Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session and the commerce committee be discharged from further consideration of PN1059; that the nomination be confirmed, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to the nomination; that any related statements be printed in the Record; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action and the Senate then resume legislative session.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 2183, introduced earlier today.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 395.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 2 p.m., Monday, March 31, 2014; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; that following any leader remarks, the Senate proceed to the consideration of H.R. 4302 under the previous order; that at 5 p.m. the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the Owens nomination, with the time until 5:30 p.m. equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees.

Mr. President, there will be at least two rollcall votes on Monday at 5:30 p.m.

Mr. President, if there is no business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn following the remarks of the Senator from Alaska, Ms. Murkowski.

Mr. President, Joe Sewall, David Huber, Harry Richardson, Hoddy Hildreth, and Sherry Huber--those names mean nothing in this Chamber, but they meant everything in Maine in the 1970s. They were the parents of the environmental movement in our State. What do they all have in common? They are all Republicans.

I rise tonight in puzzlement as to how this issue became a partisan one. It is a scientific issue. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. That is science. That is not a partisan or debatable issue. The science on this question is definitive.

I would not call myself a denier, but I was a skeptic until several years when I encountered a chart, which I will show in a large version later this evening, that talks about CO2 in the atmosphere for the last million years. Yes, it varied over time between 150 and 250 parts per million, but in the 1860s, at the dawn of the fossil fuel age, it started to go up, and now it is at 400 parts per million. That number has not been seen in this world for 3 million years. The last time we were at that figure, the sea level was 80 feet higher.

We are playing with the future of this planet. We have to do something, and that is why we are here.

Facing challenges is hard. The bigger the challenge, the harder it is to face it because facing a significant challenge always involves risk, always involves a little uncertainty, always involves effort, always involves cost, always involves inconvenience, and always involves change. The most profound observation I ever heard about change is that everybody is for progress and nobody is for change.

In the 1930s, Europe and particularly England faced a challenge. They faced a challenge that was to their very survival. But for almost the entire decade of the 1930s, England didn't face that challenge. They did not act, even though the data was overwhelming, even though the facts were compelling, even though their greatest parliamentarian, the greatest parliamentarian in English history--at least recent English history--continuously warned them. Winston Churchill spent a good part of the 1930s warning his country about the dangers of the rise of Nazi Germany. But people didn't listen, and they didn't listen for much the same reason I think people aren't listening now--because it is hard to take on a new challenge. It is hard to take on something that will have a cost. It is hard to take on something that will entail risk. But ignoring warnings has consequences. In the case of the 1930s in England and ignoring Winston Churchill's warnings, the consequences were 55 million people dead. Most historians believe Hitler could have been stopped in 1938, 1939, but instead of facing the challenge, people said it was too expensive; it was too inconvenient; it was too much of a change. They were exhausted from World War I.

That was perfectly understandable, but the consequences were catastrophic.

That is where we are today. We are facing a daunting challenge. For all of us speaking tonight, this isn't easy. We can outline the problems, but the solutions aren't easy, and the solutions aren't going to be free. The solutions are going to involve change; they are going to involve investment; they are going to involve innovation; and they are going to involve facing up to a challenge that is very serious.

There are lots of ways to think about this. One way is this example: All of us have health insurance. We all have homeowners insurance--even simpler than health insurance. Homeowners insurance means basically we are insuring our home against burning down. What is the risk of our house catching fire? One in two? No. One in 365. Will your house burn down once a year. No. One in 3,650? I suspect the risk is somewhere around 1 in 10,000 or 20,000. But every family in America is paying an

average of $800 or $900 a year to insure against a 1 in 10,000 risk. But we are being told in this body--in this country--that we can't take steps to insure ourselves against a risk which 98 percent of the scientific evidence says is a dead certainty. I don't want to take that risk.

People say: You are wrong, Angus. This isn't true. It isn't going to happen. Maybe I am. Maybe we are. Maybe that 98 percent of climate scientists who have spent their lives studying this issue is wrong. I hope they are. I hope I am. But what if we are not wrong? The consequences are almost unimaginable.

Although I have a long history of involvement in environmental matters in Maine, I was a climate skeptic. I heard all the arguments about it, and I said, I don't know whether this is really true. We can argue it both ways. Then, about 5 years ago, I ran across a little chart and the chart to me answered the whole question. Here is the chart.

This chart shows a million years of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We often hear carbon dioxide naturally goes up and down in the atmosphere. Well, yes, it does. That is what these figures show. But for 900,000-plus years, it ranged between 160 parts per million to about 250 or 275. That is the range. Then all of a sudden, we get up to the year 1,000, and it is still in the same higher range. Then right here, 1860, when we started to burn fossil fuels in large quantities, and there it goes. It goes to levels that we haven't seen on this planet for 3 million years. The last time we saw 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, the temperatures were 12 to 14 degrees warmer and the oceans were 60 to 80 feet higher.

This isn't politics. This isn't speculation. These are actual measurements based on the Greenland ice cores. This is what the CO2 concentrations were, and here we are at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

This chart, it seems to me, answers two of the three basic questions on the subject. The first question is: Is something happening? Yes, inevitably. We just can't look at this and say this point and this point are so different, and this is a million years. Something is happening.

The second question about this whole issue is this. Do people have anything to do with it? This is when we started burning stuff. This answers that question. Of course, people have something to do with it. It is just too weird a coincidence to say all of a sudden, when we started to burn fossil fuels in large quantities and release them into the atmosphere and increase the CO2, it just happened to happen at the same time. One fellow I know said it is volcanoes. I am sorry. We didn't have an outburst of volcanoes in the 1850s and 1860s. We had little fires all over Europe, all over America. We had steel mills. We had the beginnings of the industrial revolution. We started to burn coal and later oil. This is what happened.

I mentioned there were three questions. No. 1, is something happening? Yes. No. 2, do people have anything to do with it? Yes.

The third question is, So what. CO2 is going up in the atmosphere. So what. What does that mean? This answers that question. This is the relationship between CO2 and temperature. The red line is carbon dioxide and the black line is temperature, an almost exact correlation. If the CO2 goes up in the atmosphere, and we are at about 500,000 years, we can see CO2 goes up, temperature goes up; CO2 goes down, temperature goes down. So this is the answer to the third question, so what. The answer is temperature.

One of the things that worries me, and the reason I am here tonight, is some research that has been done at the University of Maine. We have a climate study center at the University of Maine. I was there a year or so ago, and I was meeting with them. It was one of these meetings where we are going around and we go to the university, factories, and schools and meet with people and they give us briefings, and I was listening to a briefing on climate change when a word crept into that discussion that I had not heard before, and the word was ``abrupt.''

Climate change, I always assumed, happened in a very slow, long, historic, geological time kind of way. That is not the case.

These are two lines on this chart. The yellow line is temperature; the red is the extent of the ice in the Arctic. The point of the chart is, look at these vertical lines. That is in a matter of a few years. It is not a matter of 1,000 years or 10,000 years; it is a matter of a few years. It is as if someone throws a switch, and I do not want to be around when that switch is thrown, and I certainly do not want to be the cause of the switch being thrown.

Abrupt climate change, that is what keeps me awake at night; that this is something we are sort of assuming is going to be the next generation's problem or the generation after that or by 2100. Who knows about 2100? Who thinks about 2100? Well, it could be a lot sooner than that.

If things such as this cause a melt-off in the Arctic ice and the Greenland ice sheet, and it changes the currents in the Atlantic or anywhere else in the world, for that matter, everything changes.

Without the Gulf Stream, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia are essentially uninhabitable. I do not know about the Presiding Officer, but I have always thought of England as a being to the east. It is not to the east; it is way to the northeast. England is on the same latitude as Hudson Bay. The only reason it is of temperate climate is because of the Gulf Stream. If something happens to the Gulf Stream, Northern Europe is almost uninhabitable.

These changes can happen abruptly. Again, maybe I am wrong. I hope I am wrong. But what if I am right? What if the science is right. Are we willing to take that risk? Do you want to be the person who says to your grandchildren: We saw this coming. All these people talked. They talked all night in the Senate. But we decided not to do anything because it would be expensive and it would disrupt some of our industries and might cost us a few jobs, which, by the way, would be replaced in other industries.

Do you want to be the person who says: Well, we had this warning but, no, we didn't feel we had to do anything. I do not want to be that person.

Does it have practical effects? It does have practical effects. There is not a theoretical discussion. This is not just a science lesson. This has effects in all of our States. We have heard them here tonight--about the water temperature in the streams in Minnesota, the forest fires in Colorado, the drought in the West, in California, that is rendering millions of acres potentially unproductive that have been the breadbasket of America.

In Maine, it is the lobster, the iconic product of the coast of Maine. What is happening is the ocean is getting warmer. As the ocean is getting warmer, the lobsters do not necessarily--they are not too unhappy about it getting warmer, but the center of gravity of lobsters is going to go where the water is colder, and that is what is happening. That is what the lobstermen have told me.

The center of gravity of lobstering in Maine used to be right off of Portland in what is called Casco Bay, where I live. But over the last 10 or 15 years, it has slowly moved northward. Now the lobsters themselves have not moved northward, but the heavy catch has moved northward.

Here is a dramatic picture of what has happened. In 1970, here was the hotspot for lobster: south of Massachusetts, south of Rhode Island, off the end of Long Island. This is where they were catching the most lobster. Here is where they are in 2008. They are up along the coast of Maine, headed for Nova Scotia. This is the center of gravity of the lobster industry.

People around here may not know what is happening in the climate, but the lobsters of Maine know it, and the green crabs and the shellfish and the moose and the deer and the trees, they know it because that is what is changing in my State.

There is another thing that is happening that I do not think has been discussed tonight; that is, that the ocean is becoming a giant sink for all this carbon that is in the atmosphere. When the atmospheric carbon dioxide goes into the water and is dissolved in the water, it turns into something called H2CO3--carbonic acid. Carbonic acid attacks shellfish. Shellfish cannot form their shells because the ocean is becoming acidic. This is a recent observation, and it is the result of the massive load of carbon that we have been putting into the atmosphere.

Here is another practical result, and the Presiding Officer talked about this in terms of Boston. These are charts that show what happens if the sea goes up varying levels--6 meters, 1 meter. One meter is shown in dark red on the chart. Look what happens to Virginia Beach in North Carolina at just 1 meter, and that is predicted in the next 100 years as the sea level goes up. Then we look at all these communities: New York, Boston, Savannah, and Charleston, Virginia Beach, Miami, Louisiana. Then we can multiply this all around the world. I do not know the percentage, but a very significant percentage of the world's population lives within about 40 miles of the coast--everywhere in the world.

These are real consequences, and these are the kinds of consequences that are unbelievably expensive and unbelievably destructive.

There is another piece of evidence, which is the sea ice extent. We are now talking about the famous Northwest Passage actually existing. Ships can now go from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the Arctic because the ice is disappearing.

Here it is, as shown here, just from 1979 to the present. This is evidence. This is data. This is irrefutable.

Here is essentially a chart of the Arctic sea ice. The red line was the extent of the ice, the average place the ice was in 1979 through the year 2000, and here is where we are in 2012. As it continues to shrink, several things happen: the ocean levels rise, the acidification of the ocean continues, and there is a threat of a change in the ocean's currents, which would be catastrophic for many parts of the world.

Another example is the Muir Glacier in Alaska. These two photographs I have in the Chamber were taken from exactly the same spot. In 1941, here is the glacier. In 2004, here is the lake. The glacier is gone. That has changed, and that is a change that is the canary in the coal mine. That is the change that tells us something is happening and we ignore it at our peril.

What are the consequences? What are the consequences? I have talked about the economic consequences: forest fires, floods, lobsters, agriculture, all of those people living in low-lying areas. Multiply Superstorm Sandy by two, three, four, five, and we are talking billions of dollars of economic costs; we are talking about lost jobs. Something like 30 percent of the businesses that were wiped out by Superstorm Sandy never came back. They never came back. To each one of those businesspeople, to each one of those insurers that insured those businesses, to those families it is gone forever. That is the result of these superstorms we are seeing more and more frequently.

An enormous economic risk, an enormous cost. Yes, it is going to cost something to prevent this, but it is going to cost us either way. The old ad I remember when I was a kid: Pay me now or pay me later. In this case, it is pay me now or pay me more later.

But there is a second level of risk that is almost as significant as the economic risk; that is, the national security risk. We have had panels of retired judges and admirals who have looked at this issue. Global climate change is a major national security risk. Why? Because it is going to lead to friction, to riots, to famine, to loss of agricultural land, to loss of homes, to territorial disputes about water, and that increases our risk.

I am on the Armed Services Committee and Intelligence Committee. I have spent the last year and a half listening to testimony about Al Qaeda and what we are doing to confront Al Qaeda. Part of our strategy is to fight them and to kill them, but we cannot kill them all. It is like the Hydra. You cut off one head and two come back. What we have to do is get at the basis of why young people are joining an organization such as that and change their lives. This climate change, which threatens people's livelihoods, particularly in the developing world, is a grave threat to our national security because it generates the very people who are dangerous. The most dangerous weapons of mass destruction in the world today are large numbers of unemployed 20-year- olds who are angry and dispossessed and have no hope and are willing to take up arms against any authority they can find, and unfortunately that may be us.

This is a national security risk. Water, I predict, will be one of the most valuable commodities of the 21st century. It is going to be something people fight about. It is going to be something people get into wars about. Water is an enormously valuable commodity that global climate change threatens.

Finally, on the question of what are the consequences, it is an ethical risk. It is an economic risk, a national security risk, but it is also an ethical risk. Another aspect of this that has struck me that is not strictly related to climate change but is related to our consumption of fossil fuels is what right do we have in two or three generations to consume the entire production of fossil fuels that the world has produced in the last 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 million years.

It reminds me of a dad sitting down at Thanksgiving dinner, where all of his children are sitting around the table, mom brings in the turkey, puts it in front of him, and he says: This is all mine. None of you get any. I am going to take it.

None of us would do that, but that is exactly what we are doing. We are saying this oil, this precious oil that is an amazing commodity, can do all kinds of different things, we are going to burn it up in about 200 years. It takes millions of years to make it, and we are going to burn it all up. I think that is an ethical risk.

OK. I hate talking about problems and not talking about a solution. What are the solutions?

I believe in markets. I believe in free markets as the best way to allocate goods and services. But the market, in order to be efficient, has to be accurate, and it has to accurately reflect the true costs and price of the commodity. Right now we are not paying those costs. The cost of climate change is not factored into the cost of consuming fossil fuels. If you factor it in, then you have a free market and people will make their decisions based upon their economic situation and also their commitment to the environment, but the real costs are not factored in.

I am old enough to remember when this debate took place in the 1970s, when I worked here. But the debate then was about environmental law itself, and the debate was characterized as payrolls versus pickerel. I can remember that term, ``payrolls versus pickerel.''

The idea was that if you clean up the water and clean up the air, it is going to put people out of business, we are going to lose jobs, industry is going to run away, we can't possibly do it. Well, a man named Edmund Sixtus Muskie from the State of Maine did not believe that. He was raised in a paper mill town on the Androscoggin River--one of the most polluted rivers in America. They used to say it was too thick to drink, too thin to plow. Muskie did not believe it, and Muskie stood in this body and fought for the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

Here is the amazing thing. I was asked to do some research and to do a presentation about Muskie's environmental leadership. I went back and looked at the record. I could not believe my eyes, particularly in light of where we are here today--tonight--in this body and in this city. The Clean Air Act passed the Senate unanimously. In the midst of the debate, Howard Baker, the minority leader, the Republican leader, gave his proxy to Muskie. Can you imagine that happening today? It passed unanimously. We could not pass the time of day unanimously in this body. Yet it happened.

That brings me to a question that really puzzles me. How did this become a partisan issue? How did it come to divide us so cleanly along environmental lines? This discussion tonight is important, but it is all Democrats and people--Bernie and I, the two Independents--Senator Sanders, the Senator from Vermont, and I, the two Independents--no people from the other party. I do not understand that. The leaders, the giants of the environmental movement in Maine when I was a young man were all Republicans.

When Ed Muskie got the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act passed through this body, it was with the support of the overwhelming majority--in the case of the Clean Air Act, all of the Republicans, including very conservative Republicans. Senator Buckley

from New York supported the Clean Air Act. I do not know how or why this became a partisan issue. Maybe it was because it was invented by Al Gore. I do not know. But somehow it has become this divisive partisan issue. It should not be. This is our future that is at stake. This is our children and grandchildren's future. This should not be a partisan issue.

In my experience, if we can develop a common understanding of the facts, we can find solutions. They will not be easy, but they are there. Right now the problem is that we do not have a common, shared understanding of the facts.

So what are the solutions? The market is one. Innovation, as Senator Kaine from Virginia said, is another. There are ways to use electricity and generate electricity through innovation that will be much cleaner, support just as many if not more jobs, and help prevent this tragedy from befalling us.

By the way, it does not mean we cannot burn coal. Coal is an abundant resource that we have in this country that is loaded with energy, but unfortunately it is also loaded with CO2 and other pollutants. So I think part of our commitment should be intense research on how to use coal efficiently, effectively, and cleanly. That should be part of the deal. We are not trying to put any region of the country out of business or control people's use of valuable resources, but let's use them in the most efficient and effective and environmentally safe way. That can be done in part through innovation.

I was a lobbyist in Maine 30 years ago. One of the things I lobbied for was to get rid of pop-top beer cans. The Presiding Officer probably remembers the first ones. You grabbed the ring, pulled it off, and it became a little razor. People threw them on the ground. You would step on them. They were dangerous.

I remember going to the lobbyist for the bottlers and I said: We want to get rid of those things.

He said: There is no way. Our engineers have looked at it. It is impossible to make one that you do not have to tear off.

Well, lo and behold we passed a law banning those pull-off tabs, and the industry found a way to do it safely and in an environmentally sound manner. Sometimes you have to help people find a way.

The final piece when it comes to solutions is that this has to be international. I agree with my colleagues who say we cannot just do it here. We cannot just do it here. If we just do it here and nobody else in the world does it, if China and India do not do it, then it is not going to be effective. We will have imposed costs on our society that will simply make their businesses more competitive if they are ignoring these externalities, these realities of price. It has to be done through international cooperation.

I think the moment may be right. From everything I understand about the air quality in China, they may be ready to discuss this. They may be ready to take steps along with us. But we are going to have to be the leaders. We are going to have to show what can be done and how it can be done. We are going to have to innovate our way out of this. But we have to do it with our international partners. Movement of air does not respect boundaries.

When Ed Muskie was promoting the Clean Air Act, he would take a globe--I do not think we are allowed to take props onto the floor of the Senate--he would take a standard globe--imagine I have it here--and everybody used to have these in their library. On a globe is a coating of shellac to make it shine. That coating of shellac is the same thickness in proportion to the globe as our atmosphere is to our real globe. In other words, it is very thin and very fragile. We destroy it and threaten it at our extreme peril.

I can boil it all down to one simple concept. This is a Maine concept. It is the Maine rototiller rule.

For those of you from urban States, a rototiller is a device that you use to turn the ground in your garden. I guess it is a homeowner's plow. It turns the dirt. Not too many people own rototillers, but enough do so that you can borrow one when you need it for that one day in the spring when you are going to put in your garden.

The Maine rototiller rule is very straightforward: When you borrow your neighbor's rototiller, you always return it to them in as good shape as you got it with a full tank of gas. That is all you need to know about environmental policy. We do not own this planet. We have it on loan. We have it on loan from our children, our grandchildren, and their grandchildren. We are borrowing it from them. We have a moral, ethical, economic, and security obligation to pass it on to those people in as good or better shape than we got it. That is what this issue is all about.

I deeply hope we can put aside the partisanship and the arguments, agree on the facts, and then have a robust and vigorous discussion of solutions. It is not going to be easy. It is not going to be free. But it will make all the difference in the world to the people to whom we owe our best work--the future of America and the world.

Mr. President, it was a great privilege for me a few moments ago to read George Washington's Farewell Address for a number of reasons; one, we learned in doing a little research on this practice--which as the majority leader indicated goes back more than 100 years--that the last Senator from Maine to read President Washington's Farewell Address was Senator Ed Muskie, who read it on this floor exactly 50 years ago. The last Senator to read before him from Maine was a freshman Senator in 1949, one Margaret Chase Smith. So if you believe that I am honored and humbled to be following in those footsteps, you would be correct. This is one of the seminal documents in American history. It really ranks with the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution itself. As the majority leader indicated, it didn't simply spring from Washington's mind. It actually has an interesting history. It was originally drafted in 1792, at the end of Washington's first term, when he intended to retire. He kept wanting to retire all the way from the end of the Revolutionary War, and the public kept calling him back into service.

The first speech in 1792 was drafted by James Madison, who was the father of our Constitution. Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson convinced Washington that he couldn't leave at the end of his first term because there was too much going on in the country. The country was still in its very formative years, and patriotism required him to stay for a second term, which he reluctantly did.

This speech was delivered in September of 1796--at the end of Washington's second term--and was based upon the original Madison draft, edited and updated by Alexander Hamilton. I don't know about others, but I wouldn't mind having Madison and Hamilton be my ghostwriters--two of the greatest minds in American history and minds which didn't always agree about all the principles of what the country should work toward, but they agreed to work with Washington on this remarkable address.

I would like to take a moment to talk about Washington's importance. I used to teach about leadership, and one of the fundamental principles I used to pound into my students was that execution is as important as vision--that

having a good idea and a concept is not enough; it has to be executed well in order to take root and actually achieve the benefits that are intended.

Washington was the execution of the vision of the Constitution. When he took office, there was no United States. There was an idea, there was a vision, there was a concept, but how it was actually put into practice was so much in the consequences of Washington's decisions on a day-to-day basis, starting with only running for two terms, starting with when they asked him what the President should be called--and, of course, in Europe it was ``Your Excellency'' and all these fancy titles--and he said: ``Mr. President'' is the proper appellation for an executive in a republican form of government. But Washington was essential to the success of this country because of his role as the person who did the executing of the vision embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The speech itself is amazing. In many parts, it could have been written last week. Several things come through to me very quickly.

One is his wonderful, inspiring, powerful, passionate commitment to public service. He talked about his humbleness, his patriotism, his feeling of duty in order to serve his country. Next, he is passionate about national unity, and indeed his comments foreshadow the Civil War. He talked about regional differences and the importance of unity not only to the country as a whole but as benefits to the regions themselves. He talks about the North and South and the East and the Atlantic. He is presaging the arguments of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s that led to the attempted dissolutions of the country and passionately argued for the importance and significance not only as an abstract principle but in a very material, concrete interest, how important union was.

Of course, as one of the two Independents in this body, it would be unbecoming for me to dwell at too great length on his imprecations about the dangers of party to our society. I will let those speak for themselves. But he was very worried about what he called factions and later on in the address actually refers to them as ``parties.''

He also talks about the dangers of concentration of power and the usurpation of power by one branch or another of the government--again, a fundamental principle and a realization of the important role the Constitution played in dividing powers between what he calls the segments of the government.

I think one of the aspects that comes through in this document, as it comes through in the Federalist Papers--which is the other sort of seminal explanation of how our government came to be and what the thinking is--is a brilliant in-depth understanding of human nature. He is talking to the ages in this speech. He is not talking to the politics of 1796 or the politics of 1800s or the politics of the Revolutionary War; he is talking about human nature and the tendency toward despotism, the tendency toward usurpation, the tendency toward power being accumulated in one place, and that comes through. Often he talks about human nature. I think that was one of the most important and most salient characteristics of all of the founding individuals of this country.

There is a very interesting provision on religion expressly stating that religion is part of our heritage and that morality is part of our heritage. He has an interesting image: How can an oath mean anything if religion doesn't mean anything?

Finally, there is a short but powerful passage about the importance of education. He calls it the ``general diffusion of knowledge.'' That is public education. The general diffusion of knowledge means everyone, not just the elite. That is one of the secrets of America, the general diffusion of knowledge.

Of course, one that speaks to us today is his admonition to cherish the public credit and not get into debt, and if you get into debt because of a war, endeavor during peacetime to pay off the debt. I think that is something we really need to take to heart and think about, lest our debt swamp us in the future. He uses a phrase I couldn't help but emphasize when I read the speech: that we should not ungenerously throw upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear. In other words, we ought to pay our own bill, and right now in this country we are not doing that.

He also has a sort of amusing passage about taxes, saying: Nobody likes taxes. They are never fun. They are always inconvenient. But they are necessary. And he talks about how the members of the government have to prepare the public for the idea that they have to pay for those expenditures that are going to be entailed in the pursuit of any governmental enterprise.

Finally, he talks about foreign entanglements, probably the most famous portion of the speech, where he talks about being neutral, the luxury we have being protected by huge oceans, and that we really should avoid foreign entanglements.

Interestingly, on that provision I went back and read the comments. Each time a Senator reads the speech, there is a leather-bound book in which they put their notes, which I am going to be doing in a few minutes. I went back and read the notes of Ed Muskie and Margaret Chase Smith. In 1949 Margaret Chase Smith wrote in her note: I wonder if we should be entering into NATO. This was indeed the first major foreign commitment of American enterprise after Washington's speech. Margaret Chase Smith obviously had second thoughts after she had read the speech here on the Senate floor in 1949.

Finally, this speech is so powerful because it is so fresh and it speaks to us today. My favorite quote from Mark Twain--and there are many, but one which I suspect I will repeat on this floor at least half a dozen times during my tenure here: History doesn't always repeat itself, but it usually rhymes. In this case, what Washington was telling us in the fall of 1796 rhymes. It helps us to think through so many of the issues which are confronting us here today and the wisdom of Washington expressing it. Remember, two of the most brilliant minds of that period--Hamilton and Madison--participated in the drafting of the speech--words well worth remembering, a wonderful contribution to the life of our country.

I thank the majority leader and the leadership for giving me the privilege and the honor to read the speech today on behalf of my colleagues.

Recognition of the Minority Leader

Mr. President, it is a pleasure to join the Senator from Nebraska. I love the idea of the surf-and-turf caucus reaching across the country to try to find commonsense solutions. I often think about legislation and what we are attempting to do, and there is an attempt to codify common sense, to try to bring to the regulatory process, as it deals with medical devices, a little more thoughtfulness and cautiousness as it affects health information technology.

The first part of the bill actually sets up a process whereby we can examine in a thoughtful kind of way some of these issues to reduce the regulatory burden and at the same time foster innovation and, very importantly, protect patient safety. It sets up a process involving the National Institute of Standards and Technology and other parts of the administration so that the regulatory process in this area can be rationalized across agencies and better coordinated.

The heart of the bill, however, as the Senator just outlined, is our attempt to differentiate between medical software, which has a direct impact upon patient health, and software that is more peripheral and can range from the app I have on my iPhone, which is a pedometer that tells me how much I have walked each day and how much I should walk each day, to the kind of software that is being developed across the country to assist medical practices in their billing and in the operational part of the medical business.

I think one of the most important points, as the Senator pointed out, is that software evolves almost overnight, and if you go through this burdensome regulatory process--whether it is 60 days, 120 days, or 1 year--to get your software approved and then you find there is a bug you have to fix, that could restart the whole regulatory process. So I think we should acknowledge that this is a bit of preemptive legislation because the FDA thus far has not intruded very deeply into this process, and we believe it is important in order to define the areas where regulation and the protection of patient safety is important, but software that manages the billing process of a medical practice should not fall into that category and should not be subject to that level of regulation. That is really what we are talking about.

As the Senator mentioned, this law goes back to 1976. In thinking about 1976, Gerald Ford was President and software was a mink coat. We weren't really thinking about what we are doing today, and of course the legislation did not anticipate the kind of intense innovation and new thinking that is going on that is able to protect people's health just by giving them information about themselves. No doubt the time will come when a smartphone will be able to do blood pressure or temperature or certainly provide one's heart rate, and that is information we should have ourselves, not necessarily regulated by the Federal Government.

I am delighted to join the Senator from Nebraska and the Senator from Florida in introducing this piece of legislation. I think it is important. It is part of a larger project to try to bring our Federal regulatory process into the 21st century where time is of the essence, innovation is at the speed of light, and that we can't burden our people who are creating these innovations with a lengthy and, yes, expensive process that has a tendency to discriminate against smaller entrepreneurs and businesspeople.

I compliment the Senator from Nebraska for bringing this piece of legislation forward. I am absolutely delighted to join her in its sponsorship, and I look forward to moving it through the legislative process. There is a companion piece of legislation in the House, and I think this, as I said at the beginning, is an effort to get as close as we can to legislating common sense in this area, and I believe it will make a difference for businesses, for people, for patients, and for the health care system in America.

Mr. President, it is a pleasure to join the Senator from Nebraska. I love the idea of the surf-and-turf caucus reaching across the country to try to find commonsense solutions. I often think about legislation and what we are attempting to do, and there is an attempt to codify common sense, to try to bring to the regulatory process, as it deals with medical devices, a little more thoughtfulness and cautiousness as it affects health information technology.

The first part of the bill actually sets up a process whereby we can examine in a thoughtful kind of way some of these issues to reduce the regulatory burden and at the same time foster innovation and, very importantly, protect patient safety. It sets up a process involving the National Institute of Standards and Technology and other parts of the administration so that the regulatory process in this area can be rationalized across agencies and better coordinated.

The heart of the bill, however, as the Senator just outlined, is our attempt to differentiate between medical software, which has a direct impact upon patient health, and software that is more peripheral and can range from the app I have on my iPhone, which is a pedometer that tells me how much I have walked each day and how much I should walk each day, to the kind of software that is being developed across the country to assist medical practices in their billing and in the operational part of the medical business.

I think one of the most important points, as the Senator pointed out, is that software evolves almost overnight, and if you go through this burdensome regulatory process--whether it is 60 days, 120 days, or 1 year--to get your software approved and then you find there is a bug you have to fix, that could restart the whole regulatory process. So I think we should acknowledge that this is a bit of preemptive legislation because the FDA thus far has not intruded very deeply into this process, and we believe it is important in order to define the areas where regulation and the protection of patient safety is important, but software that manages the billing process of a medical practice should not fall into that category and should not be subject to that level of regulation. That is really what we are talking about.

As the Senator mentioned, this law goes back to 1976. In thinking about 1976, Gerald Ford was President and software was a mink coat. We weren't really thinking about what we are doing today, and of course the legislation did not anticipate the kind of intense innovation and new thinking that is going on that is able to protect people's health just by giving them information about themselves. No doubt the time will come when a smartphone will be able to do blood pressure or temperature or certainly provide one's heart rate, and that is information we should have ourselves, not necessarily regulated by the Federal Government.

I am delighted to join the Senator from Nebraska and the Senator from Florida in introducing this piece of legislation. I think it is important. It is part of a larger project to try to bring our Federal regulatory process into the 21st century where time is of the essence, innovation is at the speed of light, and that we can't burden our people who are creating these innovations with a lengthy and, yes, expensive process that has a tendency to discriminate against smaller entrepreneurs and businesspeople.

I compliment the Senator from Nebraska for bringing this piece of legislation forward. I am absolutely delighted to join her in its sponsorship, and I look forward to moving it through the legislative process. There is a companion piece of legislation in the House, and I think this, as I said at the beginning, is an effort to get as close as we can to legislating common sense in this area, and I believe it will make a difference for businesses, for people, for patients, and for the health care system in America.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Chris Sweitzer, a military fellow in the office of Senator Pryor, be granted the privilege of the floor for the duration of the calendar year.

Mr. President, I commend the Senator from Michigan, her committee and staff for their tireless work that has brought this farm bill to fruition. Further, I greatly appreciate the Senator's willingness to discuss an issue that is absolutely critical for dairy farmers in the Northeast: prehearings to review the Federal pricing formula for class III and class IV milk.

The senior Senator from Maine and the junior Senator from New York authored the provision included in the Senate farm bill which required USDA to address the pricing formula for class III and class IV milk through a public, transparent prehearing process. Their work has been essential in moving this conversation forward.

As the Senator from Michigan well knows, milk pricing policy is a complex, convoluted, and controversial business and challenging to handle in a package such as the farm bill. Does the Senator believe that the USDA, which is charged with stabilizing farm income; conserving soil, water, and other natural resources, and ensuring the availability and quality of food and fiber products, should provide an opportunity for a thoughtful, balanced process for addressing essential dairy pricing structure?

I thank the Senator for her response. The dairy producers in Maine have told me that they believe that it will take just such a thorough review of proposals from interested parties, to help address concerns from industry, assist with the stabilization of the price of milk and provide greater certainty for dairy producers.

Does the Senator agree that the Secretary has the authority and ability to conduct a prehearing procedure to consider alternative pricing formulas for class III and class IV milk products?

I understand that the Dairy Industry Advisory Committee has recommended that the Secretary take such action and review interested party proposals to address class III and class IV pricing formula changes in a participatory and transparent manner.

The dairy producers that I have spoken with are calling on the USDA Secretary to undertake a study of alternatives and to agree to hold prehearings on such alternatives as a basic component of the USDA's fundamental mission to the dairy industry. They believe it is time for Congress to direct the USDA to take the bull by the horns and to ensure that all regions of the United States can sustain viable dairy sectors and meet local, national and international demand for high quality U.S. dairy products.

Mr. President, I am delighted to congratulate PORTopera on its 20th anniversary season.

Since its opening performance of ``Carmen'' in the summer of 1995, PORTopera has been a pillar of Maine's artisan community and inspired countless young musicians and performing artists to pursue their passion for the opera. Over the years it has brought some of the world's greatest stars and most highly acclaimed productions to Maine audiences and played an invaluable role in enriching our communities.

PORTopera's dedication to excellence has been recognized around the country earning praise in Opera News for its 2012 production of ``Madama Butterfly'' and the Boston Globe for ``Le Nozze di Figaro'' in 2001. Furthermore, PORTopera's educational outreach initiatives such as the young artists programs and the opera-in-school program with the University of Maine have provided future generations of singers a place to hone their skills and learn from some of opera's greatest figures.

As Maine's artistic community continues to grow, I am pleased to recognize PORTopera for its leadership and tremendous accomplishments. Congratulations and thank you.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to address the Senate for 15 minutes.

Madam President, we are going to have a historic vote this afternoon--historic at least in recent history--because for the first time in 3 or 4 years we are going to pass a budget--at least I certainly hope so. It is historic because, while the process was not perfect, it is a budget that was arrived at fundamentally through negotiations, through discussions, and through compromise between the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and the chairman of the House Budget Committee. We are finally talking to each other.

This agreement is important. This vote is important for three basic reasons. One is that the agreement maintains the momentum of deficit reduction that has been in place here since the summer of 2011 when the Budget Control Act was passed. In fact, rather than breaking the budget numbers, it actually improves them in terms of deficit reduction by some $22 billion. And it maintains, as I said, the momentum.

One of the points that has been lost in the discussion about the budget and the budget deficit is that the Federal budget deficit has fallen faster in the last 2\1/2\ to 3 years than at any time in the past 40 or 50 years. It has fallen from almost 10 percent of GDP to under 4 percent of GDP over the past 2\1/2\ years. That is progress.

I think one of the problems we have around here is that often we don't know how to declare victory. We don't celebrate our successes. I am not prepared to declare victory in the fight for fiscal responsibility, but I am prepared to declare progress, and I think that is what we have made when we have more than trillion-dollar deficits that have been cut more than in half.

So the first reason I think this bill should be supported is that it is not a budget buster by any means; instead, it is a continuation of the momentum toward rational fiscal policies that we have been on, and I think it is something we should continue.

No. 2, this budget bill will finally get us out of the business of governing by crisis, of lurching from crisis to crisis and threats of shutdown and continuing resolutions year to year, month to month, quarter to quarter. It will provide some certainty to the Congress, to the government, and to the country about what the budget numbers are going to be.

I think it is important that people realize exactly what it is we are voting on today. Essentially, it is one number. It is what is called a top-line number. This is not the budget that embodies all the detailed decisions about where those dollars go. Those decisions will be made by the two Appropriations Committees of the two Houses between now and the middle of January. But by providing a number, those committees now know what their targets are. They know what their limits are. They know what they have to work with. It will enable them to make the kinds of decisions on priorities and spending that we should have been making all along.

By governing by continuing resolution, essentially what we are doing is using the priorities of last year and the year before and the year before that. And then, of course, the sequester on top of a continuing resolution is really a double budgetary whammy because the sequester is a cut. That is difficult enough to deal with, but it is a cut that was designed to be stupid, and it succeeded. It was designed to be so unacceptable that Congress would feel they had to find an alternative. Unfortunately, this past March that didn't happen. So the sequester, which was across-the-board cuts by account, went into place. That meant that within the military, within the Pentagon, within the Navy, within the FAA, and within the Department of Transportation, each account had to be cut. Some accounts probably could use some cutting and other accounts desperately needed the funding that was made available. This bill relieves the irrationality of the sequester while maintaining the sequester's downward pressure on spending.

Finally, and I think most importantly, what this bill we will be voting on this afternoon will do is demonstrate to the country that we can do our job.

I was talking to people in Maine yesterday, and they said: Well, why should you be puffing up your chest and pounding your chest about just doing what you ought to be doing all along?

I couldn't really argue with that, except that we haven't been doing our job. And the fact that we are now at least inching toward doing it in the manner we are supposed to is progress--at least it is progress in recent history. I think that is one of the most important parts of this bill. I think that is the signal it sends to the country--that we can, in fact, talk to each other; we can compromise; we can make financial and fiscal arrangements around here that make sense, that are rational, that are prioritized, and we can do our job.

When I was in Maine last weekend, the most common question I got was this: Why can't those people down there talk to each other? Why can't they work things out? We do that in our town meetings, we do that in our businesses, and we do that in our families. Why can't they?

Well, in this case, they have. It wasn't a perfect process, but at least it involved bipartisan, bicameral negotiations that get us to the point where we have a budget we can vote on today. Do I like it? I don't like every piece of it. I don't like the pension hit the Senator from Texas described. That wouldn't have been in my proposal. In fact, I made a proposal at the budget conference that was quite different from this one. It wasn't accepted. That is how this place works.

My favorite philosopher, Mick Jagger, said, ``You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.'' What we need right now is a budget. It is something we can work from that gives us some certainty.

I believe we can fix this pension problem. In fact, I have joined with Senator Shaheen of New Hampshire on a bill that would replace the cuts to the military pension, dealing with some offshore tax benefits that I think is a much more sensible way to fill that $6 billion gap. We can do that because the pension proposal doesn't take effect for 2 years--not until December 2015. So we can fix that, but we have to get this budget passed now.

To answer the question ``Why can't they talk,'' they have talked, and I think that is important.

Now I would like to turn to a slightly different topic, but it is related to the budget. In 1997 the Congress passed something called the sustainable growth rate, which was designed to control reimbursement rates for physicians and providers under Medicare. The problem is that it has turned into a monster that reduces physician fees to the point where they won't serve Medicare patients unless it is fixed. Each year since 2002 we have fixed it year by year, but it is always temporary. It is always a patch. In fact, it has gotten its own name in the lexicon of Washington: the ``doc fix.'' It is something we have to do. Everybody knows we have to do it. But why not fix it for good?

The Congressional Budget Office tells us that if we fix it once and for all, it would cost $116 billion over the next 10 years. That sounds like a big number, but it happens that there is a place we can go to get that money that I think fits with it very well. In 1990, under President George H.W. Bush, the Medicaid drug program was created, and because the government was buying drugs under Medicaid in very large quantities, they sought a volume discount from the pharmaceutical companies--perfectly rational; any of us would ask for a volume discount if we

were buying in large quantities--and, indeed, Medicaid-eligible beneficiaries had discounts or rebates on their drugs from 1990 to 2006.

In 2006, Part D of Medicare was passed. We provided a drug benefit to Medicare recipients. But one of the wackiest parts of that bill said that the government could no longer negotiate for volume discounts. I hear a lot of discussion around here about private enterprise and business and how we should run the government like a business. No rational business would buy any product--cars, gasoline, drugs, or anything else--in enormous quantities and not seek and gain from the sellers some kind of volume discount.

Senator Rockefeller has introduced S. 740, which essentially says: Let's return Medicaid beneficiaries--not all Medicare beneficiaries but Medicaid recipients--to the status of prior to 2006, where they will get applied to their drug purchases--or the government actually gets-- the same kind of rebates they got for the 16 years from 1990 to 2006. This will produce $140 billion over the next 10 years. It will not cut expenses to recipients; it will only save the government money.

It seems to me this is a sensible way to fix the doc fix once and for all and to do something that makes sense for the taxpayers, which is to acquire for them volume discounts, volume rebates that are available today for other Medicaid recipients who aren't under Medicare and for the VA, and it puts them on the same status, these so-called dual- eligibles, people who are eligible for Medicaid and Medicare. Just this change would save $140 billion, and it would enable us to fix the doc fix permanently. It would also contribute about $30 billion to deficit reduction over the next 10 years.

I think we have a historic opportunity this afternoon to pass a budget--the first budget, by the way, produced by a divided Congress, where the two Houses were in different political hands, since 1986. And I think that is an achievement. It is something that a month ago I wouldn't have bet too much on, but I am very appreciative and admiring of Chairman Murray and Chairman Ryan for coming together and putting their ideological issues aside and coming up with an arrangement, an agreement which allows us to have some certainty and which can signal to the country that we are, in fact, capable of doing the most fundamental responsibility we have, which is to pass a budget.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Deanna Wilbur be granted the privilege of the floor for the purpose of being here during these remarks.