Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, there are a lot of Americans who don't understand what is happening right now. Republicans asked for control of the U.S. Senate, they asked for control of the House of Representatives, and they asked for control of the White House. They got all three. They promised that by doing so, they would be able to more effectively manage the affairs of state, and that is clearly not happening right now. There is a fundamental inability to govern, as we are now shut down for the second day.

Tomorrow is an important day because many of the functions that the people expect from the Federal Government will not be there on Monday morning, despite the fact that we have made some progress--first, on Friday night on this floor, and subsequent to that, in private discussions today--in order to reach an agreement that Republicans and Democrats can support.

So I am here with several of my colleagues to make some fairly simple requests of the U.S. Senate. It seems that if we were really adults, if we were really going to operate like grownups and we were going to be truly responsible stewards of the Federal Government, then we should be able to keep the government open for a very short period of time while we negotiate a way out of this.

As many folks know, we on the Democratic side, as well as some of our Republican colleagues, don't think it is wise to do another month-long continuing resolution, but why don't we just agree to keep the government open tomorrow? Why don't we all just get together and say that on Monday, people will be able to access the Federal Government, and we can hopefully get to an agreement on a budget that is permanent, that is long term, and that gives certainty to everybody who receives something from or gives something to the Federal Government, by the end of the day tomorrow? I think we can do that.

I am going to make a few more remarks, but before I do, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 36, H.R. 1301; that the amendment at the desk that would provide for a continuing resolution to fund the government through Monday, January 22, 2018, be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, let me make a few remarks. I am sorry that the Senator decided to object to this unanimous consent request which would simply keep the government open and operating for 24 hours so we can try to come to an agreement.

Let me address the central point the Senator just made because I have heard it repeated by many Members of the Republican leadership and other Members of the Republican Senate conference.

This idea that there is no controversy because Democrats agree to everything that is in the underlying continuing resolution is not true. It is not true. We have now passed three different continuing resolutions to just kick the can forward time and time again.

As we were considering this continuing resolution on Friday night, the Department of Defense made an unprecedented decision to contradict the views of the Commander in Chief by stating that they didn't want another continuing resolution because without real, long-term certainty for Department of Defense funding, we, the Members of the U.S. Congress, are putting our national security at risk.

So the Democrats do not agree with everything in the underlying continuing resolution because we don't think that it is----

Mr. TILLIS addressed the Chair.

We don't believe that it is right for this government to continue to kick the can down the road.

I will just say personally that there are other things in that continuing resolution that I object to as well. It is not just a straightforward continuing resolution. It includes the repeal of revenue that comes into the Federal Government to pay for the Affordable Care Act. So it is not a straightforward continuing resolution. There are other parts of that bill. One of them is a further attempt by the Republican majority to gut the Affordable Care Act and the money that is used to pay for it. There are other provisions in that bill--intelligence provisions, counterterrorism provisions--that many Members of the Senate have objections to as well. So it is simply not true to say that there is unanimous agreement about all of the provisions of the continuing resolution.

Further, this idea that no negotiation happens between the Republicans and Democrats and that Democrats are expected to vote for a large, expensive piece of legislation with no input makes no sense either. I understand you have to get 60 votes in order to pass it, but how the Senate works is that in order to get to 60 votes, there has to be a discussion between Republicans and Democrats. If I walked into a restaurant and the waiter brought me a meal that I didn't order and then told me that I had an obligation to pay for it, I might raise some objections because that is not how restaurants work. That is also not how the Senate works. The Republicans can't unilaterally write a piece of legislation and tell Democrats that they have to support it, especially when there are provisions in it that many of us do not support.

I am sorry that we can't come to a simple agreement to keep this government open on Monday so that we have the time and the space to put the pieces of a long-term agreement together, which I think is easier than many people think, while our constituents still have access to the services of this government.

I am sorry that we can't agree to this unanimous consent request. I hope we continue to work through the night and all through tomorrow to make sure we have a long-term budget agreement that makes sure that kids get their healthcare, that the community health centers stay open, and that the military gets the funding they need. I think we can get there.

Mr. President, I appreciate the Senator from North Carolina offering apologies on behalf of other Members of this body, so let me return the favor.

Let me offer an apology on behalf of the Republican majority for the governance disaster that has occurred in the U.S. Congress over the last year.

Why are we here today? We are here today because last year Republicans spent all of their time and energy trying to steal health insurance from 30 million Americans, trying to rescind protections for people with preexisting conditions. They spent the first half of the year trying to take insurance away from 30 million people. They were not successful because the American people rose up and told this Congress that was a terrible idea.

They spent the second half of the year trying to push through-- successfully this time--a massive tax cut for the wealthy; 80 percent of that tax cut going to the richest 1 percent of Americans, equally as unpopular as the healthcare repeal. That one was successful.

Meanwhile, during 2017, three disasters hit the United States--in Texas,

Florida, and Puerto Rico--and the Republican Congress forgot to pass the assistance package that is normally automatic after a disaster hits. Meanwhile, Republicans let the Children's Health Insurance Program expire, and millions of frightened parents got notifications that their toddlers' healthcare would cease to exist. Meanwhile, health centers in this country, which provide some of the most important care to the indigent, had their funding expire and all of a sudden had to make budget plans for 2018 with half as much money as they thought they were going to get. Meanwhile, Republicans didn't pass a budget, forgot to pass a single appropriations bill, and CRs after CRs were required.

I am sorry, on behalf of my Republican friends, that they didn't do their job in 2017. I am sorry that the American people gave control of the House and the Senate and Presidency to the Republican Party and they didn't pass a budget. They didn't pass disaster assistance. They didn't reauthorize the Children's Health Insurance Program. They didn't provide assistance to health centers.

We are trying to be the adults here and say that it is time to do our job. It is time to get assistance to these disaster areas. It is time to pass children's healthcare reauthorization for the long term and get the money the health centers need to keep their doors open. The Department of Defense needs a budget, not just for 4 months but for a full year.

We are not asking for much. We are just asking for Congress to do its job. At some point, somebody has to be the grownup. Somebody has to be the adult. We are saying: Let's keep the government open for 1 day, 3 days, as long as it takes for us to do our job. But to pass another monthlong continuing resolution with no hope in sight for the Department of Defense, which needs its money, the disaster areas, the kids, the health centers--that is not what we got elected to do.

This has been a governance disaster over the last year. This place has not been doing its job. We ought to start right now. I love the suggestion of staying all night. The Senator from North Carolina is right--we are not going to get an agreement on all of these complicated issues this evening, but, boy, we can try. Had we made the decision to at least keep the government open and operating for 1 day or 3 days, the pain at least would not be felt by the Americans who depend on these services, because of the governance disaster that has been visited upon this place over the past year.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would have joined Senator Sullivan in a round of applause. I thank him for sharing that inspiring story.

Funding the Government

Mr. President, I come to the floor this afternoon just to talk very briefly about the real-world impacts of the decisions we are going to make in the next week or so regarding the future of the budget and to really implore my Republican colleagues here, most especially the Republican leadership, to get this job done and not put us on another continuing resolution. This is not a theoretical or a rhetorical exercise; this is about people's lives and our failure to do our job-- our failure to pass a budget and to extend lifesaving programs, like the Children's Health Insurance Program. It is not about politics, and it is not about headlines. It is not about point scoring. It is about making people's lives better.

I really just want to share three stories from Connecticut to talk about the impact of the decisions that we are going to make with respect to the Federal budget. Let me first talk about this often esoteric-sounding concept of parity. One of the most important things that we are discussing is how many additional dollars are going to be in the budget for 2017 and 2018 versus in the prior fiscal year.

There seems to be fairly widespread agreement that we are underresourced when it comes to the Department of Defense. We have a multitude of kinetic challenges that are presented to the United States. A group of us just got briefed, once again today, by our military leadership on the scope and extent of the North Korean threat. I agree with many of my Republican colleagues that we need to increase funding for national security, but national security is not just housed in the Department of Defense. National security is also about making sure that our families are secure and that our communities are secure.

We believe that we should increase funds for the Department of Defense, and we should also make sure that our schools have teachers. We should also make sure that we have cops on the streets. We should also make sure that our bridges aren't falling down. That is national security as well. It is not too much to ask to make sure that our security is taken care of internationally and domestically as well.

Let me give you a perfect example of how you can't just plus-up defense spending and leave the rest of the budget unattended to. We love defense spending in Connecticut. Why? Because we make a lot of big ticket items for the Department of Defense. We make the helicopters at Sikorsky. We make the jet engines at Pratt & Whitney. We make the submarines at Electric Boat.

We are proud of all of them, but let me tell you what happens at Electric Boat if you plus-up the Defense Department at the expense of all of the other discretionary accounts. We are going to be building a lot more submarines over the next 10 years. We are now building two fast attack submarines a year. We are going to start building the new ballistic submarines, the Columbia class, and Electric Boat needs to hire 14,000 employees over the next 10 years. Much of that is because their workforce is older, and so they are going to have a lot of retirements. They have to find 14,000 new employees over the next 10 years. If they can't, we cannot make the submarines in the United States, or we cannot make the parts that go into

the submarines in the United States. Either the job will not get done, or the work will happen somewhere else in another country. You can't assemble the submarines anywhere other than at Electric Boat, but those parts will go to foreign companies rather than American companies.

The way in which we are going to fill the 14,000 jobs is through the Department of Labor. The Department of Labor has a partnership with an organization called the Eastern Connecticut Manufacturing Pipeline. That is a public-private partnership that seeks to train hundreds of individuals in the skills necessary to build the submarines. They received 4,500 applications over the past year. They can't place all those people because they only get a certain amount of funding from the Department of Labor, but they were able to train 500 new workers for Electric Boat, putting them right into those jobs that are necessary to build these submarines. The problem is the money for that program is running out, and with another CR, they can't get renewed funding for that program. So if you plus-up the Defense Department without increasing funding for the Department of Labor, you can't get the stuff that you want to build for the Department of Defense because you can't get the workers in order to fill the contracts.

If you don't renew this contract, if you don't renew this funding agreement with the Eastern Connecticut Manufacturing Pipeline, the work will not get done, and the jobs will go overseas. I just want my colleagues to understand that this isn't some philosophical belief that we need the same amount of money in the Department of Defense as we need in the rest of the budget. It is practical. It is practical because we need domestic economic security, but you also can't execute the Department of Defense contracts without funding in the rest of the budget.

Second, let me talk to you about the real-world implications of not funding the Children's Health Insurance Program. You know that healthcare more than any other issue has become a political football. Democrats toss it to the Republicans, and Republicans toss it back to Democrats. Yet there is no other issue that is more personal than this. If someone doesn't have healthcare for their family, nothing else in their life can happen.

I want to share one story. These letters and emails are flooding into our offices with respect to the real-world impact of not funding the Children's Health Insurance Program.

In Connecticut, letters have gone out to families whose children are insured through CHIP, telling them that by the end of this month--that is 20 days away--they lose their insurance. So here is what Tara from Washington, CT, writes. She said:

Despite our full time employment--

She works as a small business manager, and her husband is a full-time electrical apprentice--

my husband and I do not make enough money to buy health

insurance for our children in addition to our other mandatory

expenses.

She explains that her children go to daycare, which costs $1,800 a month, which she says is more than their mortgage plus taxes and insurance.

To go back to her letter, she says:

This is where the [Children's Health Insurance Program]

comes into play in our lives. I cannot even begin to tell you

the anxiety I faced when I was pregnant with my daughter,

crying every day because I didn't know how we were going to

make ends meet. Thank God for a family friend who happened to

be an insurance agent. She told us about [CHIP] and suddenly

some of that anxiety was quelled.

We have been blessed to have [CHIP] in our lives.

I say CHIP. She says in the letter HUSKY. HUSKY is the name of the CHIP program in Connecticut.

We have been blessed to have [CHIP] in our lives. Last

month my daughter got RSV and was prescribed a nebulizer. Two

weeks ago, my son caught it from her and that developed into

a double ear infection and pink eye, requiring two expensive

medications. The co-pays and premiums are manageable though

and they got the care they needed.

I read in the [local paper] this weekend that letters were

going out to parents of children . . . telling them that

their coverage will end on January 31, 2018.

She is writing this in December.

We are a week away from Christmas, and what should be a

happy time of year has now turned into stress and depression.

How am I going to get insurance for my kids? My daughter

turns two on February 10th, how am I going to pay for her

well visit? I can't just skip it, they won't allow her back

into daycare.

I cannot believe the dysfunction going on in this country.

I cannot believe tax cuts for the wealthy have taken

precedent over the health of my kids. . . . What is Congress

doing to ensure their continued healthcare?

This story is repeated literally millions of times over all across this country. People went through the holiday anxious and depressed because they were convinced that we weren't taking seriously the healthcare of their kids. When we debate the budget, it has to have attached to it a long-term, if not permanent, extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program because there are families just like Tara out there who are doing everything we ask them to. She is full-time employed, her husband is full-time employed, and they can't afford health insurance for their kids without CHIP.

Let me talk to you about the importance of making sure that we get the right amount of disaster funding to Texas, Florida, and in particular Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico matters to us in Connecticut because we have the largest percentage of our population with Puerto Rican roots than any State in the country. We are so proud of that. The Puerto Rican community in Connecticut is vibrant, economically and culturally, powerful politically, involved in our cities and towns and in State government.

The Governor of Puerto Rico has requested $94 billion for Maria recovery and rebuilding, and I am just back from Puerto Rico. I can report to you that the island is still in crisis. One hundred days after the hurricane hit, more than half of the country--half of the households--still don't have electricity.

If that were happening in Connecticut, Alaska, or Louisiana, there would be riots in the streets, but for some reason it is acceptable in Puerto Rico. We are 100 days after the hurricane, and we still haven't approved a disaster recovery package, and the Trump administration is nickel-and-diming the island.

I walked through the poorest, most densely populated neighborhood in San Juan, the capital of the Commonwealth. They have no power. Mold is growing in these homes because they can't dry out the moisture without electricity. Kids are enduring more frequent and more intense bouts of asthma. People are dying because they can't refrigerate their medication or keep their ventilation equipment running. This is what is happening in the United States of America. We need to authorize significant, robust funding for Puerto Rico and for Texas and Florida. We need to do it now.

We need to do it now because the day that I arrived on the island--I think it was January 2--it was reported to us that there was the highest volume of people leaving Puerto Rico since the hurricane--on that day, January 2. The exodus is getting more intense. More people are leaving, not less. Why? Because they don't think we are committed to rebuilding the island. Puerto Ricans don't think that Congress is serious about putting back on the electricity. They waited 1 month. They waited 2 months. They waited 3 months, and then they said: Enough, we can't put our kids in these conditions.

They started leaving in record numbers. They were leaving right off the bat, but they are now leaving in record numbers. While most of them are coming to places like Florida, many of them are coming to Connecticut. Why? Because when they make that move, they often go first to stay with friends. Because we have such a compassionate, large Puerto Rican community in Connecticut, many of these families are coming to Connecticut.

So let me just give you a couple of the numbers here. We asked our school systems to try to keep a rough track of how many new Puerto Rican students are showing up. Our cities are small in Connecticut. We don't have a city that is much bigger than 100,000. In Hartford, they have 388 new Puerto Rican students--``new'' meaning having come since the hurricane from the island. Waterbury, CT, has 268. New Britain, a very small city, has 213. Bridgeport has 179. These are kids who are glad to have shelter and schooling in Connecticut, but they don't want to be in Connecticut. They came under duress. They came to Connecticut as refugees. They want to be back in Puerto Rico.

The stress that this is putting on the schools is serious. We are in a budget crisis in Connecticut. Schools have already had their funding cut from Hartford. Yet these schools are now having to staff up to deal with this influx of students from Puerto Rico. We are glad to do it. We see it as our obligation, and we know that these kids will be a part of Connecticut's strength. But it is not easy to do when we haven't authorized any money to help States like Connecticut to deal with this influx of students. At McDonough Middle School in Hartford, these kids are thriving, but they have had to set up a new immersion lab to handle all these kids coming in. They have had to hire new staff to teach English as a second language. These are schools that were already seeing their funding hemorrhage from the State government.

The impact is real on McDonough Middle School. The impact is real on Tara and her family from Washington. The impact is real for an important supplier in our industrial base, Electric Boat. If we just continue to push CR after CR, these families, schools, and companies will not succeed. This isn't about political headlines. This isn't about numbers on a page. This is about real-world impact for businesses, families, and schools.

So let's get the job done. Let's write a budget. Let's at least agree to the overall budget numbers. Let's fund the Children's Health Insurance Program. Let's get Puerto Rico, Florida, and Texas everything they need. News flash: That is our job.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, when you are the father of a 9-year-old and a 6-year-old during the holiday season, you spend an awful lot of time reading holiday stories, you spend an awful lot of time watching Christmas specials and Christmas movies on TV, and it is wonderful. I love it. I love getting to relive my childhood through the eyes of my kids.

If you remember all of these stories and specials, there is a familiar theme that runs through them, and it is a really nice theme for kids to hear. The basic idea in many of these stories is that Christmas, Hanukkah, the holidays we celebrate today, aren't about pageantry, and they aren't about pomp and circumstance or the presents or material things; it is really about celebrating each other. It is about sort of understanding what is important to us and who is important to us and using this little break we get at the end of the year to spend time with each other.

My youngest's favorite of all of these stories and specials is the iconic Doctor Seuss poem about the Grinch. It ends like this:

He hadn't stopped Christmas from coming! It came!

Somehow or another it came just the same!

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,

stood puzzling and puzzling: ``How could it be so?''

``It came without ribbons! It came without tags!''

``It came without packages, boxes or bags!''

And he puzzled three hours, 'til his puzzler was sore.

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!

``Maybe Christmas,'' he thought, ``doesn't come from a

store.''

``Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more!''

Maybe it is the most famous of all of the passages from Christmas stories explaining that premise; that this time of the year is a time in which we think about each other.

I hope we do that in the Senate and in the House over the coming days before we wrap up for the year because as we approach the Christmas season and as creatures of good fortune--those of us who get to serve in the U.S. Senate--as we begin to prepare to go home and share time with our family and our loved ones, we need to think about the crisis many families are in today and will be in over the holiday season if we don't choose to do some basic things here, attached to our responsibility as U.S. Senators.

We need to think about the position we are going to put people in because of our inability to act and to pass legislation that, prior to this holiday season, seemed relatively noncontroversial.

Christmas is about celebrating our love for one another. If we really do believe in brotherhood--if we really do believe that our role as U.S. Senators is to try to lift people up around us--then we need to understand that the debates around health center funding or the Children's Health Insurance Program or the status of children who were brought here by their parents at a very young age from another country aren't about politics. They are not about scoring political points. They are about people and what we will do to people as we head into the holiday season.

Adrianna Bigard is a single mom from Hamden, CT. For her, the CHIP program has been a lifesaver. She is doing everything we would ask a young woman to do. She received her master's degree in public relations from Quinnipiac University. She is now working as a public relations specialist. She has a young son--a 6-year-old, Carter--and she is a single mom. She gets a paycheck every week, but it goes out as quickly as it comes in. She is one of the millions of Americans who are working, who are playing by the rules but are living paycheck to paycheck.

She gets insurance through her employer, but when she was told how much it would cost to add her son to her coverage, she simply could not afford it. She literally did not have the money in her monthly paycheck to be able to pay for gas and for groceries, for rent and for coverage for her son. So the CHIP program was a lifesaver for her.

Her son now is enrolled in what we call HUSKY B in Connecticut, which is the name we use for our CHIP program. Without it, she says, things would dramatically change. If HUSKY goes away--if CHIP goes away--once all benefits, taxes, et cetera, are paid, I will not have enough money left in my paycheck to pay my rent.

That is what is consuming her this holiday season.

She just got a notice from the State of Connecticut telling her that on January 31, her son Carter will lose healthcare insurance, meaning on January 31, Adrianna will not have enough money to pay for her rent or she will have to leave her son uninsured. That will be her choice come January 31. That is a pretty terrible, awful way for her to spend her holiday season.

In northeastern Connecticut, I heard from a woman who works in homelessness, and she was telling an inspiring story of a gentleman who had been living the last 3 months in a tent and suffering deeply from severe joint pain, fevers, and weakness, and had no access to healthcare until he was connected with the local community health center. That local community health center was able to get him in for care to stabilize him and potentially save his life. Yet that community health center--it is called Generations, and it serves thousands of people in northeastern Connecticut--will lose 70 percent of its funding next year.

On January 1, many health centers in Connecticut will lose more than half of their funding, and they will shut their doors to thousands and thousands of people like this man who wouldn't receive healthcare but for community health centers.

In rural America, the slashing of community health center funding will be absolutely devastating because sometimes it is these health centers that are the only way for people to get care, particularly mental health care and addiction. Community health center patients are spending this holiday season trying to digest the news that they may be shut out from their psychiatrists. They may no longer be able to see their child's primary care doctor come January 1. A 70-percent cut is not something you can manage with efficiencies; it means an elimination of services.

Faye is from Norwalk, CT. She came to this country when she was 11. She now has DACA status. She, like so many other Dreamers, has done everything we asked. Faye went to school. She got an advanced degree. She is now holding down two jobs--one of them as a radiology scheduler, working in our healthcare system. She is working two jobs because she wants to have access to the American dream of home ownership, and she is saving and saving so that she can buy a house. Now she is faced with being deported to a country that she doesn't recognize. She has been in the United States for 19 years. She lived in Connecticut for 16 years. She is spending her holiday season--as are the other 800,000 DACA recipients in this country--fearing that her life as she knows it is going to end at the beginning of next year.

Christmas, the holiday season, is not about presents. It is not about those Christmas specials. It is about people. It is about recommitting ourselves to this uniquely American notion that we are all in this together and that we are weaker as a whole if individuals who live amongst us are in crisis, especially individuals who have done everything we have asked and have played by the rules. That is Adrianna and Faye--people who are going to have something taken from them and their loved ones and are going to be put into crisis because we will not do our job.

By the end of this week, we have to protect these Dreamers, we have to provide a permanent extension for health center funding, and we have to provide a permanent extension for children's healthcare insurance funding because it is our job and also because it is cruel to send all of these millions of families into the holidays with that kind of anxiety while we all sit around our holiday tables safe and sound.

My kids remind me over and over again about what they learned from these Christmas specials. Christmas isn't about the presents. It is not about the trees. It is not about the decorations. The holidays are about our commitment to one another. We can re-up on that commitment this week by doing the right thing.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Nellie Jafari, a health fellow in my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the 115th Congress.

Mr. President, I am on the floor this afternoon to mark 5 years since the unthinkable--since 20 6-year-olds and 7-year-olds and 6 of their educators were killed in an elementary school in Connecticut. It changed the town of Newtown. It changed this country in the way that we think about gun violence. And it certainly changed me. I want to offer a few thoughts today as we once again memorialize those beautiful children whose lives were cut far, far too short.

It is easy to spend today--especially those of us who come from Connecticut, who are very intimately connected to the tragedy and to those families--drowning in sadness. There is really no way to conceive of what it is like as a parent to lose a child that young, in that manner, in 5 short minutes in a hail of bullets emanating from a tactical assault weapon. Twenty kids who had just walked into their classroom, bright and cheery, were gone.

It is easy to hang your head, thinking of all of the things that haven't happened. I have been down to this floor over 50 times, often at my wit's end, raising my voice at my colleagues in frustration at our quiet and unintentional endorsement of the slaughter that happens in this country because we haven't passed a single piece of legislation trying to make sense of our Nation's gun laws. In fact, to the extent we have made changes in gun laws, it has compounded the problem, not remedied it.

But I want to spend my brief time here today not focusing on the sadness of today--it is there; it is inescapable--and not focusing on what we haven't done but focusing on so many miracles, big ones and small ones, that have occurred in and around the lives of those who have been affected in Newtown, CT, over the last 5 years.

First, there are these individual miracles that have happened within these families. Again, very few people understand the kind of crippling pain that comes with this loss. While these families will never be the same, they have found ways to rebound. They have found ways to still capture joy in their lives. Some have added to their numbers by welcoming new children into their family since then. They have rediscovered passions. They have made sure that the surviving children--the siblings--have been able to live lives of optimism rather than live lives of perpetual fear.

I have gotten to know so many of these families. The parents and the kids are now close, personal friends of mine. Watching the rebirth of these families instills a sense of faith in the human spirit that is hard to explain. Those are small miracles, but they are important ones to remember on this 5-year anniversary.

The miracles also come in ways that lives have been changed and saved through the efforts that have sprung forth out of this tragedy. So many of the families joined together with their friends and started up small charitable organizations in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, trying to find a way to take the beauty of these kids and transfer it to others. They are almost too numerable to mention.

The Ana Grace Project gives out a scholarship every year at Western Connecticut State University for incoming freshmen who are interested in studying music because for her whole life, Ana Grace was surrounded by music.

The Vicki Soto Memorial Fund donates five books every year to every K-6 classroom in her hometown of Stratford. She was one of the teachers--heroes of that day. Kids have the opportunity to read and to learn to love reading--which is what she taught to these kindergarten kids--because of her foundation.

The Charlotte Helen Bacon Foundation pays for therapy dogs for kids and families in need, reflecting Charlotte's love of dogs.

The Catherine Violet Hubbard Foundation opened an animal sanctuary on 32 acres in Newtown to help animals that had been rescued from abusive or neglectful environments because of Catherine's love of animals.

The list goes on and on. These are small, beautiful miracles that are happening all across Connecticut and all across the country in trying to honor the memory of these kids and their educators.

Then there are miracles that have happened in the context of public policy. A year ago this week, I sat at the White House with a few of the Sandy Hook parents, quietly in the back of an auditorium, as President Obama signed into law the 2016 Mental Health Reform Act, which would not have become law without the input and activism of the Sandy Hook parents and many other survivors of gun violence.

Our gun violence problem is not a mental health problem, per se. There is no inherent connection between mental illness and gun violence. But there is no mistaking that the shooter in Newtown--as has been the case in so many other of these mass slaughters--had deep mental health problems that went untreated. There have been public policy victories.

So today, on the 5-year anniversary, I hope that my friends here will celebrate these small but meaningful miracles that have happened over the last 5 years, and I hope that you will be reminded that we cannot take one day or one moment for granted. Those moms and dads who sent their kids to school that morning never imagined that would be the last time they would be able to interact with their children. So none of us should think that we will have another chance to say what we want to say to somebody we care about. None of us should think we can put off saying ``I love you'' for another moment. Those small things that we do for each other matter desperately.

I think about one story that I will leave you with from that morning. Daniel Barden is one of the young boys killed in that elementary school. His older brother went to school at a different time than he did. He would get up earlier and go down to the bus stop earlier than Daniel would, so they normally wouldn't really see each other in the morning. For some reason, the morning of the shooting at Sandy Hook, Daniel got up earlier than he normally did. He saw that his brother was at the end of the driveway waiting for the bus. He ran out of the house and down the driveway to say goodbye to his brother--goodbye for the day. It was just a small, tiny act of kindness that Daniel thought probably would be forgotten by his brother by the end of that day, but it has meant the world to that family, the idea that Daniel got the chance to walk down the driveway and say goodbye to his brother before he went to school that day and never came back.

Don't ever think you will have another chance to say what you want to say to a loved one, to someone who means something in your life.

A few months ago, one of the Sandy Hook parents arrived unexpectedly in my office. I got word from the front desk that she was there. She just wanted to stop in for a few minutes. I said: Of course, send her back. This mom had lost her child. I have come to know her very well. She burst into my office and she flung her arms around me and she whispered into my ear: Keep going. She unclasped her arms and looked at me and said: That is all I wanted to come and tell you. After a few pleasantries, she walked out the door.

Keep going. That is what Newtown has done over the last 5 years. That is what those families have found the courage to do over the last half a decade.

For those of us who believe the laws of this country must change in order to protect kids like those who lost their lives in Sandy Hook, it is what we do. As we mark 5 years since the violence at Sandy Hook Elementary School, we keep going.

I yield the floor.

Thank you very much, Mr. President.

I was paying attention to my social media feed, and I have seen that Senators on the Republican side are starting to announce which way they are voting. I saw that Corker is a no and Collins is a yes. I don't know what they are a no or a yes on. How can you declare which way you are going to vote on a bill that you haven't read, on a bill that your constituents haven't seen?

Senator Wyden just piled up what looked to be about 6 inches' worth of text in front of the Senate floor. There is no possible way that any Member of this body has read all of that. There is no way that in the time between when it is released to Senators and when we vote, anyone-- even from the very close States--is going to be able to get back to their constituents and ask them what they think about this piece of legislation. I guess I would say I have never seen anything like it, but we just went through it earlier this year when we were given about an hour to look at a complete reform of one-sixth of the American economy, the healthcare system.

We are now being asked to vote this evening on a multitrillion-dollar reform of our Tax Code, and not a single U.S. Senator will have read it. There is no way you will have read it. I just saw how big it is. Maybe Republicans have read it because they have seen it in these secret negotiations, but I can guarantee you that Senate Democrats will not have read this because we have been kept out of the loop on all of these negotiations designed to get to 50 votes--not to 60 votes, not to 70 votes, not a consensus product that can get Republican and Democratic support.

I got here in 2007 when Democrats took control of the House and the Senate. I remember during those 2 years all sorts of consternation from Republicans about how bills were being rushed through the process. In reaction to that, when Republicans took back control of the House, they instituted something called a 72-hour rule that said that we couldn't vote on a piece of legislation unless Members have been able to see it for 72 hours. We need a 72-minute rule. I don't think we are going to be able to look at this legislation for more than 72 minutes--a multitrillion-dollar reform of the U.S. Tax Code--before we are asked to vote on it.

Senator Wyden and others have been waving around this list of lobbyist asked-for amendments that fill up an entire page. We are not going to get 72 minutes to look at this, never mind have a single conversation with our constituents. It is dark out. The bill is going to be introduced on a Friday night. We are going to vote on it overnight. This is supposed to be the world's greatest deliberative body. It is not supposed to work like this.

It is not a middle-class tax cut. I am not going to deny that there are some people in the middle class who are going to get their taxes lowered by this bill, but the middle-class tax cuts here are temporary and they are very selective. They are selective in a way that very peculiarly seems to discriminate against Democratic States. So the States that are represented by Democrats don't get as big a tax cut out of this because it has been crafted in a way that hurts States like mine that utilize the State and local tax deductions more than other States, those that happen to be represented by Republicans.

It is not a middle-class tax cut because the middle-class tax cuts are temporary. They go away after 7 years. The corporate tax cuts, the inheritance tax cuts for billionaires, are permanent. Those go through the full 10-year timeframe. But middle-class families don't get permanence. After 7 years, 6 out of 10 middle-class families will have their taxes go up, not down.

That 7-year timeframe is an important one because by repealing the individual mandate, premiums go up by 10 percent a year. Republicans have been screaming about premiums going up, and they decided intentionally to put a provision in this bill that will guarantee premiums will continue to go up at 10 percent per year. Guess what happens at year 7. Year 7 is when that 10 percent increase year-by-year compounds such that premiums will double. So in year 7--this is a great deal if you are a middle-class taxpayer--your tax cut to the extent it exists in this bill disappears and your healthcare premium is doubled.

What it is, is a big tax cut for the wealthy. I am stealing Senator Bennet's chart, but he did it very well. We have 572,000 taxpayers--the richest 500,000 Americans--getting $34 billion in tax cuts, and then we have 90 million taxpayers who are making under $50,000 a year getting $14 billion in tax cuts.

I get it. If you are going to structure a tax cut that covers everybody, naturally people who make more are going to get more. But why does it make sense to borrow $34 billion to help the wealthiest 500,000 Americans? This

doesn't even count the inheritance tax, which is going to help an even smaller percentage of those people even more.

Come on, this idea that you could deficit-finance a tax cut for the rich and it will just trickle down and magically result in economic growth--that is just not true. It is fiction. We have decades of economic experience to tell us that when we cut taxes for the rich, it does not magically result in enough economic growth to make up for the deficit, especially deficits that are going to be in the neighborhood of $2 trillion. You might as well claim that unicorns are real. You want to believe that Tupac is still alive, go for it--that is just as plausible as deficit-financed tax cuts for the rich resulting in enough economic growth to wipe out the deficit. It is fiction. It is a fantasy from the beginning.

I think we should take our time, read the bill, and have a real conversation about what we are about to do. If our goal is to provide a middle-class tax cut, we could do a much better job if we worked together. This is not a middle-class tax cut for everybody, and after 7 years, the majority of people in the middle class lose that tax cut.

There is no reason to borrow this much money for the richest 500,000 Americans. As a Senator with two young kids, I just don't know why you would ask my kids and so many others to pay back the loans necessary to deliver this tax cut, especially when it isn't going to magically result in the kind of economic growth that trickle-down economists have claimed for years and years.

It is not impossible to get a bipartisan tax bill. I know my Republican friends claim, as they did on healthcare, that there is no good will on the Democratic side to try to craft a bipartisan proposal. The tragedy is that they didn't even try. There was no attempt to try to find common ground here, just as there was no attempt to try to find common ground on healthcare until the bill failed. I credit Senator Alexander and Senator Murray for trying to find that common ground after the healthcare bill failed, but the order switched--try to find common ground first, and if that fails, do it in a partisan fashion, instead of doing it in a partisan fashion, and when that fails, trying to find common ground.

This is a really bad deal, a really bad piece of legislation for my constituents--I think, because I will not have read it by the time I am forced to vote on it, and neither will any of the other 99 Members of this body.

I will yield the floor.

I will.

I say to Senator Wyden, I don't want to be too heavy about this, but everybody shouldn't assume that the way in which we run our country just continues on forever. Democracy is unnatural. We don't run other parts of our lives by democratic vote. We decided to run our country in a way that allows everybody to participate. And, you know, let's be honest--people have been asking some questions recently about the health of our democracy, and maybe that was a big part of the subtext of the 2016 election.

This doesn't help win people's faith back in the democratic experiment when they see this casualness afforded to a debate that affects millions of Americans. It hurts us all when a bill this big, this important, gets rammed through under the cover of night. It starts to atrophy people's faith in the entire way that we go about running our government.

I understand that Congress is not that popular. It would be hard to get less popular than we are today. If we ever want to start to climb our way back to legitimacy, then we have to trust the people to be part of the process of drafting and passing legislation rather than being afraid of the people and burying a bill in the dead of the night, as is happening now.

I yield back.

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

Mr. President, my colleagues, cholera is a truly awful way to die. It is a manmade disease, a man-caused disease that this world could easily eradicate from existence. You become so dehydrated, you vomit so much liquid, your body dispenses so many nutrients, so much water through unending diarrhea, that your body is thrown into shock. You literally die from vomiting and diarrhea, sometimes over the course of hours, sometimes over the course of days, sometimes over the course of weeks.

Inside Yemen today, by the end of this year, there will be 1 million people diagnosed with cholera.

This picture I have in the Chamber is a hard image to see. I will replace it with this one.

One million people will be diagnosed with cholera. Thousands and thousands inside Yemen today are dying because of this disease. There is a humanitarian catastrophe inside this country--which very few people in this Nation can locate on a map--of absolutely epic proportions. This humanitarian catastrophe, this famine--one of four famines across the world today--is being caused in part by actions of the United States of America, and it is time that we do something about it as a body.

As we speak today, the Saudi-led coalition that has been engaged in an incessant 2-year bombing campaign in Yemen is blockading Yemen, not allowing any humanitarian relief, not allowing fuel or food or water to get into the country.

The coalition's blockade has grounded U.N. flights. It has prevented humanitarian workers from flying in and out of the country. It has barred ships from delivering lifesaving food, fuel, and medical supplies. A 25,000-metric-ton World Food Programme ship is currently, as we speak, being denied access to the port. As we speak today, hospitals and aid organizations inside Yemen are shutting down because they do not have enough fuel to continue operating. Vaccines will run out in the country by the end of the month. Prices for food and medicine are spiking such that they are unaffordable to the majority of Yemenis. Because of cholera alone, 2,000 people have died. Thousands of other civilians have died because of other humanitarian nightmares, including a lack of access to the medical system.

I mentioned that the blockade is being run by the Saudi-led coalition. The United States is a member of that coalition. For 2 years, the United States has been aiding the Government of Saudi Arabia in a bombing campaign of the Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. That bombing campaign caused this outbreak of cholera. Why is that? The bombing campaign deliberately targeted the electricity grid of Yemen in and around Sana'a, the capital controlled today by the Houthis. The water treatment facility runs on the electricity from that grid.

As you can read in a lengthy story in the New York Times from 2 days ago, the country no longer has the ability to treat water that goes to its capital because the Saudi-led bombing campaign has knocked out electricity. The fuel that has helped temporarily run the water treatment facility is no longer available either because the Saudi-led bombing campaign has targeted the infrastructure that allows for fuel to be delivered. So today the water is undrinkable. It is toxic. Yet, because there aren't other supplies of water, millions of Yemenis are ingesting it. They are eating food that is also toxic because of the inability to treat water, because of the flow of sewage and feces throughout the capital city, and almost 1 million people have contracted cholera.

That bombing campaign that targeted the electricity infrastructure in Yemen could only happen with U.S. support. It is the United States that provides the targeting assistance for the Saudi planes. It is U.S. refueling planes flying in the sky around Yemen that restock the Saudi fighter jets with fuel, allowing them to drop more ordnance. It is U.S.-made and transferred ordnance that is carried on these planes and dropped on civilian and infrastructure targets inside Yemen.

The United States is part of this coalition. The bombing campaign that has caused the cholera outbreak could not happen without us. The official position of the State Department with respect to the blockade--which was imposed by the Saudis about a week ago--is that they should end it, at least for the purposes of allowing humanitarian resources into the country. That has not happened.

As I mentioned, there is literally a World Food Programme ship right now with 25,000 metric tons of food waiting to get into the capital to help families like this. So although that may be the official position of the State Department, we clearly aren't articulating that position to the Saudis because the Saudi blockade--which happens with U.S. military support--continues. Maybe that is because the State Department and the White House are simply operating on two different planets.

While on his trip to Asia, President Trump said that he has full confidence in the Saudi King, that he knows what he is doing. Let me tell you what he is doing. He is using starvation and disease as a weapon of war, which is in contravention of international human rights law. You cannot use starvation. You cannot intentionally cause this kind of disease in order to try to win a military conflict. So maybe the Saudis do know what they are doing, but what they are doing is a gross violation of human rights law.

It would be one thing if the United States were a mere observer, but we are a participant in this. This horror--I am sorry, it is hard to see--is caused in part by our decision to facilitate a bombing campaign that is murdering children and to endorse a Saudi strategy inside Yemen that is deliberately using disease and starvation and the withdrawal of humanitarian support as a tactic.

Last night, the House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution making clear that there is no legal authorization for U.S. participation in the Saudi-led campaign against the Yemeni people. Importantly, the resolution also made clear that there are multiple bad actors in Yemen today. The vast majority of cholera cases today--I think upwards of 80 percent--are in Houthi-controlled areas. But the Houthis do not have clean hands, and their patrons, the Iranians, do not have clean hands. There have been human rights abuses and attacks on civilian targets by the Houthi forces as well.

The Iranians should stand down immediately, as should the Saudis, as they continue to whip up this proxy war between regional powers that is killing civilians inside Yemen, but without U.S. leadership in the region, there is no hope for that stand-down to happen.

In the Obama administration, at least Secretary Kerry was actively, personally engaged in trying to bring some resolution to the civil war inside Yemen. But since President Trump took office and Secretary Tillerson became Secretary of State, there is zero U.S. leadership on this question. We don't have an Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East. We don't have any envoy for this crisis. All we have is a President who says that the Saudi Government knows what it is doing.

That kind of unconditional endorsement of intentional humanitarian pain is un-American. We have stood up time and time again for human rights all across the world. We have been the people who deliver humanitarian salvation to people who are at risk of disease and famine and death. And instead of rescuing the people of Yemen during this moment of blockade, we are contributing to the deterioration of the quality of life inside that country.

The Saudi blockade needs to end today. And a partial lifting of the blockade is not enough. This morning, the coalition did say they are going to allow some humanitarian access to the ports they control, but we need access to the ports near where the majority of the population actually lives--Hudaydah and Saleef. Allowing access to the ports that the Saudis control--which are not the ports where the majority of humanitarian aid flows through--is not sufficient. It will not do the job. Medicine and vaccinations will continue to dry up. Price spikes will continue to go through the roof. The cholera epidemic will continue.

We have a responsibility as a nation to ensure that the coalition, of which we are a part, is not using starvation as a weapon of war. This will be a stain on the conscience of our Nation if we continue to remain silent. I hope the Senate takes the same action that the House did. I hope we make clear that there is no legal authorization for the United States to be part of a war inside Yemen. Congress has not given the authorization for this President to engage in these military activities.

By the way, the civil war inside Yemen has aided the enemies we actually have declared war against. Al-Qaida is getting stronger inside Yemen because, as more and more of the country becomes ungovernable because of this war, al-Qaida is moving into that territory. ISIS-- against which we have not declared war, but we are engaged in active military activity in the region--is getting stronger there too.

So even if you don't believe there is a humanitarian imperative attached to U.S. withdrawal from this coalition, there is a national security imperative because we are just strengthening the most lethal elements of the extremist movement worldwide.

I know many other Members of this body on both sides of the aisle feel as strongly about this as I do. We are not going to get leadership on this question from the administration. They have given a blank check to the Saudis. They have turned a blind eye to this epidemic inside Yemen--an epidemic that is getting worse by the day since the Saudi blockade began. Leadership will have to come from this body.

We need to make clear to the administration that they do not have the authority to continue to participate in this military coalition. We need to press the administration to tell the Saudis to end this blockade. We need to start using our ability as appropriators and authorizers to send messages to the Saudis that this kind of conduct cannot continue. We have tools at our disposal to lead as a Congress on this question--the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe happening right now, as we speak, getting worse by the hour inside Yemen. This Congress, this Senate, cannot remain silent.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, we are grieving yet again today another horrific mass shooting in a church in Texas--over 25 dead, others still clinging to life. We were barely past our stage of grief as more than 50 people were shot dead and 500 were injured at a country music concert in Las Vegas. Of course, every single night in this country, parents and brothers and sisters go to bed having lost their loved ones, and 90 people die every day from guns in this country.

I just think it is worth stating that this happens nowhere else other than in the United States. This is not inevitable. This is not something that we should accept. We are not impotent or helpless to try to change the scope of tragedy that is crippling for families that have to go through this.

I want everyone to take a quick look at this pretty simple chart. The United States has more guns and more gun deaths than any other developed country. It is not close, we are not even in the neighborhood of any of our other G-20 competitor nations. While the President told us the other day that this is a mental illness problem, one cannot explain this outlier status through a story of mental illness because none of these other countries have any lower rate of mental illness. There are just as many people who are mentally ill in these countries as there are in our country.

We cannot explain it by the attention we pay to mental illness. We spend more money on treating mental illness than these countries do. This isn't a mental illness problem. We have to do better in treating people who have psychological disorders in this country, but the reason that we are an outlier nation when it comes to the number of gun deaths and the epic scale of our mass tragedies is explained by something else.

Here is a quick story. This graphic shows the States that have background check requirements on all gun sales in the private sector, and here are the States that have no background check laws beyond those that are required in Federal law. It is a fundamentally different story when it comes to gun-related homicides. In the States that have background check laws, the average rate of homicide is substantially lower--substantially lower--than in States that haven't background check laws. That is because in this country, with the loosest, most lax gun laws in the industrialized world, private citizens are able to get their hands on weapons that are designed not for hunting and not for shooting for sport but to kill. These tactical assault-style weapons are being used over and over in these mass tragedies, and more people end up in harm's way.

Smarter gun laws--just making sure that the right people have guns, not the wrong people--lead to less gun deaths. It is time for us to admit that this is a uniquely American problem and that it deserves our attention rather than our silence, which has been our response every single session that I have been a Member of Congress.

This poster shows but a few of the faces that have been lost to gun violence in this country. My small town of Sandy Hook is a broken community. It is a beautiful, wonderful community, but it is a broken community. The ripples of grief that come with losing that number of children--beautiful children--all at one time never really gets repaired. That small community in Texas, Sutherland Springs, will suffer that same fate. It will be a community that will not ever truly repair itself, having lost so many beautiful people at one moment. You can't rewind the clock.

It is increasingly impossible for me to continue to go back to Newtown, CT, and tell the people of that community that even after mass murder after mass murder in this country, at a scale that occurs in no other Nation, our response as a body is to do nothing. It is a level of callousness that is frankly unexplainable to the victims of this violence, and this macabre club of families that have had to deal with the consequences of gun violence is getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Why? Because the number of people who die by guns is not going down. It is not leveling off. It is exploding. Every year, more people--not less people--are killed by guns in this country, and it seems to be the only problem in which there is zero interest in this body to solve. When a terrorist plows into civilians with a truck in New York City, Republicans in this body are talking about policy change within hours, but after somebody walks into a school or a church or a shopping mall, we are told that there has to be a restraining order on policy debate for days. It is ridiculous, and it is offensive to the families who have gone through this.

So, let's just for a moment set aside the issues that I will admit are unlikely to come up for a vote in this body between now and the end of this session. I think it is unbelievable that universal background checks, supported by 90 percent of Americans, can't get a vote here. I don't think there is another issue like that in the American public, where 90 percent of Americans agree on something and Congress can't even conceive of getting it done.

The only place where background checks is controversial is in the Congress. Every single gun owner I talk to

in my State wants to make sure that criminals and people who are seriously mentally ill can't buy guns.

Similarly, let's admit what is happening here. It is not a coincidence that the same kind of weapon is used every single time in these shootings. These are copycat shootings in which people see the kind of destruction that comes with an AR-15-style weapon, and they use it again in order to maximize the lethality.

Wake up. Wake up to the reality that these weapons are being used to murder with speed and power, and the killers are watching what happens in Sandy Hook, what happens in Texas, what happens in Orlando, what happens in Las Vegas, and they are repeating the process. They are replicating the weapon. They shouldn't be in the hands of civilians. You can have plenty of fun hunting without an AR-15 or AR-15-style weapon. So let's set aside universal background checks and assault weapons for a moment. I get the politics of this place. I understand those are unlikely to pass.

Why, then, can't we work on the things that we know we agree on? I have listened to dozens of Republicans in the House and the Senate claim that they are for making real the prohibition on automatic weapons. People shouldn't have fully automatic weapons in this country. Nobody should be able to do what that guy did at an upper story window in a hotel in Las Vegas, and the law that we all passed is being ignored by companies that are selling these aftermarket modifications that turn semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons. The company that sold the modification took it off the market, but only for a couple of weeks. They are back to selling bump stocks again because we have signaled that we are not going to do anything about it.

It is not enough to just tell the ATF to do it. Why? Because the law is vague. The ATF said it was vague in 2010. All we have to do is clarify it, but aftermarket modifications that turn semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons shouldn't be legal. It seems we have agreement on that because I have listened to many Republicans saying they are willing to take that step. Let's take it and stop talking about it. Put legislation on the floor that says you cannot have an automatic weapon in this country. Let's do it. We agree on it.

I didn't agree with the President yesterday when he said it is a mental illness problem, but similarly we could work together to make sure that people who are seriously mentally ill don't buy weapons. That is the second noncontroversial policy proposal on which we could work together. Let's just admit we are going the wrong way, not the right way.

Earlier this year, Republicans passed a piece of legislation that allowed for 75,000 people in this country who have serious mental illness to be able to get off the list of prohibited purchasers and start buying guns again. These are people who were judged to be so mentally ill that they couldn't deposit a check. They were given conservator status for Social Security purposes. These are people who were so mentally ill, so limited in their cognitive abilities that they couldn't take a Social Security check and deposit it. Those people were prohibited from buying guns. This Congress passed a law earlier this year to say that those people who can't deposit a check should be able to go buy an assault weapon.

If we are serious about trying to stop people with mental illness from getting weapons, let's work together on that instead of moving backward.

Finally, it is an open secret that the existing background check system is broken. Let's not pretend we just woke up yesterday in amazement that the records of people who are seriously mentally ill or have been convicted of crimes aren't ending up on the background checklist.

I am holding in my hand the data that is available to every single one of us about the records that are being uploaded onto the background check system. For the Department of Defense, it is a whole bunch of zeros. The Army, the Navy, the Air Force--zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero.

Similarly, States aren't doing their part either. Connecticut uploaded 363,000 felony records onto the NICS system over the course of 2016. Colorado uploaded 10 felony records in 2016. New York uploaded 57,000 domestic violence records in 2016. North Carolina uploaded 261. There weren't 261 people in North Carolina who were convicted of domestic violence crimes in 2016; it is just that only 261 people went up on the list. Many other States, like the Department of Defense, have zeros in all of these columns. Many States are uploading no records onto the system.

Now, admittedly, NICS tries to get those records through other means when States don't give it to them, but it is an open secret that the NICS system is broken. Congress at least tried to make some changes. After the Virginia Tech shooting, Congress did pass a NICS improvement bill, but it has not worked. It gave the Department of Justice the power to withhold Federal funding if States don't upload records. Despite the fact that there are a handful of States that have uploaded no records to NICS--zero--no State has been penalized under that 2007 law. That is not a Republican or a Democratic problem. The Obama administration didn't penalize States, and Republican Presidents didn't penalize States. Why don't we work together on that?

A couple of years ago, the House passed additional funding to help States, other jurisdictions, upload records. Why don't we find a way to work together to at least make the existing background check system work?

This feeling of helplessness that people have in this country, this feeling of impotence that nothing can be done to change the trajectory of violence in this country, the regular scroll across the bottom of your TV screen telling you news of the latest mass shootings where little kids and senior citizens are being gunned down in churches and schools--that sense of helplessness isn't real; it is a fiction, an invention of the gun lobby designed to make this place feel as if there is nothing that can be done in order to make sure that they can continue to make these obscene amounts of profits. There are things we can do.

I understand that despite the popularity of background checks with the public, we are probably not going to get a vote on that, but let's work together to make sure that automatic weapons can't be in the hands of civilians. Let's make real the very simple premise that seriously mentally ill people shouldn't be able to buy guns. Let's fix the background check system so that, as Republicans tell us over and over again, at least we can enforce existing law. There are ways that we can stop this slaughter, and I don't know how we live with ourselves, how we sleep at night as a body if, in the face of these massacres, we don't even do the stuff we all agree on.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, whenever a Higher Power is looking down on us as we move through our daily lives, I imagine that He probably doesn't see political borders. I imagine He probably doesn't care much about the distinctions that we create to tell the difference between us and others. He probably doesn't care much about walls and fences. He cares about us as people. He looks at us, at how we conduct ourselves, and at how we treat others.

We spend a lot of time here talking about the arbitrary divisions between us, but in the end, when we face our Maker, it probably is just about how we treated those around us, whether we tried to make their lives a little bit better.

So I am on the floor this afternoon to talk about a handful of my constituents who need our help, young people who we have labeled with the term Dreamers, who came to this country not by their decision but by the decision of their parents, when they were very, very young. They are Americans in every sense of the word. They are beautiful, beautiful young men and women, and they want us to see them as the beautiful individuals they are. They don't want to be labeled. They don't want to be put into the middle of a divisive political dialogue. They just want our help.

We all hear from them because there is no State that doesn't have these kids. There are 800,000 who have officially registered under the existing law that provides them with protection. They are in every single congressional district.

I thought it would be useful for my colleagues to hear from just a few of them today because they can tell the story of why we need to give citizenship, permanent protection, to these kids at the very least, if not their parents and others who have been waiting for a long time for comprehensive immigration reform. They can tell this story better than I can.

Vania from Willimantic is a student at Eastern Connecticut State University. I want to read what she wrote to me. She said:

I was born in Mexico, and I was brought to the United

States at the age of 3 and have been living in Willimantic

since. I am 19 now. I grew up in Willimantic, Connecticut,

and I consider it my home. It's where I grew up, where I went

to school, where I made friends, and where all my memories

are.

As an undocumented student in the United States, you are

constantly unsure of what your future may hold, but not

because you're indecisive or unsure of what you are going to

do, but rather because you don't ultimately have power of

your own future. At a young age I always knew I wanted to go

to college; however, I also knew that because of my status, I

might have not been able to carry out that goal. However, I

didn't let it discourage me. I like many other undocumented

students did the best we could and constantly strived to be

the best at anything we did, and now, thanks to DACA, all

that hard work has finally begun to pay off.

See, DACA is more than just a legal status; it is the

puzzle piece that many of us have been missing in order to

reach our goals. It has allowed me to get a Social Security

number, a driver's license, but more importantly, a higher

education.

Growing up, I constantly had all my teachers say to me: Do

good in school, try your best at anything you do, stay out of

trouble, and you are guaranteed to go far in life.

Let me step out of her comments for a second. Boy, if that is not an encapsulation of the American dream--``do good in school, try your best at anything you do, stay out of trouble, and you are guaranteed to go far in life''--I don't think I could find a better way to encapsulate what we hope is the story for every single child in this country.

Vania said:

So that is exactly what I did. Most other DACA recipients

did the exact same, but it currently doesn't seem enough for

this government. There is no longer a fight for a work permit

but rather a fight for my human rights. I am just as worthy

to live here and carry out my goals as any other natural born

citizenship. I have done my best, consistently contributed to

society in a positive way. This is my home. I deserve to feel

safe here, and I will continue to fight for that until I do.

Mirka is from Wallingford, CT, and she is a Southern Connecticut State University student. She said:

I came here from Mexico sixteen years ago. I am currently a

senior at Southern Connecticut State University, studying

bilingual education.

We need more good people in bilingual education.

I just started student teaching last week, but all that is

in danger. Besides being able to get a license and work

permit, DACA has allowed me to follow through on my passion

of becoming a teacher. It has given me hope that I have a

future career in education and that I can live my life

without fear of deportation.

An in-need profession--bilingual educators. Somebody willing to devote their life to our kids needs our help.

Faye in Norwalk says:

I am one of the more than 800,000 DACA recipients in the

United States. I am from Trinidad and Tobago and have been in

the United States almost 19 years. I live in Norwalk, CT, and

I have lived there for about 16 years. It is home to me.

You hear that over and over again: It is home to me.

I am currently a Lead Radiology Scheduler, and I have a

second job working at Ulta, both of which I enjoy. My goal in

working both jobs is to purchase my first home.

That is another very critical component of the American dream--home ownership.

Growing up, I wanted to be a homeowner. I wanted a place

that I could call mine, and with DACA I saw that as a

possibility. Now I'm not sure when or if that would come

through, but I still will continue to work hard because in my

heart I know God is bigger than even this moment, and I know

that we will be victorious. Even in a land that would not

allow me to claim it as my home, I want to buy a house of my

own to call my home. One day I will be called American not

just among my undocumented community but by a Nation.

I mean, listen, we have some very articulate people in this body, Republicans and Democrats. I am not sure that any of us could write something that poignant, that beautiful, and that compelling: I am not sure if any of that will come through, but I am going to continue to work hard because in my heart I know that God is bigger than even this moment, and I know that we will be victorious. Even in a land that would not allow me to claim it as my home, I want to buy a house to call it my home. One day I will be called an American not just among my community but by my Nation.

There are 4,900 DACA recipients in just my State alone. I have met a lot of them. Frankly, maybe not everyone is as beautifully articulate as Faye, but, boy, they have done some very impressive things with their lives, maybe in part because they always knew that their status here was in jeopardy and they had to make the most of their time in the United States, not knowing when it would end, knowing that they had opportunities here in the United States that they simply would not and could not have if they ever went home, especially those kids who came here when they were 3 years old, going back home to a place where they might not even speak the language--they certainly know no one--a place where opportunity is farther off even for those who were born there. They worked hard, and they hustled a little bit more, knowing that they might be at risk of some day being pushed out of this country.

They are Americans. Every single one of these students, these Dreamers, use the phrase ``This is home.'' And they want our help.

I think this is a moral issue, first and foremost. It is how we treat each other. These people are our neighbors. They are our coworkers.

Eight hundred business leaders--CEOs from companies such as Walmart, Target, Facebook, Pepsi, Kaiser--want them to stay here because they are their employees. They know how much they add to the economic bounty of this country. They wrote to us and asked for us to provide permanent protection for these kids.

Seventy-five national colleges and universities, including all the ones in my State--Yale, Trinity, Connecticut College, the State universities--said the same thing. They want to educate these kids. They see them. They see what stellar students they are, and they just can't imagine the United States deciding to send 800,000 of these incredibly capable kids away.

One hundred eighty-six civil and human rights groups running the gamut say: This is a moral and civil rights issue. Let these kids stay.

Because of President Trump's decision to telegraph the end of the temporary protection for these students, the burden is now on us, Republicans and Democrats, to do something and do something soon. It is hard to describe the psychological toll on these kids right now. I mean, it was bad enough when they were pushed into the shadows. It got a little bit better when they got temporary protection. But now that we have put a clock on, now that they have revealed themselves to the world and put themselves on a list that can allow them to be targeted, there is a little bit of their soul that atrophies every day as they wonder whether we are going to come together and do the right thing. Part of the reason part of them is crumbling inside is because they see themselves as being made political pawns in a bigger game here.

It would be so easy for us to decide to protect these kids. Just do it now. Don't wait until the end of the year. Don't wait until this issue is mixed together with all sorts of other must-pass legislation. Just come together right now and step up and give these kids some degree of confidence that they can be here.

I have heard so many of my Republican colleagues say they want to do that. Why wait? Why push this up until the last minute? Do it right now. It is the right thing to do.

In the end, whoever is up there does not look at borders. He looks at us. He looks into our soul. He thinks about how we treat those who need our help and our protection. And no one needs our help and protection more than these kids right now--5,000 of them in my State and 800,000 of them across the country.

So my plea is simple, Mr. President: Let's do this and do this now. Let's give permanent protection, citizenship, pathways to citizenship, to these beautiful boys and girls, men and women. Don't make this issue about politics. Don't make it about parties. Don't make these kids a bargaining chip in a bigger game. Just do the right thing. I promise you, if you do, you won't regret it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, last week, we voted on a judge who felt it necessary to sign up for a lifetime membership with a political organization in order to get his nomination forwarded back before this body.

The judge we voted on last week became a lifetime member of the NRA in between his appointment by President Obama and, then, his appointment by President Trump--a signal, apparently, to the new Republican White House that he would align with their interests and views on issues related to the regulation of firearms in this country.

We are going to see a parade of very interesting choices for the Federal judiciary come through this body, and they are going to be moved in rapid succession, as they are this week. I have been told that never before have we taken four votes on appellate nominees in a single week. Of course, that stands in contrast with the Republican Senate that refused to give even a hearing to one Supreme Court Justice over the entirety of 2016. I think it is worth noting that this body can move fast when it wants to, and yet we watched a Supreme Court seat be stolen by this Senate from a Democratic President who, by constitutional right, had the ability to make that appointment.

I bring up the lifetime membership in the NRA because it is increasingly clear that you have to signal a level of extremism on issues like firearms in order to get your name brought before this body. That signal is wildly out of step with where the American public is on many of these issues.

I have come to the floor over the course of the last 4 years every few weeks in order to talk about the fact that there is no other country in the world where 80 to 90 people every single day die from guns. The numbers are just absolutely stunning. Some 2,800 people a month die from guns, and 33,000 a year. The majority of those are suicides, but there are record numbers of homicides and accidental shootings in this country. Americans by and large don't accept this rate of slaughter. Americans want us to change our laws, and they don't want a judiciary that is going to stand in the way of Congress's ability to follow the wishes of our constituents.

I have been coming down to the floor to tell the story of the victims. My hope is that, although the data hasn't moved this Congress--90 percent of Americans want stronger gun laws--the data incontrovertibly shows that in places that have universal background checks or laws requiring you to get local permits before you buy a gun, there are less gun crimes.

Maybe if the data doesn't move my colleagues, the story of the victims will. Deon Rodney was shot on October 14 of this year, just a few weeks ago. He was working at Just Right Cutz, where he was a barber, in Bridgeport, CT. He was the 22nd homicide victim in Bridgeport this year.

He had just finished cutting a young boy's hair in a chair when a masked gunman chased somebody else into the barbershop. Police said Deon was protecting the young boy, shielding the young boy from this intruder who came running in. He jumped out of his chair to try to get in between the boy sitting in the barber's chair and the gunman, and the gunman shot him.

The owner of the barber shop said:

Deon had just finished his haircut and the boy was getting

ready to go outside when the gunman came in. He saved

everyone in the barbershop.

Deon was 31 years old. He left behind his wife, his mother, plenty of other family members, and an 8-year-old daughter.

Speaking about their daughter, Deon's wife said:

He loved her endlessly, unconditionally.

His mother said:

Deon is a part of me. He was my son, but he was also my

friend.

His cousin said:

I know that everyone is recognizing his heroism now, but he

was always like this. Always a role model and always willing

to give. Always willing to go out of his way to help a

stranger. Nothing has changed all these years. I guess I'm

glad that the masses can now see this.

The owner of the barbershop went on to say of Deon:

He's dead because of these people running around with guns.

There are guns everywhere you look in cities like Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, New York or Chicago. People say: Why is that? Why are there all these guns--many of them, if not most of them, illegal guns-- if you have strong gun laws in places like New York, Illinois, and Connecticut? The reason is that gun trafficking doesn't recognize State boundaries, and the guns used to commit crimes in places like Connecticut come from outside of Connecticut.

A comprehensive, groundbreaking survey of gun crimes in New York City found that 75 percent of the guns that are used to commit crimes in New York City come from outside of New York State. They come from States with looser gun laws, where you as a criminal can easily buy a gun without having to prove you are a responsible gun owner.

How do all these illegal guns get into Bridgeport such that somebody can turn a corner and walk into a barbershop with a weapon in their hand? It is because criminals with criminal records go into gun shows in States that don't require background checks at those forums, buy up dozens of weapons, load them into their cars, and then drive up to States with tougher gun laws and sell them on the black market.

Congress willingly allows this to happen because we have not moved our mandatory system of background checks to the places in which gun purchases are made today. Data is a little bit hard to pin down, but anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of gun sales today don't involve a background check. You can understand why. Sales have migrated to online. They have migrated to gun shows. They have gone to places where background checks aren't required.

I mentioned what the data tells us when it comes to background checks. The data tells us background checks save lives. Here is one slice of the data. In States that have universal background check laws, 47 percent fewer women get shot by an intimate partner than States without universal background check laws. That is because, in the heat of passion, domestic abusers often go to get a weapon and use it to perpetuate a domestic violence crime. You can't do that if you have a domestic violence history in a State with a universal background check law because wherever you go, you are going to be prohibited from buying that weapon.

Since November of 1998, more than 2.4 million gun sales to prohibited purchasers have been prevented because of background checks; 2\1/2\ million people who were criminals or who were addicts or who were seriously mentally ill were stopped from buying guns because of our background check laws. Because we now have at least one-quarter of all sales happening without background checks, that means there are hundreds of thousands of criminals,

hundreds of thousands of people with serious mental illness who are able to buy guns. It is not surprising that 90 percent of Americans, 90 percent of gun owners, 90 percent of Democrats, and 90 percent of Republicans support expanded background checks.

I would argue there is not another issue out there in American politics today that enjoys 90 percent support amongst Republicans and Democrats. Senator Durbin corrected me the other day and said the latest survey states that the number is actually 94 percent support from Republicans and Democrats. The only slice of the American electorate that you can get under 90 percent support of background checks is NRA members. NRA members support universal background checks at a 75-percent clip. Background checks save lives, they are supported by the vast majority of the American public, and yet we can't get it done.

This month, I, along with a couple dozen cosponsors, introduced a new version of legislation allowing for background checks to occur in every commercial sale that is conducted in this country, with commonsense exceptions, making sure that when you are gifting a firearm to a family member or you are loaning a gun to a friend who wants to take it to go hunting, you don't have to conduct a background check under those circumstances, but if it is a traditional arm's-length sale, then you have to go through a process, which normally takes 10 minutes in order to prove you are not a criminal. Again, this proposal is supported by 90 percent of Americans. It is time we recognize that it is directly connected to this epidemic of gun violence that plagues the country.

Let me close by making another argument to you. I know a lot of my Republican friends talk a lot on this floor and on the cable news shows about the threat of terrorism to this country. When the terrorists decided to use planes as their weapon of choice to attack our country, we changed the way our law protects us from attacks by airplanes. We made sure we screened individuals before they got on these planes to make sure they don't have weapons or bomb-making material that could ultimately threaten the rest of us. We now all take off our shoes every time we get on an airplane because we recognized that we needed to change our laws to understand that these planes were being used to attack American citizens.

These terrorist groups have recognized that it is now pretty hard to get somebody with a weapon or an explosive device on a plane so they are now directing would-be attackers to a different forum. An issue of Rumiyah, which is Isis's propaganda magazine, encouraged recruits in the United States to take advantage of our loose gun laws. It specifically told people go to gun shows where you will not have to present identification or submit to background checks in order to buy military-style weapons that you can use to kill dozens of Americans. ISIS and al-Qaida are telling their potential recruits in the United States to go to gun shows so they don't have to submit themselves to a background check and so there is no paper trail of the gun they are buying in order to kill Americans.

Why wouldn't we adjust our laws to recognize that the new weapon of choice of terrorists is not an airplane, but it is today a tactical weapon bought outside of the background check system. I have a million more reasons why we should do what 90 percent of the American people want, and someday maybe we will get there.

So 33,000 people a year, 2,800 a month, 93 a day--that is a rate of gun violence that is not twice that of other industrialized nations. It is not 5 times, it is not 10 times, it is 20 times higher than the rate of gun violence in other industrialized countries in this world. It is not because we have more people who are mentally ill, and it is not because we spend less money on law enforcement. It is, by and large, because we have a set of gun laws that allow for illegal guns, dangerous weapons to flow into the hands of very dangerous people.

I hope my Republican colleagues will take a look at the new background checks legislation I have introduced with many of my colleagues, and we can finally get to a place that 90 percent of our constituents want us to be.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I rise today to talk about the dire humanitarian situation in Puerto Rico and to challenge this country to end a century of discrimination against the Puerto Rican people.

While the fleeting media attention may have waned, the desperation of the people of Puerto Rico has not. The lackluster response from the Trump administration is an outrage. It has been more than a month since the hurricane, and 80 percent of the island's electricity is still out. Roads and bridges have collapsed. Homes have been destroyed. Of the 67 hospitals that are open, less than half of them are operating with electricity. Families are searching far and wide for clean drinking water, and some have been drinking water from wells at a Superfund site.

This kind of inhumane response would never ever be permitted in a U.S. State. But one doesn't even have to look at other States to evaluate this response; we can look abroad. Within 2 weeks of the earthquake in Haiti, there were 17,000 U.S. military personnel on the ground in that country. Two weeks after Hurricane Maria made landfall in the United States, the United States had deployed only 10,000 troops to respond to the disaster in both Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

News broke yesterday that the state-owned electric company on the island, PREPA, refused to operationalize mutual aid agreements with electric companies on the U.S. mainland. That is a standard step in normal disaster response. Fault lies with PREPA, but how on Earth did FEMA and the Trump administration allow that to happen, leaving millions of Puerto Ricans in the dark and in danger for almost a month? It is beyond comprehension, and it speaks to the failure of the U.S. Government's response.

The truth is that Hurricane Maria exposed far more than just immediate physical damage; the hurricane also laid bare a very simple truth that is plain to every resident of the island and every Puerto Rican living in my State. The truth is this: The United States has been screwing Puerto Rico for over 100 years, and this is just the latest, most disgusting chapter.

There is an undercurrent in the discourse about Puerto Rico that is as pernicious as it is ahistorical. You will hear people, like President Trump, say that Puerto Ricans are wholly responsible for the financial mess they find themselves in and that Puerto Rico should just pull itself up by its bootstraps. The rewriting of history ignores the fact that the Federal Government and Congress have had our hands tightly wrapped around those very bootstraps since 1898.

The United States acquired Puerto Rico from Spain through the Treaty of Paris in 1898, when the United States defeated Spain in the Spanish American War. Puerto Ricans didn't ask to be part of the United States; we acquired the island. A century ago, Congress extended U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans. In 1950, Congress recognized the island's limited authority over internal governance, and Puerto Rico became formally known as the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Being a commonwealth or a territory is permanent second-class status. Without access to the same healthcare reimbursement, the same infrastructure funding, the same education dollars as other States, Puerto Rico starts every single race 50 feet behind the rest of America. These built-in disadvantages are designed to hold Puerto Rico back. They have been in place for 100 years to keep Puerto Rico from being a true economic competitor with the mainland.

Believe me, the Puerto Rican people have done everything they can to overcome this discriminatory treatment. There is an entrepreneurial, never-say-die spirit in Puerto Rico. I know this because no State has a greater percentage of residents with Puerto Rican roots than Connecticut. But despite the strength of the Puerto Rican people, they are stuck because Washington has tied their hands behind their backs by taking away the right to vote in Federal elections, virtually guaranteeing that Puerto Rico's economic disadvantage will never ever be remedied. It is a black hole from which Puerto Rico and the other four U.S. territories can never escape.

Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens--despite the fact that recent polling suggests that half of Americans don't know this--but they can't vote for President. They have no voting representation in Congress. Think about it this way: Americans with a mainland address can vote if they move to Mongolia or Sierra Leone, but if they temporarily take up residence in a U.S. territory like Puerto Rico, they miraculously lose their right to vote.

There are real, practical consequences to this lack of representation. We are watching the most egregious example right now. Do you really think that if Puerto Rico had two U.S. Senators, 80 percent of the island would still be without power a month after the hurricane? By the way, Puerto Rico has more citizens than 21 States that have a total of 42 Senators in this body. Do you think a President would denigrate and insult Puerto Rico the way President Trump has if it had electoral votes?

The botched response to Maria is just the latest attack on the island, perpetuated by a Congress that can afford to ignore a big part of the United States that has no voice in Congress to object.

For over six decades, the U.S. Navy pummeled the island of Vieques, just off Puerto Rico's coast, with ordnance, using it as a bombing range for military exercises. Those weapons allegedly contained uranium, napalm, and Agent Orange. Today, people who live on Vieques are eight times more likely to have cardiovascular disease and seven times more likely to die of diabetes than others in Puerto Rico. Cancer rates on Vieques are much higher.

If you want to know why Puerto Rico has been in a decade-long recession, look no further than Congress. More than 50 years ago, the U.S. Government launched several initiatives to help spur economic growth on the island. It was a good thing. Ironically enough, the initiatives were collectively called Operation Bootstrap. One of the tools that were used to spur economic growth was a tax break to allow U.S. manufacturing companies to avoid corporate income taxes on profits that were made in Puerto Rico. Manufacturers descended on the island in droves, and the entire economy in Puerto Rico became oriented around those companies. But what Congress gives, Congress can take away, especially if the entity you are taking from has no meaningful representation in Congress. In 1996, Congress phased out the tax breaks. Guess what. It sucked the island's tax base away, cratering Puerto Rico's economy for the next two decades.

It is worth noting that Puerto Rico is not blameless for the financial situation that it is in. There definitely has been a fair share of mismanagement on the island. Bad decisions have been made. Saying that Puerto Rico is only a victim of schemes of the mainland is not true. But the same can be said of fiscal mismanagement and bad decisions in other U.S. States. But a century of underinvestment in Puerto Rico has been a big part of the story as to how they arrived at this situation. And unlike all those other U.S. States, Puerto Rico has no way of rectifying the past misdeeds because its toolbox to reckon with its past is limited to what Congress sticks in the toolbox, and that toolbox doesn't provide access to the Bankruptcy Code.

As a result, Congress passed PROMESA, which created this financial oversight board on the island. Puerto Rican bondholders on Wall Street, who bought the bonds for pennies on the dollar, are now challenging the current oversight board's legitimacy, with the hope of being paid before the island gets relief. These practices of the bondholders, who have been circling the island for years, are made more menacing because they are spending boatloads of money lobbying Congress. Just watch TV at night in Washington, DC, to see their ads. They know that the people of Puerto Rico have no voice here, have no votes here.

Now it looks as though other predators are circling. News came out this week that a small, two-person company in Whitefish, MT, somehow, some way, got a no-bid $300 million contract to restore power in Puerto Rico from the island's power authority--the same power authority that refused the help of experienced electric companies that actually know how to turn the power back on. How does something like this happen? It turns out that the little town in Montana is the home of the new Secretary of the Interior.

Get ready, because this is just the start. President Trump and his billionaire cronies are going to use this disaster to enrich themselves. The Whitefish power contract given to a friend of the Secretary of Interior--with two people employed at that company--is just a scratch on the surface of what is to come.

Puerto Rico has been getting screwed for decades. None of this is new. None of this is unpredictable. If you think this is just one century-long string of rough luck, you are ignoring the last critical aspect of Puerto Rican history.

Back in 1901, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that even though residents of the territories lived in the United States, they shouldn't be able to enjoy full constitutional protections, the Supreme Court was pretty explicit about why these citizens in places like Puerto Rico deserved this second-class treatment. Justice Henry Brown, who authored the separate but equal doctrine, held that Puerto Rico and the other territories didn't need to be afforded full rights under the Constitution because the islands were ``inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought.'' That, my friends, is racism defined. And it is both past and present when it comes to the rationale for the historical and continued mistreatment of the people of Puerto Rico.

It is time for that mistreatment to change--not just by doing right by Puerto Rico at this moment, at their hour of need. Yes, it is time for President Trump to command that FEMA and the U.S. military and the powers that be in Puerto Rico turn the lights back on right now. Congress should give Puerto Rico every cent they need.

I am glad that we came together this week to approve the latest round of emergency aid, but it is long past time that we addressed the second-class treatment we have given the people of Puerto Rico for decades. Even that racist 1901 Supreme Court decision contemplated that the territories' unequal status could only be justified temporarily. It is time to untie the hands of the Puerto Rican people and ensure that they have full economic and political rights.

I hope my colleagues will join me in this conversation in the coming months. It is just as important as the one we are having on emergency response because if anything good can come from the disaster of Hurricane Maria, maybe it is that.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I think all of us felt a familiar knot in our stomach early this morning when we received news of what might be the deadliest mass shooting in American history. The numbers are hard to comprehend. They certainly aren't final. Fifty-eight people are dead, and perhaps over 500 have been wounded, either by the gunshots themselves or by the pandemonium that ensued once the thousands of concertgoers in downtown Las Vegas figured out they were being fired upon from above.

There is nothing wrong with sending every thought and prayer and every bit of your heart to Las Vegas, to all of the family members who lost loved ones, to those who are recovering, to the first responders, and to the community at large. It really does help. I lived through one of these as a witness in Sandy Hook. Many of those parents are still my friends. We are about the same age, and our kids are the same age. While there are absolutely no words and no gestures that can ever salve the wounds that come with losing a child--especially a first grader--it did not hurt to know that the rest of the world was thinking every single minute about that community. There was an overwhelming amount of stuff that showed up in Sandy Hook--the teddy bears that piled up in the days and weeks that followed. It was a reminder to that town that they weren't forgotten. It helps. It does. But it is not enough.

I want to just spend a few moments--I know I was preceded by a few of my colleagues--to talk about the work that we have to do here if we are to address what I would consider to be a festering, lingering paradox that exists in this country. What I mean by that is this. This is a country that leads. Almost every great magical invention in this world today--whether it be open economies, participatory democracies, communication through the internet--is essentially a modern American invention.

The reason that we were able to catapult the rest of the world in just a quarter millennium to a point of global preeminence is because we saw big problems and we solved them before anybody else did. Then we took those solutions and we exported them to the rest of the world. That is a definitional characteristic of this country--working harder than anybody else to solve big problems and then giving that solution to others so they can use it for themselves. The paradox lies here. We solved a lot of big problems: How to govern ourselves, how to order our economies, how to talk to each other, and how to save people from disease. Yet maybe the longest standing human concern is a very simple one--concern for our physical safety.

I can chart you a history of civilization based upon society's ability to protect more consistently our physical body. That is, in fact, one of the original reasons why humans found each other--to try to protect ourselves from physical harm that comes from the outside. The paradox lies in the fact that, when it comes to this country's ability to protect its citizens from physical harm, we are not a leader. We are a laggard. We are an outlier when compared to other industrialized first-world nations. You are much more likely to meet a violent death, especially by the hands of a firearm, in this country than you are in other first-world countries.

It is time for us to explore why this paradox exists. Why are we such a leader and why have we been such a leader over the course of 240 years on so many different concerns, and yet we are a laggard when it comes to protecting ourselves and our fellow citizens from physical violence? The scope of this problem is enormous. When you look at OECD countries, there are just a handful that have a higher rate of violence--and, in particular, gun violence--than the United States.

I have been down on this floor as have Senator Durbin and others to talk about the numbers, over and over. But every day approximately 80 people lose their lives by gunfire, and two-thirds of those are suicide. But still, about 30 people every day are killed with a gun that is used by someone else. There is really no other country in the industrialized world that meets that rate of gun violence.

The mass shootings, which get the most attention, are truly epidemic. We have become normalized and regularized to 50 or 40 or 30 people losing their lives, but this happens nowhere else other than the United States at this rate. This is a uniquely American problem, and, by the way, it is not just the Las Vegases, the Orlandos, and the Sandy Hooks. We have actually had more mass shootings this year than days in the year, if you categorize a mass shooting as four or more people being shot in any one given time. Let me guarantee you, if four or more people were shot in your town or your neighborhood, that would be a cataclysmic event, and yet it happens on average more than once a day in this country. Because we have become so regularized to it, only with the moments like last night, where the scale is truly epic, do we focus on it as a Nation.

I want my colleagues to understand the pain that comes when the victims of this kind of epidemic violence see nothing but silence from this body. The hurt is deep. The scars are wide in Newtown, but they are made wider by the fact that this body, in 4\1/2\ years, has done absolutely nothing to reduce the likelihood of another mass shooting. Indeed, because we have done nothing, the mass shootings continue.

I know these are harsh words, but I believe it in my heart. I think this is an unintentional endorsement that gets sent to these mass murderers when, slaughter after slaughter, Congress does nothing. If the greatest deliberative body in the world doesn't act in unison to condemn them through policy change, it starts to feel and look like complicity. So there is going to be another wave of unimaginable pain that will sweep across Las Vegas and the country as we learn about who these victims were and, perhaps, as the numbers mount. They will, over time, be just as angry and just as furious at this body as those parents in Sandy Hook are today that we do nothing to try to reduce the likelihood of these shootings. Compassion is important, but it is not enough.

I read a little passage of the Bible to my 5-year-old son every night. I am the furthest thing from a theologian, but I know that sprinkled throughout the Bible are references to the fact that prayer has to be matched with action--with works. James says: ``Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.'' Thoughts and prayers need to be matched by action, and that is our job. Our job, frankly, is not just to send good thoughts. The reason why we exist is to act, to change the laws of the Nation, and to address challenges that our constituents face. Since the beginning of time, the most important challenge our constituents have faced--the human race has faced--is that of physical security.

So before I turn this over to my colleagues, let me just run down very quickly through the arguments that are going to be used over the next few days to continue to do nothing. The first is already in operation today, and it is a critique I hear very often. It is often lodged at me personally. It is this: To talk about policy change in the wake of a mass shooting is to politicalize it, to cheapen it. I reject that argument in full force because the reality is that every single day there is a mass shooting. Every single day 80 people die from gun violence. Unfortunately, the news media doesn't pay attention to that regular carnage.

If we aren't talking about policy change the day after a mass shooting in this country, then you are never talking about policy change, because a mass shooting happens, on average, every day. Unfortunately, the ones in which 8 people are shot or 12 people are shot do not get national attention.

Second, whether we like it or not, the world's attention--the country's attention--is positioned on this question of how we protect our country from harm in the immediate aftermath of these mass shootings. It is an enormous gift to the gun lobby, to the forces of status quo, if we cannot talk about how to change our laws to make people safer when everyone's mind is on that question. When a murder occurs, there is not a 48-hour waiting period before the police can try to investigate who did it and how to hold them accountable. So why can't we get immediately to the question of why these shootings are happening and try to solve it?

Also, others today are saying that legislation is a pointless exercise because you can't regulate away evil. There is truth to that. There are evil people in the world who are regularly doing very bad things, and there is no way that a set of laws can stop people from doing harm. But I would argue in some way, shape, or form, that the very nature of government is an attempt to try to regulate the effect of evil on citizens. Our laws against murder, arson, rape, and assault are attempts to try to make sure that people are protected from evil, from bad people. So why can't we have a conversation about how to make sure that people who are contemplating mass violence, at the very least, do the least violence possible?

It is not coincidental that these epidemic mass shootings, in which 50 or 60 or 40 people have died, largely have happened after the expiration of the assault weapons ban. Now that it is much easier to get your hands on a gun that is much more accurate and much more lethal, the likelihood of large numbers of people dying, as happened last night, is much greater.

An AR-15 style weapon does something different to a human body than a pistol does. That is why 20 kids were shot in Sandy Hook, and not a single one of them survived.

Laws do work. Just look at a State like Connecticut, which requires universal background checks, doesn't allow you to buy assault weapons, and requires you to get a permit before you can carry it. When we passed that set of laws, it resulted in a 40-percent reduction in gun violence, even when you attribute or account for other factors that could have caused that reduction. That is a Johns Hopkins study.

In places that have universal background checks, gun homicides are lower; domestic violence homicides are much lower by a degree of 40 percent. Laws work. The data is irrefutable on this point.

Though you can't regulate away evil in total, you can do more to protect people, especially from this mass-scope gun violence.

Third, people will say: Well, this guy clearly was very mentally ill. With gun laws, you can't do anything about the fact that people are mentally ill. That is true. We should fix our broken system of mental health treatment because it is broken, but we should also recognize that this problem of mass execution is a uniquely American problem, despite the fact that there is no evidence that we have a higher rate of mental illness than any other country.

There are plenty of very mentally ill people in other OECD countries. But in those countries, their mental illness is not a straight line to a gun crime, in large part because they have a very different set of laws that make it harder

to get your hands on a gun and much harder, if not impossible, to get your hands on a weapon that does the kind of mass violence we saw last night.

Lastly, one of the favorite arguments is that this is just too hot an issue for the U.S. Senate or a political body to handle, that it is controversial. It is controversial, but it is not as controversial as people may think.

In fact, the issue of background checks--which I understand may not have been dispositive on what happened in Las Vegas last night but might have reduced the likelihood that another 80 people died from gun violence over the course of Sunday--is supported by 80 percent of Americans.

Most polls will suggest that a majority of Americans support the other sweep in law changes that I talked about as well.

In fact, many of the first steps we would take as a body--saying that people on the terrorist watch list can't buy guns, tightening up the law to make sure people who are mentally ill can't buy guns--are supported by 80 to 90 percent of our constituents, no matter whether they live in a blue State or a red State. The question of making sure that only the right people own guns is actually one of the least controversial issues in the American public today. Why don't we start by finding that common ground? Then maybe after that, we can find other common ground.

This is going to keep happening. This is going to keep happening over and over again. I know the answer can't be that we are powerless, as a body, to do something about it. I personally just can't bring that answer back to the families of Sandy Hook for another year.

I don't want to speak for them, but I have a feeling that the delegation from Nevada is going to have a hard time bringing that answer back to the victims in Las Vegas as well.

This is a growing fraternity--a tragic, awful fraternity--of Members of Congress who represent States and have gone through these horrific mass executions. I had too many phone calls from Senators, Representatives, who were already part of that club when Sandy Hook happened. I got to make that call this morning, as well, to offer whatever advice I could on how to help the community heal.

But this silence has become an unintentional endorsement. It has become a kind of sick complicity, and I hope that in the coming days we can come together--Republicans and Democrats--to start talking about, at the very least, some baby steps to show the people of Las Vegas, to show the people of Orlando, to show my constituents, my friends from Sandy Hook, that silence is no longer an option.

I yield the floor.