A resolution reaffirming a strong commitment to the United States-Australia alliance relationship.

Mr. President, I rise to urge my colleagues to join me in opposing the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education. Simply put, Betsy DeVos is completely unqualified to serve as Secretary of Education in this great Nation.

Many others share this view. I have heard from thousands of parents, teachers, and other citizens of Wisconsin who are concerned about the future of our education system urging me to oppose Mrs. DeVos and certainly opposing her vision for America's students. As of today, over 20,000 Wisconsinites have emailed me, and we have had over 7,000 phone calls opposing the confirmation of Mrs. DeVos, and Senate Democrats are unified in our opposition to Mrs. DeVos serving in this capacity. Even two Senate Republicans have announced that they cannot support Betsy DeVos. If just one more of my Republican colleagues were to announce their opposition and were to vote no, we could do the right thing and tell President Trump that he really needs to find a new candidate, a new candidate for Secretary of Education who is qualified to run that Department.

While Betsy DeVos has spent decades advocating for a particular vision for education, she has never actually worked as a teacher or as an administrator. Her career has involved investing hers and her family's considerable

wealth and using those resources to advance the privatization of our K- 12 education system. She did not attend a public school either for grade school, high school, or college, and nor did her children. She has never worked as a teacher, principal, professor, counselor, or in any other formal role in our education system.

Her confirmation hearing before the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee clearly demonstrated how little she knows about Federal education law and policy. It was startling to see her ignorance about critical measures like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or the debate over growth versus proficiency as a measure of student achievement. Betsy DeVos has demonstrated that she has neither the knowledge nor the experience in education that would allow her to be a successful leader of the Department of Education. Mrs. DeVos has worked to advance a vision of K-12 education that is fundamentally hostile to our public education system.

My home State of Wisconsin has a long and very proud tradition of support for public education. Back at the founding of our State, we wrote the guarantee that every child should receive a free public education into our very founding document, our State Constitution. Wisconsin had the first kindergarten in the United States. Wisconsin is proud of something that we actually call the Wisconsin idea in higher education; that the walls of the classroom should be the borders of the State, if not the borders of this Nation or the entire world.

Mrs. DeVos's experience in education, however, has been a decades- long effort to privatize it. Her record of support for vouchers as well as charter schools that lack adequate accountability and oversight is very troubling and could lead to diversion of public dollars in even greater amounts out of public education.

Regardless of any vision or experience on education, Mrs. DeVos is a nominee with, let's say, complex and opaque finances. She has a very opaque record of financial dealings and political giving, including on matters directly related to the work that the Department does which she seeks to lead. Given her and her family's investments in companies that benefit directly from Federal education programs, I remain very concerned about what we simply still don't know.

I am also troubled by Mrs. DeVos's and her family's long history of contributing to organizations that have been hostile to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, even promoting the discredited idea that sexual orientation or gender identity can be changed through conversion therapy.

While she told me and several of my colleagues at her hearing that she believes all students should be treated equally, I really remain concerned about how this long history of support for these anti-LGBTQ organizations will influence a Department which, over the last 8 years, has shown some tremendous leadership in supporting LGBTQ students and parents in the education system.

The Federal Government's primary role in elementary and secondary education is to promote equity. I am not convinced that Mrs. DeVos will be the leader the Department needs to do just that. Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 as a civil rights measure. It was designed to ensure that every student, regardless of ZIP Code or parents' income, has access to a quality public education.

We continued that important tradition in reauthorizing this law, which is now in the form of a very strongly bipartisan bill, the Every Student Succeeds Act. The next Secretary of Education will have to implement that act.

I fear that Mrs. DeVos, as a vocal proponent of State and local control, will not be the strong voice we need to hold States accountable for serving all students, particularly those who have been historically left behind.

When we passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, we made sure there were strong Federal guardrails to assure that we never forget why there is a Federal role in education to begin with, for equity and civil rights and to make sure that every child can succeed. Furthermore, I am very concerned that Mrs. DeVos would not commit to robustly supporting the Department's Office for Civil Rights or enforcing the very guidance that protects transgender students from discrimination.

Betsy DeVos lacks knowledge about and commitment to the Federal laws that ensure students with disabilities have access to the various supports that they need to receive and benefit from a quality public education.

As I noted, she has demonstrated a complete lack of understanding about our Federal obligations to these students. I have heard from numerous parents in Wisconsin, parents of students with disabilities who were appalled by her inadequate answers to questions at our education panel hearing. She was unprepared to answer questions about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and these parents have written to express their distress about what her filling the role of Secretary of Education could mean for their children if she were to be confirmed.

One Wisconsin mother of three special needs children wrote to me about how this Federal law provided the legal rights that she needed to advocate for them, to advocate for the best possible educational environment for her three sons with special needs.

I heard from another mother, Melissa from Beloit, who detailed how the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act makes it possible for her daughter, Rowenna, who has Down Syndrome and autism, to actually thrive in a public education setting, along with her peers.

Finally, as a strong proponent of making college more accessible and affordable, I do not believe that Mrs. DeVos has the experience or vision that will allow her to successfully lead the Department in supporting higher learning.

There is a student debt crisis in this country, but Mrs. DeVos doesn't have a plan to address it and has even expressed skepticism about a Federal role.

While she has acknowledged that there are some bad actors in higher education, she has also refused to commit to enforcing regulations that help students who are defrauded by dishonest schools like Corinthian Colleges. We need a Secretary of Education who is an advocate for those students, not one who is looking for ways to shirk that responsibility.

Despite the fact that the Department oversees billions of dollars in grants and loans that allow students to pursue higher education, she has expressed skepticism about any Federal role in making college more affordable. She has even refused to oppose cuts to a program that helps students who commit to a career in public service or to support efforts to ensure that the value of the Pell grant keeps pace with the cost of college.

For all of these reasons and many others, Betsy DeVos is not the right choice for Secretary of Education. I call on my colleagues to defeat her on the question of confirmation and to afford this new President the chance to send us a nominee who is prepared to be an advocate for all students and public education in this country.

Mr. President, tonight the Senator from Maryland, Mr. Cardin, and I and a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators, have submitted a resolution reaffirming the strong alliance between the United States and Australia. I wish to speak about that for a few minutes.

I don't know what happened during last week's telephone call between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Australia, but I do know this: The people of the United States do not have better friends than the people of Australia.

We are more than friends. As one Australian told me when our family lived there thirty years ago, ``Well, we're mates all right. The English may be our ancestors but you Americans are our cousins. First cousins. We started out the same kind of people. Underprivileged, a long way from home, doing the same kind of thing, looking for a new life. Found a hard life. Hoped it would be a better one for our children. Each wave of new ones lifted up the last ones. A pioneering spirit in the countryside here. In America, too.''

Even though they live down under on the other side of the world, for a century Australians have stood with us every time we are at war, and we have stood with them. During World War II, when Australian troops were fighting in North Africa and Europe, and the Japanese were bombing Darwin four times a day, the United States came to the rescue. In 1992, Dick Cheney and I, as members of President George H.W. Bush's Cabinet, traveled to Australia to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea, when the U.S. Navy stopped Japan's advance. Today, no two countries trust one another and cooperate in security arrangements more than Australia and America. We trade, we visit one another, and our

students study in each other's universities.

Thirty years ago, our family lived an American dream and we moved to Australia. We arrived on Australia Day, January 26, 1987, 199 years after the first fleet of English settlers sailed into Sydney Harbor. After 8 years of swiveling in the Governor's chair, on the very day I was sworn out of office, my wife Honey and I and our four children flew to Sydney for Six Months Off in the ``Land Down Under.'' It was my wife's idea: an opportunity for a retreat from the merry-go-round of power and to discover what really was important.

We rented a home in view of the most beautiful harbor in the world, bought an Australian car, and I learned to drive on the wrong side of the road. Our four children walked to Australian schools, and we all sank deeply into the culture of America's favorite cousins. I attended Chester A. Arthur Society meetings, where Australian Parliament members competed to show that they know more about American history than United States Senators do. We spent the night in the South Wales bush. We saw 9-foot crocodiles in the Northwest Territory. We traveled by train to see the Melbourne Zoo and took a horseback trip across the Snowy Mountains. It didn't take long for us to understand what Mark Twain meant when he wrote: ``When a stranger from America steps ashore in Sydney . . . the thing that strikes him is that it is an English City with American trimmings.''

We made friends then that exist to this day. Last year, four of those friends, the Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr and the Australian Ambassador to the United States Kim Beazley and their wives, spent the weekend with us at our home outside the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. We cherish those friendships and our country's relationship with Australia. It is always appropriate for the U.S. Senate to reaffirm the importance of that relationship, and I am glad to join Senator Cardin and a long list of bipartisan U.S. Senators to do that again today.

To offer a more complete understanding of what makes the Australians our favorite cousins, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record chapter 30 from my book ``Six Months Off,'' written after our time in Australia.

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Flake), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), the Senator from Nebraska (Mr. Sasse), and the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey).

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I move to instruct the Sergeant at Arms to request the attendance of absent Senators, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Rules of Procedure be printed in the Record.