Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act of 2017

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, it is time for the Senate and the U.S. Department of Education to get serious about the student loan crisis in America.

This is a crisis in Illinois. It is a crisis in Iowa, in Nevada. You pick the State. Student loan debt is now a larger debt in the United States than credit card debt. Add up all of the debt that Americans owe on credit cards, and it will not reach the amount of student loan debt that is carried by students and their families.

More than 44 million Americans have student loan debt. The total amount is $1.5 trillion. As I mentioned, it is larger than America's cumulative credit card debt--second only to the mortgages that we owe on our homes across the United States.

An American who graduated from college in 2015, with a 4-year degree, owed an average of $30,100. That debt is often much higher for many Americans if they decide to go on to graduate school or if they are unfortunate attendees at the for-profit colleges and universities. Across the United States, there are many of these for-profit institutions. You should remember them. It is 9 percent of young people who come out of high school who end up at for-profit colleges and universities, while 33 percent of all of the college students who default on student loans come out of the same schools--for-profit colleges. This is 9 percent and 33 percent. Why?

It is that they are so darned expensive--dramatically more expensive than are community colleges or other universities. No. 2, they don't care if you finish. They would just as soon you didn't. No. 3, if you finish, you get a worthless diploma and can't find a job. So there you are, stuck with your debt.

Yet this is about student loans in general, not just about for-profit victims.

I hear from students, young and old, who have had to forgo homeownership and hold off starting families because of their massive student loan debts. Increasingly, I have been hearing from parents and grandparents who, in gestures of goodwill and kindness, cosign on the loans on behalf of those children or grandchildren who are students. Guess what. Grandma and Mom are now trying to pay off that student loan debt because the student can't.

Earlier this year, Chairman Jerome Powell of the Federal Reserve said the student debt crisis absolutely could hold back economic growth in America--the student loan crisis. We need to take action on it. We rarely even try, but today I am going to try.

Earlier this year, in March, I tried to offer an amendment on the Senate floor to help student borrowers. At that time, the Senate had a bill up to provide regulatory relief--breaks--to banks. I thought it was only fair that the Senate also consider taking a look at the student debt crisis. I was blocked from getting a vote on my amendment. I am not giving up.

I am filing an amendment today to the Financial Services and General Government bill that is part of this appropriations package pending on the floor of the Senate. My amendment deals with an important part of the student loan problem--the treatment of student loans in bankruptcy.

If you borrow money for a vacation house, lose your job, and have no money, you file bankruptcy, and your mortgage is discharged. If you borrow money for a car, and you can't pay off the car--you lose your job--you file for bankruptcy, and your auto loan is discharged. How about a boat? If you take out a loan to buy a boat and file for bankruptcy, it is discharged.

I will tell you that there are only a handful of things you can borrow money for that you cannot discharge in bankruptcy no matter how bad things get, and one of them is student loans. Currently, most types of debts can be discharged in bankruptcy but not student loans.

Up until 1976, all student loans were fully discharged in bankruptcy, but since then, the law has been changed. Now if you have student debt, you are going to carry it to the grave. You cannot discharge it in bankruptcy.

In 1998, Congress determined that Federal student loans would be nondischargeable in bankruptcy unless the borrower could demonstrate that he or she faced an ``undue hardship''--that is a quote, ``undue hardship.'' But we didn't define it; we left it up to the courts. That is a problem.

Most students don't even try to pursue the undue hardship exception because of the difficulty and expense of meeting the standard of proving undue hardship in bankruptcy court.

Listen to what the Wall Street Journal said last month. It found that in 2017, only 473 student loan borrowers in the United States out of 44 million asked for relief from their student debt in bankruptcy--473 out of 44 million. The Journal found only 16 bankruptcy cases that year where a judge actually ruled on student loan debt--16 cases out of 44 million borrowers--and in only 3 of those cases did the judge cancel the debt. What do you think your odds are in taking your student loan debt to bankruptcy court when 3 out of 473--out of 44 million--actually had their debt discharged?

A big reason the undue hardship path is difficult for student borrowers is because the Department of Education contracts out the collection of the debt to companies like Educational Credit Management Corporation. This is a student loan guaranty agency that collects on defaulted Federal student loans. This company is notorious for aggressively challenging and appealing borrower claims of undue hardship in bankruptcy court because it doesn't want to see the loans discharged. So many students don't even try to fight them because they know they are going to lose.

Here is what my amendment does. My amendment would bar the use of Federal funds to pay contractors, such as the one I named, to contest undue hardship claims in bankruptcy court when the claims are brought by specific categories of borrowers who face severe undue hardship.

Let me tell you the categories I am trying to protect. These are people who are deeply in debt with student loans and are coming to court asking for relief from their student loans. You tell me whether you think these Americans deserve a break when they go to bankruptcy court on their student loans. The first category is veterans who have

been deemed unemployable because of a service-connected disability; No. 2, family caregivers of a veteran or an elderly or disabled family member; No. 3, people who are receiving Social Security disability or whose only income is Social Security; and No. 4, borrowers who have finished school but have spent at least 5 years with an income of less than $24,000 a year. Those are the four categories.

Wouldn't you agree that you would start with groups just like these and say: Give them a break. This disabled veteran has reached a point where he can't pay back this loan. Don't have these agencies hounding this poor fellow for the rest of his life.

By stopping these Federal loan guaranty agencies from contesting and litigating these undue hardship claims in bankruptcy court, we can at least give these hard-hit student borrowers a chance to seek an undue hardship discharge in bankruptcy.

My amendment also includes a provision preventing Federal funds from being provided to a for-profit college if the college receives more than 85 percent of its revenue from Federal sources, including the Department of Veterans Affairs GI bill and Department of Defense tuition assistance funds.

Currently, for-profit colleges are able to receive 90 percent of their revenue from Federal sources--the most heavily subsidized, private, for-profit companies in America. They can add the GI bill in on top of it, to add insult to injury. It makes no sense. It incentivizes for-profit colleges to aggressively recruit veterans and servicemembers in order to get extra money from the Federal Government and provide very little in return.

Not only would this provision help protect students, it would result in long-term cost savings to the Federal Government.

I say to my colleagues, I bet you have all given a speech on student loans. Haven't we all? When young people come in, burdened with debt, and say ``I don't know what to do with myself. I can't pay off this debt. I can't even buy a car. I am living in my parents' basement. I thought I was supposed to be a college graduate with a big life ahead of me. What are you going to do about it, Senator?'' if you say ``Well, I wish there were something we could do,'' you will get your chance today. There is something you can do. It is the amendment I am offering.

This issue of student loan debt is challenging. Let's not run away from it. Let's face it honestly. Let's give at least these four groups, including disabled veterans and the caregivers who watch them, an opportunity to get their student loans discharged so they can get on with their lives.

I am going to keep at this and keep raising this issue until we get the positive change the students and their families deserve.

I yield.

Madam President, I would like to ask the Senator from Hawaii a question through the Chair.

When the Senator is referring to the number of children who are currently forcibly separated from their parents by our government, is the Senator referring to the 2,551 children between the ages of 5 and 17 who were reported

by this administration as of this past Monday?

Is the Senator referring to the fact that 1,634 families are possibly eligible for reunification, according to this administration?

And that leaves 917 families with children forcibly separated by our government from their parents, who, according to this administration, may not be eligible for reunification?

We are also told there are some 463 parents who are ``not in the United States''--children taken away from them, and they have been sent out of the United States?

Incidentally, the administration reported 37 children in its custody who have not been matched with a parent?

And we are being asked to reduce the standards of care for these children by this unanimous consent request?

I thank the Senator from Hawaii.

I object.

Madam President, I have a unanimous consent request.

Madam President, I am making clear to my friend from North Carolina, as well as to the other Members on the floor, that I would like to have this colloquy. I would like to make a formal unanimous consent request, and then we can enter into debate or colloquy, as the Chair would allow, if I may proceed.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 3263 introduced earlier today; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

This is a bill which embodies the Keep Families Together legislation by Senator Feinstein, A Fair Day in Court for Kids Act by Senator Hirono, and additional measures which I will then describe later when we go to colloquy and debate.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I would like there to be some exchange, something even perilously close to a debate on the issue. I would be happy if the Senator would reframe his unanimous consent request for that purpose, and I would be happy to agree to it under those circumstances.

I object to the original unanimous consent request.

Madam President, let me try to give this some perspective. Let me start with something I hope we all agree on. There are three things about immigration that Democrats and Republicans can agree on. Let's see if we can say those three things and all agree.

We need border security in the United States. We cannot have open borders; we need border security.

No. 2, if someone coming into America is dangerous, we don't want them here, and if there is someone undocumented in America who is dangerous, we want them to leave. Those two things I think both parties can agree on.

The third thing really gets to the heart of it. We need comprehensive immigration reform. It is not a matter of solving the issue of the day; it is a matter of looking at all of our immigration laws and making them work.

The Senator from North Carolina has probably heard what I have heard from our friends in agriculture. Whether it is ranching or dairy or picking fruit, they need migrant labor. Americans are many not stepping up to take that backbreaking work, and they need help. That is one example.

We need comprehensive immigration reform. Let's take a look at the whole package.

I spent 6 months with Senators John McCain, Chuck Schumer--four Democrats, four Republicans. We wrote a comprehensive immigration reform bill. From start to finish, it was a bipartisan bill. It passed on the floor of the Senate with 68 votes 5 years ago, and the Republicans refused to consider it in the House of Representatives.

We still need comprehensive immigration reform. We ought to be working on that together. We ought to take that bill, reintroduce that bill, and make that our starting point.

The last point I want to make is about the current issue we face. Let's put this issue into perspective. First, I am sorry, but I disagree with my friend from North Carolina and the Senator from Texas, who say that this is our job to fix or, as the Senator from Texas said, we created this problem in Congress. That is not true.

The zero-tolerance policy that has led us to this moment of debate was created by President Trump, Attorney General Sessions, Stephen Miller, and others. It went into effect in April. We decided then, as official policy stated by the United States, that we would physically, forcibly separate children from their parents.

We argued that they are all criminals if they show up at the border. That is not the case. Some people legitimately come to our borders seeking asylum status. They are not criminals, per se, and to treat them as such and take their kids away is unwarranted. But that was our policy.

So 3,000 children were forcibly removed from their parents starting in April, and what happened next? These children were sent off into the system. The parents were sometimes held, sometimes tried, sometimes deported, and there was a furor that rose across the United States. People said: What are we doing? Why did we take that nursing child away from the mother? Why did we take that little toddler away from his father? What are we doing here? What is our goal?

The opposition from both political parties--Republicans and Democrats--got so intense that this President did something he almost never does. He reversed his position. He said: We are not doing the family separation policy anymore. That is the end of it.

But it wasn't soon enough. There were 3,000 kids at that point separated from their parents and spread across the United States. There was one I knew of in Chicago. A woman from the Congo was being held in California. Her 6-year-old daughter had been sent to Chicago. That is how I learned about the case. There are cases like that all over the United States.

Then a Federal judge stepped in. We are here today because that Federal judge said: Enough--we want these parents reunited with their kids now.

He set some deadlines. Four weeks ago, he said: All kids under the age of 5 need to be reunited with the parents they were taken away from. He set that goal with a deadline of 2 weeks ago. Our government identified only 103 out of the 3,000 who were under the age of 5, and they reunited fewer than 60 of them. As for the rest of them, it is uncertain what is going to happen to those kids under the age of 5 who were separated from their parents.

Now there is a vast number beyond that; 2,500-plus kids are out there, and this judge from San Diego stated that as of tomorrow, July 26, all of those kids are to be reunited with their parents too.

Guess what. We are in a position where that is not going to happen. It physically can't happen. Our government can't do it. Here is the heartbreaking secret that we now know: Our government separated these children from their parents without any means of reuniting them, without keeping information about where the parents were going to be, where the children are going to be when the day would come that the mother would get her baby back in her arms. We have no process for that. That, to me, is inexcusable and disgraceful.

If you order a package on Amazon this afternoon, they give you a tracking number. Tomorrow, if you want to know where it is, you go to Amazon, put in the tracking number, and you will know where your package is.

We sent infants, toddlers, and young kids all across the United States without a tracking number, and now we are trying desperately to reunite them. As I mentioned earlier to Senator Hirono, there are 37 kids out there about whom this government has admitted: We don't know where the parents are. We can't put this back together again. What are we going to do with these kids?

That is why we are on the floor to talk about this current crisis. It wasn't a crisis created by Congress. It was created by the Trump administration with

a zero tolerance policy. Attorney General Sessions and others were so proud of it, as they took the kids away from the parents, and they didn't keep records. They tossed these infants, toddlers, and children out into the bureaucratic sea and said: Start swimming or sink.

I met some of these kids in Chicago. There were 10 of them. Kids will be kids. They looked like regular kids sitting around the table. Two little girls came in, and I thought at first they were twins because their hair was identical and they were about the same size. When I looked more closely, I saw that they weren't.

We asked in Spanish: Are you sisters? The little girl said: No, amigas. No, we are friends. These two little girls had attached themselves to one another. One was from Honduras and one was from Chiapas, Mexico. They were holding on for dear life to one another's hand as they walked around this place because that was their connection; that was all they had to hang on to. They were taken away from their parents. I don't know what happened to those two little girls.

As a grandfather of 6-year-old twins, I looked at those little girls and thought, I know kids just like them, and I love them to pieces. I can't imagine being physically, forcibly separated away from those kids by any government. That is what we have done.

So I say to the Senator from North Carolina, let's find some things we can agree on. Let me suggest some things. Let's increase the number of immigration judges. Let's do it on a merit basis so that we can get professional people who know what they are doing--not political appointments.

Secondly, let's say that every child who appears in an administrative hearing is going to have an attorney next to them. It is embarrassing to me as an American to think of a 6-year-old, 10-year-old, or 12-year- old standing before an administrative judge with an interpreter, trying to figure out what is about to happen to them. We are better than that in America. We ought to make sure we are going to do much better than that in America.

Beyond that, we have to talk about what we do that is humane--that follows the Flores decision. Just wiping it away--there are no standards for humane treatment for those kids. We have to have standards. We have to make sure that they will be placed in areas we can be proud of, that they will be treated fairly, humanely, in the right way, which I am sure you want and I want too.

Those are things we can work on. Several weeks ago, we met and sent a list of questions to the administration to start our bipartisan conversation. They never got back to us. I think it has been a month now. I think it is time.

If you want to rekindle this bipartisan conversation, count me in, but let's do it with the information, and let's try to do it with a common purpose.

The last point I will make is this. If you want to make sure that somebody shows up at a hearing, 95 percent of those who are supposed to show up for these hearings do show up if you do one of three things. If you provide them with an attorney who gives them advice, they will come back for the hearing. If you provide them with counseling services--for example, programs that have been run by the Lutheran family services or the Catholic family services--they will show up for the hearing. Or if you provide, in some cases, an ankle monitor, they will come back for a hearing. So it isn't a question of whether they are going to be lost in the system. We know this works. Let's make use of it. It is a heck of a lot more humane than separating families by thousands of miles.

I yield the floor.

I announce that the Senator from Illinois (Ms. Duckworth) is necessarily absent.

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

Madam President, I want to start today by sharing a story that is very personal to me and that has informed my work and my values ever since it happened. When I was in college, a friend of mine--we were close and lived together in the dorm--went out on a date. She was raped. She got pregnant. She didn't know where to get a safe abortion, and she wasn't wealthy. So she knew she couldn't afford it, either. The botched procedure she ended up having left her, at a very young age, unable to bear children.

I saw my friend hurt and frightened, alone and unable to get the care she needed because someone else's beliefs mattered more under our laws than her health and her future. That impacted me a lot, and it has stayed with me to this day.

Let me tell you a few other stories. This is the story of a woman I met just a few weeks ago. When she was 23, fresh out of college, she became pregnant while living paycheck to paycheck in what she described as ``an extremely unhealthy and volatile relationship.''

She and her partner realized they were not ready to be parents and couldn't afford to raise a child, so they drove to a Planned Parenthood a few miles from her apartment. There, she was informed of her options. She was treated with respect and kindness and got a safe, legal abortion. Today, she is a writer and an editor and the mother of an adorable little boy, with another child on the way.

Here is another story. This young woman became pregnant in her first semester of college after a contraceptive failure. Having a baby would not only have meant dropping out of college but returning to an abusive home. She was grateful to be in New Jersey when this happened, where she could get an abortion without a waiting period and where there are a number of providers. She wrote that abortion access was ``critical in allowing me to determine my life path'' and in escaping the abusive household she had grown up in.

Finally, there is the story of a partner in a major law firm who was already the mother of a 3-year-old child. She was thrilled to find out she was pregnant with another child. But headed into the sixth month of her pregnancy, she and her husband were told that because of a rare heart defect, there was, in the best case scenario, just a 10-percent chance of the pregnancy making it to term, and there was less than a 1- percent chance of their baby making it to its first birthday--with no hope of a reasonable quality of life.

There is no right answer when it comes to decisions like these. Some women, some families choose one way; some, another. But this woman and her husband made the decision to end the pregnancy. It was their family, their future--her choice. She says she knows she did the right thing for her and her family, as difficult as it was.

A year later, she gave birth to a healthy son. She wrote: ``I have shared my story with my children and hope that should my daughter ever find herself in a position similar to mine, she will enjoy the same rights that were available to me.''

There are decades between my college friend's story and the three I just told and the historic ruling in Roe v. Wade, which affirmed that our Constitution protects a woman's right to control her own healthcare decisions. Roe and the rulings that have upheld it make clear what women across the country know at their core to be true--that reproductive freedom is essential to a woman's ability to control her future, plan her family, and contribute to

her community in all the ways she may choose to, as those three women were able to.

Reproductive freedom means women are more able to participate equally and fully in our country. And while I can't adequately express how frustrating it is to have to assert this in the 21st Century, we are stronger today because women in the United States are treated more equally than we were in the 1970s. In fact, former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen--the only woman to hold this position in the Reserve's 100-year history--has said that our country's economic growth in the last half-century was in large part due to women joining the labor force, and to continue the growth we have seen, we will need to do more to ensure that more women have a level playing field in the workplace and in society as a whole.

But the progress women have made--and the prospect of future progress--truly hangs in the balance. Today, I want not only to emphasize how real this threat is but also to paint a picture of how much more unequal life would be for women in the United States of America should Judge Kavanaugh be confirmed and add a fifth vote on the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade and rolling back reproductive rights women have had for more than four decades.

Let me say it again. The threat to women's reproductive rights is frighteningly real. It is real because, unless Democrats and Republicans come together, President Trump will follow through on his promise to overturn Roe.

On the campaign trail, Candidate Trump assured extreme, anti-choice special interest groups that he would implement their agenda if elected. He established a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees and released a list of potential picks, each of whom had demonstrated opposition to a woman's right to choose.

He said that under his Presidency, Roe would be overturned automatically once he had the opportunity to appoint Justices because they would all be pro-life. He said that women should be punished for having abortions. He chose a Vice President, Mike Pence, whose views on women and women's health are about as antiquated as smelling salts--and far more damaging.

Candidate Trump aligned himself unequivocally with those who want to roll back women's rights. And while President Trump has broken promise after promise to workers and families, he has never once wavered in following through for those anti-choice special interests.

He has done virtually everything he can to chip away at women's constitutionally protected reproductive rights from the Oval Office, whether it is proposing a domestic gag rule that would allow the government to interfere in provider-patient relationships, attempting time and again to defund Planned Parenthood, or trying to allow virtually any employer to decide to exclude birth control coverage from their employer-sponsored coverage.

I could go on.

Anyone who says President Trump isn't applying an anti-choice litmus test in this nomination or thinks it is unclear where President Trump's allegiance lies when it comes to women's health should take a look at what he has said and done. Unless they willfully ignore the facts, they will quickly realize that the President, far beyond any modern President, has championed the anti-choice cause and has found exactly what he is looking for in Judge Kavanaugh--a fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The best evidence that Judge Kavanaugh would overturn Roe is that extreme, anti-choice groups vetted his likelihood to do exactly that and sent him straight to President Trump.

But I do want to address a few aspects of Judge Kavanaugh's records that, to me, expose how unqualified he is to make decisions that will impact women from all backgrounds for generations to come. When I examine the record and history of a Supreme Court nominee, I hope to see a breadth of life experience, the ability to walk in someone else's shoes. Judge Kavanaugh has not demonstrated either of those qualities.

In expressing support for Justice Rehnquist's dissent in Roe--where the Justice argued for allowing restrictions on women's reproductive rights--Kavanaugh agreed with the idea that if a right is not explicitly stated in the Constitution, it must be ``rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people.'' But he made clear that he does not believe a woman's right to choose is rooted in the traditions or the conscience of our people.

I am deeply concerned about who Judge Kavanaugh thinks about and trusts when he imagines the traditions and conscience of our people and makes those decisions accordingly.

His opinions from the bench only heighten my concern. In one opinion, Judge Kavanaugh ruled to allow the Trump administration to block a pregnant 17-year-old who arrived alone at our borders from accessing an abortion until the government could place her with a sponsor. He felt she needed a ``support network'' around her before she was capable of making that decision, even though she had been seeking an abortion for months and had already met State level requirements.

In another opinion, he expressed the belief that if a woman's employer doesn't believe in birth control, that employer shouldn't even have to fill out a one-page form to allow the woman to get birth control coverage directly from her own insurer.

The ``traditions'' and ``conscience'' Judge Kavanaugh referred to may be, in his mind, that of historically powerful, very wealthy White men--first in powdered wigs and then in suits--who never faced the challenges women in these cases face. These women matter, too, and they deserve a Justice who accounts for their rights and liberties in his or her decisions.

Unfortunately, Judge Kavanaugh's opinions indicate he will not do so. Instead, they display a fundamental lack of trust in women's abilities to make their own healthcare decisions. They also show something more: a very poor understanding of the unequal economic and social realities women continue to face in our country, despite the progress we have made, and the degree to which these differences make it all the more important that women be trusted and treated equally under the law, independently, and in their own right.

If an employer tries to deny his employee affordable birth control because he thinks he knows better or if a politicized Federal agency is detaining a young woman in hopes that it can impose its beliefs on her or if a woman does not want to carry her rapist's child to term, our Nation's laws must affirm her autonomy because our laws are her place of last resort.

But under Judge Kavanaugh's vision for our country, based on his assessment of traditions and conscience, women wouldn't have that last resort. Instead, a woman's ability to get reproductive healthcare would overwhelmingly depend, as it did before Roe, on whether she could afford it and, therefore, disproportionately on her race and ZIP Code as well.

Our country as a whole would see outcomes like those we are already seeing in States like Texas and Mississippi, where abortion access is heavily restricted under policies Judge Kavanaugh has referenced approvingly. While women with resources have more options, women without resources see the providers where they had received affordable contraception and healthcare closed down because of anti-abortion politics.

Reproductive healthcare--from sex education, to birth control, to abortion--becomes a privilege for the wealthy, rather than the right of every woman, regardless of who she is. That isn't fair. It is not right, and it truly isn't what people in this country want.

President Trump said that Roe is a ``50-50'' issue in the United States. He is wrong. People in our country--Democrats, Republicans, women and men of all ages and backgrounds--overwhelmingly understand that abortion is a deeply personal decision, one our laws should allow women to make, just as every American's bodily autonomy should be their own concern and not their government's. Despite what the White House would have us believe, this is not a country that wants to follow President Trump, Vice President Pence, and five male Supreme Court Justices back to 1972.

The only way to stop this from happening is for people to take action. I urge anyone who is concerned right

now--women or men--to make that clear, loudly and immediately. If you have a story that shows why reproductive rights matter in our country, share it. If you haven't signed up to vote--or told your friends to--do it.

One year ago this week, three of my Republican colleagues stood with Democrats and stopped President Trump's effort to enact TrumpCare, which would have gutted protections for patients with preexisting conditions, ended Medicaid as we know it, and more. That happened because people across the country knew what was at stake and spoke up, despite how long the odds seemed. That is what we need now. I am confident we can succeed again if people who care show it.

The last story I will tell is one I hope women and men today will be able to tell their daughters and their granddaughters decades from now, should they ever need to hear it. It is that our country went through an extremely frightening time when one of the many rights on the verge of being taken away was a woman's right to choose. We thought about them--our daughters and granddaughters--and how important it is that each one of them be treated equally under our country's laws and have the opportunity to achieve the goals they set out to achieve. We did everything we could to fight back, and we didn't let it happen on our watch. I hope we make that our story.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object to the Senator's request, families should have access to simple, straightforward information so they can make the food choices that are right for them.

I was very glad to see that after 7 years of delays and foot- dragging, 7 years of objections from Republicans who didn't want to allow this commonsense law to be fully implemented, in May of this year, we finally saw this law implemented--by a Republican administration, no less. Yet, today, before us now is a proposal-- however well intended it may be--that would take us backward.

This bill would undermine nutrition labeling. It would punish businesses along the way that have already fully implemented the law and would carve out an entire category of businesses from providing labeling in their stores. It would bar the FDA from conducting the oversight we all count on it to do. It would weaken consumer protections

as well as protections for States and localities.

Frankly, why? This is a solution in search of a problem. Restaurants across this country are already providing labeling, and the FDA has made it clear that it intends to work with, not against, businesses in implementing the law. Furthermore, many States and localities have required caloric labeling for years, and not one restaurant chain has been sued.

So I am going to keep advocating for families being able to have access to clear, transparent nutrition information.

I object.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today with my colleagues in defense of the millions of Federal workers around the country who have been targeted by President Trump and his administration, including tens of thousands of workers in my home State of Washington.

Federal workers go to work every day, performing jobs that often go unnoticed or unappreciated. They ensure that our grandparents receive Social Security and Medicare benefits. They investigate claims of unsafe working conditions or employers not paying workers what they are owed. Federal workers are the nurses and the doctors who take care of our veterans at VA hospitals and facilities. They are our first responders when natural disasters devastate communities, including thousands of men and women on the frontlines of the wildfires that today are ravaging the West. They help protect our drinking water and clean air as scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. They educate us about our Nation's landmarks at our national parks, and so much more. They work tirelessly every day to make sure our lives are a little bit better.

While it is the responsibility of government to ensure that every worker is able to go to work without putting their health or safety at risk, earn a living wage to support their families, and retire with dignity, the Federal Government has even more direct responsibility for its own workers and should be a model for treating workers fairly and protecting their rights.

Unfortunately, since day one, President Trump has fought to roll back those worker protections and undermine their rights. Now he has taken a number of steps targeting Federal workers' right to join together and collectively bargain for better working conditions.

Through a series of Executive orders, President Trump has made it harder for workers to organize, for their unions to effectively represent them when they have a dispute with management, and for Federal agencies to bargain collectively with their employees in good faith. These Executive orders target protections that were painstakingly negotiated and agreed to by both parties to make sure workers who are paid with our taxpayer dollars are treated fairly and that workplace disputes in the Federal Government are resolved efficiently and equitably.

Again, the Federal Government should be a model for employers, demonstrating how to treat their workers fairly and with respect. By treating

these Federal workers poorly, President Trump is sending a clear signal that this administration doesn't care about workers and will do nothing to intervene when corporate management mistreats their workers.

These series of Executive orders are not the only way President Trump is making it harder for working families to succeed in this country. Since day one, President Trump has undermined worker protections, including the right to overtime pay and collective bargaining, and made it harder for working families to become economically secure.

Now he has nominated another anti-worker, anti-union judge to our Supreme Court. Last month's Supreme Court decision in Janus made it clear that working families have to have a fair voice in the highest Court in the land.

Judge Kavanaugh's record proves he wouldn't be a fair voice for working families. Throughout his long career, Judge Kavanaugh has sided with corporate special interests at the expense of their workers and rights. He has argued against health and safety standards for workers-- a view not shared by other members of the circuit court. He has argued against workers' rights to be paid fairly for the work they do and repeatedly has been hostile toward workers' rights to organize and join a union and speak up together for better wages and working conditions.

Judge Kavanaugh has used his power as a Federal judge to try to create loopholes for corporations to avoid negotiating with unions and has even argued that some immigrant workers don't have a right to organize or collectively bargain.

Judge Kavanaugh's record is not one of someone who will be balanced and who will listen to each case without bias. It is the record of someone who has consistently sided with corporations and management, and I fear he will do the same on our Nation's highest Court. I fear that Judge Kavanaugh's pro-corporate, anti-worker record is exactly why President Trump and Republicans in Congress are pushing so hard to get him on the Supreme Court.

I am proud to join my colleagues on the floor today to stand for our Federal workers and for their families.

I urge every worker who believes that our economy should work for them, not just for corporations and special interests, to make their voice heard. Call, write, and text your Senators, and urge them to oppose this nomination. Our government, our economy, and our country are strongest when workers are able to make their voices heard and are part of this process.

I hope my colleagues across the aisle who care about the economic security of our working families and the middle class will join us in pushing back against President Trump's harmful Executive orders and opposing this anti-worker Supreme Court nominee.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, earlier this month, President Trump announced his choice to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, and he told us that nominee would be Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

During this short period of time--just a little over 2 weeks--we have seen some of our friends across the aisle attempt to tank Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation before it really has a chance to get started, certainly before they have a chance to meet him. Five of our colleagues across the aisle announced their opposition to any Supreme Court Justice President Trump might nominate--anybody; fill in the blank. Then, once the President chose Judge Kavanaugh, 15 more fell into lockstep with the first 5, so now we have 20 of our Democratic colleagues, before they have even had a chance to meet the judge, who have announced their implacable opposition.

I thought that would pretty much take the cake until I saw reported this morning that one of our colleagues across the aisle said that to support Judge Kavanaugh would make you complicit in evil. It is hard to take statements like that seriously. To me, that is completely unhinged and detached from any reality. This is the same judge who was confirmed in 2006 by a substantial bipartisan vote to what many have called the second most important court in the Nation. My advice to some of our friends across the aisle who are engaged in this kind of super-heated rhetoric is, get a grip. Get a grip.

The strategy we have seen on the other side hasn't worked too well. They have targeted the nominee's character, but then they have had to deal with the fact that this nominee is a standup guy and a good father. Multiple fact-checkers debunked claims regarding his legal views, as well as the timing of his confirmation, so it seems like our colleagues have moved on.

Now it seems like it is all about the paper. It is all about documents. We have heard from some of our colleagues requesting that every email, every memo, every document that ever crossed Brett Kavanaugh's desk be disgorged and produced in the course of this confirmation proceeding. Ignore the fact for a minute that when he was confirmed to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, they didn't request any of the documents from when he was Staff Secretary for the President of the United States, but now, for some mysterious reason, they could well be hiding the smoking gun they will use to derail his confirmation--or at least so they are acting.

In the course of my legal career--I served for 13 years as a judge on the trial court and appellate courts in Texas--I have seen phishing expeditions before, and this is the very definition of a phishing expedition.

I agree with our colleagues who say all relevant documents need to be produced--and should be and will be produced in a perfectly normal part of confirming a judicial nominee. But that is the key--the documents need to be reasonably related to the confirmation process.

Our friend the minority leader from New York sees things differently. There is no surprise there. Yesterday, he scolded me personally, as well as other Republican colleagues. He said that we are guilty of applying an enormous double standard when it comes to producing documents in a judicial confirmation hearing. He compared the confirmation of Justice Kagan to Judge Kavanaugh's.

Let's rewind the clock. It is true that Republicans wanted to see Justice Kagan's documents and review them before holding a hearing on her confirmation for the Supreme Court, but it wasn't the range of documents we are talking about with Kavanaugh. Her situation was dramatically different.

First, she had never served as a judge before, as Judge Kavanaugh has. He has a vast judicial record--300 opinions, 12 years on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. He has a vast record when it comes to his activities as a judge. You would think that would be a good place to start. We thought it was important to review relevant records for Justice Kagan at the White House because we didn't have judicial opinions to review. For Justice Kagan, we needed materials to understand her legal philosophy and style of reasoning, and we had to use what actually existed at the time.

I will say that the Solicitor General files--she was Solicitor General of the United States and represented the U.S.

Government in front of the Supreme Court. Virtually none of that was touched. We recognize that those attorney-client communications should be respected.

Second, for Justice Kagan's confirmation, Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that not every single executive branch document was relevant and important to her confirmation process. In that respect, I will tell my friend the minority leader that is not a double standard; that is the same standard. It should be the same standard.

Republicans and Democrats got together in the case of Justice Kagan and agreed that records from her time at the Solicitor General's Office were too sensitive and privileged and that they shouldn't be made available to the Senate in connection with her confirmation. Instead, the Senate decided it was more appropriate to focus on records from Justice Kagan's time at the White House Counsel's Office and the Office of Domestic Policy. So, too, we would say that Brett Kavanaugh's documents that he authored, that he contributed to at the White House Counsel's Office, subject to any privileges that might pertain, should be fair game. So there is already well-worn precedent when it comes to executive branch records--which should be on-limits and which should be off-limits. We observed that in the case of Justice Kagan, and we would argue that the same consideration should be applied to the Kavanaugh nomination.

Third, in the past comment of mine Senator Schumer was referring to yesterday, I was talking specifically about tens of thousands of documents in reference to Justice Kagan. In the end, 173,000 documents were produced on her behalf. By the way, that is nowhere close to the ``gazillion'' that the junior Senator from Alabama has alleged was produced during the Kagan confirmation. It wasn't a gazillion; it was 173,000. It might have seemed that way because that is a lot of documents. The stacks of paper were stacked high. But the truth is, much fewer than a gazillion were produced--173,000. Compare that to the document production for Justice Gorsuch when he was confirmed. That was roughly 182,000 documents. That is a high number as well, but it pales in comparison to what our Democratic friends are asking for in the case of Judge Kavanaugh.

The truth is, our friends across the aisle are picking numbers out of the air, talking about potentially millions of documents. The senior Senator from California has named 1 million as her magic number, and that is the minimum amount of documents she said she expects to be produced.

As I said, we all know that Judge Kavanaugh, in addition to serving as a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and in addition to working in the White House Counsel's Office, served as Staff Secretary to the President. Many documents crossed his desk while he worked in that job. But the effort to insist on every document that he touched from the time he was at the Bush White House as Staff Secretary is ludicrous. It is ridiculous. It is nothing less than a phishing expedition designed to delay his confirmation until after the Supreme Court reconvenes in early October.

Do our colleagues really seriously need to see every piece of paper that crossed his desk? Is what President Bush had for dinner 14 years ago relevant to how Judge Kavanaugh will serve on the Court? I am sure there is a copy of the White House mess menu as part of those documents, but those aren't his documents in the sense that he didn't create them, he didn't contribute to them. He was sort of a traffic cop--a very important traffic cop--in terms of the documents that went across the President's desk.

Our friend, the senior Senator from Connecticut, for example, seemed to suggest that every piece of paper that crossed his desk is important. He said he wants to see any documents that have Judge Kavanaugh's name on them, whether he was a direct recipient or a sender or he was copied.

If somebody sent a document to him, how is that relevant to Judge Kavanaugh's qualifications, something sent to him by somebody else that he didn't contribute to and he didn't author?

Well, based on that rationale, if Judge Kavanaugh were cc'd on an email about somebody's birthday party down the hall, apparently some of our friends across the aisle think that information is absolutely crucial to this confirmation hearing. Well, that is just not right, and it is ridiculous.

Just as the Judiciary Committee quickly processed Justice Kagan's nomination in 2010--somebody who spent a number of years at the Clinton White House--I am confident we could do the same if we got together and worked at it in the case of Judge Kavanaugh.

Under Chairman Grassley's leadership, the Judiciary Committee will work to produce hundreds of thousands of documents for Members to conduct a thorough review. I am confident of that.

We met with the White House Counsel yesterday to talk about the strategy for producing the documents that are relevant to the confirmation process, but there is no better evidence of exactly what kind of judge ``Justice Kavanaugh'' will be than the opinions he has written on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

The committee will receive thousands of documents that are relevant and important to the confirmation process. Senators and their staff will be able to review them, and Senators will be able to ask questions. I guarantee Chairman Grassley will hold a full and fair hearing before the Judiciary Committee when we convene for the purposes of the confirmation hearing.

We will be able to ask--all of us--on a bipartisan basis, the hard questions everybody wants to ask, and at the end of the process, which I am hopeful will take place this September, the Senate will act, and Judge Kavanaugh will become Justice Kavanaugh.

Beyond the document production, there is another wrinkle in the confirmation process that has emerged, and it hinges on the nominees's views on Executive power. I spoke a little bit about that yesterday, but there is just another thing to mention.

I am referring to a 1999 transcript of a panel discussion in which Judge Kavanaugh discussed the case United States v. Nixon, which forced then-President Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes. It was a significant event in our Nation's history.

My friend the minority leader has provocatively questioned whether Kavanaugh would have let Nixon off the hook. Well, no, he wouldn't, and neither did the Supreme Court of the United States--just the contrary. That is what we expect from the courts: independent legal judgment, whether it is the most humble among us or whether it is the President of the United States.

In a speech in a law review article, Judge Kavanaugh praised the unanimous ruling in the Nixon case. His views have been further confirmed by those who have worked closely with him over the years. They have said that to Judge Kavanaugh, Nixon was one of the most significant cases in which the judiciary stood up to the President.

So enough already. Enough with all the distractions, the hyperventilation, the fishing expeditions, and let's get to work. Let's keep this process moving forward on a bipartisan basis. Let's roll up our sleeves. Both Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch were confirmed in 66 days. If you applied that standard to Judge Kavanaugh, that would mean we would vote on his nomination on September 13, but we will have plenty of time to vet this nominee and to review the relevant documents that have some bearing on his qualifications and his experience and fitness to serve as a member of the Supreme Court.

I hope our Democratic colleagues will take advantage of the opportunity to meet with Judge Kavanaugh and to talk to him for themselves and see that he is an accomplished jurist and, perhaps even more importantly, an entirely decent human being. He is one who will faithfully and fairly apply the laws written and uphold our Constitution.

I know the senior Senator from West Virginia has agreed to do that, and I express my personal appreciation to him for breaking up this boycott, which has, I guess, been commanded by the highest authorities--the Democratic leader--to not meet with the judge until we get all the documents we are asking for.

Well, in addition to the Senator from West Virginia, the junior Senator from Delaware has also said he will meet with the judge, as has the senior Senator from Indiana, and I appreciate that. I think they will find a lot of comfort in meeting with the judge, and they will be able to get some answers to their questions.

I look forward to continuing our vetting process and voting to confirm Judge Kavanaugh this fall.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, is there an objection?

Madam President, there is an important difference between legal and illegal immigration, and they shouldn't be confused. We should all, as Americans, celebrate legal immigration. In fact, the United States is the most generous country in the world. We naturalize almost 1 million new citizens each year, many of whom serve in the military and otherwise serve their newly adopted country and are rewarded, in part, by an expedited path toward legalization, toward naturalization.

As a result of the deadlock in the U.S. Senate, the drug cartels that traffic in illegal drugs and other contraband--they traffic in migrants, they traffic in children--are celebrating today because we have a big problem that apparently we are unable to solve, and the status quo is simply unacceptable. It is dangerous, it is deadly, and it is killing people--not only the people who attempt the perilous journey from Central America up through Mexico and into the United States but also the drugs that are sold by these same criminal organizations that are, in the words of one expert, ``commodity agnostic.''

This is part of their business model. This is how they make money, and they are celebrating today because the very reasonable solution that our colleague from North Carolina has proposed has been rejected out of hand with no real alternative being suggested.

This is the same mentality, I fear, that calls for the abolition of ICE. You might as well ask for the abolition of the Austin Police Department or the Dallas Police Department or the San Antonio Police Department. It is an invitation to lawlessness. Unfortunately, there are some who believe that the status quo is better than the very reasonable, rational solution offered by our colleague.

Let me explain why objecting to this commonsense legislation imperils the life and well-being of children. Under the current law, unless this very reasonable solution is embraced, children are sent across the border unaccompanied by their parents because the traffickers know and the parents know that if they pay thousands of dollars to these criminal organizations, their child will be transported from Central America across Mexico and into the United States, and if they make it here under the current law, the Border Patrol needs to process this child--some of whom are 17 years of age and older, and for all practical purposes they are young men.

They need to be handed over to Health and Human Services for placement with a sponsor here in the United States. Recently the New York Times pointed out that the United States had lost track of 1500 of the children that had been placed with sponsors. Nobody knows what happened to them because, under the current law, the government doesn't have to do a criminal background check. The sponsor with whom this child is placed doesn't have to be a citizen, and there is simply no infrastructure in place and no system in

place to monitor the status of these children in the hands of these adult sponsors to make sure they appear at their subsequently noticed immigration hearing so that they can present a legitimate claim, if they have one, to asylum or some other immigration benefit.

All President Trump has said is that we are going to enforce our laws against illegal immigration. So if you come into the country as a parent with a child, the parent, being legally responsible, is going to be prosecuted. That is what the law calls for as passed by Congress and signed by the President.

The child will be protected under the law that I mentioned earlier. They will be placed with a sponsor if the parent or the person who claims to be a parent is going to be prosecuted. Part of what we have been struggling with is the refusal on the part of some of our colleagues to actually try to solve this problem, to keep those families together so that they can be kept in a humane, clean family detention facility pending a hearing in front of an immigration judge. If they have legitimate claims, then those can be rewarded.

The status quo guarantees that the criminal organizations that profit from transporting people, drugs, and other contraband across the border win. That is guaranteed by the status quo. It is also that we don't fix the problem associated with unaccompanied minors or minors who come with somebody who claims to be their parent.

So let's say we put the families back together, which is our goal. Everyone agrees with that goal. We don't have detention facilities for those individuals to be detained pending a hearing in front of an immigration judge, so they are released and told to come back for a hearing months, maybe years, in the future. Well, it shouldn't surprise anybody that the vast majority of people don't show up for their hearings. They simply use this flaw in our immigration system and the status quo in order to exploit gaps in our legal immigration system, and it is dangerous.

I regret that rather than embracing a solution, there has been an objection to this very reasonable proposal, which would add additional immigration judges and move these families to the head of the line so that they can present their case before the judge, rather than just releasing them into the vast American landscape. Many of them will never be heard from again. I think it is a terrible lost opportunity.

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Arizona (Mr. McCain).

Mr. President, there are a few things I wish to talk about today, but I would like to start by recognizing the service and bravery of our Capitol Police officers.

This week is the 20th anniversary of a shooting which occurred in the U.S. Capitol that claimed the lives of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Jacob Chestnut and Detective John Gibson when a gunman forced his way into this Capitol Building. They laid down their lives in defense of others and made the ultimate sacrifice defending the U.S. Capitol, this pillar of American democracy.

At the time, then-President Clinton said: ``The shooting at the United States Capitol yesterday was a moment of savagery at the front door of American civilization.'' He was right.

I was working in the Capitol that day, 20 years ago. I remember where I was, as I am sure everybody does who was here. I remember hearing the gunshots. I was on the telephone from my office in the House of Representatives with a member of the leadership staff, and I heard the chaos through the phone lines for the first time.

We are forever grateful for the sacrifice of those two police officers and their families and for the continued service and commitment of the U.S. Capitol Police every single day in the Capitol. They are the ones who protect us every single day. This week, we are reminded to thank everyone who puts on a uniform and steps into harm's way to protect fellow Americans.

Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act

Mr. President, I also wish to discuss important legislation the Senate passed earlier this week and the House passed today to improve skills training in our country at a time when it is so badly needed.

I am the cofounder and cochair of the Senate Career and Technical Education Caucus. I have to tell you, I am excited about this bipartisan legislation. It reauthorizes what is called the Perkins Career and Technical Education, or CTE, Act. It is a Federal law designed to help Americans get the education, training, and skills they need to fill in-demand jobs. The President supports the legislation. I know he is excited about signing it into law and helping

those who need the skills to fill those jobs that are out there.

CTE--at one time called vocational education--is just a great opportunity for the students but also for our economy and for employers. The bill that passed includes what is called the Educating Tomorrow's Workforce Act, legislation my colleague Senator Tim Kaine and I authored a few years ago to allow States and localities to use Perkins grant funding for a number of purposes.

No. 1, we allow them to use it for CTE-focused academies. We also encourage schools to incorporate key elements of high-quality CTE programs from around the country and promote partnerships between local businesses, regional industries, and other community stakeholders to create work-based learning opportunities for students, like apprenticeships and internships. We know they work. Getting that work experience really helps to be able to land a job, so we are excited about this legislation.

It also includes important accountability information for our most vulnerable students to track how well CTE programs are performing so we can ensure high-quality skills training.

When I travel around Ohio talking to employers of all sizes, they all stress one thing to me, which is, yes, the economy is doing better, tax reform has worked well for me, the regulatory relief is happening--that is great--but we are having trouble finding workers.

In Ohio today, on our website OhioMeansJobs, you will probably see 145,000 jobs being advertised, and yet we have 200,000 people out of work. A lot of that is the skills gap. I often hear the biggest challenge employers have is they can't find enough skilled workers for the positions they already have. We want to give these students the chance to acquire that training needed for today's jobs. Again, this legislation helps to ensure it regardless of someone's economic standing.

It provides a route to good-paying jobs and a successful career for students who might not have been interested in a typical formal STEM education or maybe they can't easily spend the time and money involved in going through a traditional college education.

It is not just about the students. It also helps those who are further on in life who are trying to rebuild or start a new career. This bill will also help those incumbent workers. Recently, I visited Flying HIGH, a welding school in Youngstown, OH. It is a very impressive program. It focuses on teaching people in recovery and people who have recently been released from prison to learn a skill--in this case, welding--which lets them transition back into the workplace. I am really impressed by it. Their placement rate is about 100 percent. They have taken people and helped provide them with the skills they need, and then, in turn, their lives have been turned around. This legislation will help enable places like this school to be more successful.

There are so many opportunities out there. Whether it is welding, whether it is coding, whether it is machining, whether it is healthcare skills, or whether it is in commercial driving, where we need drivers right away who have the CDL commercial license, we should encourage more of that.

I wish to thank my colleague and cochair of the Senate CTE Caucus, Tim Kaine, as well as Senator Lamar Alexander, who chairs the Senate HELP Committee that passed the bill this last month, Mike Enzi, and all my colleagues on the CTE Caucus, for their work on this issue over the years.

Once signed into law, this legislation will help students get the career and technical education they need, regardless of economic standing, and help them have the opportunity they need to be able to pursue whatever their American dream is

DATA Act Implementation

Mr. President, the last thing I want to talk about today is some bad news we received this week. This is about our Federal Government and the lack of information from Federal agencies as to how they are spending our hard-earned tax dollars.

As many people know, our Federal Government has grown a lot in the last half century or so. In 1961, President Kennedy entered office with 7 Cabinet positions and 451 career management positions. When President Trump took office, we had gone about seven times higher in terms of the number of people. The number of Cabinet posts have been doubled from 7 to 15.

The increased size of our Federal Government is intended, of course, to provide a better structure to carry out important duties the government has and help more Americans, but one result we have to be cautious of is the increase in Federal spending that comes with it. As the size of our government grows, transparency in how taxpayer money is spent becomes increasingly important.

Most of the increase in funding we have seen over the last 20 years, of course, is in programs that Congress does not appropriate every year. This includes important entitlement programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. We need to address this unsustainable growth in the so-called nondiscretionary spending. We need to save these entitlement programs for the current and future generations of Americans who rely on them, but we also need to ensure we rein in the waste, fraud, and abuse in our departments and agencies, the so-called discretionary spending that Congress spends every year on departments and programs. That is why this legislation is so important--to be able to require transparency and accountability with how Federal agencies spend their taxpayer dollars.

While the White House and Congress tracks spending through the budget and appropriations process, each Federal agency tracks its own spending internally. They have their own metrics and measurement systems. As you can imagine, it has made it hard to truly know where all of the funds are going to various departments and agencies because each has their own measurement. We recognized a need to address this.

In 2006, when I was Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act became law. I personally endorsed that legislation by then-Senator Tom Coburn--who some will remember was a key sponsor of that--when I was at OMB because I knew we needed it badly. We went about putting all grants and contracts online. That was a good thing. The goal of that law was to standardize the way Federal departments and agencies report their spending to have a more comprehensive and transparent account of where taxpayer dollars are going.

It also created a public website to be managed by OMB called USAspending.gov, where taxpayers and policymakers could go to get accurate, accessible information about what these funds are used for. Taxpayers should be able to see where their money goes, and Congress-- which is given the power of the purse in our Federal Government--needs to know what the funds it allocates are being used for to make informed decisions about spending.

In 2010, the GAO, Government Accountability Office, looked into how this program was working. What they found was the usefulness of the USAspending.gov website was impaired by the lack of guidance to agencies on how to report their spending. So, in 2014, my colleague Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and I authored what is called the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, the DATA Act. We followed what the GAO had said, and we wrote this legislation to fix the law.

The goal of the DATA Act was to create a more consistent spending system across government to improve the efficiency of USAspending.gov and make tracking Federal spending more transparent and accessible. That would ultimately provide the American public and policymakers, we thought, with accurate, consistent, and reliable data on governmentwide spending to eliminate unnecessary spending.

Being able to follow Federal dollars from appropriation to the resulting grant or contract that actually occurs is incredibly helpful in that effort. The DATA Act required Federal agencies to report spending in real time down to the location by congressional district by 2017.

Now it is time to take stock of how that program is working and to assess the transparency in our Federal spending. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair, has taken this task on. Along

with the ranking member, Senator Tom Carper, we have looked into the implementation of the DATA Act and how accurately departments and agencies report spending data. What our bipartisan report found was troubling.

We reviewed inspectors general, or IG, reports of 25 Federal agencies, making up more than 80 percent of all Federal spending from the second quarter of 2017.

At least 55 percent of the spending data--equal to roughly $240 billion those agencies submitted to USAspending.gov--was found to be incomplete, inaccurate, or both. Notably, the IG's report on the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy determined that 100 percent of those Departments' spending data was not accurate.

According to the inspectors general, some agencies, such as the Department of Education and the Agency for National Development, did well. They reported accurate data.

Unbelievably, about 96 percent of the spending data the Treasury Department submitted for its own Department was not accurate. So the Treasury Department, which the DATA Act says is supposed to monitor other Departments' spending data for accuracy, overwhelmingly submitted inaccurate data itself--and we found that just last month, OMB and the Department of Treasury have updated agency guidance that appears to weaken some of these data standards, which could lead to less accurate and not standardized DATA Act submissions in the future.

So we should be doing more to ensure this law is properly implemented, to ensure accountability and accuracy in our finances.

We also found deficiencies with the USAspending.gov website itself. The DATA Act requires the website to be user-friendly and accurate. Our investigators found it to sometimes be neither.

It is important to remember that the DATA Act is still in its early stages. It was fully implemented just a little over 1 year ago. So it is not yet what we had hoped it would be when it became law in 2014, but it is not too late to improve it. We know it has to be done. Our PSI--Permanent Subcommittee Investigation--report includes recommendations to do just that.

First, OMB and the Treasury Department should continue to update the standards and guidelines for agencies to follow when making DATA Act submissions to improve accuracy and accountability of spending. It is really up to them to do it.

Second, OMB and the Treasury Department should establish clear definitions for agencies and IGs to follow when conducting reviews of DATA Act compliance to avoid any existing confusion and disparity, which we found is out there today.

Finally, the Treasury Department should improve the overall quality of USAspending.gov.

These are all reasonable steps, and they are going to help increase accountability within the Federal Government and provide greater transparency for taxpayers. As I mentioned, taxpayers deserve to be able to access accurate information on where their money is going, and lawmakers need to know how departments and agencies are actually spending their resources to be able to conduct proper oversight, plan future budgets, and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in our Federal spending.

On the floor today, we were discussing appropriations bills. We will pass another floor appropriations bill this week, I hope. That is good, but part of this process is that we have to be sure we are doing the oversight so that if we are passing spending bills--all 12 should be passed by this Congress--we know where the money is going so we can identify ways to improve the spending.

I recognize that a lot of hard work has gone into USAspending.gov to date, and I am grateful for all the support and investments that many outside groups--like the Data Coalition and the Project on Government Oversight--have put into making this project successful. I also appreciate those in the Federal Government who have taken this seriously and have worked hard on this.

Although the executive branch has only implemented the law selectively so far, it has already made our government more transparent. If we continue to do the necessary followup to this important law that passed 4 years ago, I am optimistic that it will spur action to make our government spending more accountable, more accurate, and more accessible. That is the goal.

Mr. President, I yield back my time.

Mr. President, it is always an honor to follow the President pro tempore of the Senate on the Senate floor.

I am here to talk about the work we are working through and what--for decades would actually be an understatement--for a couple of centuries was the principal work of the Congress, which was to set our priorities by how we spend the money people have entrusted us with.

Today I want to talk specifically about the importance of transportation, and the ag bill is in here, too--the agricultural bill. Certainly, those things come together in a way that allows us to be competitive or don't come together in a way that doesn't allow us to be as competitive as we would like to be.

There is no question that our Nation's infrastructure is not what it should be. The Interstate Highway System, built under the leadership of President Eisenhower, some of it is now over seven decades old, a lot of it over five decades old. It is not where it should be. It has outlived the projected life, and that is a good thing. The construction and repair are better than thought to be at the time, but they are not the kinds of things that are going to last forever.

It has been reported that we have a backlog of at least $836 billion in highway and bridge infrastructure, just that part of our infrastructure.

I am the chairman of the Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Aviation. The Chair and I serve on that committee, and on that committee, we believe there is at least $100 billion in airport infrastructure projects. There are all kinds of airports all over the world that you can fly into or fly out of, and as you come back into the United States, you realize how far we are behind.

Location is important to us. In fact, Winston Churchill said at one time, talking about the United States, that the United States of America was the best located country in the world. We have the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. We have neighbors north and south whom we have learned to cooperate with and live with. We could turn to the Pacific, if that is where the opportunities were. We could turn to the Atlantic.

Winston Churchill pointed out that the Mississippi River, which runs through the center of our country, is maybe the greatest waterway in the world, in terms of the system that created transportation from the very start. The Mississippi River and all the tributary valleys there were incredibly well located.

But all of these things can benefit us if we make the most of them, but it is possible to make the least of them. If you get to the water or if you get to the river and you get on it and you can use it and it becomes an avenue of commerce, it is an opportunity. If you get to the water and you can't get on it, it is an obstacle.

That is sort of what all these things are when we talk about transportation. Are we going to talk about obstacles or

opportunities? What are we going to do with inadequate and deficient infrastructure that really does impact whether local communities can compete or not?

Back to the thoughts about the map of America and where our State is located, Missouri is really at the hub of where a lot of the natural infrastructure of the country come together, and also the No. 2 and No. 3 biggest rail yards in America are in our State. No. 2 is in Kansas City, and No. 3 is in St. Louis. The interstate highways come together there.

Chairman Collins and her committee worked on this part of the bill--a bill where all four committees have brought a product to the floor that we can vote for and that we get a chance to amend. We get a chance to talk about how this could have been made better and maybe find a way to make it better or maybe find a way to realize that, now that I understand the arguments, it is a better bill than I thought. That is the importance of getting that to the floor.

The bill provides $1 billion for BUILD Grants. Those were previously known as TIGER grants. At least 30 percent of that billion dollars is to benefit rural areas. This is particularly the kind of program we had benefited from. The program funded the Champ Clark Bridge over the Mississippi River in Louisiana, MO, and the bridge over the Missouri River at Washington, MO. They all benefited from TIGER Grants.

There is another $49.3 billion for critical highway infrastructure. That is an increase of $3 billion over the authorized level. This program will provide our State with $79 million more in Federal funding increases for roads, bridges, and freight programs. Highways and roads are generally still largely a State problem. This bill encourages States to do things that they might not quite be able to do otherwise.

We have 3,000 bridges in our State deemed structurally deficient. I think it is the highest number of bridges anywhere because we have more than 3,000 bridges that are structurally deficient and there are thousands of bridges more than that.

The bill provides $175 million in discretionary spending, combined with $140 million in mandatory spending to support Essential Air Service communities. Those communities can almost support their own commercial system, but not quite, and still have an argument that they need it. In Missouri, Joplin, Cape Girardeau, and Kirksville all benefit from that Essential Air Service Program. The airport in Columbia is benefiting right now with rehabilitating runways from that program.

The bill provides some capital investment grants that allow some help with transit projects.

As far as ag infrastructure is concerned, we have the chairman of the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee on the floor right now. For ag to work, you have to have an infrastructure that works. The world price of grain is the world price of grain less what it costs you to get it there. The way you win that competition is to have a transportation network that works in a way that allows you to be more competitive than anyone else. If you could arrive with a quality product and get it there cheaper than anybody else can, you get that marketplace.

We don't want to forget broadband. As we think about rural America today, broadband is as important as the telephone was 70 years ago. We figured out how to get telephones to people that were a long way from the nearest telephone, or until they got a telephone, a long way from the nearest telephone pole. We figured that out, and we need to figure out rural broadband just as well. If you can't get the high-speed information you need, you may be doing something that you don't have to go to an office to do, like commodity trading, but you do have to have instantaneous information to do it effectively.

As for rural Missourians, we have 3 percent of the rural population in our State, and half of that population doesn't have access to high- speed internet. That is behind the rest of the country, and our State is trying to catch up. If we can take advantage of these broadband pilot grants that encourage everybody to catch up, we will catch up faster than we would otherwise.

This bill provides distance learning and telemedicine grants as part of our rural community development, and there are rural development community facilities grants in here. We are benefiting from that, and we hope to see that program continue. We received rural development community facilities grants for things like police facilities, road construction equipment, and healthcare facilities in Dent County, Scotland County, Livingston County, Grundy County, and Schuyler County. All of those kinds of things would still be out there to compete for if we pass this bill.

It includes $1.25 billion for the Rural Development Water and Waste Disposal Program to be developed in rural Missouri. We have eight communities right now benefitting from that. Every level of government--local, State, and Federal--as well as the private sector, really has to continue to recognize the importance of infrastructure-- the infrastructure we see on top of the ground, the infrastructure we don't see below the ground, and the broadband infrastructure that some people have and other people don't. That is how we compete.

This bill largely is a bill about competition. Certainly, the transportation and ag parts of this bill are about competition. We need to do what we can to strengthen our overall infrastructure and our transportation network, to boost economic growth, to create jobs, and to be sure that we are more competitive where I live and where you live and all over our country. That is what this bill is about.

I am really pleased that, for the first time in a long time, every Member of the Senate has a right to come to the floor and say: Here is how we can spend this money better. Our goal should be to take what we have been entrusted with and spend it in the way that benefits the country in the most effective way. I think this bill goes a long way in the right direction to do that. I am certainly looking forward to supporting it when it comes to final passage and looking carefully at every amendment anybody offers to see if that is not a better idea than those of us on the Appropriations Committee had.

I see that my friend from West Virginia is here.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 772, which was received from the House. I ask unanimous consent that the Blunt substitute amendment at the desk be agreed to and that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, in 2010, legislation passed that mandated national calorie menu labeling standards for chain restaurants and similar retail food locations, like grocery stores. Many of us know that there are many different ways that foods are prepared and sold to customers. We can see all kinds of examples by walking around the Capitol Complex itself, let alone through one's neighborhood grocery store. As a result, it would be almost impossible to have a one-size- fits-all rule.

Before I mention what the Blunt-Alexander-King substitute amendment would have done, to which the Senator from Washington State has objected, let me, first of all, address the House-passed bipartisan bill that has been pending on the Senate's calendar.

Senator King joined me in introducing the bipartisan Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act here in the Senate--the same bill that has already passed in the House. The bill is not just bicameral but bipartisan, meaning Democrats and Republicans have sponsored legislation in the Senate and Democrats and Republicans have passed the same legislation in the House. My Democratic colleague from Missouri cosponsored the initial bill.

The House-passed bill would not exempt pizza delivery and it wouldn't exempt supermarkets or grocery stores or convenience stores or others from menu labeling requirements.

There are always all kinds of things that are talked about here. What the House bill and what the Blunt-Alexander-King bill would do, which is pending in the Senate, is recognize that there are unique differences in business types and product offerings to allow for more flexibility in different kinds of business models providing their customers with calorie information. This would still happen under our bill, but it would happen in a more effective way so that it meets the customers' needs. The goal here should be the customers' receiving the information rather than exactly where the information is placed in a one-size-fits-all or in a one-location-fits-all kind of format.

The campaign on this issue of misinformation has run pretty wild. There is a group saying that what we are trying to do is exempt restaurants and others from menu labeling. They clearly haven't read the bill that Senator Alexander and I and Senator King have introduced. I would like to go on record as saying what the amendment does.

First and foremost, it does not impact the delay of that menu labeling final rule that went into effect this year. Again, it does not impact the delay or stop the menu labeling final rule. The Blunt- Alexander-King amendment provides those who have to implement the rule with the regulatory flexibility to implement the rule and provide the information to their customers in the most useful manner. The amendment also provides protection against frivolous lawsuits. That is really all it does. Those are two big things, but they are two not very complicated things.

I have been working on this issue for a number of years. I am disappointed that we have been unable to move a commonsense measure here in the Senate.

I thank Senator King for working with me on this issue, and I thank Senators McCaskill, Heitkamp, and Donnelly--all Democrats--along with Senator King, for joining me as bipartisan cosponsors.

I also thank Chairman Alexander, who is the chair of the authorizing committee, who has joined with me and others in finding a commonsense path forward to ensure we provide the information to consumers in the most effective way, while providing the flexibility in implementation and protection from lawsuits, not only on the information but on some highly technical piece of the rule that really wouldn't have an impact if anybody were to have the information or not. Senator Alexander has been a leader on this. I know he is as disappointed as I am that we can't move forward with the House-passed bill, for I spent a lot of time on it.

I turn now to my friend Senator Alexander, the chairman of the Senate HELP Committee, to make whatever comments he wants to make.