Floor Statements

Mr. President, I am on the floor to talk about the status of America's healthcare system. As we speak though, the country is obsessed with the question of the firing of FBI Director Comey and the appointment last night of a special counsel who is going to seek to get to the bottom of this question as to whether there was coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian Government and their attempts to influence an American election.

There have been secret meetings happening in the Senate among Republicans--reportedly 13 Republicans, to be specific--attempting to craft a new version of legislation that passed the House of Representatives, now, I guess, 2 weeks ago, that would rob healthcare from 24 million Americans. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it would drive up costs for everyone immediately by about 15 percent to 20 percent and jeopardize the protections that are built into the law for people with preexisting conditions.

There is no CBO score on the latest House proposal because Republicans decided to ram the bill through without the ability of anyone to read the legislation. No one read that bill. Let's be honest. It was filed hours before it was voted on, and no one knows the cost of that bill because they didn't wait for a CBO score.

It is simply unbelievable that the House of Representatives decided to reorder one-fifth of the American economy without reading the proposal or without understanding its cost, but Republicans in the Senate are attempting to pass their own version of a repeal-and-replace bill. We await the results of these secret partisan meetings.

I think Democrats have been pretty clear that we would like to be in this conversation. We want to preserve what works in the Affordable Care Act, and there is a lot that works. A new report out just a couple of weeks ago shows an astonishing decrease in the number of people who face personal bankruptcy in this country. Why? Because half of personal bankruptcies in the United States of America, prior to the Affordable Care Act being passed, were due to medical debt. So the reason that less people than ever before are having to declare personal bankruptcy is because medical bills don't bankrupt them anymore because of the Affordable Care Act. Let me guarantee you, that number will spike back up if anything approximating the House bill passes.

We think there are good things in the Affordable Care Act. Our constituents agree. Polling now routinely tells you the majority of Americans want to keep the Affordable Care Act, not replace it, but we want to be part of a conversation in which we talk about keeping the things that work and addressing the parts of the healthcare system that don't work. Costs are still way too high. We would like more competition on these exchanges. So let's have a conversation about that.

As of today, Democrats are being shut out of the process. If you are represented by Democrats in the U.S. Senate, you have no voice in this process because Republicans have chosen to do it just amongst their own party. I think that is a shame. I understand in the end, Democrats passed a product in 2010 with Democratic votes, but anybody who was here remembers that there was a long process by which President Obama and Democrats in Congress tried to work with Republicans and brought the bill through the committee process. The HELP Committee and the Finance Committee had exhaustive meetings, hearings, and markups. In the end in the HELP Committee, upon which I sit today, there

were over 100 Republican amendments that were accepted and included in the piece of legislation that eventually passed on the floor of the Senate.

As far as we know, this secret process happening behind closed doors will include no Democrats now and will not go through a committee process. If they ever come up with something that can come up with 50 votes, it will be rushed to the Senate floor. That is outrageous. We want to be part of this process.

I am on the floor not to talk about what will happen if a bill robbing healthcare from millions of Americans, jeopardizing protections for people with preexisting conditions, comes to the floor of the Senate, I want to talk about what is happening right now because President Trump made it very clear, just a few days after he was sworn in, that his desire was to kill the aspects of the American healthcare system that are affected by the Affordable Care Act. By the way, that is almost the entirety of the American healthcare system because that bill did--in addition to extending coverage to 20 million Americans-- grant protections from insurance abuse to hundreds of millions more.

A January 20 Executive order issued by the President said that ``it is the policy of my Administration to seek the prompt repeal'' of the law. It said:

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Secretary of

HHS and the heads of all other executive departments . . .

shall exercise all authority available to them to waive,

defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of

any provision or requirement in the Act that would impose a

fiscal burden on any State or a cost, fee, tax, penalty, or

regulatory burden on individuals, families, healthcare

providers.

President Trump made it clear that his motive from the start was to destroy the Affordable Care Act. My colleagues, he has consistently kept up that attack. I am often bringing President Trump's tweets to the floor because, well, they continue to exist on social media. It is nice to be reminded of the fact that, over the course of the first 100 days in office, President Trump has been routinely--routinely-- attacking the American health care system, saying: ObamaCare will fall of its own weight; be careful--i.e., if you are thinking of signing up, be careful--discouraging people from signing up for these exchanges.

Once again, ObamaCare is dead, says the President of the United States, despite the fact that 19 million people rely on the exchanges for their healthcare coverage. Here is another one: ObamaCare will explode. Do not worry; he has it taken care of, he says. Finally, ObamaCare is in a death spiral.

So these are the routine, almost daily attacks, rhetorically, that this administration has waged against the Affordable Care Act. He has commanded his agencies to pick it apart in any way that they can. So, to the extent there is any diminution in the health of these exchanges, to the extent that insurers are thinking about not participating or are pushing up their rates, there is only one reason for it. It is the active sabotage campaign that the Trump administration is engaged in to try to destroy the Affordable Care Act.

This is purposeful. This is intentional. This is planned. That Executive order, unlike some other Executive orders, was not just an exercise in political and public relations, because the next month, in February, the IRS announced that it would not reject tax forms from people who failed to answer the question of whether they had health insurance. So the IRS took a definitive step to undermine the Affordable Care Act by telling consumers they were not going to enforce the individual mandate.

Now, here is a news flash: Republicans think the individual mandate is a good idea. After attacking it for the last 6 years, the House bill they passed includes an individual mandate. It does. It is in a slightly different place. Instead of the penalty applying when you lose healthcare, in the House, all they did was just shift the penalty to when you sign up for healthcare again. All they did was move the mandate from when you lose healthcare to when you repurchase healthcare. But it is still there.

The administration is seeking to undermine the existing mandate. Insurance companies have noticed. Senator McConnell came to the floor a week or so ago to take note of the pretty serious premium increases that were requested in Maryland, in part, by Blue Cross Blue Shield. But the head of Blue Cross Blue Shield in Maryland was very clear about why they were increasing rates.

He said the uncertainty around the individual mandate plays a significant role in the company's rate filing because failure to enforce the mandate makes it far more likely that healthier, younger individuals will drop coverage and drive up the costs for everyone else.

Insurance companies are noticing that the administration is picking apart the protections that can keep rates down in the exchanges and, thus, they are filing higher rates. But with less people in the exchanges than anticipated, insurance companies are also rethinking participation. This is intentional as well. Shortly after taking office, the HHS Secretary pulled the advertising for the Affordable Care Act in the last week of open enrollment. We know exactly what happened here because we have the data on who was signing up before Trump took office and after Trump took office.

Before Trump took office, open enrollment was exceeding open enrollment for the prior year. After that decision was made to pull funding for advertising, open enrollment cratered. The former marketing chief for healthcare.gov estimates that 480,000 people did not sign up for coverage in the last week because the ads were pulled and because the President of the United States was out their actively telling people that they should ``be careful'' before signing up for the exchanges because he was going to kill it.

So almost half a million Americans did not sign up for these exchanges. A half million Americans don't have health care today, potentially, because the Trump administration stopped advertising the exchanges and because the President of the United States told people, essentially, not to sign up.

Finally, let me talk about what is happening right now with respect to something called cost-sharing reduction payments. A big part of the Affordable Care Act--and really the foundation of the Affordable Care Act--is subsidies that are given to individuals, often passed straight through to insurance companies, in order to help folks who are lower income buy insurance.

Guess what. Republicans think this is a good idea too. I know that because we stole the idea from Republicans. This was initially a Heritage Foundation plan that was adopted by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. It was the Republican alternative to the Clinton healthcare bill in 1993. So this idea of individuals getting subsidies is a Republican idea that Democrats stole.

Republicans included it in the House bill. The subsidies are lower, but they are still there. The subsidies come in two forms. One, there is a tax credit to individuals based upon their income, and, two, for lower income individuals there is a payment that goes to the insurance companies that mitigates the amount of money that you have to pay out of pocket--just two different kinds of subsidies.

These subsidies are relied upon by the insurance companies to continue to offer these products. The Trump administration is paying the subsidies but is trickling them out 1 month at a time, constantly making public pronouncements that question whether they will continue to make those payments.

Here is what OMB Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters. He said the administration could pull the plug on subsidies at any time. He said: We haven't made any decisions. The payments are due, I believe, the 20th or the 21st of every single month. We have not made any decisions at all on whether we will pay in May.

Think about if you are an insurance company executive deciding, A, whether to put a plan on an exchange or, B, if you put a plan on an exchange, how much to charge, and the White House is telling you: You may not get the subsidies that are called for under the law, and we may give you no warning in pulling those subsidies. We are going to pay them for May. We might not pay them for June. Maybe we will pay them for July and August. Maybe we will pull them for September.

How would you make a decision on how much to charge consumers? Why

would you enter into a contract with a State or Federal-based exchange? So whether it is the attack on the individual mandate, whether it is the decision to pull advertising, or whether it is the games being played with cost-sharing reduction payments, there is a coordinated effort inside the White House today to destroy the American healthcare system to the extent that much of the system has the Affordable Care Act at its foundation.

President Trump was pretty clear about this the day of the failure of the first healthcare bill in the House of Representatives. He essentially telegraphed that he was going to try to undermine the Affordable Care Act as punishment to Democrats, and that if he hurt enough people, eventually Democrats would come to the table and negotiate with him. Well, I have a message for the President of the United States: That is not how it is going to work. You are not going to blackmail Democrats by hurting our constituents by undermining the Affordable Care Act.

We want to be part of this discussion about improving the healthcare system. We do. We want to work with Republicans. It will be a much smaller and likely less revolutionary bill than Republicans are considering today, but it will have both party's fingerprints on it. We are not going to be part of a bill that strips healthcare away from tens of millions of Americans, and we cannot support this administration while it seeks to undermine the Affordable Care Act on a daily basis.

If these exchanges fail--I don't think they will, but if the exchanges fail--or if rates go up, there is only one place to put the blame--on an administration that is actively, regularly, and on a daily basis trying to sabotage the Affordable Care Act.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, colleagues, I am very pleased to be joined on the floor today by Senator Young. We are both members of the Foreign Relations Committee, and both have an interest in Middle East security. We have joined together on the floor today to give remarks and perhaps have a short colloquy about a humanitarian crisis that is unfolding before our eyes in the Middle East.

Today, inside the country of Yemen--a country that, frankly, not a lot of our constituents give much thought to--every 10 minutes a child under the age of 5 is dying due to preventable causes. Today, 18 million Yemeni civilians--two thirds of the entire population of this country--cannot survive without humanitarian or protection support, and 7 million of those are on what we would call a starvation diet, which means that on a daily basis they don't know where their next meal is coming from. They don't have enough food to eat in order to remain healthy. Three million have already fled their homes because of the violence that has been caused by a civil war--that both Senator Young and I will talk about--inside their country and the humanitarian catastrophe that has resulted from that civil war.

This is one of four current famines that exists in the world today. But I would argue that this particular humanitarian crisis is in some ways the most relevant to the discussions we will have here in the Senate because the United States is participating in the military campaign that is, in fact, causing in part this humanitarian crisis.

The United States is an active participant with a Saudi-led military campaign seeking to regain control of Yemen from a group called the Houthis, who overran the capital and now control large portions of the country.

We, of course, are allies of Saudi Arabia. The President will be visiting Saudi Arabia very soon to solidify that alliance. But it is time we started asking some really hard questions about the conduct of the Saudi campaign inside Yemen and whether we are, in fact, helping to create a humanitarian catastrophe on the grounds that is impossible to defend on moral grounds but also is hard to defend based on national security grounds as well.

Let's be honest about what is happening here. The Saudis are deliberately trying to create a famine inside Yemen in order to essentially starve the Yemenis to the negotiating table. Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman said:

Time is on our side. Being patient is in our interest. We

have the supplies and we have the logistics and high morale.

The enemy does not have supplies and funds and is impatient.

Time is on our side and we will exploit the time to serve our

interests.

What are the Saudis doing to try to exploit this question of time and supplies? First, they are coming directly after the main port city, which brings 70 percent of food into Yemen and about 80 percent of all of the oil. That port city is called Hodeidah.

Senator Young has been very good in meetings to draw issue with what is believed to be deliberate targeting by the Saudis of the cranes and infrastructure in this port which allow for the supplies to come off of boats and move into these desperately, desperately needy areas of the country.

Second, they are requiring an additional screening process for this humanitarian aid above and beyond the one the United Nations has put into place. The United Nations is vetting supply ships coming in to Hodeidah to make sure there is really food and aid on these ships, not weapons, and it is working. But the Saudis are putting an additional process on top that is adding up to a month from the time the aid gets off the ship and into the country. Between that and the military campaign targeting the port and its infrastructure, this has essentially resulted in an effective blockade being put in and around Hodeidah, such that humanitarian support cannot effectively get into the country. But that is just the beginning.

The Saudi bombing campaign has deliberately targeted roads and bridges throughout the country, many of them in and around north Yemen. There are reports that the bombers have engaged in something called double tapping, which is where you hit a humanitarian--a civilian-- asset. You wait until the workers come to try to address that first strike, and then you hit it a second time to take out the civilians who have responded to the emergency. This isn't just my opinion of the situation. Representations have been made by multiple aid organizations on the ground, and, more importantly, by U.S. officials who have been embedded with the coalition.

This is a quote from Dafna Rand, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State who was in charge of the Saudi coalition portfolio at State:

In 2015, the U.S. Government offered technical training on

cyber, ballistic missiles, border security, counterterrorism,

and maritime security, [and] the precision guided

munitions were transferred in 2015 on the hopes that they

would enable better and more precise targeting by the

coalition of the targets

itself. [But instead,] what we have seen since is not an

improvement in the targeting, and the issue itself is the

target selection. It is not the precision of the target

itself, but it is the choice of targets and adherence to

the no-strike list.

That is a really important statement, a really important sentence, because what is happening is that the United States is telling the coalition: What are the civilian targets you should stay away from, so the humanitarian aid can move into the country? The coalition is deliberately ignoring that advice. It is not a matter of mistakes being made on the ground, though there have been mistakes. It is also a matter of a no-strike list being ignored.

I mention that this is not just about the millions and millions of Yemenis who are starving today because of this civil war. It is also a question of whether this is accruing to the U.S. national security interests. Again, I am speaking just for myself on this matter.

We are allies of the Saudis, and there is no doubt that an Iranian proxy state inside Yemen presents a threat to the Saudi State. There is no doubt that Houthis have been launching attacks into Saudi Arabia. This is a real security threat for our allies. But we do have to acknowledge that there are other players that exist inside Yemen today. It is not just the Houthis and those Yemeni forces supported by the Saudis. There is also al-Qaida--a branch of al-Qaida we know well because it has traditionally been the piece of al-Qaida that has the most advanced threats to the U.S. homeland--and ISIS, which is growing inside Yemen. They have taken advantage of this civil war to fill in the ungovernable spaces.

Recently, with the help of the UAE, we have begun to hit back against al-Qaida and ISIS inside Yemen. But for a portion of time, they controlled a sizeable amount of territory and revenue inside that country. ISIS is growing as well.

As a group of Yemeni Americans told me in my office about a year ago, to Yemenis the bombing campaign is not perceived as a Saudi bombing campaign; it is seen as a U.S. bombing campaign or, at the very least, a U.S.-Saudi bombing campaign.

So when responsibility inside Yemen is allotted and attributed for this starvation campaign, it is placed upon the United States, as well as on Saudi Arabia. We have to think about what that means, given the fact that there is the potential for millions of Yemenis to be radicalized in a place with very sophisticated radical infrastructure. This is a real national security concern for the United States.

I think it is time for us to draw a hard line with this coalition and say that we will not continue to support it if there is not a real commitment made to change the way the targeting happens and to make sure that relief supplies can flow into that country to try to address this unfolding famine and humanitarian catastrophe. We can be allies with the Saudis. We can be military allies with the Saudis. But they have to understand and their partners need to understand that this humanitarian nightmare inside Yemen is both immoral--to participate in a campaign that perpetuates that kind of humanitarian crisis--but it also, in the end, doesn't benefit the long-term security of the United States or our partners in the coalition.

So we come down to the floor today to try to explain to our colleagues what is happening on the ground and to see if there is a bipartisan way for us to have a policy that brings significant relief to the suffering of the Yemeni people and strengthens our national security in the region.

With that, I notice Senator Young is going to say a few words, and then I think we will engage in a colloquy.

Mr. President, I thank my friend from Indiana. I think he walked through his thoughtful approach to this issue, which has led him to cosponsor this resolution placing these very commonsense conditions upon the transfer of further munitions.

I might ask him a question. In his list of steps he has asked the Saudis to take--I have joined him in that letter, as have many of our colleagues--amongst them is a commitment to not take military action against the port of Hodeidah.

We both met with the Foreign Minister, who talked about the need to use increased military pressure inside Yemen backed by U.S. participation in the coalition to try to draw the Houthis to the table. We have both expressed reservations about the effectiveness of that tactic, and we have something to say about it because none of this can occur without U.S. military support.

Can the Senator talk a little bit about our joint fears or his personal fears about a major new campaign on this port that brings in so much of this aid and how, in the end, that really doesn't further the goals of the coalition, the United States being amongst the partners?

I thank Senator Young for making it clear in his prepared remarks that while we are focusing on the Saudis because we are part of this coalition, the Houthis do not have clean hands here either. Part of the reason humanitarian supplies have a hard time getting to places that need them is because there are roadblocks put up by the Houthis as well. And there is this known connection between the Houthis and the Iranians--sometimes, in my opinion, a bit overplayed by some foreign policy thinkers, but it is real.

To your second point in answer to my question, Senator Young, that is, to my mind, also a likely result of a deepening of the military conflict. If the Houthis had nowhere to turn, then the calculation might be different, but because the Iranians are there as a support system to lean on, a continued military campaign against Hodeidah would push them deeper into a corner and just broaden the scope of the military conflict.

There ultimately has to be a political resolution here, and by simply upping the military ante and continuing the humanitarian crisis, you get further away from that political negotiating table rather than closer to it.

It goes without saying that it is in no one's interests in the region for this civil war to continue at its current pace. So this is an important moment at the beginning of a new administration, with a pending arms sale on the table with the Saudis, to

use that transition moment and the leverage that exists with this new proposal for major arms sales to the Saudis to make sure we get this right.

I think there is nothing political about this. We all join together in trying to abate humanitarian crises and famines around the world, and we all want a policy that is going to bring an end to this civil war because, as I said, it is just as important to remember that the most immediate enemies of the United States--those terrorist groups who want to do harm to us--find their most fertile ground today inside Yemen. The sooner we can put an end to this civil war and be able to have a central government structure that spreads across the scope of the country, the quicker we can all be focused on trying to eliminate the ISIS and al-Qaida presence--AQAP, as we refer to them--in Yemen from that battlespace.

I say to Senator Young, I don't know if you have closing remarks, but I appreciate your willingness to speak up and your leadership here, and I hope we can get others on both sides of the aisle to propose and support these commonsense conditions upon this new military transfer so that we can get the situation right inside Yemen.

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

Mr. President, I thank Senator Merkley for his remarks this week, as this body has been rightly focused on the firing of James Comey

and the imagined rationale that the President gave.

Mr. President, I am on the floor today to talk about the CRA resolution pending before the Senate today.

I really can't keep track of when my colleagues on the Republican side are for State innovation and when they are against State innovation.

When it comes to Medicaid, the Republicans seem to be very willing to hand a bunch of money over to the States, no strings attached, and let them figure out what to do with it. That is the essence of the bill that cuts $800 billion from Medicaid that is pending before the House of Representatives today. When it comes to retirement, right now we are engaged in a debate that would rip away from States the ability to innovate on behalf of their constituents to try to get them access to retirement savings.

I can't figure out when my Republican friends want States to innovate and when they want to take away from States the ability to deliver results to their constituents.

Let's be honest. We have a retirement crisis in this country right now. The majority of Americans barely have enough money saved to last 2 or 3 years after they retire. Everybody knows this. And the people who are affected by this retirement crisis aren't exclusively Democrats. They aren't exclusively Republicans. They aren't just liberals. They aren't just conservatives. No matter where you live, today you are more likely than not to not have enough money in order to retire. So States have figured this out. My State is one of them.

Many States have recognized that one of the biggest barriers to retirement savings today is the fact that if you work for a small employer, you probably don't have an employer-sponsored retirement plan. In fact, there are over 50 million Americans today who do not have, through their employer, a retirement plan available to them.

Why is that a big deal? Well, it is a big deal because that is the most likely way you save today. In fact, for those 50 million Americans who don't have access to retirement through their employer, only 5 percent of them are going outside of their employer to set up a retirement plan. There are a variety of reasons for that. Sometimes,

people who are working for a company that doesn't offer retirement are making such a small amount of money, they simply don't have the means to save, but many more simply look at the private retirement savings industry as so convoluted and confusing, so opaque, that they don't even attempt to intersect with it.

So we know we have a problem on our hands. We know there are all these Americans who cannot get retirement through their employer, largely because they work for small employers. We know that if you don't get your retirement through your employer, you are unlikely to go out and get it on your own.

Employers would love to do more for their employees. This isn't about employers not wanting to provide a retirement plan for their employees. The problem is that for an employer who only has 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 or 15 employees, it is prohibitively expensive to provide a retirement plan.

A recent op-ed from an Oregon business owner showed that for him, it would cost about $1,100 per employee just in fees to establish a retirement plan. That is not even counting any possible contribution the employer would make. So you can see that for a small restaurant owner or a small retail grocer, they are not likely to provide a retirement plan to their six employees when it costs them $1,000 per employee to do it. Their employees are on their own. Again, very few of them are actually going and setting up their own retirement.

Why does this matter to us? Well, it matters to us first because I think we have a policy obligation to try to help people save for retirement, but it also matters to us here in Washington because to the extent people don't have retirement, they are going to be more likely dependent on the programs that are already busting our budget, like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. If you don't have any retirement savings, then you are going to go on Medicaid much earlier, meaning the Federal expenditure that we are all on the hook for, and all of our constituent taxpayers are on the hook for, starts getting spent earlier. So, just as a matter of fiscal prudence, we should be helping people pile up private retirement savings because it will result in less liability for public retirement programs. Yet we are not doing that.

We talk a lot about trying to help people save for retirement, but we are not passing any groundbreaking legislation that helps Americans to save for retirement. Senator Isakson and I have this small little bill that says on your retirement statement it should just tell you that if you continue to save at a current amount--this is for people who have employer-sponsored plans--this is how much you will get per year when you retire, just so there is some transparency, so that people can look at the amount they are putting away and be able to clearly and easily understand whether that is going to actually be able to pay for their expenses when they retire. We can't even get that piece of legislation passed through the Congress. That is just a transparency provision.

Let's be honest. The industry is not providing answers either. The industry has had decades to try to figure out how to be more relevant for individuals who don't have an employer-sponsored plan. That number is still at 5 percent. So the industry, maybe hamstrung by Federal rules or State rules, has not been able to fill this void.

So we have this massive number of people who don't have anywhere near the money necessary to retire. The Federal Government is not providing any answers and private industry is not providing enough answers, so States have begun to pick up the ball.

Here is what States are doing. I think there are about 12 States that have either adopted this kind of program that I am about to describe or are in the process of adopting it. States like Connecticut have said: OK. Here is what we are going to do. For employees who don't have an employer-sponsored plan, we are going to allow for those employees to enroll in a private retirement plan, with the State as the conduit.

If the employer can't do it because the fees are too much, then we will give those employees the option to enroll in a private retirement plan, have a portion of their earnings withheld with the State as the conduit. OK. States are deciding to do this. It is supported by constituents across the ideological spectrum. I looked at a survey the other day that said that amongst self-identified conservative voters, three-quarters of them wanted States to be able to have the ability to set up these conduit accounts for people who don't have retirement through their employer. Connecticut has done this; a handful of other States have done it.

The Federal Government needed to clarify, through regulation, how ERISA rules would apply to these State innovations. Why? Well, because ERISA is really designed to regulate the relationship between an employer and the plan they sponsor and the employee. But in the case of these State-backed retirement plans, there is no traditional employee- employer relationship between the person who is enrolled in the plan and the State of Connecticut, in this instance, which is providing the access to the private plan. So a regulation was proffered by the Obama administration that clarified that ERISA rules will not apply to these plans in the same way they apply to the traditional employer-sponsored retirement plans.

ERISA is just a mismatch for this State-based innovation. It seems like a pretty routine regulatory function--the Federal Government clarifying how ERISA rules should apply to those State-based innovations. Nobody had a problem with this, except for the big retirement companies--except for the big Wall Street companies that invented, in their minds, that they would be losing business to these State innovations whereby individuals would get enrolled in private accounts through a State-endorsed conduit.

There are two problems with that. First, the States are not running these retirement plans. All the State is doing is providing access for individuals to a privately run fund. Second, it is not taking any business away from these retirement plans because these people were not going to private retirement plans in the first place. Only 5 percent of people who did not have retirement through their employer were finding a way to a privately run plan themselves. So there was no risk that Wall Street or these big retirement funds were going to lose business.

We don't need to do this just because the big retirement companies have imagined in their minds that they are not going to have access to a set of business that they were not offering in a way that was relevant or cost-effective.

You know, Republicans are either for State-based innovation or they are not. You can't be for State-based innovation when it aligns with a special interest, and then be against it when it misaligns with a special interest. States are innovating to solve a problem that we are not solving. Connecticut--we are representative of other States that have done this.

The consequences of what we are about to do are real. You are talking about 600,000 people in my State who had access to retirement savings who will have it ripped away from them if this CRA passes. That is real. When you combine all of the States together that have passed these innovative retirement plan programs, the number is 12 million.

If your State does not want to do it, they don't have to. If Arkansas does not want to do it or Wyoming does not want to do it, if Tennessee does not want to do it, they don't have to. But why take away from the people of Connecticut the ability to set up a way for employees of very small businesses to save for retirement? Why do you care what we do in Connecticut if that is what my constituents want? Is it just because the big retirement companies told you that they were going to lose business? That is not true. But even if it is, it should be up to the people of Connecticut as to whether we innovate in a way to try to provide more retirement savings to the people of our State. It does not hurt Republican Members if Connecticut does it or California does it.

It feels as if we are scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to these CRAs. It feels as if we are going out and asking every special interest group whether they have any remaining problems, minor as they may be, with regulations that were passed at the end of the administration and opening the floor to any and all.

I know there are Republicans who are going to vote no. I know there are some Republicans who have a deep problem with the fact that the Congress is taking away from States the ability to innovate on the question of retirement.

I hope there are enough that this CRA goes down because the consequences to many of our States will be big. Frankly, it will chill any State's interest in trying to solve this problem because you are telegraphing that anytime a State tries to step in and deliver more access to retirement, if it slightly rubs the big retirement companies the wrong way, you are going to step in and take that power away from them. So why would a State step in ever again to try to do something for people who need access to retirement?

If my Republican friends are coming to this floor with a really sound plan to replace the plan that we developed in Connecticut--if Republicans said: Do you know what? I don't think that it makes sense to do this in a patchwork way, this State innovating this way, this State innovating that way; we are going to come in and pass a really comprehensive approach to giving people who work for small companies access to retirement. That is a reasonable conversation to have, but you are not.

Republicans are not offering the people of my State any alternative. All they are doing is robbing from 12 million Americans the ability to get access to retirement. This is a crisis. If we are not going to deal with it and the industry is not going to deal with it, let States deal with it.

This is a terrible, terrible thing that we are doing later today. I think it is going to be a really close vote because I think there are Republicans who know it. I hope there are a few more who think about the message being sent to the States. Think about the fact that on one day you are for State-based innovation, and the next day you are against it.

We have time to allow for States to continue these innovations. I hope we will take advantage of it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the leader for his remarks, especially with respect to the new addition of the healthcare bill. It is a disaster for Americans. It is immoral. It doesn't work. It doesn't address any of the problems that remain in the underlying healthcare system. Hopefully the Senate can rise above it and work together to do something better for the American people.

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

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, confirming a Supreme Court Justice is one of the if not the most important responsibilities we have as Senators. It is a vote we cast knowing full well that the tenure and the influence of the nominee who is before us will likely be greater and much more long- lasting than our own in the Senate.

After meeting with Judge Gorsuch and reviewing hours of his testimony before the Judiciary Committee, I have decided to oppose his nomination, and I come to the floor this evening to talk about the reasons why.

I am deeply concerned about the politicization of the Supreme Court and its recent capture by corporate and special interests. I am convinced that Judge Gorsuch would exacerbate that slide and continue the activist bent of the existing Court, and for that reason I won't be supporting him in the vote tomorrow.

There is no doubt that Neil Gorsuch is a well trained, very intelligent lawyer who likely has the right disposition to serve on our Nation's highest Court, but that is not the end of the analysis that I or any of us are required to conduct. I am concerned about Judge Gorsuch's record of putting corporate interests before the public interests. His past decisions demonstrate a resistance on his part to put victims' and employees' needs above those of large corporations. He has regularly sided with employers over workers, corporation's rights over the rights of employees to make personal healthcare decisions. While he admirably claims to rest his decisions on the law rather than his political views, his consistent support for the powerful over the powerless doesn't seem coincidental.

The Roberts Court, in my mind, has swung dramatically in favor of the rights of corporations and special interests over those of individual Americans. I would have supported a mainstream nominee, but the risk that Judge Gorsuch will inject his political judgment over a process that already too often favors the rights of corporations over individuals is too great a risk for him to earn my support. That was the statement I released upon making my decision. I wanted to begin my remarks with it.

I want to talk a little bit about the elements inherent in my decision to vote against Judge Gorsuch because I don't take that decision lightly. I have said throughout the beginning of President Trump's tenure that I do believe we owe some degree of deference to a President in making choices as to who will serve him in his administration, and I think that likely applies to the question of whom a President chooses for the Supreme Court as well. I think I voted that way. I certainly voted against many of President Trump's nominees, but I voted for many of the nominees with whom I had very deep disagreements with over policy as well. So it is not a question of whether Judge Gorsuch would be my choice; it is a question of whether I think he is going to be in the mainstream on the Supreme Court or whether I think he is going to be an outlier and bring potentially radical views into the courtroom.

But it is kind of silly for us to pretend this debate is happening in a vacuum. I am making my mind up on Judge Gorsuch, as I will try to outline this evening, based upon my review of his record and my belief about who he will be as a Justice.

We would all be lying if we said as Democrats that we don't remember what happened on the floor of the Senate all throughout 2016. Merrick Garland should be on the Supreme Court today, or if not Merrick Garland, someone else who was nominated by President Barack Obama. The Supreme Court vacancy occurred with nearly 12 months left in his term-- 25 percent of a term that he was elected to by the people of the United States. The Constitution doesn't allow for 3-year terms. It

doesn't say the President becomes illegitimate once he hits the final 12 months. The Framers of our Constitution were hopeful that the President would be President for all 4 years. That last year was robbed not just from President Obama but from the American people by Republicans in the Senate when they treated Judge Garland with such disrespect.

It would have been one thing to simply vote against him because you didn't want to let the President of an opposing party fill that seat, but to not even give him a hearing, to not give him a vote, to not even take meetings with him, which was the decision of many Republican colleagues, that was a show of disrespect to Judge Garland that I don't think any of us could have imagined. It was a show of disrespect to this Chamber, to the traditions of this body that those of us who may have supported Judge Garland remember. That bad taste still sits in our mouth.

So I am here to state that my vote against Judge Gorsuch is not payback for the way in which Merrick Garland was treated, but I remember what happened.

To the extent that my Republican colleagues are suggesting that we should vote for Judge Gorsuch or at least vote for cloture tomorrow as a means of upholding the traditions of the Senate--spare me. Spare me. There isn't a lot of interest on this side of the aisle in upholding the traditions of the Senate if we are the only ones doing it.

Some people say: Well, if you voted for cloture on Gorsuch tomorrow and let it go to a final vote, then maybe Republicans would keep the rules as is.

That is belied by the facts. Last year, the Republican majority made it pretty clear that they were willing to break all tradition, all precedent, and all comity in the Senate in order to get their person on the Supreme Court. That wasn't just a 2016 issue; that is the new normal for Republicans in the Senate. So whenever Democrats raised an objection to a nominee to the Supreme Court, the rules were going to change because Republicans made it clear that their first priority is to get their people on the Supreme Court and their second priority is to think about and try to preserve the way in which the Senate has run.

I am not voting against Neil Gorsuch because I am mad about what happened, but to the extent that I have heard Republicans in the Senate lecture us about violating the traditions of the Senate, it makes my blood boil because I was here in 2016. I saw what the Republican majority did to Merrick Garland.

Maybe we can sit down after this is done and talk about how the Senate just doesn't get into a giant vortex of devolvement, tit for tat, such that all of the reasons why people run for the Senate--the individual prerogatives that Senators have, the demand to find consensus in a way that doesn't exist in the House--all vanish. Merrick Garland is still here, and it would be silly for us to try to pretend he isn't.

One of the reasons I am so worried about Judge Gorsuch is because of his enthusiasm for a brand of judicial interpretation called originalism. It doesn't sound that radical, right, originalism? The idea is that one interprets the Constitution as the Founding Fathers intended it to be; one doesn't place it in the context of today. Simply think to yourself, what would those White men who wrote those words-- what would they think about the case before us? What did they mean back in the late 1700s? On its face, it is an absurd way to think about judging cases because so much of what is before a Justice had no relevance and did not exist back in the 1780s, so questions about what these men thought about various questions regarding technology or civil rights are irrelevant because the Framers of the Constitution simply weren't thinking about the same things we are thinking about today.

One of our most famous jurists understood this right from the outset. Justice John Marshall wrote in McCulloch v. Maryland: ``We must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding, intended to endure for ages to come and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.''

Even those who were judging the Constitution at its outset understood that, as the questions presented to this country changed, originalism-- the idea that you only look to the thoughts and words and deeds of the Founding Fathers--probably wouldn't be an efficient way to decide cases.

Justice Brennan gave a wonderful speech at Georgetown in 1985 that is worth reading tonight. Justice Brennan said:

We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way

that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans. We look to the

history of the time of framing and to the intervening history

of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do

the words of the text mean in our time? For the genius of the

Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have

had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability

of its great principles to cope with current problems and

current needs.

He went on to say:

Time works changes, brings into existence new conditions

and purposes. Therefore, a principle to be vital must be

capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it

birth.

It is a wonderful turn of phrase.

He said:

This is peculiarly true of constitutions. They are not

ephemeral enactments, designed to meet passing occasions.

They are, to use the words of Chief Justice John Marshall,

``designed to approach immortality as nearly as human

institutions can approach it.''

He said:

Interpretation must account for the transformative purpose

of the text. Our Constitution was not intended to preserve a

preexisting society but to make a new one, to put in place

new principles that the prior political community had not

sufficiently recognized.

Senator Klobuchar asked Judge Gorsuch at his hearing if, because the Constitution only uses the word ``he'' or ``his,'' it meant that a woman could not be President. Well, the Constitution doesn't specifically speak to this question, but if you were an originalist, I can imagine how many of those Founding Fathers would have answered that question. Why? Because they didn't believe that women deserved the right to vote, so why on Earth would they believe that a woman should be President? At the time, Blacks were considered to be subhuman. They were granted three-fifths status in the Constitution. They were slaves. To read a document only through the lens of a group of White males who did not believe that a woman should be allowed to vote, who did not believe that Blacks were human beings and on equal footing with the rest of us, is to freeze this document in a time and ask us to, consequently, freeze ourselves in that time as well. If you do not allow the document to move, then you do not allow the rest of us to move either.

Originalism is a fraud, and what it has become is a mask for politics.

Now, what do I mean by that?

When you insist on interpreting the Constitution based only on the ways in which the writers of that document viewed the world, you have no way to base decisions in current times that are based on any real text or set of historical facts because, of course, the Founding Fathers had given no thought to many of the most important questions that are presented to us today--for instance, questions about what rights individuals have with respect to government surveillance over their cell phones, which is a question that the Founding Fathers--the Framers of the Constitution--could never have considered. It allows you to, essentially, make it up for yourself because there is no way that you can find a quote from any of the signers of the Constitution as to what they thought about these modern questions. You can spin it any way that you need to.

Originalism is an invitation to bring politics onto the Court because anybody can make up a reason as to why the people who wrote the Constitution would, ultimately, have decided the way that that jurist wants the decision to turn out.

It connects with other troubling writings of Judge Gorsuch's. He proudly calls himself an originalist. Historically, if we look at the broad swath of jurists who have gotten on the Supreme Court, it is not a mainstream school of judicial interpretation, but he has other radical views as well.

The Chevron deference standard is named for a 1984 case in which the Supreme Court held that it should defer to regulatory agencies when they interpret ambiguous laws that are passed

by Congress. We pass ambiguous laws, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident. But we often do it on purpose because we, ultimately, leave it to the regulator to fill in the details--to proffer regulations, to work out the details of enforcement. We often do not define every single term, in part, because we know that there is going to be the executive branch and people working for an elected official-- the President of the United States--who are going to carry out that act and, ultimately, be responsible to the people.

What Judge Gorsuch has suggested is that maybe it is time to overturn the Chevron deference standard. Maybe we should not give any deference to administrative agencies any longer. Maybe the Supreme Court, on every single law, should do a de novo review of its constitutionality and give no deference to the executive branch.

First of all, that would be pandemonium. It would greatly accelerate the number of cases that come before the Supreme Court and the number of major--potentially life-changing--decisions that the unelected Court is making. Why? Because we are always passing statutes here that leave room for interpretation. Again, we do it many times intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, but it happens every single month here that we pass statutes that leave room for interpretation.

We often do that knowing, as I said, that the Executive will make some of those secondary interpretations. We are comfortable with that because, if his interpretation goes wrong, then that Executive is never more than about 3\1/2\ years from an election.

The executive branch is responsible to the people. The courts are not. These are lifetime appointments that we make. If every single statute that we pass is interpreted from the foundation by the Supreme Court and if they get it wrong, there is no way to get rid of them. There is no way to roll that interpretation back. In fact, that is one of the reasons for the Chevron deference--the reluctance of the Court to make itself an active political player in the process of interpreting statutes.

So it is radical that Judge Gorsuch is suggesting that, if he were put on the Supreme Court, he would overturn that 1984 case. Justice Scalia was one of the primary defenders of Chevron for that very reason, in that he saw that the legitimacy of the Court--indeed, the legitimacy of the entire judicial system--would be put in jeopardy if it inserted itself as the primary arbiter of ambiguous statutes, of statutes that needed interpretation.

Originalism is an invitation to take your politics onto the Court. The evisceration of the Chevron deference would, inherently, make the Court a political body. If you combine the two together, you will start to see a Justice who will likely continue this trend line of its being an activist Court that makes political decisions in substitute of the Congress.

We have all seen it happen, whether it be in the voting rights case, in which the unelected Supreme Court decided that racism was not something that we had to think about any longer due to their vast experience in the South and in dealing with cases of voter suppression, or in their arbitrary decision that corruption should be very narrowly defined and that we need not pay attention to the slow, creeping corruption that happens when donors get access to the political process through donations of thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars. The Supreme Court is telling the people of this country and this Congress what corruption is and what it is not.

Those are political decisions that the Court has made--an activist Court--that now may have among its members a Justice who has, effectively, advertised himself as being willing and eager to join that trend line on the Court.

Individual cases raise concerns as well. In Riddle v. Hickenlooper, Judge Gorsuch expressed an openness in providing a higher level of constitutional protection to a donor's right to make political contributions than the Court currently affords the right to actually vote--donors having more rights than voters have.

As for the result of applying strict scrutiny, which is the term that he is referring to with regard to political donations, we do not exactly know what would happen, but it likely would have the consequence of making it almost impossible to regulate campaign finance. Ninety-three percent of Americans, in a recent poll, think that government should be working to limit the impact that big donors have on politics today. Yet Judge Gorsuch has suggested that, as a Supreme Court jurist, he may move the law in the opposite direction, robbing from both of us--Republicans and Democrats--the ability to do what 93 percent of Americans want us to do, which is to restrict the ability of a handful of billionaires to affect the political process.

In the Hobby Lobby decision, yet again, Judge Gorsuch suggests that corporations, in this case, have more rights under the Constitution than do the individuals who work for them--that the religious freedom rights of the corporation trump the religious freedom rights of employees. Once again, it ruled that those with power--big donors or corporations--have more rights than those with less power--ordinary voters, employees of these big companies.

Years ago, Judge Gorsuch wrote in a complaint, according to him, that liberals were using the Court to try to push their political agenda rather than to bring it here to the Congress. The reality is that, over the course of the Roberts Court, the exact opposite has happened. It has been Conservatives who have brought their complaints to the court system--their complaints about voting rights, their complaints about campaign finance, their complaints about the Affordable Care Act-- rather than to have brought them to the floor of this body.

As the House of Representatives abandons, for the time being, the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, their allies continue to push cases through the court system that would attempt to unwind it. Judge Gorsuch has been, in his writings at least, blind to this idea that Conservatives have spent just as much time over the past 20 years in trying to push their agenda in court as have Progressives. Progressives have done that as well.

Clearly, we have full marriage rights in this country because of court cases that Progressive groups push. I am not denying that there is not this trend line on both sides of the political spectrum, but Judge Gorsuch seems to only recognize it in his writings when it comes to the liberals who are pushing these causes.

These are the most important decisions we make. Many of us may only get to vote on a Supreme Court Justice once or twice. This is my fifth year in the Senate, and this is my first vote. My first vote should have come in 2016, but it is coming now in 2017. I do not take it lightly, but there is a reason--when you go back to your apartment here in Washington--that you are watching TV commercials that are paid for by big corporations and billionaires who support Judge Gorsuch's nomination.

He says that he is going to play it straight. He says that he is not going to be affected by his political agenda. I hope that he is right, but the folks who are fronting the money for these ads do not believe him. They think they know how he is going to rule. Believe me. They would not be putting up all of this money on TV if they did not think that Judge Gorsuch was going to be a friend to the big companies, to the billionaire donors who want more and more protection through the court system.

Donald Trump was right about something when he ran for President. He was not right that elections are rigged, but he was right that, in general, the system--our economic state of affairs--does seem to be pretty rigged against regular people. Economic mobility, which is how we define ourselves as a country, is further away from the people whom I represent in Connecticut than ever before, and the statistics bear that out.

Your ability to move from poverty to prosperity is less today than it has been at any point in our lifetimes. It does feel like the powerful and the rich have recovered very nicely from this recession and that nobody else has. It feels like they have a voice here in Washington that no one else has either.

If you are President Trump, having run on this promise to unrig the system, boy, this doesn't seem like the person you should be sending to the

bench, somebody who has openly advertised his enthusiasm for voting with billionaires, with corporations, with folks who have lots of political power already.

The TransAm case, which has been talked about enough on the floor, is a unique one. It is the case of a trucker who was being potentially left to die by his employer on the side of the road, who left his truck to save his life and potentially the lives of others on the road, had he chosen instead to operate it. Judge Gorsuch ruled with his employer, effectively suggesting this man should have risked his life or the lives of others to comply with the strict letter of the law.

Judge Gorsuch was asked in the Judiciary Committee what he would have done: What would you have done if you had two options--sit in that truck and face death or put it back on the road and potentially kill others? What would you have done? Judge Gorsuch said that he hadn't thought about it.

I don't want my Supreme Court Justices to be political. I don't want them to be us. It really is our job to think about, in a real, tangible, grassroots way, the effect of our laws on their lives. But I don't want a Justice who doesn't even contemplate the answer to that question, the impact of the law on regular people. I don't want a Justice who views the law only through the eyes of a group of White men who lived in a fundamentally different world. I don't want a Justice who isn't thinking about how the law applies to people who need a statute's protection, rather than thinking about those who, frankly, don't need the protection of statute because they have been handed a pretty good lot in life from the start.

I am going to oppose cloture tomorrow, and if we eventually get to a vote, I will oppose Judge Gorsuch on final passage.

My final comment is this: When that moment comes, I do hope that our colleagues will think twice about changing the rules of the Senate. They had already broken with precedent once in 2016 in a way that I think is unforgiveable. To do it twice in a 24-month period puts this place on a downward spiral that I am not sure we can recover from. If we just want to be the House of Representatives, let's just do it. But there is another way to go, to select a nominee who could truly get bipartisan support.

As my colleague Tim Kaine is fond of saying, there is only one appointment by the President of the United States that needs 60 votes. There is only one person the President picks who needs to get more than 60. That is the Justice of the Supreme Court because it is permanent, because it is important, because it lasts longer than we do. There is probably good reason for that.

Precedent and comity were broken in 2016. I will never, ever forget the disrespect shown to Judge Garland and to everyone in this body, but to double down on that break with precedent, on that break with tradition, by changing the rules of the Senate permanently with respect to Supreme Court Justices--I know they can say that Democrats did it a few years ago. That is true. But the Supreme Court is a different animal entirely, and the decision is one I hope my Republican colleagues will rethink.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I have a great deal of respect for my friend from Pennsylvania, as we have worked together on a number of issues, but forgive me if my blood boils when I hear my Republican friends talk about breaking precedent in this body when it comes to the consideration of Supreme Court nominees. Forgive me if I get a little angry when I hear those on the other side of the aisle talk about Democrats' using exceptional measures, in their opinion, in order to oppose a Justice for the Supreme Court. Come on. Everybody knows what happened here last year. The Republican majority decided to deny the President of the United States--at the time, Barack Obama--the ability under the U.S. Constitution to nominate a Justice to the Supreme Court, not because of anything having to do with the merits of the nominee, Merrick Garland, but simply because the President was a Democrat. Everybody knows that is what happened. Everyone knows that precedent was broken and that comity was broken here in the Senate when the Republican majority decided not just to deny a vote on this floor but not to even give the courtesy of a meeting, of a hearing to Merrick Garland despite the fact that he was unquestionably qualified for that position.

It is a fiction to suggest that there is some strategy amongst Democrats on this nomination. We are all making up our minds individually. I decided yesterday that I was not going to support

Judge Gorsuch because I think he is likely going to side on behalf of corporations and special interests instead of my constituents and bring his politics to the bench in a way that I do not think squares with the people whom I represent. Yes, I am going to use my ability to vote on the floor of the Senate in order to stop his nomination.

I understand Republicans may not be happy about my decision and the decisions of others on this side of the aisle, but let's have a discussion about the merits of Judge Gorsuch, not the question of which side is breaking precedent because everybody remembers what happened to Merrick Garland. Nobody has forgotten that. This is not some quid pro quo, this is not some tit for tat, but to come down and pretend as if 2016 did not happen.

Mr. President, I would like to speak for a moment about a potential CRA--another CRA--that is perhaps coming to the floor this week or next week. It is one that would take away the ability of States to try to do something about the retirement crisis that is enveloping this country.

I speak as one of the youngest Members of this Chamber, and it scares me to death to think that half of Americans who are in their working years have no money saved for retirement today before a qualification for Social Security or Medicare. Even worse, a study that I looked at the other day suggested that 58 percent of Americans who are working have not even done the calculations as to how much money they will need in order to retire.

There is a retirement crisis in this country, and you can understand why, as wages have been essentially flat for tens of millions of Americans and employers have largely left the space of defined benefit plans. And there is just no money to save when you have to cobble together your paycheck to meet your budget every week and when your employer is not putting in the kind of plan he used to and the kind of contribution he used to. So you can understand why Americans are in this position.

State governments--those laboratories of experiments that I hear a lot of my friends talk about--have come up with an idea. There are 55 million working Americans who do not have a way to save for retirement out of their regular paychecks, meaning their employers are not offering them any way to set aside a portion of their incomes in order to save.

So that is one number--55 million Americans. Here is another: In my State, 44 percent of workers do not have access to retirement plans through their employers. That is about 600,000 people in Connecticut. Half of my State does not have access, when they show up to work, to retirement savings plans through their employers. Yet we know that employees who have access to a payroll deduction are 15 times more likely to save for retirement--not twice as likely, not 5 times as likely, but 15 times more likely.

It stands to reason that State legislatures would step in and say: OK, for employers who are not offering plans, we are going to give employees the ability to set aside a small portion of their earnings in a privately run plan that is sponsored through the State governments.

If the employer is not going to do it, then there is really no one else other than the State governments. In a handful of occasions, the States of decided to step in and offer this option to employees.

By the way, as far as I understand, it is not traditionally a State- run plan; it is a privately run plan. It is just that the State is acting as the conduit to get employees linked with private plans and to allow for a small portion of their paychecks to be set aside. Employees are 15 times more likely to save if they have access to that payroll deduction.

This is a pretty run-of-the-mill, typical State intervention in order to try to solve a problem that is real for State legislators. So it is a mystery to me as to why we would try to take that ability away from States.

What we are doing is taking away an ERISA exemption for States relative to these plans. Why that is important is that ERISA is all about the employer-employee relationship. There are important responsibilities that flow from employers to employees when they are engaging in a retirement plan that is offered through the workplace. But the State is not the employer of this individual; the State is simply acting as a conduit to get that employee into a private sector plan. So the ERISA rules simply do not work. They are a mismatch for this State innovation. The Federal Government, through regulation, has recognized that.

Importantly, in my State of Connecticut, which does have one of these plans, we provide ERISA-like protections, so the protections you get in ERISA, you get through this State innovation. It is just that the way in which the Federal Government normally requires it does not make sense because the State in this case is just the conduit, not the employer.

This sort of seems like a pretty run-of-the-mill exercise of State innovative power, a fairly run-of-the-mill exercise of Federal regulatory authority to allow for this innovation to happen, and it is hard to understand why we are taking it away, why we are taking this ability away from 600,000 Connecticut residents who, frankly, will not have access to easy retirement savings without it.

We have known that set-asides in your paycheck work. That is why we have provided incentives for employers to do it. But not every employer does it. Why? Because if you are a small employer, it just may not make sense administratively to establish one of these plans. So States have decided to offer it themselves.

I know that the retirement industry may not love this idea because it might not make the same fees on these plans as it would if the plans were offered through the employer, but, frankly, these hundreds of thousands of people in my State are not going to be the retirement companies' customers without this innovation. It is not like these State-backed plans are stealing business from the private retirement plans. They were never going to be customers without their ability to put aside a little bit of money.

We have a retirement crisis in this country right now, and this is an innovative way to solve it. I know this is not yet scheduled for a vote, a Congressional Review Act vote that would take away the ability of States to offer these plans in a meaningful way, and I really hope we think twice about it. It sort of feels like we are just inventing CRAs to bring before the Senate and the House. We are kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel, and this one just does not make sense. This does not make sense.

Let States that want to pass this innovation, that want to give their constituents, their citizens the ability to save through payroll deductions, through payroll withholding, the ability to do that. Do not do the bidding of the big retirement providers, who may think they are going to make more money if the CRA passes, but in reality these folks were probably never their customers. Let States move forward with this innovation. Let the people of Connecticut and California see how it works so that maybe other States can learn from our experience.

I hope we can come to some agreement to leave this innovation alone and move on to some other important issue here and not risk doing something that is, frankly, going to exacerbate the retirement crisis that exists in this country. Republicans and Democrats should be trying to work together on this question of giving people more access to retirement plans.

For all of the things that we fight over, whether it be the healthcare law or whether it be a tax cut bill or a budget, this just seems like one of these issues in which we should set this CRA aside with respect to State innovations and try to find a way to find some common ground. I hope that is where we will head. It would really matter to my constituents in Connecticut, who are expecting to receive the benefit of this newfound access to retirement.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I am on the floor to speak in favor of the pending business before the Senate--to allow for Montenegro to join NATO as a new member. I have been a proponent of this move for a long time, having spent time in Montenegro and having chaired for a period of time the Europe and Regional Security Cooperation Subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, now serving Senator Johnson as his ranking member.

I am convinced that NATO will be stronger if Montenegro joins. I am convinced that our alliance will be stronger if Montenegro joins. It is a small country with a very small military, but it occupies an incredibly important space on the world map. It is the only part of the Adriatic coast that breaks up the current NATO map, and it will provide a strengthening of our alliance in that region.

Montenegro is ready. It has made significant progress on internal reform, especially in the area of the rule of law and security sector reform. The Ministry of Defense has met all of the requirements for NATO membership. It is moving to modernize its military. It is moving to try to operationalize itself in a way that it can interact with both U.S. and European equipment. It is replacing its aircraft that previously had required Russian spare parts so that they are more compatible with European and American air equipment. There is still work that Montenegro needs to do, but now it can continue under the umbrella of the alliance.

I am very happy that we are taking an important step here to signal that NATO's open-door policy is still in practice. I think there was some doubt, frankly, and some concern, after years and years of Montenegro's desire to join amidst the interest from Georgia and prior to the crisis in Ukraine, that some of these transatlantic institutions were closing down. This is a sign that NATO is not only viable but is still open to those countries that want to join, that want to find additional safety and security under our umbrella. I am glad we are going to have a bipartisan vote here in favor of Montenegro's joining

Mr. President, at this hour, we still don't know what the House of Representatives is going to do. They are amending and changing and modifying the reform of one-sixth of America's economy under the cover of darkness, trying to secure the votes necessary to fulfill a political promise. We await their decision as to how much havoc they wreak.

I wanted to come down to the floor today to address for a moment the exceptional process that is occurring right now, as we speak, in the House of Representatives and to talk about one of the reported changes they are considering before sending the product over to the Senate.

Just to review for a minute, Speaker Ryan likes to talk about his approach to healthcare as a three-pronged approach. Well, the Congressional Budget Office, headed by a gentleman handpicked by the Republican House conference, agrees that it is a three-pronged approach; they just have a little bit different interpretation of those three prongs.

First, they say higher costs--15 to 20 percent spikes in premiums for everybody right off the bat and then dramatically higher costs, especially for older people, sicker people, and poorer people. If you are young and if you are relatively affluent and healthy, you may make out a little bit better under this proposal, but if you are not in that category, you are going to pay a lot higher costs and get less care.

This is the headline from the CBO report: 24 million people lose health coverage. That is catastrophic. That is the total population of 17 U.S. States. We just kick them off health insurance without anywhere to go other than our emergency rooms.

Remember, all of this is in order to finance a giant tax cut for the rich. I had a chart up here yesterday that showed that in this bill, if you make zero to $200,000, you get no tax cut, but if you make over $200,000, you get a nice, healthy tax cut. It could be up to $7 million on average for some of the wealthiest taxpayers. So there will be higher costs for everybody, except for maybe a very small slice of the population, but with less care. I mean, it is a nightmare when it comes to the number of people who lose care under this bill, all in order to finance tax cuts for the wealthy.

That is the background on what TrumpCare is and what the American Health Care Act is. People hate it. I mean, people hate it. There is a new poll out by Quinnipiac University that shows stunning numbers. The approval numbers for this bill are under 20 percent.

Republicans kicked the living you know what out of the Affordable Care Act, and they never got its approval ratings down to under 20 percent, as has happened to the American Health Care Act in its third week of existence. That is pretty impressive, for 18 percent of Americans to approve of a bill that has only been out there for a few weeks. And it is not because they don't know anything about it; over 50 percent of Americans don't like it, 18 percent support it, and 56 percent don't support it. Across demographic groups, across age groups, everybody hates this thing because they get it. They are not dumb. They know that this is taking healthcare from them and passing along higher costs to them in order to finance a tax cut for the rich. It is pretty simple. People really didn't need a lot of time to understand it.

Republicans in the House know that as this thing hangs out there, it is getting less popular. It is hard to get less popular than 18 percent. Those are tough numbers to do worse than. The reason Republicans are racing this bill through the process is because they know how deeply unpopular it is because they know it is a scam. They know it is essentially just taking healthcare from Americans and forcing them to pay more in order to finance a tax cut for the rich.

What is happening today in the House is they are blowing up their rules in order to push a bill through that no one will have looked at. It is possible that they are going to file a gigantic reform to the entire American healthcare system and then call a vote on it within hours. Come on.

In 2009 and 2010, Republicans were blistering critics of Democrats, who they said were forcing the Affordable Care Act through the process too quickly. But in 2009 and 2010, the House held 79 bipartisan hearings and markups on the health reform bill over the period of an entire year. House Members spent nearly 100 hours in hearings, heard from 181 witnesses from both sides of the aisle, considered 239 amendments, and accepted 121 amendments.

This bill was introduced 2 weeks ago. The first time the American public ever looked at it was 2 weeks ago, and the House is rushing it through today. Two weeks. Fourteen days. Twenty days. Not a year. Not 79 hearings. Not 100 hours of hearings. And we are talking about bringing it up before the Senate for a vote next week, with 20 hours of debate on a reordering of one-sixth of the American economy.

It is really extraordinary how this bill is getting jammed through the process because Republicans know that every day it hangs out there, more people figure out what it is--a massive transfer of wealth from regular, ordinary Americans, through less care and higher costs, to the very rich and also insurance companies and drug companies, which get a big tax cut.

On today's modification of the bill, the talk today is that in order to make the bill a little bit meaner and a little bit crueler, the House is going to remove from the underlying law the requirement that insurance companies cover a basic set of what are called essential benefits. This change is being demanded by the very, very conservative wing of the House Republican conference. They call themselves the Freedom Caucus. This is a group of sort of the most radical Members in the House of Representatives. They are demanding that these essential healthcare benefits be stripped out of the law in order to get their votes.

Let's talk about what these essential healthcare benefits are. Basically the law now says that if you are offering an insurance plan and you want to call it health insurance, then you have to actually offer to cover healthcare. So the essential healthcare benefits--what every plan today has to offer in order to be able to call itself insurance in this country--are ambulatory patient care, which means outpatient care, emergency care, hospitalizations; pregnancy, maternity, and newborn care; mental health and substance abuse care; prescription drugs; rehabilitation if you get injured; lab services; tests; chronic disease management--management for diabetes or heart and liver conditions; and pediatric services, services for kids. That is it. Those are the essential healthcare benefits.

Frankly, if you are buying a health insurance plan, wouldn't you expect that it would cover your emergency care if you were to go to an emergency room? If you are buying healthcare in this country, what good is it if it doesn't cover a hospitalization when you get very sick? If you are buying an insurance plan in this country, don't you think it is going to cover your kids when they need basic pediatric services?

So what is happening now is something different from healthcare reform in the House of Representatives. What is happening now is a radical rethink of what healthcare insurance is. If all of a sudden health insurers don't need to cover the cost of your hospitalizations, don't need to cover mental illness at all, don't need to cover addiction coverage at all, then is it really insurance any longer? If it is not covering that list of things, what is it covering?

CBO has an answer for this. CBO says that if there is an insurance plan that doesn't cover this list of benefits, they won't count it as insurance. So when they are giving you the numbers of people who will have insurance or not have insurance after this bill, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says: We don't really count it as insurance if it doesn't cover basic stuff, such as hospitalizations, outpatient services, prescription drugs, and pediatric services.

So what is happening now in the House of Representatives is really a radical rethink of healthcare insurance. Under the law they are contemplating passing, healthcare insurance wouldn't need to cover anything. You could buy an insurance plan, pay your premium, and then be told that it doesn't cover your kid when he gets diagnosed with schizophrenia, that it doesn't cover your daughter when she gets in an accident and has to go to the emergency room, that it doesn't cover your spouse when they get really sick and are hospitalized for 3 days. What kind of coverage would that be any longer if it didn't cover that list of things?

Let's be honest. This would be a massive transfer of cost to individuals. The No. 1 prong of TrumpCare is higher costs. If insurance companies don't need to cover any of these things anymore but you still have to buy them, then it is just a massive shift of costs to individuals because, remember, TrumpCare penalizes you if you don't buy insurance.

The Affordable Care Act did the same thing, admittedly. The Affordable Care Act said: If you don't buy insurance, you are going to pay a penalty. But that is why the Affordable Care Act said that insurance has to really be insurance. It has to cover stuff because if we are going to require you to buy it or we are going to penalize you if you don't buy it, then insurance should really be insurance.

Well, TrumpCare penalizes you if you don't buy insurance. You would pay a massive penalty. For a lot of people, the penalty could be $5,000 if they don't buy insurance. But now the change they are considering in the House of Representatives means the insurance product you will be forced to buy won't cover diddly.

By the way, when your insurance company doesn't cover it and you have to pick up the cost, it is going to cost you way more money. Everybody has probably seen a bill from a hospital. Let's say you had to go in and get a colonoscopy. You get your bill, and you always sort of scratch your head because you see two numbers--you see the number the hospital bills and then you see the number your insurance company pays. Often, the number the insurance company pays is like one-third of what that hospital billed. Why is that? It is because the insurance company is negotiating with the hospital on behalf of thousands of patients, so they get that price way, way down. The insurance company only pays a fraction of the cost that is billed. If you don't have insurance coverage for it, if all of a sudden it is not a benefit in your plan because the American Health Care Act told insurance companies they didn't have to cover a hospitalization, then you will pay that higher price. You don't get the insurance company discount. You will pay that higher number. That is going to bankrupt people.

The families in my State, when their child gets hooked on heroin, they are going to find a way to pay for that care so that their child doesn't become another statistic, another one of the 900 who died in my State last year from overdoses. They are going to do everything possible to get that child care for that addiction. They will mortgage their house, they will sell their house, they will drain their savings account, they will sell off every possession they have to make sure their child does not die from an overdose and so that child gets the care they need. If their insurance company won't cover it, then they will do everything necessary to cover it, and you will have a rapid increase in the number of people whose lives are ruined, who go bankrupt because of their medical costs--something that doesn't happen right now because the Affordable Care Act gives you real subsidies to afford care. It gives you real help to be able to buy insurance, and it requires that insurance companies actually provide you with insurance.

This is an extraordinary thing that is happening in the U.S. House of Representatives right now. Nobody likes this bill. Healthcare experts think it is a joke. The American public has roundly rejected it. It is getting meaner and crueler every day in order to round up the votes necessary to get it passed. Why? Because this bill is not about solving any problem in the healthcare system. It doesn't solve a single problem. Again, except for this narrow group of younger, healthier, affluent people whose premiums will be a little bit less, everybody else is worse off. It only solves one problem, a political problem--the promise that the Republicans made to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But they didn't spend any time thinking about how to actually do it. So they are stuck now with an awful bill that nobody likes, that doesn't solve a single problem, and that is getting meaner and meaner every single day.

It was bad enough, and now this bill is frankly getting into some really radical territory--talking about totally rethinking insurance and letting insurance companies offer you a product that covers nothing and then it requires you to buy it. Think about that. We are going to require you to buy insurance, but the insurance isn't going to cover anything. TrumpCare, the American Health Care Act--whatever you want to call it--has three prongs: higher costs, less care, and tax cuts for the rich.

We will have an opportunity here in the Senate to get this right. As to the House of Representatives, I don't know if they are going to pass this. I don't know if it is going to fall apart. But we will have a chance to get this right. Republicans and Democrats coming together, we can admit together that there are still a lot of things that are wrong in our healthcare system.

In the Affordable Care Act, there are some good parts of it, but other parts need improvement. We can come together and decide to tackle this problem--the high drug costs, whatever it may be--together and reject this partisan, rushed approach in the House of Representatives. It does nothing except give us higher costs and less care in order to finance tax cuts for the wealthy.

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, the House is still on schedule to vote tomorrow on a reform of one-sixth of the American economy that the American public has not seen. This is, frankly, unprecedented--this rush job, this attempt to jam through a massive rewrite of the American healthcare system, intentionally done so fast that the American public cannot keep up with what is a truly disastrous piece of legislation. It is a train wreck. It is a dumpster fire. I cannot come up with enough words to describe how bad this legislation is going to be for the American public.

Bill Kristol, who is an icon of the conservative movement and who has been arguing for the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act since it was passed, tweeted out this:

This healthcare bill does not, A, lower costs; B, improve

insurance; C, increase liberty; D, make healthcare better. So

what is the point?

Frankly, many Americans, many healthcare professionals, and many consumers are asking the same question: What problem does this bill solve?

Whatever you want to call it--the American Health Care Act, TrumpCare, RyanCare--what problem does this bill solve other than a political problem?

Clearly, Republicans have a political problem. They have promised, for the last 6 years, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Now they have control of the White House, the House, and the Senate, and they feel pressured to make good on that promise.

It does solve a political problem for the Republicans. The passage of this bill in the House or the Senate would allow my Republican friends to say: We told you we were going to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and--doggone it--we did it. But it does not solve any other problem in the American healthcare system. It makes the existing, remaining problems even worse. The Republicans know this because, for 6 years, we have heard criticism--relentless criticism--that the Affordable Care Act was rammed through the process, that it was passed without Members' knowing what was in it, that it was shoved down the throats of the American people. Well, imagine our surprise when the replacement to the Affordable Care Act is being pushed through at absolutely light speed compared to the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

So we look at what happened when the Affordable Care Act was passed, and the HELP Committee that I sit on, the Finance Committee in the Senate, the Energy and Commerce Committee, and the Ways and Means Committee held dozens of hearings--dozens of committee meetings. The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in the Senate alone debated hundreds of amendments and accepted 130 Republican amendments to the Affordable Care Act.

This time around, the HELP Committee isn't even going to have a meeting on the replacement. The committees in the Senate aren't going to have anything to do with this bill. The substitute language that Speaker Ryan has filed likely will not even get a CBO analysis before it is jammed through the House tomorrow. Why is that? Because Republicans are so fearful that the American public will have the time to take a look at this and realize what it is.

I don't often say that Bill Kristol is right, but he is right when he says that this bill doesn't lower costs, it doesn't improve insurance, increase liberty, or make healthcare better, so what is the point?

Here are three really simple ways to understand this bill. This bill is all about higher costs for consumers, all about less care for Americans, all in order to finance tax cuts for the rich. These are the three prongs of TrumpCare: higher costs, less care, and tax cuts for the rich. You don't have to spend a lot of time deep inside this bill to figure out what it is all about.

So costs go up, CBO says 15 to 20 percent, just in the first couple of years for a number of reasons, but primary amongst them is the fact that the help that you are going to get to afford insurance just dramatically decreases. For low-income Americans, here it is: You get $1,200 less if you are 27, you get $1,100 less if you are 40, and if you are 60, you get really hosed. If you are 60, good luck affording insurance. Your subsidy goes down by $5,800. It gets even worse than that because this bill allows for the insurance companies to discriminate against older Americans by jacking up the ratios that you can charge older Americans versus younger Americans from 3 to 1 to 5 to 1, so the average low-income, sixtyish-year-old in this country will be paying about $15,000 more out of pocket for healthcare.

What problem does that solve? Talking to people in Connecticut, I didn't hear a lot of my constituents who are in their fifties and sixties say: Let me tell you the problem with the American healthcare system. I am paying way too little. I need to be paying--if I could be paying $13,000 more, that would scratch me where I itch.

Nobody says that the problem with the healthcare system today is that costs are too low. It is the opposite. Costs are too high. Yet the first prong of TrumpCare: higher costs. That is not me saying it; that is CBO saying it.

I will give my colleagues the exception to this because let's lay all of our cards out on the table. CBO does say that if you are young, healthy, and relatively affluent, you might get a lower rate. Let's be honest about that. So if you are young, healthy, and you are affluent, you might get a lower rate. But that is a sliver of the population compared to all of the people who are going to be paying higher rates, especially older people and especially low-income people, because the subsidies don't change if your income goes up, and because of the discrimination made legal in this bill, older people have to pay more.

So, basically, another way to think about this in terms of how costs are going up is the more you need healthcare, the less help you get. If you are low-income and you are older, you get less help. If you are younger and higher income, comparatively, you get more help from this bill. Again, that is not attacking a problem that I hear about very often. People who need more help tend to need more help.

Here is the second chart. All of this is done in order to give a big tax cut. So here is the amount of tax cuts in this bill for people making $10,000; here is the amount for people making $20,000 to $30,000; here is the amount of the tax cut one gets if you are at $50,000 to $60,000. We see a trend line. It is about the same amount if you are making $10,000 up to about $200,000. The amount of tax cut you get from this bill in that range is zero. But if you are making $200,000 or more, well, here is where the money is, up to the point where people who are making the highest incomes in this country get over $1 million in tax cuts.

It repeals some tax provisions in the Affordable Care Act that were used to finance the subsidies, but all of those tax provisions affect the very top income level earners. So there is a tax cut in this bill, but it gives you zero if you make less than $200,000 a year. It gives you a lot if you are making more than $200,000 a year.

Here is the last chart: less care. Here is what CBO says will happen if the Affordable Care Act remains. This is a really important line to look at here because part of the narrative, part of the explanation for this piece of legislation is that, in Paul Ryan's words, ObamaCare is in a ``death spiral,'' and Donald Trump says it is ``collapsing.''

The Congressional Budget Office--which is run by a man who was handpicked by the Republican caucus in the

House--the Congressional Budget Office says: No, actually, it is not collapsing; it is not in a death spiral. If we do nothing and allow the Affordable Care Act to remain--yes, over 10 years, the number of people without insurance will go up by a little bit, up to 28 million, but the death spiral happens if you pass TrumpCare. There is a death spiral coming into the American healthcare system. There is a humanitarian catastrophe that is about to hit us, but it only happens if you choose to pass this piece of legislation that is pending before the House of Representatives today.

Now, I hear this legislation can't pass the U.S. Senate because my Republican colleagues understand this. So I am not necessarily talking directly to my Republican colleagues here because I trust that they understand the collapse of the American healthcare system that occurs when, in a very short period of time, you create 24 million more uninsured people.

But, remember, Donald Trump said during the campaign that no one was going to lose healthcare. Republicans in the House said that everyone who is on healthcare today will get to keep it. CBO says that is not even close to true. In the first 2 years, 14 million people lose care, and eventually those who are uninsured goes to 52 million. The Presiding Officer knows this, and my Republican colleagues here know this.

This 52 million, it is not that they are totally outside of the American healthcare system. If there is an emergency, they go to an emergency room, and the emergency room covers their care. That is the most inhumane way to run a healthcare system, to wait until you are so sick, so ill, that your cancer has ravaged your body so badly, you have to show up in the emergency room, but they will get that care--often the most expensive care--and we will all pay for it. Part of the reason that CBO says that rates will go up is because this 52 million gets their care from emergency rooms. The emergency rooms and the hospitals pass that cost along to private insurers, and everybody's premiums go up.

Here is another way to think of this. I know these numbers tend to get a little hard to digest, a little hard to understand as they get thrown around. Here is what 24 million people losing healthcare looks like. How many people is 24 million? Twenty-four million is the entire combined population of Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. This isn't a minor shift in the number of people who will not have healthcare. This is a seismic change. The entire population of 17 States loses healthcare over the course of 10 years if this bill is passed.

By the way, let's be honest about who these people are. Yes, many of them will be people losing healthcare in the private marketplace. CBO says people who have private insurance will lose it because of this bill, either because their cost-sharing goes up and they can't afford it or because their employer might not offer it any longer. But a lot of this is in the Medicaid population, and you have to make a decision. The Medicaid population is, by and large, poor people, disabled people, elderly Americans, a lot of children, a lot of kids. The Members are going to have to make a decision about whether their conscience will be OK with 24 million. Most of them are pretty sick and disabled and pretty young--if you are OK with that many people losing coverage.

So Paul Ryan is right; it is a three-pronged approach. The three prongs are higher costs, less care, in order to finance tax cuts for the rich. It doesn't solve any problem that exists today in the healthcare system, except for maybe, as I mentioned, that very narrow issue of young, healthy, affluent Americans. They will probably do a little bit better here. But everybody else does worse.

By the way, here is what CBO says is the reason why those young, affluent healthy Americans do better--because you kick old people off of insurance. The only reason that premiums stabilize in years 3 and 4 and 5, according to CBO, is because this bill jettisons millions of older, relatively sicker Americans off of healthcare. So as you just kick old people off healthcare, then it gets a little bit cheaper for the younger people who remain.

So even the small percentage of Americans who, from a monetary standpoint, do a little bit better under this bill, they only do better because individuals who really needed care lose it under this approach.

This bill is moving really, really fast. It is moving really, really fast. Its impact is absolutely stunning. My hope is that it gets stuck somehow, that Senators of goodwill recognize, as Bill Kristol did in his tweet, that this bill doesn't actually solve any problems. Maybe they recognize that it looks an awful lot like the Affordable Care Act. For the Speaker's reputation as being a big ideas guy, there are no new ideas in this legislation. It is essentially just the Affordable Care Act dialed down from 10 to 3.5, making healthcare unaffordable for everybody. The subsidies are still there; they are just much less. The individual mandate is still there; it just applies it in a different, more cruel way. Instead of paying a penalty when you lose coverage, you now pay a penalty when you lose coverage and try to sign up again. It is the same concept; it is just the penalty applied at a different place, and the insurance requirements are there.

So there are no new ideas. If you were ideologically opposed to the Affordable Care Act, there is no reason why this solves any of your problems. And from a practical consideration, it raises costs, it doesn't improve insurance, and it kicks a lot of people off healthcare.

My final thought is this: I know this issue of healthcare has become probably the most partisan, in part because there are some real important philosophical questions at the heart of this debate. I don't apologize for the fact that I do believe that healthcare should be looked at as a human right. I really think that in this country, we give you access to education; we should give you access to healthcare as well. You are living in the most powerful, most affluent country in the world. You probably shouldn't die because you are not rich enough to afford access to a doctor. It seems like something we should be able to do for you. So there are some serious ideological differences because I know a lot of my Republican colleagues don't view it that way. They view healthcare as a commodity much more so than I do. But we have shown the ability to work together on healthcare and on some pretty controversial pieces of it.

At the end of 2016, just 2 months ago, we passed the 21st Century Cures Act. That wasn't easy. That was $6 billion of additional spending on medical research in this country. It included legislation that Senator Cassidy and I wrote--the Mental Health Reform Act--that had some tough reforms on our insurance markets requiring insurance companies to cover more mental illness. We had to work through some very tough issues with Senator Cornyn, who opposed our legislation until we worked out issues he had, and then he became a supporter and champion of it. We had to work through some difficult issues, but we passed a big healthcare bill at the end of 2016, with Republicans and Democrats supporting it. Frankly, in the end, some progressive Democrats voted against it and some conservative Republicans voted against it. It wasn't without controversy even until that final vote. But we have shown the ability to be able to work together, so why don't we do the same thing here?

I submit there are still big problems in the healthcare system. The Affordable Care Act didn't solve every problem out there, and even some aspects of the Affordable Care Act have to be amended, have to be changed. But let's work together on ways to keep what is working in the Affordable Care Act and make improvements to the parts that aren't working as well. Let's move into territory that we haven't covered yet, like drug prices, and do something about that.

Donald Trump, the President of the United States, gave a speech earlier this week in which he told Americans that if you pass this legislation, drug prices will come ``way, way, way down.'' That is his quote, that drug prices will come ``way, way, way down.'' That is not in this bill. TrumpCare doesn't have anything that controls drug prices. Drug prices are not coming way, way, way down, but

we could work together to try to make sure that happens. We could have a tough conversation about what we are willing to pay when it comes to drugs, whether we are willing to let the rest of the world free ride on the contribution of the United States to global research and development. That would be a very important discussion to have. I bet it wouldn't get all 100 of us, but it would allow for Republicans and Democrats to work together.

Instead of ramming this bill through this process, through the reconciliation process, which means you can do it without a single Democrat supporting it, let's sit together and try to work out a bipartisan approach to improving our healthcare system.

I know why Speaker Ryan is pushing this bill through so fast. He knows it doesn't solve any problems that exist in the American healthcare system. He knows that the only problem it solves is a political problem--a political problem created by the promise that Republicans and this President made to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But because they are doing it so fast, so ham-handedly, the replacement is going to result in disaster for Americans. That is not me saying that. That is the Congressional Budget Office. That is Bill Kristol. That is Republicans and Democrats all across the country.

Whatever happens tomorrow in the House of Representatives, the Senate will have a chance to be the adults in this conversation. Senate Republicans will have a chance to take a big step back and start over, and they can start over in a partisan way, or they can start over by reaching out to Democrats and saying: Let's try to work this out together. We may not get to that point where we have a bipartisan agreement, but, boy, it would be nice if my Senate Republican colleagues would at least try because if they don't, then Paul Ryan is right--there will be three prongs to what will be called TrumpCare, if it isn't already: higher costs for consumers, less care for Americans, all in order to finance a giant tax cut for the rich. This isn't what the American people thought they were getting, and we have a chance in the Senate to do so much better.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Dr. Laura Willing, a health fellow in my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the year.

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

Mr. President, I want to talk about an upcoming CRA that will be on the floor potentially this week that would cancel out an important regulation that is designed to build upon this country's history of making sure there is a marriage between civil rights and education to make sure that children in this country, regardless of their race, regardless of their learning ability, regardless of their religion, regardless of their income, get an equal chance at education.

Frankly, the whole reason the Federal Government is involved in the question of education is due to civil rights. This used to be a purely local concern, and the Federal Government stepped into the question of local education because Black kids throughout the South were not getting an equal education. They were living in segregated schools and getting an education that was of far lesser quality. So the Federal Government has always been involved in education because it is a matter of civil rights.

I want to talk about this issue through the prism of one individual. I am going to call him James, but this is a true story--a story, frankly, that could be told millions of times over across the country.

James went to school in an urban district in Connecticut. He was a 10th grader. At the beginning of James's 10th grade year, he had a habit of walking out of class. In the middle of class, he would just get up and walk out after 10 or 15 or 20 minutes, and he would wander the halls of this big, urban high school until inevitably he was met by a security officer or a teacher or an administrator. They would bring him down to the office, and they would call his grandmother, as he lived with her. He would get suspended for a couple of days, and then he would come back.

It played out so often--this cycle of James walking out of class, being brought down to the principal's office, being suspended--that somewhere around the end of October, during his sophomore year, he had been out of school more days than he had been in school.

One day, though, James goes through this cycle again. He is in the hallway, and he runs into an assistant principal. He is sort of sick and tired of this story playing out over and over again. He raises his voice. He has some words. James has never hurt anybody in his life, no history of violence, but the assistant principal decides to call the police. The police come and they arrest James for disorderly conduct, essentially for having words with an assistant principal. Now James, at 16 years old, has a criminal record. At the time, he was treated as an adult in Connecticut, so he has an adult criminal record.

It turns out that James was walking out of class every day because he couldn't read, and he was mortified. He was embarrassed because he had been socially promoted through the years. He had a learning disability that was going untreated, and he was in the 10th grade with the ability to only read at an elementary school level. No wonder he was walking out of class every day. He literally couldn't follow along. It was embarrassing. He didn't want to be called on by the teacher so he left. Nobody ever figured that out until he got arrested and finally got a legal aid lawyer, who happened to be my wife, who identified his disability and the fact that it was being unaddressed.

The fact is, a big part of this story is tied up in the fact that James was Black, and he was a big kid. So the police got calls maybe because he appeared to be threatening in a way that he simply was not. I can say that because the data backs up the fact that Black kids and disabled kids are treated very differently in schools today. Wherever you are, whether in Connecticut, in North Carolina, or in California, Black kids--especially Black boys--are suspended and expelled at a rate that is twice that of their White peers for the exact same behavior. Take mouthing off to a teacher. When that happens, Black kids, Black students, are twice as likely to be suspended for mouthing off to a teacher than a White student.

James's story is not unique. It is not unique because it happens in every State across the country, and it is not just in suspension and expulsion rates, it is also in achievement rates as well. We know the statistics. The graduation rate for African-American students is 16 percent lower than their White peers. I can go down the line and tell you about the different story when it comes to achievement and treatment of African-American students as compared to White students.

Racism isn't gone in this country. It might not be overt. Sometimes it might not even be conscious, but it is still there. Discrimination against kids who are different, whether they be poor or disabled, didn't vanish. It is still all over.

John Lewis is a civil rights icon. We celebrate him every day, Republicans and Democrats, in the U.S. Congress. He got mercilessly beaten over the head simply because he wanted to vote. John Lewis is still alive, but you know what, so are the people who beat him. We are only a generation removed from an era of open, unapologetic racism in this country. To think that we don't need civil rights protections for kids any longer is to deny reality. Racism doesn't look the same as it used to. Discrimination against kids who are different isn't as overt as it used to be, but the data is the data. It is still there.

No Child Left Behind got a lot wrong, but one of the things it got right was that it shed a light on this disparate treatment, these disparate outcomes between Black students, Hispanic students, disabled students, and their peers, because it forced States--and this was a Republican and Democratic accomplishment at the time--it forced States to disaggregate results. So you had to look at how were disabled students doing, how were Black students doing, and if they weren't measuring up and if they weren't getting closer to the performance of their nondisabled or White peers, then you had to do something to turn those students around, turn their performance around.

Now, the part that No Child Left Behind got wrong is big and significant. Part of it is that it required every single one of those kids to hit the 100-percent proficiency mark, when progress is important to measure as well. It also told States exactly what to do to turn around the experiences of those kids. It is not the same in Connecticut as it is in North Carolina, and it is not the same in an urban district as it is in a suburban district. So when we got together on this floor and passed, in a bipartisan way, the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we did something really important. We preserved those requirements to disaggregate results for Black kids and for Hispanic kids and for kids with disabilities, but then we left it up to States to decide what proficiency is, and we left it up to States as to how they would turn around the experience for these kids if they weren't meeting those State-set goals. We gave an enormous amount of discretion and flexibility to States, but we preserved the basic expectation that our education policy was still going to be civil rights policy: Pay attention to how those vulnerable populations with a history of discrimination levied against them performed and require States to pay attention to the interventions.

That was a bipartisan achievement, and when we did it, we knew the regulation was going to be needed because, as with many education statutes, they are very vague. Republicans and Democrats understood that there was going to have to be a regulation to provide some clarity to States on how you build these locally driven accountability systems.

So the regulation we are talking about here today was not one of these that came out of left field. It was not one of these regulations that was political in nature; no, it flows from a bipartisan act that preserved accountability requirements for kids.

It is important for a variety of reasons. One, it is important because there are some really vague terms in the statute that do need clarification. For instance, one of the things we voted for, Republicans and Democrats, is we voted to say you have to show that you are providing improvement for African-American students, let's say, and if they are not showing continuous improvement, then you have to have a turnaround plan. By the way, that turnaround plan is totally yours to decide; no sanctions from the Federal Government if it is not X turnaround plan or Y turnaround plan. That is the old law. The new law says it is yours to decide.

``Continuous improvement'' is a super vague term. It is one of those obvious terms that has to have some regulatory guardrails put around it because what if the State said ``continuous improvement'' is improvement over 20 years. Well, kids come in and out of schools in 2 or 3 or 4 years and a 20-year period of looking at a particular subgroup's performance is meaningless to kids.

So the regulation says continuous improvement means 2 years; look at how a kid does over 2 years. And then it says, if 2 years doesn't work for you, you can make it longer but just tell us why. That is an important protection, and it still preserves enormous flexibility for States.

States want this regulation because it also gives them other types of flexibilities. An example is, when you are looking at performance, the statute suggests that you can have students who are meeting goal or students who are not meeting goal. The regulation recognizes that is, frankly, a really arbitrary way to look at performance. So the statute says: Yes, that is what the regulation says. The statute says: Meeting goal and not meeting goal, but you can get extra credit for students who are close to meeting goal, who have shown growth. You can get credit for students who are way above goal, your high-achieving students. You don't have to measure your schools just based on how many students meet goal. That is flexibility States want, that they likely don't have without the regulation.

Another example, for English language learners, proficiency goals should vary based on where you started. If you start here with no English skills, then your proficiency target should be different than if you started with a pretty advanced understanding of the language. The statute just says you have to have a proficiency goal. It is unclear whether you can have different ones for different levels of learners. The regulation makes it clear: Give States that flexibility.

So that is why States didn't ask for this CRA. This is different than these other CRAs. States didn't ask for this CRA. All of the educational groups we listened to--teachers, superintendents, principals--they weighed in on this regulation. They didn't love every piece of it, but they were ready to implement it. None of these groups were coming up to the Congress asking for this regulation to be withdrawn. Would they have liked it to be fixed or tailored? Sure. But here is what they understood, and here is why I am really concerned.

Secretary DeVos could fix the things she doesn't like or Senator Alexander doesn't like through the regular notice and comment period. I think there is 80 percent of this regulation that everybody agrees on, that just dots the i's and crosses the t's on a bipartisan commitment to accountability, and maybe there is 20 percent or 10 percent that Senator Alexander and some other Members think goes a little bit too far, but when you pass a CRA, you don't allow for a regulation to be passed in the future that is substantially similar to the entirety of the regulation. The courts aren't going to look, or, frankly, even know, what parts of the regulation you didn't like and the 80 percent of the regulation you wanted to preserve.

The Department of Education can't pass anything that is similar to this

ever again. So one of the things the regulation says is that you get a 1-year delay because it is just too quick to come up with accountability systems for this coming school year. That is gone. When this CRA passes, every school district in the Nation has to develop an accountability system for this calendar year because without the regulation, you don't have that flexibility.

So what makes me, frankly, so disturbed about this CRA is that it could happen another way, which would preserve the pieces of the civil rights protections that all of us agree on, which is the majority of the regulation. To my mind, it violated the spirit of our agreement when we passed this law. Here was a really amazing achievement; that we were able to rewrite the No Child Left Behind law--essentially repeal it and replace it with something better--that Democrats and Republicans could agree upon. In my mind, that agreement was predicated upon the Department being able to enforce maybe the most important part of the law for big constituency groups in this country--the accountability section, the civil rights protections.

By passing this CRA, we are essentially making it impossible for any regulation ever again to be passed to implement the accountability sections and the civil rights protections in this law. Why? Because you can't pass anything that is substantially similar--substantially similar to the parts you like, substantially similar to the parts you don't like. This isn't like these other CRAs where Republicans didn't like any part of it, where Republicans didn't see any need for the regulation to go forward. This is different. We agree on 80 percent of this one, but the 80 percent is likely gone by passing this.

I guess part of what disturbs me here is that we worked, locked arm in arm, in passing this law. I really do believe that by passing this CRA, Republican leadership--HELP leadership--is violating the agreement we had to make sure this law went into force and effect in the way we all intended.

It happened in the context of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that isn't working this year like it used to work. I have such great respect for the chairman and the ranking member of that committee. They pulled off some big bipartisan wins during the time of their tenure, including the Workforce Investment Act, the rewrite of the No Child Left Behind Act, and some other smaller wins that people didn't necessarily think as much about, and leading up to the end of last year, the passage of a major new commitment to reforming mental illness and mental health in this country.

That spirit of bipartisanship, which was present in the HELP Committee in a way that it wasn't present in other committees, is disappearing before our eyes. We were mad that we only got 5 minutes to question Betsy DeVos because it felt like the committee was hiding her from public view. Democrats were asking for more time to ask more questions, and we didn't get it. That rarely happens in that committee, where the minority party is just asking to be heard and is shut down.

We begged for the CRA not to come before this body because there was another way to get it done that didn't violate the spirit of our agreement around the rewrite of the No Child Left Behind law, but we were denied in that request. Now we are voting on a CRA that is potentially going to be devastating not just for kids out there who need protection but also for States that want this flexibility.

Finally, we are on a schedule, according to the majority leader, that is going to bring a healthcare bill that will rewrite the rules for one-sixth of the American economy to the floor of the Senate without any debate in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, without a single hearing on the bill, without a markup, and without any ability for amendment.

I listened for 6 years to my Republican friends tell me that the healthcare bill, or the Affordable Care Act, was rammed through Congress and that the biggest problem was the fact that it was done outside of the public view for expediency's sake. Now, I was there in the House of Representatives, and let me express the unbelievable irony of those complaints now that there will be no process for the committees to consider the replacement to the Affordable Care Act.

The House and the Senate had hundreds--hundreds--of meetings and hearings. The HELP Committee alone--I don't have the numbers in front of me--considered hundreds of amendments and adopted over 100 Republican amendments in the markup process. The Senate's session was the second longest in the history of the Senate, in for more than 20 days debating that bill. The reason there was so much tempest out in the American public over the Affordable Care Act was because it was open for debate for so long.

The Finance Committee had a full process. The HELP Committee had a full process. The Ways and Means Committee had a full process. The Energy and Commerce Committee had a full process.

None of that is happening here. This bill is being jammed through, as we speak, the Ways and Means and the Energy and Commerce Committees. This bill is going to be jammed onto the floor, perhaps without any committee process, in the Senate. The target is from introduction Monday to passage in the House in 3 weeks and perhaps just a few more weeks before it passes the Senate. So spare me the complaints about the Affordable Care Act being rushed into place when this process is going to make that look laborious in comparison.

What pains me is not just this CRA, which is unnecessary, but it doesn't have to happen this way. What pains me is a committee process that when I got here had a reputation for being truly bipartisan, for being one of the more functional, if not the most functional, committee processes. That is being blown up most significantly by the rush job-- the rush job on the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, which nobody in the American public is going to have enough time to look at it and see it.

I ask my colleagues one more time to reconsider their votes on this CRA. We are at our best when we come together around the idea that every kid in this country should have a chance at a quality education, no matter what color their skin is, no matter what their learning ability is. I know my colleagues have a couple problems with this regulation. I get it. But by passing this CRA, the regulation is gone and never coming back, and the States that want the flexibility, that are begging for the flexibility, won't get it. It will just be an unworkable section of the bill. A section that was supposed to be bipartisan now fundamentally won't work because we can't get a regulation passed that is at all substantially similar to the good parts or to the bad parts.

This body is at its best when we stand together--Republicans and Democrats--and say that no matter what you look like, no matter how well you learn, no matter how much money you have, you get a quality education. We did that when we voted together on ESSA, and we are going back on that bipartisan commitment by passing a CRA that is unnecessary. As to the bad stuff you don't like, it can be gone in a matter of months by a regular process of notice and comment in the Department of Education.

This is part of a disturbing new trend line in this committee toward partisanship and away from a history of commitment to our kids-- Republican and Democrat.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Tim Abram, a fellow in my office, be granted floor privileges through July 31, 2017.

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

Mr. President, TrumpCare is here, and you are going to hate it. This replacement for the Affordable Care Act has been 7 years in the making. On a cursory overview, it appears that when you ask the question as to who gets hurt under the replacement plan, the answer is everyone, with the exception of insurance companies, drug companies, and the very wealthy.

I hope we are able to step back and take our time to analyze what this replacement plan is going to do to Americans who badly need healthcare, who believed Republicans when they told them that they were going to repeal the bill and replace it with something better, and who believed President Trump when he said that he was going to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something that was wonderful, that insured everybody who was insured under the Affordable Care Act and did it at lower costs.

I know that my colleagues who are well meaning in this Chamber cannot read this replacement plan and understand it to do anything but strip coverage away from millions of Americans and to drive up costs for millions of Americans. There is no credible way to look at this replacement plan without seeing the devastation that will be wrought.

I want to spend just a few minutes, now that we have had this plan to look at for 24 hours, talking about how dangerous it is and pleading with my Republican colleagues to take their time and, hopefully, decide instead to work with Democrats to try to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, fix what is not working as well, but preserve the parts that are working.

Here is what I mean when I say that everyone, with the exception of insurance companies, drug companies, and the superrich, is hurt by the GOP replacement plan. First, this idea that we are going to end the Medicaid expansion--that is what this replacement plan does. It says that in 2 years, effectively 2020, the Medicaid expansion will go away. That means in my State, 200,000 people will lose healthcare. Millions across the country will lose healthcare. They are, by and large, the poor and the lower middle class--largely women and children who can't get insurance other than through the Medicaid expansion--who will no longer be able to get it. Medicaid has been expanded in Democratic States, Republican States, blue States, red States. Letting Medicaid expansion hang around for 2 years is no solace to people who will jam into those years as much healthcare as they can get, but then be without it afterwards.

Even more insidious is the part of the GOP healthcare replacement plan that would turn Medicaid into a block grant after 2020. This has been talked about in conservative circles for a long time, but has been resisted, again, by Democrats and Republicans who understand what that means. It means Medicaid will eventually wither on the vine and will become a State responsibility. No longer will the Federal Government help States pick up the costs for insuring the most vulnerable citizens.

Remember who Medicaid covers. Medicaid covers 60 percent of children with disabilities in this country. Of the tens of millions of kids living with disabilities, 6 out of 10 of them get their insurance from Medicaid. If Medicaid is turned into a block grant, let me just tell you, let me guarantee you that healthcare will end for millions of those kids. If it does not end, it will be dramatically scaled back because States cannot afford to pick up 60, 70, 80 percent eventually of the cost.

Thirty percent of non-elderly adults with disabilities are covered by Medicaid. Sixty-four percent of nursing home residents are covered by Medicaid. Two out of every three of our senior citizens who are living in nursing homes are covered by Medicaid. If you block-grant Medicaid, all of a sudden States will not be able to pick up those costs and will not be able to deliver healthcare to people in nursing homes. That is just the truth.

The Republican bill effectively ends coverage for 11 million people all across this country who are covered by the Medicaid expansion after 2 years, and then it jeopardizes care for tens of millions more by dramatically cutting the Medicaid Program and the Medicaid reimbursement to States. This is not a game; this is 11 million people.

Remember, it is not a guess because in 2020 you will be reverting back to the rules before the Affordable Care Act. Before the Affordable Care Act, 11 million fewer people were covered under Medicaid. Even if States maybe hang around and decide to front the billions of dollars necessary to cover a few million of those, you are still talking about 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 million people who will lose insurance--again, people who can't buy it anywhere else. This is people's lives we are playing with--as I mentioned, 200,000 in Connecticut alone.

Do you know who else gets hurt by this replacement plan? Older Americans. It seems that older Americans are really targeted in this plan because although the underlying Affordable Care Act says that you can't charge older Americans more than three times that of younger Americans, this replacement plan changes the rules. It allows insurance companies to jack up prices on older Americans. So a 60-year-old would have their premium go up by about one-quarter. That is roughly $3,000, according to an AARP study. I don't know about the Presiding Officer, but a lot of adults getting ready to qualify for Medicare in Connecticut don't have $3,000 sitting around.

But it gets worse. Because the premium support is so skimpy, under this plan, that same 60-year-old in Connecticut would have their premium support--their tax credit--cut in half, from $8,000 down to $4,000. Do the math. That is a $9,000 increase in healthcare costs for a 60-year-old resident in Connecticut. That is unaffordable. There is just no way for anybody to say that for that 60-year-old living in Connecticut or living in Nebraska or living in California, that is better healthcare. Nine thousand more dollars out of pocket for a 60- year-old is not better healthcare.

The claim is that this bill will cover people with preexisting conditions, but because there is no minimum benefit requirement, the plans don't have to cover anything that you need for your preexisting condition. So, yes, they can't technically charge someone with cancer more, but they don't have to cover chemotherapy. The Affordable Care Act says insurance has to be insurance. There has to be some minimum, basic level of benefits so that everybody knows that when they buy an insurance plan, they are basically getting coverage for maternity care, for cancer treatment, for mental illness. Because this legislation strips away any requirement that insurance be insurance, maybe you get insurance if you have cancer, but it may not cover anything you have.

Of course the cruelest piece of this bill says that if you lose insurance, you then get charged more. Republicans are right that in the Affordable Care Act as it exists today, there is a penalty if you don't buy insurance. Republicans just do their penalty differently. What this replacement plan says is that if you lose insurance and you try to get it later on, you will pay 30 percent more. I admit that there is a penalty in the underlying Affordable Care Act and there is a penalty in the Republican bill, but the problem is that under the existing Affordable Care Act, the help you get to buy insurance allows you to buy insurance. That is why 20 million people have insurance today. But because the tax credits are basically cut in half under this proposal, it will render healthcare unaffordable; thus, more people will have gaps in coverage; thus, more people will pay the penalty.

So in the end, this bill really does not provide protection for people with preexisting conditions because they are not going to be able to buy insurance in the first place. They are going to fall into that gap, and then they are going to have to pay more. Even if they do have insurance, it may not even cover what they need.

All of this is made harder to understand because it seems to be one big excuse to deliver a giant tax cut to the wealthy. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that this bill would cut taxes by $600 billion for the wealthiest Americans. The Affordable Care Act was financed in part by a tax on unearned income for people making over $250,000 a year. I live in a pretty wealthy State--Connecticut--but people who are making $250,000 and a whole lot of unearned income are not amongst the most needy in our society. The average tax cut under this bill

would be $200,000. Why? Because we are taxing so few people who are making such big amounts of money, the average tax cut would be $200,000.

It is so hard to understand because when you do the sum total of parts that are moving under this replacement plan, it seems as if the biggest parts that are moving are care away from millions of poor people and the elderly and money going to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. That is not hyperbole; that is just how this bill works out.

The biggest net result of this bill from the status quo is that millions of people who are on Medicaid today in a few years won't have it--those are kids; those are the disabled; those are the elderly--and a handful of very wealthy Americans will make out with enormous tax cuts under this legislation.

I guess it is no secret that this bill was crafted behind closed doors. Seven years in the making, and this bill was hidden from public view until yesterday. Now House Republicans are saying they are going to give the American public 1 week to look at this. No estimate of the cost--they are going to ram it through as quickly as they can.

I held half a dozen townhalls in the summer of 2009, when the tea party tempest was at its highest, where people really wanted to talk to me about how upset they were with the way the healthcare debate was going. One of the refrains that I heard in those townhalls was that Democrats were ramming through the Affordable Care Act. Everybody heard it. Ramming through the Affordable Care Act. It was on FOX News every night. It was part of our townhalls regularly.

Well, let me tell you what happened in 2009. The House process spanned three committees: the Energy and Commerce Committee, the Ways and Means Committee, and the Education and Labor Committee. The House had 79 bipartisan hearings and markups on the health reform bill--79 bipartisan hearings and markups. House Members spent nearly 100 hours in hearings, heard from 181 witnesses, and considered 239 amendments and accepted 121. The HELP Committee had 14 bipartisan roundtables, 13 bipartisan hearings, and 20 bipartisan walkthroughs on health reform. The HELP Committee considered nearly 300 amendments and accepted 160 Republican amendments. The Finance Committee held a similar process. When the bill came to the floor, the Senate spent 25 consecutive days in session on health reform--the second longest consecutive session in history.

So don't tell me that the Affordable Care Act was rushed through when during that time the HELP Committee considered 300 amendments, held dozens of hearings, and in 2017 there are going to be no committee meetings, no committee markups, no committee amendments, and barely a week for the public, for think tanks, for hospitals, for doctors, for patients to be able to consider the chaos that will be wrought if this healthcare plan goes through.

So I am on the floor today to plead with my Republican colleagues to step back from this potential debacle. This seems like it was written on the back of a napkin in order to rush something out into the public so that Republicans can claim they are fulfilling the promise they made, without thinking through the consequences.

Over and over again, I heard my Republican friends and President Trump say they are going to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. I heard the new Secretary of Health and Human Services say that no one was going to lose insurance, that costs were not going to go up, and that the insurance protections were going to be preserved. None of that will be true under the current plan under consideration. Everybody knows it, which is why it is being hidden from public view.

Politicians love praise. We love good press. So if Republicans thought this was a praiseworthy plan, they would not be hiding it. They would not be trying to rush it through. They would be celebrating an achievement they have been crowing about for years--replacing the Affordable Care Act with something that is better.

This is worse for everyone except for insurance companies, drug companies, and the superrich. The superrich get a big tax cut, and all of the fees that were levied on the insurance companies and drug companies that were used to pay for additional expansion go away.

Tucked inside here, there is even a very specific tax cut for insurance company CEOs. I mean, think about that. Tucked into this bill is a specific tax cut for a select group of individuals--insurance company CEOs. I represent a lot of those CEOs, but it does not make it right.

I hope we will find a way to work together to try to strengthen the Affordable Care Act and fix what is wrong. The plan that was unveiled yesterday--I understand not by the Senate but by the House--hurts everybody except for a select few. I think most of my colleagues know we can do better.

I yield the floor.