Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, here is what is happening with so-called ``tax reform.'' Tonight, the Budget Committee is voting on a budget resolution that does two things.

First, it sets the spending limits for everything in the government-- environment, energy, defense, healthcare, education, transportation, and so on.

Second, it includes something called reconciliation instructions that basically direct all of the committees to report back with legislation that either increases or decreases the Federal deficit by a certain amount. This time around, here is what they are doing--asking the Senate Finance Committee to draft legislation to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion. Again, this is going to pass on a party-line vote, with Republicans prevailing, to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion. This is what will start the tax reform process.

That is not all. Republicans still haven't given up on decimating our healthcare system. They are still trying to cut Medicaid and, this time, Medicare, and they are going to use this tax bill. They are going to cut $473 billion from Medicare at a time when our population is getting older and many seniors are already struggling. They are also going to cut $1 trillion from Medicaid. This is the program that pays for one out of every two births in this country. It helps millions of families who have loved ones in nursing home care.

Last week, they tried to pass a healthcare bill that cut taxes. Now they are trying to pass a tax bill that will cut healthcare. Their proposal will, actually, increase the deficit by $4 trillion. That is 12 zeros.

Here is what we could do with $4 trillion. We could completely rebuild half of the airports in the United States. We could put 20 million people through 4 years of college. We could pay off the debt for every student loan.

Instead, the United States is going to be in the red by $4 trillion, but after they cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and one-half trillion dollars from Medicare, the party that has railed against the Federal debt and deficit will still add $2.5 trillion to the deficit.

This is all so that they can give tax cuts to the richest people in the United States. I promise you, I understand that both parties are sometimes guilty of exaggerating and that sometimes both parties are guilty of relying on talking points and relying on caricatures of the other side, but you couldn't caricature this bill if you tried. This bill is already a caricature of what people say Republicans are all about, which is to shred the social safety net and provide tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.

They are going to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent, and they are going to cut tax rates across the board, but the people who will actually benefit will be the people at the top. The Tax Policy Center, which is a nonpartisan, highly respected group, has crunched the numbers, and they found that within 10 years, 80 percent of the benefits of this $4 trillion tax bill will go to 1 percent of Americans.

Remember what is happening. We are borrowing a huge chunk of this, and whatever is not borrowed comes out of Medicare and Medicaid. So the programs that pay for women to give birth in a hospital or for elderly people to get healthcare will be decimated, and the wealthiest Americans will pay less in taxes. This is bad policy, not just for the people who work hard but for the whole economy.

I want to give you a specific example. Again, both parties rely on talking points, and both parties accuse each other of having the wrong set of ideas, but we have an example of what happens when you do this. This bill is actually modeled after what they did in the State of Kansas. The State government eliminated one of its business taxes, telling people that it would help the State's economy. Instead, the economy slowed down, which left them with even lower tax revenues. They had to cut government programs, like education, and now people do not want to send their kids to Kansas public schools anymore because they do not have the resources to educate their children.

This is not a path that America should follow. Everyone needs to pay their fair share, and that includes big corporations and the people who are benefiting from the system and making millions of dollars every year, but in this proposal, they are the ones getting all of the tax breaks.

Companies already have huge tax breaks. Some corporations end up paying zero in Federal income tax every April 15 even though they are making healthy profits. They have teams of lawyers and accountants who help them dodge paying even a penny to the Federal Government. That is why corporate income taxes make up less than 10 percent of all of the revenue to the Federal Treasury. Meanwhile, at least 30 percent of the middle class will actually pay more if the Republicans succeed with their tax reform package.

Think about this.

Thirty percent of the middle class is going to see tax increases in their tax bills. Why? It is because they have to find some money to subsidize the tax cuts for the richest people. Some of the money will be found by borrowing; some of the money will be found by making cuts to Medicare and Medicaid; and some of the money will be found by increasing taxes on the middle class. One out of every two households with children will see its taxes go up under this plan. Increasing taxes for these people while decreasing them for big corporations is not a plan for economic growth. We have heard over and over that Republicans do not want to add to the deficit--I don't either--but this is, literally, what they are voting to do tonight.

Again, this is not a talking point. This is not a sort of rhetorical flourish. The bill, itself, provides for $1.5 trillion worth of deficit spending. Yet it is not deficit spending on the military; it is not deficit spending on disaster response; and it is not deficit spending on Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security or any of the social safety net programs that they claim is the problem with the Federal budget. It is deficit spending for the purpose of a tax cut, 80 percent of which is going to 1 percent of the country. This is not conservative-- certainly not fiscally conservative--and it will not help us to grow the economy.

It is no surprise that this policy is bad, because, again, the process has been so bad. With healthcare, they ignored regular order. They obliterated the committee process. They ignored Democrats. They ignored the way the U.S. Senate is supposed to work, and they failed. One Republican Senator says that he will not vote for anything that adds one penny to the deficit. Another Republican Senator said that he

will not do anything that does not cut taxes for everybody. It already does not meet that test. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle--Republicans too--have promised not to cut Medicaid or Medicare. It violates all of those promises.

If you did not like the ACA repeal because it cut Medicaid, guess what. This cuts Medicaid more. If you made a promise to your voters not to cut Medicare, you should be aware that this bill provides for one- half trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare. If you are railing against debt and deficits, this is the biggest budget buster that I have ever seen in my short, 5-year career in the U.S. Senate.

During the campaign, the President of the United States promised not to cut Medicare, and the senior Senator from Arizona has called for regular order. This violates every procedural and policy principle that has been articulated on this Senate floor since I have been here. I do not see a way forward on this legislation when it has been conceived in a purely partisan way. It will only take us deeper into dysfunction. For the sake of the Senate, let's stop going down this path. Let's restore regular order and work together on a bipartisan tax reform process.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, before my planned remarks on the Federal Communications Commission, I want to say a few words about the awful events that happened in Las Vegas. Our hearts are with the families affected by the tragedy and with the city of Las Vegas, and we do send them our best wishes and our prayers. But we can do more than send our thoughts and prayers to the grieving. We can do more than thank the first responders. We can do more than lower the flag to half mast.

We can take a stand against gun violence by passing commonsense gun safety laws. Otherwise, this becomes a ritual of mass murder, mourning, and moving on. Let's stop this awful ritual. Let's stop the violence. Let's do something about it.

Mr. President, I wish to talk about the nomination of Chairman Ajit Pai to lead the Federal Communications Commission for another 5 years. When it comes to Chairman Pai, personally and professionally, I want to say that I believe in his integrity as a public servant, and I believe he is smart and qualified. But the FCC is supposed to create competition and protect consumers, and Chairman Pai isn't doing that.

First, Chairman Pai's FCC is trying to get rid of net neutrality. Net neutrality is a Federal rule that says ISPs--internet service providers--must treat all content equally. They can't discriminate by making certain kinds of content slower, charging more for other kinds of content, or blocking some content altogether.

That is the basic premise of the internet. Once you pay for your broadband internet access and then you jump on a browser, everything comes down to the same speeds. It is so foundational to the way we use the internet that it is actually hard to describe a future without net neutrality, but it could be that you pay your ISP, and certain websites download fast.

Certain websites are almost impossible to find. For certain websites, you have to pay a premium just to be able to capture their content. Forget what you may have to pay Hulu, Netflix, and others. The ISP will essentially control your access to the internet. That is why net neutrality was so important. It is not that, in that moment, things were necessarily undermining the current internet but that, without a firm rule, these companies may have incentives to change the internet as we know it.

When Chairman Pai announced that the FCC would review the rules on net neutrality, he said: ``This is a fight we intend to wage, and it is a fight that we are going to win.'' But that is not how the FCC is supposed to work. This is a quasi-judicial agency. They are supposed to propose a rule, allow the public to weigh in, and then the agency considers the comments before making a decision. Chairman Pai had made it clear from the beginning that he had already made up his mind. Even though there were 22 million individual comments from American citizens about what we should do with the free and open internet, he had decided in advance of that.

Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern. Right after Congress took away the FCC's ability to protect people's privacy online, he wrote an op-ed that essentially read that this is good news. It is pretty unusual to have a chairman of a quasi-judicial body weigh in on something that the legislative branch does or to completely disregard the process for public input. Chairman Pai has not yet demonstrated a willingness to stray from the party line.

One of the things I like about him is that I know that he has a big brain. We have talked policy, and when we have had private conversations, I have seen that he has liked the engagement, that he likes the job, and that he likes public service. The challenge is that there has been no instance in which he has done anything that was other than predictably Republican. That is OK for now, as it has been a relatively short tenure, but what we need in an FCC Chairman is someone who takes his own views and the facts, as the record becomes established, and makes up his own mind. He is not a Republican while he is on the FCC. His job is to apply the facts and his own judgment.

During the confirmation hearing, I asked him about the President of the United States calling the media the ``enemy of the state.'' He would not say one way or another what he thought of those comments or how he would guide the FCC based on those comments. At some point, he needs to demonstrate some independence from his party and from the President.

With this vote, the Senate has a chance to say that the person who leads the FCC should understand, at a bare minimum, how to run a quasi- judicial agency in a nonpartisan fashion,

that he or she should value public input, and that he or she should not simply go along with what the party is asking and implement it no matter how it stacks up against the statute.

Here is another example. Earlier this year, Chairman Pai rolled back a rule in order to allow local TV stations to be bought up without any limits by one single company. This decision seemed to be for the benefit of one company, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which just happens to be a company with strong conservative leanings. Sinclair is already the largest owner of local broadcasting stations in the United States, but now it is trying to buy another company, Tribune Media, which would expand Sinclair's reach into 72 percent of the households.

For decades, both Congress and the FCC have taken steps to protect local broadcasting because it has benefited the public interest. So, under normal circumstances, Sinclair would not be able to buy up these other stations, but Chairman Pai has changed the rules so that this company will have even more power and reach. The secondary beneficiary of this change will be the Republican Party, because Sinclair has a decades-long history of pressuring its local stations to broadcast certain news that helps the Republican cause.

We need an independent Chairman at the helm of the FCC. We need someone who will make decisions based on statute, not based on political affiliation. That is why I will vote no on Mr. Pai's nomination, but I hope that I will be proven wrong.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I want to thank the senior Senator from Texas for his leadership in the disaster response, and I pledge my commitment to whatever is needed for Houston and the areas around Houston, as well as Florida. I appreciate the commitment at the legislative level for what needs to be done in Puerto Rico.

Mr. President, we also need to continue to apply pressure to the administration because it does appear as though there is an unequal response between what is happening in Puerto Rico and what has happened in Houston and in Florida. So we need to hold as a country the executive branch accountable for the lack of a sense of urgency for 3.5 million Americans who are mostly going to be without power for 9 months, who are currently without potable water, who are in a devastated situation. It is our obligation to do everything we can.

Mr. President, the Senate is about to make an important decision about who leads the Federal agency that oversees everything from the internet, to the TV, to radio.

This vote is a choice: We can either give our stamp of approval on the FCC's direction under the leadership of Chairman Pai, or we can decide that his leadership has put the FCC on the wrong track and that it is time for someone else to take charge.

Generally speaking, here is how I approach a nomination. There are three reasons one might reject a nominee. If the person is corrupt, it is a nonstarter. If the person is nonqualified, it is also a nonstarter. And even on policy grounds, in the policy space, just disagreeing with someone can often boil down to the fact that there is a President from another party and is not sufficient to vote no.

Chairman Pai is someone I know. He is skillful, he is a decent human being, he is very smart, and he is qualified. When we disagree, we can do it in a way that doesn't ruin our ability to work together on the following day on the following issue. And this is no small thing in today's political climate. So it is important that if we are ever going to get something done, we are able to disagree and find common ground afterward.

I do like Chairman Pai as a person. I think he is ethical and he is capable. But he is just so wrong on policy. For me, that means he is not the right leader for the FCC. I want to highlight four of the concerns I have.

First, the FCC really is trying to end the internet as we know it by getting rid of net neutrality. If they succeed, your internet service provider will have the power to stop you from seeing certain kinds of content. They will be the ones that make decisions about what you can access online and how fast and how much you have to pay for it.

Some people say that companies aren't going to change the internet because it is not in their interest to change the internet, even if the law goes away. But think about this: Most often, these ISPs are publicly traded companies, and they are going to make decisions based on their own financial interests. It is not just an objective; it is their obligation. If there is an opportunity to change their business model for internet service, they are duty bound to pursue it. They do not have any obligation to a free and open internet; they have an obligation to shareholders and to profits.

That is why net neutrality exists in the first place--because we should not leave it up to any company to decide whether they are going to charge people more to stream video, for example, or block certain content altogether. If we allow the FCC to end net neutrality, Americans across the country are going to find that the internet no longer works in the way that it should. And this has happened under Chairman Pai's leadership.

It is not just bad policy that he is pursuing; they have also had some serious process fouls. When Chairman Pai announced that the FCC was revisiting the rules, he made clear that the FCC was going to get rid of net neutrality regardless of what happened throughout the process. He said: ``This is a fight we intend to wage and it is a fight we intend to win.'' Why is that a significant thing to say? ``This is a fight we intend to wage and it is a fight we intend to win.'' This a quasi-judicial agency. They just opened up a public comment period. There were 22 million members of the public who submitted public comments after the Chairman of the Commission has already announced that he has decided which way they are going to go. I think that is antithetical to the governing statute, and it is antithetical to the basic premise that if you have an open comment period where an individual has an opportunity to express themselves, you have to listen to them. You don't say: I already decided, but you 22 million people-- if you have an opinion, I will be happy to receive it and file it and do what I planned to do all along. That is the exact opposite of how this is supposed to work.

The agency proposes the rule, the public weighs in, and then the agency considers the comments from the public in making the decision. But Chairman Pai turned it upside down. The FCC has tried to diminish the fact that so many people tried to weigh in. About 96 percent of the roughly 22 million people who have weighed in have weighed in in favor of net neutrality. They are trying to lay the groundwork to get rid of net neutrality even though the vast majority of people are for it. By doing that, the FCC is effectively saying that lobbyists and law firms matter more than regular citizens.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The FCC has claimed that cyber attacks kept people from being able to comment, but they have not been forthcoming about what exactly happened, and we are still working in our oversight role to figure that all out.

Secondly, I would like to address media ownership. Local TV broadcasters are an essential part of every community. People know their local TV station. They trust it. There is a range of perspectives offered. Because the broadcasters are based in the community, they have relationships with their viewers that make their content better and more relevant.

For decades, Congress and the FCC have taken steps to keep local broadcasting local because it benefits the public interest. These are the public airways. It is like fast food options across the country. You may not mind McDonald's once in a while, but you don't want that to be the only option in your hometown. You want something that captures the local culture in your community. That is what local broadcasting does. It makes TV in Honolulu different from TV in Hartford or Houston.

But now the American tradition of local broadcasting is in real danger because the FCC is going to change the rules so that these stations can be bought out by a single company without any limits. I have no doubt this would create a world of sort of nationalized content distributed through each of these local companies, with consumers having to watch whatever is distributed to them by their national headquarters. This is no longer local news, and this is not the broadcast media that Americans deserve.

The third area I want to talk about is broadband access. Right now, Americans have widely different levels of internet speed basically based on where they live. In some places, you have great broadband access, no trouble streaming video, accessing government services online, downloading, uploading, but in rural and Tribal communities, they are very, very far behind. As the FCC noted, 39 percent of rural America and 41 percent of those on Tribal land lack access to advanced broadband. Even if they have cell phones with internet access, a mobile network will typically offer slower speed than fixed broadband, so they can't go online and do the things we can in Washington, DC, or in many

other cities across the country. So everyone, on a bipartisan basis, understands that this needs to change.

High-speed broadband is the cornerstone to economic development, public safety, and quality of life in every community, no matter how many people live in your community. The FCC has historically worked so that every home, school, and business has had adequate access to the internet because that is what it will take to unlock the innovation and potential for all Americans.

The FCC has worked on this issue by setting the bar for what it will take to connect more Americans to the internet. There is already a threshold in place which says that this is what high-speed internet access is, so we know who has it and who doesn't. But instead of actually working to get more people broadband, the FCC is working to change the definition of broadband so that it looks as if they have gotten people more broadband. That way they can say that more Americans are covered, even if they have internet service that does not meet their needs. In other words, they are not actually solving the problem; they are literally just redefining what it means to have access. Rather than giving people access, they are papering over the problem that they are not solving. This is a real issue, and it is something that the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee members have worked on on a bipartisan basis.

The way to get more people broadband access is to get more people broadband access. It is not to change the rules and to change the metrics so that you can come back to the Congress and say: Look, we just achieved more access by allowing these companies to claim that people are covered who are not.

The fourth and final concern I want to raise is a little more sensitive because, as I said, I like Chairman Pai, and I respect Chairman Pai, but he made some comments during his confirmation hearing that worried me. I asked if he agreed with the President's comments calling the media the enemy of the state. He would not give a direct answer.

I understand that Mr. Pai is a Republican. That is not the problem. I understand Republicans will be appointed in a Republican administration. I am the former Democratic Party chairman of the State of Hawaii, so I understand party loyalty. I respect party loyalty.

We have a President and a White House that are pushing to blur the legal, moral, and ethical boundaries in our Nation's Capital. This is not the time to get cute when we ask a question about the rule of law. This is not the time to finesse an answer. The only acceptable answer is this: I will not let anyone interfere with my work, whether it is the President or anyone else, and the media is not the enemy of the state. Mr. Pai did not take that opportunity. This was one of a few opportunities Mr. Pai had to be unequivocal. The senior Senator from New Mexico, if I remember correctly, and other members of the panel, sort of gave him a second and third bite at the apple so that he could get it right. It was an easy one to get right.

I understand it is politically complicated, but sometimes you have to set aside the politics and just say what is right and do what is right. My instinct is that he will not use the FCC to do anything that crosses any ethical boundaries that I am worried about, but the fact that he will not say so leaves an opening that should not be there.

The President has tweeted about media companies that give him bad coverage. He consistently refers to the media as ``fake news'' media and ``garbage'' media and makes unsubstantiated claims about various networks and newspapers and threatens to come after them. So it is not out of the realm of possibility that this could go beyond some partisan talking point from the Democrats in the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and into a real crisis.

I just want to hear from Mr. Pai. He will be confirmed on Monday, but I want to hear from Mr. Pai that he does not believe the media is the enemy of the state and he will not allow any interference from the White House.

I would like to end by bringing this back to the American people. This vote is our chance to stand up for them. There will not be a vote on net neutrality on the floor in the next weeks or months, but they deserve to keep their faith in local broadcasting, they deserve a free and open internet, and they deserve to have adequate access to the internet no matter where they live. That is why I have to vote no on this nominee.

I admire Chairman Pai. I like him as a person, but he is the wrong leader for the FCC. I urge my colleagues to join me and vote no on his nomination.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, for the past several months, Republicans in Washington have done just about everything they can to hide their healthcare repeal bill. Remember that way back in the beginning they tried to actually move a bill without a CBO score. Then, they realized that even Republicans didn't want to vote on something without knowing how much it would cost or how many people would lose healthcare coverage. So they said the score didn't matter or that it was wrong, except for in the areas where they liked the numbers. They trashed the CBO even though, for the last 8 years, they referred to the CBO to make their argument against the Affordable Care Act.

When that didn't work, they tapped 13 men to draft a bill in secret. It is no surprise that a bill crafted without women, without hearings, and without Democrats was not able to cross the finish line.

Now they are actually back to their original plan, which is to push legislation without a score from the CBO. In other words, we are going to go to next week, and we are going to vote without knowing how bad this bill is. This is not the way the Senate is supposed to work. If there is no score, there should be no vote.

Clearly, CBO got back to the Senate today and said that they will have enough time to analyze the fiscal impact of this proposal, but they will not be able to analyze the impact it has on our constituents.

So do you remember the last 2 or 3 iterations of this bill? People were concerned with the fiscal impact. But remember that the headlines were that 18 million people lose coverage, 26 million people lose coverage, and 32 million people lose coverage.

We are going to vote next week not knowing how many people are going to lose coverage. It shouldn't matter what side of the aisle you sit on. We should all be able to agree that something as complicated as healthcare needs as much debate as we could possibly get, and that is certainly more than the 90 seconds that procedurally we have left on this bill.

After all, this is one-sixth of the American economy, but for the third time this year, Republicans are going to do whatever it takes to pass a healthcare bill, even if no one knows what is in it or what it will do, even if this bill is very clearly bad policy. By doing this, they are letting down millions of Americans who were counting on the Senate to be the cooling saucer and to slow down and consider policy carefully.

There has been very little debate around this bill. We have not heard from doctors. We have not heard from patients or advocacy groups. We have not heard from healthcare administrators or economists. That is because we have had no hearings.

Just tonight, Senate Finance Chairman Hatch announced that on Monday at 10 a.m. his committee will hold a hearing on the bill, and I am hopeful that, through that process, we will begin to understand the damage that this bill will do. But right now, here is what we know. This is actually the most extreme of all of the versions of TrumpCare that we have seen. Here is what it does. It eliminates everything in the ACA that was essential: tax credits and subsidies to help people to afford their insurance; the Medicaid expansion, which is very, very successful and very popular; and the protocols that we have in place for people with preexisting conditions.

It eliminates Medicaid as we know it. This bill eliminates Medicaid as we know it. So what they did was that they established block grants, which means you get a fixed amount. Each State gets a fixed amount for Medicaid. Then, those Medicaid block grants disappear after 10 years.

It is shocking to me that having failed to get the votes, they went further to the right, with deeper cuts to Medicaid--both to the Medicaid expansion program and to the Medicaid Program as it existed before the Affordable Care Act. They went ahead and said: You know, we only got to 49 votes last time. So I think what we should do is to eliminate all of the subsidies, all of the patient protections, all of the essential health benefits, and all of the Medicaid expansion, and let's take Medicaid as it exists and eviscerate it.

The latest version of TrumpCare will take healthcare coverage away from tens of millions of people.

Last week our country hit an important milestone. The number of Americans who do not have health insurance fell to a historic low of 8.8 percent. That means that 9 out of 10 Americans now have health insurance. But instead of celebrating this milestone, Republicans are about to end our country's progress on healthcare.

Americans who don't lose their coverage will still get hurt with higher premiums or insurance plans that don't cover basic things like getting help for opioid addiction, pregnancy, hospital stays, mental health. So if this bill passes, healthcare will no longer be a right in this country. It will be a privilege. It depends on where you live,

where you work, and how much money you make.

This bill devastates one of the best and most successful programs this country has, and that is Medicaid. This is a program that helps one out of every five Americans and two out of every five children. It helps one out of every two families with a newborn baby, and it covers three out of every four long-term nursing home residents. Medicaid saves lives--nursing home patients, people struggling with opioid addiction, and people who are working two jobs but still don't have enough to cover their own healthcare.

This bill destroys Medicaid as we know it. They start off by putting traditional Medicaid into what they call per capita caps or block grants. That basically means that, whatever money was spent last year, that is the amount the State gets in perpetuity until they just zero it out completely. What that means is that States will be left without adequate Federal funding for Medicaid. Think about what this means for the healthcare infrastructure in this country.

In many States hospitals and local governments have actually designed the healthcare system based on a certain amount of Federal funding coming in. If you take away that funding, hospitals will collapse. In rural areas, hospitals and clinics will close, and people will be left without options and ultimately without access. That is just the damage done by cutting Medicaid.

This bill also lets insurance companies opt out of covering what they call ``essential health benefits.'' This is a term of art, a piece of jargon. So I want to explain what this means. Under current law, there are certain things that have to be in any healthcare plan. Those are called essential health benefits. You buy a healthcare plan, wherever you buy it. If you get an employer-covered plan, if it is a DOD plan or a VA plan, or if you are on the exchange--whatever it is--it has to cover certain things. Let me list what is covered right now as an essential health benefit: ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance abuse services, prescription drugs, rehab, lab services, preventive and wellness services, chronic disease management, and pediatric services. These are the things that actually have to be in your healthcare plan under ACA.

Yet do you know what this bill does? It says: No need. Configure your healthcare plan however you see fit.

If you are a health insurance company and if you are a for-profit health insurance company, you are going to pick and choose these things based on what is profitable, and if there is a certain thing that is costing you a lot of money, you are under no obligation to provide any of these health benefits because it is not in the law anymore. This eviscerates essential health benefits.

This bill will also take away protections for people with preexisting conditions. Nothing will hold States back from allowing insurers to charge people with diabetes more or people with cancer more for their health insurance. Experts have started to look at what this will mean for people with preexisting conditions, and they will pay thousands of dollars more. A patient with asthma will pay more than $4,000 a year extra if this bill passes, while a patient with metastatic cancer will pay $142,000 extra. If you have metastatic cancer, this bill will cost you $142,000. If you have a kid with asthma, that will be $4,000 a year. This is their healthcare bill--to charge people more who get sick. That is their healthcare bill.

Everything that is working under our healthcare system is being shredded by this bill. Take Planned Parenthood. These health centers serve millions of women and men across the country. They are part of the solution, not the problem, but this bill cuts funding to Planned Parenthood, which will cause many of these clinics to close.

I want you to think about how many people in this country are actually employed in the healthcare industry. When the Affordable Care Act started to kick in, research estimated that as many as half a million jobs were created. But if millions of people are to lose their insurance, that means that they will lose access. If fewer people can access healthcare, that means that we will have fewer doctors, nurses, and technicians. In other words, cuts to healthcare coverage are also cuts to American jobs.

I know that, in a lot of rural communities across Hawaii and across West Virginia and across the country, the community healthcare centers or the small rural hospitals are not just the centers of their communities in a social context or in a community context, but a lot of the time they are the economic drivers. So this will do great damage to rural America.

I end by making clear what this means for Americans and their healthcare. This is bad policy, plain and simple. It is bad if you live in a State like Ohio, where lives have literally been changed because people now have access to prescription drugs or to a primary care provider under Medicaid. It is bad for people who buy their insurance on the exchanges because their prices are going to go up.

It is really bad for people with disabilities. This is not unusual. For whatever reason, people with disabilities are the first to be punished when the battle over healthcare comes up.

It is bad for people with preexisting conditions because States will no longer be required to protect their ability to get healthcare. This bill does not pass Senator Cassidy's own Jimmy Kimmel test. That is why more than half a million doctors in the United States have come out as being opposed to this bill, because it will take healthcare away from the people who need it, who are sick, and who will not be able to get healthcare if the bill goes into law.

This may feel like the zombie bill we have killed several times already. I know it feels like that for me. I am sure that people are exhausted. I am sure that people thought this was over. We had that magnificent moment on the Senate floor when John McCain walked over to that well right there and did a thumbs down. I tell everybody back home that it is so rare that politics is just like the movies, but that night was just like the movies. John McCain saved healthcare for the American people and put us on a path toward regular order. What does ``regular order'' mean? I did not know what that phrase meant until I came to this institution. Regular order just means that the Senate understands that it has a special obligation in American society--that we are the place in which we are supposed to handle tough issues.

Chairman McCain pricked our consciences as Senators. Forget Democrats and Republicans; forget Liberals and Conservatives. We are all here because we want to try to make a difference. So there we were with Lamar Alexander, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Patty Murray, the top Democrat on that committee. They were ready to work on a bipartisan basis. Lamar had held hearings and, by all accounts, they had had tough negotiations and difficult challenges, not as much progress as you would want or as quickly as you would want. That is the way legislating works. They are in a bipartisan process, and we show up here, and that process is in danger of being blown up.

This bill is a rotten piece of legislation. It is not like this thing has been vetted by experts. It is not like this thing is bipartisan. It is not like this thing will help. It would be one thing if this were absolutely necessary. Then, you could make some procedural accommodations because you just must. This is a political necessity for a party that has not yet had a legislative win. That is why they are doing this. They are in a hurry because they have until September 30 to check a box called ``We repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act.'' They have no new ideas. So what they did was to take all of the bad ideas from all of their previous bills and put them into one bill, and they are going to take one last swing at it.

I cannot tell you how disappointed I am, not just on policy but on process. I was never prouder to be in the Senate than on that early morning, after a long session, when John came in and, in my view, saved the Senate and put us on a path toward regular order. Do not blow that up. We have a chance to do things in a bipartisan way and restore the dignity of this institution, but what we are fixing to do next week will take us in a very, very dark direction.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank the Senator from Connecticut.

That is right. I would just point out that they are going to get the fiscal impact from the CBO in order to comply with the terms of reconciliation, but that is, actually, not what impacts the American people the most.

When you get a CBO score--and it is exactly right, what the Senator from Connecticut said--you find out what impact it has on your home State. You find out the number of Americans who are going to be harmed by this bill or helped by this bill. What we do know is that, basically, this contains elements of all of the previous pieces of legislation. It, actually, just kind of combines them all and puts them in a pile. So it is very hard for me to imagine, when they do come back with their analysis, that it will not be 20, 30, 35 million people who will lose healthcare.

The craziest thing about this is that these Republicans who will vote yes are going to vote yes and then find out 10 days later that 25 million people are going to lose their healthcare. Why they will not wait is beyond me, except that they have a deadline to deliver a win for the President. As near as I can tell, that is the only reason that they are in such a rush.

Madam President, I think the Senator is right. I agree with him.

I think that one of the most encouraging things over the last 5 weeks has been Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray and their ability to work together. I mean, if you had told, I think, either of us that we were going to repeal and replace No Child Left Behind with 77 votes in the Senate, I would have said: I don't know. That seems like it is going to get into some pretty difficult, partisan, thorny territory.

Yet what Lamar and Patty were able to do is to conduct hearings and bring us through a process by which we acted like a Senate, and we got all the votes.

Now we are in that process when it comes to healthcare, and I think some people feel deeply uncomfortable with empowering the chair men and women of this body. They feel deeply uncomfortable. They talk about the regular order, but they really just want to get their way on the floor.

I will just make one other point here. As people on the Republican side were justifying their ``yes'' votes in BCRA and whatever the other one was called before that, they were always talking about advancing the conversation and bringing us into a conference committee negotiation. Now, because September 30 is the deadline, there will be no negotiation. If Graham-Cassidy passes the Senate, it will pass the House, and it will be enacted into law. Nobody will get to hide behind: Well, this is not perfect, but I want to advance the conversation, and maybe we can fix this in the House or fix this in the conference committee.

This is the bill. The bill that gets voted on next week is the bill. Everybody owns it, and you own the fact that you don't even know what it is going to do to your own constituents.

Mr. President, there are two reasons why every Member of the Senate should vote against confirming Marvin Kaplan to the NLRB. The first is that he is just not qualified.

The NLRB is the Federal agency that enforces our labor laws. It protects the rights of workers and the private sector to organize for better wages and better working conditions. It is up to them to make sure that their employers follow the law and that when there is an issue between employers and employees, everyone acts reasonably.

Democrats and Republicans who have served on the NLRB have been the top labor and employment attorneys in their fields. They have had long careers working on labor issues, either as lawyers or as law professors. Many of them have spent time as staffers on the NLRB board. In other words, they understand the labor issues better than anyone. They may have a unique perspective on it one way or the other--sort of pro-management or pro-labor--but there is no question that previous nominees and previous members of the Board know labor law.

Marvin Kaplan doesn't fit this profile. He is not a lawyer with any relevant labor experience. He has no record and no public positions on relevant labor law. What he is is a well-connected Capitol Hill staffer. His only qualification, that I can find, is that he has drafted some legislation for a committee in the House of Representatives. That does not stack up against the resumes of any other member who has served on the Board--Democrat or Republican.

This lack of experience is dangerous. It means he will not know the intricacies and the historical development of labor law. He will simply be a rubberstamp who brings a political agenda to the Board, because he has no on-the-record opinions on these issues of his own.

That was clear from the hearing on his nomination, when he would not properly commit to recuse himself from any issues he had worked on and to approach issues with an open mind, which brings me to the second reason. If somehow Senators can make an excuse for his lack of experience, we can't

deny that this is the opposite of the message that Congress should have received during the 2016 election.

In November, Americans made clear that Washington had failed working families and that we have not done enough to stand up for American workers.

Now here we are about to confirm a nominee to the NLRB, and the only experience he has is that he has drafted legislation to hurt American workers.

The Board is about to face some important decisions. They could reverse a decision that holds big companies accountable for how their contractors treat workers. The future of American workers and their ability to organize will be influenced by this Board, which includes any members confirmed by the Senate.

If Mr. Kaplan is appointed, it will further silence workers who already feel that they aren't being heard in Washington, DC.

A vote for Mr. Kaplan is a vote that ignores the voices of American workers. It is a vote that further politicizes the NLRB at a time when we need to shore up our institutions against blind, corrosive ideology.

I urge my colleagues to vote no on this nominee.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I make a point of order that the pending amendment violates section 302(f) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Mr. President, you know, late this afternoon, around 5 o'clock, a number of Republican Senators indicated their unwillingness to support the so-called skinny bill, which would rip healthcare from 16 million people, according to CBO, and increase health insurance premiums by 20 percent--and not 20 percent over several years, 20 percent per year for the next several years, doubling health insurance premiums over the next 4 or 5 years. That is the bill we are talking about. They said that they don't like this bill, but they are willing to vote for it if they are provided assurances that this is just sort of a procedural vote.

We just had a motion to proceed that was procedural in nature, according to them. We think it is the vote on healthcare.

Now, this second vote, which is actually a vote to enact legislation--they are saying they are going to vote for it but only on the condition that we go to conference committee.

Something just happened over the last couple of hours that is actually pretty astonishing. The House Rules Committee adopted what they call martial law. Now, it is not quite as bad as it sounds, but it is pretty bad. What that means is it gives total control over the procedures to the House majority. The House majority now is in a position to enact the skinny bill right away.

There are a lot of Members of the Senate who want to talk about this, but I will just give you my little indicators that they are going to enact this into law by Sunday. They are going to enact this into law by Sunday. No. 1, the White House already has a name for it, the President has indicated a willingness to sign it sight unseen, and Paul Ryan just issued a statement that was not at all reassuring. There were lots of words, but none of them included ``We will not enact anything that comes from the Senate. We will go to conference committee, and if we don't have an agreement, we will not enact the Senate version of the bill.''

They are desperate to enact a bill before the summertime starts, and that is why we are all terrified here. There are a lot of people on the Republican side who hate the bill that they are going to be asked to vote for, and the only reason they are entertaining the possibility is that they want to go to conference. But they are not going to end up in a conference committee; they are going to end up in a signing ceremony over the weekend.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, would the Senator yield for a question?

Four-and-a-half years.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, we just took one of the most reckless legislative actions in this body's history. We are blowing up the American healthcare system, and we don't even know what comes next.

I want to be clear. The Senate has never before voted on major legislation that would reorder about one-sixth or one-fifth of the American economy and impact millions of lives without actually knowing what the bill would even do.

There has been no bipartisanship. There has been talk of it, but there have been no real discussions. There have been no public hearings. Let me say something about hearings. This is not a technical point. This is the way a legislative body does its work. This is the way we figure out whether our bill is any good or not.

This is the way the Senate has always worked. We don't do major legislation without hearings. But that is what we are doing today, and that is because people don't want to disclose what is in this bill.

It is true that we don't know exactly what is in the bill, but we can be sure of a few things. First, whatever problems there are with the ACA, this bill doesn't even bother to take a swing at them. To the extent people are worried about high deductibles, it will increase the deductibles. To the degree people are worried about the choices on the exchanges, it doesn't even try to solve that problem.

We don't know exactly how much Medicaid will be cut, whether it is just rolling back the Medicaid expansion or making these radical structural reforms, but we know there will be deep cuts to Medicaid. This will hurt people. It will hurt people in nursing homes. It will hurt people with drug addiction. Medicaid is a program that works for tens of millions of Americans, and it will be slashed massively.

We don't know whether they are going to get rid of the capital gains tax or just other revenue, but we know they are going to reduce many of the taxes in the original Affordable Care Act, and they are going to pay for it by cutting Medicaid.

So under the guise of fixing the ACA, they are actually doing nothing about ACA. What they are doing is cutting taxes and cutting Medicaid. We don't know exactly what is in the bill, but we do know that.

People are going to be hurt--people with preexisting conditions, families with loved ones struggling with opioid abuse, people in nursing homes, people who rely on Planned Parenthood, and the tens of millions of people who will lose their insurance almost instantly. That is why every group--from the American Medical Association to the nurses, to the American Cancer Society, to the March of Dimes, to the National Physicians Alliance, and the AARP--opposes this bill. There are 14 different versions of this bill, but, actually, these organizations oppose them all.

There are some core elements of the vote we took that are going to be true no matter what. It will cut Medicaid and cut taxes. It will reduce patient protections. It will reduce the number of people who have insurance.

It was all done with no hearings, with no Democrats, with no experts on healthcare. This thing is going to be dropped on us without enough time to review it and without enough time to interact with our home State and figure out the impact.

Make no mistake, the reason they will not tell you what is going to be in the final bill is because the moment they do, this thing will come crashing down. What the American people have to do is to make sure that this thing comes crashing down anyway. We have to do it for the tens of millions of Americans who depend on Medicaid and the ACA. We have to do it for our rural hospitals. We have to do it for the people with preexisting conditions. We have to do it for the people without power, without money, without the ability to walk 200 yards from this gilded Chamber and get the best healthcare in the world.

I will be fine. All the Members of this Chamber will be fine. But our job is not to take care of ourselves. Our job is to represent our constituents, and this bill has earned the title of most unpopular major bill in American history, most unpopular major legislation in American history.

There is still time to walk back from the brink.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Senate Republicans are about to take one of the most reckless actions in Senate history. They are going to vote to blow up the American healthcare system and do I don't know what next.

I want to be really clear about this. Never before has the Senate voted on major legislation that would reorder one-sixth of the American economy and impact tens of millions of American families without even knowing what the bill does. There has been no bipartisanship. There have been no hearings.

Let me just say something about hearings. This may seem like sort of a process or procedural complaint, but this very much matters. Hearings matter because it is how you get experts to tell you whether your bill is any good, whether it is smart or stupid, harmful or helpful. Hearings matter because they subject your bill and the process to public scrutiny. The media is able to report on what you are up to, and your constituents know what you are up to. So it is not a small thing to complain about no hearings. In fact, you can't be a good legislator without having hearings, and you can't be an effective legislative body without conducting public hearings. We never have major legislation without hearings, but that is exactly what they are doing, and there is one very simple reason for this. They are embarrassed by what is in this bill.

It is true we don't know exactly what is in this bill. There are lots and lots of versions and lots of notions being kicked around, but we can be sure of a few things.

First, we know this; that whatever problems there are with the Affordable Care Act, this bill doesn't even bother to try to fix them. To the extent that people are worried about high deductibles, it actually increases the deductibles. To the extent that people are worried about the lack of choices on the healthcare exchanges, it doesn't even try to fix that.

Second, we don't know exactly how much they are going to cut Medicaid, but they are going to cut Medicaid. Whether it is rolling back the Medicaid expansion or making these radical structural reforms, essentially block-granting Medicaid to the States, they are going to deeply cut Medicaid. This hurts people. It hurts people in nursing homes. It hurts people with drug addiction. Medicaid is a program that works and delivers care for millions of Americans, and it will be slashed massively tomorrow.

We also don't know whether they are going to keep the capital gains tax cut or get rid of it. In any case, they are going to get rid of most of the revenue in the Affordable Care Act. They are cutting taxes for the very wealthy, and the way they pay for that is to cut Medicaid. So under the guise of fixing the ACA, they do the thing they wanted to do all along--cut taxes, cut Medicaid. It has nothing to do with ACA: cut taxes, cut Medicaid. That is what the bill tomorrow will do. I don't care if it is the 2015 version. I don't care if it is BCRA. I don't care if it is a new Senate version. I don't care if it is Cruz's. All this cuts taxes for the wealthy and cuts Medicaid. That is what this legislation does.

Americans are going to be hurt by this legislation; people with preexisting conditions, families with a loved one struggling with opioid abuse, people in nursing homes, people who rely on Medicaid, people who rely on Planned Parenthood. The tens of millions of people who will lose their insurance almost instantly. That is why every single patient advocacy group, from the American Cancer Society to the March of Dimes, to the National Physicians Alliance, to disability groups, to the AARP--everybody hates this bill. Make no mistake, they hate every version of it.

It is not like there is a less harmful version. Either 22 million or 23 million or 32 million lose their healthcare. We don't have to do this to ourselves. We don't have to do this to the American people.

So there are lots of different versions of this legislation. What the leader is doing, very cleverly, is allowing people to believe that the thing they are moving to is the thing they may prefer. In other words, it is a blank canvas. It is just a motion to proceed. It is just a motion to begin debate.

Make no mistake, the vote tomorrow is to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no plan to replace it. That is what they are doing tomorrow, and they have been totally secretive because they know the moment they start talking specifics, the whole thing comes crashing down.

There are core elements of this vote tomorrow that are true no matter what. It cuts Medicaid; it cuts taxes for the rich; it reduces patient protections; it reduces the number of people who have insurance; and it will all be done with no hearings, no Democrats, no experts in healthcare. This thing will be dropped on us without enough time to review it, without enough time to interact with our home State to figure out what the impact would be.

We are being asked to do one of the most reckless things any group of legislators has ever been asked to do, which is to jump off a policy cliff--a healthcare cliff, a political cliff--and eventually they are going to tell you it is going to work out. Make no mistake, the reason they can't tell you what is in the bill is the moment they do, this thing will come crashing down.

What we have to do is make sure this thing comes crashing down anyway, and we have to do it for the tens of millions of Americans who depend on Medicaid and the ACA. We have to do it for our rural hospitals, we have to do it for people with preexisting conditions, and we have to do it for people without power, without money, without the ability to walk 200 yards from this Chamber to the U.S. Senate doctor, the best healthcare in the world.

Not only are we on the exchange--I have a Kaiser plan so we are on the exchange, we are in ACA--but also, anytime I want, if I have a headache, if I have a stomach ache, if I have something more serious, I can literally walk about 200 yards from here, go to the Senate doctor, and get whatever kind of healthcare I need.

I want you to understand how lucky the people who are voting on your future are and how privileged we all are in this literally gilded place, when people's lives and livelihoods and life savings are on the line tomorrow, and if I get so much as a hangnail, I get to call my staff and have them help me out. We are lucky people, and we need to think about whom we are representing. I will be fine. Every Member of this Chamber will be fine, but our job is not to take care of ourselves. Our job is to represent our constituents.

This bill has earned a really historic title: Most unpopular major bill in American history. Most unpopular major bill in American history. How that can get 20 votes, let alone 51, is beyond me.

I want to make one last point. We need to kill this bill, not just because of all the harm it is going to do to the country, we need to do it for the legislative branch of the U.S. Government. We just can't make laws like this.

Right now, the majority party is shortsighted because at some point Democrats are going to have the gavel. The temptation to follow this precedent being set this week, to enact major legislation without hearings and without the other party, might destroy the Senate itself. There is still time. There is still good will. We can walk back from the brink and do the right thing.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Washington for her leadership on tech and technology issues and, in particular, on net neutrality.

I would like to amend one thing she said. She said that we got about 5 million comments in favor of net neutrality on this question. It is true. Yesterday we had 5 million and change, but I just checked, and we are at 6.728 million, and more and more people are weighing in on this important issue.

As of today, it is important to point out that net neutrality is the law of the land. We are not asking for a change in the way that the internet operates. We are asking for the internet, as we know it, to be preserved.

What does that really mean? It means you have an arrangement with your ISP. You pay your internet service provider for access to the internet, and you get the whole internet. Your provider does not get to decide what you access. You do. Whether it is NBC or ABC, Hulu or Netflix or Breitbart or Google or Yahoo or Facebook or the New York Times or RedState or HotAir or whatever you want, you get to go there, and everything comes down from the internet at whatever speed it comes down. But without net neutrality, that arrangement could change.

The free and open internet, as we understand it, is a premise of the way we use the internet. It is a premise of the internet economy. It is a premise of Silicon Valley. It has now become a premise of car companies and real estate companies and anybody who does business online that, of course, you wouldn't have to pay money to an ISP to make sure your website loads fast enough so that consumers can see it. But that freedom, that free and open internet, really is in danger.

Here is what is happening: The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, is trying to change the internet by ending the net neutrality rules that were put in place. If they succeed, your ISP will have the power to stop you from seeing certain kinds of content. They will be the ones that get to make decisions about what you can access and how fast--not you. It is a foundational change in the way the internet operates.

Now, some people--including the internet company lobbyists and their CEOs--will say: Look, the companies aren't going to change the internet even if the law goes away. In fact, we are committing to voluntary net neutrality. That is what they say.

But I want you to think about how likely it is that a publicly traded company will not at least explore the possibility of different business models, and here is the problem: There may be opportunities without net neutrality for them to make more money.

Right now I have basic cable in my apartment. I don't have HBO. Back in Hawaii I have HBO and the whole deal, but in my apartment here I have more basic cable. I pay for a certain number of channels. I don't get access to the entire TV universe. I pay for packages. There is no reason under the law, should they repeal net neutrality, that

an ISP couldn't give the liberal package, which you could pay $75 for, or the conservative package, which you could pay $75 for, or the NBC- related families package, which you could pay $120 for--or maybe it is free because it is part of a vertical, which is included in your ISP.

The whole idea is that there is nothing preventing them--except these net neutrality laws--from deciding whom you get, where you get to visit, and how fast the downloads come. This is especially important, of course, in the entertainment space, when we are all streaming TV, news, movies, and even gaming online so the relationship between the person who creates the content and you is going to be intermediated by an ISP.

If you have a great app idea, right now you just have to have a great app idea. If you have a great website, people can log on to your website and you are in business. If you have the next great website, if you have eBay or Craigslist or Amazon, but it is post-net neutrality and the FCC goes through with this, you will not need a bunch of engineers but a bunch of lawyers and business sharks to try to negotiate with the ISP to even get in the door.

Students could have less access to online resources, including online classes. Realtors would be stopped from using online tools to sell their homes. Patients might not able to use the internet to communicate with their doctors or monitor their health. Musicians, photographers, entrepreneurs will use the tools everybody depends on to make a living or share their art online.

I was talking to somebody I know in the tech community, and they were saying that this is a parade of horribles. None of this is going to come true.

I asked: Why do you think that is true? Why do you think this is just some apocryphal scenario I am describing? If you were an ISP, why wouldn't you slice up the internet and sell it for more? If you are the one controlling the access to it and you are a publicly traded company, you have no duty to a free and open internet. You have a duty to maximize shareholder profits.

If your board of directors comes to you and says: You know what, this whole ``you pay a flat fee and you get the whole internet,'' that is not the right business model. Look at these areas where ISPs are the only provider in many communities. The idea that the consumer has a choice in lots of rural communities, you have only one broadband provider in the first place.

Why wouldn't a broadband provider slice and dice up the internet and charge you a la carte? They can get more money for this. It is not that they are bad people. It is that they are duty bound to maximize profits.

Today, July 12, is the day of action. The internet is pushing back. Today we stand up to the FCC so the internet remains free and open. As we speak--I mean literally as we speak--thousands and thousands of people across the country by the minute are logging on to the FCC website to express themselves.

I have to say, this has become a Democratic issue. This has become a progressive issue, but it wasn't so long ago that people in the conservative movement were worried about media consolidation and the conservative movement was saying: Hey, listen, I don't know who is going to own my media company, but I want to get to my websites to get my content at whatever rate it comes down. Don't tell me what information I get to have access to.

Everybody uses the internet. Many people are spending dozens of hours a week on the internet via their phones, via their television, via their broadband connection at home, and the innovation economy that underlies our economic growth is really in jeopardy.

I know it is an arcane process. I know most people probably haven't even heard of the FCC. To talk about net neutrality and lay all this jargon on you, it is concerning that the free and open internet is really in danger. We have this unique opportunity because unlike what happened a few months ago with consumer privacy, where very quickly this body reversed a rule that provides for privacy so your broadband providers can't resell your personal browsing data to a third-party advertiser or any other company--that happened very quickly and without any public input.

Here is the really good thing about the FCC process. The statute provides for public input. We are in a public comment period, and July 17 is the deadline. There is an opportunity for people to let their voices be heard. The internet should be in the hands of people, not in the hands of companies.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that two fellows from my office, Micaela Klein and Sunmin Kim, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the calendar year.

Mr. President, this is the beginning, not the end. Today, we claim an important victory because of thousands of people across the country. There are not enough Senators who support this Republican healthcare plan, so there will not be a vote this week. Because of all of the people who spoke up, the realities of this bill are delayed--the tens of millions of people without insurance, a decimated Medicaid Program, the closure of health clinics and hospitals. Yet that is the key word here--that this bill is delayed. This bill is not dead.

Everyone who spoke up about this bill should take a victory lap. Pat yourselves on the back tonight. It is an extraordinary moment in terms of what grassroots democracy can accomplish. You did what you had to do with what you could, and you succeeded but only for tonight. Tomorrow morning, we have to get ready because the minute that the Senate comes back from the July 4 recess, they will have 3 weeks to ram through a bill. They are not done.

I heard the Vice President say today that they are going to keep working until they get it done. They are not giving up, so we cannot rest either.

Most importantly, we cannot let them forget that we are watching, that we are waiting, and we will still be here when they try to come back and jam this bill through.

I really hope that the Republicans take another course. In setting aside the policy disagreements that we are having, there is really a better way. There is a way for the Senate to be a Senate, which is to empower two of the best Republican Senators whom we have seen in generations. They are Lamar Alexander and Orrin Hatch--two people whose conservative credentials nobody doubts. They are the chairmen of two of the biggest committees in the U.S. Senate--the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the Finance Committee. They have done bipartisan work--

Orrin Hatch for decades and Lamar Alexander for decades. Both of them, relatively recently, have done bipartisan work on tax extenders and on repealing No Child Left Behind. These are not easy issues. For these two chairmen, because they understand the committee hearing process and because they earned those gavels, I can only imagine their frustration.

Look, I am a Progressive, and I support the Affordable Care Act, but if I were sitting there as a Republican member of the HELP Committee or the Finance Committee and if these bills were going through and taking the country in a direction to which I objected and if I were the ranking member or were, maybe, a couple off from being the ranking member, I would be thinking to myself that I cannot wait until I get that gavel back.

I can tell you that I can have my own hearings, and I can listen to expert testimony, and I can craft a bill. That is what I want to do. The point of being a legislator is to actually work together on a bipartisan basis. Everybody knows that the chairman or the chairwoman has the lion's share of the authority, but it is still a collaborative process. It is politics. You try to accommodate people on both sides of the aisle, and you have quite an ideological spectrum, both on the D side and the R side, but that is the fun of it. That is the way the Senate is supposed to work.

You have a hearing, and the thing that we should remember about a hearing is that, generally speaking, if you have four testifiers--I do not know if it is a rule or just kind of an operating assumption--the majority party gets to pick three out of the four testifiers. So you are going to get three Republican witnesses and one Democratic witness if you have a normal hearing in HELP or Finance about the Affordable Care Act or what ought to happen with the American Health Care Act or whatever it may be. So it is not as if you cannot control the message, and it is not as if you cannot, in the end, do whatever bill you want to do. Isn't that the fun of being in the Senate?

Forget the Democrats for the moment. I mean, the Democrats were totally in the dark, and the public was totally in the dark. Even for the Republican Members, I mean, this has to irritate them that 13 people were sort of kept in the loop--some more than others, some less than others--but it was like these consecutive conversations: What will it take to get you to yes? OK. We will consider that. We will let you know what we are able to do.

Why not just have a public hearing?

That is, literally, what we do for everything--for the Defense authorization, for appropriations bills. Of the 12 subcommittees, we have several hearings. Whether it is telecommunications or railroads or education or even other healthcare issues, we have public hearings, and we do so on a bipartisan basis.

As tough as we are on each other in the election context and as tough as we are sometimes with each other on the floor, the committee hearing process is rarely as partisan. The committee hearing process allows you to kind of get to the work of legislating.

All I am suggesting is that I understand what Leader McConnell is going to try to do. He is going to try to peel off votes. Senator Markey is exactly right in that he is going to try to peel off votes. Yet there is another way to go here, and that is to legislate. Let me just make the political argument for this on behalf of Republicans.

The problem with being the majority party and trashing the healthcare system by not properly funding the exchanges right now and by creating all of this uncertainty is that prices go up, and everybody understands this. Barack Obama is not the President. He was river rafting when all of this was happening, and he deserves it. I am happy for him. He is not the President. So the idea is that you are going to sort of say: Well, we are going to cut Medicaid, cut opioid funding, and we are going to turn this into a big tax cut for people who are already doing well financially because that last bill was called ObamaCare. It had the word ``Obama'' in it.

Listen, Republicans and Democrats across the country may not be politically sophisticated like we pretend to be, but they are smart. They are thinking to themselves, I am a Republican, I am a conservative, but I don't care about Barack Obama anymore. He is gone. He is not the President. So if you sit there and tell me we need to slash funding for mental health services or slash funding for my community health center in a rural neighborhood, I don't care--your argument cannot be: Because ObamaCare, right? You can't be: Because ObamaCare.

Now you have a majority in the House, a majority in the Senate, you have the Presidency. So now Republicans own the healthcare system. So here we are trying to figure out a way where we can both own the healthcare system. We are acting like this is impossible to discover. We are acting like: Gosh, what way would we work where we can each sort of shoulder some of the political and policy responsibility, the personal responsibility for the American healthcare system?

There is a very simple answer to that. We just do this through the regular order. If you do this through the regular order--what that means is--it is interesting to me that the difference between now and, say, 6 months ago is people actually know what reconciliation is. They know there is a threshold for regular legislation of 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, but it is a really important point. The moment the Republicans decided to do this via reconciliation, that was tactical, and that was kind of technical, but what that meant was, they said: We have 52. We only need 51. We don't need to talk to you.

I understand that kind of rationale. You have 52 votes. You can give up actually two and have Vice President Pence break the tie. That may be a judgment they made; I am not sure if they regret it or not.

So here we are. The way to take this off the table as a political liability for the Republicans is to get a bill that could get 60 votes because once it becomes a bipartisan enterprise, it cannot be a cudgel. We cannot beat each other up over it.

When the Affordable Care Act passed originally, one of the challenges we had as a political matter is that we had not a single, solitary Republican vote. I will take everybody at their word that they just couldn't vote for it because it was against their political ideology and their principles, but it also had the side benefit of, the moment a bill doesn't have the patina of bipartisanship--the moment only one party participates in a process--boy, do you own it.

So the question I have is, Do you really want to own the American healthcare system, whatever happens, good or bad? You become like the utility company. Nobody likes their utility company. The best thing that can happen, if you are a utility company, is the lights stay on and the rate of increase slightly slows. You are never going to have cheaper rates, right? And when you flip your light switch on and your lights go on, you don't say: Gosh, I am so pleased with my utility company. You ignore it.

The best thing that can happen is, you come up with a brilliant bill, without any Democratic support, and then everybody shrugs their shoulders and moves on. More likely you are going to own all the problems you are creating, and you are creating myriad problems. I just want to say, there are a lot of Democrats who are on the level about wanting to legislate here, and we will do it the moment repeal is taken off the table, the moment there is a commitment to public hearings, the moment there is a commitment to doing things through the regular order.

Now, those were not my prepared remarks, but that really matters to me. I really believe in the Senate. For all of our flaws, we are still the place that has to solve the problems. We are still the world's greatest deliberative body because we must be, because these are Federal problems and we are the Federal legislature so we have to fix this ourselves. There are only two paths; one is the partisan path, which is great peril for people across the country and great political peril, and then there is the path of statesmanship and stateswomanship--the path of us working together and being a Senate again. We can do that, but we have to decide that is what we want to do.

I am hoping we go home, we participate in our parades, we hang out with our families, we cook some burgers, we cook some hot dogs, and we think: You know what, I want to legislate again. That was the battle, that was tough, I

am angry, I am disappointed, I am relieved--it depends on who you are-- but I would like to start legislating again, and I would like to do so in the regular order.

I am hoping that is what happens over the next week. If it doesn't, then we will be ready to fight again, and I know there are literally millions of Americans who are not going to let up until this bill is dead.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, you might think that for the last 7 years, the major complaint people had about the Affordable Care Act was that it hurt rich people, because they seem to be the only people who stand to gain with this Republican Senate healthcare plan. They get a giant tax break. The rest of America, on the other hand, is in trouble.

With TrumpCare, healthcare will cost more, and 22 million people are going to lose their healthcare altogether. Some healthcare bill. To put this in perspective, imagine if everyone lost their healthcare in Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Alaska, West Virginia, Ohio, Idaho, and Wyoming. That is what TrumpCare does. That is 22 million Americans. It also devastates one of the best healthcare programs this country has.

With this bill, Medicaid is going to lose nearly $800 billion. If your only worry is that your investment income gets taxed at 3.8 percent every year, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Let me drill down on that because one of the most egregious tax breaks in this bill--and this is mostly a tax cut bill and not a healthcare bill--is the following: If you are making $200,000 as an individual or $250,000 as a couple, capital gains income is currently taxed at 3.8 percent. If you are making $200,000 as an individual or $250,000 as a couple and you have capital gains, not regular income, it is taxed at 3.8 percent. This bill zeros that tax out. This bill zeros that tax out. On top of that, it is retroactive. Think about the absurdity.

Here we are. I am looking at the Senator from Pennsylvania and how much he has advocated for children and especially for children with disabilities. I am looking at the Senator from Connecticut and the work he has done for people with chronic diseases and mental health challenges and the resources we need for that. And in the middle of a supposedly oriented toward healthcare piece of legislation, we are giving a retroactive capital gains tax cut to people who make over $250,000 a year in combined income. It is absurd. It is not a healthcare bill.

If you have a loved one in a nursing home, if you are pregnant or thinking of having a baby, if your kid has a disability that requires costly care, if you work two jobs but your employer doesn't provide health insurance, then this bill does not take care of you. Instead of less taxes, you get less care, and you are going to pay more for it.

This is what happens when legislators don't have committee hearings or they refuse to meet with patients, doctors, nurses, advocates, their own constituents. There have been so few townhalls about healthcare. There have been so few real Senate debates about healthcare.

I have seen every single Democratic Member of the Senate come here and

talk about this piece of legislation. I have seen every single Republican Member of the Senate talk about legislation that they are proud of. I have seen very few people on the Republican side of the aisle come down and talk about this bill because they know it is not a good piece of legislation.

At this point, we are not even debating healthcare policy. It is not a question of what is the best way to get people to sign up for insurance or how we can lower premiums and deductibles or how we can improve the delivery system; it is a question of how many people are going to lose their healthcare so that insurance company CEOs can continue to make millions of dollars a year. That is literally what is in this bill. Those are the conversations we are having--nothing related to reforming the healthcare system or getting people more coverage for less but, rather, tax cuts for people who are involved in the healthcare industry.

How many grandparents are going to get kicked out of nursing homes? It is not a rhetorical question. My wife's grandmother was in a nursing home 2 months ago. It was a beautiful facility. They took great care of her. They had three beds, three nursing home beds. I think the normal reimbursement is about $9,000 a month. They took wonderful care of my wife's grandmother. They won't exist. That nursing home and all the nursing homes like it won't exist if there is an $800 billion cut to Medicaid. This is not a theoretical conversation. This isn't even a partisan conversation. Everybody has nursing home beds in all of their home States. Everybody at least ought to know some middle-class people who rely on Medicaid for nursing homes.

CBO gave us the answer today. Too many people are going to be locked out of the healthcare system if this bill goes forward, and all for giant tax cuts.

Look, our healthcare system is not perfect. Changes need to be made, but this bill is just not it. It has no clear guiding principle other than slashing Medicaid to pay for tax cuts. We have to start over.

I am looking at the Presiding Officer, who was a speaker of the house in North Carolina and understands how to do a bill on a bipartisan basis. I am thinking of the numerous Republicans who are capable of working on a bipartisan bill that can get 60 votes.

By the way, the politics would change because if we worked on a bill that could get 60 votes, we would be in a wonderful position--the Senate is set up to encourage us to work together--because if we abide by that 60-vote threshold and we come up with a bill together, we would own the American healthcare system together. We don't get to play this blame game about what is happening with premiums or what is happening with coverage numbers. We actually, on the level, collaborate.

When you think about a bill or an issue that used to be as partisan as public education, we had Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray come together. Heck, in the last Congress, we had Jim Inhofe and Barbara Boxer do a bill together. It is possible for us to do a bipartisan piece of legislation.

The decision was made to go with reconciliation, and that is backfiring because the problem with not involving Democrats is that there are Democrats across the country. The problem with not involving experts is that you end up with a product you can't defend.

What we really need to do is take a breath, take the Fourth of July weekend, and reconvene as a Congress--not as Democrats and Republicans but as Americans who understand that our healthcare system is not perfect, that it is in need of improvement, but this bill doesn't get it done.

I yield the floor.