Floor Statements

Mr. President, I would like to extend thanks to my colleagues from Ohio and Maryland for allowing me to cut in line.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, until you arrived to relieve me, I had been presiding since the opening of the Senate this morning, and I had the opportunity to listen to lengthy speeches from the Democratic leader and the assistant Democratic leader this morning. I would like to correct the record on three brief items.

First of all, as is common, almost an epidemic around here, there were repeated references to the Republican desire to cut Federal spending on healthcare for the poor and for the sickest among us. That is simply not true. It is an epidemic way of speaking around here, where people act as though, if you want to reduce the rate of growth, that is actually a cut. The fact that people in this body say it all the time doesn't make it true. No normal people ever talk that way. If you are having a debate at your house about your household budget and you are spending beyond your means and somebody proposes that next year you should spend 30 percent more than you spent this year, when this year you already spent more than you can afford, and you have big debate and you say ``No. Actually, next year, let's only spend 15 percent more than we spent this year,'' that is not a cut. You will still spend more money next year than you will this year. Because you have a debate about the rate of growth--that is not the same thing as a cut. It is a fundamentally dishonest way of speaking, and we should stop doing it around here.

The second thing that was said in these speeches that I listened to is that Republicans have a desire to give insurance companies more money. I would love it if some Democrat would come to the floor and explain why the stock prices of all the big health insurers in America have been through the roof since the passage of ObamaCare and why the big health insurance companies are the people lobbying the strongest to keep the current collapsing ObamaCare regime in place and actually asking for even more Federal money for insurance companies.

It isn't the case that the proposals Republicans are making on reforming healthcare are something for which the insurance companies are cheering; rather, the insurance companies want to keep the ObamaCare regime in place and add yet more tax dollars to it.

It would be great if we could have an honest debate around here instead of these sort of made-up stories that the Republican plans are in the interest of health insurance companies.

I will readily admit and have often admitted to this body that the Republican Party has done a bad job of explaining what we are for in terms of replacing ObamaCare. We have done a bad job, and we have not spoken with a clear voice. But speaking for myself, I will say that I actually want to have insurance play a smaller role in the healthcare sector because there are all sorts of things that we are currently insuring against in healthcare that we don't ever conceivably think would be a rational way to build an insurance marketplace in other sectors. If you think of property and casualty insurance, for instance, we don't have any law that mandates that Allstate and State Farm have to buy my gas and schedule my Jiffy Lube appointments. If they did, I submit to you that we would all consume a lot more gas, we would do it less thoughtfully, and we would have Jiffy Lubes that are at the wrong locations, open at the wrong hours, with poor customer service, with a lack of clarity as to what services they are delivering and what quality metrics they have.

We don't try to take in other sectors--the entire sector and swallow it by insurance. Insurance is supposed to be insulation and protection against catastrophic loss in the event of unforeseen, unpredictable, non-behaviorally driven events.

To be clear, I don't think the Republican Party has spoken clearly and spoken with one voice. But for this conservative vocalist, I actually want American healthcare to work better by making clear what things we want to insure against and what parts of the healthcare delivery market we think might work better if moms and dads and local doctors and nurses were more empowered by having to mediate fewer

of their transactions through the insurance space.

So while I am not in favor of cutting Federal spending for the poorest and sickest among us, I am in favor of having a debate about how we get to a sustainable growth rate, not the unsustainable growth rate we are on that is going to bankrupt the next generation.

I am in favor of shrinking the amount of money that goes to insurance companies. The plans being debated here on the floor tend to be debates where a lot of the Democrats actually want to have a conversation about how we can give even more money to insurance companies. They often have Orwellian names like ``insurance marketplace stabilization funds,'' but make no mistake--what they are really talking about is giving more money to private health insurance companies that have had stock prices go through the roof since the passage of ObamaCare. That is the second falsehood in the speeches this morning.

A third item on which it is important to correct the record--and this is not to pick on in particular the two most powerful Democrats in the body; those just happened to be the speeches I listened to this morning. We have a habit around here of people saying a lot of things that aren't true. You might ask: Why can you get away with saying things that aren't true? One of the ways we get away with it is, just as I am doing at this moment--I am speaking to an empty Chamber. The Senator from Arizona is here. He has the duty to preside over the Senate right now. But he is the only person in this Chamber. So everybody at home watching on C-SPAN--I know the camera angle is this wide, and so I am the guy on the screen, but this body has 99 empty desks.

One thing that is very common--and was true of both speeches I listened to this morning--is that there is no one in the Chamber even though, as the speeches are made, there is a lot of gesturing as I beat down this debate partner, and I just one-upped you and I just persuaded you. There is a lot of motioning and gesturing and fake rhetoric that goes on around here where we try to masquerade for the American people and for the 50, 60, 70 people in the Gallery right now. I see people chuckling because they all know that it is true. They are sitting in a body, and there is no one here. Yet, when people come and make their speeches on the floor, they pretend they are winning some grand debate, and then their communication staff rips apart the video and sends it to the local TV stations back home, where people get lots of credit, as if they just won some big debate on the Senate floor. And maybe they said a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't actually true, but there was no one here to answer them because we are not actually debating big issues very often in this body.

There are a lot of theatrics and a lot of charades and a lot of false deliberation. But right now, I am speaking to an empty Chamber, and both of the speeches that I heard this morning from the Democratic leaders--making up stuff about what the Republican healthcare proposals would do--those were speeches all delivered to an empty Chamber, even though the gestures implied somebody was winning a debate when that was happening.

Once upon a time--there is no golden age in world history; we all live post fall. But once upon a time, this really was the greatest deliberative body in the world. Two hundred forty years ago when the Constitution built a system of three separate but equal branches that checked and balanced one another, the Senate had a unique role. The upper body of article I, of the legislative branch, was a place where debates were supposed to be long so that you could forge consensus--70, 80, and 90 percent consensus--on issues, because people actually were in this body actually debating real issues.

We are not the greatest deliberative body in the world right now, and a lot of people pretend we are. One of the ways we get away with that is by standing in here and pretending there are a lot of people listening to our speeches when no one is here. Again, I am the third speech of the day in the Senate today, and all three of them have had an audience of zero. I submit that most of today on C-SPAN is going to have an empty Chamber with a little ticker at the bottom that says ``waiting for Senators to speak.'' When the Senator comes to speak, they are going to speak to an empty Chamber, and they are going to pretend they are winning a big debate. It is not a useful way to tackle the biggest public policy problems that face our people and not a great way to restore the Senate. We should make the Senate great again.

Thank you, Mr. President, for the opportunity to correct these three items.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, Hurricane Harvey is a horrible tragedy. It has ruthlessly taken lives. It has taken diplomas and baby albums. It has taken homes and gardens and playgrounds. It has also given us many new pictures of volunteerism, heroism, and neighborliness, and God bless those many helping hands. It has also revealed the willingness, the advanced planning, and the hard work of many government employees in the State and local governments, in the National Guard, in FEMA, and beyond.

So what are we doing here today in this body? And what should we be doing? What is the specific duty of the U.S. Congress at this moment? We should provide emergency funding relief. We should provide emergency funding for FEMA and for related agencies. They are doing important work, and they need it.

The amount agreed upon by the administration and the House of Representatives on Tuesday--just 48 hours ago--was $7.8 billion. It passed noncontroversially. The vote was 419 to 3. They did the right thing. So let's approve it. Let's do the exact same thing. Let's let FEMA spend that $7 billion. It is important money. There is a genuine emergency. There is real need. I am a small government guy, but there is a clear and urgent governmental role in this moment, so we should do it.

But what we should not do are unrelated things that we will pretend are hurricane relief. We should not fool ourselves into pretending that the legislation on the floor today is actually doing what it says it does just because it has a certain name on the top of the legislation. What we are actually considering doing today in this body is much, much larger, much clunkier, and much less explicable or defensible to your and my constituents.

Do your constituents know, for example, that far less than half of all of the spending in this bill before us today is in any way related to emergency relief for Hurricane Harvey? Think about that. Do your constituents know that far less than half of the spending is actually related to hurricanes? Shouldn't they know that? Shouldn't they know that the vast majority of the money this body is going to spend today, under the pretend guise of an emergency in the Schumer-Pelosi-Trump bill, is not actually emergency spending at all?

Do your constituents know that we are using the hurricane as an excuse to extend the debt ceiling? Translated, that means we can't pay our credit card bill, so we are just going to take over the credit card company and change our credit limit without any discussion. We are not going to have any conversation about the fact that

we constantly spend more money than we have, and we have to borrow to do it.

There is a mechanism by which, when we hit up against our debt limit, we are supposed to pause and have a conversation, but we are not going to do that today. We are going to use the hurricane as an excuse to hide from that truth.

What we are really doing right now is borrowing from our kids. There is no other explanation for what we are doing. What we are doing is we are intergenerationally stealing. We are passing on debt to the next generation for current spending. We are not funding infrastructure here. We are not funding roads and bridges and IT systems and weapons systems. These are not things that could be called investments in the future.

Again, I am not talking about the hurricane spending. We should do all of the hurricane spending. But mostly what this bill is going to do is spend current priorities--current-year money--month over month, as we always do, but we are going to pass the price tag and the debt on to our kids, and we are going to hide from our constituents what we are actually doing. We are not going to admit it. We are not going to have a conversation about it. We are not going to have an honest accounting about how much money we are going to spend. What we are going to do is increase the odds that we will have a debt crisis soon. At the moment that comes, we will have another emergency that we will be able to use as an excuse to do things that we then also will not want accountability for.

We should separate these two things. We should do all of the hurricane spending. We should not do things that are not hurricane spending but, rather, are excuses to kick the can down the road on the nature of the obligations we are constantly incurring beyond our ability to pay.

What we are not doing in this body today is draining the swamp. What we are doing is running a whole bunch of hoses to the edge of the swamp, turning them on to the highest possible volume flow, and then turning our backs on the swamp and shouting that there is nothing to see here. That is what we are doing. We are doing the opposite of draining the swamp today.

Finally, do your constituents know that what we are doing today actually increases the likelihood of both a government shutdown and a government default in December? The odds of a government shutdown are up and the odds of a government default are up in December.

Do your constituents know that Chuck Schumer--whose title is minority leader, not majority leader--just made himself the most powerful man in America for the month of December? Chuck Schumer has made himself the key man in all negotiations in December because of the legislation we are going to pass today.

Do your voters know that real and fundamental tax reform is going to get less likely because of today?

What is going to happen today is that the calendar for the next 90 days will be laser-beam focused on that December shutdown and showdown, and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi now hold most of the cards for when we get to December. This is an embarrassing moment for a Republican- controlled Congress and a Republican administration.

Here is the good news. We still have an off-ramp before us. We can do better, and we have a legislative pathway to do better.

I have a motion at the table that is simple. It funds all of the emergency relief that the administration has requested for Hurricane Harvey. Hear that clearly. What the House did yesterday morning that they negotiated Tuesday night funds all $7.8 billion that the administration says they need for hurricane relief. It passed 419 to 3. We can still pass that same legislation. That is it. That is what my legislation does. It doesn't do anything that is not hurricane relief and pretend it is hurricane relief; it just goes back to the bill that funds all of the hurricane relief that the administration says they need.

I am not offering lots of other stuff. I am not kicking the can down the road on the conversation that we should have tonight and tomorrow and Saturday and Sunday about the debt crisis we face. All I am trying to do is make a bill that says it is about hurricane relief, actually be about hurricane relief instead of a majority of other stuff masquerading as hurricane relief.

In short, if you want hurricane relief, this amendment is your vehicle to get to hurricane relief, not other pretend stuff calling itself hurricane relief. Just as the House did earlier this week in a 419-to-3 vote, we can do hurricane relief clear, plain, and simple, and we don't have to hide a whole bunch of other stuff in it.

Thank you, Madam President. I thank this body for its consideration.

Madam President, in the fall of 2015, when I first spoke on the Senate floor, I gave Nebraskans and every Member of this body my word that I would speak up when a Republican President exceeded his or her powers. At that moment, the Democratic President had taken to himself powers the Constitution had not given him. My opposition was not that President Obama was a Democrat but rather that our brilliant Constitution intentionally separates executive and legislative powers.

I gave my promise then because, despite the lazy, partisan rhetoric of this city, not everything is actually a blood feud between Republicans and Democrats. That is because American politics at its best is acutely aware of the difference between justice and strength. That is because when our body is working well in the Senate, we take seriously our history, our duties, and our unique place in the Constitution's architecture of separate powers, both vertically and horizontally.

In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Obama administration had made unconstitutional appointments when it declared this body to be in recess when the U.S. Senate was not, in fact, in recess, and it functionally claimed power--that is, the administration functionally claimed power--that belonged to the Senate under our Constitution.

So today I have come to the floor to keep my promise and to offer a word of humble advice to the President. If you are thinking of making a recess appointment to push out the Attorney General, forget about it. The Presidency isn't a bull and this country isn't a china shop. Mr. President, you are a public servant, in a system of limited government, with a duty to uphold and to defend and to teach to our kids the Constitution's system of checks and balances. This--this is the world's greatest experiment in self-government. It works only if all of us-- Presidents, Senators, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and judges--if we all keep our faith to the American institutions and to the rule of law.

Our oath is not to popularity, it is not to polls, and it is not to political parties. Our oath is to the Constitution and to the rule of law. Our duty is to the American people--the men and women who elected us, the men and women who came before us, and especially the men and women who will come after us in this greatest of experiments in self- government.

Madam President, with respect to the healthcare debate that we are having in this body, while I obviously look forward to taking seriously and considering any and all amendments offered by my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats, the basic trajectory of where we are in healthcare has not changed. We should all be disappointed by where we are.

Here is what I mean. It is very likely that in the coming decade, basic math is going to force Americans and those who will serve them in this and other institutions of government--they are going to be forced to choose between two paths. This isn't that hard to see. We are ultimately going to choose between single-payer, socialized medicine-- something I think is terrible policy, but it is intellectually coherent--or we are going to actively build the innovative, disruptive system of consumer-based health insurance that actually goes with consumers and patients and Americans and taxpayers across job and geographic change. We are ultimately going to make a choice.

Sadly, this has been a missed opportunity. We are not making the big choice now. We are making a choice between a couple of small options. We have forks in front of us that are, I think, dissatisfying to everyone. I have one constituent at home, who also happens to be my wife, who when she checks in on the processes of Washington, she regularly says: Both of your political parties are so gross. She is dissatisfied, like so many of the constituents who call us and come to our offices, with the fact that we are not debating the real stuff around here. We are making a choice between two small, pretty crappy options, when really the big choice that is in front of us--when we have health entitlements which dwarf everything else on the Federal budget--the two choices before us aren't really that hard to see. We are ultimately going to migrate toward a European-style single-payer system, where government will be more effective at controlling costs, but it will do it by crowding out lots and lots of the private sector. We are either going to have single-payer healthcare or eventually we will create a system where you have portable, affordable insurance.

We have none of those things today. We have no portability today. You can't take your insurance policy with you across job and geographic change. When I change jobs, I don't lose my life insurance. I don't have to cancel my car insurance because I changed jobs. But we are still living on a system that launders our insurance, which is really mostly the collectivized prepayment of mostly predictable medical expenses. We launder it through a tax accident from the 1940s. So you have to do that through your large employer group. You can't do it in the small market or as an individual. So we don't have portability, and we all know we need portability.

We did this 30 years ago in pensions. We used to also launder through a tax accident where, when people were presumed to work at one firm through their whole career, they had a defined benefit pension plan. It worked when you worked at the same place from high school graduation to retirement. It doesn't work when the average duration at a job for Americans is now under 4 years. So we did the hard work of reforming a pension system from a defined benefit to a defined contribution, tax- protected, portable 401(k) plan.

Obviously, we all know that if we are not going to end up in socialized medicine, we should have portability in our health insurance benefits. We should have farmers and ranchers in the Presiding Officer's State or in my State able to keep their insurance that they usually have to buy through the individual market, or we need the gig economy mobile workers who are going to change jobs even faster than every 4 years to not become uninsured for 4 to 6 months every fourth year when they change jobs. That is actually the No. 1 driver of uninsurance in America today.

To listen to pundits screaming on TV, you would think that somehow there are so many sicker or so many poorer Americans and that is why we have had arcing uninsurance since 1990. But that is not true. We don't have more poor people and we don't have more sick people. Uninsurance went up from 1990 to 2009 because people change jobs more rapidly, and every 4 years when they change jobs, if they have a 4- to 6-month period of uninsurance, that is when they get the breast cancer diagnosis, or probabilistically that might be when they get in the car accident, and now they become the preexisting condition population of 5 and 10 and 15 years from today.

This isn't rocket science. Uninsurance has grown in America over the last 25 years because we change jobs more and we have a stupid, clunky system from 60 years ago that we still launder through a tax accident. We should have portability. We should have affordability. We should have a real debate in this body about why so many--and by the way, I have been critical of my party for not having a good plan for replace. But I will say to those on the other side of the aisle, the ``Affordable Care Act'' is an absurdly Orwellian name for a piece of legislation that those who were in this body and voted for 7 years ago told the American people--you all did a press conference at the White House, and you said premiums would fall $2,500 per family of four. They have risen $3,200 on average per family of four. So your plus or minus sign was off to the tune of $5,700 per American family.

In my State and in the Presiding Officer's State, we now have a lot of

farming families in counties where there is only one insurer, where premiums are now north of $20,000 a year for the insurance market.

Stop pretending this is in any way affordable.

What we have is a system where the assumption is that because the system is so broken, the only way anybody could ever get health financing--and supposedly, health financing is the means to getting access to the health delivery system--is that everybody needs to be on welfare. That doesn't work.

We should have a robust social welfare safety net for the poorest and sickest among us, and we all in this body should be accountable for passing a piece of legislation that delivers a system where lower middle-class and middle-class and upper middle-class Americans can afford their own health insurance. Not everybody in America needs to be on welfare, and not everybody in America wants to be on welfare.

So our system is not affordable, it is not portable, and fundamentally it is not really insurance.

We have a system that is mostly about the collectivized prepayment of all medical expenses. We don't do this in any other sector of the economy. Think how absurd it would be for us to pass a law in this body mandating that Allstate and State Farm have to buy all your gas and schedule all your Jiffy Lube appointments. That is what we are trying to do in healthcare. Guess what. We can guess what it would look like. Jiffy Lube would be open at the wrong hours; it would be at the wrong locations; we wouldn't know what services they deliver; there wouldn't be quality metrics on any of it; and it would probably grow at 2 to 2\1/2\ times inflationary or GDP growth--just like healthcare.

We are trying to hyper-regulate and micromanage all of the largest sector of the U.S. economy from here by pretending we are talking about insurance, when we are not. What this body and what the Congress and what Washington, DC, have wanted to do for years is run every decision in healthcare but not tell the American people the truth--that it turns out it is really expensive.

Nobody comes to the floor and advocates--maybe Bernie does. Maybe Senator Sanders comes to the floor and actually honestly advocates for raising taxes to the level of all the micromanagement of the health sector that people in this body want to do. But what most people want to do--and it isn't just your side of the aisle; it turns out it might be a lot of people on my side of the aisle as well--they would like to have so much control over the healthcare sector but not admit how expensive it is, that we will do it by regulations on the financing model so you can hide it under the word ``insurance.'' Most of what is happening in American healthcare isn't insurance. Insurance is insulating people from catastrophic loss from non-behaviorally-driven, unpredictable events.

Everybody in this body wants every American to have health insurance, and everybody in this body should also want a health delivery system where the average American family living on middle-class wages could afford to buy their healthcare without potentially going broke or needing to become a ward of the State in the form of welfare. We should be having that debate. We should have a debate about portable insurance, about affordable insurance, versus socialized medicine. I am against socialized medicine, but people who want to advocate for it have an intellectually coherent position. That is the debate we should be having. Instead, we are going to kick the can down the road and have another small-ball debate. This is a lost opportunity for the American people, and it kind of makes a sham of the joke that this is the greatest deliberative body on the face of the Earth.

I live in a little farm town in Nebraska. There are 10 not-for-profit boards in my town that deliberate a heck of a lot better than we deliberate in this body. We can and should do better.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, I yield back all remaining time.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, I would like to add my voice to yours in commending the chairman of the Judiciary

Committee, the Senator from Iowa, for the honorable, principled, and commonsense way in which he led this committee through the last number of weeks and months as he shepherded through this body the confirmation of Judge--on Monday, Justice--Gorsuch.

The chairman from Iowa is a special man, and the 100 of us--or the 99 of us--who are privileged and blessed to serve with him know he is the model of how to conduct oneself honorably in this job, and America will benefit from Judge Gorsuch's joining the Court.

I add my voice to those commending the senior Senator from Iowa for the way he has helped shepherd this body.

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

Mr. President, I rise to comment briefly on Russian interference in the electoral processes in this country and across the West and governments of many of Russia's own neighbors.

We are in the middle of a civilization warfare crisis of public trust in this country. This isn't about the last 2 months. This isn't just about the last Presidential election. This is fundamentally about the last few decades of declining public trust in a broad range of our institutions: the press, political parties, executive branch agencies, the Congress, and beyond.

Russia is not unaware of our own distrust of each other. Russia is not unaware of our own increasing self-doubt about our shared values. Russia is today very self-consciously working to further erode confidence in our self-government by pulling at the threads of our public and civic life. Moscow's influence campaigns don't start by creating wholly new problems out of thin air, but rather by exploiting fissures that already exist in our civilization. The simplest way for Russia to try to weaken us is by trying to exploit the places where we are already weak, the places where we are already distrustful, and the places where we are failing to pass along a shared understanding of American values to the next generation.

The sad state of modern politics and the explosion of digital media are proving to be ripe targets for many of our own internal doubts and our own discord. We--all of us, Republicans and Democrats, the legislature and the executive branch--are ill-prepared for the challenges that are already on our doorstep, let alone what comes next with the acceleration of these kinds of technologies.

Today in the Wall Street Journal, we in this body were rebuked-- rightly rebuked, I think, and rebuked in a bipartisan way by former Congressman Mike Rogers. Chairman Rogers, a Republican, served as the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2011 through 2015. I am going to read his op-ed rebuke into the Record today, but I would humbly ask that all 100 Members of this body calmly and self-critically consider carefully Chairman Rogers' argument, for his argument is not fundamentally against Republicans alone. It is not against Democrats alone. He is offering double-barreled criticism of all of us in the Congress--criticism of both parties. Why of both parties? Because Russia's influence campaign is a really big deal. Are we Republicans listening? Also, because our response to Russia's influence campaign is not primarily about who you supported last November in the Presidential election.

Listening to the Democrats, it is sometimes hard to understand if that side of the aisle remembers that basic fact about what Russia's influence campaign was up to. Russia's goals in our most recent election were not initially about one candidate versus another candidate. We need to underscore this. There are particulars that those of us who spend time reading classified intelligence know we can't discuss in this unclassified setting. But the big, broad point is simple and needs to be shouted, and that is that Putin's fundamental goals are about undermining NATO. Putin's fundamental goals are about making us doubt our own values: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the right of protest or redress of grievances.

The Kremlin isn't attempting an influence campaign to make Americans believe that the sky is green or the grass is blue. He is trying to undertake an influence campaign to make us doubt our own First Amendment values. The Kremlin wants us to believe that our society is as corrupt as the thugocracy that Putin and his cronies are trying to advance. That isn't true, but if you listen to us in this body, we regularly do very little to restore the kind of public trust that Putin is actively working to undermine.

So I ask that each Member of this body would humbly and carefully consider Chairman Rogers' rebuke to the Congress this morning. This is from the Wall Street Journal, Chairman Rogers; headline: ``America is Ill-Prepared to Counter Russia's Information Warfare.''

When historians look back at the 2016 election, they will

likely determine that it represented one of the most

successful information operation campaigns ever conducted. A

foreign power, through the targeted application of cyber

tools to influence America's electoral process, was able to

cast doubt on the election's legitimacy, engender doubts

about the victor's fitness for office, tarnish the outcome of

the vote, and frustrate the new President's agenda.

Historians will also see a feckless Congress--both

Democrats and Republicans--that focused on playing partisan

``gotcha'' and fundamentally failed in its duty to gather

information, hold officials accountable, and ultimately serve

our country's interests.

Whether or not the Trump campaign or its staff were

complicit in Moscow's meddling is missing the broader point:

Russia's intervention has affected how Americans now view the

peaceful transition of power from one president to the next.

About this we should not be surprised. Far from it.

Propaganda is perhaps the second- or third-oldest

profession. Using information as a tool to affect outcomes is

as old as politics. Propaganda was familiar to the ancient

Greeks and Romans, the Byzantines, and the Han Dynasty. Each

generation applies the technology of the day in trying to

influence an adversary's people.

What's new today is the reach of social media, the

anonymity of the internet, and the speed in which falsehoods

and fabrications can propagate. Twitter averaged 319 million

monthly users in the fourth quarter of 2016. Instagram had

600 million accounts at the end of last year. Facebook's

monthly active users total 1.86 billion--a quarter of the

global population. Yet each of these staggering figures

doesn't fully capture the internet's reach.

In February, Russia's minister of defense, Sergey Shoigu,

announced a realignment in its cyber and digital assets. ``We

have information troops who are much more effective and

stronger than the former `counter-propaganda' section,'' Mr.

Shoigu said, according

to the BBC. Russia, more than any other country, recognizes

the value of information as a weapon. Moscow deployed it with

deadly effect in Estonia, in Georgia and most recently in

Ukraine, introducing doubt into the minds of locals,

spreading lies about their politicians, and obfuscating

Russia's true intentions.

A report last year by RAND Corporation, ``The Russian

`Firehose of Falsehood' Propaganda Model,'' noted that

cyber propaganda is practically a career path in Russia

now. A former paid troll told Radio Free Europe that teams

were on duty around the clock in 12-hour shifts and he was

[personally] required to post at least 135 comments of not

fewer than 200 characters each.

In effect, Moscow has developed a high-volume, multichannel

propaganda machine aimed at advancing its foreign and

security policy. Along with the traditional propaganda

tools--favoring friendly outlets and sponsoring ideological

journals--this represents an incredibly powerful [new] tool.

Now [let's] extrapolate that one step further: Apply

botnets, artificial intelligence and other next-generation

technology. The result will be automated propaganda, rapid

spamming and more. We shouldn't be surprised to see [more] of

this in the future.

Imagine [if you will] an American Senator who vocally

advocates a new strategic-forces treaty with European allies.

Pausing from the article for a minute--it is interesting to note that is the debate we are actually having in the Senate today. We are talking about expanding NATO to include Montenegro.

Picking back up:

Moscow, feeling threatened, launches a directed information

campaign to undermine the senator. His emails are breached

and published, disclosing personal details and family

disputes, alongside draft policy papers without context.

Social media is spammed with seemingly legitimate comments

opposing the senator's policy position. The senator's phone

lines are flooded with robocalls. Fake news articles are

pushed out on Russian-controlled media suggesting that the

Senator has probably broken campaign-finance laws.

Can you imagine the disruption to American society? The

confusion in the legislative process? The erosion of trust in

democracy? Unfortunately, this is the reality the U.S. faces

[next], and without a concerted effort it will get [much]

worse.

Congress is too focused on the trees to see the frightening

forest. Rather than engaging in sharp-edged partisanship,

lawmakers should be investigating Russian propaganda

operations and information warfare. They should be figuring

out how to reduce the influence of foreign trolls, and

teaching Americans about Moscow's capabilities. This would go

a long way [toward saving] the republic.

That is the end of the op-ed. Again, this was Chairman Mike Rogers, who led the House Intelligence Committee from 2011 to 2015, writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning.

Here is what he is really saying. What he is saying is that America has a future in foreign policy and national security and global security that is going to have a lot more propaganda, and a body like this--the Congress generally, but the Senate in particular--has an obligation to help make sure the American people understand Moscow's capabilities and their intentions.

Their intentions are to make us doubt our values. Their intentions are to make us doubt our investment in NATO, the most successful military alliance of last 2,000 years. Their intentions are to exploit the ways that we already distrust each other in ways that should be Republican versus Democratic policy, fighting about particular forms of government intervention and the economy, for instance, but that are subordinate to fundamental American beliefs about who we are as a people and the things that we believe together before we are Republicans and Democrats.

But if you listen to this body right now, would you have much confidence that the American people hear people who come together and believe things that are prepolitical and prepartisan first? Do we have shared American values that we know how to trumpet? Do we have ways to celebrate the things that fundamentally make us Americans well before we are Republicans or Democrats?

I worry that if you watch cable news any given night right now, you would not, as an American citizen, have that as a takeaway. Instead, you would hear Americans saying--American public listeners and viewers to those radio shows and cable shows thinking that the great divide in the world is between Republicans and Democrats. That is actually not true.

By voting record, I am the third most conservative guy around here out of 100, so I care deeply about Republican versus Democratic answers to most of the policy fights we have. But those things are radically subordinate to the things we believe in common about the dignity of people who are created with rights. The government doesn't give us rights. God gives us rights by nature, and we come together as a government to secure those rights. The rights of free speech, press, assembly, and religion are fundamentally American things well before we get to any of our policy bickering.

Yet, if the Americans listen to us in the Congress most days or most weeks or most months, I bet their takeaway is that Republican versus Democrat is the great divide, and we shouldn't trust anybody across that aisle.

Well, guess what. That is exactly what Putin is trying to do. His fundamental objective is to make Americans doubt our own values and to doubt our own civilization so that we fight with each other first, instead of agreeing as Americans first then fighting about a bunch of important policy things--but first agreeing who we are as Americans.

The future that we face is a future where there is going to be a lot more propaganda that tries to exploit our internal divisions to begin with. It makes it all the more critical that a body like this exists to help 320 million Americans with a lot of diversity and a lot of disagreement about really important things. They ought to trust that an institution like this exists to restore some sense of those shared values and exists to restore some of that shared trust. Right now that is not usually what they take away from us in the Congress. So I call on the 100 Members of this Senate to consider carefully Chairman Rogers' rebuke of us this morning in the Wall Street Journal.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

I thank Chairman Grassley for that question and the invitation to join him in the colloquy. As two of the only non- attorneys on the Judiciary Committee, it is important that we, on behalf of the majority of Americans, who are non-lawyers, do reclaim the separation of powers as a basic American inheritance. So I thank the Senator for the chance to discuss it here today.

Starting the morning after President Trump's victory last November, there has actually been something of a renaissance of separation of powers talk among many folks around this body, and that is a good thing. After 8 years of legislative atrophy, many on the other side of the aisle are now remembering the old ``Schoolhouse Rock'' distinction among the three separate and coequal branches, and this is good news for Americans' civic health.

If Democrats are serious--frankly, if all of us are serious, for we in this body have taken an oath not to a political party but to a constitutional structure of limits where power is intentionally separated and divided because our forefathers and foremothers were skeptical of the consolidation of power--if we take this seriously and we would like to reclaim some of the Congress's responsibility and ability and authority to check and balance the other two branches, the debate around Judge Gorsuch's nomination and the hearings we will have beginning in the chairman's committee next month are a great place to start. So I wish to offer a little bit of what I think is an important historical backdrop for this debate.

Any discussion of the separation of powers must be rooted in a solid understanding of what we mean and what the Founders meant by the phrase ``the consent of the governed.'' Historically speaking, this is still a bold idea which must be constantly defined, reclaimed, renewed, and passed on to the next generation, for over the course of human history, we can put every form of government into one of two categories: You are ruled either by people you didn't choose or by people you did choose.

One of these groups has taken many forms through the centuries-- Kings, elites, political parties, and technocrats. Indeed, most governments throughout human history fit this mold, where the people were ruled by a form of government that they had no say in and that they didn't choose. But there is another group, and these are people who rule themselves through the leaders they have chosen and continually get to choose. When the leaders fail to serve the will of the people, those leaders can be removed. This describes our form of government and its historical anomaly. We should recognize that, and our kids should understand what a special blessing it is to live under this form of government.

The point is elegantly simple: Either people are ruled, or the people are ultimately and fundamentally the rulers. Why does this matter? This isn't a question to take flippantly but, rather, each generation of Americans should reexamine and reclaim and reteach it. So why is it so important that ``the people'' are actually the rulers in their government? It comes down to a profound truth about human dignity. Human beings cannot thrive when they are stripped of basic liberties. Human flourishing requires the freedom to make basic choices about how you will live your life in community: Who are your friends? Whom will you marry? Where will you work? What do you believe? Whom do you worship? How do you worship? These are the things the Founders meant when they said that we are all born with the right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness.

Notice that the Founders were not referring to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as a bunch of vague platitudes or as aspirational pleasantries for a bumper sticker; they were talking about rights. These are not given to us by any other man or woman. They are rights we have from God via nature, and so they can't be taken away from us by some other mere man or woman.

Here is what is great about this idea: We are all born equals in the eyes of God and history, and we have certain rights. As a group of equals, it requires people to get permission to serve for a time--for a limited time--as our rulers. This equality is what the Founders called the self-evident truth--something so obvious that it didn't need to be proven; a truth so true that denying it would be denying something essential and true about human nature itself. Once we understand this, our expectations of our government begin to change. We expect responsiveness and transparency. We expect equality before the law.

Government's primary purpose is not to solve every human problem, like a King or some all-powerful technocrat; rather, the government's job is to provide a framework for ordered liberty so that we can live our lives in our communities, in our families, in our businesses, and in our places of worship. Government's job is to secure the rights of a free and sovereign people.

But what does this have to do with Judge Gorsuch? What does this have to do with the confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court next week? What does this have to do with separation of powers?

As Americans, we secure our rights by separating the functions of government into what our Founders called the three different departments: There is a Congress to write the laws, and this is article I of the Constitution; there is a President--or Presiding Officer, as he was first called--to execute the laws; and there is a court to decide the controversies under the law. This system of checks and balances keeps too much power from falling into any one set of hands, and it keeps the American people in charge.

We sometimes talk euphemistically about judicial activism, and that is a big problem, but we don't attack it enough. A judge who takes it as his or her job to do anything other than settle cases is not just being an activist, they are becoming an untouchable, unfireable ruler. They are becoming a lawmaker who is not accountable to the people because our judges have lifetime tenure. A judge who uses his or her position to write the law fundamentally undermines the foundation of government, which is that the will of the people should rule.

That is why I am so strongly supporting Judge Neil Gorsuch to be the next Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. He fully understands the place in the government and his place in the government as a servant of the people, not as some unchosen ruler with lifetime tenure.

When you listen to Judge Gorsuch, when you read his speeches, when you read his opinions, it is clear that he is not interested in making laws. He knows that is not his calling. He is interested in interpreting law. He is interested in upholding and defending the Constitution. He is not interested, when he has his robe on, in specific policy outcomes; he is interested in justice. He is not interested in the laws that he as a private citizen might want; he is focused on the laws that are actually written in the books. He is a judge's judge, and that is exactly what the Constitution calls for.

In closing, I wish to read three quotes from Judge Gorsuch into the Record to demonstrate how he conceives of his job. Again, this is Judge Gorsuch paying tribute to Justice Scalia:

Tonight I want to . . . suggest that perhaps the great

project of Justice Scalia's career was to remind us of the

differences between judges and legislators. To remind us that

legislators may appeal to their own moral convictions and to

claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think

it should be in the future. But that judges should do none of

these things in a democratic society. That judges should

strive (if humanly and so imperfectly) to apply the law as it

is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to the text,

structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at

the time of the events in question would have understood the

law to be--not to decide cases based on [a judge's] own moral

convictions or the policy consequences they believe might

serve society best.

Again, he is saying a judge is not a superlegislator. If a judge wants to be a legislator, that is a completely fine thing to do. Take off your robe, resign your position, and run for office so the

people can decide whether to hire you or fire you. But a judge who has lifetime tenure doesn't get to make their policy preferences the will of the people somehow.

The second quote:

When the political branches disagree with a judicial

interpretation of existing law, the Constitution prescribes

the appropriate remedial process. It's called legislation.

Admittedly, the legislative process can be an arduous one.

But that's no bug in the constitutional design: It is the

very point of the design.

Third and finally:

To the founders, the legislative and judicial powers were

distinct by nature and their separation was among the most

important liberty-protecting devices of the constitutional

design, an independent right of the people essential to the

preservation of all other rights later enumerated in the

Constitution and its amendments.

If my colleagues in this body are serious, if the hundred of us are serious, if we want to defend our role as legislators, if we are serious about doing our job as lawmakers, if we are concerned about overreaching Executives, if we are concerned about the lack of accountability in the administrative bureaucracies of the government, if we honestly want to make Congress great again, we should start by confirming Judge Neil Gorsuch.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 2:30 p.m. today, all remaining time on H.J. Res. 58 be yielded back.

Mr. President, I rise to restate my support for H.J. Res. 58, a resolution to overturn the Obama administration Department of Education's rule regulating future teacher preparation programs from Washington, DC.

This teacher preparation mandate actually assumes that Washington bureaucrats are competent to micromanage teacher training programs across America. There are 27,000 such programs, by the way, and this micromanagement is absurd. We all agree that education matters, that teachers matter, that teacher training programs matter, and that kids are the future of our country, but I ask my colleagues to acknowledge the expertise and to respect the reforms already begun at the district and State levels and to reverse this misguided Federal regulation of teacher preparation programs.

I would like to close by reading several quotations from those who would have been affected by this regulation had it gone into effect.

This first quotation comes from the American Federation of Teachers. Their public statement on the final rule, on October 12, 2016, reads as follows:

It is, quite simply, ludicrous to propose evaluating

teacher preparation programs based on the performance of the

students taught by those program's graduates. Frankly, the

only conceivable reason the department would release

regulations so out of sync with the Every Student Succeeds

Act and President Obama's own call to reduce high-stakes

testing is they are simply checking off their bucket list of

outstanding issues before the end of their term.

The final regulations could harm students who benefit the

most from consistent, high-quality standards for teacher

preparation programs. The regulations will create enormous

difficulty for teacher prep programs and place an unnecessary

burden on institutions and states, which are also in the

process of implementing ESSA.

My second quotation comes from the comments of the provost and the chair of the Department of Education at Creighton University in Omaha, NE, dated February 2, 2015, of the comment period:

As stated earlier, the regulations represent a significant

financial burden to institutions, local school systems, and

states. In the state of Nebraska, there are over 500

individual teacher preparation ``programs'' subject to the

complexities of these regulations.

Again, these regulations are 700 pages.

Even as a system is developed, issues regarding privacy,

low numbers, and student demographics would impact results

unfairly and result in decisions unlikely to improve teacher

preparation programs and student learning at PK-12 schools

[in Nebraska].

My third and final quotation comes from the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Nebraska, and they wrote the Department of Education about this rule as follows:

[T]he budgetary impact of this regulation is significantly

understated, if not laughable. No financial support for

states, school systems, or institutions of higher education

to implement the requirements is proposed. The regulations

create new requirements for colleges, schools, and states to

track and report on candidates and teachers for many years.

Those systems are not in place. The cost estimates make

inaccurate assumptions that colleges and states already have

the systems in place for collecting, analyzing, reporting,

and utilizing data (federally-mandated data which may or may

not be valid or reliable for the purposes for which it is

intended to be used). It also provides a timeline that is

unworkable for most states and institutions.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following statements and letters be printed in the Record.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield back.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I rise in support of S.J. Res. 26, a resolution to disapprove the Obama administration Department of Education's regulation on teacher preparation issues. This resolution is simple. It overturns the last administration's overreach into scores of States and territories, into thousands of college and university teacher preparation programs, and into millions of American classrooms.

Last night, I drafted a fairly detailed statement on some of the problems deep inside this regulation, but I have decided to skip past most of that. Why? Because the problem with this regulation is actually much more basic than all of the substantive problems in the regulation. This regulation actually makes the assumption that bureaucrats in Washington, DC, are competent to micromanage teacher training programs in America. That is what this regulation ultimately does, and that is absurd.

So I would like to ask three questions of folks who plan to vote to defend this regulation. First, do you really think that bureaucrats in this city know better how to run teacher training programs than people who have spent most of their lives inside actual classrooms with actual future teachers and with students? How many of you have ever run a teacher training program? Has anyone in this body ever run a teacher training program? Because I have--almost. I have spent a lot of my life around these programs. As a kid, with my dad, who was a lifelong public schoolteacher and coach, and I have been in many of these classrooms with him when he was getting master's and continuing education programs; then with my wife who is also a public high school teacher; and then I was a college president at a university that had multiple teacher training programs. I know Keith Rohwer, and I know the other deans of education that have been at Midland University and at many other colleges and universities across Nebraska. Yet, even though I have been around a lot of these programs in some detail, I wouldn't possibly think I am ready to decree all the details inside those programs from thousands and thousands of miles away.

Question No. 2, has anyone actually read this regulation that folks are going to say they want to defend on this floor? Because I have been reading in it. I will not claim I have read it, but I have read in it. This is the 695 pages of the regulation itself. There is actually a lot of guidance material as well, but I didn't bring that because I didn't want to have both of my hands occupied. This is the 695 pages of the regulation we are talking about today, and it is actually really silly. If you read inside it, it is filled with enough specificity that if you tried to explain it to thoughtful, generally educated Americans, I submit to you that you would blush. There is a level of detail and a level of specificity in this that we are not possibly competent to defend at the micro level.

Question No. 3, can the folks who think this is what Washington, DC, ought to be doing right now--please show me somewhere in this document, the Senate version of the Constitution--show me somewhere in this document where we are given the specific authority to micromanage local programs like this from here. Because, honestly--I mean this sincerely to my colleagues who plan to vote to defend this rule--I don't see how you can defend this document and think that this is conceivably our job from here. We are not competent to do this.

Now, a couple of qualifications are in order. Am I suggesting that all teacher training programs in America work well? Heavens, no. There are some that are fairly strong, and there are actually a lot that are really, really poor and weak, but having a good intention to make them better is not the same as actually having accomplished something that will make them better. Good intentions are not enough. For us in this body to act because we have compulsory governmental powers, we would need not merely good intentions, we would also need competence and authority. We have neither of those about teacher training programs.

Everyone in this body agrees that education is darn near the center of the future of our country. We all want and we need good teachers. Most of us can remember specific teachers who stood out because of her or his creative presentation, because of their unexpected humor, because of their charm and their compassion, because of their tireless drive, because of their inspired mentorship. None of us in this Chamber who has the privilege of serving our fellow country men and women regret or are unaware of the fact that the skills and the guidance and the abilities that we have are the function of the mentorship and the pedagogy of life-changing teachers early in our lives. We have benefited from and we need good, prepared teachers.

If we all agree teachers are critically important to our future, and since we all agree teacher training programs are important and we also agree that some of them aren't very good, the question would be, What would we do about that? What kind of debate should we have about why much education in America isn't good enough? Does anyone in this body sincerely believe that the big, pressing problem in American education is that there aren't enough rules like this coming out of bureaucracies in Washington, DC?

Because if you believe that, I would humbly suggest that you should go and meet with some of the ed school faculties back in your State and ask them if you can read them these 695 pages so you can tell them that we have the answers. Read it to them, and then please come back and tell us in this body that they agree with you, that what we really need is more 700-page regulations from Washington, DC, micromanaging things as specific and local as teacher preparation programs.

Oh, and one more thing, which is actually kind of big. This regulation explicitly violates the plain language and the congressional intent of the Federal education law that was passed in this body last year. You will all recall that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed in this Chamber with overwhelming bipartisan support last year. I think it got 83 votes. The act prohibits the Secretary of Education from prescribing ``any aspect or parameter of a teacher, a principal, or other school leader evaluation system within a State or local education agency'' or ``indicators or specific measures of teacher, principal, or other school leader effectiveness or quality.'' There is nothing ambiguous about this language.

In addition, the Higher Education Act is clear that the levels of performance used by a State to assess teacher training programs ``shall be determined solely by the State.''

This rule overrides State authority over literally tens of thousands of discipline-specific teacher preparation programs across the Nation, burdening States with a federally defined and expensive mandate. Under this regulation, States would be required to create elaborate new data systems that would link K-12 teacher data to data on evaluations of teachers and administrators in particular schools and then on to the data back into the teacher preparation programs. This regulation's goal would be to measure the success of teacher preparation based largely on teachers' students' subsequent test scores, and it would all need to be backlinked in the data. This is data that is not currently gathered.

Rube Goldberg is smiling somewhere because this sounds like a bureaucrat's dream, a paperwork trail monitoring all the strengths and weaknesses of some vast machine spitting out layers and layers of new data over which Washington's experts could then postulate and tinker. Again, I have no doubt the bureaucrats who wrote these 700 eye-glazing pages--pages about rules, about data to be gathered that States are not currently gathering--I have no doubt the people who wrote this mean well. I also have no doubt the people who are going to defend this rule as somehow commonsensical--then why is it 700 pages--also mean well, but those good intentions don't change the fact that what they have actually done in this rule--what they have actually done--is build a much larger requirement set of paper trails, demanding further burdens on our teachers, on our principals, and on the professors who are teaching teachers, and then require all of them to report back through new or expanded bureaucracies at the State level, though the States have not chosen to gather this data, and then pass this data on to a bureaucracy a couple of blocks from here.

These Rubik's Cubes of rules and data collection are not being done today, and supposedly we are going to make teacher preparation programs better by all of the specificity that comes from this rule.

The fact that these regulations will likely cost States millions of dollars to implement simply adds insult to injury. Let's be honest. Education is not some vast complex machine that just needs a little bit more tinkering from Washington-level intervention before it will be at utopia. It isn't true, and this rule is not an effective way to actually help the teachers who care so much that they are investing their lives in our kids.

Nebraska's parents and educators and locally elected school boards are better equipped and better positioned to tackle the most important educational challenges. They are better equipped and they are better intentioned, even than the smartest, the

nicest, and the most well-meaning experts in Washington, DC. If you disagree, again, I humbly challenge you to go and try and read this rule to elementary and secondary school teachers in your State and to those who are running the programs that train them. Read the 695 pages to them and then report back to us that they actually share your view that the really big problem in American education is not enough 700- page rules from educational bureaucrats from DC.

Good intentions are not enough. Federal intervention and reforms should never make problems worse, and that is what this rule would do.

I urge my colleagues to reject this rule and to rededicate ourselves to the duties that really and fundamentally are ours, to the duties the Federal Government is exclusively and monopolistically empowered to carry out because it isn't this. We are not competent to displace the expertise of the district and the State level, and we should not be trying to regulate teacher training programs from Washington, DC. We are not competent to do this.

Thank you for your consideration.

I yield the floor.