Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, 50 years ago today President Lyndon Johnson challenged a joint session of Congress and the American people to begin a war on poverty. ``Unfortunately,'' President Johnson said, ``many Americans today live on the outskirts of hope. Our task is to replace their despair with opportunity.''

Since President Johnson first issued that call, Congress and our Nation have taken important steps to build and sustain a circle of protection around the most vulnerable in our society. That protection is not as complete or as strong as it can or should be, but through programs such as unemployment insurance--which we are considering this week in this Congress--we are more able to catch our neighbors when they fall and support them as they work to get back to their feet.

Earlier this week this Senate began debate on whether to extend emergency unemployment insurance for the 3,600 Delawareans and more than 1 million American job seekers whose benefits just expired. It is absolutely critical that we approve this extension.

During this fragile but sustained economic recovery, unemployment insurance has been a critical lifeline, one that has prevented millions of unemployed Americans from slipping further, falling into poverty. In 2012, unemployment insurance kept 2.5 million Americans, including 600,000 children, out of poverty. That means without Federal action to extend unemployment insurance, the Nation's poverty rate would have been doubled what it was. These numbers are for 2012, not the height of the recession.

So let's be clear about what we are debating when we discuss an unemployment insurance extension. These are long-term benefits for jobless Americans who have been out of work through no fault of their own for more than 26 weeks. When I say through no fault of their own, I mean it. People cannot get benefits if they are fired for cause. As they receive unemployment insurance benefits, they must diligently search for another job. So when we talk about the millions of long-term unemployed Americans, we are talking about folks who were laid off because of the recession, are fighting to get back on their feet, and rely on those benefits to keep their families afloat, to keep a roof over their head, food on the table, their families together, and sustain them as they continue looking for work.

Yet 2 weeks ago, funding for long-term emergency unemployment insurance benefits ran out. That meant $300 less weekly income for the average job seeker and that meant $400 million left our economy in just the first week.

In Delaware it pulled $877,000 out of our economy. That is money that otherwise would be spent in local grocery stores and our markets.

One of the most vexing comments I have heard in the debate over whether to continue these benefits is that they somehow incentivize people to not bother looking for jobs, to not be serious; they instead lull able-bodied Americans into lives of dependency. Given the people I know in Delaware, that is not just absurd, it is, forgive me, offensive. As President Obama said yesterday, it sells the American people short.

I have met a lot of people in my years of public service. I have heard from and spoken with Delawareans up and down my State who are relying on unemployment benefits that they paid into when employed. Every one of them would trade a job for not relying on unemployment insurance in a heartbeat. Let me share a few stories of Delawareans who have contacted me and shared how hard this has been for them.

Debbie from Middleton, DE, wrote to me that while she is receiving unemployment benefits, she has applied to 156 jobs. She has been interviewed three times. She is 56. She has worked diligently since she was a teenager. She has worked hard. She paid her taxes. She paid into this unemployment insurance system practically her whole life. Yet now when she needs it most, we fail to continue to provide this lifeline of support.

Linda from Newark wrote to me that on just $258 a week her family has been barely able to stay afloat. They are doing everything they can to keep up on their bills, to stay current, but even with unemployment insurance they have had to sell some of their family's treasured possessions and goods. She wrote to me:

This is no way for anyone to live. It's disheartening and

it is difficult to stay motivated to keep searching.

Frankly, she said:

I am thoroughly fed up with being categorized as someone

who lives off the Government by collecting unemployment

benefits.

I agree with her because, frankly, Linda, you paid into these benefits for years. This is what it is there for.

John from Frederica told me he was laid off from the Dover Air Force Base in part because of the sequester and now depends on unemployment benefits while he continues diligently searching for another job. This is a man who is a Navy veteran, was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for our country. Yet right now, because of the partisan gridlock in this Congress, we are not there for him and his family.

The millions of Americans such as Debbie, Linda, and John in Delaware face a very tough job market. Nationally, for every available job there are three job seekers. The longer someone remains unemployed, the harder it becomes for them to find work. The more their skills are out of date, the more difficult the search becomes and the more they need our support to sustain that job search.

I have seen these effects up close and personal in Delaware. In my 3 years as a Senator I have hosted 16 different job fairs to connect Delawareans looking for work with employers looking to hire, and I have been honored to partner with Senator Carper and Congressman Carney in hosting these job fairs. In fact, we are hosting another one in Dover, DE, in just a few weeks.

When you listen to unemployed Delawareans and listen to them talk about their struggle, about how hard it is to keep making ends meet and get a job, you get a sense of how important these jobs are for their survival as families and you get a sense of how much more we can and should be doing to tackle long-term unemployment in America.

As poverty of opportunity and hope afflicts too many of our communities and darkens the lives of too many of our neighbors, let us not suffer in this Chamber from a poverty of imagination, determination, and ambition. On this issue, which is so fundamental to who we are as a nation and to our service to this body, we cannot give in to complacency and apathy. Fighting poverty is hard, and adapting our economy to the realities of a new era is a challenge we have struggled with for more than a generation. It is hard finding out how to realize an economy with growth that is both strong and more equitable, one that is dynamic and creative and 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 every child, but building that economy is surely one of the most urgent and difficult challenges we face. Doing so requires that we put aside our personal politics and ideologies and come together in areas where, until recently, there has been a broad and bipartisan consensus.

I now hear some of my Republican colleagues talk on this floor about the war on poverty, 50 years later, as having been an abject failure. They make sweeping indictments on government

action, putting small government ideology ahead of the shared national goal of fighting poverty. But this perspective misses the point. The original war on poverty was made up of a lot of programs, energetic initiatives that worked at every level of government, some that failed but many others that through steady and determined bipartisan work and steady improvement and refinement over the years have become critical, central, and widely valued strands that hold together our social safety net. Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, unemployment insurance, all of these programs are valued and hold American families together and sustain American job seekers. Bipartisan leaders across the decades have reaffirmed the importance and value of these programs time and time again. These programs, let's remember, are about so much more than lifting people out of poverty. They are about keeping people out of poverty in the first place. We need them to build and strengthen the American middle class, which is one of the greatest legacies of this Nation.

As we search for ways to adapt our fight to new times and new challenges, there is no one way to win the war on poverty President Johnson declared 50 years ago. It is not a question of big or small government, Federal or local action. As President Johnson himself said:

It will not be a short or easy struggle. No single weapon

or strategy will suffice. . . . Poverty is a national

problem. . . . But this attack, to be effective, must be

organized at the State and local level. . . . For the war on

poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in

the field, in every private home, in every public office,

from the courthouse to the White House.

This was not an ideological call for big, centralized government. It was an all-hands-on-deck call, a moral call, for our Nation to meet a national challenge. Although we have made progress since he first addressed this Congress in 1964, his call to combat poverty remains just as important today, even as our challenges have evolved.

We have come a long way since the depths of our own great recession just a few years ago. More than 8 million private sector jobs have been created. There has been more than a three-point drop in the national unemployment rate. We have resurgent energy, housing, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors. Although a few years have passed since our economy sunk to its lowest lows, this crisis remains for those Americans and their families who are still struggling to find a job either for their families' food or to keep a roof over their heads.

This week, while we are debating extending emergency unemployment insurance, we should note this is not only obvious and necessary to do, it is the beginning of our real work of sustaining the war on poverty.

I am proud to be engaged in bipartisan efforts to strengthen the middle class, to focus on jobs and skills and manufacturing. We have to find bipartisan solutions that engage the private and public sectors, Federal and local governments, in putting our people back to work. While we do that, we cannot forget to continue to insist on a circle of protection around the most vulnerable in our society rather than allowing that valued circle to crumble. We have to remember we are all in this together, that ``there but for the grace of God go I,'' as we see those in our community, in our families who are struggling in this recovery.

We know that today it may be our neighbors, tomorrow it may be us. President Johnson called on us to focus on the best of America, the spirit that we hold each other up, the spirit that builds community through mutual sacrifice. As we begin our work in this new year to jump-start our economy and spread hope and opportunity, we must never forget that basic spirit which President Johnson called forth and which has kept this country moving from generation to generation.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor once again to talk about manufacturing jobs. This week, under Senator Amy Klobuchar's leadership, the Joint Economic Committee released a report that thoroughly and thoughtfully lays out why manufacturing jobs have such promise and how Congress can act to help spur manufacturing job creation now and into the future.

The report shows that today manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs, that they pay better than jobs in any other sector in wages and benefits, and that they help create more local service sector jobs, that they contribute more to the local economy, and that manufacturers invest the most in private sector R&D of any sector in our country.

Manufacturing, as the Presiding Officer well knows, has long played an important role in our Nation's economy, has served as our economic backbone, and has built the American middle class. But over the past 60 years, manufacturing in our country has changed, gradually and then dramatically. As our economy and the world have changed, so has the nature of manufacturing and the playing field on which we can and must compete.

Due to global competition and the worst recession since the Great Depression, we lost 6 million manufacturing jobs in the United States in the first decade of this century. We are now on our way back, but we are well short of where we were in 2000. We have gained 550,000 manufacturing jobs over the last 3 years, and that gives me real hope. In just the last 6 months, we have seen new signals that our manufacturing sector continues to be on the rebound.

A new report from the Institute for Supply Management shows the U.S. manufacturing sector grew last month at its fastest pace in 2\1/2\ years, and hiring has reached an 18-month high. The value of our manufacturing exports has grown 38 percent in the last 4 years, and those exports now account for nearly 3 million jobs on American shores.

But, as the Presiding Officer and I well know and as many of our colleagues know, we need to invest more in that success and in that growth, in the private sector and in the public sector.

Overall, this is great news, about the slow, but real, steady recovery of our manufacturing sector. The reason we are coming back is the United States is actually poised to compete in advanced manufacturing, in the manufacturing economy of this century. In the 21st century, manufacturing is fundamentally different than it was in our past. Rather than repeating the same simple tasks over and over, workers must now carry out far more complex and varying tasks. They need to be critical thinkers and problem solvers. They

have to do math and communicate with each other in writing and as a team and work in ways simply not expected 20 or 30 years ago. Crucially, they need to understand the entire manufacturing process in a way that wasn't necessary before. Yes, there are machines doing a lot of work, but we need workers who can oversee them and understand them to keep our steady, growing benefits to increase productivity.

Manufacturers can't rely on someone from outside our country to fix a problem every time there is one. Today they rely on their workers to troubleshoot on the fly. Our workers need to continue to be some of the most productive in the world and, to do that, they need to be more skilled than ever, particularly because they are overseeing highly complex operations.

The manufacturing floor today, as this report reminds us, is no longer the dirty, dingy, dangerous manufacturing workplace of 150 years ago. Today it is clean, high tech, highly productive, and it needs a highly skilled workforce. We can win by training our workers for these jobs.

While some nations engage in a race to the bottom on environmental labor and wage standards, this isn't the playing field we can or should try to win. Fortunately, we already have the tools to lead the way in manufacturing, in an innovation-centered economy.

This Joint Economic Committee report outlines how low-energy costs, due to greatly expanded natural gas supplies, a highly skilled workforce relative to much of the rest of the world, and having still the world's best universities, all in combination give us a real fighting chance. American manufacturing, I am convinced, is poised for a takeoff.

Now we have this report from the Joint Economic Committee which shows us just that. It shows why we should remain optimistic about American manufacturing, if we can simply in this body harness the will to act. This report frankly lays out a lot of why we have created Manufacturing Jobs for America.

Manufacturing Jobs for America is a campaign. It is a campaign to build support for good manufacturing legislation that Democrats and Republicans can agree on. So far, 26 Democratic Senators have come together to contribute 44 bills to a conversation; 31 of those bills have already been introduced in this body, and almost half of them have bipartisan cosponsors. We are actively seeking Republican cosponsors on the rest.

Our goal overall is to generate more and work more closely with Republicans to build consensus for bills that can pass the Senate, pass the House, and go to the White House to become law. We want to see manufacturing bills that can really help put Americans back to work.

I am grateful for the leadership of Senator Debbie Stabenow who, along with her cochair, Senator Lindsey Graham, led the bipartisan manufacturing caucus that is helping take great ideas and bills generated through this initiative and turn them into solid, bipartisan bills.

This Joint Economic Committee report emphasizes that there are four key areas where we have to focus to create manufacturing jobs now and in the future and they are exactly the areas that the Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative centers on as well.

First, we have to strengthen America's workforce. Second, we have to fight for a more level global playing field so we can open markets abroad and compete successfully. Third, we need to make it easier for manufacturers--especially new and small businesses--to access capital, to invest in research and development as well as new equipment and products. Fourth, we can and should do more to ensure a coordinated, all-of-government effort in supporting manufacturing by insisting on a stronger, clearer national manufacturing strategy. Together, across these four areas, the bills in Manufacturing Jobs for America can have a real and substantial impact if they become law.

I believe in the power of this initiative because I have seen the potential of manufacturing up close. In my time in the private sector, I developed a fierce belief in how we can and must act here in Washington to support and spur American private sector manufacturing. Before I came here, much of my work in the private sector was at a manufacturing company, a materials-based science company that makes hundreds of products. At one point I was part of a site location team that had to decide where to locate a new state-of-the-art semiconductor chip packaging manufacturing plant.

What made the difference? In the ultimate decision it was first and foremost we needed a skilled and reliable workforce. Second, we wanted the State, county, and city governments to be responsive and have made investments in infrastructure. While we also of course considered tax credits and training grants, the first two really were the main factors--the skills and capabilities of the workforce at all levels and the responsiveness of the local government, the State government, and the Federal Government in investing in infrastructure.

This experience taught me two things: that the advanced manufacturing sector can thrive in the United States--that facility was located in America, not overseas; and there is a critical role for government to play. So if this Congress makes a concerted, across-the-board push to help create manufacturing jobs in America, I am convinced we can lay a strong foundation for growth today and tomorrow. The opportunity is there, just in front of us. We just need to stop the endless partisan struggles that have dominated this Congress in the last few years and seize the very real, very positive opportunity in front of us--to lay out a bipartisan path forward to strengthen the manufacturing sector in our country.

Together, we can keep our factories humming and lead the way in new industries in the future. We just need the political will to try. That is what this effort, Manufacturing Jobs for America, is all about.

I am so grateful to Senator Klobuchar and the Joint Economic Committee for the Manufacturing Jobs for The Future report and for the vision it lays out, and I appreciate the effort of all of my colleagues who contributed great and strong and clear ideas to this Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative.

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

I came to speak to a bipartisan bill which I hope to take a few minutes to talk about, but first I wish to comment on what is happening or not happening on the floor and the comments of the majority leader.

I have been a Senator for only 3 years, as the Presiding Officer well knows. We were sworn in as a group of those elected to the class of 2010. I just came from an inspiring event where the Vice President, who previously held this seat on behalf of Delaware, gave an award to the former majority leader, a real patriot, a veteran, former Senator Bob Dole. They talked about how compromise, principled compromise, made it possible for Senator McGovern and Senator Dole, folks from opposite ends of the political spectrum, to work together in the interests of hungry children in the United States.

Frankly, what I have seen in the 3 years that I have been in the Senate, the 3 years that we have served together on the Judiciary Committee, has been a slow walk.

There are minority rights in this body, but there are also minority responsibilities. There are majority rights but also majority responsibilities.

I wish to add to the comments of the majority leader that the nominees to serve on the DC Circuit, the nominees to many district court seats, whose confirmations I have either presided over or attended, were not objected to on substantive grounds. I have trouble with the idea that the three empty seats on the DC Circuit do not need to be filled.

I have listened at great length to the arguments about caseload and about workload. As the chair of the courts subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, I presided over the presentation of the Judicial Conference's report on where we need additional judgeships and where we don't.

I will note briefly and in passing that Judge Tymkovich, who presented this report, did not suggest there was some need to reduce the DC Circuit by eliminating these currently vacant spots.

We could go through this chapter and verse. This has been debated to death on this floor. In my view, we have three excellent, qualified candidates. I regret that we have spent so much time burning the clock and that we have had to make changes that ultimately will make it possible for qualified nominees to be confirmed. It is, to me, a subject of some deep concern that we cannot work better together, Republicans and Democrats, to move work forward.

If I might, I would like to move for a moment to an example of exactly the sort of bipartisan bill that we should be able to move to here, that if there weren't this endless obstruction, if we weren't running out the clock on nothing, we might be able to get done together. This is an example of the sort of reaching across the aisle that used to dominate this body when giants such as Dole and McGovern served here but is no longer the case. They are no longer the daily diet of this body. We are no longer reaching across the aisle and finding ways to make our country more competitive, create more manufacturing jobs in partnership with the private sector, and responsibly reduce our deficit.

I was encouraged as a member of the budget conference committee that we seemed to be moving toward enacting a significant--small in scale but significant in its precedence--deal for the Budget Committee that could allow us to go back to regular order for appropriations. But here, as we waste hour after hour running out the clock to confirm nominees, I wonder. I wonder whether we are going to be able to take up, consider, and pass substantive legislation.

Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Tom Carper, Congressman John Carney and myself, I rise today to recognize the Aetna Hose Hook & Ladder Company and its many volunteers and leadership who, on December 17, 2013, will celebrate the 125th anniversary of the company's founding in 1888.

For more than a century, Aetna has provided exemplary firefighting and lifesaving services for residents of Newark, DE. From its humble beginnings at the turn of the century, when the company consisted of a simple, hand-drawn hose cart, the Aetna Hose Hook & Ladder Company has grown to incorporate 5 stations, 17 trucks, and hundreds of members dedicated to ``service for others.''

Prior to 1888, residents were forced to combat fires on their own, until a fire in a woolen mill resulted in the loss of 800 jobs. The disaster prompted the town council to call for the creation of a town fire company. Founded on December 17, 1888 at a meeting of 30 town citizens, Aetna Hose Hook & Ladder Company's first leadership group included John A. Mullin as chairman, Isaac J. Moore as secretary, William H. Simpers as president, and Joseph T. Willis as foreman--the 19th century term for fire chief. Dues for active members began at $1, while contributing members paid $2 per year. The company was incorporated on December 13, 1889, with 57 charter members.

During its humble first years, Aetna's fire alarm system consisted of ringing Catholic Church, academy and college bells. In 1893, the company purchased its first hose carriage and in 1901, it received its first $250 appropriation from the town of Newark, prompting a celebratory parade.

The fire company soon became an integral part of the Newark community, hosting banquets, carnivals, and bingo nights to raise money for equipment and firefighting gear. Formed in 1949, the Aetna Ladies Auxiliary has provided unwavering support for the company's members, from fundraising to providing hot meals for firefighters and their guests.

Today, Aetna is proud to be home to more than 20 highly decorated firefighters, EMS, and EMT members. Recent citations include Heroic EMT of the Year to Jeff Evans, Eric Barsky, Paul Testa, Steve Walls, and Garland Church, and Lt. John P. Murphy; EMT of the Year to Rob ``Dusty'' Sweetman, Joshua Rainey, Michael Shao, Kevin Eichinger, Theodorica Cenizal, Ann Gillespie, Arman Fardanesh, Laurel Petchel, and Melanie Patnaude; and Lifetime Achievement in EMS Awards to Diane Silverman, E. David Bailey, and Gene Niland. Aetna is also the home to 12 EMS Top Responders, including 4-time winner Eric B. Barsky.

The Delaware congressional delegation is proud to recognize the Aetna Hose Hook & Ladder Company and its team of first responders for 125 years of honorable service to the community of Newark, DE.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak on the tragedy, on the ongoing crisis of sexual assault in our Armed Forces and what I believe we must do. There are several options before us, each of which has been the subject of lengthy and passionate debate, a debate that I think is healthy, and needed, and welcome here in this Chamber.

I commend my many colleagues--Chairman Levin and Senator Inhofe, Senator McCaskill and Senator Ayotte--for the very real progress, the very significant steps taken both in the base bill, the NDAA, and in the amendments to be offered by Senators McCaskill and Ayotte, serious and important steps forward to protect victims, to ensure that commanders are held accountable and to criminalize retaliation. A wide range of important and significant reforms that will make real progress towards addressing the ongoing decades-old scourge of sexual assault in the United States military.

As was said recently on the floor by another of my colleagues, this disagreement today is over one of more than a dozen important and needed reforms. But in the end, we have to decide. I believe the measure offered by Senator Gillibrand of New York, of which I am a cosponsor, is the right additional path forward. Because at the end, here is the bottom line: Sexual assault has been a disease, a corrosive and widespread and horribly negative influence on our military that has simply not been effectively treated.

I think this significant, dramatic step is the needed driver for extensive reform. I understand that the chain of command is essential, that it is central to the proper functioning and order of the military, especially during war time. In fact, the chain of command is nearly sacred.

But ensuring that our spouses and our siblings and our children can serve with honor and not have to face another enemy within our ranks is sacred. This is, in the end, a debate about justice--justice within our own Armed Forces, justice so we can fulfill that sacred duty of protecting men and women in uniform as well as they protect us.

Despite many years of good-faith efforts by leaders in our Armed Forces to work within the parameters of our current system, literally tens of thousands of sexual assaults are still occurring annually within our Armed Forces.

That is, frankly, unacceptable and it reflects a fundamental breakdown in order and discipline that in my view we cannot tolerate anymore. The current system, in this important and vital way, is failing. I understand the intense desire our leaders feel to fix what was broken and for our military leaders to atone for taking their eyes off the ball, to paraphrase the testimony of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

But, once again, this debate is not about them, about their commitment or about their strategy or about their determination. It is about justice. In America, justice must be blind. Whether someone receives it or not should not depend on the fact of whether or not he or she serves in the military rather than in other workplaces. We know the chilling facts, that according to the Department of Defense's own Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, 50 percent of female victims state they did not report the crime in the first place because they believed nothing would be done, and one-quarter or 25 percent who received unwanted sexual contact indicated the offender was in their chain of command.

In my view, we strengthen our military when victims of sexual assault have the confidence to come forward and to report crimes and when we remove fear and stigma from the process.

We strengthen our military when we are able to deliver fair and impartial justice on behalf of victims.

When we know the military chain of command in this one area is failing, we should not continue to tolerate an exception we would not make in other settings. I came to this decision with great reluctance, recognizing as many in my family have, that the importance of the chain of command, the importance of respecting the unique and different traditions and structures of the military is something that we should only come to with great hesitation.

One of the responsibilities of serving in the Senate that I take seriously is my annual responsibility to review and approve candidates for the military academies who are selected by my independent military academy advisory board, and personally calling the top candidates to inform them that they will be the ones--of the dozens and dozens of highly qualified competitors, they will be the ones selected to go to the Merchant Marine Academy, the Air Force Academy; to Annapolis, the United States Naval Academy, or to the U.S. Military Academy, to West Point.

This is a moving experience each of the 3 years I have had the chance to do this. But this past year, the three top candidates for West Point, for Annapolis or for the Air Force Academy were all women-- impressive, compelling, determined to serve our Nation.

Meeting with them and their families, the nervous and proud parents of these confident cadet candidates is also a great annual experience. It reminds me always of my responsibility to them. I promised their parents that we will support and respect them and their service. When we speak to the cadets and thank them for their willingness to serve, I am reminded we have a responsibility to not send them into an institution where they will face threats that we can and should address.

I believe I have a responsibility to send them into an institution I know is well equipped to respond strongly and swiftly to threats to their safety. Yet, today, I am not able to uphold that responsibility because we have not protected our men and women in uniform from sexual assault.

I thought of my picks for the service academies when I heard another Senator say to General Dempsey that the Senator would not advise a parent to encourage his or her daughter to join the military. What made this decision difficult for me to join Senator Gillibrand on this particular amendment was an unfortunate, tragic case.

Last spring while I was trying to decide which path to follow on this bill, my office received a gut-wrenching call from the father of a young woman serving honorably in our military. He was calling against his daughter's wishes, and only as a desperate last resort.

She had been the victim of sexual assault and, as so many others, reported it to her commanding officer up the chain of command. As so many others, her case went nowhere. Her by-the-book reporting and patient waiting for results was met with delays, excuses, and nonresponse. Ultimately, during these repeated delays, she was physically assaulted after she had warned leadership she feared for her safety.

We took action and, ultimately in this instance, justice was done. A chain of command such as that isn't strengthening unit cohesion and morale, it is harming it.

After this particularly troubling case, I made a decision to join Senator Gillibrand as a cosponsor, to say to all of us, how can we accept this? How can this situation that has gone on for years be tolerated? How can we justify the status quo?

I am grateful for the leadership of the many Senators on the Armed Services Committee and throughout this body who have taken real steps to add significant improvements to the UCMJ and to the code that underlies our military and the requirements for leadership in the service to take on and tackle these very real problems of sexual assault in the military.

In my view, taking decisions out of the chain of command should only be done under the most serious of circumstances, but that is exactly what we have. We wouldn't find justice if this was the way that any other workplace in America operated. How can we argue that we have justice today for these thousands of victims in our military? The men and women who dedicate themselves to keeping us safe and protecting our rights deserve equal dedication on our part to their safety and to those same rights.

I wish to speak about three bills I am offering as amendments to the NDAA that all relate to a topic I have spoken to many times on the floor, to manufacturing and manufacturing jobs.

The first is the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, a bill I introduced last week with Illinois Senator Mark Kirk. It enjoys the support of the Presiding Officer, as well as Senator Blunt and Senator Stabenow. It is a simple but important objective, to require the creation of a national manufacturing strategy.

We need to know our country's direction as we try to support the growth in manufacturing. We have grown more than half a million manufacturing jobs in the last 3 years, an encouraging sign, but one we need to strengthen and support with a coordinated strategy between the Federal Government, State governments, and private sector to align all our investments in research and development, new skills, and new infrastructure, to make sure they are all heading in the right direction. Our leading competitors all have successful and well- deployed national manufacturing strategies. Whether Germany, China, India, South Africa, or Russia, they have all thoroughly developed, deeply researched, and prominently successful strategies, which we lack.

Our amendment would require that every 4 years the Secretary of Commerce, advised by a board of 15 different folks, pull together and think through, research, and then deliver a national manufacturing strategy.

This amendment is bipartisan, simple, does not cost the Federal Government a dime and doesn't create a new program, Like the next two amendments I will speak about, it is a commonsense measure that I hope we will adopt.

Secondly, I wish to speak to an amendment I am cosponsoring with Congressman Blunt to ensure small businesses are not subject to conflicting guidance from Federal agencies.

In the 1970s Congress passed a measure for the Small Business Administration to ensure that small businesses that get contracts from the government aren't actually fronts for much larger companies.

Last year we passed similar but distinctly different rules for the Department of Defense. Most of the time these two sets of rules can peaceably coexist, but in a few cases they come into conflict, creating significant compliance difficulties for very small business. This amendment would say that when both sets of rules apply to a small business contract, the SBA rules would apply, while DOD rules would not.

This amendment is bipartisan, has no cost, and will help small businesses focus on effectively delivering products and services without worrying about compliance.

Last, I wish to speak about an amendment I am cosponsoring with Senator Booker of New Jersey to ensure that our defense and intelligence communities maintain their vital technological edge. This is an important measure that would create more opportunities to train America's best talent and pave the way to new innovations.

Recently, the commission on R&D in the U.S. Intelligence Committee reviewed our current and future R&D capacity to support our intelligence community's vital work. Their unclassified report shows, in fact, that we have insufficient funding and a critical deficiency of human capital, of skilled workers, and the cutting-edge thinkers we need in this area. Specifically, for one example it said we may not have the kind and number of people we need to build the next generation of satellites to gather and process the intelligence upon which our national security relies.

There is currently a program run by the Department of Defense designed to address one element of this problem. It is called the Science, Mathematics & Research for Transformation Scholarship Program, or the SMART Scholarship Program. This amendment calls on the Secretary of Defense to report back to Congress on two things: Whether the SMART Scholarship Program, or similar fellowship and scholarship programs, are, in fact, providing

the necessary number of undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math to meet the recommendations of the commission's report, and to recommend how those programs can be concretely improved. Those amendments have already passed the House of Representatives by a voice vote and would be an important if small step toward paving the way toward job creation and ensuring our national security now and into the future.

I urge my colleagues to support these amendments.

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate on these important issues.

I yield the floor.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I come to the floor again today to talk about jobs, about manufacturing jobs, about the high-quality, high- skill wage jobs America needs for today and for the future.

Today I have introduced a bill which shows that dealing with our ongoing challenges of supporting our manufacturing sector and growing jobs in our manufacturing sector can have bipartisan solutions. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois joined me in introducing the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, which has a simple but important objective: to require the creation of a national manufacturing strategy.

Today more than 12 million Americans are directly employed in manufacturing. As I have said on the floor before as part of our Manufacturing Jobs for America Initiative, manufacturing jobs are good jobs. They are high-skilled jobs, they are high-wage jobs, they are high-benefit jobs, and they have a terrific secondary benefit in terms of the other support and service sector jobs that come along with manufacturing jobs in a community.

We need to know the direction we are heading as a country as we try to support the growth of manufacturing. We have grown more than half a million manufacturing jobs in the last 3 years. That is an encouraging sign. We are one of the most productive in the output of our manufacturing sector of all the countries in the world.

What we have lacked is a very coordinated strategy between the Federal Government, State governments, and the private sector to align all of our investments--our investments in research and development, our investments in new skills, our investments in infrastructure--to make sure they are all heading in the right direction.

Do our competitors have national manufacturing strategies? Absolutely. Germany, China, India, South Africa,

and Russia all have thoroughly developed, deeply researched, and prominently successful strategies for how to accelerate and sustain manufacturing as a key part of their economies.

This bill would amend the America COMPETES Act. It would require every 4 years that the Secretary of Commerce, advised by a board of 15 different folks, pull together and think through, research, and then deliver a national manufacturing strategy. This doesn't require new programs. It doesn't even necessarily require new funding or new Federal expenditures. It only requires that we coordinate all the different areas where the Federal Government is investing in supporting manufacturing and where State and local governments are working in partnership with the private sector. This may be a small but vital step toward giving the lift we need for our manufacturing sector to continue its sustained growth of the last few years.

Why is a manufacturing strategy essential? Because we have a couple of areas where, frankly, we are falling short--in infrastructure, in access to capital, and in skills. Having a highly skilled manufacturing workforce is one of the things we need to do if we are going to win the fight to regain our international prominence as the leading global manufacturing country.

The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte, a global consulting firm, have both independently concluded that there are as many as 600,000 manufacturing jobs in America today that are unfilled because of a lack of a workforce with the relevant skills. The Society of Manufacturing Engineers estimates that number could increased to 3 million by 2015.

So a focus through a national strategy and through some facilitating investments and legislation by this body and the House and by enactment by the President and investments across-the-board could deal with these important skill gaps.

Why are there skill gaps in manufacturing? Many Americans have a misconception about what manufacturing is like today. They have a picture in their heads of manufacturing from 10, 20, or 30 years ago when it required simple labor, when it required repeated routine tasks such as simply putting on a bolt or affixing a particular piece onto a vehicle, where there wasn't any teamwork, there wasn't any continuous improvement required, and there weren't analytical skills required. That was the manufacturing line of the past, not of today and certainly not of the future. In fact, the skills required to be successful in modern advanced manufacturing are quite different from what they were 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Today one has to work as part of a team and be able to troubleshoot and problem-solve.

There are fewer people working on manufacturing lines, but they are higher in productivity because the analytical skills they are bringing to the job are greater than they have ever been before. That is also why manufacturing can be a more satisfying career, a more rewarding place to work than it was in the past, because it engages the whole human being. It engages the whole worker. It allows them to have ownership of the quality of the finished product.

One of the lessons American automobile manufacturing learned in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as it faced the threat of higher quality auto manufacturing elsewhere in the world was to not only retool the manufacturing line but to empower the individual worker to be engaged in quality control.

Those of us here in the Senate who worked in the manufacturing industry know what it meant to have gone through a process where we had to certify. You had to go through a searching auditing process to be able to demonstrate, if you were a component supplier or if you were part of a supply chain, that you were meeting world-class standards. In fact, the ISO 9000 system--the International Organization for Standardization--and its 9000 series audits that swept through the country over 20 years and ended up resulting in a higher quality of manufacturing was just the first of a number of steps toward requiring those who were working in manufacturing facilities to have a higher level of skills.

One of the ways in which we have an ongoing challenge is that manufacturers--medium and small manufacturers with whom I visited up and down the State of Delaware--don't know the level of skills and the quality of skills of young people they wish to hire who may have just finished high school or might have taken a certificate course with a community college. We don't have a transportable, translatable certificate for basic manufacturing skills.

One of the innovations of the IT industry was a whole series of skills certifications that allow someone to know, when they are hiring a young person to do office support for IT or when they are hiring someone to be a network administrator, whether they have the practical skills they need to do that job and do it well. They can't guess that by where they went to high school or what courses they took at a college. We don't have a similar sort of reliable, transportable, translatable, manufacturing skill certification process. That may be a part of this national manufacturing strategy.

We certainly have heard from manufacturers large and small--not only in Delaware but around the country--about what they need, what would put a floor beneath their growth and would allow them to be globally competitive. No. 1 would be a stronger, skilled workforce; No. 2 would be more access to capital; and No. 3 would be more and better access on a fair basis to a global market and a global economy.

We have had a great first couple of weeks with the Manufacturing Jobs for America Initiative. More than 25 Senators have contributed more than 40 bills. Many of these are broad or bold or bipartisan bills that contain the ideas that I think can sustain and grow manufacturing in the United States going forward. It is a growing menu of bills--bills that are bipartisan and that I believe not only need but deserve a vote on the floor later in this Congress.

I am grateful to Senator Kirk for partnering with me in introducing this bill today, the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, and I am hopeful it will pick up more bipartisan sponsors in the days and weeks ahead. I also hope, working in partnership with the Manufacturing Caucus, ably led by Senator Stabenow and Senator Graham, we will begin to hammer out the bipartisan bills that will deserve a vote on this floor and that will ultimately reach enactment through the Congress and by signature of our President. With that, we might well be able to deliver on what we hear most often from our constituents: Help us grow high-quality jobs in this country.

Mr. President, I come to the floor again today to talk about jobs, about manufacturing jobs, about the high-quality, high- skill wage jobs America needs for today and for the future.

Today I have introduced a bill which shows that dealing with our ongoing challenges of supporting our manufacturing sector and growing jobs in our manufacturing sector can have bipartisan solutions. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois joined me in introducing the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, which has a simple but important objective: to require the creation of a national manufacturing strategy.

Today more than 12 million Americans are directly employed in manufacturing. As I have said on the floor before as part of our Manufacturing Jobs for America Initiative, manufacturing jobs are good jobs. They are high-skilled jobs, they are high-wage jobs, they are high-benefit jobs, and they have a terrific secondary benefit in terms of the other support and service sector jobs that come along with manufacturing jobs in a community.

We need to know the direction we are heading as a country as we try to support the growth of manufacturing. We have grown more than half a million manufacturing jobs in the last 3 years. That is an encouraging sign. We are one of the most productive in the output of our manufacturing sector of all the countries in the world.

What we have lacked is a very coordinated strategy between the Federal Government, State governments, and the private sector to align all of our investments--our investments in research and development, our investments in new skills, our investments in infrastructure--to make sure they are all heading in the right direction.

Do our competitors have national manufacturing strategies? Absolutely. Germany, China, India, South Africa,

and Russia all have thoroughly developed, deeply researched, and prominently successful strategies for how to accelerate and sustain manufacturing as a key part of their economies.

This bill would amend the America COMPETES Act. It would require every 4 years that the Secretary of Commerce, advised by a board of 15 different folks, pull together and think through, research, and then deliver a national manufacturing strategy. This doesn't require new programs. It doesn't even necessarily require new funding or new Federal expenditures. It only requires that we coordinate all the different areas where the Federal Government is investing in supporting manufacturing and where State and local governments are working in partnership with the private sector. This may be a small but vital step toward giving the lift we need for our manufacturing sector to continue its sustained growth of the last few years.

Why is a manufacturing strategy essential? Because we have a couple of areas where, frankly, we are falling short--in infrastructure, in access to capital, and in skills. Having a highly skilled manufacturing workforce is one of the things we need to do if we are going to win the fight to regain our international prominence as the leading global manufacturing country.

The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte, a global consulting firm, have both independently concluded that there are as many as 600,000 manufacturing jobs in America today that are unfilled because of a lack of a workforce with the relevant skills. The Society of Manufacturing Engineers estimates that number could increased to 3 million by 2015.

So a focus through a national strategy and through some facilitating investments and legislation by this body and the House and by enactment by the President and investments across-the-board could deal with these important skill gaps.

Why are there skill gaps in manufacturing? Many Americans have a misconception about what manufacturing is like today. They have a picture in their heads of manufacturing from 10, 20, or 30 years ago when it required simple labor, when it required repeated routine tasks such as simply putting on a bolt or affixing a particular piece onto a vehicle, where there wasn't any teamwork, there wasn't any continuous improvement required, and there weren't analytical skills required. That was the manufacturing line of the past, not of today and certainly not of the future. In fact, the skills required to be successful in modern advanced manufacturing are quite different from what they were 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Today one has to work as part of a team and be able to troubleshoot and problem-solve.

There are fewer people working on manufacturing lines, but they are higher in productivity because the analytical skills they are bringing to the job are greater than they have ever been before. That is also why manufacturing can be a more satisfying career, a more rewarding place to work than it was in the past, because it engages the whole human being. It engages the whole worker. It allows them to have ownership of the quality of the finished product.

One of the lessons American automobile manufacturing learned in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as it faced the threat of higher quality auto manufacturing elsewhere in the world was to not only retool the manufacturing line but to empower the individual worker to be engaged in quality control.

Those of us here in the Senate who worked in the manufacturing industry know what it meant to have gone through a process where we had to certify. You had to go through a searching auditing process to be able to demonstrate, if you were a component supplier or if you were part of a supply chain, that you were meeting world-class standards. In fact, the ISO 9000 system--the International Organization for Standardization--and its 9000 series audits that swept through the country over 20 years and ended up resulting in a higher quality of manufacturing was just the first of a number of steps toward requiring those who were working in manufacturing facilities to have a higher level of skills.

One of the ways in which we have an ongoing challenge is that manufacturers--medium and small manufacturers with whom I visited up and down the State of Delaware--don't know the level of skills and the quality of skills of young people they wish to hire who may have just finished high school or might have taken a certificate course with a community college. We don't have a transportable, translatable certificate for basic manufacturing skills.

One of the innovations of the IT industry was a whole series of skills certifications that allow someone to know, when they are hiring a young person to do office support for IT or when they are hiring someone to be a network administrator, whether they have the practical skills they need to do that job and do it well. They can't guess that by where they went to high school or what courses they took at a college. We don't have a similar sort of reliable, transportable, translatable, manufacturing skill certification process. That may be a part of this national manufacturing strategy.

We certainly have heard from manufacturers large and small--not only in Delaware but around the country--about what they need, what would put a floor beneath their growth and would allow them to be globally competitive. No. 1 would be a stronger, skilled workforce; No. 2 would be more access to capital; and No. 3 would be more and better access on a fair basis to a global market and a global economy.

We have had a great first couple of weeks with the Manufacturing Jobs for America Initiative. More than 25 Senators have contributed more than 40 bills. Many of these are broad or bold or bipartisan bills that contain the ideas that I think can sustain and grow manufacturing in the United States going forward. It is a growing menu of bills--bills that are bipartisan and that I believe not only need but deserve a vote on the floor later in this Congress.

I am grateful to Senator Kirk for partnering with me in introducing this bill today, the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, and I am hopeful it will pick up more bipartisan sponsors in the days and weeks ahead. I also hope, working in partnership with the Manufacturing Caucus, ably led by Senator Stabenow and Senator Graham, we will begin to hammer out the bipartisan bills that will deserve a vote on this floor and that will ultimately reach enactment through the Congress and by signature of our President. With that, we might well be able to deliver on what we hear most often from our constituents: Help us grow high-quality jobs in this country.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Bryan Stephan, an intern in my office, be granted floor privileges for the duration of today's session.

Mr. President, I come to the floor once again to talk about jobs and economic growth.

We are continuing to see signs of a steadily improving economy, with more than 200,000 jobs created last month in the jobs report just released last Friday. Of those, 19,000 were new manufacturing jobs. We have had 43 straight months of private sector job growth, but the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high and sadly particularly for those who are long-term unemployed.

Earlier today the Budget Conference Committee met, and we heard from Congressional Budget Office Director Dr. Elmendorf. He let us know that in his view, the uncertainty--the lack of clarity about the path forward for all of us here, for the solutions we need for the budget and for the deficit--is one of the greatest drags on job creation and on competitiveness for our country and our economy.

In our Budget Conference Committee, we need to come together and reach a balanced budget deal that repeals sequester and allows the Appropriations Committee--ably led by Chairman Mikulski--to move forward with an Omnibus appropriations bill for this fiscal year. We cannot afford, in my view, another long-term continuing resolution at the current sequester levels.

As we heard today from Dr. Elmendorf, and as we have heard from other sources, the sequester will have killed 750,000 jobs by the end of the year, and next year these ongoing, steady, grinding cuts could kill another 800,000. These are jobs. These are investments by the Federal Government that could be helping the private sector create jobs in repairing our crumbling infrastructure. In Delaware alone, we have 175 deficient bridges being neglected. These are jobs that help families to put food on the table. In Kent County, DE, where Dover Air Force base is, sequester has hurt those who serve our Nation who operate the base and serve our country valiantly. These are jobs that could be going to help research a cure for cancer. NIH supported more than 500 jobs in Delaware in 2011. Now cuts are costing those jobs and setting us back in the fight to find a cure for cancer and many other diseases.

Sequester has been devastating to Delaware and the whole Nation. We need to replace it with a smarter, more balanced set of spending reforms that maintains investments that will allow our country to be competitive. In particular, if I might, we need to refocus on jobs by investing in infrastructure and focusing on manufacturing.

In my view, the 19,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector that we just learned were created in the last month were a promising development but far from as many as we should be filling. Why? Because manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs. They pay more in wages and benefits. They help create secondary local service jobs. They contribute more to the local economy. And manufacturers invest more in private R&D than any other sector in our economy.

Mr. President, as you know, before I came here to the Senate and before my service in county government, I spent 8 years with a manufacturing company in Delaware. At one point I was part of a large site location team that went around the country to try to decide where to build a new state-of-the-art semiconductor chip packaging manufacturing plant. To make a long story short, in the end we decided on a location where there was a skilled and reliable workforce, a responsive government that invested in the local infrastructure, and certainly we considered other factors--tax rates and incentives offered by the State and local government--but really the skill of the workforce and the quality of the infrastructure were absolutely essential to the decision we made--a surprising decision in terms of where we ultimately located. We invested and were able to get up and running a state-of-the-art plant in record time and were able to contribute significantly to local employment and the tax base. This taught me a lot about the significance of infrastructure and workforce skills.

If I could mention this, the World Economic Forum ranked the United States 25th overall in infrastructure, a key drag on our competitiveness. The American Society of Civil Engineers says we are falling behind by $250 billion a year in deferred maintenance, in investments not made by Federal, State, and local government. In my view, the case for infrastructure investment is a no-brainer. This is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing and that the sequester is preventing us from doing, making wise, timely, and needed investments in improving our infrastructure.

Another critical foundation for growth, as we saw, is a skilled and adaptable workforce. We can be the world's manufacturing leader again but not without investing in workforce skills and in workforce training. There are many programs that can help make this possible. One I like to point to is the Federal, State, and local partnership called the Manufacturing Extension Partnership that helps make it possible for university-based researchers to partner with local manufacturers to deliver skills training that keeps them at the cutting edge, that makes them more productive.

In today's modern manufacturing workplace, there are fewer people, but they are more productive because of their skills. Back in August I visited a new facility, the ILC Grayling plastics manufacturing plant in Seaford, DE, which is a great example of what it will take for America's manufacturing resurgence to continue and grow. This plant has already brought more than 100 jobs to Sussex, DE. These are not the manufacturing jobs of the past. The men and women working on this

line need to be able to collaborate and communicate, to do advanced math and adequate quality control work and oversee high-tech machinery and have an intimate understanding of the products they are working with. In the end, this company looks forward to growing, to probably doubling the number of jobs in this facility in Sussex County. To me, in an even more exciting development, these are jobs that had left the United States to go south to a lower wage country and that have been brought back, brought back from Juarez, Mexico, to Seaford, DE, where there are now Delawareans employed in this newly expanded manufacturing facility.

Let me conclude by simply saying that here in Congress we have the opportunity, if we work together across the aisle, to find a pathway toward making these investments in the skills of our workforce, in the infrastructure of our country, that will help grow our economy and help create good manufacturing jobs today and tomorrow.

One of the core challenges we face in the budget conference committee is to find a path forward that will respond to the call that I hear up and down the State of Delaware, and I presume my colleagues hear from their home States, that we should make principled compromises that allow us to invest again, to replace the sequester with a more responsible and balanced package of revenue and cuts that allow us to return to investing in the skills and infrastructure necessary to grow our economy.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about jobs-- about manufacturing jobs. As we all know, manufacturing jobs are high- quality jobs. Manufacturing jobs come with higher pay and higher benefits. Manufacturing jobs help create other local service sector jobs, and manufacturing jobs contribute more to the local economy than jobs in any other sector. Beyond that, manufacturers invest the most of any industry sector in research and development, which is critical to America's continued growth and our security as a leading innovation economy.

Last week 21 Senate colleagues and I joined in a new initiative called the Manufacturing Jobs for America to help create good manufacturing jobs here at home today and tomorrow. It has grown out of 25 Senators who have all contributed different policy ideas. This is not one big megabill with dozens of sponsors, but just one bill. Instead, it is a constellation of 40 different proposals. Some of them have already been introduced as bills, and half of those that have been introduced are bipartisan. These bills illustrate some of our best ideas about how we can work together across the aisle to provide badly needed support for our growing manufacturing sector here in the United States.

There are 4 different areas these 40 different proposals fall into, and I wanted to talk about 1 of them today. Three of them are: How do we open markets abroad? How do we strengthen America's 21st century manufacturing workforce? How do we create a long-term environment for growth through a manufacturing strategy? The fourth is: How do we ensure access to capital?

Of the four I just mentioned, I want to speak about access to capital. As any business owner knows, you cannot ensure the long-term growth and vitality of your business unless you have capital to invest--whether in research and development, new workers, new products, or new equipment to expand into new markets. Access to capital is absolutely essential to manufacturing jobs for America.

The three bills I am going to talk about today, which are part of this constellation of 40 different proposals, would each expand access to capital for manufacturers in different ways.

Let me start with the Startup Innovation Credit Act. This is an existing bipartisan bill I have introduced, along with Senators Enzi, Rubio, Blunt, and Moran, who are all Republicans, and Senators Schumer, Stabenow, and Kaine, all, like me, Democrats. Although we represent different parties, come from different parts of the country, and have different backgrounds, we have all come together to strengthen our economy and in particular to support innovation and entrepreneurship.

One way we do that now is to support private sector innovation and manufacturing through the research and development tax credit. The R&D tax credit generates new products and industries, benefiting other sectors. But there is a critical gap in the existing and longstanding R&D tax credit. It is not available to startups because they are not yet profitable. This is a tax credit you can only take if you have a tax liability and are profitable.

We worked together--Senator Enzi and I, and the other cosponsors--to fix this hole with a relatively simple tweak, and that is what the Startup Innovation Credit Act does. It allows companies to claim the R&D tax credit against their employment tax liability rather than in income tax liability--a corporate income tax liability. Supporting small innovative companies in their critical early stages of research and development could unleash further innovations and unleash greater growth that would spur good job creation for Americans in the long run.

Between 1980 and 2005, all net new jobs created in the United States were created by firms 5 years old or less. In total, that was about 40 million jobs over those 25 years. This credit is specifically designed with those new young firms in mind--those early-stage firms that are the font of the greatest source of creativity and jobs. It is limited to those companies that are 5 years old or less, and it is limited to being an offset against their W-2 liability so we can provide some access for early-stage startups to this R&D credit that encourages them to hire more folks and grow more quickly--just a part of Manufacturing Jobs for America.

The second bill I would like to talk about today is the Master Limited Partnership Parity Act. It levels the playing field as far as getting access credit. Instead of giving smaller, early-stage startup companies the same access to capital that larger, more mature firms have, this bill levels the playing field in the energy sector. It levels the playing field, in particular, for clean energy firms.

This is bipartisan as well. I introduced it with Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow as my lead cosponsor and Republican Senators Jim Moran and Lisa Murkowski. I am grateful for their persistent and engaged leadership on this bill. I am thrilled that in the last couple of days Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu and Republican Senator Susan Collins signed on as cosponsors as well.

The MLP Parity Act allows us to have an ``all of the above'' energy strategy. As I presided in my first 2 years--as I served on the Energy Committee--there are many Senators, Republican and Democrat, who think we should not pick winners and losers in technology and we should be promoting an ``all of the above'' energy strategy. This bill makes that possible in clean energy financing and in preserving a widely used tool for existing traditional energy financing. Oil and gas will play a significant role in our Nation's energy picture for the foreseeable future, but right now we don't have a level playing field between renewables and between oil and gas and pipelines.

For nearly 30 years, traditional nonrenewable sources of energy have had access to master limited partnerships. MLPs give natural gas, oil, and coal companies access to private capital at a lower cost. That is something that capital-intensive projects, such as pipelines, badly need. I would argue that alternative energy products need that as well; in fact, in some ways more than ever.

Last night I spoke to a group of board members at the National Academies of Science, and what we spoke about was how much technology has

developed and sped up in the clean energy space, but how financial innovation has not kept pace. This has held back renewable energy and investments in energy efficiency even as technology has made energy production and distribution and energy efficiency cheaper to achieve.

Expanding access through this broad bipartisan bill to low-cost, long-term capital would be an important step to letting new energy sources take off and letting them compete on a level playing field with all sources of energy. That is exactly what the MLP Parity Act intends to do.

Last but not least, I was proud to be able to join a number of other Senators in cosponsoring the Small Brew Act. Senators Cardin and Begich, Senators Collins and Murkowski, Democrats and Republicans, have worked together to give small brewers a leg up by lowering the excise tax they face on the beer they produce.

Small Brewers, such as Dogfish Head in my home State of Delaware, are big job creators in communities across the country. As Senator Cardin said on the floor earlier this year, ``While some people may think this is a bill about beer, it is really about jobs.'' And I would say jobs in manufacturing.

Small and independent brewers today employ more than 100,000 Americans and pay more than $3 billion in wages and benefits. Sam Calagione, the owner of Dogfish Head Brewery in my home State of Delaware, now employs 180 workers at their facility in Milton. Of course, what they are manufacturing is not a new or innovative or recently invented product. People have been brewing beer for thousands of years. Sam has done a remarkable job of coming up with a very broad range of different brews, and, in fact, of bringing back brews that are centuries or millennia old by recovering recipes for fantastic and tasty beers.

What I am focusing on today is about the expanse. This particular company has invested $50 million in a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. When I recently visited, I was struck at how different it is from the beer bottling plant of the past, from what some may have seen on ``Laverne and Shirley'' or what they would imagine a traditional manufacturing plant to look like.

Those folks who work on the manufacturing line at this particular facility have to be able to use programmable logic controls. They have to be able to do quality control and math, and to communicate as a team. They have to communicate in a way that puts them at the cutting edge of advanced manufacturing. This highlights some of the biggest challenges in manufacturing. It takes a lot of money to invest in a plant and machinery in order to make them capable of competing as a modern-day plant. It takes access to capital.

We also need to change the public's perception of what manufacturing is. It is a very different place to work--a manufacturing line--than it was 20 or 50 years ago. They are safe, clean, and well lit. These are decent, high-paying jobs. If we are going to win in the global competition for manufacturing, we need to strengthen the skills and the perceptions of manufacturing across our country.

Each of the three bills I have spoken about today will help create good manufacturing jobs here in America, and I believe are ready for consideration on a bipartisan basis by this Chamber. We need to take action together on a bipartisan basis to get our economy going again.

I will remind everyone: Manufacturing jobs are not just decent jobs, not just good jobs, they are great jobs. They are the jobs of today and tomorrow. They are the jobs that sustain and build the backbone of the American middle class.

We already have all the tools in this country to ensure its growth, but if we work together and put in place stronger and better Federal policies in partnership with the private sector, we can put jets on our manufacturing sector, and it can take off and grow again.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, every so often in between the crises and rancor and partisan fighting, we have an opportunity to make real progress in the Senate. This week we are considering the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. It is a bill that will put in place basic workplace protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.

It has been a big year for equality nationally and in my home State of Delaware. The Delaware General Assembly legalized same-sex marriage in May, giving every Delawarean access to the full rights and responsibilities of marriage, no matter the orientation.

A month later, Delaware's General Assembly built on its 3-year-old law by protecting LGBT people from workplace discrimination, adding protections for transgender Delawareans as well. These two laws are about dignity, respect, and basic fairness for our neighbors.

Of course, a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, giving all married couples across our country access to the Federal benefits they are due. This has truly been a historic year for civil rights and for our country.

For all of our progress, much remains to be done. In 29 States it is still legal to fire someone just because they are gay, just because they are lesbian, or just because they are bisexual. That means that more than 4 million Americans across those States go to work day in and day out with no protection against being fired summarily because of who they love. In 33 States, which include 5 million people, it is legal to fire someone because of their gender identity.

I thank my colleague, the Senator from Oregon, for his hard work and leading this fight here on the floor, and the Senator from Iowa for his long advocacy for this bill that should have passed years and years ago.

More than 40 percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans, and almost 80 percent of transgender Americans, say they have been mistreated in the workplace because of who they are or because of who they love. Clearly there is still work for us to do.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act would provide basic protections against workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. It is a bill that is built on our Nation's historic civil rights laws, including the Civil Rights Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act. This is about basic fairness.

The overwhelming majority of Americans--in fact, more than 80 percent--think it is already against the law to fire someone just because they are gay. Most Fortune 500 companies already have policies preventing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in place.

Some of Delaware's biggest employers and companies, including DuPont, Dow, Bank of America, TD Bank, Christiana Care, and the University of Delaware have led the way with their own policies to protect the rights of LGBT Delawareans and their employees.

There is real momentum behind these protections, and it is time for Congress to pass this law. Protecting Americans from discrimination is part of America's shared values, and it needs to be part of our laws as well.

No one here thinks it is OK to fire someone simply because they are African American or because they are a woman or because they are an older American. It is not OK to fire someone because they are gay or transgender either. Equality is a fundamental part of our shared American values: Do unto others; treat people with the respect and dignity with which you want them to treat you. Majorities in every State support putting these protections in place. Majorities of Democrats and of Republicans and of Independents support putting these protections in place. Majorities in every Christian denomination support putting these protections in place. The majority of small business owners surveyed support putting these protections in place.

Freedom from discrimination is a fundamental American value that we don't just share, we cherish. Why not put these protections in place now, today, to ensure that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans will be able to go to work, to earn a living, to provide for themselves and their families, without the fear of being fired just because of who they are.

The opportunity in front of every one of us is an important one. Leadership on civil rights in this Chamber has traditionally been bipartisan, and this period of partisanship on civil rights is only fairly recent and need not be permanent. In fact, this bill is cosponsored

by two of our Republican colleagues, Senator Collins of Maine and Senator Kirk of Illinois. When he came to the floor to speak on ENDA earlier this week, Senator Kirk noted the importance of a Senator from his home State of Illinois being in a position of leadership on this civil rights issue. This really is a historic opportunity.

When the Senate votes on final passage on the Employment Non- Discrimination Act tomorrow, I hope we all will take advantage of this historic opportunity.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I wish to honor the service, dedication, and passion of an individual whose name is synonymous with law enforcement in Delaware, New Castle police chief Kevin P. McDerby. After more than 40 years of service to the people of Delaware, Chief McDerby embarked on a well-earned retirement at the end of last month. While known for his long and decorated career in law enforcement, Chief McDerby's tenure will be most remembered for his work with veterans and community groups, such as Delaware Concerns of Police Survivors, or C.O.P.S, and the Special Olympics Torch Run, as well as his efforts leading trips to the Nation's Capital to bring Delaware WWII and Korean veterans to visit national memorials and coordinating the establishment of the Delaware Law Enforcement Memorial on Legislative Mall in Dover.

Chief McDerby began his public safety career in Delaware on January 12, 1971, when he joined the Delaware State Police as a trooper working in the Criminal Investigation and Tactical Support Units. He quickly climbed the ranks, rising to sergeant in January 1979, to lieutenant and commander of Troop 6 in January 1986, to captain in February 1987, and finally to major in May 1989, where he took on the role of operations major for New Castle County.

Shortly after his retirement from the Delaware State Police in August 2000, McDerby was appointed chief of the New Castle Police Department, one of the oldest existing police departments in the Nation, established in 1672. As New Castle police chief, McDerby continued the department's proud legacy of dedication to duty and service with honor, established by a long line of distinguished officers who have served the department over five centuries.

Chief McDerby's dedication to service was a hallmark of his law enforcement career. A strong advocate for law enforcement families, he was a founding member of Delaware C.O.P.S, an organization dedicated to providing resources to assist surviving families of officers killed in the line of duty.

In his 40-plus years of law enforcement service to the people of New Castle and Delaware, Chief McDerby leaves behind not just a policing legacy but also an opportunity, a benchmark for his fellow officers to strive to reach. To follow Chief McDerby's example is to be more than just the best police officer you can be; it is to be a leader and a true ambassador for the law enforcement community in Delaware. On behalf of all Delawareans, I thank Chief McDerby for his tremendous service and wish him well in his retirement.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Ohio for his tireless and engaged leadership on manufacturing, on fighting for access to foreign markets on fair terms, for fighting for skills and increasing the skills of our manufacturing workforce, and in this instance, in this strong bipartisan bill, for working with our colleague from Missouri on a national network of manufacturing innovation centers.

My own work of 8 years at a manufacturing company in Delaware in a materials-based science company that makes things helped make it clear to me how important research and development and continuous innovation are for manufacturers at all levels. I have seen this across the State of Delaware. Our Presiding Officer--long owner and leader of a manufacturing business in his home State of Indiana--knows this better than any of us: that if we don't innovate, if we don't invest in research and development, in improving the skills in the workforce and improving the productivity and the operating efficiency of any manufacturing company, we can't survive in the tough headwinds of the global marketplace today.

One of the programs I championed here in the Senate that has bipartisan support is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. It is a long-established program that takes the latest cutting-edge research and development work at universities and moves it to the shop floor. I have visited companies up and down Delaware, from FMC in Newark to Speakman in New Castle, where they have taken those innovations from the university to the shop floor.

One of the things I am grateful to Senator Blunt for is his leadership in taking that insight that in order to have the most productive manufacturing workforce in the world, in order to continue to compete globally, we have to find ways to continue to invest in demonstrating the power of innovation and we have to find ways to do that in a bipartisan way.

I thank the Senator for being willing to work with Senator Brown and others here. This is exactly the sort of stuff I hear from Delawareans they want us to be doing. There is lots that divides us. This is something that unites us: working together to strengthen our manufacturing sector, to make it more competitive, to bring jobs back to the United States, and to grow this sector.

We have grown half a million jobs in the last 3 years in the manufacturing sector. These are good jobs, at high wages, high benefits, high skills. But we can and should do more, pulling together to sort of lift further this ongoing manufacturing revival.

If Senator Blunt would share some more with us about this specific bill and about his experience in what else we can and should be doing together to strengthen manufacturing in Missouri, I would be grateful.

I thank Senator Blunt for his work on this bill with Senator Brown. There are other bills that I hope this body will take up and discuss and debate where I hope we can find ideas that are out there, with progress that is being made and policy innovation that is being made, and that we can take them up, debate them, and find bipartisan sponsors who will carry them forward.

I absolutely agree with the Senator's point that we are seeing in manufacturing a revival in this country for a variety of reasons. One of them is less expensive energy. The shale gas revolution is reducing the feedstock costs for chemical manufacturing and reducing the energy costs broadly for manufacturing of all kinds.

We are also seeing that lots of American companies fear the loss of their inventions, their innovations, if they move offshore. So some of the attractiveness of operating in other countries has dimmed a bit, as they have recognized that the United States is one that has a rule of law that protects their inventions and innovations.

There is also less of a wage gap, frankly, as wages have come up in the developing world. In China, the wage gap is less. So that combination gives us a window, gives us a moment of opportunity. We lost millions of manufacturing jobs in the first years of this century, but in the last three we have been growing them and growing them steadily. If we can work in partnership across the aisle on manufacturing skills, on access to credit, on innovation, on a coordinated strategy, I cannot imagine a community in this country that would not rather have high-quality manufacturing jobs.

As Senator Blunt was mentioning, for every manufacturing job that is created, there is 1.6 new support jobs created. For every $1 spent in manufacturing, there is $1.34 spent in the local economy that moves around. It is the sector that has the most positive secondary impact in our communities.

I do think there is broadly in our country a sense that we have sort of lost our leading edge in manufacturing because of the large-scale layoffs and the large plant closings. But in my State, and I presume in the Senator's State and in the Presiding Officer's State of Indiana, and others, there are dozens and dozens of small and medium-sized manufacturers who have seized this moment, who are growing, and who simply want us to help facilitate their access to the market, their access to innovation and new research, their access to a skilled workforce.

If we can pull together, I think we can do great things for the United States going forward.

Also, before we close, I thank Senator Blunt for being a cosponsor with me of the startup innovation tax credit--something Senator Enzi and I and many others--Senator Rubio, Senator Schumer, Senator Stabenow, as well as Senator Moran--have cosponsored and introduced and discussed over time. It would help with access to capital for early stage startup manufacturers.

There are lots of good ideas we can and should discuss on the floor, in hearings, and going forward. But for today I am grateful to Senator Blunt for his leadership with Senator Brown on this bill that would help strengthen the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation centers. The Senator is a strong leader for manufacturing in his home State of Missouri, and I am grateful for a chance to spend some time with him on the floor today discussing that good bill and his good ideas.

I thank Senator Blunt. I thank the Senator for his enthusiasm for manufacturing and for his enthusiasm for working together with me on the startup innovation credit bill, as the Senator referenced, and with Senator Brown on the national network of manufacturing innovation centers as he spoke about.

Manufacturing is the center, the beating heart of the middle class of America. Manufacturing jobs are good jobs. We do need to get back to being a country where inventing, growing, and making things is an area of bipartisan, sustained, purposeful focus. I know for the folks who watch us at home and for the folks here in this Chamber, nothing could meet the demands and the needs of our communities and our States more than for us to come together in a bipartisan, balanced, and responsible way to advocate for a stronger manufacturing sector in the United States.

I thank Senator Blunt very much.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I rise today to speak in favor of Ms. Patricia Millett's nomination to the DC Circuit Court. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have the opportunity to closely examine each of the judicial candidates nominated by our President. I did so with Ms. Millett, attending her nomination hearing and speaking to a wide range of the practitioners and colleagues who have direct knowledge of her professionalism and experience. Without exception, at every stage of her career and with every personal and professional colleague with whom she has had work experience, Patty--Ms. Millett-- has distinguished herself as a person of integrity, intelligence, and dedication. She is a person whose capability and devotion to a family is an inspiration to those around her. She is unanimously recommended by former living Solicitors General, and received the ABA's highest rating.

Some of my colleagues here have argued that President Obama is trying to ``pack the court'' by nominating Ms. Millett and two other nominees to fill three current vacancies on the DC Circuit Court. These charges of court packing strike me, frankly, as without foundation. Court packing is an historical term used to describe when politicians try to change the size of a court, expand a court, in order to control its expected outcome. That was the cause of the objection to President Roosevelt's plan to add up to six Justices to the U.S. Supreme Court back in 1937.

In fact, a current legislative proposal to strip the President's ability to fill three vacant seats on the DC Circuit could better be called court stripping. In this particular case, making nominations to vacant judicial positions is not court packing, it is a President doing his job. Confirming highly qualified nominees to serve on this circuit in this vacancy would be this body doing its job.

The charges of court packing are absurd on their face. They are even more absurd when put in context.

Ms. Millett has been nominated to the ninth seat of the 11 authorized on this court. There are currently three vacancies on this vital circuit court.

I held a hearing earlier this year on judicial staffing levels in my role as the chair of the Subcommittee on Bankruptcy and the Courts of the Judiciary Committee. I invited the chair of the Judicial Conference Committee on Judicial Resources, Judge Tymkovich, to come testify. For those who ascribe significance to such things, Judge Tymkovich was nominated by President George W. Bush to sit on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Tymkovich testified--convincingly, in my opinion--that the Federal judiciary needs more judges, not fewer. Every other year, the Judicial Conference submits to Congress a report on recommendations on judgeships. That report did not conclude that any judgeships should be removed or remain unfilled on the DC Circuit.

Judge Tymkovich also explained why the caseload statistics used by some of our colleagues to argue that the DC Circuit has a low caseload--and thus need not have its vacancies filled--are, in fact, unconvincing. The DC Circuit hears a unique caseload, with four times the number of complex administrative appeals than other circuit courts around the country.

The DC Circuit is the circuit from which all the Federal agencies' actions are repealed. More than any other court in the country, its caseload is made up of very complex, very difficult cases with far- reaching consequences and that require a great deal of time. Simply looking at the raw number of cases filed, opened, and closed is not an accurate predictor of whether a vacant seat on the DC Circuit should, in fact,

be filled. The DC Circuit's caseload has remained steady over the past 10 years, so the Judicial Conference has seen no reason to recommend any alteration in its staffing level.

The court packing argument made by some is also at odds with history, especially when one considers that caseloads lower than they are now on the DC Circuit were sufficient when all Republican Members then in office voted to confirm then Judge Roberts to the 9th seat, Janice Rogers Brown to the 10th seat, Thomas Griffith to the 11th seat, and Brett Kavanaugh to the 10th seat when it became vacant. When Ms. Millett is confirmed, the DC Circuit will still have more pending appeals per active judge than after the confirmations of any of those four earlier Bush nominees I just referenced. The caseload on the DC Circuit would also remain above that of the current 6th Circuit and 10th Circuit, to which courts the Senate has confirmed Republican supported judicial nominees this year.

A filibuster of Ms. Millett on caseload grounds would bring the Senate to an unprecedented and regrettable place. It would destroy comity and trust at a time when our Nation needs it most, when we need to demonstrate to the people of the United States that this Congress can function and that this Senate can fulfill its constitutional role.

It would not only facilitate the administration of justice by our courts, but also allow us to tackle other issues if we could move past endless and needless filibusters on issues such as this. It would allow us to move forward to the broader issues of the day, tackling long-term debt and deficit challenges, the fight against global terrorism, reinvesting in our future, and working together to invest in manufacturing and grow our economy. There are so many other issues that call for the time of this body.

With that, I wish to urge my colleagues to look at Ms. Millett's nomination on its merits and to not be distracted by what I think are groundless arguments that this is an instance of so-called court packing by this President.

This President is doing his job. He is nominating supremely qualified candidates to serve in the highest courts of this land, and this body should do its job and confirm those qualified nominees.

National Technological Innovation Day

If I might, I simply wanted to comment to this body that something passed with little notice here yesterday. October 29, 2013, was National Technological Innovation Day. This was recognizing the role that technological innovation plays in the United States economy.

We know that innovation is absolutely essential to developing new medicines, treatments, and cures to help us live longer and more healthy lives. Innovation is essential to strengthen the manufacturing sector of the American economy and make us more competitive. Innovation is essential to allow us to take advantage of new materials and new opportunities in the world and to access new export markets overseas. Innovation overall is what has brought all that is best about modern life and the modern world.

Yesterday, in a bipartisan way, we recognized that on October 29, many years ago, was the very first day that DARPAnet was able to exchange communications from one computer to another. It was literally the dawning of the modern Internet age. This was made possible in part by Federal investment and innovation.

I am grateful that Senator Moran, Senator Isakson, Senator Heinrich, and Senator Kirk joined me in recognizing the unique and important role that technological innovation has played in America's past, America's present, and America's future.

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

Mr. President, in just 3 days, barring some action by Congress, the Treasury Department of the United States will run out of options for preventing default on this Nation's debts for the first time in our history, setting off a chain of economic events that will be felt around the world and by every family and business and State and community in our country.

We have heard a great deal on this floor the last few days about how we arrived at this point and who is to blame. There is a lot of concern and consternation about exactly who owns this and how we got here. I am not going to spend time today on that. I am going to skip the politics and the drama for now and just talk about the facts and the policy. I just want to talk to Delawareans about what would happen if we actually go over this impending cliff, if we do default, and which of the options for addressing this are viable.

First, let's be clear about what we are talking about.

What is the debt ceiling? Defaulting on our debt by failing to raise the debt ceiling is not the same as cutting up America's credit cards. It is not the same as denying the President the right to sign more checks into the future. Raising the debt ceiling does not give Congress or the President a blank check to spend more money. It allows the United States to borrow more money, yes, but only to pay bills for goods and services already incurred, to meet pledges already made.

We have had some kind of a national debt ceiling since 1917, when Congress

allowed the Treasury Department to issue long-term Liberty bonds to pay for our engagement in the First World War. Over the course of the next two decades, caps were placed on other kinds of debt as well, and finally, in 1939, Congress decided to place a ceiling on the total amount of debt the country could have.

The last time Congress raised the debt ceiling, it was up to $16.99 trillion. Technically, we reached that limit a few months ago--actually on May 19 of this year. The Treasury Department has since been using what it calls ``extraordinary measures'' to keep paying our bills, but, as Secretary Lew has communicated to this Congress over and over in letter and in testimony, in just a few days the Treasury Department will no longer have enough money to keep up. These extraordinary measures will have run out, and in a week or two later we will have come up to zero.

What are the bills we need to raise the ceiling in order to pay? It is the salaries of all Federal employees, including our military; it is Social Security and Medicare payments; it is unemployment benefits, tax refunds, and interest on our sovereign debt. Raising the debt limit allows the Treasury to borrow the money it needs to pay these bills. That is it.

If on any particular day more bills come due than we have cash in our accounts to cover, then the United States of America will default on some or all of its obligations. That day is coming and coming quickly. Frankly, we cannot let it happen.

For decades investors have bought U.S. debt because it was seen as a sure thing, a safe investment. When people buy a Treasury bill, a T- bill, they do so because they know they are going to earn interest on one of the safest investments in the world. American debt is considered unimpeachable. That is what makes the dollar the reserve currency for much of the world, which is something that benefits every American company and community and family in ways that are hard to see but cumulatively powerful--the absolute certainty that we will repay our national debt.

Who are these investors? Who are the folks who buy these T-bills? Some are everyday Americans. A large number of retirees invest in our government bonds because they are such a safe bet. Pension funds and mutual funds invest in government bonds for the same reason. Some investors are the governments of other nations that look at the United States as such a good investment that they tie their financial stability to ours. So when it starts to look as if Congress will not live up to that standard, will not take the steps necessary to pay all of our bills on time and might actually default on some of our debts and transform us into a deadbeat nation, it makes investors really nervous.

Just the talk of defaulting on our debts sends a shockwave through our economy and through the markets. For proof we need only look back to August of 2001, when Congress last brought the Nation to the brink of default. Although we didn't cross the line, just the talk of it, the mere possibility that we might for the first time default had an array of consequences.

First, it slowed job growth and led to an increase in part-time employment.

Second, consumer confidence in our economy fell. The Consumer Confidence Index--the index of consumer confidence--is a reliable indicator of Americans' willingness to spend money and fuel our economic growth. We want consumers buying products at their local stores and keeping people employed, right? The index was already on the pessimistic side of the line when this last crisis began but has fallen substantially since the government shutdown. Instability and uncertainty reduces consumer confidence and takes money out of our economy.

Third, the yield of our Treasury bills had to increase in order to prop up demand. As U.S. debt becomes perceived as a riskier investment, we have to incentivize investors by increasing what we will pay them. That means taxpayers will have to pay more over time in order to compensate. The debate in 2011 will cost American taxpayers an additional $19 billion over the next decade. Again, just the debate as we ran up to the possibility of default in 2011 added $19 billion in debt service costs to the bonds that were issued in the days and months after.

Fourth, the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's--one of the big three--lowered the credit rating of the United States, causing markets to drop more than 5 percent in a single day and 17 percent over the course of that crisis. It was one of the worst declines in the equities markets in history, and it was only because we talked about defaulting.

Just threatening to default is terrible for our economy in all these four different ways.

Financial analysts across the world have said Congress is already causing potentially lasting damage to the strength of the dollar just by repeatedly threatening to default. Said one:

There is a negative confidence shock rippling through the

economy, and foreign investors have taken fright at

developments in Washington.

Said another:

A U.S. government default is not a zero-probability event

now. Although it remains very unlikely, a low-probability

high-impact event like this is naturally making investors

cautious.

So we simply cannot afford this talk. We cannot let our Nation default.

What happens if we do? What would actually happen if we get to the end of this week and have not resolved this crisis? I am encouraged by rumors of some resolution. I am encouraged that there are negotiations and conversations going on. But I think we need to look in a clear-eyed way at what would happen if default should happen to occur.

For starters, we don't really know. The situation has never been this bad before this, and the United States has never defaulted on its debt.

Here is what the managing director of the International Monetary Fund said this weekend:

If there is that degree of disruption, that lack of

certainty, that lack of trust in the U.S. signature, it would

mean massive disruption the world over, and we would be at

risk of tipping yet again into global recession.

We simply cannot afford that.

Let me share another quote from history, from President Ronald Reagan, who back in 1983 had this to say about the potential threat of default and its impact on our economy:

The full consequences of a default--or even the serious

prospect of a default--by the United States are impossible to

predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full

faith and credit of the United States would have substantial

effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of

the dollar.

As it was true back in 1983, so it is true again today. The comments from the head of the IMF and from a whole array of economists and bankers this past week remind us of the simple and enduring truth that the modern era has been one where the dollar has been the reserve currency for the world, and the strength of the American market has been critical to the strength of the American nation, our communities, and our economy. Frankly, to put that at risk over short-term political differences is reckless indeed.

What we know is we will wake up this coming Friday with about $30 billion in the Federal Government's account, according to Treasury Secretary Lew. What we don't know is how long it will last. The moment we can't pay one of our bills, we will default. That is what is known as X date. The government will still collect revenue, but it won't be enough to keep pace with our daily bills.

Over the last year, the government collected $7.5 billion a day and spent an average of $9.7 billion a day. That means we come up about $2.2 billion short on our bills every day if we are not borrowing enough to make up the difference.

Analysts at the Bipartisan Policy Center suggest that we will run out of cash--hitting the X date--roughly on October 22. To be clear, part of why we don't know exactly what date this would occur is because money flows into the Federal Treasury at uneven rates, and it flows out at uneven rates.

Let's look at a few of the bills that are about to come due in the next few weeks. On October 23, $12 billion in Social Security benefits are due; on October 28, $3 billion in Federal salaries would go unpaid. On October 30, $2 billion in Medicaid payments are due; on October 31, $6 billion in interest payments on our sovereign debt are due; on November 1, $58 billion in Medicare,

Social Security, and SSI payments, as well as veterans' benefits and military pay.

Those are just the major bills. There are thousands, even millions, of smaller payments that are due from every agency and entity of the Federal Government that go up and down day in and day out and where our failure to pay in a timely fashion, while technically not defaulting on our sovereign debt, would put into question our ability and willingness as a government to pay our bills when due.

With what we have left, we will not be able to pay them all, and we will be in violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that the debt of the United States of America shall not be questioned.

If we have not raised the debt ceiling by this Thursday, we are likely to see disturbing losses in global markets. We have already started to see them as uncertainty takes over and volatility begins to spread. Investors are already pulling money out of our T-bills. If 2011 is an indication, stock prices will soon begin to drop in the absence of some progress toward a resolution.

Deutsche Bank, one of the world's most prominent investment banks, predicted the S&P 500 index will fall by a staggering 45 percent if we default. We heard loudly and clearly when we met with the credit ratings agencies after the 2011 incident that they would almost certainly downgrade the credit rating of the United States, which would reduce demand for Treasurys, particularly among investment funds that are required to hold a large number of AAA-rated securities.

With the Nation pressed against its debt ceiling and future interest payments uncertain, investors will be hesitant to buy more T-bills. The toxicity of U.S. debt may spread to Treasury notes and bonds, and investors will almost certainly demand higher yields, which will cost our country significantly more over time. This is exactly what happened in 2011 when we flirted with default.

Right now, the dollar is the world's reserve currency. Instead of keeping their money in cash, other nations buy our debt in order to get interest without risk. America has been a great investment. A default would cause other nations to sell our debt and then sell our dollars, weakening our dollars against foreign currencies, and raising the costs on every single good imported into the United States.

If Treasury interest rates go up just 1 percentage point, it would add over $1 trillion in the next decade to our debt service cost. Anything we saved because of sequestration would be gone, and there is no reason to think that default would cause interest rates to go up by one single point. It could add $2 trillion or $3 trillion to our debt over the next decade. This affects everyone in our community and our country from large to small, from companies to communities to families. When Treasury interest rates go up, your interest rates go up. Mortgage rates, auto loans, student loans, business loans--they all go up, and they would go up fast. Default would make it harder for all of us to use credit responsibly. As consumers buy less, business profits would fall, GDP would fall, and the Nation once again would enter a recession. Defaulting on our debt would be an unimaginable drag on the economic health of our country, our community, and families. We cannot let it happen.

Mr. President, I see my colleague Senator Mikulski has joined me on the floor. If I might, with her forbearance, I will take a few minutes to review a few points here, and then I will yield to her.

In conclusion, I will briefly touch on our options. We have all heard on this floor Senators suggest that default is really not that big a deal, that we are not really going to default, that there are other ways around this, and that we need not be scared into making some hurried deal. At the end of the day, several Senators have accused the President of fearmongering and have accused my party of suggesting that default is a major threat to our country and our economy when, in fact, it is not.

Let me briefly touch on the options that have been discussed by other Senators and, frankly, to my surprise. First, some have suggested we can pay our bills not when they are due but when we have the money-- sort of on a first-come, first-serve payment approach. Let's say we ran out of money, as I suggested, on the 20th of this month and could not pay our bills on the 21st. By the 23rd we would have enough money so we would pay the bills from the 21st, late, but go delinquent on the bills for the 22nd and 23rd, and so on. This is crazy. Payments would be delinquent and the United States would fall behind on its debt.

This option would only make our situation worse. We would keep adding over $2 billion in debt every single day while going delinquent on our bills to Americans.

The second way forward. Some have suggested we prioritize certain bills but ignore others. The Treasury Department would continue to make payments on our sovereign debt so the Chinese would get paid, but they would avoid or default on lots and lots of other obligations. Which payments would we choose in this body not to make? Social Security? Medicare? Military salaries? Payments for cancer research? Veterans' benefits? Food inspectors? Air traffic controllers? Who goes first and who would we possibly choose? These are the ludicrous choices that have been sent to us by the other Chamber as they have attempted to fund the government in piecemeal slices in the past week.

The Treasury Department makes 100 million individual payments per month, making this option a logistical nightmare. If we prioritize our payments, it is not a question of if we go into recession, it would be a question of when. We would be taking $2.2 billion out of the economy a day--4 percent of our GDP out of our Nation's economy on an annualized basis. This would push us back into recession, we would still be defaulting on our obligations, and the markets and the credit rating agencies would know it.

The other thing that has been suggested is to work around the debt ceiling. There are a whole lot of creative but legally questionable ideas: The minting of a $1 trillion coin, avoiding the 14th Amendment, a fire sale of U.S. assets, superpremium Treasurys. Each has pros and cons that I won't go into, but they would face legal scrutiny and would radically increase uncertainty in the market.

There is no better option for us going forward than to reopen the government, pay our national debt on time, raise the debt ceiling, and honor our obligations as a country. That is the fourth and only good option: pay our bills, to prevent default, to put a floor under our economy, to stop these games, and to stop suggesting that there is any way out of this other than doing our jobs, preserving the AAA credit rating of this country, and making this country worthy of global respect again.

In conclusion, I can't believe that Members in this Chamber, who had the chance to avoid default, on Saturday voted in a way that suggested they chose not to. Not only did it rattle me, it rattled the markets. The idea that a sovereign government would have the ability to pay its debts but actively chose not to is unprecedented.

We cannot allow that to happen. We cannot allow this country to become a bad investment. We will not become a deadbeat nation. We need to pay our bills, do the right thing, and avoid default. We need to stop playing games and do right by the American people.

With that, I yield the floor and look forward to the comments from the senior Senator from Maryland.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time until 7 p.m be equally divided between the two leaders or their designees, with Senators on the majority side limited to 10 minutes each.

Mr. President, I have heard a number of speeches from my colleagues on the floor today, both while presiding and in the last few moments, that call on President Obama for Presidential leadership to help us reopen the government, address our serious long-term fiscal issues, and move us forward.

I want to note for the folks who might be watching that the President is at this very moment sitting with the leadership of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. Tomorrow morning, I believe, he has invited the Republican Members of this body to the White House for conversation.

I think we agree. One of the core challenges we face as this Federal shutdown goes into, I believe, its 10th day is discerning exactly why the Federal Government is still shut down. When initially taken over the cliff into the shutdown, it was to prevent the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. That is what a number of Senators said on this floor was their purpose. Now, many days and many unintended and unexpected harmful consequences later, we are told what this was really all about was to force the President to negotiate.

I serve on the Budget Committee. We passed, more than 200 days ago, more than 6 months ago, a budget on this floor, and we have tried to go to conference on that budget now 21 times.

Yet each time it was blocked, objected to by a small number of Senators from the other party.

Frankly, my expectation, my hope is that we will return to a rational rules-following process here, reopen the government, not default on our national debt, and begin those serious negotiations, those Budget Committee negotiations that are long overdue to deal with the very real challenges that are facing our country.

I wanted to speak today about one of the consequences of shutting down our Federal Government. We see new ones every day, and we hear about them on the Senate floor. As the days drag on, we hear more and more about the impacts of the shutdown, sometimes with surprise, sometimes with regret, sometimes with outrage.

There is a lot on the line, and we have heard a lot about what the shutdown means for the various functions of the executive branch and of the legislative branch. I have heard colleagues come and speak about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, about the FDA, about its impact on higher education, its impact on families, and its impact on small businesses. I have heard many folks come to this floor and comment on how the executive branch and its functions that affect communities and families all over this country are affected by the shutdown.

We have heard from our constituents who are trying to reach Senators and are trying to seek our help with a variety of Federal services. They are frustrated that the legislative branch is largely shut down, but there is another branch to our three-branch coordinate government. Absent from this debate and discussion is how the shutdown is affecting the judicial branch of our government.

When the Federal Government shut down 10 years ago, the Federal court system was initially seemingly largely unaffected because they had enough funds in reserve to remain open for 10 business days--a period that will come to an end early next week.

On Tuesday the Federal judiciary of the United States will run out of the reserve funds it has been using to stay open. The big question is, What happens then?

The chief judge of the bankruptcy court for the District of Delaware, my home State, told me:

We are really in an uncertain situation, particularly when

it comes to employees. I am fearful for them and how they are

going to be able to pay for rent and mortgages, and provide

food and day-care for their families.

This is uncharted territory for our Federal judiciary. When the money runs out, Federal, circuit, and district courts will each be on their own, much like each Senator who has to choose which of his employees or her employees are essential, deemed vital, and need to stay, and which should be furloughed and stay home, uncertain whether they will be paid. Each district court and circuit court will figure out on its own how to keep the lights and which employees will keep working without a salary.

As the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Bankruptcy and the Courts, I have heard from a number of Federal judges this week who are frustrated by the amount of time they are spending trying to figure out what the shutdown means for their courts and their employees rather than doing the job for which they were confirmed, which is to judge cases.

This is an enormous distraction, a profound waste of time. This is not advancing our core objective, which should be growing our economy, strengthening our country, confronting the fiscal challenges in front of us, and working together to achieve some principled compromises in the Congress of the United States. In my view, Federal judges should be deciding cases, not deciding how to keep their courthouses running during this Federal Government shutdown. This needs to end. It could end literally today in a matter of minutes if Speaker Boehner would bring to the floor and allow a vote on a bill sent over from this Senate more than 10 days ago that would allow the Federal Government to reopen.

The judicial branch is not another Federal agency. It is not a program that can be suspended or a benefit that can be delayed. It is a branch. The Federal court system was created in our Constitution as the third pillar of our democracy. It is an independent branch of government whose fundamental mission is being undermined by folks, some of whom claim to love and to rigidly interpret the Constitution. Yet the consequences for our constitutional order of this senseless shutdown, I am

afraid, will soon become clear in the days ahead.

The subcommittee has heard from a number of Federal judges and clerks this week. I must warn you there are a lot of unanswered questions there. The path forward is murky. The central question in the courts-- as it was here in Congress and in the executive branch--is who is considered ``essential.'' Is it the people directly involved in the resolution of cases or are the staff who support that process also expected to work without pay?

Here is the type of question our judiciary was dealing with today instead of resolving disputes or working on long-term cost-saving measures. Evidence in our Federal courts these days is typically presented electronically to jurors rather than handing out photocopies, which is great as long as the technology is working in the courtroom. Case files are processed electronically these days as well. But what if there is a problem? What if the technology doesn't work and a trial is disrupted? At what point does a technological glitch become a legitimate due process issue? If the courtroom technology can't get an upgrade to fix a bug, will it result in a costly mistrial? The Constitution and the Sixth Amendment guarantee criminal defendants a right to a speedy trial. What happens when our courts can't live up to that Sixth Amendment guarantee because of this ongoing Federal shutdown?

The problem is equally severe in civil and bankruptcy matters. With the DOJ's Office of the U.S. Trustee in shutdown status, the number of trustee attorneys in Delaware has been cut from seven to two. This can dramatically slow the bankruptcy process and leave real jobs and real lives hanging in the balance as cases are unresolved and as resolutions don't move forward.

This raises another fundamental question. At what point in this ongoing senseless shutdown does our civil justice system fail to live up to America's promise as a free market economy grounded in the rule of law?

When an investor anywhere in the world looks to make a bet on a new company, a new idea, that investor will obtain certain rights in exchange. Those rights may include a share of equity or a priority right in the event of liquidation. What gives those rights meaning is ultimately a highly functioning, impartial, and reliable court system. That historically has been one of our great advantages competitively in the world economy. Our courts, even while plagued by persistent vacancies, lack of new authorized judgeships, and the sequester, continue to perform this vital function. Without these courts, these rights mean nothing. Without the reliable enforcement of these rights, there is no more new investment, no more new job creation, and no more new ideas successfully brought to market. We are not the only country in the world competing for investment capital and for ideas. When we undermine our civil courts, we are being hostile to those very investors who could help get our economy back on track.

The Federal shutdown is already slowing the resolution of civil cases involving the Federal Government. Clerks at district courts around the country have confirmed to my subcommittee that the Department of Justice is requesting continuances broadly and across-the-board and trying to juggle the demands of their caseloads with the constraints of this reckless shutdown. Think about it. Social Security appeals, civil forfeiture cases, business disputes, consumer protection cases, Medicare fraud cases, incidents of employment discrimination--they are all being pushed to the background. This shutdown is bringing new meaning to Dr. King's famous words: ``Justice too long delayed is justice denied.''

Only this morning I heard from the head of Delaware's district court, chief judge Gregory Sleet. He said, in essence--no insult intended, but his observation was that Congress is letting our country down. The subcommittee also spoke with a district court clerk yesterday who said--and I thought this was particularly striking--he was glad he was nearing retirement so he could escape the dysfunction of the Federal Government and our ongoing, seemingly routine manufactured crises.

This shutdown is exacerbating what is a more profound problem--a disregard for the upkeep of our Federal judiciary. More than 90 Federal judgeships are vacant. There are 39 vacancies that are deemed ``judicial emergencies.'' We need to do more to support and sustain the staffing, quality, and future investment that is required to make our Federal courts work as well as they possibly can.

I wish to make a point or two in conclusion. First, one of the essential questions every district court and circuit court will face is which of its employees are essential. After all of the cuts of the sequester and all of the burdens and challenges facing our Federal Government, aren't all the employees of our Federal judicial system, this separate branch, essential? The chief judge for the Third Judicial Circuit of the United States believes so, and I agree with him. This morning he announced that nearly ``all functions, with few limited exceptions, are essential . . . .'' I join the chief judge of the Third Judicial Circuit and urge other circuits to follow suit and to recognize that this independent third branch of our constitutional order is essential.

Last, this shutdown has dragged morale in our courts and our court system to a new low. We in Congress are blessed with a record number of attorneys who serve in Congress. It is my hope that this body recognizes the unique value of our Federal court system. Our democracy cannot afford to furlough justice. We cannot shut the doors to our courthouses. It is my hope that Speaker Boehner, following the conversation unfolding at the White House, will come back and put to the vote an action that will allow the courts and this country to get back to work.

I yield the floor.