administration, and it is time to keep that in mind and to move on ahead.

With that, I yield the floor.

A parliamentary inquiry.

Just to make sure, because Senator Roberts--I had a question. He has gotten some time from Senator Cruz; is that correct? Senator Heitkamp wanted to make comments for a couple of minutes following Senator Stabenow.

So this is what I would ask: After Senator Heitkamp is recognized, I would be recognized. If Senator Cruz comes, I will stop at that time and yield the time to Senator Cruz and then continue after he has finished. That would be a consent.

Well, if I could just say that I am happy to allow that to go forward, but there needs to be a definite time. How much time will all three Senators--my understanding was that Senator Cruz--for how many minutes?

So if the Senator is asking that he take Senator Cruz's 15 minutes, I have no objection.

Well, if the Senator is asking that he take part of the Senator's 15 minutes and count against Senator Cruz's time, I have no problem with that whatsoever. So I would revise that to say that Senator Heitkamp would be going for 3 minutes, Senator Roberts would be going for 5 minutes, and then I would be recognized.

When Senator Cruz arrives to take the additional 15 minutes, that is fine. So in other words, the Senator takes 5 minutes, Senator Cruz comes, and I would yield to him for the rest of the 15 minutes. He is not here.

I object and I would like to explain why, if that would be appropriate for the next 2 minutes--if I could?

Mr. President, I am proud be a longtime member of the Foreign Relations Committee for many years. When this Benghazi tragedy occurred, the Foreign Relations Committee held hours of hearings. I sat through those hearings.

I want to say to my friends, I share their dismay that we have not caught the perpetrators. But I want to remind them that the President who caught Osama bin Laden--who killed so many of our people--was President Obama, and when he says he is going to do something he will not rest until he does it.

Secretary Clinton immediately called for an Accountability Review Board. That Accountability Review Board was not partisan. What my colleague wants to do is set up some kind of committee filled with politicians--of which I happen to be proud that I am one--but I put more faith, frankly, in the professionalism and the nonpartisanship of the Accountability Review Board.

Who headed that Accountability Review Board? Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who was first picked for public service by George H.W. Bush; and Admiral Michael Mullen, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

There are many other reasons why I oppose this. Secretary Kerry has addressed this and continues to address it. We had two classified briefings. The Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing to release a bipartisan report on the events that occurred in Benghazi and, last December, the Senate Homeland Security Committee released a bipartisan report on the security deficiencies, and the good news is: Of course as a result of this tragedy, changes have been made all over the world.

I sense there is politics here. I sense there is politics here. I do not think it is right to inject politics into such a tragedy. Therefore, I object.

Objection.

Mr. President, we have had a carefully constructed list of who would speak. I wonder how long the Senator wishes to speak.

How much time does my friend need to talk about his first subject?

What was supposed to happen was that I was going to speak next. I will give up my place so Senator Murray can speak, followed by Senator Coons, followed by Senator Inhofe for 9\1/2\ minutes.

I don't know how many minutes my friend needs--5 minutes.

I would follow Senator Inhofe's 9\1/2\ minutes.

Yes.

Mr. President, the consent I made was that we would go to Senator Murray for 12 minutes, followed by Senator Coons for 5 minutes, Senator Inhofe would be next for 9\1/2\ minutes, and then I would get to go for about 10 minutes.

No, two.

The Republicans had quite a few on their side speak. The Republicans had three speakers--one right after the other--so now we are going to have three speakers, and then it goes back to Senator Inhofe.

Mr. President, that is what I said. I said Senator Murray, Senator Coons, Senator Inhofe, and then Senator Boxer. That is what I said. Is that all right?

No. I say to my friend, I was promised to be able to speak at 3:30 so I am already giving up so much time, so if the Senator from Oklahoma could just take 9\1/2\ minutes.

All right. I ask unanimous consent to be recognized for 15 minutes.

Mr. President, first I want to add my voice of condolence to that of Senator Murray's and say to the Navy family how heavy our hearts are and that I stand ready, any minute, any hour, any second, to work with my colleagues to make sure mentally ill people do not get their hands on weapons. As soon as we can get a breakthrough on that-- and maybe on background checks--maybe we can finally do something for 90 percent of the American people who want us to.

I also want to note that Senator Inhofe and I have an ongoing dispute, though it is quite friendly, on climate change. We went through this this morning. He sees evidence that climate change is probably still a hoax, and he talks about the great news that we do not have climate change. I think you should tell that to the people in Colorado. But notwithstanding that--forget

that--I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record four articles that appeared in the recent days about how the consensus on climate change is growing, and there is 95-percent certainty that the cause is human activity.

Mr. President, I want to ask Senator Durbin how much time he needs, and I will make a request that he be recognized.

I am not the gentle lady anymore.

I remember 10 years of being a gentle lady.

Well, that is so nice of the Senator to say.

Mr. President, I want to talk about what is happening in this Congress or, better yet, what is not happening. We have to pass a continuing resolution so we can fund this government. That means all the functions--whether it is air traffic controllers, whether it is building our highways, whether it is FBI agents, whether it is paying Social Security. All the things we do--Medicare--we have to pass a continuing resolution to keep this government going--sending meat inspectors out to make sure we do not get poisoned, and the rest; you name it.

And where is the House? All spending bills have to start over there. The Republicans control it. They have not sent us a continuing resolution. We also have to make sure we pay our debts--just like all Americans--debts we voted for. Whether it is military spending, domestic spending, spending to help our farmers, spending to help recover from Hurricane Sandy, we have to pay our debts. To do that, we have to increase the debt ceiling.

October 15; it is coming. If we do not do it, if the Republicans play games, we will see a crash in the stock market. I am sure every American looks forward to that. They are not doing their work because they are obsessed--they are obsessed--with repealing a law they have tried to repeal 41 times. They are obsessed.

They tried to get it overturned in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said it is constitutional. They are trying to take away a law that is helping every American, and I am going to talk about it. They are obsessed.

They refuse to understand that raising the debt ceiling is not about future spending, it is about past spending. So their reason is, they are very upset about the Affordable Care Act--or ObamaCare, however you want to call it--and they are very upset about the deficit, which has come down by half from its height with this President's leadership.

Here is the thing: I do a lot of speaking to youngsters in school. When I explain to them what the role of a Senator is, I say, in essence, it is to make life better for the people--that is what I think it is--and to do it in a smart way, and to work with your colleagues to make sure you can compromise and get things done. Whether it is building highways or making sure our ports are dredged or funding the military, we must work together. No one gets everything he or she wants. That is life. You have to compromise. You cannot be an ideologue and say: My way or the highway.

To go after a law that was passed years ago--that you tried to repeal 41 times and failed, that you tried to overturn in the Court and failed--and then not to do your most fundamental responsibility of keeping the government open? There is something really wrong about this.

Let's take a look at this economy. Why are they so upset at what the President has been able to achieve?

President Clinton left office with a surplus--over $200 billion. Remember that.

Eight years later, President Bush left office with a $1.3 trillion deficit. I will not go into why because I do not have the time, but that is the fact, and no one can erase it from the books.

Since President Obama took office, the projected annual deficit has been cut in half. It is less than $650 billion. Yet they are willing to shut the government down by making believe no progress has been made, when we have cut the deficit in half and we are trying to get out of a disastrous recession.

Under the Clinton administration, the economy created more than 20 million private sector jobs. Under George W. Bush, we lost 665,000 jobs.

Remember, Clinton, millions of jobs created; George Bush, the Republican, hundreds of thousands of private sector jobs lost.

Under President Obama, we have added 3.9 million private sector jobs--coming out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. You can say what you want, but President Obama and the Democrats here--even though it has been a bear to do it--we have managed to wrap our arms around this recession and get us on a course.

How about housing? Home prices are up more than 12 percent over the last year. Home sales have increased 47 percent since their crisis low. Recent housing starts are up 75 percent from April 2009.

Housing was the cause of this recession. People sliced and diced mortgages and sold them on Wall Street and brought everything down. Deregulation; that was the Republican mantra. It went too far, and we lost our way, and people suffered through the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The Republicans, instead of working with us to keep the progress up, want to shut the government down, want to say we are not going to pay our bills, even though they voted to rack up those bills.

Look at the auto industry. In 2009, the auto industry lost more than 100,000 jobs. Rescuing the auto industry saved more than 1 million jobs, and the news is great coming out of Detroit. People are buying cars.

The Republicans put it all at risk by shutting down the government and not paying the bills.

There are going to be no more bailouts. I was so proud. I offered the first amendment. I think my friend remembers: No more government bailouts to the big banks. So we are on our way to saying, once and for all, we are not going to let this crisis happen again.

The stock market. Do you know the Dow fell to 6,500, Mr. President? Since then, it has rebounded to 15,000--almost 2,000 points above its precrisis record. But yet they will put it all at risk because they are saying they are going to play games, shut down the government, not pay the debt.

The last time they played these games--the Republicans--GAO found that threatening to breach the debt limit cost the Treasury $1.3 billion just in 2011, and $18 billion over the next 10 years.

The next time a Republican tells you how fiscally conservative they are, ask them why it is they added $18 billion to the debt by playing games with the debt ceiling.

I want to quote Republican President Ronald Reagan, one of the heroes of my friends' party. He said:

The full consequences of a default--or even the serious

prospect of default--by the United States are impossible to

predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full

faith and credit of the United States would have substantial

effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of

the dollar.

That is Ronald Reagan. In 1983 he said that even talking about a default had terrible consequences. They are not even talking about a default, they are planning for a default.

My friend, who is such a great leader in the Senate, Senator Durbin, informed us and Senator Reid informed us that the Republicans in the House have a bill they love. We call it Pay China First. If there is a default, they will keep paying China the interest we owe them, but they will default on all of the Americans here and all of the contractors, the highway contractors, the people who dredge our ports. They will default on what they owe the American people, but they will pay China.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the CBO Director under George W. Bush, said:

It's a bad idea. Little defaults, big defaults; default's a

bad idea period and there should be no one who believes

otherwise.

He said that in 2011. There is no such thing as a good default.

I have shown how far we have come with this economy. If we do not have the far right of the Republican Party taking America's country hostage, we will continue to grow this economy. But if they play games and try to shut down this government, it could all turn around. If they play games and they try to default on the debt, they could turn it all around in a bad way, and we will see the results as Social Security recipients start to worry, as Medicare receipts start to worry, as contractors start to worry, as Federal FBI agents can no longer get paid--it goes on and on and on.

One of the reasons they are so crazed is they are obsessed over the Affordable Care Act, which they call ObamaCare. In my time, I want to tell you what the Affordable Care Act does and see whether you think it is worth shutting down the government over this bill. They tried it 41 times, but they hope 42 will be their winner. Over 1 million Californians--this is just in my State--are already newly insured. Three million young adults are now insured on their parents' plans--3 million are now insured, 400,000 in my State. Now 71 million Americans are getting free preventive care, such as checkups and birth control and immunizations. They do not like that, I guess. They are willing to shut the government down over it. Now 17 million kids with preexisting conditions, such as asthma, can no longer be denied coverage. Insurance companies cannot cancel your health insurance because you get sick. There are no more lifetime limits on coverage. Anyone who has had a catastrophic disease knows it is pretty easy to hit that cap. No more caps in a year. No more lifetime caps. This is what they are so obsessed about. So they are willing to shut down the government to take away these benefits.

They said: Oh, health care costs are going to go up because of the Affordable Care Act. Well, guess what, health care costs are growing at the slowest rate in over 50 years. Insurance companies now have to justify their premium hikes. Before, they just hiked your rates and they could do it with impunity. Now, insurers have to spend at least 80 percent of your premiums on your medical care, not on overhead. They cannot pocket the money; they have to spend it on health care. Also, 8.5 million Americans have received rebate checks from their insurance company because they were overcharged. Is that what the Republicans are so upset about? They are willing to shut down the government to take away these benefits from the people.

Insurance companies cannot deny coverage or charge more for preexisting conditions. They cannot charge women more than men. There is no more discrimination. Again, in a single year, they cannot impose dollar limits on you.

The Republicans are upset about the deficit. The deficit has been cut in half.

I ask unanimous consent for 3 additional minutes.

The House has voted 41 times to defund the Affordable Care Act. They took it all the way to the Supreme Court, the Republican attorneys general. They lost. They made it a centerpiece of the 2012 election. They lost the Presidential election. Now they are willing to shut down the government unless they get their way.

So I would conclude by asking some rhetorical questions.

Why are the Republicans obsessed with kicking young people off their parents' insurance?

Why are the Republicans so obsessed with stopping preventive care, such as checkups and birth control and immunizations?

Why are Republicans so obsessed with repealing benefits that guarantee insurance coverage for children and adults with preexisting conditions?

Why are they so obsessed with stopping 13 million people from getting insurance who never had the chance before?

Why are they so obsessed with stopping 24 million people from getting insurance under the new State health exchanges?

Why are they so obsessed with repealing a law that prevents insurance companies from canceling an insurance policy when someone gets sick? Why are they obsessed that we are stopping that practice?

Why are they so obsessed when we say you can no longer have an annual dollar limit on benefits?

Why are they so obsessed with repealing a law that says to an insurance company: You cannot have a lifetime limit on benefits.

Why are they so obsessed with repealing a law that finally stops discrimination against women? You know, being a woman was considered a preexisting condition. Honestly. You would have to pay twice as much as a man for your health care. If you were a victim of some kind of spousal abuse, that was considered a preexisting condition and your payments went up or maybe you never even got insurance.

I have to that say finally, why are they so obsessed with doing away with the Affordable Care Act when CBO--the Congressional Budget Office--says it will save $109 billion over 10 years and over $1 trillion the following decade?

I cannot answer these questions. All I can think is that it is politics. It is politics. I have been here a long time. I am proud of it. I thank my people in California for allowing me to have this honor. There were many laws I did not like, believe me. I have served with five Presidents. I did not agree with quite a few of them--two or three--but when I lost a battle, I did not try to shut down the government. When I lost a battle, I did not say: We cannot pay our debts. Oh, maybe I voted once or twice as a symbolic vote, but I knew the votes were there.

So I would say to my friends, get over your obsession and proceed with your responsibilities to keep this government open. Forget about repealing a health care law that is about to kick in that is good for the people and pay your debts.

I yield the floor.

I rise to talk about the relentless assault on the poor and hungry in this country that is being waged right now in the House of Representatives and too often on the Senate floor.

The meltdown on Wall Street caused a recession in this country, as we know, that was worse than anything we have experienced since the Great Depression. Eight million people, eight million Americans lost their jobs. Trillions of dollars in the stock market were wiped out. With that money went the life savings of many middle-class families.

Many families lost their homes. Small businesses closed up shop. This was an economic disaster that hit communities across this country as hard as any natural disaster we have seen.

While Wall Street is doing well again these days, millions of families on Main Street are still waiting for their situation to improve. We are seeing new job creation, but millions of Americans are still out of work. In fact, when we look at the chart on employment rates, we see what happened in 2008 and 2009, the numbers of people who lost their jobs. While based on the population we are holding our own, we are just barely at this point keeping up with the population and beginning to grow again.

What the House Republicans are saying is get a good-paying job or your family will just have to go hungry. But there aren't enough good- paying jobs, as we all know. To add insult to injury,

they are slashing job-training money, which makes absolutely no sense, job-training money that States get to help Americans find work.

Economists point also to the irresponsible sequestration cuts as a cause for this sluggish job growth.

In the Senate we have passed a budget that will replace the sequester with a balanced solution to reduce the debt and balance the budget, but a handful of Senators on the other side of the aisle are blocking us from even being able to send negotiators to the House to finalize the budget. We are now stuck with a policy that makes absolutely no sense, that economists say is slowing down our economy and costing us jobs because of political games, pure and simple, in Washington.

This is having a very serious effect on the wallets of Americans who continue to find it difficult to put food on the table for their families. This is very real. It is not a political game for American families all across the country and certainly in my great State of Michigan. Even those people who are able to find work are working for less. In fact, wages as a percent of the economy are at 30-year lows.

When we look back, what has happened is not only is job growth not coming back as fast as it should, we are seeing people who have been in the middle class struggling by their fingertips trying to hold on or, most of the time, much of the time, losing ground because we are seeing wages going down, down, and down, even for the jobs that are available. This is a situation that millions of Americans find themselves in today. They are struggling to find work. When they do find work, the salary isn't even close to what it was before the recession.

Many people have taken pay cuts to keep their jobs or they have had their pay and benefits frozen for 4 or 5 years. Families who only 5 or 10 years ago were doing fine are now in dire straits.

Now the same Republicans who refuse to fix the sequester, who refuse to work with us to get the economy moving again for millions of middle- class families, again are trying to take temporary food assistance away from the children and families who are out of work or who are working one, two or three part-time jobs trying to make ends meet.

Let me stress as we debate the question of hunger and food assistance in America, we know that many families receiving SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, are working. They are working.

About half of those families receiving food help are working. They are people with children and whose wages are falling behind so they are no longer able to feed their families.

For those who have lost their jobs, SNAP is a short-term lifeline to keep food on the table while they search for work. We know the average new SNAP recipient only receives help for 10 months or less. Let me repeat that. A person who is coming onto this program during this recession worked before they needed help. They are getting an average of 10 months' worth of help so their family doesn't starve while they are looking for work and trying to put the pieces back together. Then after that they are going back to work.

What we also know is men, women, families on supplemental nutrition assistance are using that money to feed their children. Nearly half of the people who are getting food assistance help in this country are children. We are looking now at nearly half being children, children who are going to bed hungry at night while their parents are doing the best they can to get back on their feet.

We see senior citizens who find themselves in a situation where their only income is Social Security. That little bit of food help makes a difference of whether they can go to the grocery store and put food in the cupboard or not.

The real faces of food assistance are veterans who went to war for this country, many of whom were injured and returned home only to find they couldn't get a job or their disabilities made it impossible to work. People with disabilities are the faces of food assistance. Instead of honoring these men and women for their service, House Republicans want to take away the little bit of help they get each month to buy food.

If we add all of this, 85 percent of the faces of food assistance, of SNAP, are children with their parents, people with disabilities, including our veterans, and senior citizens--85 percent. The bill being considered in the House of Representatives would kick millions of children and their families off food assistance.

This is how majority leader Eric Cantor and House Republicans will cut $40 billion in food assistance. That is what they will be voting on, probably tomorrow. They do it by cutting off individuals and families who need the assistance the most.

Under the Republican plan, which Eric Cantor says encourages people to get back to work, benefits for a jobless adult without children would be limited to 3 months every 3 years. They better eat a lot during those 3 months.

That means if you lose your job and you are unemployed for 6 months, half of the time you will be able to have help in order to be able to put food on your table. Once you find a new job, you had better make sure your company doesn't close and doesn't go overseas within the next 2\1/2\ years or you will not be able to have any help to put food on the table as well.

It is important to note that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said that 14 million people will stop receiving food assistance over the next 10 years the right way. As the economy improves, they will get back on their feet financially and be able to find a good-paying job. We built into our farm bill reduced costs in SNAP because the economy is beginning to improve. But the House of Representatives, the House Republican majority leader's bill, eliminates families from food assistance the wrong way--by eliminating food help to those who most need it: 1.7 million poor, unemployed adults next year, whose average income is about $2,500 a year--$2,500 a year; those are the folks who would lose help with food--2.1 million low-income working families and seniors next year alone, 210,000 children who would receive cuts and would lose their school lunches under the House Republican plan, and other unemployed parents and their children--parents who want to work but can't find a job or a training program to join--will be eliminated from help.

The Republicans say it is about getting people back to work. But this bill cuts worker training and job placement for people who are trying to get back to work, who are mortified that, probably for the first time in their lives, they have needed help with food. They are people who have paid taxes their whole lives and who got caught up in this great recession and are trying to climb out but need a little help with one of the things I think we would all consider pretty basic--the ability to eat and provide food for their families.

People on SNAP want to work. They are like any American wanting to work, but there currently are not enough jobs, which is why we should be focusing on jobs and growing the economy. Right now we have three unemployed workers for every job opening. It is better. I can remember standing on the floor a few years ago saying the number was six unemployed workers for every job, and then five, and now it is three. But it is still three for every job opening.

Does the Republican plan do anything to help people find jobs or the job training skills they need to get a good-paying job so they can care for their families? No, absolutely not. In fact, the Republican plan would offer cash-strapped States a truly perverse incentive. I had to read this several times to see whether this was actually written down this way. They are allowing States to keep half of the Federal money that would be spent on food whenever they cut somebody off the program. So the incentive is to eliminate help for people so the State can keep half the money and use it for something else. That is in the House bill.

Let me be clear: We have seen occasions of fraud and abuse in the food assistance program, and that is why the Senate farm bill includes major reforms to crack down on misuse and to make sure only people who truly need help are getting help. We heard reports of people winning the lottery, two in my home State, but who are still getting SNAP benefits. That will not happen again under our bill. We have seen liquor stores accepting food stamps

when they do not sell much food. We have reformed that to make sure that cannot happen again, as well as a number of other areas where we can bring more accountability and tighten up the program.

We want every dollar to go to the people I am talking about today-- who work hard all their lives, find themselves in a bad situation and are trying to climb out but they need a little bit of help because their children are hungry, because they are hungry. Maybe they are a veteran or maybe they are a senior or maybe they are somebody with a disability who needs a little bit of help. So we have passed real reforms to crack down on abuses we have found, and we did it in a bipartisan way in the Senate. I am very proud of that.

What House Republicans are voting on is nothing more than an extremely divisive, extremely partisan political exercise that is, by the way, going nowhere, and it is jeopardizing the passage of a 5-year farm bill. We have never seen this kind of partisanship injected into agricultural policy in our country before. It is shocking what has happened in the last 2 years in the House of Representatives. And shame on the majority floor leader and his allies for doing it now.

Our farmers, our ranchers, our small towns and rural communities and our children and families do not deserve this. The 16 million people who work in this country because of agriculture do not deserve this. What is happening this week in the House of Representatives is not about reality, it is about some fiction they have made up--an idea if the stock market is doing well, if wealthy Members of Congress and others are doing well, then surely everyone in America must be doing well too. And anyone who isn't must be lazy or not trying hard enough.

The reality is most people in America are still struggling to get back on their feet from the recession. There still aren't enough jobs for every person who needs and wants one. The jobs that are there pay less than they did 5 years ago, and families getting food help are making about $500 a week. They do not have money in the stock market. They do not have investment income. In fact, the average SNAP family doesn't have more than $300 in assets--things they own. What they do have, though, because of our policy of supporting those families, is $4.53 a day to eat. That is right, $4.53 a day to eat--less than the cost of one specialty coffee at our favorite stores.

But some Members of the House of Representatives have decided that is too much, that $4.53 a day is too much for our disabled veterans, too much for our senior citizens living on Social Security, too much for our children, for families working multiple part-time jobs and trying to figure out how to get out of the hole that was created not by them but by others in the great recession.

We all want to spend less on food assistance, and the good news is, under the Senate farm bill we all voted on, we do spend less. The baseline for food assistance is going down. Why? Because the economy is improving. There is $11.5 billion in reduced spending built into our farm bill because people are finding jobs, and that is added to the $4 billion in fraud and misuse we have included.

Again, the Congressional Budget Office projects that 14 million people will leave the supplemental nutrition program as the economy improves because they will no longer need temporary help. Costs are going down the right way, because the economy is beginning to improve. And as it improves more aggressively, which is what we should be working on together, we will see those costs go down.

I should also add that SNAP recipients are already going to see an arbitrary cut, unfortunately, to their benefits on November 1 because of the expiration of the Recovery Act help that temporarily boosted assistance to families in need, which we did in 2009. So they are already going to see less available for food.

If we want to continue to cut spending the right way, we should be working together to invest in our economy, to support our businesses, large and small, to outinnovate the global competition, to get rid of the sequester and to help people get the training they need to find good-paying jobs.

The Republican approach is like saying: You know, we are so tired of spending money on wildfires--forest fires--so we will cut the budget for the fire service. That isn't going to work. The fires will rage on and they will only get worse. If we want fewer fires we have to find ways to prevent fires and contain the fires in order to reduce the cost.

The Republican approach is also like saying: We are tired of paying for the cost of drought, flooding, and other crop disasters so we will cut crop insurance. The government's cost of crop insurance went up over $5 billion--50 percent--last year because of droughts and flooding and so on. It went up 50 percent. And while we are seeing increases in crop insurance, it is projected that food assistance is actually going down $11.5 billion over the next 10 years.

Are the House Republicans proposing we eliminate help for farmers in a disaster or just low-income families--children, seniors, disabled veterans--when they have a disaster?

What is happening in the House right now is a complete reversal of 50 years of great American values. Today, in the United States of America, one in six people say they do not know where their next meal will come from--one in six Americans in the greatest, the wealthiest country in the world. We have a long history in this country of making sure that poverty and hunger are kept in check. In fact, Presidents on both sides have understood this. President Ronald Reagan said:

As long as there is one person in this country who is

hungry, that's one person too many.

That is one person too many. I wish our House Republicans could hear that and understand what he was saying. What would he have to say about this effort now in the House of Representatives to blame the victims of poverty and unemployment, to blame the children, to blame the seniors, to blame the veterans, who only want enough food to be able to eat and, for those who are able, to work and to get back on their feet and get a job?

The House Republicans who are proposing these drastic cuts all have enough to eat. We in the Senate are not living on $4.53 a day for food. We have enough to eat. None of us wonder where our next meal is going to come from, like the one out of six Americans. None of us have to worry about whether our children will go to bed hungry tonight. None of us have to skip meals so our children don't have to.

We in America are better than the debate that is being waged in the House of Representatives. The good news for children, families, seniors, the disabled and veterans across America is that the House bill will never see the light of day in the Senate. It is time to stop the political games around hunger in America. It is time to work together and pass a 5-year farm and food bill, to grow the economy and reduce the need for food assistance the right way--by making sure every American has the ability to have a good-paying job so they can feed their families and achieve their part of the American dream.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, 5 years ago, as a result of the greed and the recklessness and the illegal behavior on Wall Street, this country was plunged into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As a result, millions of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, and lost their life savings. And about 5 years ago we were looking at a situation where some 700,000 Americans a month were losing their jobs--an unbelievable number. The stock market plummeted. There was panic in the financial sector.

The good news is that to a significant degree we have stabilized that situation. We are not losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month. The stock market is, in fact, doing very well. But what is important to understand is that it is imperative we not accept the ``new normal'' for the economy as it is today because the reality is that today, while the situation is better than it was 5 years ago, for the middle class and for the working families of this country the economy is still in very bad shape. And I am not just talking about a 5-year period; I am talking about a generational situation.

Mr. President, you may have seen that just yesterday the Census Bureau came out with some new and extremely disturbing statistics, and it tells us why so many Americans are frustrated and angry with what is going on in Washington and why so many people respond to pollsters and say: Yes, we believe the country is going in the wrong direction.

What they are saying is true. They have every reason to be angry, every reason be frustrated. Of course, economically this country is moving, in a very significant way, in the wrong direction.

This is what the Census Bureau reported yesterday: They said the typical middle-class family, the family right in the middle of American society, that median family income today is less than it was 24 years ago. Median family income today for that typical American family is less than it was 24 years ago.

In 2002, typical middle-class families, that family right in the middle, made $51,017. Back in 1989, that family made $51,681. What does that mean? It means that 24 years later, after all of the effort and the hard work of people, today they are worse off than they were 24 years ago.

Let's think about what that means. It means that despite the explosion of technology and all of the robotics, all of the cell phones and everything else that has made this economy more productive, the median family income today is worse than it was 24 years ago.

I will give you an example of what that means. If during the period from 1989 through 2012 that typical American family had received just a 2-percent increase in their income--just 2 percent, a very modest increase--that family today, instead of making $51,000 a year, would be making $81,000 a year. That is a $30,000 gap.

If over that 24-year period people had seen a modest--I am not taking about a huge increase--a modest increase in their income of 2 percent, which people certainly deserve, that family would make $81,000 a year. Today that family is making $51,000 a year--less than that family was making 24 years ago.

This is what the Census Bureau also reported. They said the typical middle-class family has seen its income go down by more than $5,000 since 1999, after adjusting for inflation--$5,000.

They told us the average male worker made $283 less last year than that same worker made 44 years ago. Do you want to know why people are angry? They see an explosion of technology, they see an explosion of productivity, and yet a male worker today is making less than a male worker--the average male worker--made 44 years ago.

The average female worker earned $1,775 less than they did in 2007. A recordbreaking 46.5 million Americans lived in poverty last year. That is more people living in poverty than at any time in American history. Sixteen million children live in poverty. That is almost 22 percent of all kids in America. That is the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world. That is the future of America. Over one out of five kids in the country is living in poverty.

A higher percentage of African Americans lived in poverty last year than was the case 15 years ago, and 9.1 percent of seniors lived in poverty last year, higher than in 2009. More American seniors were living in poverty last year than in 1972. Today, 48 million Americans are uninsured, no health insurance. That will change as a result of ObamaCare. But as of today, 48 million Americans are uninsured, 3 million more than in 2008.

So when people call the Presiding Officer's office in Delaware or my office in Vermont and they say: You know what: we are hurting, they are telling the truth. What they are saying is Congress seems to deal with everything except the reality facing the middle class and working families of this country.

People worry desperately not only for themselves, they worry more for their kids. What kind of education will their kids have? Will there be enough teachers in the classroom? Will their kids be able to afford to go to college or will young working families be able to find quality, affordable child care? What kind of job will their kids have when they get out of high school or they get out of college?

Those are the questions that tens of millions of Americans are asking all over this country. Here in Washington, we are not giving them clear and straightforward answers. What makes this moment in American history unique is that while the great American middle class is disappearing and while the number of Americans living in poverty is at an alltime high, something else is going on in this society; that is, that the people on top, the top 1 percent, have never, ever had it so good. Last week we learned an astounding fact I want everybody to hear clearly; that is, between 2009 and 2012, the last years we have information on, 95 percent of all new income created in this country went to the top 1 percent--95 percent of all of the new income created in America went to the top 1 percent.

The bottom 99 percent shared in 4 percent of the new income. So what we are seeing as a nation is the disappearance of the middle class, millions of families leaving the middle class and descending into poverty, struggling desperately to feed their families, to put gas in their car, to get to work, to survive on an $8-an-hour wage.

You have that reality over here, and then you have another reality; that is, the people on top are doing better than at any time since before the Great Depression.

Today, the top 1 percent own 38 percent of the Nation's financial wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 60 percent, the majority of the American people together, own only 2.3 percent of the wealth in this country. When I was in school we used to--and I am sure all over this country-- study what we called an oligarchy. An oligarchy is a nation in which a handful of very wealthy people control the economy, control the politics of the nation. It does not matter about political parties because they own those parties as well.

Guess what. What we used to look at in Latin America and laugh about or worry about has now come home to

this country. In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth. That gap between the very rich and everybody else is growing wider.

I do not believe the American people feel that is what this great country should be about; that the top 1 percent owns 38 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 60 percent owns barely 2 percent of the wealth. That is not the dream of what this great country is about.

Earlier this week Forbes magazine reported that the wealthiest 400 Americans in this country--400 people--are now worth a recordbreaking $2 trillion--400 people worth $2 trillion; in other words, the concentration of wealth is getting greater and greater and greater. The wealthiest 400 Americans now own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans, over 150 million Americans.

We could probably squeeze 400 people into this room. If we did and they were the wealthiest people in this country, 400 people in this room would own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the American people.

Just one family, one family in America, the Walton family, the owners of Walmart, are worth over $100 billion and own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. One family owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

While the middle class disappears, while children in this country go hungry, while veterans sleep out on the streets, corporate profits are now at an alltime high, while wages, as a share of the economy, are at a record low.

Wall Street--the major financial institutions in this country whose greed and recklessness drove us into this economic downturn and the group of people the American middle class bailed out 5 years ago--is now doing phenomenally well. So Wall Street drives the country into a severe economic downturn. Wall Street is bailed out by the American middle class. Wall Street now is doing phenomenally well while the middle class is disappearing.

You want to know why the American people are angry and disgusted and frustrated? That is why. In fact, the CEOs on Wall Street, the executives there, are on track to make more money this year than they did in 2009. That is the time in which Wall Street greed destroyed our economy.

The American middle class is disappearing. Poverty is increasing. The gap between the rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider. That is the economic reality facing this country. The time is long overdue for this Congress and this President to start, in a very forceful, aggressive way, to address that issue.

But where are we today? Are we having a major debate on the floor of the Senate as to how we are going to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and create millions of jobs? I do not hear that debate. Are we having a debate on the floor of the Senate that says it is an outrage that working people throughout the country are trying to survive on a minimum wage of $7.25 and we need to raise that substantially so that when people work 40 hours a week they can actually take care of themselves and their families and not go deeper into debt? Are we having that debate? I do not hear that.

Are we having a debate which says that not only should we not cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but we should join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all of our people as a right of citizenship? I do not hear that debate; quite the contrary, this is the debate I hear. This is what I am hearing from my colleagues over in the House and the Republican leadership over there. What I am hearing them say is that while poverty is at an alltime high, while our childcare system, early childhood education is a disaster, what they want to do is continue sequestration and push for more across-the-board spending cuts to Head Start, while elderly people throughout the country who are fragile and hurting are dependent on the Meals On Wheels Program, they want to continue cuts in that program.

They want to continue cuts in that program. While millions of families are wondering how they are going to send kids to college, they want to continue sequestration, making it harder for families to send their kids to college. They want to continue cuts to unemployment insurance and a number of other vital programs; in other words, instead of addressing the very serious problems facing the middle class and the working class of this country, what I am hearing from my Republican colleagues is let's make a bad situation even worse.

Let me conclude by saying, instead of cutting the Head Start Program, we should be expanding the Head Start Program. Study after study makes it clear that the most important years of a human being's life are 0 to 3. Giving those little kids the intellectual and emotional nourishment they need so they will do well in school is perhaps the most important work we can do.

We have to increase funding for Head Start, not cut funding for Head Start.

It is a moral outrage in this country that anybody here talks about cutting back on the Meals On Wheels Program, which provides at least one nutritious meal per day to fragile and vulnerable citizens. We should not be cutting back on that program; we should be significantly expanding that program.

I can tell you that in Vermont, if you talk to the people in my State, they will tell you we have significant problems with our bridges, significant problems with our roads, significant problems with rail, significant problems with wastewater and water plants. People want to invest in our crumbling infrastructure and make us a productive nation. When we do that, we can create jobs.

Right now on the floor--I don't know if we are going to get to vote on it--there is a very modest bill brought forth by Senators Shaheen and Portman which talks about energy efficiency. In Vermont and throughout this country, people are paying higher fuel bills than they should, wasting enormous amounts of energy, and contributing to global warming through greenhouse gas emissions because we are not aggressive on energy efficiency, making our homes more efficient. We should be investing in energy efficiency and creating jobs doing this.

The bottom line is we are in a pivotal moment in American history. The rich are getting richer, the middle class is disappearing, and poverty is at an alltime high. People are demanding that we create jobs and address the problems facing this country. Yet we have folks who want to make a bad situation worse by protecting the tax breaks that have been given to the wealthy and large corporations and then cut back on the needs of ordinary Americans.

I hope the American people will stand and say enough is enough and that they will demand that, finally, Congress stands with the middle class of this country.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise this afternoon to talk about two overarching issues that are confronting the Senate and the House at the same time. Both, unfortunately in this circumstance, are directly related. Normally, we would talk about these two issues separate and apart.

First of all, the Affordable Care Act and what that means for the country, what it means for families, the impact it is having now in a very positive way but also what it means for those families in the future and also the concerns I have about what a small group, but a very powerful group in the Congress, want to do that I would argue would adversely impact the economy.

Let me talk first about the Affordable Care Act. I was a strong supporter, worked hard for its passage, and will continue to work hard on the implementation. We have seen in the last couple of years, since implementation began in 2010, continued in 2011, 2012, and 2013, the benefits the Affordable Care Act have brought to this country. We have also seen where we have had to make changes, where we have had to come together, often in a bipartisan manner, to make changes to the legislation to make it work. There will be plenty of other changes in the future, but the worst thing we could do right now is to pretend, as some in this body and in the other body do as well, that nothing has changed for the better for families.

Let me give a couple of examples. I will use Pennsylvania examples, but of course in every one of these there is a national number that corresponds to the State-by-State numbers.

Consider this: In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 222,703 Pennsylvania seniors saved money on prescription drugs directly as a result of the Affordable Care Act. Health care reform provides seniors who hit the so-called doughnut hole with more than a 50-percent discount on brand name drugs. Already, just in Pennsylvania, that many seniors have had some measure of support when they got into that doughnut hole. That is a very nice way of saying a coverage gap, where they have to come up with the dollars for prescription drugs. I mentioned the number of 222,000 seniors in Pennsylvania who have already saved $168 million on prescription drugs directly as a result of this legislation. So if you are for repealing this, you have to tell us how you are going to help those 222,703 Pennsylvanians with their prescription drug coverage if you want to take away that benefit.

Two more examples. I will not go through all of these. There are 5,489,162 Pennsylvanians with preexisting conditions who will no longer have to worry about being denied coverage. That part of the legislation, as the Presiding Officer knows so well, is an enlargement of what we had before. What we had in the first couple years of implementation was a legal prohibition that a child who had a preexisting condition would not be denied coverage. Imagine where we were before this legislation. The Federal Government and the Nation were saying to those families: We know your child has coverage, we know you are paying the premium for that child, we know that technically your child has some kind of health insurance coverage, but if that child has a preexisting condition, he or she does not get covered.

That was the prevailing policy before the Affordable Care Act was passed. What we said in the act was that is unacceptable. The United States is not going to say any longer to a family: If your child has a preexisting condition he or she will be denied coverage and treatment. We wiped that out by virtue of passage of the act and then implementation.

Now we are saying, as implementation proceeds in 2014, that same kind of coverage for preexisting conditions will apply to adults as well. We couldn't afford to do it right away, but now we are able to move in that direction. Imagine what happens upon repeal, if we repeal the Affordable Care Act, if we go back to the old and, I would argue, very dark days, where children and adults with preexisting conditions don't get the coverage they need and surely deserve.

What kind of a country are we if we say a child whose parents have health insurance and have been paying premiums should not be covered or treated because an insurance company says they are not entitled to coverage? If we repeal the bill, we are going back to those days. Whether it is a child or an adult, the least we can do is say we will have a health insurance system in the United States where if you are paying your premiums, you will be given the coverage you are paying for and that you are entitled to. We couldn't say that before the passage of this act.

So repeal of the Affordable Care Act means preexisting conditions are no longer covered.

I haven't heard a lot from the other side about how they would achieve that. Maybe they will. Maybe they will come up with a plan to do that.

Finally, this is the third example. There are 91,000 young Pennsylvanians who have been able to find health care coverage. Under the act, young adults, ages 19 to 25, are able to stay on their parents' plan in order to maintain coverage.

A lot of families out there had a lot of worry and, frankly, a lot of financial burden but especially the anxiety of knowing a young person who may have been in college for years--maybe they had a 2-year college or 4-year education, but somewhere in that time period of being in college, roughly that age and after college up through age 25--had no coverage. This has solved that problem. Imagine the numbers across the country.

In both of these instances--young people having coverage on their parents' plans and children being covered for preexisting conditions-- we are talking in the tens of millions of Americans, children and young adults.

Those are just three examples--seniors getting help with their prescription drug coverage, which they never got before at this level of protection and help; children with preexisting conditions, now adults; and then, thirdly, young people across the country.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a summary entitled ``The Affordable Care Act Is Providing Stability and Security for Middle-Class Pennsylvanians.''

There is a lot more we could talk about, but we don't have time. I will not go into the national numbers because I know others have done that, but these are just some of the examples of what this legislation has meant.

The act is not perfect. No act that has been passed by this Senate has ever been perfect, especially something as challenging as health care, and we will make changes to make it work. But the worst thing we could do is for the Senate to turn its back on children and say: You don't deserve to have coverage if you have a preexisting condition or turn our back on older citizens who fought our wars, worked in our factories, taught our children, gave us a middle class, and gave us and younger generations life and love and helped us in so many ways and say to them: You know what. You can be on your own when it comes to prescription drug coverage.

That is the Affordable Care Act. But unfortunately this isn't just a debate about the act. Now we are getting into a debate about some people in Washington wanting to use the Affordable Care Act as a political weapon in other contexts. They say if they do not have a repeal of or a defunding of the Affordable Care Act, that somehow they think a government shutdown would be the right way to go or that we would default on our obligations.

Of course, I and many others don't believe that is the right way to go; in essence, in the case of the debt limit, holding the debt limit hostage to a relitigation of the Affordable Care Act. That is dangerous for the economy, but I think it is also very bad for those families I just mentioned.

This debt limit crisis that is ahead of us, just as the end of the fiscal year crisis is ahead of us, is manufactured. We don't need to have a crisis on the debt ceiling, but it is being manufactured to make a political point by some in Washington. Not all Republicans agree with this, certainly not around the country but even here in Washington. But some seem to believe this is the right way to go.

This is the kind of edge-of-the-cliff brinkmanship we saw in 2011, which had a substantial--and I think this is irrefutable--adverse impact on the economy. The Dow dropped 2,000 points because of the last debt ceiling debate, a debate which resulted in us getting an agreement at the very last minute, not going over the deadline. But some apparently think it is a good idea to default on our obligations for the first time since 1789.

What does that mean for most Americans? If we have the Dow drop 2,000 points or maybe lower, if we actually go over the deadline, it means a loss of savings for Americans. It may not affect people in the Senate who are wealthy or people in the Senate who have job security and health care security and everything else, but it will hurt a lot of Americans, and it will crater the savings of Americans if that happens.

An adverse credit rating, another adverse consequence, means more expensive credit for everyone. It translates into higher costs for housing, education, and other critical household expenses. Local governments would also bear the burden of a lower credit rating--a drop in the credit rating of the United States--which makes every project that much more difficult and expensive.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled ``Uncertainty Is the Enemy of Recovery,'' dated April 28, 2013, and written by Bill McNabb, the CEO of Vanguard.

I will not read the article, but I was certainly struck by it. Obviously, the author talks about this problem of uncertainty and what it causes. In support of his op-ed he mentioned the work done by two economists in measuring and calculating the cost of this uncertainty.

Here is what they concluded just as it relates to the uncertainty that results from a debt ceiling battle:

At Vanguard we estimate that the spike in policy

uncertainty surrounding the debt-ceiling debate alone has

resulted in a cumulative economic loss of $112 billion over

the past two years.

This is what Bill McNabb, who is someone who knows something about markets and related issues, said in April of this year.

So there is a 2-year impact of $112 billion because of a politically motivated and manufactured crisis, because some people want to make a political statement about the debt ceiling, which puts the economy at risk. I hope that some folks come to their senses because we can have and should have debates about reducing spending in a bipartisan fashion, how to reduce spending the way a business does, how to reduce spending the way a family does. But does it make any sense to do this kind of high-wire act? This is very dangerous for the economy.

This isn't theoretical. We had a dry run, unfortunately. We had a rehearsal of this in 2011. We didn't go over the line, we didn't default, but we came very close. We came within days of defaulting. Getting close to that alone had an adverse impact on the economy.

So to say this is fiscally reckless is a vast understatement. I don't know how to express it beyond saying that. To say that it is dangerous for the economy, for jobs, for families, for the middle class, for companies all over the country; to say that to default on our obligations or coming close to that--playing with fire, in a sense--to say that is dangerous is an understatement.

Here is what we should do: We should stop the games and the fiscal high-wire act, and we should focus on what middle-class families want.

When I go home to Pennsylvania, they say to me in a couple of short words what they want me to do: Work together to create jobs. Work together to create the conditions for growth, whether that is tax credits or tax policy, whether it is efforts to jump-start the economy.

One of the more depressing charts I have seen in 6 months or maybe even 6 years is a chart that was in the New York Times called ``A Shifting Economic Tide,'' dated July 25, 2013. It depicts the change in income from 1995. There is a long line going up and down with spikes and then the line going down. But the two most relevant numbers here are the comparison between the top 1 percent during the recession and then in the recovery. The top 1 percent got hit pretty hard, as a lot of people did. Even the very wealthy got hit. They lost a little more than 36 percent of their real income. But in the recovery, even though they lost 36 percent, they are up plus-11 in the recovery. So they went down by 36, but they are up plus-11. So they are still not back yet.

But what happened to the bottom 90 percent--not the top 1 percent, but what happened to the bottom 90 percent in the recession and recovery? According to this chart, the bottom 90 percent lost 12 percent of their real income, but they are still at minus 1.5. They haven't even gotten to zero. They haven't even gotten to positive territory yet when you compare their real income in the recession and the hit they took and where they are today.

So what does that mean for us? It means that both parties have a lot of work to do. It means that both parties should be working together to create more jobs and create more economic certainty instead of playing this game, which is dangerous, fiscally reckless for sure, and very damaging to the economy and even the morale of the country. They want us to work together. They don't want us to play a games like some want to play here.

I appreciate the fact that we are having a debate about the Affordable Care Act. It is very important to have that debate and make sure we get the implementation right. But we should not be using the Affordable Care Act as a political weapon in these debates about our fiscal policy. I believe we can do that in a rational way as long as people are willing to set aside their political ideology for a short period of time so we can resolve some of these issues.

I yield the floor.