Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Dr. Sydney Kaufman, a fellow from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the 113th Congress.

I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I come to the floor today to speak about the corrupting power of money in our national politics and the tragic impact of a whole series of decisions by the Supreme Court that has steadily strengthened that power.

Over the last 40 years a bipartisan coalition in this body and bipartisan coalitions in Congress have come together behind commonsense measures that actually succeeded in limiting the power of money in politics. Most recently, back in 2002, a bipartisan coalition in this Chamber led by Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold, Republican and Democrat, took a few steps to effectively limit the use of so-called ``soft money'' and to ban special interests from pouring money into national elections in the month or two before Election Day.

As actual elected representatives, their perspective as Members of Congress who enacted that legislation was informed by their real experience as public officials who have run and won elections and who have written, fought for, and passed actual legislation.

Since Members of this Chamber, Members of this Congress, have seen and experienced the corrosive effect of money every day, Congress, in my view, should be given great deference when it has been able to transcend partisan division and put in place commonsense protections.

Yet over the past few years a bare majority on the current Supreme Court has, in decision after decision, dismantled many of those critical protections and shows no signs of stopping.

In doing so, this Court's decisions display a significant and stunning naivete about how our political system actually works and how it is continuing to change and as a result have brought us closer to a world where, as a recent New Republic piece argues, ``millionaires and billionaires speak loudly and the rest of us do the listening.''

Most recently, in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down a limit that has stood since 1971, when Congress passed the Federal Elections Campaign Act, on total campaign donations anyone may make in the same election cycle.

Before this recent Supreme Court ruling, individuals couldn't give more than $117,000 between candidates and party committees. After the ruling, that limitation has been swept away, and there is nothing to stop a wealthy donor, an ultrawealthy donor, from contributing to every Federal race each election cycle.

Some here have cheered the decision as upholding the First Amendment and free speech, but in my view, when you are able to spread around hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to dozens and dozens of candidates in a coordinated way, you are not speaking, you are coming dangerously close to buying.

For ultradonors, the reality is not just about making their voices heard. Under existing Supreme Court precedent under these recent decisions, there is no limit on anybody's ability to spend whatever amounts he or she wishes to conduct actual speech, to buy newspaper ads, buy television spots, or even to make a politically motivated movie.

The reality is it is about trying to control more and more of the legislative agenda of this Congress and more and more of the direction of our government.

In McCutcheon, this recently decided case, the Supreme Court hasn't just enabled speech, it has made it dramatically easier for the wealthiest and the special interests they represent to hedge their bets by diversifying their political portfolio. It has more in common, sadly, with Wall Street investment strategies than with the free speech rights envisioned by our Founders at the Constitutional Convention.

Frankly, I think the Founders would not recognize our political system today and the increasingly harsh influence of big-money donors in our overall national political scene.

Together with the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court of 5 years ago, we see the truly dangerous implications of the decisions rendered. One of the boldest decisions I have ever seen--Citizens United, with another 5-4 decision--killed off nearly half of that bipartisan compromise bill of 2002 of McCain-Feingold by allowing corporations and other special interests to anonymously fund campaign ads in the months before an election.

In doing so, as Justice Stevens wrote in a dissent, the Supreme Court ``relied largely on individual dissenting opinions. . . . blaz[ing] through our precedents [and] overruling or disavowing a body of case law.''

Justice Stevens noted that to do so the Court decided a question the parties did not present directly to it, saying:

Essentially, five justices were unhappy with the limited

nature of the case brought

before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an

opportunity to change the law.

I understand this is a dissent, but a dissent that I think should draw our attention to the direction these two vital, difficult Court decisions are taking this Nation.

Soon after the Supreme Court extended these rules to State campaign finance laws as well. In combination these two decisions, McCutcheon and Citizens United, have brushed aside important bipartisan legislation that was designed to prevent corruption of the political branches and to provide Americans some level of confidence that their voices, not just those of the ultrawealthy and powerful, mattered to their elected representatives. We have all seen the impact of this decision, of Citizens United in particular, as commercials by groups nobody has ever heard of, funded by donors who can remain in the dark, have flooded the airwaves of our election years ever since.

Earlier I mentioned that these two decisions show a stunning naivete about how politics in our modern world really works. Let me be clear I don't say this because the Supreme Court overturned a law that Congress passed. It is the Court's job to be a check on Congress to defend our fundamental freedoms in the face of congressional overreach or improvident action. But in the McCutcheon decision, the Court overturned a core holding of its own previous decision in Buckley v. Valeo, the case it purports to apply. As Justice Breyer wrote in dissent in McCutcheon, the Court's holding:

understates the importance of protecting the political

integrity of our governmental institutions. It creates a

loophole that . . . taken together with Citizens United . . .

eviscerates our Nation's campaign finance laws, leaving a

remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of

democratic legitimacy that those very laws were intended to

resolve.

For instance, in the Court's decisions, it consistently refers to traditional political corruption as quid pro quo corruption, corruption of the sort where a specific contribution is made for a specific vote or action in arguing that campaign donations and political spending or speech have shown no signs of leading to corruption. The majority argues that campaign giving and the ``general gratitude'' that a candidate or elected official may feel is not the same thing as quid pro quo corruption in the sense of directly buying votes or action in the Congress.

But as Justice Breyer notes in his opinion in McCutcheon in the dissent, the majority's:

narrow view of corruption . . . excludes efforts to obtain

``influence over access to elected officials or political

parties.''

Every single Member of this body and every Member of the House of Representatives knows that to be true and knows this influence to be pernicious. Let me give an example. As many of my colleagues would attest, hanging over everything we do is the shadow of anonymous big- money ads getting dropped into the airwaves out of nowhere in the last weeks before an election, and it influences, in pervasive and corruptive ways, decisions made in this body week in and week out.

Of course, tough opposition ads are nothing new. Robust debates in campaign season go back to the very first campaigns of this Republic. As politicians, we all welcome the opportunity to those who engage to disagree with them. That is an important and healthy part of our democracy, and every citizen should have the right to voice their opposition to me or to any Member.

But what is a huge problem is the fact that nobody knows who is behind these ads, making it easier for any wealthy individual or corporation to pour an unlimited amount of money into a race behind completely false attacks. Because the donor is often in the dark, there is no way for the public to know who the claims are coming from or whether they are credible.

That is why in this Chamber folks in my caucus, Democrats, have repeatedly argued for our taking up and passing the DISCLOSE Act, which would require third-party ads to say who funded them so that citizens can reach their own conclusions.

This is an increasingly difficult problem for our country. In the 2010 election cycle, super PACs spent more than $62 million nationally. Through the 2012 cycle, outside groups spent an incredible $457 million on House and Senate races. So far in this cycle they have already raised and spent more than $200 million.

The result is that every campaign has to do more and more fundraising so they have the resources to rebut the claims made in these negative ads with concealed donors. That means more time on the phone or at fundraisers, traveling around the country, organizing and carrying out fundraising activities rather than engaging with our constituents and diving into details of policy. It is even worse in the House where the daily demands in their 2-year cycle are even more difficult.

Let me offer one brief statistic. In the average winning Senate race in 2012, it cost $10 million, which means the winning Senator had to raise $4,600 every single day over a 6-year term.

That is time not spent on solving the real issues facing our country. That is an unbelievable amount of time dedicated to fundraising, and it just doesn't end, whether the term is 2 or 6 years.

I know I have it relatively easy, little to complain about. Compared to my colleagues I come from a small State. The very modest amount we have to raise in a competitive race in Delaware pales in comparison to much larger States with much more expensive media markets, but it is a problem for this entire body and this entire country.

Let me offer one last example of concretely why this matters. As we debate in the Senate, the other party complains about the absence of opportunities to offer amendments and the lack of a robust and open amendment process. One of the reasons we often do not take to the floor and vote on competitive, compelling amendments is the concern that they will then become the subject of last-minute, aggressive, targeted campaign ads funded by undisclosed donors. Rather than being a Chamber of honest, open, and free debate, the shadow of secret money turns policymaking into a beacon of risk aversion. Policymaking gets paralyzed and this serves no one.

Although it is not an example of corruption in the quid pro quo sense that the Supreme Court so narrowly focuses on, money does corrode the public trust and steadily corrupts this system in a thousand different ways. The irony of this all is that we badly need an honest discussion about the impact of big spending and fundraising on our political system. At this point I believe we badly need fundamental changes to redirect the decisions and the attention of the Supreme Court.

Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 decision by the Court that equated political contributions and money with speech, in my view needs to be revisited. Senator Udall of New Mexico has introduced a constitutional amendment that, in my view, restores the balance of that original law and decision, and it is one that I strongly support. By bending backward to declare anything that corporations or the ultrawealthy wish to do with their money the equivalent of speech, today's Court, in my view, rather than strengthening speech, has weakened it for the millions of Americans who cannot afford to play in this new system.

At a time of growing economic inequality, that concerns me more and more because this new political inequality threatens the very foundations of our democracy.

Noting the presence of two other colleagues, I would ask if I might have the forbearance of two brief speeches recognizing Delawareans.

I appreciate the forbearance of my colleagues and would like to take a few minutes to recognize two great Delawareans.

Tribute to Harry Gravell

I wish to recognize Harry Gravell.

Right now in Wilmington, DE, friends will be coming to celebrate Harry, who is retiring from his long leadership role of the Delaware Building Trades Council after a lifetime dedicated to workers and our Nation.

I first got to know him in my service on the county council in New Castle County, where he gave me very helpful, very insightful advice, and was a constant source of encouragement and support.

Don't get me wrong. He didn't always agree with me. He didn't always support me. With Harry you got a straight shot. You got exactly what he thought and nothing less. You always knew

where he stood even if he disagreed with you. He is transparent, he is honest, and you know why he believes what he believes.

He is not only a great friend but a great father. We were both honored in 2012 by the Delaware chapter of the American Diabetes Association as fathers of the year. Harry is the proud father of two: Jayme and Dee, and grandfather of three: Makayla, Avery, and Lily.

Harry's life story is one of determination and service. He never gives up, especially when he puts his mind to something. From an early age he knew the value of hard work. For high school he went to the Salesianum School, a great school in our community, and worked his way through school to make sure he could afford a great education.

A Vietnam veteran, he served our country in wartime. Since he came home, he has never stopped fighting for working families and veterans, and I was particularly proud to work with him in his role in the Sprinkler Fitters Union, then on the Building Trades Council on Helmets to Hardhats, on offering training and real job opportunities to returning veterans.

If you know Harry, you have seen his drive up close. You have seen him fight through thick and thin for his workers, his family, and our community.

But perhaps the greatest example of his sheer will was his most recent fight. He suffered a stroke a few months ago. Doctors read him a long list of things he was never going to do. Harry scoffed. Digging in, as he has his entire life, he finished his physical and occupation therapy faster than doctors thought he could. He has just finished building a house in Lewes. Everyone who knows him I believe will agree with me that he deserves the years he will now get to spend on the beautiful beaches of Delaware.

Remembering James Wilcox Brown

Let me last briefly offer a tribute to a lifelong friend and mentor, James Wilcox Brown of Newark, DE. He set sail on April 24 at the age of 65. The gentle determination and unconditional kindness with which he lived his life inspired all around him, including his family, his friends, and this junior Senator from Delaware.

Jim graduated from Salesianum School, the University of Delaware, and the Washington and Lee University School of Law. He worked as legal counsel for W.L. Gore & Associates for 36 years. He served as a member of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps for 26 years, retiring as colonel.

His tireless community service was broad and deeply felt. I was proud to be able to appoint him to the Delaware Service Academy Selection Board.

He is survived by his wife Peggy and their four wonderful children: Genevieve, Hilary, William, Mary Ellen, and six grandchildren. I simply wanted to add my voice to so many who will deeply miss this patriot, this great lawyer, this centered, thoughtful, kind man, and this personal friend who helped teach me the importance of humility and of a commitment to excellence.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to start this afternoon by thanking Chairman Murray for her tireless work on the Budget Committee--on which I serve--to develop and pass a bipartisan budget, a budget that sets us on a path to return to regular order.

Senator Murray has also been a tireless advocate for transportation and infrastructure programs, and as chair of the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee--on which I also serve--she fought tirelessly to include adequate funding for Amtrak back in the fiscal year 2014 omnibus and moving forward.

The topic I would like to take up today is the role of Amtrak in our country and our communities and its appropriate role as a central piece of

Federal transportation policy going forward.

Senator Murray has been a terrific advocate for investing across a wide range of transportation modalities. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, I look forward to working with her and our leading full committee chair Senator Mikulski to make sure we are successful in fighting ardently and steadfastly for Amtrak this year and into the future.

I come to talk on the floor today about the importance of our national passenger rail system--Amtrak--because this is not just about getting people from point A to point B. Investing in Amtrak also means creating jobs, making our whole economy more dynamic, and making America more competitive.

Amtrak is performing better and better each and every year. As the Presiding Officer knows all too well, ridership over the last decade has steadily increased. In fact, 10 of the last 11 years have seen record numbers, and last year we broke through 31.6 million riders on Amtrak. The trains are more and more crowded, but they are arriving more and more frequently on time and the quality of the train sets and the quality of the service provided by the conductors and the other folks who work for Amtrak has steadily increased.

As the value proposition of Amtrak has increased, so has ridership. Record ticket sales and other revenues have made this possible. Today Amtrak covers nearly 89 percent of the cost of operating their trains, which is by far the best of any passenger rail operation in the United States. They are, in fact, on track to cover 90 percent, through revenues, of their total operating costs in 2014. Because of this success, since 2002 Amtrak has decreased its debt by more than half.

My home State of Delaware and the Presiding Officer's home State of New Jersey are part of one of the oldest and most critical sections of our national passenger rail system, the so-called Northeast corridor, which goes from Boston to Washington. If it were its own separate economy, the Northeast corridor would produce $3 trillion a year--21 percent of our Nation's total economic output--which would make it the fifth largest economy in the world if it were on its own. But it is not. It is an integrated part of our Nation, and its passenger rail infrastructure is an integrated part of our national commitment to efficient and effective transportation.

In this region in particular, Amtrak is not a luxury; it is a fundamental and critical part of our economy and moving our community and our people forward. If Amtrak service were cut off in the region for just a day, it would cost our economy $13 million. One-third of all the jobs in the Northeast corridor--or 7 million jobs--are within 5 miles of a station.

Amtrak's impact on my home State of Delaware is particularly large because Amtrak employs over 1,000 men and women in the State of Delaware. Many of them work at two maintenance facilities--Wilmington and Bear--where they repair everything from train seats to the heavy trucks to the cars themselves. I have had a chance to visit them on a number of occasions. It is incredible to see the work ethic and capabilities of the men and women of Amtrak. These shops have been there for a long time. They have worked hard to modernize, to be relevant, and to contribute to the strengthening bottom line of Amtrak overall.

I would like to mention ``Irish'' John, who is a good friend of mine and has been a leader for the sheet metal workers for a long time. Sheet metal workers with Amtrak were one of the unions that worked with management to find ways to significantly save costs on overhaul work on Acela train sets, which resulted in Amtrak choosing not to farm out their service work and instead do a $125 million job to overhaul 20 Acela sets in-house. This is union labor, and this helps support good middle-wage jobs. This helps support good middle-class families and middle-class communities in Delaware and our region. This particular work on this Acela overhaul will last more than 3\1/2\ years and sustain dozens of jobs at our Bear repair facility.

My friend Bill, who is with the IBEW Amtrak union, is another friend who has helped me understand the critical role of the employment Amtrak provides to our whole region--not just to Delaware, not just to the Philadelphia area, but to the whole Northeast corridor.

When we talk about investing in Amtrak, we are not only investing in new options for commuters and businesses, we are talking about investing in our communities and in workers who will build and maintain the next generation of American rail. As I said, these are great, high- skilled jobs. By investing in Amtrak's present and giving them a predictable future, we will preserve and continue these important skills and these important workers and their families in our communities.

Amtrak's benefits go beyond just the immediate skilled workers and their families and the communities that benefit from them.

In Delaware, the services Amtrak provides help to keep and draw in new businesses through a ripple effect in our whole economy. Last week there was an announcement of a new company that is spinning off out of Sallie Mae that will be locating its headquarters and 120 jobs in Wilmington. They have chosen a site specifically because it is walking distance from our Amtrak station--from the Joseph R. Biden Amtrak Station in Wilmington, DE.

In Newark, the University of Delaware is building a new campus called the Science, Technology and Advanced Research--STAR--Campus, which will build partnerships between several important entities, such as the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. What makes that partnership possible is the backbone of the Northeast corridor--the connection between these different cities that has made all of us stronger and better because of passenger rail.

I hope from these few examples it is clear that passenger rail is also a critical component of economic development. Passenger rail tends to link downtown urban areas and tends to be absolutely central to anchoring their revitalization, as the Presiding Officer knows so well.

Passenger rail is also critical not just in the Northeast corridor but in communities across the country that rely on it to connect with other communities and our country's major economic centers.

State-supported services have become a major source of ridership growth for Amtrak as well, with that ridership nearly doubling between 1998 and 2013.

Long-distance ridership across the great heartland of our country has also grown by roughly 20 percent without the introduction of any new services, frequencies, or equipment. In fiscal year 2013, long-distance ridership reached its highest point in 20 years.

However, we are at the proverbial crossroads--or I suppose I should say crossing--now because ridership is soaring, Amtrak is more popular than ever before, and demand will continue to grow, but we are not keeping up with the investment in infrastructure that we need to sustain this growth into the future.

For instance, right now there is nearly $6 billion in outdated, delayed investments that need to be made just in the Northeast corridor to bring it to what is called a state of good repair. I will focus on a few of the critical infrastructure needs in the Northeast corridor, but there are also needs across the country.

Baltimore is a city I traveled through this morning on my way to this Capitol on the Amtrak train. In Baltimore, Senator Mikulski's home State, the B&P tunnels have stayed open since 1873. Although they have undergone periodic repairs, none of them were built to be permanent. We can't be competitive if we continue to rely on tunnels that have been around since roughly the time of our own Civil War. We need to invest in modernizing this infrastructure.

Between the Presiding Officer's home State of New Jersey and the great State of New York, preliminary planning is underway on the Gateway Tunnel, which is a critical tunnel that will ease the bottleneck under the Hudson that causes delays throughout the whole region, limits the options of travelers, and ends up costing the economy more in the short and long run. We need to invest in our infrastructure.

In Delaware, we have a bottleneck around our most popular station, the Joseph R. Biden Station in Wilmington. The rail lines north and south of that station slim from three lines to two, restricting service and preventing the addition of new rail service. Thanks in part to a Federal high-speed rail grant, construction will soon be underway to add a third track to alleviate this critical chokepoint, the main one just south of the station. Without new investment, that chokepoint will continue north of the station.

And that is not to mention the hundreds of bridges and tunnels and other connection points--including the overhead centenary lines--that require repair and replacement on the Northeast corridor alone. We need to invest in our infrastructure not just in the Northeast corridor but across this whole country. We do spend a lot of time here on this floor, as we should, talking about our Nation's fiscal deficit and debt, but we should also focus on our physical deficit and debt--the delayed repair of critical pieces of infrastructure that we rely on for our economy and for our communities but that we are not focused on.

If we invest in our infrastructure today, it will employ people in repairing it and lay the groundwork for improvement of our economy over the long term. I recognize the reality that while the budget picture has improved, it is not yet as good as it should be. We are still facing real fiscal challenges.

I ride between Wilmington and Washington nearly every day on Amtrak, and our workers are responsible for repairing and retrofitting a lot of the trains on which I ride. I am impressed with their skill and the caliber of their repair work. As a rider and our State Senator, I see how critical Amtrak is to our economy, our communities, and to our country as a whole. I hope that is clear to the rest of the Members of this Chamber.

I hope that anyone watching who has appreciated the value of Amtrak's connecting power that links this country together from east to west and north to south will communicate with their Senator and convey the importance of strong and sustained investment in the Northeast corridor, yes, but across the whole reach of our country. Only by strengthening Amtrak and ensuring the vibrancy of the entire Nation's system of passenger rail can we really ensure that American rail will be there for years and generations to come.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 10, 2014, at 9:30 a.m.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 10, 2014, at 9:30 a.m., in room SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Keeping the Lights On--Are We Doing Enough to Ensure the Reliability and Security of the U.S. Electric Grid?''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be authorized to meet, during the session of the Senate, on April 10, 2014, at 10 a.m., in room SD- 430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Expanding Access to Quality Early Learning: the Strong Start for America's Children Act''.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 10, 2014, at 10 a.m., in room SR-215 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``The President's Budget for Fiscal Year 2015.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 10, 2014, at 9:30 a.m., to hold a hearing entitled ``International Development Priorities in the FY 2015 Budget.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 10, 2014, at 2 p.m.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 10, 2014, at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 10, 2014, at 3 p.m., to hold an European Affairs subcommittee hearing entitled, ``Transatlantic Security Challenges: Central and Eastern Europe.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 10, 2014, at 10:30 a.m. to conduct a hearing entitled, ``Oversight of Small Agencies.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Seapower of the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 10, 2014, at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces of the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 10, 2014, at 2:30 p.m.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 30 minutes as if in morning business and to engage in a colloquy with the Senator from Maine.

Madam President, I come to the floor again today to talk about good jobs and how we can work together in a responsible and bipartisan way to create high-quality and lasting middle-class jobs. All of us hear from our home States about how they want us to work together to produce for America today and America tomorrow.

As someone who worked for 8 years for a manufacturing company in the private sector before going into public service, I can tell you we can win in manufacturing. We can learn from our competitors, we can strengthen our workforce, we can strengthen our access to foreign markets, and we can strengthen our access to credit. We can do all of it and we can compete and win in advanced manufacturing in the United States.

One of the aspects of my own experience in the private sector that has stayed with me is that more of our manufacturing employment was in Germany than any other single country, and that often seems unlikely given that Germany actually has higher labor costs, labor protections, environmental protections, and in many ways a higher cost of doing business than almost any other advanced country. So how is it possible they are so successful? In fact, more than twice the percentage of their GDP is in manufacturing than is the case in the United States.

Why would we fight for manufacturing jobs? Why would we fight to emulate Germany's example? Because manufacturing jobs are great jobs. As the Presiding Officer and our colleague from Maine know, manufacturing jobs are high skill, high wage, high benefit, and have a positive impact on their surrounding community. They also need something. They need ongoing R&D, cutting-edge research, continuous improvement and innovations in order to remain at the cutting edge of productivity.

What we are going to talk about on the floor today is a bill that learns from the lessons of our most successful European competitor, Germany. Germany has more than 60 manufacturing hubs located all over their country. These manufacturing hubs are in places where universities are doing cutting-edge technical research and companies are beginning to deploy these new technologies in manufacturing and the workforce that are needed to acquire the skills to be successful in these new areas of manufacturing all work in coordination. That is something we can, by working in a bipartisan way here in this Senate, advance, and advance rapidly, here in the United States.

The Senator from Maine and I are going to talk about a bill--the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act--which has 14 cosponsors and is an indication of its broad base of bipartisan support. It has long been led by Senators Brown of Ohio and Blunt of Missouri, a bipartisan team, and to that they have added a great initial leadership team with Senator Stabenow, Senator Levin, Senator Reed, and Senator Schumer, all Democrats, as well as Senator Graham, Senator Kirk, Senator Collins, Senator Wicker, and Senator Boozman, all Republicans. Most recently our wonderful colleague, Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent, has joined us.

This bill has been endorsed by folks ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the U.S. Conference of Mayors to the United Auto Workers, and many more organizations at the national and local level, which is another indicator of how diverse its support is from across the country and many different sectors. This is a bill I have reason to hope can not just get a lot of endorsements from the private sector and not just a lot of endorsements from cosponsors here in the Senate but can actually move through regular order to be taken up and considered by the committee of jurisdiction, to be taken up here on the floor, and actually signed into law by the President of the United States. I am hopeful that could happen partly because this is good policy.

There are already a number of hubs that have been established by Federal agencies spending money that has already been authorized and appropriated for specific research areas where the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense need to do work to develop cutting-edge manufacturing capacity in the United States.

I think if this law gets taken up on a bipartisan basis and is improved, refined, and debated in committee and here on the floor, we actually have a shot at advancing a process that will be wide open and will allow elements of the Federal Government, in partnership with the private sector, to leverage cutting-edge research and deploy whole new technologies across this country.

I am excited by it, and I know my colleague is as well. I will briefly state why Senator King is a great colleague

to join all of us who have served as sponsors on this bill. He has previously worked in the private sector in clean energy. He has previously served as the Governor of the State of Maine and worked closely with the University of Maine and has a sense of how publicly funded research at a cutting-edge university, investment in workforce skills, and the deployment of new and innovative technologies in clean energy can work together to grow manufacturing, grow job opportunities, and grow our economy.

I invite my colleague to address his experience in Maine and why he has joined this broad group of cosponsors on this promising and bipartisan manufacturing bill.

Madam President, I thank my colleague from Maine for sharing his personal experience both as Governor and for his work and partnership with the University of Maine and their composites center and his understanding of the importance of a modern, skilled workforce in order to take advantage of the work we are hoping to catalyze through this bill.

I wish to summarize across three large areas. This bill, if enacted, would take advantage of linkages, leverage, and labor in a way that would grow lasting middle-class jobs. All of us want to work together to find a way to give American workers and families a fair shot, to give them a fair shot at the kind of middle-class quality of life that dominated over the last 50 years. As my colleague said, it was because of the GI bill and its investment in education, it was because of innovation and competitiveness, and it was because of a skilled workforce that we were able to dominate the world in manufacturing for much of the last 50 years of the last century. If we are to seize this moment and regain our global leadership not just in the productivity sector of our manufacturing but also in the base, in the employment of our manufacturing, we have to do the sorts of things this bill imagines.

We have research being done in national labs, in federally funded national labs--fundamental research. That is wonderful. We have applied research on composites being done at the University of Delaware and at the University of Maine and every other State university that does higher research. We have manufacturers trying to take advantage of new technologies and new opportunities. This bill will link them all together to create regional hubs that allow the researchers, the private sector, and the new employees to all come together.

It also, as my colleague mentioned, leverages private sector funds. Every one of the four hubs announced to date is a more than a 1-to-1 match; 2 or 4 or, in one case, 8-to-1 match of private sector dollars to public sector dollars.

Last, it invests heavily in training and in skills and making sure the workforce is ready as these new technologies get out there.

I wish to describe the reach of some of these linkages and partnerships for a moment. Let me take a second and take a walking tour, if I could, of the four hubs that have been finalized so far.

For example, the one in Youngstown, OH, deals with 3D manufacturing. This is a relatively new, cutting-edge technology that radically alters the scale of early stage manufacturing and what is possible in terms of prototyping, and then, I think fairly soon, what is possible in terms of customized, unit-by-unit manufacturing. It has enormous promise. But if we are going to stay competitive globally in manufacturing, when there is something new invented in the United States, we have to also make sure it is made in the United States. So this is the sort of hub that makes that possible.

There are four hubs, and I will mention them briefly: the one in Ohio, the one in Raleigh, NC, the one in Detroit, and the one in Chicago. But they don't just engage the universities and the workforce and the companies right in that immediate community. They benefit from national networks. For example, General Dynamics and Honeywell are two of the very large national footprint firms partnering with the Youngstown hub. Universities from Arizona State to Florida State are collaborating in the wide bandgap semiconductor work in Raleigh, NC. Researchers from the University of Kentucky, the University of Tennessee, Notre Dame, and Ohio State are partners with the hub that is in Detroit. There are researchers from Boulder, Indiana, Notre Dame, Louisville, Iowa, Nebraska, UT, Austin, and Wisconsin that are partnering with the hub in Chicago.

So what are these hubs? Are they just some diffuse academic teams that share names and a little bit of data with each other? No. If there were, for example, to be a hub in Maine on composites, we would find researchers at the University of Delaware who have done great work in composites and companies doing work in composites partnering with the fundamental research being done, let's say, hypothetically, at the University of Maine, and learning about how to deploy that new technology in ways that would benefit the local workforce and the local manufacturers.

That is why there is so much leverage coming out of these linkages. That is why these hubs have been so generative and so powerful in Germany's experience. It is a way to harness our Federal investment in research by the national labs and by State universities with the energy of the private sector and the capacity of our manufacturers to relentlessly innovate.

We have a very broad menu of bipartisan manufacturing bills that have been taken up and discussed in this Chamber. This one--this manufacturing hubs bill--has some of the broadest support and I think some of the best reasons for it to be considered in committee and taken up on this

floor later this spring. It is my real hope our colleagues will join us in doing so.

Let me yield back to my colleague from Maine.

If there is a footnote that says ``and Delaware.''

I thank my colleague for joining me in this colloquy on manufacturing, both broadly and more specifically on this bill. I am grateful for the leadership that Senator Stabenow and Senator Graham, as the cochairs of the Senate Manufacturing Caucus, have shown on this particular bill and the passion and the perseverance that Senators Brown and Blunt have shown in bringing this great idea into legislative form and in advancing it.

There are so many other bills that we can and should take up that will bring strength and vitality to the American manufacturing sector. But it is my real hope that S. 1468, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act will be the next in a series of important bipartisan manufacturing bills that we will take up to make sure we are doing our job to help grow high quality American jobs.

I yield the floor.

Reinstated Amendments

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I would like to thank my colleague from Oregon, Senator Merkley, who has done a tremendous job laying out the scientific case, the compelling economic case, the cultural case, and the global case for why we here in the Senate need to wake up, need to listen to the indisputable evidence of what climate change is doing in our home States, to our country, and around the world.

Mr. President, even now as we speak in this Chamber, my own three children--Maggie, Michael, and Jack--are asleep at home. And as I reflected on this past summer, I was struck by something--an experience we had--that was a simple and telling reminder of the steady changes wrought by climate change in our Nation.

Last summer we took a family vacation--a trip--to Glacier National Park. For those who have had the opportunity to hike in this majestic national park in Montana, it is the site of many striking and beautiful scenes, but there was one hike we took in particular that stayed with me. It was a hike to historic Grinnell Glacier--a glacier that is by many photographs over decades documented in its steady receding. In fact, since 1966 it has lost nearly half of its total acreage. We took a long and winding hike up the trail that takes you to Grinnell Glacier. You can't quite see until you come up over the last rise that most of what is left of Grinnell Glacier in the summers today is a chilly pool of water.

For my daughter Maggie and for my sons Mike and Jack, as I look ahead to the long-term future, I think we all have to ask ourselves this question: How many more changes are we willing to accept being wrought on creation, on this Nation, and on the world by the steady advance of climate change?

I know we can't simply take the examples of things such as Grinnell Glacier or what to me seemed a striking change in the cap of Mount Kilimanjaro. I first climbed it in 1984 and visited it again last year. There is a striking change, a visually powerful change. These aren't scientific.

There are lots of other arguments, perhaps, as to why these two particular glaciers have retreated, but I still remember hearing a presentation at the University of Delaware by Dr. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, a glaciologist who presented a very broad and I thought very compelling case based on ice cores for the actual advance of climate change over many decades.

In fact, I see my colleague from Rhode Island has a photographic history of Grinnell Glacier in Montana's Glacier National Park, so the point I was just making in passing he is able to illustrate here. That is as of 10 years ago. The glacier has retreated even further from that. But this striking glacier from 1940 is now almost completely gone in just one generation.

This and so many other glaciers that were monuments in our national parks are today receded or altogether gone.

Well, I think we have to ask ourselves fundamentally, what is our path forward? We have heard from other Senators. Tim Kaine of Virginia spoke about the importance of innovation, and Angus King, the Senator from Maine, spoke about the importance of markets and of making sure our inventions and innovations in trying to solve these problems are also shared internationally. I think these are great and important insights.

One of the things I wanted to bring to the floor today first was insights from my own home State of Delaware, where our Governor, Jack Markell, impaneled a sea level rise advisory committee starting in 2010 that looked hard at how climate change might affect my home State.

At just 60 feet, Delaware has the lowest mean elevation of any State in the country, and that already makes it more susceptible to sea level rise than almost any State in the country. In my State of Delaware, we have seen and will continue to see the impact of climate change on our businesses, our communities, and our local environment. As the sea level rises, we are seeing the effects more and more.

Sea level rises essentially for two reasons. First, as the planet's ice sheets melt--the much larger sheets than Grinnell Glacier--they add to the amount of water in the ocean. Second, saltwater actually expands as it warms as well. So as the planet's average temperature has steadily risen, so too has the level of its saltwater seas.

The fact that the Earth's oceans are rising each year isn't new information. It has been rising as long as we have been keeping track. But what is really jarring is that rate of rise is increasing and increasing significantly. When the data was tracked from 1870 to 1930, the sea level was rising at a rate of 4 inches per 100 years. Over the next 60 years it rose at a rate of 8 inches per 100 years--more than double. In just the last 20 years the sea level has been rising at a strikingly more rapid rate of 12.5 inches per 100 years. The water is rising, and in Delaware it is rising fast.

The land itself in my State is also actually sinking. There is actually a documented vertical movement of the Earth's crust under the mid-Atlantic coast. It is called subsidence. It has been happening in Delaware slowly but gradually since the ice age at a pace of just 2 millimeters of elevation every year. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but it adds up to another 4 inches over the century.

So we have the water rising and the land sinking, making climate change and sea level rise--specifically for my home State--a very real issue.

A wide array of scientists have studied this and its impact on Delaware, and they have developed three models for a future scenario. In the conservative model, by the year 2100 the sea level in Delaware will have risen about 1.5 feet. In another model, the water off Delaware rises another full meter. In another and the most disconcerting model, it is 1.5 meters or about 5 feet. Unfortunately, at present, this broad group of scientists--inside and outside of government--are estimating that is the most likely scenario.

Let's make this real. Here is a projection of these three different scenarios in one area of Delaware. This is Bowers Beach. This shows how now this is a well-established beach community. The most conservative model, we still have something of the land; in the middle, it is completely cut off here from the mainland; and then in the most likely, sadly, given the most current evidence, there is literally nothing left except a little sandbar out by itself in the Delaware Bay. That gives one example of why the difference between these three scenarios matters so much. Unfortunately, there is no scenario in which Bowers Beach is still a viable beachfront community by the end of this century. This beach community of Bowers Beach is very close to Dover Air Force Base and ends up underwater.

Now let's take a look at South Wilmington. The city in which I live is Wilmington, DE, and South Wilmington is a neighborhood in the largest city in our State. As the water rises in the Atlantic Ocean, it also rises up the Delaware Bay, the Delaware River, and the Christina River, which runs right through most of my home county, Newcastle County, and rises in the Peterson Wildlife Refuge too.

The impacts here are potentially devastating. We are talking about water 1.5 feet higher than what Delaware experienced during Superstorm Sandy--not for a brief storm surge but each and every day. Again, take a look at today the conservative, the middle, and the most likely, most aggressive scenario in which virtually all of South Wilmington is underwater by the end of this century. The calculation of whether we are hit with a half a meter, a full meter, or 1.5 meters of sea rise comes down to the rate of acceleration of climate change globally, and it leaves for us a central and so far unanswered question: whether we try to slow the rate at which climate change is affecting our planet and maybe somehow turn the tide. This is the part of climate change policy called mitigation.

Priority one in this strategy is cutting the emissions we are pumping into our atmosphere. To do that, we can and must diversify our energy sources and reduce our dependence on polluting fossil fuels. Clean energy technology, energy efficiency programs, public transportation, and more will help cut down on these emissions, but it will require a global effort in order to avoid or minimize local impacts.

The second part of climate change policy is adaptation based on an acceptance of the reality that our climate is changing and will have real effects on our planet and all of our communities. The truth is that even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today--if we shut down powerplants, stopped driving cars, stopped using gas-powered farm equipment, trains, and ships, and all the rest--the amount of greenhouse gases, of CO2 and others already in the atmosphere would still take many years to dissipate. Changes in the world's climate are at this point inevitable. It is already happening and affecting communities, and we can expect these impacts to intensify as the rate of climate change continues to accelerate. We can modify our behavior to prevent those effects from being catastrophic. We can and should make better choices now to prevent disaster later.

In Delaware, for example, we have had two laws on the books for now 40 years that have helped us adapt. The first was championed in the 1970s by a Republican Governor, Russ Peterson, a hero of mine and of our Governor's and others. It is called the Coastal Zone Act, and passing it cost him his career in politics. It prohibited future industrial development on a long strip of coastal land, allowing the State and Federal government to preserve it and reduce the impacts of flooding and coastal erosion. Ultimately, in the long run, Governor Peterson has been proven a visionary in preserving this vital barrier all along Delaware's coast.

The second law empowered the State to protect and replenish the State's beaches, including the beaches on Delaware Bay, which are often overlooked. This has allowed our State to build a berm and dune system that protects infrastructure and protects property from being washed away.

More important than these significant landmark laws of 40 years ago, today, instead of running away from the science, Delaware's leaders have embraced it. The State agency that manages environmental issues for Delaware--known as DNREC and ably led by secretary Collin O'Mara-- has taken the lead on a governmentwide project to assess the State's vulnerability to sea level rise and, as I mentioned, recommend options for adaptation.

Delaware's Sea Level Rise Committee spent 18 months looking at 79 different statewide resources--roads, bridges, schools, fire stations, railroads, wetlands, people and their homes and businesses--and layered all of this onto maps to show just how far the water would reach at different models for sea level rise.

If the sea level does get to 1.5 meters, we lose more than 10 percent of our State. The water claims 20,000 residential properties, significant percentages of wetlands, farms, highways, and industrial sites. We would lose 21 miles of our Northeast corridor rail lines to flooding, shutting down the vital Northeast corridor that transports so many millions every year.

The Port of Wilmington would be rendered useless, nearly all the State's acreage of protected wetlands could be inundated, nearly three- quarters of our dams, dikes, and levees flooded out. In short, this scenario for our lowest-lying State would be devastating.

As Secretary O'Mara said:

We're looking at big risks for human health and safety, and

not just at the Delaware Bay beaches. We have big concerns

about [communities in Delaware]. It's much more complex than

just the bay beaches or a community here or there.

He is right. So once again, remember, we have two basic approaches to climate change policy: adaptation and mitigation.

Once Delaware compiled its 200-page vulnerability assessment on sea level rise, the committee got to work on an adaptation strategy to protect our State and came up with slightly more than 60 options and hosted a whole series of public meetings and townhalls to discuss it. We are now working on a broader vulnerability assessment to examine the full range of impacts from climate change, even beyond sea level rise-- changing temperatures, extreme weather, changes in precipitation-- impacts which will affect us and our neighbors.

Climate change will affect the distribution, abundance, and behavior of wildlife, as well as the diversity, structure, and function of our ecosystem. We are already seeing changes in natural patterns. As Senator Markey of Massachusetts commented earlier this evening, many commercial and recreational fish stocks along our east coast have moved northward by 20 to 200 miles over the past 40 years as ocean temperatures have increased. Scientists expect migratory species to be strongly affected by climate change, since animal migration is closely connected to climate factors, and migratory species use multiple habitats and resources during their migrations. These changes are impacting our own multimillion bird watching and waterfowl hunting, an important economic driver for us and critical parts of our heritage.

According to the draft National Climate Assessment released in 2013, our farmers are expected to initially adapt relatively well to the changing climate over the next 25 years. But later, as temperature increases and precipitation extremes get more intense, crop yields and production of poultry and livestock are expected to decline. More extreme weather events--drought and heavy downpours--will further reduce yields, damage soil, stress irrigation water supplies, and increase production costs. All in all, this is a fairly grim long-term outlook in the absence of decisive action.

I am proud of my State. Delaware was the first State to thoroughly assess the vulnerability of specific resources in as comprehensive a way as they have, and we are determined to confront these changes to our planet head on and to protect our communities and the way of life we have built.

I will briefly review. There is so much we can and should do here in Congress in a bipartisan way to lay the groundwork for the actions we have to take. We can improve our energy efficiency. We could take up and pass the bipartisan bill recently reintroduced by Senators Shaheen and Portman to increase the use of energy-efficient technology across all sectors in our society. The new version of the bill has 12 cosponsors--six Democrats and six Republicans--and includes 10 new commonsense amendments which would save consumers electricity and money, a small but meaningful start on a journey toward changing our direction on climate change. Or we could level the playing field and help new clean energy technologies get off the ground by giving them the same tax advantages currently utilized by fossil fuel projects. The bipartisan Master Limited Partnerships Parity Act--which I am proud to cosponsor with my colleagues Senators Moran, Stabenow, Murkowski, Landrieu, and Collins, Democrats and Republicans working together-- would level the playing field for renewables and give them and other new technologies a fighting chance in our energy market.

There are so many other steps we could do in combination, if we would but get past this endless, pointless debate which has long been resolved in the halls of science, and move forward in a way which better serves our country and our world.

The bottom line is that our climate is changing. We know this. With this knowledge comes the responsibility to reduce our emissions, to mitigate the impacts, and prepare for and take action to deal with the coming changes.

As I reflect on our own responsibilities as Senators, I am in part moved to respond to the challenge of climate change--not just because it is an environmental issue, an economic issue, a regional issue or global issue, but it is also for me and for many others a faith issue. It is a question of how we carry out our responsibility to be good stewards of God's creation, to be those Senators we are called to be each from our own traditions who stand up and do what is right, not just for the short term, not just for the concerns of the day, but for the long term.

As I move toward my close, I will share with those in the Chamber and watching one of the things most encouraging to me as I have reflected on the change in the climate change movement over recent years is it has begun to draw support from all across the theological spectrum. There was last year, July of 2013, a letter sent to Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Reid, and all Members of Congress by 200 self- identified Christian evangelical scientists from both religious and secular universities all across the United States, a powerful and incisive letter which says:

As evangelical scientists and academics, we understand

climate change is real and action is urgently needed. All of

God's Creation--human and our environment--is groaning under

the weight of our uncontrolled use of fossil fuels, bringing

on a warming planet, melting ice, and rising seas.

I urge any watching to consider reading it. It is posted on line. It goes on to quote Christian Scripture at length in making the case we have an obligation, if we are concerned about our neighbors and about the least of these in this world, to take on the challenge of making sure we are good stewards.

Those of the Roman Catholic faith might be inspired by Pope Francis, who has taken the name of the patron saint of animals and the environment, and recently issued a call for all people to be protectors of creation.

Last, I might read from a letter issued by the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, a group not commonly known for their close alignment with my party. Leith Anderson wrote in a letter in 2011:

While others debate the science and politics of climate

change, my thoughts go to the poor people who are neither

scientists nor politicians. They will never study carbon

dioxide in the air or acidification of the ocean. But they

will suffer from dry wells in the Sahel of Africa and floods

along the coasts of Bangladesh. Their crops will fail while

our supermarkets remain full. They will suffer while we

study.

This couldn't be more true. I urge all of us in this Chamber to reflect on whatever traditions sustain and bring us here that we have an obligation to those who sleep soundly in our homes now, to those from our home States around the country, to stand up and take action, to look clearly at the challenge which lies in front of us and to act in the best traditions of this body and of this Nation, to be good stewards of creation and to stand up to the challenges of this time.

Madam President, I come to the floor once again to talk about good jobs--about manufacturing jobs--and about what we can do together in this Chamber to strengthen

the vital manufacturing sector of the American economy.

Last year, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and Republican Senator Roy Blunt came together in a bipartisan effort to cosponsor an important bill, S. 1468, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act of 2013--an effort to build a national network for manufacturing and innovation, also known as manufacturing innovation hubs.

This bill, if enacted, would allow us to build institutes across our country dedicated to discovering the next breakthroughs in technology and translating them to the next breakthroughs in manufacturing. I have been proud to support and fight for this bill, and now, because of my colleagues' leadership and determination, we are close to getting a vote.

We have heard about the importance of these innovation hubs for manufacturing before. Last year two hubs opened--one in Youngstown, OH, and another in Raleigh, NC. Just last week I was thrilled to hear about two more opening--one in Detroit and another in Chicago.

These hubs are good first steps, but they are being done by the executive branch, without express and explicit authorization for a whole and broader program through this bill, which would extend this national network, would make its life longer and greater, and give more specific details to the process by which they would be authorized going forward.

It is my hope, having already seen several demonstrations on a more modest scale, this Congress will come together in a bipartisan way and enact this legislation to put a framework in place for the long term.

These hubs, as I said, are good first steps, but we in Congress can and should do more. In my home State of Delaware we are blessed to have some remarkable institutions of higher learning: Delaware State University, led by the great President Dr. Harry Williams; the University of Delaware--both research institutions which benefit from federally funded research and both of which do work in energy and engineering, relevant to manufacturing. We also have Del Tech--Delaware Technical & Community College--which does great workforce training and partners with manufacturers. We also have a whole series of manufacturers, large and small; some iconic companies such as DuPont, some unknown outside my State that employ dozens or hundreds.

What a manufacturing hub would do is bring together a university that is doing cutting-edge research in a new field with companies looking to start manufacturing using that technology, with those community colleges and others who would train the new workforce, creating a network that would do the innovative work in an iterative way that would accelerate new manufacturing opportunities.

The reason this bill has such a diverse set of bipartisan backers-- from Democrats such as Sherrod Brown, Debbie Stabenow, and myself, to Republicans such as Roy Blunt, Lindsey Graham, and Mark Kirk--is because these hubs represent a great example of how the Federal Government can help foster partnerships between businesses, universities, and communities in a hands-off way.

As to these first four hubs I mentioned, in these instances, the Federal Government is also getting terrific leverage. There is a more than 1-to-1 match from private, State, and local partnerships in these existing hubs--partnerships, I might add, that have national reach, giving the hubs the potential to benefit not just their immediate regions or their immediate communities but the whole country.

General Dynamics and Honeywell, for example, are two of the partner companies in the Youngstown, OH, lab. They have footprints all across our country. At the hub in Raleigh, NC, researchers from other universities--such as Arizona State and Florida State--are collaborators as well, contributing their knowledge to the great work of these hubs and then also bringing back to their labs and their communities what is being learned through this common collaborative work.

So the Youngstown and Raleigh hubs--now well established--are about more than just those two cities, and the hubs in Detroit and Chicago will be about more than just Michigan and Illinois, and the hubs we would create, we would authorize, through this bill would be about more than just the cities or States in which they are based.

By bringing together such a wide-ranging and diverse set of partners, hubs allow many different stakeholders to pool their resources, minimizing the risks of investing in the early stage research that is critical to innovation but not feasible for one company alone to invest in.

It is about the private sector coming together with the university and public sectors to solve tough problems without just one firm bearing all the risk or the burden. R&D--research and development--as we know, is critical to our economic future. These hubs offer an innovative model for increasing our national capacity for invention.

The Federal Government acts as a convener for private firms, nonprofits, universities, and researchers, creating an environment where they can all do what they do best and share it. This idea transcends ideology or party. That is why I think Members of both parties should feel comfortable getting behind this bill. It has been endorsed by folks ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the Bio, which represents the bio and pharmaceutical community, and folks in the private sector and public sector in my own State and in States across the country.

Manufacturing is at the heart of what can and should make this country competitive and prosperous in this century. At the end of the day, this is about creating good jobs. Manufacturing jobs are high- quality jobs. It has a significant secondary benefit in the community as well as having higher wages and benefits than jobs in any other sector.

If we are looking for the key to a dynamic innovation economy, we need to look no further than manufacturers. They invest more in R&D than any other private sector within the country. When we think of manufacturing and innovation today, we often picture researchers in the United States inventing things and manufacturing factories overseas. But that is not how sophisticated, advanced manufacturing innovation works anymore. The reality is that innovation is just not linear. R&D and manufacturing need to be closer together. It does not just start in the lab and then get sent to a factory and then to a store and your home. More often R&D results in innovations that improve the products already in our home, that improve the manufacturing process to discover better ways to make things faster, more safely, more efficiently, and that innovative cycle can speed up the more closely connected and articulated it is.

By creating these manufacturing innovation hubs, all of which focus on a specific sector or industry, we can help fuel the discoveries that will make manufacturing a critical part of our long-term economic future, while ensuring that the discoveries that change our world are made here in America and the products that come out of them are manufactured here in America.

These hubs focus on emerging areas where there is enormous potential. For example, the hub in Youngstown, OH, is focused on 3D printing, which already has the potential to transform how manufacturing, large- scale and small-scale, is done not just in the United States but around the world. We believe--I certainly believe we should continue to be at the cutting edge of developing and deploying what 3D printing has to offer.

The one in Raleigh, NC, is about wide bandgap semiconductors or energy-efficient electronics and will likely dominate much of the next generation of electronics. Again, why would we not want to be on the ground for not just the inventing of new technologies but demonstrating how to manufacture them?

In Detroit, researchers and businesses and universities and other stakeholders in this newest hub will work together on advanced lightweight materials, on remarkable metals that are stronger, more durable, more ductile, and more lightweight than other existing materials, with applications, of course, in automobiles but across a very wide range of products and platforms.

Lastly, in Chicago, small businesses, universities, and larger companies are

working together on some remarkable advances that speed up the whole manufacturing process so new ideas can go from the lab to your home faster than ever before.

Hubs such as these are central to our competitiveness because it is not just about the work happening at the lab or the institute itself; it is about how they then attract companies with a national reach to an area that is capable of building sustainable and dynamic local economies. It is about bringing researchers and manufactures together to spur innovation, commercialize R&D, and create good jobs that do not go somewhere else. It is about the larger impact for our communities and our country, as innovation breeds new supply chains and new businesses locally and across our country.

Today's global economy is more competitive than it has ever been. We are competing not just with developing countries that have lower labor and environmental standards or lower wages but also with developed nations that are trying to out-educate, out-research, and out-innovate us. Germany, for example, has a well-developed, well-established, well- deployed network of more than 60 manufacturing innovation hubs exactly like the ones I have just described. It also has fairly high labor and environmental standards but is the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe. It has nearly double the percentage of its GDP in manufacturing as the United States. How are they able to do this? How can they sustain these high levels of manufacturing? It is in no small part because of the manufacturing innovation hubs they have developed and deployed.

So let's get this done. There is absolutely no reason that the season of governing and of legislating here in Washington needs to be over, especially when there is so much important work to do--work that I know we can and should get done on a bipartisan basis. Senators Brown and Blunt have done great work and shown strong leadership in developing this bill, refining this bill, and getting it to this point.

Let's show that we can come together in areas where we do agree and put campaigns and politics aside for now and put American jobs and American innovation first.

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

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Begich.) The clerk will call the roll.

Madam President, I yield 45 minutes of my hour under cloture to Senator Sanders, chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I come to the floor once again to talk about manufacturing jobs and their importance for rebuilding the American middle class, their importance for our economy, and their importance for our future.

Last week President Obama delivered his State of the Union Address before a joint session of this Congress, and he talked about what we can and should do together to invest in America's workers, to spur job creation, and to expand economic opportunity. He said:

What I believe unites the people of this nation . . . is

the simple, profound belief in opportunity for all--the

notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can

and should get ahead. . . . Opportunity is who we are. And

the defining project of our generation is to restore that

trust.

I couldn't agree more. At a basic level, one thing we need to do is to put up a floor under the struggling workers in America who are continuing to seek work and to come together to extend emergency unemployment insurance for these long-term job seekers.

While jobs remain, sadly, more scarce than they should be in our economy and as we continue in recovery, we can't let Americans fall through the cracks as they continue to seek work.

But since the extended unemployment insurance benefits expired last December, 1.7 million Americans, including more than 4,000 Delawareans, have lost the unemployment insurance that is critical to their families, to keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Emergency unemployment insurance, which this body once again today failed to extend, is a critical lifeline to Americans out of work through no fault of their own and who are doing everything they can to get back to work. While they are searching for jobs, we should make sure they can put food on their tables and keep their families sound.

One Delawarean I have heard from who relies on this lifeline is Raymond from Newark. Raymond was laid off last April from his job at the EVRAZ steel mill in Claymont. He is not sitting at home based on these unemployment benefits. He is not showing dependency, as some have suggested here. He has averaged more than 30 job applications each and every week. He has four children depending on him--one in college with tuition payments.

He wrote to me saying: ``My job search is more than finding a job; it is searching to make an honest living.''

Raymond, to you, and to the more than the 1 million Americans who rely on decent work to give meaning to their lives, to give support to their families, and to give purpose and opportunity to their children and their future, we can and should do more--not only by extending the unemployment insurance, not only by increasing the minimum wage, but by building the middle class of this country to work together.

Folks such as Raymond have worked hard and paid their taxes. They have earned the opportunity when they really need it to get unemployment insurance. That is why they paid into it for so many years. But we need to do more beyond just extending unemployment insurance.

We need to invest in Raymond's future. We need to invest in the skills that will help Americans like him transition from his job in a steel mill to a plant that is open and has a job that needs to be filled.

Throughout our history broad-based job growth and job creation have ensured economic opportunity that was there for millions of millions of Americans across several generations. Anyone who was able and willing to work in this country for a long time was able to find a decent job and a ladder into the middle class. By investing in our Nation's workforce, our people, through public education, through the GI bill, and through access to higher education, we have been a country where anyone who was willing to work could make it if they combined their work ethic and talents with the skills they needed.

During World War II, in the postwar boom, manufacturing was an economic backbone. Our country was the pathway to the middle class that made all of this possible. American manufacturing was the sturdy manifestation of that central American idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can provide for your family today so your children can get access to higher education, a brighter future, and you can have a secure retirement tomorrow. That is the essence of the American middle class.

The basic opportunity that manufacturing provided--those strong and stable rungs by which Americans could pull themselves up the ladder of opportunity--was the heart of America's economic engine, it was the glue that held communities together, but over the past few decades it has changed dramatically. As the world has changed, as billions of competitors have entered global markets, from China to India to Russia, so has the nature of manufacturing, as technology has advanced and the playing field on which we compete globally has changed fundamentally. The critical impact of low wages abroad and of trade deals that were not effectively enforced has been well documented. But too often people draw the wrong conclusion about the future of manufacturing based on its recent past. I have heard many arguing that manufacturing is no longer an industry, a sector where America can compete because this global playing field is tilted and there will always be workers in some country who will work for less, and so we are relegated to inevitably lose what is left of our manufacturing in a race to the bottom. The suggestion has been made in some sectors that we should thrive with service and high-skilled research and development and financial services but not manufacturing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In my view, only if we continue to be a country where we invent things, grow things, and make things will we continue to be a leading economy where there is real opportunity for all Americans. Why? Because manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs both for those who work in them, who get higher wages and higher benefits, but also for the local economy, where manufacturing jobs provide more of a compounding benefit than any other sector.

Some suggest we just can't compete because our labor standards, our environmental protections, and our wages are too high. But look to Germany and Europe, and you can see this isn't true. They have higher labor standards and higher environmental protections than we do, and yet more than double the percentage of their economy, the percentage of their GDP is manufacturing because their government, their education sector, and their private sector work in close harmony to do what we need to do.

Since manufacturers invest the most in private sector R&D, where there is manufacturing, there is also a wealth of high-skilled research work. That is one of the other benefits of manufacturing. Tech development works the best when research centers are close to where products are made. Over the long term it is hard to have one without the other. So as our manufacturing base has moved offshore, we have been at risk of losing our research base. But just in the last few years there has been a dynamic that is encouraging of jobs coming back to this country. As our productivity continues to grow, as our energy costs go down, and as that wage gap closes, we have actually been regaining ground in manufacturing.

I am convinced that if we want to rebuild an economy that is dynamic and that grows, one that provides opportunities to the middle class, manufacturing must be at the center--in fact, must be the foundation.

What is true is that because the global economy has shifted so dramatically, we need to shift our strategy and our approach. The manufacturing that America excels at today is more advanced and requires higher skilled workers than ever before. Rather than repeating the same tasks over and over, workers today in manufacturing have to be able to carry out complex and varying tasks; to be able to see what is not going right and fix it as a collaborative team; to understand the manufacturing process and to innovate continuously. They have to have critical thinking and problem-solving skills. The sorts of things workers weren't expected to do 30 years ago are a minimum requirement today. They need to understand manufacturing, and they need to be able to program and to improve the caliber and productivity of the machines that do most of the repetitive simple labor of manufacturing today.

We can train Americans for these jobs, but our schools and our institutions of higher learning, our community colleges and universities have to be tightly integrated into a skill-training system that is demand-driven rather than giving people training and praying that somehow they will find their way to an appropriate employer.

That is why I was so encouraged when President Obama placed such an emphasis on workplace skills training and manufacturing in his State of the Union speech. By modernizing our education system and building real and enduring partnerships between schools and businesses, we can ensure our workers have the skills that employers actually need today and tomorrow; so when a guy like Raymond from a steel mill in Claymont is laid off, he can have the opportunity to improve his skills, to retool his abilities, and to move right into an open and available manufacturing job. A recent study showed there were more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs--high-skilled, high-wage, high-benefit jobs--in America today unfilled because of this skills gap.

While I understand and even appreciate President Obama's commitment to making some progress in the coming year through Executive orders, he should not give up on working with Congress. It is just February. It is too early in this year for us to give up on the possibility of passing bipartisan legislation together.

I think more than ever, because of the message it sends domestically and internationally, we have to find a way to work together to make progress on the critical issue of manufacturing skills and to do what we can together to grow our economy and rebuild our middle class. That is why I have been working so hard with my colleagues on the Manufacturing Jobs for America campaign here in the Senate. Manufacturing Jobs for America is a campaign to build support for good manufacturing legislation on which Democrats and Republicans can agree. So far we have had 26 Democratic Senators introduce 32 bills. Almost half of them have Republican cosponsors already, and we are seeking more each and every week.

Our bills focus on four areas that, if we were to enact them, could have a real and substantial impact on manufacturing and opportunity in our country: strengthening America's modern workforce skills, as I have spoken to; fighting for a more level global playing field and opening export markets to America's manufacturers of all sizes. Medium and small businesses have been growing their exports, but we could grow so much more, and that would sustain the growth in manufacturing; third, making it easier for manufacturers to access capital and invest in the R&D I spoke to a moment ago; and fourth, ensuring a coordinated government-wide effort in support of a national manufacturing strategy. All of our competitors have them. We alone don't, and we need a national manufacturing strategy to make sure that skills, access to exports, and access to capital all happen.

Madam President, adapting our economy to the realities of a new era is a challenge we have struggled with for more than a generation. Yet figuring out how to realize an economy where growth is both strong and more equitable--one that is dynamic and creative and globally competitive and also has a broad middle class, provides security for working families, and leaves no one behind; an economy that invests in the dreams and aspirations of our children--building that economy is the central challenge we face. Manufacturing can and should be the foundation of that economy.

If we want America to be as strong in the 21st century as it was in the 20th, we need American manufacturing. Let's work together and get this done.

I thank my colleagues from both sides of the aisle for their partnership, their interest, and their work. I so much look forward to working together in the weeks ahead to prove to the American people that we can make bipartisan progress on manufacturing.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

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

Mr. President, I rise to speak about a bill introduced today--a bipartisan bill--a bill that will strengthen America's innovation economy.

Over the last 60 years our national laboratories have served as leading centers of research and discovery in America. Today we have 17 DOE labs charged with three broad research missions: science, energy, and national security. Although they have grown and changed since their founding to encompass much broader ranges of work and are successful in carrying out their primary missions, labs are not fully optimized to take part in today's innovation culture. That is a problem, because in this century of rapid change, America's best competitive advantage remains our capacity to innovate.

Over the coming months, I will be talking more about a few things Congress can do to streamline and jumpstart our Nation's hubs of discovery so that we can thrive as a 21st-century innovation economy.

At the top level, it will mean reauthorizing the America COMPETES Act to reaffirm our commitment to the robust national strategy for science and technology programs that will continue to be a critical underpinning of American prosperity.

And one part of that is how our national labs operate, which is why today Senator Rubio and I have introduced the America INNOVATES Act.

Already, our labs have incubated many groundbreaking innovations.

Their research has led to breakthroughs from new Melanoma and HIV/ AIDS treatments to IED detonators that can save the lives of our troops in combat. And that research is critical because although the private sector will continue to be a key source of innovation, the Federal Government has and will continue to play a central role in advancing innovation.

Why is that? Private markets, historically speaking, tend to underinvest in R&D relative to the potential benefits to society. This is especially true in the energy sector.

But, if there is a problem that I have heard since coming to Congress, It is that too often, the great work of our scientists doesn't translate to the marketplace.

Right now, too much groundbreaking science and too many innovative ideas never leave the walls of our national labs, squandering enormous potential in the commercial market.

Now, in our bill, we continue to support our labs' core mission. We are

not proposing anything drastic. What we are doing is modernizing the labs for the 21st century--so ideas in the lab can more effectively become innovations in the market. Luckily, we need only look to the labs themselves for inspiration on how to do this.

We make two broad proposals.

First we are integrating the management of the Department of Energy's science and energy programs to improve the linkages between basic and applied sciences. This will allow the early stages of research and development to be translated more efficiently, and it is something that Secretary Moniz has signaled he supports and is moving forward on.

Second we are giving the national labs more power to work with the private sector to ensure that more scientific discoveries can turn into commercial breakthroughs.

Together, these steps would allow us to streamline the labs' work so it can more quickly and effectively translate into the transformative innovations that can create jobs and grow our economy.

Now, to explain what our proposals intend to achieve, I will walk through what is known as the innovation pipeline, which shows how basic science research can become a world-changing innovation.

First, I will use the example of the great work that scientists at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, CO, are doing to advance cellulosic ethanol technologies.

One of our country's big challenges today is reducing our dependence on foreign oil, and to do that we need new fuel options that we can create here in America.

Cellulosic ethanol is an advanced biofuel with a lot of promise because it is produced from abundant materials like grasses and wood chips as well as other types of biomass and waste. And because these materials are so abundant, cellulosic ethanol has the potential to replace a significant portion of our Nation's petroleum consumption.

The challenge comes, however, because, unlike corn, these cellulosic materials are made of complex starches that are harder to break down into ethanol.

To make the promise of cellulosic ethanol a reality, we needed to develop the enzymes and micro-organisms that could break down and then ferment those complex starches.

That is where the innovation pipeline comes in. At the NREL in Colorado, scientists started at this first step here--basic science. Basic science is very fundamental, it is the study of the elementary principles of the universe--really discovery level science.

Enzymes are large biological molecules that are nature's catalysts-- accelerating metabolic processes that sustain life.

To develop enzymes and micro-organisms capable of converting starchy biomass into cellulosic ethanol, you need to start at the fundamentals of biology and biochemistry. This includes studying the intricate details of the relevant biochemical processes, as well as probing the proteins and amino-acids that form the building blocks of enzymes down to the submolecular level.

At this point, scientists can move into the applied science stage of the pipeline. Applied research generally concerns translating those basic, fundamental principles into an application.

In this example, scientists apply the insights gained from the fundamental basic science stage to develop new enzymes with desired performance traits such as high selectivity, specificity, and stability to enable effective and efficient conversion of the complex starches into ethanol.

Applied research can also include controlled lab-scale demonstrations to test how effectively these newly developed enzymes and micro- organisms can turrijsay, wood chips, into fuel.

Still in the lab and far from full commercial scale production, the kinds of small discoveries that happen at the applied science level act as an early demonstration that something new is possible.

At the applied research stage, we are still far away from creating something ready for the market, but between these two stages our scientists have gone from the basic science of how an idea may work to actually demonstrating that it could work in practice.

At this point now, the private sector is more likely to see its potential value. Our scientists have shown that the technology is possible, and next we move to the commercialization and scaling and deployment phases, where private investors and companies take the technology our lab scientists have developed and make it a product that can succeed in the market.

During the applied research stage at NREL, scientists were hard at work showing that they really could produce cellulosic ethanol efficiently and cheaply--eventually meeting their goal to make it price competitive with conventional fuels in today's commercial market.

That is where we are right now with cellulosic ethanol. Companies across the country, such as DuPont, Poet, and others, are currently building plants to produce cellulosic ethanol at large scale and at competitive prices.

So that is one model of public-private partnerships for innovation-- where the basic and applied science research can begin in the lab and then be transferred to private sector companies who can create a commercial product.

I had the opportunity last year to witness another model of public- private partnerships for innovation at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which is home to the Advanced Light Source, or ALS. The ALS serves thousands of researchers--from private sector scientists to university researchers--who use light sources such as soft xrays, ultraviolet light, and infrared light to conduct a wide range of scientific experiments. Experiments at the ALS are performed at nearly 40 beam lines that can operate simultaneously around the clock and year-round.

The facility's resources would be too expensive for any one company to invest in alone, but by building a public facility that then is partly sustained by fees and targeted infrastructure investments by users, the ALS becomes a place where many different partners can come to test new ideas and approaches.

In terms of the innovation pipeline, what the Berkeley Lab and its ALS do is allow a diverse range of researchers to engage in various stages of research under one roof. The unique capabilities offered at the ALS also attract many industry partners and encourages productive public-private collaboration.

A good example of this is the partnership between the lab and the semiconductor industry.

Semiconductor technology is one of the most transformative scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century. Semiconductors are at the heart of what makes a computer work. Their constant advancement is what allows us today to hold the computing power of last generation's supercomputer in our pockets.

However, the manufacturing techniques previously used to produce new, smaller, and more powerful semiconductor products aren't adequate to build the next generation of nano-electronic devices.

So what has happened is a consortium of companies including Intel, IBM, HP, and Dow Chemical--called SEMATECH--came together to leverage the unique capabilities at the lab to advance semiconductor manufacturing technology for next-generation electronics.

As the lab reports, ``[By] tapping into the Center's long term expertise in short wavelength optics and the unique properties of the ALS Synchotron facility, SEMATECH funded the development of the world's highest resolution projection lithography tool and highest performance [extreme-ultraviolet] microscope''--developments that were only possible because of the facilities and expertise at the lab.

Having then developed new tools capable of manufacturing the next generation of semiconductor devices, a company like Intel can take the new technology and scale it up in their own plants.

Of course, there are many variations of public private partnerships that our labs can and have utilized to take ideas from the lab to the market. These two examples--cellulosic ethanol and the advancement of semiconductor manufacturing technology--show us what is really possible by working in partnership with our national labs.

In our bill Senator Rubio and I are trying to expand the flexibility and freedom of all our labs to innovate and build productive partnerships so that every research project has the potential and opportunity to eventually enter the market.

As we see here on the innovation pipeline, the payoff for all this work doesn't come until the very end, so one of the best things we can do is focus our policies to make the movement of ideas through the pipeline as efficient as possible.

While there are plenty of areas where Senator Rubio and I disagree, we have come together on the America INNOVATES Act because we both agree that government has a role to play investing in the early scientific research that can lead to innovations that change our world.

In this bill, we aren't talking about expanding government or calling for new spending or regulation, we are talking about the early science work that only government can fund because there isn't yet a clear payoff for the private sector and finding out how to connect the national labs and the private sector along this innovation pipeline in a better and stronger way to deliver more products to the American marketplace and the world markets.

Once again, I thank my Republican colleague Senator Marco Rubio. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join us in supporting this bipartisan innovation jobs bill.

Mr. President, I rise to speak about a bill introduced today--a bipartisan bill--a bill that will strengthen America's innovation economy.

Over the last 60 years our national laboratories have served as leading centers of research and discovery in America. Today we have 17 DOE labs charged with three broad research missions: science, energy, and national security. Although they have grown and changed since their founding to encompass much broader ranges of work and are successful in carrying out their primary missions, labs are not fully optimized to take part in today's innovation culture. That is a problem, because in this century of rapid change, America's best competitive advantage remains our capacity to innovate.

Over the coming months, I will be talking more about a few things Congress can do to streamline and jumpstart our Nation's hubs of discovery so that we can thrive as a 21st-century innovation economy.

At the top level, it will mean reauthorizing the America COMPETES Act to reaffirm our commitment to the robust national strategy for science and technology programs that will continue to be a critical underpinning of American prosperity.

And one part of that is how our national labs operate, which is why today Senator Rubio and I have introduced the America INNOVATES Act.

Already, our labs have incubated many groundbreaking innovations.

Their research has led to breakthroughs from new Melanoma and HIV/ AIDS treatments to IED detonators that can save the lives of our troops in combat. And that research is critical because although the private sector will continue to be a key source of innovation, the Federal Government has and will continue to play a central role in advancing innovation.

Why is that? Private markets, historically speaking, tend to underinvest in R&D relative to the potential benefits to society. This is especially true in the energy sector.

But, if there is a problem that I have heard since coming to Congress, It is that too often, the great work of our scientists doesn't translate to the marketplace.

Right now, too much groundbreaking science and too many innovative ideas never leave the walls of our national labs, squandering enormous potential in the commercial market.

Now, in our bill, we continue to support our labs' core mission. We are

not proposing anything drastic. What we are doing is modernizing the labs for the 21st century--so ideas in the lab can more effectively become innovations in the market. Luckily, we need only look to the labs themselves for inspiration on how to do this.

We make two broad proposals.

First we are integrating the management of the Department of Energy's science and energy programs to improve the linkages between basic and applied sciences. This will allow the early stages of research and development to be translated more efficiently, and it is something that Secretary Moniz has signaled he supports and is moving forward on.

Second we are giving the national labs more power to work with the private sector to ensure that more scientific discoveries can turn into commercial breakthroughs.

Together, these steps would allow us to streamline the labs' work so it can more quickly and effectively translate into the transformative innovations that can create jobs and grow our economy.

Now, to explain what our proposals intend to achieve, I will walk through what is known as the innovation pipeline, which shows how basic science research can become a world-changing innovation.

First, I will use the example of the great work that scientists at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, CO, are doing to advance cellulosic ethanol technologies.

One of our country's big challenges today is reducing our dependence on foreign oil, and to do that we need new fuel options that we can create here in America.

Cellulosic ethanol is an advanced biofuel with a lot of promise because it is produced from abundant materials like grasses and wood chips as well as other types of biomass and waste. And because these materials are so abundant, cellulosic ethanol has the potential to replace a significant portion of our Nation's petroleum consumption.

The challenge comes, however, because, unlike corn, these cellulosic materials are made of complex starches that are harder to break down into ethanol.

To make the promise of cellulosic ethanol a reality, we needed to develop the enzymes and micro-organisms that could break down and then ferment those complex starches.

That is where the innovation pipeline comes in. At the NREL in Colorado, scientists started at this first step here--basic science. Basic science is very fundamental, it is the study of the elementary principles of the universe--really discovery level science.

Enzymes are large biological molecules that are nature's catalysts-- accelerating metabolic processes that sustain life.

To develop enzymes and micro-organisms capable of converting starchy biomass into cellulosic ethanol, you need to start at the fundamentals of biology and biochemistry. This includes studying the intricate details of the relevant biochemical processes, as well as probing the proteins and amino-acids that form the building blocks of enzymes down to the submolecular level.

At this point, scientists can move into the applied science stage of the pipeline. Applied research generally concerns translating those basic, fundamental principles into an application.

In this example, scientists apply the insights gained from the fundamental basic science stage to develop new enzymes with desired performance traits such as high selectivity, specificity, and stability to enable effective and efficient conversion of the complex starches into ethanol.

Applied research can also include controlled lab-scale demonstrations to test how effectively these newly developed enzymes and micro- organisms can turrijsay, wood chips, into fuel.

Still in the lab and far from full commercial scale production, the kinds of small discoveries that happen at the applied science level act as an early demonstration that something new is possible.

At the applied research stage, we are still far away from creating something ready for the market, but between these two stages our scientists have gone from the basic science of how an idea may work to actually demonstrating that it could work in practice.

At this point now, the private sector is more likely to see its potential value. Our scientists have shown that the technology is possible, and next we move to the commercialization and scaling and deployment phases, where private investors and companies take the technology our lab scientists have developed and make it a product that can succeed in the market.

During the applied research stage at NREL, scientists were hard at work showing that they really could produce cellulosic ethanol efficiently and cheaply--eventually meeting their goal to make it price competitive with conventional fuels in today's commercial market.

That is where we are right now with cellulosic ethanol. Companies across the country, such as DuPont, Poet, and others, are currently building plants to produce cellulosic ethanol at large scale and at competitive prices.

So that is one model of public-private partnerships for innovation-- where the basic and applied science research can begin in the lab and then be transferred to private sector companies who can create a commercial product.

I had the opportunity last year to witness another model of public- private partnerships for innovation at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which is home to the Advanced Light Source, or ALS. The ALS serves thousands of researchers--from private sector scientists to university researchers--who use light sources such as soft xrays, ultraviolet light, and infrared light to conduct a wide range of scientific experiments. Experiments at the ALS are performed at nearly 40 beam lines that can operate simultaneously around the clock and year-round.

The facility's resources would be too expensive for any one company to invest in alone, but by building a public facility that then is partly sustained by fees and targeted infrastructure investments by users, the ALS becomes a place where many different partners can come to test new ideas and approaches.

In terms of the innovation pipeline, what the Berkeley Lab and its ALS do is allow a diverse range of researchers to engage in various stages of research under one roof. The unique capabilities offered at the ALS also attract many industry partners and encourages productive public-private collaboration.

A good example of this is the partnership between the lab and the semiconductor industry.

Semiconductor technology is one of the most transformative scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century. Semiconductors are at the heart of what makes a computer work. Their constant advancement is what allows us today to hold the computing power of last generation's supercomputer in our pockets.

However, the manufacturing techniques previously used to produce new, smaller, and more powerful semiconductor products aren't adequate to build the next generation of nano-electronic devices.

So what has happened is a consortium of companies including Intel, IBM, HP, and Dow Chemical--called SEMATECH--came together to leverage the unique capabilities at the lab to advance semiconductor manufacturing technology for next-generation electronics.

As the lab reports, ``[By] tapping into the Center's long term expertise in short wavelength optics and the unique properties of the ALS Synchotron facility, SEMATECH funded the development of the world's highest resolution projection lithography tool and highest performance [extreme-ultraviolet] microscope''--developments that were only possible because of the facilities and expertise at the lab.

Having then developed new tools capable of manufacturing the next generation of semiconductor devices, a company like Intel can take the new technology and scale it up in their own plants.

Of course, there are many variations of public private partnerships that our labs can and have utilized to take ideas from the lab to the market. These two examples--cellulosic ethanol and the advancement of semiconductor manufacturing technology--show us what is really possible by working in partnership with our national labs.

In our bill Senator Rubio and I are trying to expand the flexibility and freedom of all our labs to innovate and build productive partnerships so that every research project has the potential and opportunity to eventually enter the market.

As we see here on the innovation pipeline, the payoff for all this work doesn't come until the very end, so one of the best things we can do is focus our policies to make the movement of ideas through the pipeline as efficient as possible.

While there are plenty of areas where Senator Rubio and I disagree, we have come together on the America INNOVATES Act because we both agree that government has a role to play investing in the early scientific research that can lead to innovations that change our world.

In this bill, we aren't talking about expanding government or calling for new spending or regulation, we are talking about the early science work that only government can fund because there isn't yet a clear payoff for the private sector and finding out how to connect the national labs and the private sector along this innovation pipeline in a better and stronger way to deliver more products to the American marketplace and the world markets.

Once again, I thank my Republican colleague Senator Marco Rubio. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join us in supporting this bipartisan innovation jobs bill.

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

Madam President, today, this week, we have come together to consider an omnibus appropriations bill. That is a big mouthful--an omnibus appropriations bill--but I hope to lay out in plain language for our folks back home and for those in this Chamber why that matters, why I am excited about it, and why I support it.

This is first time since I joined this body 3 years ago that we have considered one, and it is a real step forward. The agreement we came to on the budget and the agreement I hope we will pass on this appropriations bill means no more shutdowns, no more crises, no more autopilot, at least not for this fiscal year. This bill helps us return to regular order and to the process that, once election day is over, it is our job as the representatives of the people, elected to come together to find common ground, to solve bigger problems together, and to move the Nation forward.

This appropriations bill is the result of a lot of hard work by Members and staff. I must begin first and foremost by thanking the Senate Appropriations Committee chair, Senator Mikulski, and the vice chair, Senator Shelby, as well as the House chairman Rogers, and the ranking member, Congresswoman Lowey, who showed great leadership and worked together on a very tight deadline to craft such a vast and comprehensive bill. Their work follows on the leadership of Senator Murray, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, and Congressman Ryan, of the House Budget Committee, after they came together on a bipartisan budget that paved the way for the Appropriations Committee to reach this deal this week.

I applaud their leadership and thank them for the example they have set. As a member of both the Budget Committee and the Appropriations Committee, it has been a privilege to work with them to craft these bills and ensure we meet our Nation's needs.

The bill before us is, of course, a compromise. It is the essence of a compromise that it is not perfect by any means. There are many who can find fault within it or disappointments aplenty among choices made or not made. It doesn't include--for example, to pick one thing of great importance to my State--enough funding to make real headway on Amtrak's critical infrastructure improvements that I think are essential--just in dealing with the $6 billion backlog of investments needed in aging tunnels, bridges, and tracks.

So while this bill does provide adequate funding for Amtrak today, which I am very pleased about, it puts off those critically needed investments in repairing these essential elements of its infrastructure, which we will inevitably need to make. That is only one example, and in a bill this big there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of the tough tradeoffs that had to be made between House and Senate, between the appropriators, and between the majority and the minority.

But as we consider our vote on this bill and how it does or doesn't meet our own priorities or our State's priorities, we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We need to remember that at least in this case the alternative to this bill isn't our own individual or perfect vision of government--whatever view we might hold. The alternative is crisis after crisis, government that doesn't move forward with the country but treads water as the world passes us by in an increasingly competitive global environment.

What this bill does in a very real way is bring back some stability to our government, to our economy, and it allows us to make important investments in our country's growth. For instance, it takes a number of valuable steps for my home State of Delaware.

It funds meat and poultry inspectors, critical to Delaware's chicken industry and its 13,000 jobs. It funds the next stage of an Army Corps of Engineers project to deepen the Delaware River from 40 to 45 feet so that we are ready and can be competitive when the expansion of the Panama Canal nears completion.

It dedicates funding through the Victims of Child Abuse Act--and I am an original cosponsor of a bill reauthorizing the Victims of Child Abuse Act--for the three children's advocacy centers throughout my State. These centers are critical to delivering justice for the victims of child abuse without harming their healing process.

The bill maintains funding for the Bulletproof Vest Partnership, an initiative that has supplied Delaware police officers with nearly 1,000 bulletproof vests in the past 2 years. Two of those vests, I should add, saved the lives of two officers during a shooting at the New Castle County Courthouse only last spring.

These are only a few of the things for which I am grateful in this broad omnibus bill. Nationally, it also allows us to meet our key priorities of training our workforce for this century, making our communities safer, building a circle of protection around the most vulnerable in our society, and, in combination, making us safer, stronger, and more just.

The investments it makes in America's workforce by funding education programs can last a lifetime. Head Start Programs ensure kids don't fall behind before they have even had a chance. This bill increases that funding by $1 billion to serve 90,000 more kids this year.

There is a competitive grant program to help States and communities find innovative ways to provide high quality preschool options for low- and middle-income families that I am particularly excited about.

In Delaware, we saw the power of this program when we competed for-- and won--Federal funding on a competitive basis for high-quality early education only last year.

The Department of Education's first in the world initiative will help colleges to measure--and thus improve--outcomes, and it brings down costs for students and families. This bill increased our investment in job training programs such as Job Corps and the Veterans' Employment and Training Service, which help everyone from low-income Americans who failed to get on their feet in the job market to veterans who stood for us around the world and have earned our support upon their return.

Next, this bill includes crucial funding that makes our communities safer. We are upping our investment in the COPS program--first championed on this floor by my predecessor Senator Joe Biden. It will put 1,500 more officers on our streets and in our neighborhoods, keeping us safe.

The Violence Against Women Act, which we came together in a bipartisan manner to pass last year, is fully funded. We are taking important steps to stop the scourge of gun violence that affects each and every community: a new comprehensive school safety program I am excited about, new investments to improve background checks, and new training to help local law enforcement react and protect the public from active shooters.

Of course, the second part of making our communities safer is ensuring that justice is delivered in our courts when

crime does happen. Unfortunately, the sequester's cuts to our Federal courts cut the judiciary to the bone, imposing furloughs, and hurting our Nation's justice system by leading to layoffs of hundreds of experienced, seasoned, senior court staff. Yet, thankfully, the bill before us reverses these and many other cuts and will minimize the delays of justice that resulted and that are unacceptable to our Nation.

Finally, this bill allows us to build and sustain what I like to call a circle of protection around the most vulnerable in our society that reflects our shared commitment to each other. Our most basic values: Investments in the WIC Program, for women, infants, and children, will make sure 87,000 more mothers and children will have the food they need at a vital early stage of development. LIHEAP--or the Low-Income Heating and Energy Assistance Program--ensures that low-income families don't freeze during the coldest months of the year, and this bill's funding increases will ensure 400,000 more houses have this critical assistance. And lastly, when we pass this bill, which I pray we will by week's end, we will reverse the sequester's devastating cuts to housing programs and, as a result, prevent more than 100,000 American families from becoming homeless.

Each of these investments in our workforce, in our public safety, and in protection for our most vulnerable, together make up the foundation of a safer, a more just, and a more inclusive society. But when we also combine them with investments in research and innovation and infrastructure, we lay the groundwork for growth and shared prosperity today and tomorrow.

After the last 3 years, which in my experience have been mostly defined by bipartisan gridlock--stopgap budgets, crisis governance-- this bipartisan Appropriations bill allows us to create some stability for our Nation and our economy. I think it reminds us we are a nation that is at its best when we are determined to be open to each other's ideas, to hear each other's concerns and criticisms, and to find ways to work together.

Although there are plenty of areas where I disagree with my Republican colleagues, as I have gotten to know them over the past 3 years we have found many more areas of common good and common work. Let me briefly mention a few of them as I celebrate what I think is the most important aspect of this bill, which is that it is truly bipartisan.

Senator Marco Rubio and I were both elected in 2010 and came to this Chamber at roughly the same time, and we found ways to work together to invest in STEM education and to open pathways to college for young Americans. Senator Hatch and I wrote a bill together called I-Squared-- and we are joined by Senators Klobuchar and Rubio--and this is a bill that helps bring high-skilled workers to our shores and helps invest in STEM education for American citizens. Senator Kirk and I have worked together to create a national manufacturing strategy that focuses our energy and resources on creating manufacturing jobs in America. And just this Monday Senator Roberts of Kansas and I announced our partnership on a new bill to make the research and development tax credit and its funding available to startups and to young innovative companies.

There are so many issues where we can work together to invest in our workforce, to protect the public, to sustain this storied circle of protection around the most vulnerable, to invest in long-term economic growth, and to lift up every community and every American.

I am incredibly thankful for the leadership of Senators Mikulski and Shelby and the way they displayed that leadership with action through this process, by putting aside their differences and finding common ground. I wish to also close with a note of personal thanks to the countless committee staff on both sides who worked tirelessly throughout the holidays to make this bill a reality. With this Omnibus appropriations bill it is my sincere hope we are putting an end to a cycle of manufactured crises and we are sending to the American people and to our markets and to our communities the message that we can and will work together to confront the many challenges that remain here and in the future.

With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the privilege of the floor be granted to Julia Sferlazzo for the pendency of this Congress.