National Park Restoration Act

Mr. President, on September 5 of last year, President Trump's Attorney General made an announcement. It was an announcement that affected the lives of about 800,000 people living in America. The announcement was that the President was going to abolish the DACA Program.

DACA was a program created by President Obama by Executive order. Under that Executive order, if you were brought to the United States as an infant, a toddler, a child, if you grew up in this country, were educated in this country, and had no criminal record of any consequence, President Obama said that you have a chance to apply to stay in this country on a temporary, renewable basis--2 years at a time--and that you won't be deported and you can take a job.

Eight hundred thousand young people came forward under President Obama's Executive order, under this DACA order. What have they done with their lives? Many of them went to school and had to work at the same time because, being undocumented, they didn't qualify for any Federal student assistance. A lot of them took jobs all across the country--about 20,000 of them as teachers in schools, and 900 of them volunteered for the U.S. military, taking the same oath as everyone else, saying that they are willing to risk their lives for America.

The success stories of these DACA recipients are boundless. I have told a number on the floor in the course of discussing this issue over the years.

Today, I will tell another one. I am so proud of what they have done. They are amazing young people. Can you imagine growing up in America with all the challenges of youth and all the demands from your parents and peers and superiors but also knowing something that you can't say publicly: that at any moment, you could be deported from this country because you don't have the necessary legal status? That is the story of these DACA young people, the Dreamers.

President Trump, if you will remember, talked about immigration a lot in his last campaign. Some of the things he said were very harsh. He talked about building this big, beautiful wall, from sea to shining sea, across the Mexican border, and, of course, told us the Mexicans would pay for it. Then he referred to those in Mexico who came to the United States as Mexican rapists and criminals. It was pretty harsh language. But interestingly, toward the end of the campaign and after he was elected, he started saying conciliatory, good things about these DACA Dreamers. He told me personally, when I first met him on the day he was inaugurated: We will take care of those kids, Senator.

Well, on September 5 of last year, he announced that the program protecting those young people would expire as of Monday of this week, 2 days ago. As of that date, he said, if Congress hasn't replaced the DACA Program with something new, something legal, something statutory, there would be no protection for these DACA recipients as their protected status expired. For 800,000 in limbo, uncertainty is their future.

Well, the President challenged Congress, and a number of us took him up on the challenge. Six of us--three Democrats and three Republicans-- Senators sat down for months. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was part of that group, a Republican; Jeff Flake of Arizona was part of that group, a Republican; and Cory Gardner of Colorado, a Republican. On our side, Michael Bennet of Colorado, a Democrat; Bob Menendez of New Jersey, a Democrat. We worked out a bipartisan agreement among us that not one of us would have written. It was a compromise in trying to meet the President's challenge of replacing DACA with something that could be the law of the land and work.

I reflect on that effort and believe it was a good one. It was certainly in good faith, and it was bipartisan. When we presented it to President Trump on January 11 at 12 noon--I remember the time very specifically--he rejected it. He not only rejected that bipartisan solution to the crisis he had created, he rejected five other bipartisan proposals to try to resolve the crisis he had created in eliminating the DACA Program.

So here we are, just 2 days after his March 5 deadline, and where do we stand? Well, the situation has been complicated by three Federal courts that have been asked to review President Trump's decision abolishing DACA. Two of those courts have issued injunctions and said to the Trump administration: Stop what you are doing. You have to prove to us that you have the legal authority to end this program the way you ended it.

There is an injunction stopping the Trump administration from doing what the President said he would do. The President's administration didn't think much of those courts and decided to file an extraordinary appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is across the street, to knock down this injunction and to go forward with closing down DACA. Last week, the Supreme Court rejected the Solicitor General's petition.

So here we stand. The President has abolished the DACA Program. The protection for 800,000 young people from being deported, the protection that allowed them to work, is officially--President Trump's point of view--abolished. It has not been replaced, the deadline has been reached, and it is being argued in court.

So how much protection does that buy for the 800,000? We don't know. We know it is a court-based protection, an injunction that could last for weeks or months or even longer, but that uncertainty is what is hanging over this whole debate.

So this morning I called the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, and I asked her: Explain to me what your Department is doing because of these court injunctions and President Trump's decision to abolish this program.

She gave me a partial explanation. In fairness to her, she promised to get back to me and even promised to come up here to Capitol Hill next week and try to explain in more detail how the Department of Homeland Security is handling this.

For example, if you were protected by DACA--a young person--and if the President's abolition of DACA did not allow you to renew your DACA application when it expired, what is your status? Can you be deported?

Secretary Nielsen told me point blank: No, we will not deport those who have pending DACA applications.

I then asked the next question: Do you have the authority to allow these same people to continue legally working, as they did under DACA?

She didn't know the answer, and in fairness to her, she said she would look into it and get back to me. I look forward to that happening.

It is a sad situation that this Congress can't pass a law to deal with this kind of emergency. Ask the American people what they think about Dreamers, what they think about young people who were brought to the United States as children, infants, and babies, and who are asking for a chance to be legal in America, to become citizens. Ask Americans what they think. Overwhelmingly, they say: Of course. Why would you punish these children who grew up in this country? They didn't break a law or commit a crime. They didn't make a decision; it was a decision made by others. They should have a chance.

Overwhelmingly, the American people say that, 85 percent or more, including more than 60 percent of people who say they voted for President Trump. Can you find an issue with that kind of public support? For those who follow the news, there is another one called universal background checks for guns, which has an even higher level of support. But going back to the DACA issue, 85 percent of the American people believe Congress should pass a law to give these young people a chance--not punish them, not deport them. Give them a chance. Give them a chance to earn their way to legal status. Despite that, this Senate has failed to pass a measure to do that.

Two weeks ago, we made it to the floor. We had four different versions of the bill. I won't go into detail other than to tell you that the most popular version of the bill got 54 votes. You would think that in a Chamber of 100 Senators, that would be enough, but not under our rules--you need 60 votes.

The President had a plan, incidentally. President Trump brought his immigration plan to the floor of the Senate the same week we debated this. Now, understand, there are 51 Republican Senators and 49 Democrats in this Chamber. On the day of the vote, one Senator, Senator McCain, was missing, so 50 to 49. How many votes did President Trump get for his immigration policy presented on the floor of the Republican-controlled Senate? Thirty-nine. Sixty Senators voted against it, including a substantial number of Republicans. So the President's approach to this has been rejected by even his own party.

What has the House of Representatives, the other Chamber, done about this? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Sadly, that is a commentary on many major issues facing our country. The Congress has not even taken up a serious debate, let alone found a solution, and here we sit. It is easy for us to sit here in the Senate Chamber, confident of our own citizenship status, but for 800,000, the uncertainty makes a wreck of their lives. I have met many of them. I have talked to them. They are outstanding people. They have succeeded when others failed. They have been determined and resilient when others gave up. They are running out of time.

President Trump created this crisis for DACA on September 5. He has been unable to agree to any of six different bipartisan measures to solve it--not one--and today the fate and future of these young people rest in the hands of the courts.

It is easy to speak of these young people in gross numbers--800,000, 1.8 million--but over the years, I have decided it is better to get to know them

personally. As they have had the courage to come forward and identify themselves, I have come to the floor to tell their stories. This is the 110th time I am bringing a story to the floor.

This man is Alejandro Fuentes. Alejandro was brought to the United States at the age of 4 from Chile and grew up in San Diego. He was an extraordinary high school student--honor roll, AP scholar with distinction, and a member of the National Honor Society. He was involved in a lot of activities--high school cross-country and lacrosse, a member of the choir--and volunteered as a worship leader at his church.

He was accepted at Whitman College in the State of Washington, and when he was there, he was a member of the campus Christian fellowship group. He volunteered with the local Humane Society and was the philanthropy chair of his fraternity. He was a student government representative and a mentor to other students.

After graduation, he was accepted into Teach For America. We know that program, don't we? That is where some of our best and brightest college graduates say: I will give you 2 years of my life and work in a school that needs me as a teacher. Send me to a tough area to work. Thousands have done it. Alejandro--not a citizen of the United States-- said: I will do it. I will do it for my country.

Today, he is a sixth grade math teacher at a middle school in Denver, CO. He volunteers as a mentor after school for students who need help with math.

What is going to happen to this man? What is going to happen to him if Congress fails to replace DACA? What is going to happen if he is deported? And it could happen. There are 20,000 just like him, teachers across America who are DACA-protected and have no protection now, no protection in the law. Their only protection is a court order, which could be changed in a moment.

If he leaves, of course, the students will pay a price, and certainly America will pay a price. Will we be better off as a nation? Of course not. This young man grew up in America. He was brought here at the age of 4, went to his classrooms in San Diego and pledged allegiance to the flag every day. This is his country. It is the only country he has ever known. Why would we want to throw him out of this country after he has gone through all of these things in life and achieved an amazing record of success? To me, it would be a horrible waste.

There is a larger issue at stake here than just DACA. The issue is immigration in America. Are we a nation of immigrants? I think so. But 2 weeks ago, at the immigration Federal agency, they decided to strike those words from their mission statement, that America was a nation of immigrants. They can strike all the words they want, but they can't strike the facts. The facts tell us that with the exception of Native Americans, who preceded us, we are all immigrants--some voluntary, some forced, but we are all immigrants in this country. We come from every corner of the Earth. We are as diverse as any nation could be. That is our history, that is our strength, and that is our legacy. That diversity makes us an extraordinary nation in the world.

Those people who came here from far-reaching shores came here for a lot of reasons. My grandmother was one of them. She brought my mom. My mom was an immigrant to this country. I don't know all the reasons that my grandmother came here, but I know there was one reason she came. She had three little kids, and she carried a bag and had with her a Catholic prayer book from the country of Lithuania. It was written in Lithuanian. The Russians were in control of Lithuania at the time, and they had prohibited prayer books written in Lithuanian. My grandmother, whom I never knew, was one tough lady. She was willing to pick up this prayer book--this contraband in Lithuania--and bring it to the United States of America. I don't know if she ever took a constitutional law course, but she knew there was freedom in this country. Nobody was going to stop her from praying from her prayer book when she got to the United States. I am sure economics had more to do with her coming, but that was part of the reason my family made it to this country. It is something I have never forgotten, and I have told the story many times.

All these people who have come to this country--every single one of us brings a story, a family story. Now we are being told it is a mistake--it is a mistake to continue legal immigration to America.

The President's proposal on immigration would cut legal immigration to this country almost in half. Currently, our Nation of 320, 330 million people brings in approximately 1.1 million legal immigrants a year--1 million legal immigrants; 320 million Americans. It is not an overwhelming number in comparison. On average more than sixty percent of the 1.1 million people are members of families of those already here.

Do you just ask to come in, and we let you come to America if you have a family member here? Of course not. You wait and you wait. For example, in the Philippines, you may wait 20 years for a member of the family to be reunited with someone who is already an American citizen-- 20 years waiting in line. The President's proposal--the one that has come to the floor of the Senate that got 39 votes--said we ought to cut the number of legal immigrants almost in half, tell those people to wait longer or stay where they are.

In most cultures, in the American culture, the family unit is our strength--flag, family, God. How many times have we heard those speeches from politicians? Yet these families who are trying to be reunited and to be strong are being told: You are not wanted. That is a mistake. The last time we did that was in 1924 on the floor of the U.S. Senate. We decided--the Senate then--there were certain people we didn't need in America. Asians were excluded. People from Africa and Eastern Europe and other regions were severely restricted. That could have included my mother's family. They restricted Italians. We had enough Italians--that is what Congress said. They restricted Jewish people.

That shameful chapter in American immigration history prevailed for over 40 years, until we passed a new immigration law. Now this administration wants to take us back to that debate. This administration wants to change the face of immigration in America. The President has been explicit about that in terms of what he would like to see America look like in the future--not as diverse, excluding people from certain places. I think that is a mistake.

If there is one thing that has made us strong, it is the fact that this diversity, when it comes together under that flag, can conquer everyone and everything on Earth. Why would we walk away from that legacy? Why would we walk away from Alejandro? Why would we walk away from 800,000 protected by DACA? Why? Is that the legacy we want to leave, that we have excluded these talented, high-achieving, energetic, fearless young people? Alejandro's story is certainly not unique. There are 20,000 teachers like him who are DACA recipients and DACA- protected.

Teach For America, the program that pays these young college graduates a limited amount of money to go to challenging schools--190 of them were protected by DACA. They are officially not citizens of the United States, but they are willing to teach kids in the toughest schools in America. They teach in 11 different States.

There is a question now about what happens next, and I don't know. Right now, the President created this crisis, and only the President can solve this crisis. There are Republican Members of the House and Senate who will not vote for anything unless it has the Trump stamp of approval on it, and I don't know what that can be. Six different times we have gone to him, and six times he has rejected bipartisan approaches. We need the President to help us work toward a solution. It is up to the Republican leaders in Congress--they control the House and the Senate--to take yes for an answer and accept one of these bipartisan approaches, to save these young people, and to resolve this crisis that faces us.

Congress needs to do its job. We should make the Dream Act the law of the land, or we will be responsible for hundreds of thousands of talented

young immigrants leaving our workforce and put them at risk of immediate deportation. It would be a chapter in American immigration history even sadder than 1924.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, probably every single one of us in the Senate would agree that it is hard to get here, it is hard to stay here, and it is wonderful to be able to accomplish something worthwhile while you are here. That is why I am here today--because I want to call attention to an announcement that was made this morning by a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators and the Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, which could take away

the $11.6 billion of national park maintenance backlog in the 417 national parks that we have. The proposal we made this morning could eliminate that backlog over the next 10 years.

I want to give Secretary Zinke and the President a lot of credit for this because they have agreed to do something that no other President and no other Secretary of the Interior have ever agreed to do, as far as I know, and that is to allow us to use revenues from energy development on Federal lands as mandatory spending to pay for the maintenance backlog in our National Park System.

Ken Burns called our national parks ``America's Best Idea.'' I would say that the best idea to support America's best idea is the proposal that Secretary Zinke has made to take care of the maintenance backlog in our national parks.

Half of that maintenance backlog is our roads. Of course, when we pay for the roads this way, that means all the money that is now being taken away from all the other purposes at our national parks--I am talking about the National Mall, where I get up in the morning and walk every day, or the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where I walk when I go home on the weekends--could be used for other purposes there, in all 417 of those parks.

If we don't do this, we will never catch up because this backlog-- this $11.6 billion backlog--is four times the annual appropriations for the National Park Service. Everyone who cares about our national parks--and that should be almost every American--should welcome this proposal.

As I said, our use of Federal dollars in this way is unprecedented, but the principle is not unprecedented. The principle is a very simple principle, and that is this: If we create an environmental burden, which energy exploration does, whether it is wind turbines or whether it is spreading solar panels all over hundreds and hundreds of acres or whether it is oil and gas exploration. If we create an environmental burden, we should create a corresponding environmental benefit. That principle is well established in our laws and has been supported by almost every major environmental and conservation group I know of.

Let's start with the 1962 Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission that Laurance Rockefeller chaired. That Commission, which took a look at America for the next generation to see what we should do to protect the outdoors so we could all enjoy it, recommended, and the Congress adopted, the idea of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. There was a Federal side and a State side. Over all of the years since 1964, $18 billion has been spent in the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That is the environmental benefit. Where did the money come from? It came from drilling on Federal offshore properties.

In 1986, I chaired President Reagan's Commission on Americans Outdoors. We reaffirmed our support for the idea that an environmental burden means we should have an environmental benefit. We urged Congress to make permanent the funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. So we reaffirmed that again for the next generation.

Then, in 2006, with the leadership of Senator Domenici, Senator Bingaman, and others--many of us worked on it--Congress decided we would take some of the revenues from new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and apply those to the State side of the Land and Water Conservation Fund--again, an environmental burden and a corresponding environmental benefit.

That is why this proposal is so exciting to me. That is why this proposal has such strong bipartisan support.

In the Senate, the supporters include Senator King of Maine, Senator Daines of Montana, and Senator Heinrich of New Mexico. It is a bipartisan group. Supporters also include Senator Capito and Senator Manchin, Senator Gardner and Senator Tillis; all of us support and are cosponsoring this legislation we are introducing today.

In the House of Representatives, we also have two cosponsors. Congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho, who is chairman of the House Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, and Congressman Kurt Schrader from Oregon is also a cosponsor in the House of Representatives.

So I believe this is an unprecedented day; for all of those who care about and love our national parks and who have struggled to imagine how we can deal with this $11.6 billion maintenance backlog--a backlog that is four times the annual appropriation--we can pay this all off with this proposal, which is supported by the President and his Office of Management and Budget, a bipartisan group of Senators, and a bipartisan group in the House.

I look forward to working with Senator Murkowski and Senator Cantwell in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Hopefully, it can be moved promptly through that committee. There are other important things we would like to do, but I can't think of anything much more important than our National Park System.

I mentioned a little earlier that we have 417 national parks in the country. I grew up camping and hiking in one of those, and I live within 2 miles of that park. It is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It has more visitors than any other national park--nearly twice as many as the closest one. Eleven million people a year come to the park.

Many of my best memories are from that park. I remember, when I was 15 years old, my dad dropped me and a couple of other boys at the highest point of the park, Clingmans Dome, one day around Christmastime. There was 3 feet of snow. He said: I will pick you up in Gatlinburg. Well, he did, and that was about 8 or 9 hours later.

Later that same year in the summertime we were camping on Spence Field. That is at about 5,000 or 6,000 feet as well. We had taken blueberry pancake mix up there. We picked the blueberries. We had all of the materials for a good breakfast, but we made one mistake. We left the breakfast in our packs in the tent, and during the night a bear crawled in there with us, took it out, and we ended up on top of the trail shelter banging the pans together trying to run the bear off. That was the last time we left our breakfast materials nearby the sleeping area when we were camping in the park.

The park is a good place for lessons and learning and appreciating beauty. It is a good place for the rich. It is a good place for the poor. Parents bring their children out of a digital diet to feast on a world of natural splendor. We learn our history in a place where history comes alive; not just the history of the world but the history of East Tennessee, the history of Wyoming, the history of Maine, the history of Montana.

Let me give my colleagues a sense of just what this $11 billion backlog means. I have already said it is nearly four times what the National Park Service receives in annual appropriations. We can talk about the Smokies alone. Between Tennessee and North Carolina, there is about a $215 million backlog of projects; 75 percent of that is roads. We get nearly twice as many visitors as any other park. These visitors come to see our majestic views. They spend 400,000 nights camping in 9 frontcountry campgrounds and 100 backcountry camp sites.

In 2013, the park had to close Look Rock Campground and the picnic area due to funding shortfalls in replacing the water treatment facilities. In order to open this recreation area for visitors, the park needs $3 million to replace the water treatment facility, repair the road infrastructure, and replace aging picnic tables and campground pads. This proposal could do that.

The funding provided in the National Park Restoration Act, which is what we call our legislation, could help reopen this campground for the enjoyment of the over 11 million visitors to the Smokies.

The Smokies also supports a vast trail system, with almost 850 miles of maintained trails for hikers, backpackers, and visitors. The current deferred maintenance backlog for trails in the Smokies is $18.5 million. This proposal would take care of that.

In August 2017, I visited the Smokies with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and I saw firsthand with him the work that is needed on the trails. We hiked the Rainbow Falls Trail, where a 2-year project is underway to rehabilitate the trail.

Crews from Trails Forever, a partnership between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Friends of

the Smokies, and the American Conservation Experience are working to build a rock staircase along the trail to reduce erosion and improve visitor safety and enjoyment.

Crews use rigging systems to move large rocks, split them using drills and chisels, and then set them into place to provide long- lasting trail structures for those hoping to see the rainbow formed by mist from the 80-foot waterfall along the Rainbow Falls Trail.

Secretary Zinke and I worked to split and place one of those rock steps. It is not very easy to do. Volunteer crews will work to rehabilitate over 6 miles of that trail.

In addition to the crews, every Wednesday volunteers head up the trail to help restore it for future visitors. In 2017, volunteers donated 900 hours of work on that trail.

The Smokies is full of wonderful volunteers like those working on the Rainbow Falls Trail. Over 2,800 volunteers donated over 115,000 hours last year alone, but we must do more to get the funding to our parks to help address the maintenance needs and support the countless volunteers.

In the Smokies, 75 percent of that maintenance work is roads, which isn't surprising, since millions of visitors to the park each year experience it behind the wheel. The park maintains and operates nearly 400 miles of roads, including 6 tunnels and 146 bridges, which allow visitors to traverse the park's mountainous landscape.

The Smokies is working hard to address these maintenance needs, and later this year they will open 16 miles of the Foothills Parkway. We are all looking forward to that in East Tennessee. Driving the Foothills Parkway will give you a spectacular view of the highest mountains in the Eastern United States. Tennesseans are excited that these new 16 miles of the parkway will soon be open to the public. It is scheduled for this fall.

Due to funding shortfalls, building and repairing the 16-mile stretch of the Foothills Parkway took over 50 years and will be completed nearly 75 years after Congress first authorized the Foothills Parkway. Completing just 1.6 miles of the parkway took nearly 30 years.

In 1944, Congress authorized the Foothills Parkway but prohibited Federal funds from being used to purchase and acquire the land, so the State of Tennessee purchased the land and gave it to the Federal Government to create a scenic parkway to provide views of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

For 75 years, Tennesseans and visitors have been waiting to enjoy the majestic views of the Foothills Parkway because there hasn't been sufficient Federal funding to address the maintenance needs of our national parks. Other roadways in the Smokies, including Newfound Gap Road and Clingmans Dome Road, remain on this backlog list.

Clingmans Dome Road takes visitors to Clingmans Dome--the highest point in Tennessee and the third highest mountain east of the Mississippi. At 6,643 feet, Clingmans Dome offers panoramic views of the Smoky Mountains.

Additional funding is desperately needed for the Smokies and all of our National Parks to help repair and rebuild campgrounds, trails, and roads. Doing that will bring more visitors, more tourists, and more jobs to Tennessee and to national park communities throughout our country.

According to the Outdoor Industry Association, the outdoor recreation economy generates 7.6 million direct jobs and $887 billion in consumer spending. In Tennessee, the outdoor recreation economy generates 188,000 direct jobs and over $21 billion in consumer spending.

In 2016, the visitors to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park alone spent nearly $950 million in communities surrounding the park. The over 11 million visitors to the park supported nearly 15,000 jobs and $1.3 billion in economic output in these communities.

Restoring our parks not only helps to preserve our land for generations but helps to grow our economy.

Now, here is what our bill does. I see the Senator from North Carolina is coming to preside, and he is one of the principal cosponsors of the bill. The National Park Restoration Act will use revenues from energy production on Federal lands to help pay for the $11 billion maintenance backlog at our national parks. It will provide mandatory funding on top of annual appropriations for the National Park Service--for the priority-deferred maintenance needs that support critical infrastructure and visitor services at our parks.

The National Park Restoration Fund created by the legislation will receive 50 percent of revenues from energy production on Federal lands over the 2018 projections that are not already allocated to other purposes.

This legislation includes revenues from all sources of energy production on Federal land: oil, gas, coal, renewables, and alternative energy.

The legislation protects all existing obligations for revenues from energy production on Federal land, including payments to States, payments to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and payments to the Reclamation Fund.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the work that Senators Portman and Warner have done. They have introduced similar legislation. They have many of the same objectives. I know there are many other Senators who care deeply about this issue, other than the bipartisan group of us who introduced the legislation today. We can all work together in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee where this bill will be referred. We will put our heads together with Senator Murkowski and Senator Cantwell. We will come out with the best possible bill-- something that President Trump can continue to support and that the full Senate and then the House of Representatives can pass. Then, we can get on with it and begin to deal with the deferred maintenance backlog in our national parks.

Theodore Roosevelt once said that nothing short of defending this country in wartime ``compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.'' We must all work together to restore our national treasures so future generations have the same opportunity to enjoy them, as we have.

In conclusion, let me reiterate something personal about this. In 1985, the Secretary of the Interior called and asked me, when I was Governor of Tennessee, to chair the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors. I did that, along with Gil Grosvenor, the chairman of the National Geographic Society, and a variety of people. One of our major recommendations was to pick up the recommendation of the Rockefeller Commission from 1964, which said, if there is an environmental burden, there should be an environmental benefit. They are the ones who recommended, to begin with, that we take land from energy exploration and use it to pay for the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

We reaffirmed that in 1986. We reaffirmed that principle in 2006 when we used revenues from drilling for the State side of the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

So while this proposal is unprecedented in the sense that it is the first time that I know of that a President and his Office of Management and Budget have approved mandatory funding using revenues from energy production on Federal lands to deal with national park maintenance needs, the principle of matching an environmental burden with an environmental benefit is well established.

I am grateful to the President, and I am especially grateful to Secretary Zinke for his initiative. I look forward to working with a bipartisan group of Senators in the Energy Committee to develop a bill, pass it, and get started on the work of America's best idea for restoring America's best idea--our National Park System.

Mr. President, probably every single one of us in the Senate would agree that it is hard to get here, it is hard to stay here, and it is wonderful to be able to accomplish something worthwhile while you are here. That is why I am here today--because I want to call attention to an announcement that was made this morning by a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators and the Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, which could take away

the $11.6 billion of national park maintenance backlog in the 417 national parks that we have. The proposal we made this morning could eliminate that backlog over the next 10 years.

I want to give Secretary Zinke and the President a lot of credit for this because they have agreed to do something that no other President and no other Secretary of the Interior have ever agreed to do, as far as I know, and that is to allow us to use revenues from energy development on Federal lands as mandatory spending to pay for the maintenance backlog in our National Park System.

Ken Burns called our national parks ``America's Best Idea.'' I would say that the best idea to support America's best idea is the proposal that Secretary Zinke has made to take care of the maintenance backlog in our national parks.

Half of that maintenance backlog is our roads. Of course, when we pay for the roads this way, that means all the money that is now being taken away from all the other purposes at our national parks--I am talking about the National Mall, where I get up in the morning and walk every day, or the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where I walk when I go home on the weekends--could be used for other purposes there, in all 417 of those parks.

If we don't do this, we will never catch up because this backlog-- this $11.6 billion backlog--is four times the annual appropriations for the National Park Service. Everyone who cares about our national parks--and that should be almost every American--should welcome this proposal.

As I said, our use of Federal dollars in this way is unprecedented, but the principle is not unprecedented. The principle is a very simple principle, and that is this: If we create an environmental burden, which energy exploration does, whether it is wind turbines or whether it is spreading solar panels all over hundreds and hundreds of acres or whether it is oil and gas exploration. If we create an environmental burden, we should create a corresponding environmental benefit. That principle is well established in our laws and has been supported by almost every major environmental and conservation group I know of.

Let's start with the 1962 Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission that Laurance Rockefeller chaired. That Commission, which took a look at America for the next generation to see what we should do to protect the outdoors so we could all enjoy it, recommended, and the Congress adopted, the idea of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. There was a Federal side and a State side. Over all of the years since 1964, $18 billion has been spent in the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That is the environmental benefit. Where did the money come from? It came from drilling on Federal offshore properties.

In 1986, I chaired President Reagan's Commission on Americans Outdoors. We reaffirmed our support for the idea that an environmental burden means we should have an environmental benefit. We urged Congress to make permanent the funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. So we reaffirmed that again for the next generation.

Then, in 2006, with the leadership of Senator Domenici, Senator Bingaman, and others--many of us worked on it--Congress decided we would take some of the revenues from new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and apply those to the State side of the Land and Water Conservation Fund--again, an environmental burden and a corresponding environmental benefit.

That is why this proposal is so exciting to me. That is why this proposal has such strong bipartisan support.

In the Senate, the supporters include Senator King of Maine, Senator Daines of Montana, and Senator Heinrich of New Mexico. It is a bipartisan group. Supporters also include Senator Capito and Senator Manchin, Senator Gardner and Senator Tillis; all of us support and are cosponsoring this legislation we are introducing today.

In the House of Representatives, we also have two cosponsors. Congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho, who is chairman of the House Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, and Congressman Kurt Schrader from Oregon is also a cosponsor in the House of Representatives.

So I believe this is an unprecedented day; for all of those who care about and love our national parks and who have struggled to imagine how we can deal with this $11.6 billion maintenance backlog--a backlog that is four times the annual appropriation--we can pay this all off with this proposal, which is supported by the President and his Office of Management and Budget, a bipartisan group of Senators, and a bipartisan group in the House.

I look forward to working with Senator Murkowski and Senator Cantwell in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Hopefully, it can be moved promptly through that committee. There are other important things we would like to do, but I can't think of anything much more important than our National Park System.

I mentioned a little earlier that we have 417 national parks in the country. I grew up camping and hiking in one of those, and I live within 2 miles of that park. It is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It has more visitors than any other national park--nearly twice as many as the closest one. Eleven million people a year come to the park.

Many of my best memories are from that park. I remember, when I was 15 years old, my dad dropped me and a couple of other boys at the highest point of the park, Clingmans Dome, one day around Christmastime. There was 3 feet of snow. He said: I will pick you up in Gatlinburg. Well, he did, and that was about 8 or 9 hours later.

Later that same year in the summertime we were camping on Spence Field. That is at about 5,000 or 6,000 feet as well. We had taken blueberry pancake mix up there. We picked the blueberries. We had all of the materials for a good breakfast, but we made one mistake. We left the breakfast in our packs in the tent, and during the night a bear crawled in there with us, took it out, and we ended up on top of the trail shelter banging the pans together trying to run the bear off. That was the last time we left our breakfast materials nearby the sleeping area when we were camping in the park.

The park is a good place for lessons and learning and appreciating beauty. It is a good place for the rich. It is a good place for the poor. Parents bring their children out of a digital diet to feast on a world of natural splendor. We learn our history in a place where history comes alive; not just the history of the world but the history of East Tennessee, the history of Wyoming, the history of Maine, the history of Montana.

Let me give my colleagues a sense of just what this $11 billion backlog means. I have already said it is nearly four times what the National Park Service receives in annual appropriations. We can talk about the Smokies alone. Between Tennessee and North Carolina, there is about a $215 million backlog of projects; 75 percent of that is roads. We get nearly twice as many visitors as any other park. These visitors come to see our majestic views. They spend 400,000 nights camping in 9 frontcountry campgrounds and 100 backcountry camp sites.

In 2013, the park had to close Look Rock Campground and the picnic area due to funding shortfalls in replacing the water treatment facilities. In order to open this recreation area for visitors, the park needs $3 million to replace the water treatment facility, repair the road infrastructure, and replace aging picnic tables and campground pads. This proposal could do that.

The funding provided in the National Park Restoration Act, which is what we call our legislation, could help reopen this campground for the enjoyment of the over 11 million visitors to the Smokies.

The Smokies also supports a vast trail system, with almost 850 miles of maintained trails for hikers, backpackers, and visitors. The current deferred maintenance backlog for trails in the Smokies is $18.5 million. This proposal would take care of that.

In August 2017, I visited the Smokies with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and I saw firsthand with him the work that is needed on the trails. We hiked the Rainbow Falls Trail, where a 2-year project is underway to rehabilitate the trail.

Crews from Trails Forever, a partnership between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Friends of

the Smokies, and the American Conservation Experience are working to build a rock staircase along the trail to reduce erosion and improve visitor safety and enjoyment.

Crews use rigging systems to move large rocks, split them using drills and chisels, and then set them into place to provide long- lasting trail structures for those hoping to see the rainbow formed by mist from the 80-foot waterfall along the Rainbow Falls Trail.

Secretary Zinke and I worked to split and place one of those rock steps. It is not very easy to do. Volunteer crews will work to rehabilitate over 6 miles of that trail.

In addition to the crews, every Wednesday volunteers head up the trail to help restore it for future visitors. In 2017, volunteers donated 900 hours of work on that trail.

The Smokies is full of wonderful volunteers like those working on the Rainbow Falls Trail. Over 2,800 volunteers donated over 115,000 hours last year alone, but we must do more to get the funding to our parks to help address the maintenance needs and support the countless volunteers.

In the Smokies, 75 percent of that maintenance work is roads, which isn't surprising, since millions of visitors to the park each year experience it behind the wheel. The park maintains and operates nearly 400 miles of roads, including 6 tunnels and 146 bridges, which allow visitors to traverse the park's mountainous landscape.

The Smokies is working hard to address these maintenance needs, and later this year they will open 16 miles of the Foothills Parkway. We are all looking forward to that in East Tennessee. Driving the Foothills Parkway will give you a spectacular view of the highest mountains in the Eastern United States. Tennesseans are excited that these new 16 miles of the parkway will soon be open to the public. It is scheduled for this fall.

Due to funding shortfalls, building and repairing the 16-mile stretch of the Foothills Parkway took over 50 years and will be completed nearly 75 years after Congress first authorized the Foothills Parkway. Completing just 1.6 miles of the parkway took nearly 30 years.

In 1944, Congress authorized the Foothills Parkway but prohibited Federal funds from being used to purchase and acquire the land, so the State of Tennessee purchased the land and gave it to the Federal Government to create a scenic parkway to provide views of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

For 75 years, Tennesseans and visitors have been waiting to enjoy the majestic views of the Foothills Parkway because there hasn't been sufficient Federal funding to address the maintenance needs of our national parks. Other roadways in the Smokies, including Newfound Gap Road and Clingmans Dome Road, remain on this backlog list.

Clingmans Dome Road takes visitors to Clingmans Dome--the highest point in Tennessee and the third highest mountain east of the Mississippi. At 6,643 feet, Clingmans Dome offers panoramic views of the Smoky Mountains.

Additional funding is desperately needed for the Smokies and all of our National Parks to help repair and rebuild campgrounds, trails, and roads. Doing that will bring more visitors, more tourists, and more jobs to Tennessee and to national park communities throughout our country.

According to the Outdoor Industry Association, the outdoor recreation economy generates 7.6 million direct jobs and $887 billion in consumer spending. In Tennessee, the outdoor recreation economy generates 188,000 direct jobs and over $21 billion in consumer spending.

In 2016, the visitors to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park alone spent nearly $950 million in communities surrounding the park. The over 11 million visitors to the park supported nearly 15,000 jobs and $1.3 billion in economic output in these communities.

Restoring our parks not only helps to preserve our land for generations but helps to grow our economy.

Now, here is what our bill does. I see the Senator from North Carolina is coming to preside, and he is one of the principal cosponsors of the bill. The National Park Restoration Act will use revenues from energy production on Federal lands to help pay for the $11 billion maintenance backlog at our national parks. It will provide mandatory funding on top of annual appropriations for the National Park Service--for the priority-deferred maintenance needs that support critical infrastructure and visitor services at our parks.

The National Park Restoration Fund created by the legislation will receive 50 percent of revenues from energy production on Federal lands over the 2018 projections that are not already allocated to other purposes.

This legislation includes revenues from all sources of energy production on Federal land: oil, gas, coal, renewables, and alternative energy.

The legislation protects all existing obligations for revenues from energy production on Federal land, including payments to States, payments to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and payments to the Reclamation Fund.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the work that Senators Portman and Warner have done. They have introduced similar legislation. They have many of the same objectives. I know there are many other Senators who care deeply about this issue, other than the bipartisan group of us who introduced the legislation today. We can all work together in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee where this bill will be referred. We will put our heads together with Senator Murkowski and Senator Cantwell. We will come out with the best possible bill-- something that President Trump can continue to support and that the full Senate and then the House of Representatives can pass. Then, we can get on with it and begin to deal with the deferred maintenance backlog in our national parks.

Theodore Roosevelt once said that nothing short of defending this country in wartime ``compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.'' We must all work together to restore our national treasures so future generations have the same opportunity to enjoy them, as we have.

In conclusion, let me reiterate something personal about this. In 1985, the Secretary of the Interior called and asked me, when I was Governor of Tennessee, to chair the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors. I did that, along with Gil Grosvenor, the chairman of the National Geographic Society, and a variety of people. One of our major recommendations was to pick up the recommendation of the Rockefeller Commission from 1964, which said, if there is an environmental burden, there should be an environmental benefit. They are the ones who recommended, to begin with, that we take land from energy exploration and use it to pay for the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

We reaffirmed that in 1986. We reaffirmed that principle in 2006 when we used revenues from drilling for the State side of the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

So while this proposal is unprecedented in the sense that it is the first time that I know of that a President and his Office of Management and Budget have approved mandatory funding using revenues from energy production on Federal lands to deal with national park maintenance needs, the principle of matching an environmental burden with an environmental benefit is well established.

I am grateful to the President, and I am especially grateful to Secretary Zinke for his initiative. I look forward to working with a bipartisan group of Senators in the Energy Committee to develop a bill, pass it, and get started on the work of America's best idea for restoring America's best idea--our National Park System.

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

Madam President, when we passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, we did so in response to a financial crisis that shook the foundations of our economy and devastated so many of our hard-working constituents. For example, the Dow Jones dropped from an average of 13,677.89 in July of 2007 to an average of 7,235.47 in March of 2009, resulting in a 47.1 percent loss. Nationally, the unemployment rate increased from 5 percent in January 2008 to 10 percent in October 2009, and in Rhode Island, the unemployment rate was even higher, increasing from 6.2 percent in January 2008 to 11.9 percent in December 2009.

In short, we had to do something to respond and avoid another financial crisis because behind each of these harrowing numbers were our constituents and their families, who saw their life savings, their jobs, and their homes evaporate in a flash. That something was the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, also known as the Dodd-Frank Act.

I am proud to have drafted and supported several of its provisions, such as the creation of a consumer watchdog--the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB--whose primary focus has been on protecting consumers from unscrupulous financial activities; my bipartisan language calling for a dedicated Office of Servicemember Affairs at the CFPB, which helps ensure that our servicemembers and their families are protected in the consumer finance space in the same way these service men and women protect us. That is now a part of the CFPB, and it has done remarkable work protecting the men and women of our armed services, who do remarkable work protecting us.

Also , I was able to provide an additional $1 billion in funding through the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, which provided targeted emergency assistance to help local communities acquire, redevelop, or demolish foreclosed properties.

Frankly, in the wake of the crisis, every city and many rural areas were seeing foreclosed properties sitting there, reminding us all of the devastation. With these resources, they could be repurposed for families to live in, or if they were decrepit, they could be demolished for urban development and economic development in rural areas.

These are just a handful of the many good and worthwhile provisions in the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, but, like any other major piece of legislation, it was not perfect.

Years ago, the custom here was that we would come together and agree on technical fixes to comprehensive legislation. It was almost predictable that after we had a complex piece of legislation, we would discover unintended consequences, and we would come together on a bipartisan basis to fix those technical issues without having to relitigate the entire bill.

Unfortunately, that moment to make needed fixes never happened, and while the legislation before us today makes changes to the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, I am concerned that this legislation may actually go too far and go beyond the needed technical fixes. For example, I worry that this legislation may actually make it tougher for community banks and credit unions to compete against the larger financial institutions despite the regulatory relief provisions in this bill for smaller financial institutions. This is because the legislation encourages large financial institutions to grow even larger--from $50 billion up to $250 billion. It does so, in part, by removing some of the extra oversight provisions we put in place with the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, such as making sure large banks undergo strong and robust stress tests to ensure that they have their own sufficient rainy day fund and that any type of problem is not funded by taxpayer bailouts.

In addition, this legislation may further encourage larger financial institutions to grow by increasing their competitive edge for the kinds of businesses and customers currently served by community banks and credit unions, which should be concerning to all who support our smaller local financial institutions. Larger institutions can absorb more costs than smaller institutions. They can have programs that cost them a lot in the short run but drive out the competition in the medium and long run. Because they can stretch costs over bigger institutions, they can provide services that might be better provided or more personally provided by smaller institutions, but these will be pushed out of the marketplace. So the potential net result of this bill, ironically, may make it more difficult for regulators to spot a threat to financial stability from a larger bank while increasing competitive pressures on community banks and credit unions.

To address some of these concerns, I have filed several amendments to improve the bill and add needed protections for consumers. Let me describe some of these amendments in greater detail.

One amendment seeks to prioritize regulatory relief for institutions with a strong history of doing right by their customers. In the legislation before us, Federal financial regulators are given the discretion to provide regulatory relief to certain financial institutions, and in so doing, to consider factors they deem appropriate. My amendment simply directs the regulators, when exercising this discretion, to also consider whether the financial institution, in the preceding 24-month period, paid any Federal fines or penalties and to consider whether there was any violation or settlement related to an alleged violation of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act--the SCRA--or the Military Lending Act and if these violations could have been avoided. Again, that is a strong emphasis on protecting the men and women who protect us--our servicemembers. These two pieces of legislation, the SCRA--the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act--and the Military Lending Act, are the strongest protections our servicemen and women have against financial abuse by institutions.

In short, how well an institution serves its customers, including our servicemembers, should help determine whether certain financial institutions deserve the regulatory relief provided under the bill.

On a very strong bipartisan basis, I hope we can adopt this amendment. It just seems so clear to me that when we are giving relief, we should give it to those who have earned it--those institutions that have treated our service men and women well and have treated their customers well.

Another amendment I filed would empower the CFPB and its Office of Servicemember Affairs to enforce existing SCRA safeguards--the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act safeguards--such as those that protect our servicemembers from being overcharged. This amendment is needed because, despite the importance of the SCRA's protections to our servicemembers, enforcement of this critical law has been inconsistent and subject to the discretion

of our financial regulators, which can change with each Administration.

According to a July 2012 report from the Government Accountability Office, the estimated percentage of depository institutions that serviced mortgages that were examined for SCRA compliance varied widely, ranging from rates of 4 percent in 2007, 17 percent in 2008, 18 percent in 2009, 26 percent in 2010, and then dropping down to 15 percent in 2011. You can see that sort of tracked with the financial crisis, where at a point after 2007 and 2008, the regulators understood the threats that were being posed to service men and women in terms of their mortgage obligations. But that seems to be fading. We can't lose focus on protecting the men and women who serve us.

As someone who has had the experience and privilege of leading soldiers as an executive officer of a paratrooper company, I spent a lot of time trying to explain to people who were trying to collect from men and women in uniform that they couldn't because the law had set certain interest rates that they exceeded and that they couldn't because they were violating--back then it was called the Soldiers' and Sailors' Civil Relief Act. We need an agency of the government, not individual members of the Armed Forces, to protect these men and women. I think that is what we are trying to do with this legislation.

Simply put, prioritizing the consumer protection of our service men and women should not be discretionary; it should be mandatory. This amendment ensures that the SCRA enforcement will be permanently a priority of the CFPB and the Office of Servicemember Affairs. It is supported by more than 30 organizations, including the National Military Family Association, Military Officers Association of America, Veterans Education Success, Student Veterans of America, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States.

We also need to do more to protect student loan borrowers. There is a growing private market to refinance student loans, including Federal student loans. I filed an amendment to require lenders to disclose the benefits that borrowers might forfeit, such as income-driven repayment plans, loan forgiveness, and deferment options, when they refinance a Federal loan into a private loan.

I have also filed an amendment to clarify that the Education Loan Ombudsman at the CFPB should monitor and report student loan complaints for all education loans, including Federal student loans.

Additionally, I support Senator Durbin's amendment to strengthen student loan servicing and protections for private student loan borrowers and to provide greater transparency and accountability for campus-based banking products beyond just credit cards. We have all read about the many abuses that have taken place, and we owe it to consumers everywhere to ensure that these abuses are detected and prevented.

Continuing this focus on consumer protections, another of my amendments responds to the difficulties that Rhode Islanders face when trying to secure a loan modification by taking greater advantage of bank branches. If you are able to walk into a bank branch and get a mortgage, then you should also be able to walk into the same branch and get help to avoid preventable foreclosures. What we found in the crisis was that often this was not the case. They could get a loan at the branch, but if they needed any type of assistance, they had to call a servicer or go someplace else. My amendment, which is supported by the National Consumer Law Center and the National Association of REALTORS, establishes a pilot program to see whether this would be feasible-- whether we could get bank branches not only to make loans but also to help borrowers when they come into difficult circumstances.

I have also filed an amendment that would direct GAO to conduct a retrospective study of the impact of the provisions of this legislation on economic growth and consumer protection. Specifically, my amendment asks GAO to evaluate the bill's impact on non-managerial wages, senior executive pay, stock buybacks, the interest paid on savings or money market accounts, jobs being moved abroad, foreclosure rates, and enforcement actions.

In so doing, we will be able to determine whether the legislation actually delivers on the claims by its sponsors of economic growth and consumer protection. I think we always have to go back and check our work, and this provision would allow us, in a formal and systematic way, to check our work. I hope we can do that.

Finally, I have filed an amendment supported by the former Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker, to retain and strengthen the Federal Reserve's emergency safety and soundness powers. To quote Chairman Volcker: ``It's clear that circumstances can arise where the activities of some banks with less than $250 billion in assets would pose a grave threat to financial stability. To address such a threat, regulators have certain tools in their arsenal that we wish they will never have to use. Senator Reed's amendment wisely restores and strengthens one such tool, allowing it to be deployed under limited circumstances and only upon approval of a supermajority of the [Financial Stability Oversight] Council.''

Surely, at the very least, we should agree to preserve and strengthen the ability of our financial regulators to avoid grave threats and another financial crisis.

Before I conclude, I would like to make one further observation. Ten years ago today, few of us knew ahead of time that we would see an economy that would collapse into depths that we did not anticipate, that our Nation would literally recoil due to the recklessness and unchecked greed of too many on Wall Street. We should not forget that, nationally, over 8.6 million jobs were lost between January 2008 and January 2010, with over 33,000 jobs lost in Rhode Island alone. If anything, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was a sensible and long overdue response to the reality that people are nowhere near perfect and cannot always be trusted to do the right thing.

We learned in the hardest and most painful ways that certain safeguards are necessary. Unfortunately, the bill before us today removes some of those safeguards. Absent any serious changes made to the bill during this week's debate and for all the reasons I have stated, I cannot support it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, listening to my friend from New York--and he is my friend--we have worked together on a number of projects, even though we have diametrically opposed views on many policy prescriptions. To listen to him talk, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was a bad thing because it took money from the Federal Government and let the people who have earned it keep it and spend it the way they see fit.

I know they made a bad bet. They bet that it would fail. They bet that we would not get the votes to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but we did, and the American people and American families are the beneficiaries of that.

I have come to this floor time and again, telling those stories, most recently about a plumbing company in Cleburne, TX, that has seen the benefits in terms of bonuses and increased pay, more take-home pay, along with the lowest claims for jobless benefits since 1969--the lowest claims for jobless benefits since 1969. But when we come to the floor, our Democratic colleagues, who bet against the American economy and this resurgence, the reawakening of this great economic engine known as the American economy--they bet against it. They are still sticking with the same old story, regardless of the facts.

I know the American people know better. They have noticed in their paychecks starting in February--because the tax tables were rewritten by the IRS--that they actually have more take-home pay. I have family members who are ecstatic about that. One of my daughters called and just couldn't be more excited, and I know that is happening to families all across the country.

I guess it is just one reason we have two political parties-- Democrats and Republicans--because while we may agree in some sense on the outcome, we certainly don't agree on the means to achieve that outcome. They are the party of Big Government, higher taxes, and more spending. We are the party of smaller government, effective government, one that provides essential services to the American people, like defending our Nation and maintaining peace around the world, but we believe in the individual. We believe the people who earn the money ought to be able to keep more of it and spend it as they see fit, and they believe that government ought to keep more of that and spend it as Washington sees fit. That is

the reason we have two political parties, and people have to make their choices, and they do each election.

Yesterday, though, Mr. President, we voted to proceed to a very important bipartisan bill that would provide relief for small and midsized banks and credit unions across the country. This was an important step in what has been a long time coming.

You might ask: Why do we care about providing regulatory relief for banks and credit unions, especially the smaller ones that are in our communities? Well, that is where people go when they want to buy a house and they need a mortgage, when they need some startup money for a new business, where they need to go borrow money, for example, to buy seed and equipment to plant a crop. If you are in the agriculture sector, that is where they get access to credit, and that is why it is so important.

Unfortunately, since the Dodd-Frank law passed in 2010, we have seen a lot of that access to credit, particularly among small and medium- sized banks and credit unions, dry up because what they had to do was hire more people, but not for the purpose of making more loans. They hired more people because they needed to comply with the redtape and regulatory burden imposed by Washington.

We are peeling that back; we are reversing that--not for the big banks. The regulations stay in place, but for community banks and small credit unions, we are peeling that back so that it is a more rational and reasonable regulatory regime.

Ever since the law known as Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010, community and regional banks have been trying to get their voices heard. They have been clamoring to get lawmakers to understand that their businesses are much different from the titans of Wall Street that Dodd- Frank went after, following the financial crisis. Usually, when I am talking to the community bankers and the credit unions from my State, I say: You didn't cause the great recession of 2008. You didn't cause the great financial crisis, but you are the collateral damage. And they nod their heads sadly.

These banks want us to know they are from Main Street, not from Wall Street, and they want the rules to reflect that fact. After yesterday's vote, we finally started on a pathway not only to listening to their concerns but also to acting on them.

Dodd-Frank, the regulatory legislation that was passed in 2010, was almost 250 pages long. It required more than 10 Federal agencies to write more than 400 new rules, imposing some 27,000 mandates on financial institutions of every size, from large to small. In doing so, Dodd-Frank's rules imposed billions of dollars in new costs. Much of the weight fell on the backs of banks and credit unions that posed little systemic risk to the overall economy, and they have had a much harder time than Wall Street firms complying with excessive and complex reporting requirements.

Here is the irony. It is actually the big banks and big financial institutions that have the heft and the money to be able to comply with all of this new spider's web of regulations. It is the smaller community banks and credit unions that can't afford it, so they have been going out of business or being gobbled up in mergers by the big banks. This isn't what Congress intended in 2010. That wasn't the focus, but that is the consequence.

As the Senate majority leader said yesterday, based on one survey, compliance costs--those are the costs of dealing with the redtape in the financial sector--have gone up by 24 percent. What has happened as compliance costs have increased? Well, banks have closed in small towns in rural America, for one, which has led to a growing number of places with no bank branches at all.

In Texas, for example, we lost about 165 bank charters, a 26-percent reduction. In smaller rural areas that lacked multiple options to access credit, this is a serious problem. It is one of the many issues this bill we are voting on this week attempts to solve.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, the bill mainly ``eases administrative burdens'' on community banks. These banks incredibly ``make up about 98 percent of financial institutions, but [hold] only 15 percent of [U.S. banks' total] assets.''

Our colleague, the senior Senator from Idaho, the chairman of the Banking Committee, has spearheaded this effort, which is called the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act. I heard him say yesterday that it does all three of those things. It helps stimulate economic growth; it provides regulatory relief; and it protects consumers. We all appreciate the tremendous amount of hard work he has poured into the difficult and elaborate negotiations. His leadership has been indispensable.

As Senator Crapo has pointed out, the reforms in the bill will rightsize existing regulations on community and regional banks and credit unions while ensuring consumer safety at the same time. Anyone who lives and works in the real world knows that a one-size-fits-all approach just about never works, and banking and the financial sectors are no exception.

Dodd-Frank never worked as intended, but it was especially disastrous for smaller financial institutions that shouldn't be subject to many of its provisions, which weren't meant for them in the first place. The bill, therefore, will relieve the burden on small and midsized businesses that are being treated unfairly. Again, it is not so much the banks and the credit unions that we are worried about; it is the people they lend money to, who need access to credit to live their lives, to build their business. That is who we are mainly concerned about.

Surprisingly and gratefully, this bill is supported by Democrats who passed Dodd-Frank in the first place. This bill is supported by Democrats and Republicans, as well as the Trump administration and top Federal Reserve officials. This is actually a little bit of a bright light in an otherwise, sometimes, dark atmosphere here in Washington, DC, when it comes to dealing with some of these problems. This actually will help solve some real-world problems, and it is supported by Republicans and Democrats.

One specific objective is to raise the threshold at which banks face the stricter Dodd-Frank oversight, but it will also--and I want to emphasize this--keep in place requirements for much larger financial institutions, like rigorous stress testing, for example.

As I said, negotiations have been going on for this legislation for years; I think it is 4 years to be exact. But because of the resistance of the former administration, the Obama administration, as well as the former Senate majority leader, Senator Reid, we couldn't get these reforms passed before this week--and next week, if necessary. This is a new day, a new administration, a new leadership, and we are making progress.

In the meantime, though, American families and businesses lost out. Some farmers and ranchers, looking to actually buy what they needed to bring in the crops so that they could earn a living, couldn't get the loans they needed. Young people couldn't find a mortgage at a price they could afford and purchase their starter home.

In Texas, bankers confirmed that these reported difficulties are real. They recently signed a letter that urged the Senate to seize this opportunity and to pass this bill as quickly as possible. As the Independent Bankers Association of Texas has pointed out, community banks neither participated in nor profited from the excesses and bad behavior that precipitated the financial crisis, yet they are paying a disproportionately high price in attempting to deal with the aftermath. That just about sums it up.

Another group from my State, the Texas Bankers Association, has said that they are pleased to see this bill has finally been brought to the floor for a vote. That group represents about 450 banking institutions in my State. Sometimes we see the credit unions and the banks as rivals. They often see themselves as rivals for the same line of business. But the banks and credit unions agree. The credit unions in my State say that passing this bill would allow them to more fully serve their members' needs, whether that be providing mortgages or small business loans, instead of spending so many hours and so much money trying to deal with the redtape--and to what purpose? It doesn't help grow the economy. It doesn't help access to credit.

It is really regulatory overkill that we are trying to deal with here. As the

majority leader said yesterday, there are a ``wide diversity of views on Dodd-Frank. But there is widespread agreement that we should not continue allowing'' unintended consequences to wreak havoc on community banks and small credit unions.

I hope all of our colleagues will join me in supporting the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act. It is good for American families. It is good for communities across our country that are underserved and for people who lack access to credit. It just makes sense.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.