Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rise to speak on the stream protection rule. One of the first things we learn as kids is that if you make a mess, you are responsible to clean it up. It is good manners, but it is also a matter of ethics. It is about doing the right thing. This is the spirit, this is the idea behind the stream protection rule. It simply tells coal companies doing mountaintop mining that they need to clean up their mess if they make a mess. It seems pretty common sense to me.

Opponents of this rule argue that this is somehow an unfair burden on coal companies because coal is doing poorly in the emergency markets. Opponents seem to want to say that asking companies to be responsible to clean up whatever mess may have been made makes it harder for them to compete.

The truth is, coal is having a very difficult time in energy markets, but it is not because they are being required to clean up after themselves. It is because other energy resources are becoming cheaper. Solar is cheaper now than ever. The natural gas revolution is now in competition with coal. It is very difficult to get a new coal-fired powerplant on line. It may be even more difficult to recapitalize an old one. So coal is struggling, but the reason is not the stream protection rule.

There is another aspect of this, which is, since when is there no cost to doing business? Since when are any companies allowed to come in, pollute, and then walk away without doing anything about it? If you hired a contractor to work on your house and they left a pile of materials in your kitchen, you wouldn't say: Well, that is just the cost of doing business. You would say: Clean up the mess. That is part of the job.

There is no question that coal mining is a tough business, but it also can sometimes be a messy business. That is a simple fact. If we ignore the pollution that is caused, if we ignore the cost the public bears when toxic substances are dumped without proper treatment or when coal-fired powerplants spew carbon pollution into the atmosphere, for that matter, we are ignoring the cost of doing business.

To be fair, we have to make sure every industry, including the coal industry, plays by the same rules as everyone else. Up until December of last year, some coal companies just were not playing by the same rules. Mountaintop mining had leaked dirty water and waste into the streams. Researchers estimate that this has destroyed 2,000 miles of stream in the United States of America.

That destruction has a domino effect. It threatens the health of people who depend on those streams for their drinking water, it poisons fish, birds, plants, and it reduces the quality of life for people across the country. That is why the stream protection rule was established. It is there so parents don't have to worry when their kids go play by the stream or go fishing behind their house. It is there so ranchers don't have to worry about a nearby mine that could harm their land, and fishermen don't have to worry if the salmon catch is poisoned or if there are fewer fish because salmon are dying from pollution.

This rule is so communities don't have to worry that their daily lives will be changed because a company is not being responsible and cleaning up after itself. This may surprise some people, but the rule will actually create jobs. People like to talk about how burdensome regulations are, especially in the environmental space, but the truth is, it will not lead to fewer jobs.

The Department of Interior predicted it will actually create hundreds of jobs a year, not take them away. Most of all, it is going to have a real positive impact on the world we live in. Over the next two decades, researchers estimated that the stream protection rule would protect or restore 6,000 miles of streams. That is more than the distance between eastern Maine and my home State of Hawaii.

So if you care about protecting local water supply, if you care about having a place for your kids to go hiking and fishing, if you care about holding everyone to the same standard, then don't let this bureaucratic mumbo jumbo get in the way. This rule was created to fix a specific problem, and repealing it could effectively exempt mountaintop coal mining from modern regulation indefinitely.

This is a very important point that has to be made about Congressional Review Act votes. We are going to have a slew of them over the next probably 2 or 3 months. Here is the thing about a CRA vote because it gets rather technical. It is not just overturning a regulation. The way the law works, is that not only is the regulation overturned but an administration can never touch this issue again. We can't do anything that is ``substantially similar.''

So if you want to do something about the stream protection rule, make a law; override the rule that was just made and craft legislation. You have a working majority in both Chambers, work with the bipartisan group. You have four or five Democrats who voted for the CRA. Let's legislate.

What is going to happen when the CRA vote succeeds is we are never going to be able to touch the question of pollution from mountaintop removal again--literally. That is how CRA works. So every time we have a CRA vote, it is not just whether you like the particular rule and want to overturn it, it is whether you never want to touch this subject matter again. That is a rather serious threshold that we have to come through.

We are going to do a lot of CRAs. I know everybody on the Republican side is raring to go to sort of undo all the rules that were done under the Obama administration. Fair enough. We understand. You have the Presidency. You have both Chambers. It is certainly your prerogative to take up all of these CRAs, but be careful because you are not going to be able to touch these issues again. You are forfeiting your prerogative to touch these issues again.

So for the sake of public health and in order to leave a better world for our kids, we need to keep this rule in place.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, American history has been shaped by U.S. Secretaries of State. Secretary Dean Acheson guided the United States through the Cold War. Secretary Madeleine Albright proved that diplomacy does not depend on gender and that protecting refugees and human rights are core American principles. Secretary Henry Kissinger laid the groundwork for peace between Egypt and Israel. And forgive me for using such a recent example, but Secretary John Kerry helped to bring the international community together to tackle climate change.

As our Nation's top diplomat, the Secretary of State is the highest ranking cabinet member and the President's top adviser on U.S. foreign policy.

The Secretary balances relationships with some 180 countries and is responsible for tens of thousands of Americans working at more than 250 posts around the world.

In other words, it takes a remarkable knowledge base and skill set to be Secretary of State, particularly as the United States takes on a complex and complicated set of issues. At the top of the list is climate change. The global changes we have seen in the climate are affecting almost every part of the world, from droughts in Sub-Saharan Africa to rising sea levels in parts of Asia.

We have also not seen this level of refugees and migrants since after World War II. The Rohingya, Syrians, Afghans, Guatemalans, and many others are fleeing war, violence, persecution, and instability. Globalization and technology have disrupted economies, leaving governments, companies, and workers trying to figure out how to keep up with the times without being left behind. Terrorism and violent extremism haunt parts of the globe, from the Middle East to Europe, and to our own borders.

The Secretary of State has to take on all of these challenges and do it in a way that advances U.S. interests and values. After reviewing his record and his testimony before the Senate, I am not satisfied that Rex Tillerson is the right person to lead the State Department. On each of these criteria--views, knowledge base, and skills--I have concerns about his nomination at this point in the process.

First, I am not satisfied with Mr. Tillerson's views. There has been a clear consensus among both parties on the foundation of U.S. foreign policy. Throughout the confirmation process, however, Mr. Tillerson indicated that his views did not necessarily align with that consensus. During discussions on international human rights, the hearing record shows that Mr. Tillerson was vague about oppressive governments, extrajudicial killings, and the bombing of hospitals. He demurred when given the opportunity to rule out a Muslim registry, a concept that is anathema to American values, and yet this administration is dangerously close to implementing one.

Perhaps most concerning were Mr. Tillerson's views on Russia. I don't need to be the umpteenth person to list the many, many concerns we have about a country that is not America's ally. For decades, there has been bipartisan consensus about U.S. relations with Russia, and I am uncomfortable with confirming a Secretary of State who does not share that bipartisan view.

Secondly, I am not satisfied that Mr. Tillerson has the knowledge base to lead U.S. diplomacy. His vision for the State Department seemed to confuse the roles of the Department of State and the Department of Defense. During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Tillerson responded to a question on the South China Sea, but his answer focused on military solutions instead of the long list of diplomatic options which we should first explore.

That is not to say a Secretary of State can't recommend military solutions. There is certainly a long history of the State Department doing just that, but it should always be as a last resort. It always comes after a long pursuit of peace through diplomacy.

Finally, I am not satisfied that Mr. Tillerson will be able to translate the considerable skills he has from ExxonMobil to the State Department. His long career at Exxon is certainly impressive, but it is the only international job on his resume, and let's be clear, the company's record does not at all align with U.S. foreign policy, from accusations related to human rights abuses to Exxon's business operations in countries that are not friendly to the United States. I am not arguing that this makes Mr. Tillerson a bad person. As the CEO of a big company, he had his own imperatives and his own obligations, and I understand and respect that. But it is not enough to say that I used to care only about ExxonMobil's interests, but now I only care about the U.S. interests.

The next leader of the State Department will have to argue for our values and our priorities with friends and adversaries alike. He or she will need to balance business interests with national security and with American values. I approach this nomination process with an open mind, but Mr. Tillerson's confirmation hearing left me with too many doubts about his views, his knowledge set, and his abilities. I will be voting no on his nomination.

Mr. President, 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, in just a few weeks, our great country will mark the 75th anniversary of President Roosevelt's Executive order authorizing the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian Americans during World War II. They were rounded up with their families and held behind barbed wire like war criminals. But they had done nothing wrong; their crime was being Japanese, German, or Italian. They were labeled ``enemy aliens.''

Mark Twain reportedly said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and this seems to be the path the President has pursued with his Muslim ban. This ban has already harmed green card holders, students, business people, and those fleeing violence and persecution. Remember, these are the people fleeing the violence, not the perpetrators of the violence. They are the victims, not the criminals. They have been pulled from their flights, left stranded in the airports. They have been detained without the ability to talk with a lawyer. And they are wondering if the United States of America is still the beacon of hope, the lamp by the golden door, the shining city on the hill.

Iraqis who risked their lives to serve our country as translators saw their visas revoked. An 11-month-old baby was detained. That is disgusting. It is un-American. It is contrary to everything we stand for.

We stand for providing refuge for those who want to escape their own awful circumstances and live in freedom and opportunity. It is my grandparents escaping Ukraine. It is my wife's grandparents leaving China. It is the Schatzes. It is the Binders. It is the Kwoks. It is Albert Einstein. It is Madeleine Albright. This is who we are. We are people from all over the world. We are united not by our ethnic extraction or religious affiliation but tied together by our love for America.

Here is the thing: It is not even as though we are trading liberty for security. We are getting no additional security. This is all about being cruel to Muslims because it is good politics for some people.

This isn't just morally wrong, it is also guaranteed not to work. This ban is ridiculous as a homeland security measure.

First, zero people from the countries on the ban list have been involved in terrorist attacks in America. Zero people from the countries on the ban list have been involved in terrorist attacks on America. It is almost as though the criteria for picking the countries is something other than the threat of terrorism.

Second, this ban has the potential to strengthen violent extremist groups by playing right into their hands. It encourages everyone to be afraid of people we don't know from other places. That is not America, and it will not work.

When President Gerald Ford repealed the Executive order interning Japanese Americans, he asked citizens across the country to make a pledge. He said: ``I call upon the American people to affirm with me this American promise--that we have learned from the tragedy of that long-ago experience forever to treasure liberty and justice for each individual American, and resolve that this kind of action shall never again be repeated.''

That promise is being broken. It is broken for the American who came to this country as a lost boy from Sudan and who now cannot see his family. It is broken for the American married to an Iranian, whom the government is splitting from her husband. It is broken for the millions of Americans, the majority of us, who want us always to have the moral high ground.

The world is watching. History is watching. We have to ask ourselves: What do they see? Do they see Lady Liberty or do they see something darker? The choice is ours. We can fix this.

We start by following the wise words of Fred Korematsu, an outspoken voice against Japanese internment and an American hero who was born 98 years ago today.

He said: ``Protest, but not with violence, and don't be afraid to speak up.''

Today I call on every Member of the Senate to follow Mr. Korematsu's advice. Speak up, stand against this ban, and fight chaos and paranoia as official government policy.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, more than 50 years ago, when Medicaid was

created, Congress made a smart decision. Lawmakers designed a program so that if health care costs rise, if the economy starts to struggle, Medicaid would be there for the American people, no matter what.

A couple of days ago, the counselor to the President said that, as part of the replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid will be converted to block grants. Let's be clear about what this means.

People like grants, and they like Medicaid. Maybe they are not sure about whether they like block grants. Whether intentional or not, this kind of technocratic, bureaucratic language can trick people. It sounds fine. Maybe it is even the smart thing to do.

Let me be totally explicit about what block granting Medicaid actually means. It means cutting Medicaid. It means less money for Medicaid. It means less health care for people. It is a euphemism. It is not quite a lie, but it is a way of describing something so that you don't know exactly what it is. They are calling it a block grant because they don't want to say that they are cutting Medicaid.

These cuts are going to hurt millions of people. They will hurt working families who rely on Medicaid to pay for nursing home care for their families. We have to be pretty out of touch to not know anyone who at some point in their life will rely on nursing home subsidies from Medicaid. It is happening in my extended family right now.

It is important to remember that Medicaid certainly helps children. Medicaid certainly helps people who are economically disadvantaged. It helps poor people. But it also helps middle-class families, because at the end of a family member's life, who can pay for nursing home care out-of-pocket? You may have saved all of your life, but, for instance, in Hawaii a nursing home costs around $10,000 a month. So it is a rare family who can pay $10,000 a month for a grandmother or a great- grandmother or a father or a mother. Nobody can do that. This is going to harm middle-class families.

It is also going to hurt women in particular. Women need Medicaid for maternal health services and for family planning. These cuts are going to hurt seniors and people with disabilities. These people have nowhere else to turn. That is the point of Medicaid. Medicaid is their only option.

Now, I have heard some people say: Well, this is going to expand local control. That is preposterous. The truth is that block granting Medicaid, which is the same thing as cutting Medicaid and giving a fixed amount to the States, gives States less control, not more control. They force States to choose between seniors and kids, between people with disabilities and women, or between health care and education.

Look, it does not matter whom you voted for. American voters--left, right, and center--have this sense that what we do in Washington is that we run for office saying one thing and then we get in office and we do exactly the opposite. Frankly, the Congress has earned that reputation. This is another instance where a party has promised to not cut Medicaid, but here we are--week 1, day 5--debating cuts on this important program.

This is a deal breaker for me and many of my colleagues, and it will be a disaster for millions of Americans.

I call on everyone on both sides of the aisle to stand up for seniors, to stand up for women, to stand up for children, and to fight any cuts to Medicaid.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, having Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA is bad for the air we breathe and the water we drink, and it is bad for American leadership on climate. It is not just that I have a different view from Mr. Pruitt on the Environmental Protection Agency, it is that he has made a career out of undermining the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. It is not just that he is a Republican or that he doesn't share my views about clean energy.

Look, I understand that when a Republican administration comes in, their EPA nominee is going to have a different view of what the Agency ought to be doing. I am not suggesting that we are going to get Henry Waxman or Jeff Merkley to run the EPA. That is not what is going on here. Here is what it is, and I want people to listen carefully.

Scott Pruitt is a professional climate denier. That is his job. He has made his political bones trying to shred the EPA's ability to enforce the laws that protect clean air and clean water. The core mission of the EPA is to safeguard public health by enforcing the laws on the books, and the cornerstones of the EPA's authorities are the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. These laws were passed over 40 years ago with huge bipartisan majorities, and they have been extremely successful.

It is especially important for the dozens of young people watching C- SPAN right now to understand that the state of the environment in the late 1960s was catastrophic, like out of a science fiction movie. Even for those of us who were around, it is a good reminder of what the EPA has accomplished over the decades.

The Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so polluted that it caught on fire. Lake Erie was so polluted that almost nothing could live in it. Bacteria levels in the Hudson River were 170 times above levels that could be considered safe. Raw sewage was directly discharged into rivers and streams where children swam. The FDA found that 87 percent of U.S. swordfish contained so much mercury that they were unfit for human consumption. Then the Clean Water Act was passed. We made incredible progress in the last 44 years. We still have a long way to go, as about one-third of our waterways are not yet fishable and swimmable, as the law requires.

Scott Pruitt's opposition to the Clean Water Act and EPA makes me terrified that we could go back to the bad old days of water pollution. EPA's enforcement of the Clean Air Act is an even bigger success story. This law has saved millions of lives and improved the health of millions of others. EPA's enforcement of the law has reduced air pollution by 70 percent since 1970. Smog levels in L.A. have fallen two-thirds since their peak. Lead in the air is down 98 percent, carbon monoxide down 85 percent, sulfur dioxide down 80 percent. Acid rain is down over 50 percent and at a fraction of the anticipated cost. But this progress is in real jeopardy.

As the Oklahoma attorney general and as the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association, he dismantled the unit in his office charged with enforcing Federal environmental laws and stood up a unit to undermine Federal environmental law. He led the opposition to the Clean Power Plan. He sued the Federal Government over a dozen times to prevent the implementation of rules that would protect our health and our environment. What he does is fight the EPA. That is his thing.

As Oklahoma attorney general, he literally--I am not making this up-- he literally copied and pasted a letter from a major oil company onto his official State attorney general letterhead and then sent it to the EPA as though it were his own.

I have never met Mr. Pruitt--and I assume he is personally a good guy--so I will say it like this: A person who works so closely with industries that

pollute our air and water is an unusually bad fit to run the EPA. Never before in the history of the EPA has a President nominated someone so opposed to the EPA to run it, and on the most significant environmental challenge of our generation, he is aggressively wrong. He has said that the climate debate is ``far from settled'' and that ``scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connections to the actions of mankind.'' This, of course, is nuts. The climate debate is settled and has been for some time. More than 97 percent of climate scientists agree that the climate is changing and that humans are responsible. Ask a scientist, ask a farmer, ask a fisherman, ask a skier or snowboarder. If you don't believe 97 percent of scientists, will you at least believe your own eyes?

His position even puts him at odds with the Department of Defense, which has called climate change a ``threat multiplier.'' Here is the good news. We are actually making a lot of progress in clean energy, almost all of it in the private sector. The cost of solar power has dropped by 60 percent in the last 10 years and more new solar capacity was added in 2016 than any other energy source. Wind power was by far the largest source added to the grid in 2015. Clean energy generation grew by about 20 percent in the last year, and the long-term extensions of the renewable energy tax credits give us hope to think that kind of trajectory can be sustained. This comes at a time when public concern about climate change is at an alltime high, and with three-quarters of Americans, including half of Republicans, supporting Federal efforts to reduce carbon pollution.

This progress is fragile, and confirming Scott Pruitt can undermine our momentum. Again, here is Mr. Pruitt in his own words about the Clean Power Plan: ``The EPA does not possess the authority under the Clean Air Act to accomplish what it proposes in the unlawful Clean Power Plant.'' This is flat wrong.

Let me quickly explain a lawsuit called Massachusetts v. EPA. The Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate air pollution and carbon pollution as a pollutant so it is not only that the EPA may regulate greenhouse gas emissions, under the Clean Air Act they are actually required to do so. Mr. Pruitt has bragged that he ``led the charge with repeated notices and subsequent lawsuits against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.''

On climate change, he has said:

Is it truly manmade or is it just simply another period of

time when the Earth is cooling, increasing in heat? Is it

just typical, natural type of occurrences as opposed [to]

what the administration says?

I cannot think of a person more ill-suited to run this Agency.

On clean energy, the Chinese are leading. Mexico is leading. Europe is leading, Germany, Africa. The question isn't whether the clean energy revolution will occur, the question is whether we will lead it or get left in the dust.

This is where we are. A nominee who does not understand the vital role of clean air, clean water, and protecting the environment has been nominated to lead the EPA, who denies decades of scientific research.

To my Republican colleagues, I have had many encouraging, rational conversations about climate with you but almost exclusively in private. I say this. This vote is the litmus test, the one your grandkids will ask you about. I know being in the Senate is about making choices--and lots of times it is great--but this issue, this vote is absolutely simple: Don't vote for a climate denier. You cannot dabble in conservation or energy efficiency or vote for a budget amendment recognizing the scientific consensus on climate change and then vote yes on this nominee. If you say you are not a climate denier, this is the point in your career when you get to prove it. If we find another nominee, even one who hates the Clean Power Plan, who shares your view on federalism, who shares your view about the United Nations, about President Obama, that is fair, that is fine, but this nominee is out of bounds.

Please, consult your voters, your university experts, talk to your kids. It is their planet. It is their future--or consult with your own conscience.

I know sometimes politics is complicated and the right thing to do is not that easy to determine in the fog of the battle. This is not one of those times. For future generations, for the planet, for the future of the Republican Party, you have to get this one right. If you are not a climate denier, do not put one in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency.

I yield the floor.

Madam Clerk, how am I recorded?

I vote no on behalf of the people who need mental health care.

Mr. President, I thank the senior Senator from Connecticut for his leadership on this and so many other issues on behalf of the people of his home State.

Before I get into prevention as a policy issue, I just want to reiterate a process point.

Here we are in the world's greatest deliberative body--the world's greatest deliberative body--and there really are so many talented individuals who come from county counsels, who come from State assemblies, who come from State senates, who come from the U.S. House, and find themselves in the U.S. Senate, the world's greatest deliberative body. And here we are debating one of the biggest public policy issues over the last decade, arguably over the last generation. Here we are.

I am thinking about my early days in the Hawaii legislature and what we would do. If we wanted to move a bill along but we weren't sure exactly what to do, we would flaw the effective date because we knew the language didn't work yet, but we wanted to take it to conference committee. We didn't want it to be enacted into law, but we wanted it to move through the process. So what we would do is we would flaw the effective date. We would say ``Effective year 2100,'' so that even if it were accidentally enacted into law, it wouldn't have the force of law.

Yet once in a while, a staffer or a member would make a clerical error and actually enact something with a delayed effective date into law, and they were humiliated. This was a mistake. This was a clerical error, and this showed that it was amateur hour. This showed that somebody didn't know what they were doing. This showed that somebody wasn't a very serious legislator.

Yet here we are in the Nation's legislature, here we are in the world's greatest deliberative body, and we are doing that on purpose. We are doing that right away. We are doing this with the Affordable Care Act after 7 years of blasting this law because they know they can't repeal the parts that are popular. So what they are going to do is eviscerate the revenue attached to the bill and leave themselves, as one of my colleagues said, in a ``box canyon'' so the only thing they can do is shovel money to insurance companies--borrowed money--to maintain the benefit because they don't want to deal with the political ramifications of what they had done to their constituents on preexisting conditions, on coverage for people up to the age of 26, on prevention.

This is the most unserious effort I have seen in this legislative body. This is absolutely unserious. And whatever your political persuasion is, you should ask every Member of the Senate to stand up and be counted and say what they want to do about health care in the United States.

The answer can no longer be because it is an article of faith that because the Affordable Care Act has ``Obama'' in its name--it is ObamaCare--it must be bad, and it must be repealed root and branch. That is no longer acceptable.

This President is only President for another 10 days, and we have an obligation to our constituents to say what we are going to do about this law. We all know that we should get a regular check-up from our doctor, eat fruits and vegetables, and exercise as much as possible, as difficult as it is for all of us at times. Why do we do this? Any doctor will tell you that it is better to stay healthy and prevent disease than to get sick. It is not just common sense. It is not only less painful for people, but it is less costly to prevent illness than to treat it.

The same is true for public health. If we can prevent drunk driving or the spread of diseases such as Zika, we could save lives and save the public money. That is why Senator Cassidy and I introduced the Public Health Emergency Response and Accountability Act last Congress. Our bill, on a bipartisan basis, recognized, basically, that we should be able to respond quickly to public health threats before they spread and harm more Americans and cost more money.

That is what the ACA does through its Prevention and Public Health Fund. The fund serves a very important dual purpose, investing Federal dollars in effective programs that prevent disease and also it saves money.

It is a simple concept. We should stop diseases from developing or spreading before they start. This sounds like common sense to almost everybody, but here is the problem. In the partisan battle around the ACA, even a really good idea within the Affordable Care Act must be bad because it is part of ObamaCare. This is insane.

This is the Prevention and Public Health Fund that provides money to the Centers for Disease Control. The CDC did an incredible job with the U.S. Public Health Service, with the U.S. military in addressing the Ebola crisis. The CDC did an incredible job, again, with the National Institutes of Health and others in addressing the potential Zika crisis, which looks to have abated. The CDC does incredibly important work in tobacco prevention and cessation, and this Prevention and Public Health Fund has gotten 1.8 million individual smokers to call and try to quit smoking. That is hundreds of thousands of lives saved, not just in blue or purple States but all across the country. This Prevention and Public Health Fund helps our elderly to avoid falls. It helps our elderly to avoid falls. I know there are people of goodwill on both sides of the aisle. I know that we are all responsive to our senior citizens in our individual communities, and I know that this is a smart and humane use of public health money. If we can prevent an elderly citizen from falling in their own home or falling on the way to a bus stop or to church or to a family member's home, that is money well spent, not just morally but fiscally.

This is my great regret when it comes to the Affordable Care Act and the debate that is happening. The only time I hear a serious-minded, good-faith debate between a Republican and a Democrat in the Senate when it comes to the Affordable Care Act is in private, because if you look at this side of the Chamber, there is only one Member of the Republican caucus who is here. We are not having the world's greatest deliberative body deliberate over the Affordable Care Act. We have an empty Chamber, full of Republicans who are absolutely bound and determined to walk off this cliff and take 22 million Americans with them.

Public health prevention works. Public health prevention is fiscally prudent, and it is the humane thing to do. That is just one of the many attributes

of the Affordable Care Act that ought to be preserved.

If there is to be a good faith conversation about how to improve upon the Affordable Care Act, we are all ears. I can guarantee you that there are 48 of us who want to have that conversation, but do not put the whole country into this box canyon. Excuse me for mixing my metaphors. Do not take the whole country off this cliff because it is going to be very, very difficult for us to make good policy after that.

With that, I yield the floor to the senior Senator from Massachusetts.

Mr. President, I want to thank the junior Senator from Connecticut for his leadership on ACA. Since we arrived in the Senate together, he has been stalwart, not just on the many benefits of ACA but specifically on mental health and the benefits and the destigmatization of mental health care in the context of ACA.

It wasn't so long ago that people wouldn't step up and say: I need help. I need mental health care. But now I think it is broadly accepted on both sides of the aisle, partly because of Chris Murphy's leadership, that mental health is health and that just as if you tweak your shoulder or need something with your lungs or have a crick in your neck, if you have some mental health issues, you need to get them taken care of.

The plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no replacement reminds me of a car I used to have. It was an OK car. I remember I bought it in 2006. It was a 2005, but it was new--one of those in the back of the lot. I got it for $2,500 less than MSRP. It was a station wagon. It was ugly. It was purple, and I just sort of rode it into the ground. I kept driving it. I didn't take great care of it. I have gotten better about taking care of my cars. At the time I just rode it and rode it. The AC busted, and I didn't fix it. There was a fender bender, and I didn't fix that. The car was OK. It needed some TLC, but it got me around. What if I had taken this car to Jiffy Lube in Honolulu just to get a little tuneup and left it, and then I came back an hour later and it had been dismantled? That is what the Republicans are doing with the Affordable Care Act. Instead of fixing what is wrong and keeping what is working, they are going to destroy the American health care system.

I try very hard not to be too apocryphal with my language. I try very hard not to be too nasty and too partisan on this floor, but this is factual. They are going to destroy the American health care system. That is what repeal and replace is all about. They are going to remove a law from the books and come up with something terrific in a few months or a few years, but they are also going to keep the stuff you like.

Here is the first thing that everybody across the country needs to know about this process. It is not on the level. There is no way around it. This is just not on the level. Anybody who has spent any time thinking about health care policy knows that covering people with preexisting conditions like cancer, mental illness, and diabetes is a popular thing to do. It is the right thing to do. People also know that the only way to do that is to create a risk pool that includes healthy people. If you are going to insure folks, you can't just be paying out for the expensive cases; you also have to be bringing in revenue and not paying out, so you need young people in the risk pool. You need professionals in the risk pool. You need nonsick people in the risk pool. That is how this all works. Everybody understands that.

Everybody who is working on this in good faith understands that you need to create a risk pool in order to cover more people. So they know that if they eliminate the individual mandate, they eliminate the benefit, but they are stuck with a promise they made to repeal this law totally, root and branch--not to improve upon the law.

Just remember that it was an article of faith that we couldn't make even the most modest improvements to this law at any point in the last 6 or 7 years; that if you did so, you ran afoul of Republican orthodoxy. It is not that they wanted to fix the law. It is that they had told everybody it was so bad--partly because it was ObamaCare--that there was nothing good in it; there was nothing worth preserving about the Affordable Care Act.

Now they are into repeal and replace. They are stuck with the promise they made to repeal this law totally, and they know people are about to be very, very angry because President Obama is the President only for another 10 days, and people are not going to accept the premise that we are going to rip health care out from under you, but don't you hate health care because it is called ObamaCare? That is an argument that may have worked 3, 4, or 5 years ago, but with a new President-elect and a new Congress, we have an obligation to have a better strategy than that.

Republicans do not have a replacement plan. If they had one, they would be adopting it shortly. It has been 7 years. It has been 7 years, and we haven't seen any legislative language--none. They have no plan at all for American health care other than to cause immediate harm and to try to blame it on the law that they are repealing.

There are only a few ways this could end up. I will give you a couple of them. First there could be the equivalent of a health care cliff, which is similar to what we have done with our fiscal situation where they have to periodically shovel money at the problem

and bail out the insurance companies. What will happen is they are basically eviscerating the revenue that provides the subsidies for individuals, but they are going to realize: Hey, these subsidies are quite popular, but we just eliminated the revenue. We don't want to increase taxes so let's borrow money and keep shoveling money at the insurance companies or they may make minor reforms in the ACA and call it a replacement. That would be great. I do not see that they are on this path right now or they are really going to repeal the law and take health care coverage away from millions of Americans. This is completely irresponsible.

So what happens when they repeal ACA? Twenty-two million people will have their health care coverage ripped away from them, more than 22 million men, women, and children. For those of you who still have coverage, I want you to know that this impacts you too. If you have a preexisting condition as common as diabetes or high blood pressure or mental health issues or cancer or Crohn's disease or Lupus or in a lot of instances pregnancy is a preexisting condition, you are not going to be able to keep your coverage.

If you are a woman, you are likely going to lose access to preventive health care services like birth control. If you live in a rural area-- everybody in rural America should understand this.

There is this thought that there are rural States and nonrural States. Every State is both a rural State and a nonrural State. I know the Presiding Officer has an urban area and plenty of rural areas. I have one of the densest cities in the United States, and then I have far-flung, very small towns that are old plantations. Everybody in the Senate represents rural America in some form or fashion.

If you live in a rural area, chances are that your local hospital will lose millions of dollars in funding, which will force many rural hospitals to turn away patients and close their doors. This is not an exaggeration. I encourage every Republican Member of the Senate, Member of the House, citizen out there to ask their health care leaders in rural hospitals what is about to happen. They are in a panic.

Let's be totally clear about what this means. You lose rural hospital money and you lose rural hospitals. For a lot of small towns, from Hawaii to the Dakotas, to the Carolinas, and everywhere in between, the rural hospital is the economic center of the community. It is often by far the largest employer. I want you to understand, if a rural community loses its rural hospital, a lot of the working-age folks leave. They move to a more urban area.

What happens is, the elderly citizens also have to leave because if you need access to emergency services but you are nowhere near any of that care, you are going to have to go too. So there is not a single thing we can do in the Congress that would harm rural communities quicker than what is being done this week by the Republicans.

I want to be really clear about how much harm is about to be done to rural communities, not just rural health care providers, not just nurses and doctors and technicians and admins and janitors and everybody who works at those rural hospitals.

That is important because in a lot of instances, that is the economic driver of a small town. It is also about, people start to make choices with their own life and with their own planning, especially as they get older, and they think to themselves: How do I stay close to health care? If that rural hospital goes away, that rural town goes away.

We have seen it in Hawaii. That is why we fight for Molokai Community Hospital. That is why we fight for Lanai Community Hospital. That is why we fight for Waianae Coast Comprehensive Treatment Center. That is why everybody fights so hard for their community rural hospitals-- because it is the center of a community, not just economically, but without it, you basically have no community.

All of this will cause the entire insurance market to unravel, raising costs for everyone. This means families are going to pay more for prescription drugs, pay more on their premiums, and pay more for out-of-pocket costs.

So if the Republicans are still unfazed by the health impacts of the repeal I just outlined, and have been outlining for the last 4 or 5 hours, over the last 3 or 4 days, there is another reason to be extremely cautious about what is about to happen. As we know, the vehicle for this is a budget resolution, right? They are trying to characterize this as, no, it is not a budget resolution.

The only reason they are doing it as a budget vehicle is so they can do reconciliation. What does that mean? That means they only need 51 votes, where otherwise they would need 60 votes, but this is a budget. If it were not a budget, they would not be subject to the 51-vote threshold. This is the Federal budget. This Federal budget increases the deficit by trillions of dollars.

This Federal budget increases the deficit by trillions of dollars-- not trillions of dollars at a flat line with the previous Federal budget, this is trillions of dollars more than last year's Federal budget.

So if you are a fiscal hawk, gosh, you must be swallowing hard over the next couple of days. This must be a bitter pill to swallow because on the one hand, boy, do you hate ObamaCare. On the other hand, boy, do you hate running up the national deficit--not the debt, deficit--by trillions of dollars. This is insane. This deficit--what we are doing to the debt and deficit in the next 2 or 3 days makes everything that we have done in the last 3 or 4 years pale in comparison.

If you are a fiscal hawk, I cannot see how you get to yes on this. You cannot vote to increase the national debt by trillions of dollars and then still call yourself a fiscal hawk. So we have a choice in front of us. Do we build on the progress of the Affordable Care Act or do we strip millions of Americans of their health care coverage, leave those with preexisting conditions out in the cold, and raise the national debt?

We know ACA has its flaws. No one ever said it was perfect. Let us be clear. Every major piece of legislation, every signature piece of legislation that this body has ever passed has been flawed in some way. What do we do when we are a functioning world's greatest deliberative body? We iterate it. We work on a bipartisan basis to fix it. That is what we should do.

The benefits of ACA are undeniable. That is what we should be debating, improvements to the ACA, not an implosion. So let's keep our eye on the ball and remember what our common goal is: giving every American the opportunity to get quality, affordable health care they deserve.

I yield the floor.

That is the first time the Senate has ever ended with that one.

Madam President, the Keystone legislation is likely to move to the President's desk this week after the House takes it up, and he will veto it. The votes are not there to override a veto, either in the Senate or the House. Legislation has a natural lifecycle, and this piece of legislation is reaching the end of its lifecycle. This debate is almost over.

So where are we when it comes to American energy policy? The debate that occurred on Keystone was no doubt an important one, but it was exactly upside down. Congress and the media treated the Keystone bill as if it would settle American energy policy once and for all, when in fact it was and is a tiny sliver of debate. American energy policy is not defined by one project or one piece of infrastructure, however contentious it may be.

In order to have a real energy conversation, we have to agree on the facts, and this body cannot be the only place where there is a lack of consensus on the basic facts. That is why Senator Whitehouse's amendment, my amendment, Senator Hoeven's amendment, and those of many others were so important.

Last month's climate votes were illuminating and encouraging. First, Senator Whitehouse's language, which simply stated that climate change was not a hoax, received a nearly unanimous vote. Believe it or not, that is progress. My amendment, which stated that climate change is real, caused by humans, and has real and significant impacts, received a bare majority of the votes, with five Republicans supporting it. Senator Hoeven's amendment had similar language, as well as some pro- Keystone language, and it attracted a dozen or so Republican votes.

What is the significance of all of this? It is very simple. Without acknowledging the problem, we cannot even begin to work on it. The wall of denial has begun to crack. So now we have a majority--and depending on how it is phrased, even a potential supermajority--in the Senate saying that climate change is real.

Now, most every serious person in public life either admits the basic facts of climate change or is on their way to getting there, and that is a good thing. Now the question is: What should we do? Given our regional differences, ideological differences, and the partisan divide, what comes next?

Later this year or next, we will see efforts to repeal a number of important environmental rules, especially the administration's clean power plan, which will regulate carbon pollution from existing and new powerplants, but that too is highly unlikely to result in anything other than a Presidential veto.

So are there any areas for potential common ground?

I think we saw real glimmers of hope and possibility during the Keystone debate. Several of my Republican colleagues made the argument during the debate on Keystone that while climate change is a real problem, we must be aware of how energy costs influence economic activity.

I could not agree more. We don't hear this often from folks on my side of the debate, but price matters. No climate policy is a real solution unless it strengthens both the national and global economies. As we pursue clean energy, we must understand its impacts on consumers--especially individuals and families in lower income communities--as well as businesses. We miss an opportunity to find common ground if we move too quickly past the questions of cost and the social and economic context in which this transition is going to occur.

We can contend with these challenges in Congress through a legislative solution. We can create incentives, create market-based mechanisms, look at regional differences, and fund R&D to help develop new and less-expensive solutions. EPA certainly has the authority and the obligation under the law to regulate carbon and other greenhouse gases. I support the President's Clean Power Plan because carbon pollution is real and it ought to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. If we want to be more comprehensive and if we want to be more nuanced and more flexible and more responsive to communities, we need a bill. Structured properly, a bill has the advantage of creating economically efficient solutions that can reduce carbon pollution from a much wider range of sources. That is why a well-designed fee on carbon is critical for our economy and our environment.

I understand the politics are nearly impossible right now, but if we think

about our ability as legislators to remunerate communities struggling during a transition, to ameliorate certain economic challenges, we may agree that legislating provides us the tools to achieve greater pollution reductions at a much lower social and economic cost. So once the Clean Power Plan is established, once it is litigated, and once it is full-on reality, I believe there may be room for compromise.

One more point on the issue of price. We have to do our calculations on an all-in basis. That includes tax expenditures, environmental damage, health impacts, and other so-called externalities. There is plenty of good research which indicates that clean energy technology is already competitive with fossil fuel technology when all costs are added in. Additionally, the cost of solar, wind, and energy efficiency is dropping precipitously and in many places is competing successfully in the free market, even before we consider the costs of pollution.

We will have a couple of battles that are unavoidable--on the Clean Power Plan and likely another run at Keystone--but there are a couple of areas that in my view don't have to be a battle. They are energy efficiency and energy research.

We ought to start with the Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency legislation. I have little doubt that Democrats would support this as a stand-alone bill. Energy efficiency is just common sense, and the energy experts remind us of an idea our mothers and fathers taught us growing up: waste not, want not. In other words, the straightest line toward saving money for people, businesses, and institutions is to help them adopt the latest energy efficiency practices and technologies.

Even this has unfortunately become a partisan issue in the last several Congresses with people worried that light bulb efficiency standards were part of some Orwellian plot. But that is not what these Department of Energy standards do, and it is not what Shaheen-Portman does.

At its core, energy efficiency is simply this: Use less but get the same result. Using less means paying less. Getting the same result means not having to sacrifice our way of life. The idea is not to ask people to do without, the idea is to just get more for our money. It is an old-school, conservative idea. Of course the Shaheen-Portman bill doesn't cost the taxpayers a dime, and projections are that it will create nearly 200,000 jobs.

I also think there is a lot of room for good bipartisan work in advanced technology research in the energy space--the kind the Department of Energy did for the State of Hawaii in developing a grid system that can accommodate unprecedented levels of intermittent renewable energy, the kind that made major advances in hydraulic fracturing, the kind that has helped the price of solar panels drop 80 percent since 2008, the kind that is making breakthroughs in battery storage, which has fallen in price by 40 percent since 2010, and the kind that is working on carbon capture and sequestration.

America must lead on energy, and that requires us to do the kind of basic research that private companies can eventually use. A relatively small increase in research funding--both on the fossil and renewable side--has been shown to make an enormous impact on our economy. Investments in renewable and fossil fuel electricity generation, distribution, and transmission systems, grid stability and security, and fuel systems will enable America to lead in energy for decades to come.

These are the kinds of investments we would see in a comprehensive energy bill. I was so encouraged last week that the chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the Senator from Alaska, has indicated her desire to pursue comprehensive legislation this Congress. The Senator from Alaska is a very skilled bipartisan legislator, and I am looking forward to working with her on these issues. I am especially encouraged by her openness to climate provisions as part of that bill, something she mentioned as recently as last week. Just as she has listened to the concerns I and others have raised about climate change during the Keystone debate, so should we listen to her call for reliable, affordable, clean, and diverse energy supplies.

Several energy proposals contained within the President's fiscal year budget could become a part of a bipartisan bill, including ideas to more fully promote carbon capture and sequestration technologies and protect coal workers and their communities as we transition. The concerns of communities that have coal-based economies are real and legitimate and I believe any true climate solution must prioritize solutions for every American. The President recognized that and proposed $55 million next year to help affected communities diversify their economies, offer job training, and ensure a good transition.

This will require compromise. It will require those of us on the left to concede that fossil fuels aren't going to disappear instantaneously, and it will require those on the right to recognize that investing in clean energy technologies doesn't necessarily mean picking winners and losers. We have wind energy in nearly all States--in fact, more in Republican than in Democratic States--and we have tea party members everywhere who love the freedom and liberty that distributed generation--rooftop solar--offers. We also have clean energy progressives, including myself, who understand that we have to deal with the energy system we have, not the one we wish we had.

The areas I have mentioned are not the only opportunities for bipartisan compromise, but we do need to start a dialogue, either on the floor, in committees or in informal discussions, about what we can actually do. As we consider a policy solution, let's ask the following questions: Can it be enacted into law? Will it advance American energy security? Will it strengthen the economy and provide economic growth? Will it reduce pollution?

There are a few areas where we are going to fight--there is no avoiding it--and that is OK. But there is, for the first time since I arrived, a glimmer of hope that we may be able to find common ground on some of these issues and begin a serious discussion about tackling American energy policy and climate change.

I yield the floor.

Madam 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 rise today to urge my colleagues to pass a clean Homeland Security funding bill for fiscal year 2015. This is an issue of national security, and we cannot allow politics to divert attention from our responsibility as Senators.

The majority in the House sent the Senate a bill with five poison pills that they know will prevent the passage of this legislation. Yesterday and again today, my Senate colleagues and I sent a clear message that these politically divisive immigration provisions have no place in this bill.

I urge my colleagues to dispense with any further delays and allow for an up-or-down vote on the bill as originally drafted.

The Department of Homeland Security funding bill--created in the wake of 9/11, as Senator Durbin reminded us earlier--is not the place to litigate immigration policy; rather, those issues are appropriately addressed in a comprehensive immigration bill, and I hope

the House will draft and vote on that type of legislation soon.

The recent executions of the Japanese and Jordanian hostages by the terrorist group ISIL and the attacks in Paris, Ottawa, and Australia serve as reminders of the very real threat we face.

Each day we delay in providing adequate, reliable resources to the Department of Homeland Security, we undermine the Department's efforts to defend the home front. That is why I am calling on my colleagues to take up and pass a clean bill.

My colleagues on the Appropriations Committee Senator Shaheen and Vice Chairwoman Mikulski have introduced a clean DHS funding bill that reflects the bipartisan agreement reached between the House and Senate appropriators. This bill funds a wide range of programs that keep Americans safe and secure.

For example, the clean version of this bill funds a host of counterterrorism, intelligence, and security functions; investments in cyber security defense technologies and personnel, investments to detect and protect against biological threats, research and development of nuclear detection technologies, TSA and Coast Guard operations to keep our skies and our waters safe. The clean version also funds $6 billion in disaster funds to help States, localities, businesses, and individuals rebuild after a natural disaster, staffing nearly 24,000 Customs and Border Protection officers who ensure legitimate travel of individuals who seek to enter the country, and staffing 20,000 Border Patrol agents who protect the 6,000 miles of our land border and 2,000 miles of coastal waters.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Johnson has been clear that while the Department operates under the current CR, it cannot fund key homeland security initiatives.

A short-term CR would prevent the Department from awarding new disaster preparedness grants that support our local emergency responders. It would delay the hiring of more investigators for cases related to human trafficking and smuggling. It would also prevent the Secret Service from training for the next Presidential election, and the list goes on.

We cannot expect DHS to do long-term strategic planning with short- term funding measures. The Department needs reliable funding to operate efficiently and effectively.

The House majority is unfortunately playing politics with our homeland security because the President has taken an action that every President since the 1950s has taken: He has provided commonsense direction to our immigration enforcement efforts.

The President's Executive actions on immigration are fundamentally aimed at keeping families together, making our communities safer, and using our resources efficiently. It is hard to understand how someone could oppose that.

The President's actions will ensure that our immigration enforcement efforts are used to secure the border, prevent threats to national security, and protect public safety. These should be our top priorities, and I support those efforts, but if Members of the House take issue with them, they should draft and adopt immigration reform, just as the Senate did on a bipartisan basis 18 months ago.

Our path forward is simple: Pass a clean funding bill. If my colleagues want to fix our broken immigration system, then let's take up a bill, but let's not use this critical funding bill to play partisan politics.

The dedicated men and women of the Department of Homeland Security deserve better. The American people deserve better. Let's put aside politics and let's pass a clean Department of Homeland Security funding bill.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, yesterday I offered an amendment to the Keystone XL bill which is really straightforward and will not affect the underlying legislation. I do think it has the potential to get strong bipartisan support. That is because my amendment states a simple set of facts--that climate change is real and humans are contributing to it.

This is an opportunity for people on either side of the Keystone debate to agree on something; that is, the facts. It will inform, I think, what happens next in energy policy. As intense as this debate over this pipeline is, the real question in front of us, after we dispose of this legislation and it goes to the President's desk for a certain veto, is that then we have to contend with our national energy policy.

We need to agree on the set of facts that everyone outside of this Congress agrees on. These claims require evidence, and my amendment provides those pieces of evidence. It cites the final supplemental environmental impact statement prepared for the Keystone Pipeline by the State Department, which says that ``human activities . . . have added to the greenhouse gas accumulation and exacerbated the greenhouse . . . effect, resulting in greater amounts of heat being trapped in the atmosphere.''

Now, this is not controversial. It also states: ``These climate change shifts can . . . affect other processes and spark changes that cascade through natural systems to affect ecosystems, societies, and human health.'' Only in the halls of Congress is this a controversial piece of legislation.

This impact statement, in turn, cites the work of thousands of scientists who have contributed to reports by the IPCC, the National Research Council, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. These independent factfinding bodies have conducted decades of research on questions related to climate change. They have been subject to intense scrutiny both internally and externally. Their work has held up to repeated concerns about impartiality and accuracy.

This scrutiny helps. It has forced these organizations to improve their methodology and be increasingly deliberate as they develop their findings and present the facts and only the facts. Human-caused climate change is accepted by Fortune 500 companies, school teachers, religious groups, and the U.S. Department of Defense. It is accepted by nurses and doctors, professional sports leagues, the majority of other countries, more than 97 percent of scientists, and many of my colleagues in the House and Senate.

For most people, climate change existing is not a controversial issue. Certainly, the Keystone Pipeline is a controversial issue. Once we together set the premise of climate change facts, there is plenty to argue about. What approach ought we take with respect to

solving this problem? Is a carbon tax the right approach? Is the President's clean powerplant the right approach? Ought we to wait for or accelerate our actions with respect to international coalitions and agreements?

Those are legitimate debates to have. But we have to agree on the facts. That is why a vote on my amendment is so important. The Senate has before it a bill to approve a pipeline and an environmental impact statement touted by Keystone supporters as a comprehensive, accurate document that impartially assesses the environmental impacts of the pipeline. Within that impact statement is a comprehensive review and an acknowledgment of the reality of the facts of climate change.

Many of my colleagues who support Keystone might be the same ones who question the reality of climate change, but I want to try to create a political space where one can be for Keystone XL and still want action on the climate. Now, I think Keystone XL is the wrong direction to move in. I think it is absolutely doubling down on fossil fuel energy and the tar sands oil. So I will be voting against Keystone.

But I understand there are people of good faith and plenty of knowledge who are going to be supporting the pipeline. What we need to do after this legislation is disposed of--and it will be relatively quickly--is agree on a set of facts and move forward with intelligent, bipartisan climate policy.

Last week, we learned that 2014 was the hottest year on record according to two separate studies by our Nation's brightest scientists at NASA and NOAA. That means that the 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since the year 2000. A warmer planet means big changes in weather patterns, rising sea levels, and increases in extreme weather events.

Sea level has been rising more than twice as fast since 1990 as it did over the previous century, nearly doubling the likelihood of storm surges such as the one we experienced during Hurricane Sandy. Over the years, the issue of climate change has, unfortunately, become a partisan issue. It did not used to be that way. It does not need to be that way going forward.

We may not agree on the solutions, on the path forward or even on some of the details, but I do believe it is time for us to begin to agree on a basic set of facts. The purpose of my amendment is to take a step back, to take a deep breath on a very contentious issue, and to give the Senate an opportunity to come together and state with no value judgment that we accept the work of thousands of the world's brightest and most dedicated scientists, including those working at U.S. agencies and for U.S. companies; that we accept the reality our farmers, our fisherman, and our families see with the every passing season.

I urge all of my colleagues to vote for this amendment. It is an opportunity to restate a set of facts with which a majority of Americans already agree. It makes no presumptions about where we go from here.

I am hopeful that we will have a big bipartisan vote this afternoon on this amendment. I think there is an opportunity for common ground.

Obviously, Keystone XL is dividing not just this Congress but the Democratic conference, so I understand that. But agreeing on the set of facts related to climate change is a good predicate for all of us moving forward.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Thank you, Mr. President.

This has been a surprisingly productive day on the issue of climate debate. I know there has been a lot of consternation and discussion, but that is a good thing.

We have one final amendment to consider today, and it simply takes a portion of the language from the EIS for the Keystone XL and adopts it. That language says, in summary, that climate change is real and that climate change is caused by humans.

That language simply states that climate change is real, that climate change is caused by humans and principally by carbon pollution.

So the simple vote in front of us is: Do you agree with the factual evidence? Will you concede to the facts? We have an opportunity to set a new chapter in this climate debate. Today has been good progress.

So I urge my colleagues for a big bipartisan vote on this amendment.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Senator from Washington.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate set aside the pending amendment in order to call up amendment No. 58.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

This amendment affirms something very simple; that is, climate change is real and human activities significantly contribute to climate change. It also states that a warmer planet causes large-scale changes, including higher sea levels, changes in precipitation, and altered weather patterns, such as increases in more extreme weather events.

This amendment cites for its evidence the findings of national and international scientific institutions, including the IPCC, the National Research Council, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. All of these organizations are cited and quoted in the State Department's final supplemental environmental impact statement on Keystone XL Pipeline. This is the same environmental review document that plays a prominent role in the text of the underlying bill, S. 1, and the substitute amendment.

The purpose of this amendment is simply to acknowledge and restate a set of observable facts. It is not intended to place a value judgment on those facts or to suggest a specific course of action in response to those facts. It is just a set of facts derived from decades of careful study of our land, air, and water.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I rise today in opposition to S. 1, which will circumvent the administration's official review process for projects crossing international borders and approve construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, a pipeline dedicated to increasing production of some of the dirtiest, most polluting, and most dangerous crude oil in the world.

Supporters of this pipeline in Congress have been relentless. Over the last 2 Congresses they have held 44 votes in the House and Senate intended to approve Keystone. On Tuesday, the very first bill the new Republican majority introduced, traditionally reserved for a party's highest legislative priority, was Keystone. Think about this. Here we stand in what people still call the world's greatest deliberative body, and the first bill we are taking up is not infrastructure generally, not national energy policy, not even national laws as they relate to our pipeline infrastructure. No, we are legislating about a specific pipeline which will move oil from Canada through the United States to be primarily exported from our southern border.

I understand there are people of good will and good faith, including the Presiding Officer, who are on both sides of this issue. But it is hard to imagine why this should be the first piece of legislation we take up in this Congress. We have yet to seriously consider or to clarify our policy with respect to the Islamic State. Income inequality is gutting the middle class. Our national infrastructure needs a jolt of investment. Our immigration policy is a failure and a mess. I do not understand why this would be S. 1.

Supporters of this bill have stood up three main arguments in favor of Keystone and expanding drilling of tar sands oil reserves in Canada. One, they say it will increase energy security; two, they think it will lower oil and gas prices; third, they say it is a jobs bill.

Let's examine these claims, because however tenuous they were, they have been undermined further by facts over the last couple of years.

First, the United States has never during the modern age of global energy trade been more energy secure. We import far less oil from unstable regimes and unfriendly countries than we have in decades. We are continuing to build massive amounts of ever cheaper homegrown clean energy such as wind

and solar, even as we use our energy more efficiently.

The United States will add nearly 10 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity in the next year. Not including hydro, the United States has over 85,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity and continues to build on that number year over year. The prices for solar have dropped 80 percent since 2008 and prices for wind power, which are already competitive with fossil fuels, have dropped 30 percent since 2008.

These trends are creating jobs right here at home. For example, the wind industry has over 500 manufacturing facilities across 44 States that are responsible for making wind turbines with over 66 percent domestic content.

Second, the recent collapse of crude oil and gasoline prices demonstrates two things. In my home State of Hawaii, energy prices remain far too high. But on the mainland, oil and gas prices are currently very low. The idea that Keystone would make a significant difference was never based in reality, but now it is just obvious. We have low prices and the project has not even started.

Gasoline is now $2.21 a gallon. Crude oil prices have slipped below $50 a barrel. The last time gasoline prices were this low was in the aftermath of the financial crisis. As a practical matter, it is not clear to me, and it is certainly not clear to most energy experts, how moving oil from Canada through the United States and exporting refined crude from the Gulf of Mexico would significantly reduce energy prices for us in the United States.

Finally, this is called a jobs bill by some. This is many things. It is anti-clean air; it is anti-clean water; it is anti-public health. It is a regulatory earmark. But it is not a jobs bill. It is not deserving of being the No. 1 priority of the 114th Congress.

We have heard estimates ranging as high as 42,000 indirect or induced jobs during the construction phase. We know, and everyone seems to agree, that Keystone will employ approximately 35 full-time employees when construction is finished. That is not 3,500 employees. That is not 35,000 employees. That is the 35 full-time employees when construction is completed.

If we want to do a real jobs bill worthy of the Senate, we should do a real jobs bill. An infrastructure bank, a highway bill, Shaheen- Portman--all would create orders of magnitude more jobs than this.

The American economy added 353,000 jobs in November alone, which made 2014 the strongest year for job growth since 1999. If we pass a highway bill, we get millions of jobs. If we pass an infrastructure bank, we will get hundreds of thousands of jobs. If we pass the bipartisan Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency bill, we will also get hundreds of thousands of jobs. Look, even one new job is a good thing. But if we want to do a jobs bill, let's do a jobs bill.

There is plenty of room for us to work together on infrastructure, on energy efficiency, and create hundreds of thousands and even millions of jobs. But this is an energy bill. It moves us in the wrong direction. There are colleagues, with whom I agree, who are arguing against this legislation primarily saying they want to allow the administration's process to play out and that we should not supersede the State Department review. I agree.

It is fair to say this is unprecedented, even a little strange, for the Congress to legislate the specifics of a particular infrastructure project. But I want to be clear. This is not a process argument for me. I oppose Keystone because it is a bad idea. Whether it is done through the regular order or in an expedited fashion, whether it is done through the administrative process or the legislative process, I oppose any action, whether through legislation, litigation, or administrative action, that will enable the extraction of Canadian tar sands oil.

My reasons are very simple--climate change and math. Climate change, because it is the greatest and most urgent challenge to the health of our families, to the economy, and to our way of life. I want to preserve the American way of life, not endanger it. Math, because we have crunched the numbers and we know we simply cannot afford to burn the oil from tar sands and put its pollution into the air.

It is simple. We have a budget. Just as every family in this country must stick to its budget and live within its means, we have to do the same as a planet when it comes to carbon pollution. A new study published last week in the scientific journal Nature makes this clear. The authors asked the question: If we want to stay within our carbon budget and limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, which is the limit 167 countries agree we must meet to avoid catastrophic effects of climate change, how much more coal, gas, and oil can we burn?

The study finds that in order to meet this goal, the majority of the world's known reserves of fossil fuel must stay in the ground between now and 2050. This includes one-third of the world's current oil reserves and 80 percent of current coal reserves. It also finds, and this is critical, that:

Any increase in unconventional oil production--

Which includes Canadian tar sands.

--is incommensurate with efforts to limit average global

warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

As we learn more about climate change amidst a clean energy revolution, we find that moving toward clean energy, taking control of our future, is good for business. Our economy will do better. It will grow faster and it will be more resilient if we embrace the technologies and solutions at our fingertips and end our reliance on fossil fuel. We have a chance to embrace the future here. Our future is not tar sands oil. Our future is wind and solar and geothermal and energy efficiency. Our future is not in adding carbon pollution. Our future is in innovating our way out of this problem. Throughout our history, America always leads when we are needed the most. That is what we have to do, not in the direction of more carbon pollution but toward a clean energy economy.

A report by New Climate Economy, a group chaired by former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and including Bank of America chairman Chad Holliday, among others, marshals quantitative evidence to show that action on climate change is a requirement for future global economic growth. In other words, those who warn about the EPA regulation or prices on carbon killing jobs have it exactly backward. The truth is that in order to avoid major disruptions to our economy, we have to reduce carbon pollution and work with other countries such as Canada to ensure that they do the same.

I am looking forward to the open amendment process on this bill that the majority leader has promised. It will be an opportunity for the American public to see where Members of the Senate stand on the facts of climate change. Anyone who looks at the facts and does the math ought to oppose this bill and oppose construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. For me and for many Americans, a vote against this bill is a vote to preserve and protect the air we breathe and the water we drink. It is a vote to ensure that we continue to reduce carbon pollution and fight climate change. It is a vote to leave our children a healthy world.

I urge my colleagues to oppose cloture on the motion to proceed.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.