Floor Statements

Mr. President, I hope the Presiding Officer and my colleagues had a great Father's Day this past Sunday. I had maybe the best Father's Day you can imagine because I got to spend part of it with my two sons and my father. We all went out to dinner with my wife, and it was a really special day.

I come to the floor with both a light and heavy heart, light because I got to experience Father's Day in a way I wish thousands of other people across the country could experience it. The statistics of the number of people who are killed by guns every year is pretty stunning. There are tens of thousands of people all across this country who are losing their fathers and sons, in part because the Senate doesn't do anything to try to stem the scourge of gun violence across the country.

As the Presiding Officer knows, I try to come to the floor every week for about 10 minutes or so to try and give voice to the victims of gun violence.

Today, 24 hours having passed Father's Day, maybe we can talk a little bit about those who have lost their fathers and their sons-- little boys such as Logan Soldo.

Logan is about to turn 1. He certainly doesn't know what happened to his father Igor, but when he is old enough, unfortunately he will hear a pretty horrific story. His father--having fled war-torn Bosnia as a 13-year-old to settle in the United States--was killed in a shooting at a Walmart, which got a lot of attention about a week or so ago.

Jared and Amanda Miller--fairly well-known radicals in the Las Vegas area--walked into a Walmart and shot Igor Soldo, a police officer, while he was eating at a restaurant.

People talked about Igor and his journey. As I mentioned, he came here from the Balkans when he was 13 years old and graduated from Southeast High School in Lincoln, NE. Following high school, he studied criminal justice at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and worked part time as a corrections officer for 3 years in Lincoln where he met his wife Andrea. The couple were married in 2009. They were planning on celebrating their son's first birthday. His birthday will be on July 7. They

were going to return from Las Vegas to Lincoln to celebrate it with friends and family, but instead Igor's family ventured and journeyed from Lincoln to Las Vegas to bid farewell to their son, who was a police officer killed in this episode of horrific violence which killed two others and eventually also led to the death of the two shooters.

One of his fellow officers, who was one of Igor's close buddies, told the story at his funeral about how close Igor was to his son. He said, through tears, to the crowd:

I started getting pictures of Igor and Logan. I would see

him with Logan over at the house and it was clear . . . our

once epic romance was being replaced.

Logan Soldo will never know his dad, but there are thousands who lose their sons every year.

Over the weekend some of my colleagues might have had a chance to read an op-ed in the Washington Post written by Mark Barden and David Wheeler. Mark and David lost their sons, Daniel and Ben, in Sandy Hook. They talked about what Father's Day has become. They said:

We know Father's Day is meant to be a day when fathers sit

back on their couches, watch sports and take it easy. But

this Father's Day, we ask you to do one thing differently.

Look at your children, your beautiful, growing, pesky

children who bring you so much joy and sometimes cause you so

much heartache, and ask yourself--really ask yourself--this:

Am I doing everything I can to keep them safe? Because the

answer to that question, if we all answer honestly, clearly

is no.

Of course, that is the answer here in the Senate because we have witnessed over 70 school shootings since Sandy Hook. There were 35 school shootings this year alone, and we are not even halfway through the year. There are 31,000 people a year--2,600 people a month, 86 people a day--who are killed by guns, and we do nothing.

We tried to pass a pretty simple bill that would expand the number of sales that would be subjected to a background check--supported by 80 percent of the American public--on the floor of this Senate, but because of a Republican filibuster, we could not get it to a final vote. The numbers are clearly not moving people, so hopefully the stories will, stories such as that of one particular father who has become the face, in many ways, of the Sandy Hook tragedy, Neil Heslin.

Many people have heard Mr. Heslin talk because he probably talks in the most poignant, open, soul-baring terms of any of the parents.

Twenty-four hours removed from Father's Day--which many of us got to spend with our dads and our kids--I will leave you with the words from Neil Heslin's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

On December 14, Jesse got up and got ready for school. He

was always excited to go to school. I remember on that day we

stopped by Misty Vale Deli. It's funny the things you

remember. I remember the hug he gave me when I dropped him

off. He just held me, and he rubbed my back. I can still feel

that hug.

And Jesse said, ``It's going to be alright. Everything's

going to be okay, Dad.'' Looking back it makes me wonder.

What did he know? Did he have some idea about what was going

to happen? But at the time I didn't think much of it. He was

just being sweet.

He was always being sweet like that. He was the kind of kid

who used to leave me voice messages where he'd sing me happy

birthday even if it wasn't my birthday. I'd ask him about it,

and he'd say, ``I just wanted to make you feel happy.'' Half

the time I felt like he was the parent and I was his son.

Taking a break from Neil's testimony for a second, this was Neil's only family. He was separated from his wife. Neil has been unemployed, bopping between different housing situations. His entire family--his entire life--was his son Jesse.

Neil went on to say:

Jesse just had this idea that you never leave people hurt.

If you can help somebody, you do it. If you can make somebody

feel better, you do it. If you can leave somebody a little

better off, you do it.

They tell me that's how he died.

When he heard the shooting--at Sandy Hook Elementary School

that day--he didn't run and hide. He started yelling. People

disagree on the last thing he said. One person who was there

said he yelled ``run.'' Another person said he told everybody

to ``run now.''

What I know is that Jesse wasn't shot in the back. He took

two bullets. The first one grazed off the side of his head,

but that didn't stop him from yelling. The other hit him in

the forehead. Both bullets were fired from the front.

I hate to say it but even when you know your community has

been hit, you hope and pray it wasn't your boy. They had us

all to go to a fire station to wait and see if our kids would

make it out of the school. By 3:30, maybe 4 o'clock, they

told us there were no more survivors. I should have realized.

They'd basically told me my son was dead, but I waited. I

told the people what to look for, what he'd been wearing that

day. He had this striped shirt and Carhartt jacket, and these

pants that fit him in September, but then he hit a growth

spurt. I gave the description and I waited some more. I

waited and I hoped, until 1:30 in the morning. That's when

they told me he wasn't coming.

Breaking away from his testimony again for a second, I was at that fire house, and I will never forget the scene of Neil Heslin sitting by himself hour after hour.

Returning to his testimony, he concludes by saying:

Before he died, Jesse and I used to talk about maybe coming

to Washington some day. He wanted to go to the Washington

Monument. When he talked about it last year, Jesse asked if

we could come and meet the President.

I said earlier that I can be a little cynical about

politicians. But Jesse believed in you.

This is Neil talking to us.

He learned about you in school and he believed in you. I

want to believe in you, too. I know you can't give me Jesse

back. Believe me, if I thought you could I'd be asking you

for that. But I want to believe that you will think about

what I told you here today. I want to believe you'll think

about it and then you'll do something about it, whatever you

can do to make sure no other father has to see what I've

seen.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I thank both Majority Leader Reid and Chaplain Black for allowing Rabbi Ginsberg to open our session with what I thought was a very beautiful prayer challenging us to action and to conscience.

Just a word about Rabbi Ginsberg's leadership. For the last decade Rabbi Ginsberg has been helping to organize one of the most robust religious communities in Connecticut.

In 2000 Rabbi Judah Harris conceived a yeshiva in Waterbury. It began with about 38 students and today has grown to service 600 students and 180 families who have settled in a neighborhood just off the center of Waterbury that 10 to 20 years ago had become pretty rundown but today is thriving and has been rebuilt because of the community surrounding the yeshiva.

We have had a wonderful Jewish community since the mid-1800s, but it is stronger today than ever, in large part because of the efforts of Rabbi Ginsberg.

In addition to building this wonderful community and being amongst its leaders, he has been of great counsel to me, Senator Blumenthal, and Governor Mallow as a moral guide but also as someone on whom we can rely when it comes to the tough policy choices we have to make.

I again thank Chaplain Black and Leader Reid, and I thank Rabbi Ginsberg for accepting our offer to lead us this morning.

Madam President, we have a lot to be proud of in my home State of Connecticut, and that includes our thriving arts community. Our small but vibrant theatrical arts industry is often overshadowed by that of its more renowned next-door neighbor, New York City. But this week, a homegrown production--``A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder''--took home the top honors at the 2014 Tony Awards, demonstrating the incredible talent and artistic skill that comes from our State's theaters and schools. I could not be prouder of these individuals' historic achievements.

Not only did ``A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder'' win ``Best Musical'' of the year, but director Darko Tresnjak of Connecticut's Hartford Stage took home ``Best Direction of a Musical;'' Yale Drama School graduate Robert L. Freedman won ``Best Book of a Musical;'' and Linda Cho, also a graduate of the Yale Drama School, won ``Best Costume Design of a Musical.''

The musical originally premiered under Mr. Tresnjak's direction in 2012 at the Hartford Stage in Hartford, CT. The musical follows the story of a British commoner, Monty Navarro, who discovers he is ninth in line to inherit an earldom and great wealth, and decides to eliminate the other eight heirs who stand in his way. The musical stars only three actors, all with Connecticut ties. The talented lead actor Jefferson Mays of Clinton, CT plays an incredible total of eight characters throughout the course of the musical. He is supported by Bryce Pinkham and Lauren Worsham, both graduates of the Yale Drama School.

In 2013, the musical and its Connecticut cast moved to Broadway, where it became the most Tony Award-nominated musical of the 2013-2014 season and ultimately took home the night's top honors. Their victories are not only wins for their careers and productions, but also for the State of Connecticut.

I ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating these incredible artists on their Tony Award-winning performances, and I wish the company of ``A Gentleman's Guide'' all of the continued success in the world as it goes on to enrich the lives of many more audiences for years to come.

Madam President, before I address the issue of college affordability, I want to send my condolences to the families in Oregon, another community ravaged by a school shooting, the 37th of 2014, the 74th school shooting since Sandy Hook. Those are pretty stunning numbers: 37 school shootings this year alone, more than 1 a week; 74 school shootings since Sandy Hook.

I will make the comment one more time, that we are becoming accomplices in these mass murders. We are becoming complicit in this murder of children all across our country. When we do nothing, when we sit on our hands idly as children are gunned down all across our country, we send a message of acceptance that we can do practical things that will lessen the chance that people will be killed in our schools and in our homes and in our neighborhoods.

I will not go through the list right now, but we also can send a message that enough is enough. That message, frankly at this point, is probably just as important as the practical effects of the laws we would change.

I thank the Presiding Officer for her great work on bringing the issue of college affordability to the point where we have reached a national debate around what we can do to try to relieve families of the crippling debt sitting on top of them today. As the youngest Member of this body, I perhaps know in as personal terms as anyone else about what this burden means for my wife and myself who continue to owe money on our student loans, and for our neighbors and friends who are in similar positions.

I want to tell you a story today of one such family, a namesake of mine, the Murphys from Killingworth--no relation. Dennis Murphy recently wrote me about his family's story. Dennis is 52 years old and has five kids. His parents emigrated here from County Kerry, Ireland, and he was born in New York. His family lived in a small apartment in the Bronx. While Dennis was still a boy, his family moved to a house in East Haven, CT, which his father called the promised land.

His father died at the age of 50, when Dennis was 14 years old. Since the family was poor and the father did not have life insurance, Dennis could not afford to go to college himself, so he went straight to work. He was lucky enough to find a job working for the railroad, working as a locomotive engineer for Metro North. He still works at that job, Dennis does, making a good living and earning a solid upper middle- class salary.

Dennis wanted to provide a better life for his own family. So he worked as much as he could, took as many hours as he could, he took as many extra shifts as possible, he worked on holidays, and he was eventually able to make his life better, make his family's life a little bit better. They bought a house in Killingworth. He hoped his kids would get to go to college. One of his daughters has a learning disability and needs extra support, so that took up a decent amount of the family's income, but his oldest son Dennis Murphy, Jr., was a good student in high school, made the honor roll.

When Dennis junior was accepted to the University of Albany, Dennis was so proud that his son would receive the college degree that he never did. Dennis junior worked since the age of 16 to do his part to be able to afford college. He continued working all throughout college. Dennis junior seldom asked his dad for any money. Unlike many of his friends, Dennis junior actually graduated within 4 years.

But the family still had to contribute to Dennis junior's education. So without any money saved away, with money going to pay for the house and for raising five kids and for their daughter's learning disabilities, Dennis had to take out PLUS loans that ultimately totaled over $100,000. Because the interest rate on the loans is fixed at 8.5 percent, the minimum monthly payments were around $700 to $800 a month. With their mortgage payments and the rest of their living expenses, Dennis cannot afford to pay this amount, even with his good salary. Frankly, like a lot of Americans, he did not realize when he first took the loans how the interest would add up over 4 years, nor did he understand how much the monthly payments would be.

The stress of wondering how they are ever going to pay back this huge debt has caused a lot of tension in the family, a lot of arguments within his formerly close family. Sometimes Dennis says he wonders whether he should have let his son go to college at all. Even though Dennis junior has a new good job earning $20 an hour because of his degree, it is not enough for him to be able to contribute significantly to paying off these loans either.

Dennis's family came to America, got that little apartment in the Bronx for reasons that are familiar to nearly every one of us in this Chamber, this idea that if you came to the United States, you had a shot to move and move quickly, a fair shot at economic mobility. My family came from Ireland about two generations before Dennis's, but it was the same reason that brought them here to the United States. It was education that was the vehicle for advancement.

You know, it was not a myth. It was not a story that they told in places such as Ireland and Italy and Poland. It was true that if you came here and did your work and played by the rules and saved a little bit of money you could go to college and you could do significantly better than your parents did. But the reality is that idea, that truism of America being the home of the greatest level of economic mobility in the world is becoming a myth. The odds today that a young person will go to college if their parents did not is 29 percent.

That is one of the lowest rates in the industrialized world. Think of it the other way. Seventy percent of kids whose parents didn't go to college will never go to college. Seventy percent of kids who didn't go to college will essentially be destined to live the same

life and take in the same income level their parents did. That is a stunning lack of economic mobility.

The truth is that it is getting worse specifically for a particular group of Americans. For African Americans, the gap between those with a college degree in the African-American community and in the White community has gone from 13 points 20 years ago to 20 points today. The gap for Latinos was 18 points 20 years ago, and it is 25 points today. So for African Americans and Latinos, that dream of economic mobility is getting even further away than for other folks.

America used to be No. 1 in the world with respect to the amount of young adults with college degrees. We are 12th in the world today. In a very short period of time we have gone from leading the world in college graduates to becoming rather middling.

You don't, frankly, need a college degree for one thing: You don't need a college degree to figure out why fewer people have college degrees. Here it is: Since 1989 the cost of college has gone up by 307 percent and income for the average family has gone up by 72 percent. You don't need a degree in mathematics or a graduate degree in rocket science to understand that when you have this disparity between the growth in income and the growth in the cost of college, you are going to leave millions of families on the outside when it comes to accessing the apparatus of opportunity that has historically made this country the place where economic mobility was more real than anywhere else.

That is why this piece of legislation this week matters so much-- because to Dennis the numbers are not going to lie. Dennis is going to go from paying 8.5 percent to about 6.4 percent. You think that is only about 2 percentage points. That is thousands of dollars in savings for the Murphys--thousands of dollars that today they don't have. That story can be multiplied hundreds of thousands of times. We think there are about 300,000 families just in the State of Connecticut who are going to be able to access a lower rate of interest based on the legislation we are going to pass this week. These numbers are pretty stunning, but the fact is that there are stories like Dennis's all across my State and all across this country, and we can do something about it this week.

As Senator Harkin said--and let me finish with the thought that this is the beginning of the work we have to do--the reality is that it is very important to give students access to lower cost loans, as we will hopefully do this week. It is very important to lower the borrowing burden for families who have already taken out loans, but we actually have to get serious about this number. We actually have to get serious about bending this curve so that college isn't 307 percent more expensive another 20 years from today.

So I hope that in the reauthorization bill our committee, the HELP Committee, is going to undertake, an idea that has been put forward by myself, Senator Schatz, Senator Sanders, and Senator Murray will get a fair airing; that is, the idea that we should start expecting some accountability when it comes to these schools that are getting billions of dollars in Federal aid. We send out $140 billion in Federal aid every year, and we really have very loose standards when it comes to affordability and outcome.

A group of schools is under the for-profit umbrella of a company called Corinthian in California. It has 50 percent of its students dropping out after 1 year and 36 percent of its students defaulting on their student loans. They charge $41,000 for a paralegal degree, and the local community college charges $2,500. That is a miserable set of outcomes. That is a total lack of affordability. Yet they collect $1.6 billion every year in Federal aid--$1.6 billion in Federal aid every year. Federal aid means you and me. Our taxpayer dollars are going to a school that is doing nothing about affordability and is delivering very bad outcomes.

So this bill is very important for the Murphys and hundreds of thousands of families like them. But our work is not done. It is time for us to agree that in addition to making it easier for students and families to afford college, it is finally time for Congress to put some real pressure on these schools to do something about the cost of tuition and the quality of degrees they provide. I am going to be very excited to cast my vote for this week's legislation, for the Murphys-- no relation--and thousands of families like them in Connecticut.

I yield back.

Mr. President, I speak in memory of the life of Robert Jackson Miller III, an accomplished architect and a man who, above all else, was a devoted husband and a loving, generous father. Bob passed away on March 10, 2014, at the age of 48, leaving behind a wife and four daughters who loved him dearly.

Bob held within him a brilliant capacity to design buildings that drew out the full potential and imagination of those who entered their doors. Throughout his career--from his early years at Robert A.M. Stern Architects and his role as partner-in-charge at Michael Graves and Associates in New York, to his co-founding of Miller & Wright Architects in New York City--he was a diligent designer who cherished the ability he had to provide unique shared space for individuals across the United States. He often spoke of his proudest work, the St. Coletta School in Washington, DC, a place where children and adults with intellectual disabilities were afforded the opportunity to learn and grow as a community.

Yet all of Bob's architectural accomplishments pale in comparison to the passion that defined his life: the love he felt for his wife Grace and his daughters Eve, Margot, Lily B. and Poppy. To say that Bob was an utterly devoted family man would merely scratch the surface of his complete dedication to the lives of his wife and daughters. If you were to ask Bob, he would prefer nothing in the world more than simply sharing a Friday night at home with his family, watching movies or relaxing on the beach in their company. He was content to spend as much time as he possibly could with them; nothing brought him more joy. If you were ever to go to the Miller household, you would invariably find Bob hard at work teaching the girls new lacrosse techniques, helping them practice for their plays, or helping construct an elaborate Halloween costume. His faithfulness as a father and a husband were characteristic of the kind soul Bob possessed. When he was diagnosed with melanoma, Bob placed even more emphasis on profoundly treasuring each moment he was allowed with Grace, Eve, Margot, Lily B. and Poppy. He never lost sight of the gift he had been given to spend his life with them.

This will be the first Father's Day the girls spend without their father. To lose a valuable, vibrant, compassionate spirit like their father's at such a tender age is an incomprehensible tragedy. There are moments of pain in this life when we can see the sadness of others and desire only to lessen their hurt, knowing full well that our words and our sympathies are insufficient. This is such a moment.

I hope that Grace and the girls understand the bright loveliness their father brought into the world, and will continue to carry that light forward in his absence. The world is a better place for Bob having traveled through it. He is continuing his journey now, but we will remember him here, and his family will remember him for the rest of their lives. His memory will serve as an example of how to love completely, how to dedicate yourself to your family entirely, and how to treasure the moments you are given in the brief time we have.

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

Madam President, I come to the floor to speak in support of Sylvia Burwell's nomination to lead our efforts at HHS and to follow up on the comments of her great friend Senator Manchin.

I would like to add two points to what I think was a great presentation by the Senator from West Virginia. We rarely get someone who has this kind of background in both the public and private sector and of course who is perfectly suited for a tour of duty at the helm of the Nation's largest public-private partnership.

HHS is obviously the payer for our Medicare Program and for much of our Medicaid Program, but they are doing business with literally hundreds of thousands of private entities and private companies all throughout the country--primarily health care practitioners from the east coast to the west coast--and the Affordable Care Act is an enormous private-public partnership. We expanded coverage through both the traditional Medicaid Program and also through millions of people--8 million and counting--who have signed up for private insurance with a little bit of help from their government through tax credits. It is this background that she has on both sides of the public-private divide that I think will put her in a perfect position to lead this agency.

When she came before the HELP Committee, I was particularly pleased that she was very willing to be flexible and aggressive in her work with Governors throughout the country who have not yet expanded Medicaid. I think there is growing willingness on behalf of many Republican Governors to look at some innovative ways to expand Medicaid, and Sylvia Burwell is the perfect Secretary to work with Governors to find a way--perhaps with subsidies--that will help people in the lower income brackets afford private insurance that could capture those 5 million individuals across the country who do not have access to Medicaid because their States have not expanded it.

I wish to spend a few minutes in the context of this debate answering what I imagine will be a growing chorus of concerns and criticism from our Republican friends regarding some of the new rate announcements from exchanges all across the country. It has been hard to follow a lot of the criticism of the Affordable Care Act because it seems as though it mutates on a pretty regular basis. It started out with claims that the Web site could never work given its initial rollout problems. Of course it is working very well today.

Another criticism was that nobody would sign up for this new benefit because it was not affordable. We hit 8 million in terms of those who signed up for private insurance.

They said young people would not sign up. Private insurers are telling us their mixes of enrollees are exactly as they hoped, especially with respect to the young people signing up.

Then they said people would not pay their premiums. In a House hearing about 1 month ago, the private insurers said that in fact 80 to 90 percent of people were paying their premiums, which is comparable with the non-ACA plans.

Of course, there was the general claim that it will bankrupt the Treasury, even though it is saving us trillions in terms of deficit savings as well as savings to the overall health care spending line items of the Federal Government.

Now the critique is that these rate increases are unjustifiable as insurers are getting ready to offer rates on the new exchanges coming out for open enrollment at the end of this year.

First of all, it is important to note that there are a lot more insurance companies offering health care on these new exchanges. Connecticut will get at least one new entrant. New Hampshire, for instance, went from one insurer to five insurers. There is very good news coming with the new exchanges. There will be a lot more options because the insurers have figured out it is a pretty good deal for them as well as their consumers.

It is important to have a little bit of context. I have a couple of examples of the kind of premium increases that have been asked for by private insurers all across the country in the last several years. In 2010, Anthem in California proposed a 25- to 39-percent increase in premiums. Again in 2010, Anthem asked for a 23-percent increase in Maine. The year before in Michigan, Blue Cross Blue Shield asked for increases up to 56 percent for some populations.

The reality is that on average we have seen a premium increase for the individual market of 15 percent or above over the last 10 years. That is not good news, but it does provide some context for the requests for premium increases we are going to see in the exchanges this year. Actually, the reality is that since the law passed, there has been a fairly precipitous decline in the number of premium increases above 10 percent that have been requested by private insurers. There are less requests for premium increases above 10 percent today than there were in the corresponding period before the Affordable Care Act was passed.

Just because the rate increases that are being requested--or may be requested--as we roll out the next year of open enrollment for the State-based exchanges may be below the historical averages of the last few years, that certainly is not any reason for people to jump for joy. Fifteen percent is unaffordable, fifty-six percent is unaffordable, and 10 percent is still unaffordable.

It is also important to note some of the protections that are in the bill. For instance, one of the most important provisions of the Affordable Care Act that very few people have noticed is the provision that says that an insurer has to spend 80 percent of all the money it takes in on care. If at the end of the year they have not spent 80 percent of the money they have taken in from ratepayers and premium payers on direct care, then they have to rebate money to consumers.

Thus, if these premium increases are above what is justified based on the actual experience, there is going to be a rebate paid to ratepayers. Those rebates thus far have saved patients and consumers all across the country $5 billion, and it is a significant, historic protection against unjustifiable premium increases that are not backed by actual experience in terms of claims paid.

The protections are even broader. While rate increases are not new, what is new is that consumers are back in charge of their health care again. Ten years ago insurers were charging 15 percent, 20 percent increases and they were also denying health care to millions of Americans who were sick. In some parts of the country they were charging women 50 percent more than what they were charging men. They were putting annual limits on health care coverage that ended medical insurance for many of the sickest individuals and families all across the country. All of those abuses, under the Affordable Care Act, are history.

While I will admit we still have work to do to bring down the cost of health insurance in this country, at the very least today consumers are back in charge of their health care, the worst excesses and abuses of the insurance industry are no longer permitted.

While I want to see a day when health insurance premium increases are 2, 3, and 4 percent, what we are seeing thus far in the wake of the passage of the Affordable Care Act is premium increases that are less than the historical average before the law was passed.

Those are the facts. I know that is not solace for individuals who are receiving these premium increases, but what we have seen are premium increases coming down and not going up since the Affordable Care Act was passed.

There is still an enormous amount of work to do. The news is generally very good. More people are being enrolled in the Affordable Care Act than what was expected. Over the last 6 months alone, the rate of uninsured individuals in this country has come down by 20 percent. Medical inflation is at a near-term historic low. Whether it be infection or readmission rates, outcomes are getting better.

Our next Secretary of Health and Human Services will have a lot of work to do to continue to perfect this law, but she is going to have a lot of good work and a lot of good outcomes upon which to build, based on her experience in both managing private sector entities and large public sector entities. Even with these challenges, Sylvia Burwell is the right choice for HHS, and I hope we will confirm her in a big vote tomorrow.

I yield back.

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

Mr. President, having just come down from the chair, I wish to briefly respond to the remarks of the junior Senator from Alabama, who engaged in a pretty stunning and broad denial of science for about 15 minutes on the floor of the Senate as part of what I imagine will be a pretty robust critique this week of the new EPA rules from the administration.

When we were all schoolkids, we probably had the chance to read the play ``Inherit the Wind.'' It is rather de rigueur for students to read. In the end, as Drummond is essentially excoriating Matthew Harrison Brady on the stand, the book ends with almost a sense of sorrow about the unraveling of Brady's argument and the kind of figure he is portrayed at the end of the book to be.

My hope is that the same degree of strange affection may be the legacy of those who come to the floor and engage in the same denial of basic science that is at the root of the Scopes Monkey Trial in the book which made it famous.

Our colleague talked about the fact that the jury is still out as to whether the planet is warming. Here are the 10 hottest years on record since 1880: 2010, 2005, 1998, 2013, 2003, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2007, and 2004.

The Senator said that all the science doesn't really suggest global warming is happening. Well, he is right. Ninety-seven percent of scientists with peer-reviewed literature have come to the conclusion that the planet is warming and humans are contributing to it.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said this in their last report: ``Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.''

My friend said: Well, even if it is happening, we are really only a small part of the problem. So why is it even necessary for us to act?

Well, we are not a small part of the problem. We are 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's pollution. And even if the specific actions this week do represent a very small percentage of the ultimate solution when we talk about trying to get the temperature of the planet under control, that is a terrible argument in and of itself. Is that a reason why none of us should bother to vote--because each one of our own actions in and of itself really doesn't affect the overall outcome? It is the collection of all of the actions we take in a democracy that makes the difference, and it is the collection of actions we will take as a community of nations and a community of individuals that will ultimately make the difference.

I imagine this debate will continue.

Thirty-one thousand people a year die across this country from gun violence. That is 2,639 a month or 86 a day. I have tried to come down to the floor every week--a couple times a month at the very least--and talk about the voices of those victims because if the statistics aren't actually moving this place to action, then maybe we can talk about who these people were. Of course, we have a fresh set of stories from Santa Barbara, CA.

I don't need to tell the story of young Mr. Rodger. He was a deeply troubled young man who went on a shooting spree, killing six people and wounding many more.

Katherine Breann Cooper was 22 years old when she was gunned down by Elliot Rodger. She was a painter, and she was known as Katie by her friends. She had a really outgoing side. She was going to get a degree in art history, and she had a smile that ``lit up the room,'' according to her friends.

What her childhood friends from Chino Hills remember is that she was absolutely unbeatable at foot races. She was the fastest kid in the whole neighborhood. You couldn't beat her at foot races, hide and go seek, and you certainly couldn't beat her when the ice cream truck went through the neighborhood.

Her seventh grade teacher said:

She was one of 2,500 students I've taught over the years,

but Katie was a standout.

Veronika Weiss was 3 years younger--she was 19 years old--but her father Bob said she was wise beyond her years. He said he would actually go to his 19-year-old daughter for advice when he was having a problem with one of her brothers, Cooper and Jackson, or maybe when he was having an argument with his wife.

She played four sports in high school: cross country, baseball, swimming, and water polo. She earned straight A's. Her strength was math. She really excelled at sports, and she didn't let barriers get in her way. She didn't want to play softball; she wanted to play baseball. There was a baseball league for kids in her hometown of Westlake, and there were 500 players in that league--499 boys and 1 girl, and that 1 girl was Veronika Weiss.

When she got to UC Santa Barbara, she didn't have a lot of friends until she joined the Tri-Delta Sorority. They became a built-in circle of friends for her.

Her former coach said:

We're really shocked. She touched a lot of people. And for

someone who's 19 years old to have that many people showing

up [at her service], that's a lot to say. There's been kids

who say, ``Oh, I was a new kid in school and she came up to

me and just started talking to me. I didn't even know her.''

So she was that type of person.

Christopher Michaels-Martinez's father has had some strong things to say about the inaction of Congress, but he also had a lot of wonderful things to say about his son.

His son Christopher was a studious kid. He was an avid reader. He was an athlete from a young age, first beginning with soccer and going on to play football and basketball. He served as residential adviser at his dorm and was the kind of guy who would welcome strangers into his home and into his room.

His father talks a lot about his resilience. He remembers that at 8 years old Christopher decided he wanted to play football. He remembers at a practice watching his son being knocked down by a much larger teammate, and his father said he remembers thinking:

My god, he must be hurt. But he was on the ground no more

than two seconds. He hopped back up, stomped one foot on the

ground and walked determinedly back into the line.

That's the kind of kid Chris was.

Richard Martinez urged the 20,000 people at the memorial for the victims to follow his son's example from the football field. He said:

Like Christopher on that day, we've been knocked down. And

like Christopher on that day, I want you to get back up and

walk determinedly forward.

His father Richard has challenged Congress not to let one more person die because of our inaction.

In a lot of ways, the story of Elliot Rodger is a word of caution about the limits of what policy can do, but it is also an invitation for us to look at some of the things we can do.

Elliot was an incredibly troubled kid, but he was not a kid who lived outside of the mental health system, nor was Adam Lanza, the young man who killed 20 6- and 7-year-olds in Newtown. We can go back with 20/20 hindsight and pick apart the decisions--sometimes a very legitimate critique--that Rodgers' parents or Adam Lanza's parents made, but the reality is that Elliot Rodger was in and out of the mental health system and in and out of a number of different schools trying to find the appropriate placement. Adam Lanza had been identified with a severe mental illness, and his mother was trying to find treatment for him.

We need to do something to improve our mental health system. We have closed down 4,000 mental health inpatient beds in the last 6 years alone, while the needs of those with mental illness are skyrocketing. We know the waiting time for especially young adolescents to see a psychiatrist or psychologist just for an introductory visit is far too long. So we need to make massive investments in our mental health system. But the law can help as well when it comes to guns. The fact is Adam Lanza should never have been able to possess the high-powered weapon that he did, and had he walked into Newtown with a different weapon instead of a semiautomatic rifle, there would still be children alive today, in the minds of many of those parents.

It is not clear the law could have changed anything in California, but what we know is that in States that give law enforcement the ability to take guns away from people who pose a danger to the community or deny them to those individuals in the first place, fewer murders happen.

Police showed up at the door of Elliot Rodger's house and, had they walked in, they would have found a draft copy of his manifesto and a whole bunch of guns and a whole bunch of ammunition. He likely would have been taken into involuntary custody. His guns would have likely been taken away. The police didn't make that decision, but in California they have the ability to do that whereas, in many other States they do not.

In Missouri, for instance, they used to have a law on the books that allowed for local law enforcement to deny gun permits to individuals whom those local law enforcement personnel knew to be a potential danger to society. Well, Missouri repealed that law, and a recent study by Johns-Hopkins University shows that controlling for all other possible factors that could explain the dramatic increase in gun violence since the repeal of Missouri's background check legislation, the repeal itself accounts for 60 to 80 additional gun murders in Missouri every single year.

We know that laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, allow law enforcement to take guns away from dangerous people, laws that prevent military assault weapons from being in the community in the first place, save lives. It is not a coincidence. During the period of time after which the government instituted an assault weapons ban, we saw a reduction in the number of mass murders in this country. After it was repealed, we started to see an increase in those mass murders. Assault weapons bans don't have a lot to do with average, everyday gun violence, but they can have something to do with mass shootings.

Edmund Burke said: ``The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.'' I believe every single Senator here has heard that.

I will end with this thought: I think we can pass laws that will reduce these

numbers. It won't eliminate these numbers, but we can pass laws, whether it is improving our mental health system or changing our gun laws, that reduce the number of people who die and to perhaps lessen the weekly stories we hear of mass violence across the whole country.

What is the real risk of doing nothing, not even trying? I submit it is like pulling teeth to get any Republican Senators or Congressmen to even cosponsor a bill addressing any of these issues, and the real risk of doing nothing is that we start to look complicit in these mass murders. I know that is a strong thing to say, but it is not enough for the community itself to rally after these mass murders to shame the action when the most important legislative body in the world has nothing to say about this dramatic increase in mass gun violence. When we allow these numbers to fester without a single piece of legislation to address this trendline passing the Senate and the House, we have become accomplices because we send a message that we don't think the murders in Aurora, in Tucson, in Newtown, in Santa Barbara, are serious enough for us to do anything. That is a real shame.

Hopefully, at some point over the time the Presiding Officer and I have the honor of serving in the Senate, if the numbers don't move this place to action, the voices of the victims will.

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

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

Madam President, I want to tell my colleagues a story about Charlene Dill.

On March 21 Charlene Dill was supposed to bring her three children over to the South Orlando home of her best friend Kathleen. The two friends had cultivated a really close relationship since 2008. They shared every resource they had from debit card pins to transportation to babysitting to house keys. They helped one another out. They essentially had become each other's safety net.

As Kathleen described it, they hustled. They picked up short-term work. They went to every event they could get free tickets to for their kids. They lived the high life on the lowdown. They cleaned houses for friends just so they could afford the daily necessities of life. They were the quintessential working poor, and they existed in the shadows of this economic recovery that is yet to reach a lot of average people out there.

On March 21, when Dill never showed up with her three kids, who often came over to play with Kathleen's 9-year-old daughter, Kathleen was surprised she didn't even get a phone call from her friend Charlene. She shot her a text message--something along the lines of ``thanks for ditching me''--without knowing what had really happened.

Charlene, who was estranged from her husband, had been raising her 3 children alone--ages, 3, 7, and 9. She had picked up another odd job to try to pay the bills. She was selling vacuums on commission for Rainbow Vacuums.

On that day, in order to make enough money to survive and--as you will understand--keep herself alive, she made two last-minute appointments. At one of those appointments in Kissimmee, she collapsed and died on a stranger's floor.

Charlene had a documented heart condition for which she took medication, but she often could not afford the medication, and her friend Kathleen often had to turn to crowd-funding Web sites to help raise the money that her friend Charlene needed to pay for her heart medication. Charlene was the working poor, but she was also among the uninsured. After her death, her friend Kathleen used that same crowd- funding method that she used to occasionally pay for her friend's medication to pay for Charlene's funeral.

Florida has made the decision not to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act. They have made a decision--for political reasons--to keep hundreds of thousands of people such as Charlene among the ranks of the uninsured. The consequences are for many such as Charlene absolutely deadly.

Charlene died because she was on the outside of our health care system. Occasionally she would get to see a doctor and occasionally she would get the medication she needed for her condition--in part--because she had one good friend who went out of her way to try to help Charlene.

The reality is that there are 5.7 million people all across this country who have been denied the chance to get health care through Medicaid simply because their Governors or their State legislatures have decided to score a political point against a President whom they don't like by refusing Federal dollars in order to expand Medicaid, and that is what this is all about. This is not about good policy, this is not about health care, and this certainly is not about finances. This is just about a bunch of really angry Republicans that don't want to participate in a health care reform law passed by Democrats even though they are essentially giving away the money of their constituents.

The first reason you should do this is because it keeps people such as Charlene alive. A 2002 Harvard study of 3 States that expanded Medicaid--Arizona, Maine, and New York--showed that the expansion of Medicaid in those States was responsible for a 6-percent reduction in mortality as compared to other States. It found that for every 500,000 adults that gained Medicaid coverage, we prevent 3,000 deaths a year.

I am not really good with quick math, but that is 3,000 deaths prevented for 500,000 people covered by Medicaid. We are talking about 5.7 million adults that are being denied Medicaid because of these political decisions; that is a lot of people who are dying needlessly every year. That is the first reason you should do it, because it is the right and compassionate thing to do.

The second reason you should do it is because people in States such as Virginia or Texas--there are 1.2 million people in Texas alone. There are 1.2 million people who could have health care insurance but don't have health insurance in one State because the Governor and legislature don't like President Obama.

This is also about those constituents essentially giving their money away to other States. The message to people in States such as Florida, Virginia, and Texas is that you are funding people getting insurance in other States because the Federal Government is contributing almost the entire cost of this Medicaid expansion. Texas and Florida's dollars are going to Washington and being spent to subsidize the health care of somebody else. It does not make any sense from a health care standpoint and it certainly doesn't make any sense from a fiscal standpoint. It is not just the taxpayers and patients who are getting hurt, but it is all the health care providers as well.

An Urban Institute study found that hospitals across the country are being denied $294 billion because of this refusal to expand Medicaid. The Presiding Officer knows this because she has worked in and around health care policy her entire life. This idea that denying people health care insurance denies them health care is patently false. They get health care. They just don't get it until they are so sick they show up at the emergency room door and their condition is at a crisis point, and then that costs infinitely more. All of this money we are spending could be spent in a different place, such as on preventive care, instead of on crisis care.

With a new Secretary of HHS, there is an opportunity for these States to think differently. From the beginning, HHS has been incredibly willing to be flexible with Governors who are not quite sure of the politics of joining in the ACA but know it is the right thing to do. States such as Arkansas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania have come up with innovative programs in which they take the Medicaid expansion dollars and instead of using them to expand State-based Medicaid, they use those

dollars to help people buy private coverage. It seems to make a lot of sense to me.

At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Burwell said she was willing to continue to be as flexible as she possibly could with States that want to explore these innovative methods. Hopefully, with a new Secretary coming through the doors at HHS, maybe this is a new moment for these States to take another look at Medicaid expansion because this is just a matter of conscience.

Madam President, 5.7 million people are going without health care and potentially dying, as Charlene Dill did, simply because of politics.

David from Virginia wrote:

I am the coverage gap. I am a single 41-year-old male. I

save Medicaid thousands of dollars per month by caring for my

99-year-old grandmother at home without pay, rather than

place her in a nursing home at Medicaid's expense. I do not

qualify for Medicaid even though I have a zero income. I have

to cross the state line, into Kentucky to receive potentially

lifesaving cancer screenings and hopefully receive treatment

if I get bad news. Virginia Republicans hate the president

and governor so much, they are willing to let thousands of us

die. It is high time that these delegates place human lives

ahead of party politics and do what is right, for a change!

Eight million people have signed up through the exchanges. Despite these decisions by Governors and Republican State legislatures, 5 to 6 million more have been added to Medicaid, and 3 million young adults have coverage for the first time.

Prices to the Federal Government are falling. We are spending trillions less than we thought we would spend on health care because of the Affordable Care Act. Quality is increasing. The number of readmissions to hospitals and hospital-acquired infections are decreasing because we are starting to pay for outcomes instead of paying for performance.

People are figuring out that the Affordable Care Act works, and that is why there are fewer Republicans coming to the floor of the Senate and the House complaining about it, and that is why the Koch brothers and others have stopped running all of these ads about the Affordable Care Act.

The Affordable Care Act works, but it only works if leaders actually try to implement it. It doesn't work if you ignore it for political spite, and that is what is happening in State legislatures and Governors' mansions all across the country.

We have a new Secretary of HHS and a new willingness of a lot of Republican Governors, including Mike Pence in Indiana, to take a look at trying to reverse this reality for 5\1/2\ million people who--if not for the political actions of their State leaders--could also figure out, as millions and millions of others are doing on a daily basis across the country, that the Affordable Care Act works.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. President, one of the protagonists of Leo Tolstoy's epic ``War and Peace'' is the iconic Russian general Mikhail Kutuzov. Kutuzov was brought out of retirement to be the commander in chief of Russian forces during Napoleon's invasion, and his unorthodox strategy confounded and frustrated his superiors and his underlings alike. He becomes convinced, as Tolstoy depicts, that Napoleon will lose the war by overextending his army. He believes by playing the long game he will exhaust and defeat the seemingly invincible, unstoppable French army.

Tolstoy creates a fictionalized version of Kutuzov, of course, but one of the most famous passages from ``War and Peace'' is worth repeating here today. Speaking of those who doubt his strategy, Kutuzov says:

Patience and time are my warriors, my champions.

Again, quoting from the book:

He [Kutuzov] knew that an apple should not be plucked while

it is green. It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked

unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your

teeth are set on edge. Like an experienced sportsman, Kutuzov

knew that the beast was wounded, and wounded as only the

whole strength of Russia could have wounded it.

Whether or not this famous Russian general ever shared this exact sentiment, it is representative of a time when the Russians better than anyone on Earth knew how to play the long game. How times have changed.

Over the past few weeks, I have listened in agony to my Republican friends criticizing the Obama administration for having no coherent policy regarding the current crisis in Ukraine. I come to the floor today to rebut that argument and also to add a few suggestions on how the administration's policy can be enhanced.

I certainly understand the Republicans' frustrations. News of the ongoing daily drama in Ukraine dominates the national news. Russia seems omnipresent, manipulating events on the ground by the hour, and there clearly has not been a proportional pound-for-pound response from the United States or the collective West. This frustration is fed by memories of the Cold War--obsolete, even ancient memories given how fast the world has changed since 1991. But the President's critics, fueled by these largely irrelevant memories, insist that when Russia acts, we must meet fire with fire--crippling unilateral sanctions immediately, lethal arms for Ukrainian military, new missile capacity in Eastern Europe.

The problem is that this is a strategy for 1964, not 2014. Russia simply doesn't matter to us in the same way it used to. They are a secondary world power whose power is diminishing. Their demographics are catastrophic, their economy can't survive the inevitable global energy revolution, and their endemic corruption is going to rot their society from inside out. The invasions of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine are signs of Russian weakness, Russian insecurity, not Russian strength.

Last fall, two former Russian Republics, Georgia and Moldova, refused Russian overtures to join their nascent economic union and inked preliminary agreements to join the European Union. Ukraine, at the last minute, bowed to Russian bullying and refused to ink the same deal, but it set off a series of events that pushed Russia's man in Kiev out of office.

In a panicked reaction, Russia invaded, and the consequences have been devastating. Russia's economy is in free fall, with nearly $70 billion of capital leaving the country in just the last few months alone. No major institutional investors will touch Russia today with a 10-foot pole. To make matters worse, Russia has been kicked out of the G8 and generally has become an international pariah, not allowed at the table with major powers. Russia is increasingly isolated at the United Nations. And things are going to get even worse as the Europeans use this crisis as a wake-up call to make themselves truly energy independent of Russian energy and also to reinvigorate NATO.

In ``War and Peace,'' Kutuzov goes on to say this of his critics:

They want to run to see how they have wounded it. Wait and

we shall see! Continual maneuvers, continual advances! What

for? Only to distinguish themselves! As if fighting were fun.

They are like children from whom one can't get any sensible

account of what has happened because they all want to show us

how well they can fight. But that's not what is needed now.

The story of ``War and Peace'' and the Russian-French war is not entirely a useful parallel to the current crisis in Ukraine or to the proper response of the United States. What is needed now is much more than just patience and time. But our response needs to be proportional to our Nation's national security interests, not proportional to Russia's actions in their backyard. That is why the administration is right to strongly support this new Ukrainian Government without overreacting in a way that could compromise our relationship with other nations or make the situation worse, not better, on the ground in Ukraine.

I would like to take a few minutes this evening to lay out what a coherent, thoughtful approach to the crisis might look like and how, in fact, the actions of the Obama administration largely follow this pretty simple outline.

First, as Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenuk has been quick to tell visiting dignitaries, the most important help the United States can provide is economic assistance, conditioned on necessary reforms to show the Ukrainian people that a Western-oriented government can deliver prosperity to their country.

Russia has effectively invented a new form of warfare that is based on gradual provocation, where Putin uses psychological methods, intimidation, bribery, and propaganda to undermine resistance so that firepower is rarely needed to get his way. But of course these tactics only work on vulnerable countries with weak economies and a susceptibility to Russian overtures of economic overlordship and corruption. So the best way to repel Russian provocations is to strengthen the Ukrainian economy and government institutions both for the short and long run. The $1 billion in loan guarantees authorized by Congress and the $17 billion loan approved by the IMF and brokered by the United States are an important part of that process, and the conditions imposed--which include a floating exchange rate, steep increases in gas tariffs, and budget reductions over the next several years--represent some of the tough medicine necessary to get Ukraine back on its feet.

The United States hasn't sat on the sidelines when it comes to economic aid to Ukraine. We have led from day one, and the results are impossible to deny.

Second, let's recognize what military assistance makes sense and what military assistance does not make sense. It makes sense to shore up our treaty obligations in Eastern and Central Europe by positioning more troops in places such as the Baltics and Poland and Romania. Just in case the Russians were thinking of trying to use these types of destabilizing tactics in NATO countries, make them think twice. But remember that Ukraine is not a NATO ally; we have no obligation to defend their sovereignty, and it is totally unrealistic and indeed irresponsible to think that we can make up for decades of military neglect and mismanagement inside Ukraine with a few million dollars of aid today.

Ukraine doesn't need more small arms. Their problem isn't that they don't have them; their problem is that they don't know how to shoot them. There is no way the Ukrainians can effectively utilize more sophisticated weaponry like anti-tank and anti-aircraft artillery. The only way they could do that is with military advisers standing side by side with Ukrainians, and there is really no appetite here in the United States to commit personnel to a ground war in Ukraine.

To be clear, I don't offer these cautions because of a danger of provoking Russia with an influx of U.S. arms. Russia is going to do what Russia is going to do in Eastern Ukraine regardless of what small investment the United States makes today in Ukraine.

But I do worry that since any lethal assistance from the United States would have little to no effect on the ability of Ukraine to repel a Russian invasion, a Russian victory over the Ukrainian army, backed by U.S. weapons, would then be sold by Putin to his public as a Russian military triumph over the United States. That is a truly bad outcome, but that shouldn't stop us from more quickly delivering nonlethal support to help bolster the Ukrainian military in the short term--reasonable support such as body armor and communications equipment--that balances our limited direct interest in Ukraine with our humanitarian interest in saving lives. There is a middle ground between just sending a handful more MREs and sending tanks or automatic weapons, and we have had ample time to explore those options.

Over the medium and longer term we need to work with Ukraine to rebuild its military institutions that were neglected for so many years by its leaders who were pilfering from the state rather than providing for the country's defense forces.

Third, focus, focus, focus on the May 25 elections. The Russians occupy dozens--not thousands--of buildings in Eastern Ukraine. They have no hold or influence on other sections of the country near and to the west of Kiev.

As part of the international effort, the United States has committed millions of dollars and thousands of hours of manpower into making sure the May 25 election is held in a free and fair manner. The Russians will likely do everything possible to stop this election from coming off. As of today they effectively have no straw man in the race, and so more likely than not the result will be a victory for a free, whole, sovereign Ukraine and a damaging blow to Russia's claims that Ukraine can't govern itself. Our State Department representatives in Ukraine are working feverishly to help Ukraine conduct this election, and we have helped deploy unprecedented resources from the OSCE to make sure Russia cannot dislodge this election from occurring. That is American leadership happening right now on the ground in Ukraine.

Fourth, let's be crystal clear on what will lead to the next logical level of U.S. sanctions, which would be industrywide, sectoral sanctions against the Russian economy. We have moved deliberately so far because, wisely, President Obama has desired to move in relative concert with our European allies. But it is increasingly clear to me and to many others that Europe is simply not prepared to move at the pace necessary to send a strong message to Russia about the consequences of their continued aggression.

So having primarily mounted a defense of the administration's policy in Ukraine so far today, I would make one additional, significant suggestion for amendment of this policy. I believe the highest levels of American foreign policy leadership, from the President, to the Vice President, to the Secretary of State, should make it clear today to Russia, right now, that if the May 25 elections do not occur in a free and fair manner, we will hold Russia--and only Russia--responsible because if not for their interference, there can be no explanation for why these elections could not come off properly.

Further, we should make it clear that if the May 25 election is not allowed by Russia to be conducted according to OSCE electoral standards, the United States will immediately impose sectoral sanctions on the most important Russian industries, including but not limited to the Russian banking, energy, and raw materials sectors.

Hopefully, significant Russian interference in the elections would prompt Europe to act with us in order to protect our most important democratic values, but we can't wait for them any longer. Let's make it totally, completely, unequivocally clear today that if the May 25 election doesn't occur, the United States will move toward industry- level sanctions against Russia.

This is and can be a coherent, thoughtful U.S. strategy toward the crisis in Ukraine: Support Ukraine economically. Strengthen NATO. Don't overreact with reckless military aid to the Ukrainians. Do everything possible to make the May 25 election a success. Be clearer than current policy on what will trigger sectoral sanctions by the United States. And then act if Russia doesn't listen.

I get it that this isn't all my Republican colleagues desire when it comes to U.S. policy toward Ukraine, but overreacting to this crisis is just as bad, if not worse, than doing nothing. I was in Kiev at the very beginning, standing on stage at the Maidan with Senator McCain, urging the Ukrainian people to demand more from their government. I was here, advocating for a robust U.S. response to support these protesters. I believed, as I still believe, the United States should be playing an active role in this crisis, and I was making this argument before anyone else in this Chamber. But this isn't the Cold War. This is a fight in Russia's backyard, and the cold hard reality is that the stakes are just simply greater for Moscow than they are for us. And the world is no longer organized around who is with the United States and who is with Russia. The foundational paradigms of global security now are about who has nuclear weapons and who doesn't. Who is allied with the Shia and who is allied with the Sunni. Where are the Islamist terrorists organizing and who is helping them.

I don't mean to say that unchecked Russian action doesn't have global consequences. It does. China, for instance, is certainly watching to see if nations pay a price when they reset their borders through aggression rather than through diplomacy. But we ultimately won the Cold War by playing the long game. We knew that if we held true to democratic and free market values, the world would notice that an alliance with us was far more beneficial than an alliance with the Soviet Union. That, in fact, is the very reason for the current crisis. The Ukrainian people revolted because they saw the value of a Western economic and political orientation. We didn't need to use intimidation or bribery or little green men; we just showed them that our stuff is better.

Of course, the irony is that the Russians used to be the kings of the long game. Kutuzov let Napoleon march into Moscow after clearing out the city and leaving only about 10,000 people behind. He strung out the French army and left it ultimately helpless.

We don't have to resort to the drastic tactics of this old savvy Russian general. There are actions we can take and have taken to support Ukraine and send a message to Russia. But we shouldn't overinflate our national security interests in this crisis. We simply do not need to win every battle to win the war. And this body, the U.S. Senate, built by our Founding Fathers to see and play the long game for America, should understand this fact. We aren't the Russians in 1812. We must engage in a robust policy toward Ukraine that is much more than simply time and patience, but that doesn't mean there aren't some important lessons to be learned.

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

Thank you, Mr. President.

I hope the Presiding Officer had a great Mother's Day. I hope Senator Klobuchar had a great Mother's Day and got a phone call from her daughter in Connecticut.

I am here to tell the story of three pretty heroic mothers who are representative of far too many with similar stories across the country. I wish to tell you very quickly this afternoon about Gwen Cox Salley, Lori Gellatly, and Marianne O'Shields. All three of them are no longer with us. They are amongst the 31,672 victims of gun violence every year, 2,639 deaths a month, and 86 people a day who are killed by guns all across this country. I wish to try to lend a voice to a few of these victims tonight, mothers who were killed by their intimate partners, by their spouses, in an act of domestic violence that frankly could have been prevented if not for the law of this land.

First, the story of Gwen Cox Salley. Gwen was killed 2 days after she finally took out a restraining order against her husband. She had a long history of abuse with her husband Michael Scott Salley. Most recently he had come to her house the day before she took out this restraining order and threatened to kill her and their 7-year-old daughter. He tried to get access to his gun that was on the property, but she was able to hide it and then very quietly texted a couple of her friends that she was in trouble. The police came, and before violence erupted they were able to arrest him. She took out a restraining order, but the next day he came back with a gun, went to the local daycare parking lot where Gwen was picking up her 7-year-old daughter, took control of the car, sped off to apparently kill them both, but luckily Gwen was able to push her 7-year-old daughter out of the car so her daughter could be rescued and taken in by the daycare center's employees, but an hour or so later Gwen Salley was dead.

She did everything she was supposed to do. She finally left this man who had been so abusive over the years. After he threatened to kill them both, the cops were called and she took out a restraining order, but because the law of Louisiana at the time didn't allow for police to come and take his gun--in fact, the law allowed him, as the Federal law allows now, to go out and even purchase a gun during that time, and 1 day later Gwen Cox Salley was dead.

The gun industry wants to make us believe that our greatest fear comes from gun-wielding strangers who are going to break into our house at night and murder us, but the fact is women across this country are three times more likely to be killed by a gun by their husbands or their intimate partner than they are to be killed by anybody else with any other kind of weapon. That is the reality. For women who live in homes with a firearm, they are 500 percent more likely to be the victim of homicide through domestic violence than in houses without firearms. The statistics don't look good for women across this country and in part because our laws are so weak, even in a State such as Connecticut.

This is the story of Lori Gellatly, who was killed just a few days ago in Oxford, CT. She had taken out a restraining order against her husband Scott. They had twins, but things had gone wrong. She wrote in the application about one incident that ``Scott had yelled in my face . . . and got very angry. I felt threatened. He then told me I wasn't going anywhere and grabbed my right thumb and twisted my wrist . . .'' while the two children were in her arms. ``He acts out very violently and I am afraid for my kids and myself.''

She took out that restraining order and again, almost within moments, he was at the house. She called 911, but when police got there they found Lori Gellatly and her mother Merry Jackson with gunshot wounds. Lori was pronounced dead at Waterbury Hospital. Again, a restraining order taken out

but with no ability to take the guns away from her husband or to stop him from buying a gun, she was found dead.

The reality is we can do something about it. In fact, some of these States I am talking about are doing something about it themselves. Louisiana, which has a reputation as a State with a pretty strong history of gun ownership, has done something about it. The State legislature has passed a law allowing for a process that someone convicted of a domestic violence crime can have their guns taken away. Wisconsin has done the same, a State with a similar, pretty robust history of gun ownership.

It just makes sense that if someone has been convicted of a domestic violence crime, if they have a restraining order taken out against them because they got violent with their spouse, that is the exact time at which society needs to step in, law enforcement needs to step in and separate those guns from that individual. The statistics back that up. In States, for instance, that have just basic background check protections, women are 38 percent less likely to be killed by guns. These laws matter when it comes to keeping women alive at the hands of abusive spouses.

Mariann O'Shields died just a couple weeks ago in Spartanburg, SC. Not only had she taken out a restraining order against her husband Robert O'Shields, but she had gone the extra step to bring her and her kids--her daughter to a domestic violence shelter. She was staying in a shelter, but her husband tracked her down at the shelter, and just after she had dropped off her child at a bus stop she was killed. The staff at the safe home, if you can imagine, were paralyzed by this crime. The director said:

My staff and I are totally devastated. It is your worst

nightmare when you work with a shelter. I don't think that

there is anything we could have done to protect her.

That is right. There wasn't anything more that domestic violence shelter could have done to protect Mariann O'Shields, but there is something we can do. We have all sorts of disagreements about the future of gun laws in this country, and I understand in the foreseeable future we are not likely going to get a bill that expands the sales that are subject to background checks, even though 80 percent of the American public thinks we should require people to show they are not a criminal before they can buy a gun.

I wish we could get the assault weapons off the street that did the kind of damage we saw in Newtown, CT, but in the absence of getting an agreement on commonsense alternatives to current law such as bans on assault weapons and a greater scope of background checks, at least maybe we can take this specific issue, which is spouses, in particular, women who have taken out restraining orders against their husbands or spouses or boyfriends, maybe we can limit the change we can agree on to at least those situations in which women are most vulnerable, after an episode of violence, after a threat, when they have taken out a court- ordered restraining order, maybe at that moment their spouse shouldn't be able to possess a gun. Maybe at least during those few moments the spouse shouldn't be able to go out and buy a gun. Maybe the week after Mother's Day, in the face of the heroism that women such as Gwen and Lori and Mariann showed in removing their families and themselves from violent situations, maybe we can at least listen to the voices of these handful of victims of domestic violence crimes and do something in a targeted, limited way that could in the end prevent hundreds of unnecessary deaths across this country. I have to believe that in a body of good will we can at least agree on that.

That is the reason virtually every week I try to come down to the floor and share with my colleagues some of the voices of the victims, these 31,000 a year, 2,600 a month, 86 a day who are lost to gun violence all across this country. We can do better.

I yield the floor.

I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business.

Mr. President, there was a fairly remarkable hearing in the House of Representatives yesterday in the Energy and Commerce Committee, upon which I used to sit when I was there. It called together some of the Nation's biggest insurers to talk about the failures of the Affordable Care Act as seen through the lens of the insurance companies.

First up on the docket for Republicans was the claim that no one had paid their premiums, that people had signed up for plans, but a report which had been released by the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House suggested in fact only maybe about 60 percent of them actually paid their premiums.

So they asked representatives from WellPoint, Aetna, and other insurance companies to confirm that fact, and of course they did not. WellPoint said, in fact, 90 percent of the people who signed up for WellPoint plans--the biggest insurer through the Affordable Care Act-- have paid their premiums. Aetna said the number for them is somewhere in the low to mid-80s. Both numbers are actually representative of what people in the non-Affordable Care Act market pay with respect to their premiums.

When we dig deeper into the Energy and Commerce report, we found out the

reason they suggested that only about 60 percent of the people had paid their premiums is because most people's premiums hadn't been due yet. They didn't have to pay them when they had signed up for the plans in February and March.

So they tried another tactic. They said: We have heard all these reports and news media representations that you are going to be increasing premiums next year by double digits.

The insurers said: No, we have no idea what our premiums are going to be next year. We don't have the data yet. In fact, we are starting to get the subsidies coming into our plans that help keep these premiums affordable for low- and middle-class individuals across the country.

It turned out to be an absolute disaster for Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee because, as the insurers also pointed out, their profits have done pretty well, their stock prices have done pretty well over the past several years, because the Affordable Care Act is working for patients and, as it turns out, for the insurance companies that have offered plans on the exchanges.

It is representative of a whole litany of complaints Republicans have registered with respect to the Affordable Care Act's horror stories and worst-case scenarios which have simply not come true. I will take a few minutes to run through each of these arguments because I think it is important to have some context to understand that each one of their representations has not come true. Thus, as they turn to their next series of representations or challenges to the act, I think we can look back on history as a pretty good predictor of the future when it comes to Republicans' ability to prognosticate about an Affordable Care Act which is working now for millions of Americans.

The first thing they said is nobody is going to enroll. They said the Web site was unfixable. Of course we know that is the easiest to debunk now that we have 8 million people who have enrolled through the private exchanges and another 4 million to 6 million people who have enrolled via Medicaid expansion, and 3 million young adults who are now on their parents' plan. In fact, enrollment far outpaced what initial expectations were and beat the CBO estimates by 2 million people.

So clearly Republicans were wrong when they said nobody would sign up for the Affordable Care Act. They were also wrong when they said the Web site couldn't be fixed. There is no excuse for what happened in the fall of last year on the Web site, but it got up and running. Once it did, people were able to get on in record numbers.

They said the Affordable Care Act was going to kill jobs. We have done nothing but add jobs by the millions since the Affordable Care Act was passed. There is a chart, which I don't have on the floor, that shows what has happened since the Affordable Care Act went into law: Job growth has continued unabated.

Specifically, Republicans said: It is going to result in people who were working full time to move to part-time work. The Congressional Budget Office in a report which came out about 2 months ago said there is absolutely no economic evidence to suggest full-time work is shifting to part-time work. That is not a trend actually happening in the economy. I understand there are anecdotes and stories which are true where employers have made that choice, but there is no broader economic evidence that there is a shift from full-time work to part- time work.

Republicans said it is going to cost too much. Sylvia Burwell was before the HELP Committee today, and she was very articulate in explaining the simple fact that the Congressional Budget Office has revised downward Federal health care expenditures by $900 billion over the 10-year period from the passage of the Affordable Care Act to a decade later. We are going to be spending $900 billion less than the CBO initially thought we would, in large part because of all the wellness, prevention, and pay-for-performance measures built into the Affordable Care Act.

Premiums are lower than expected on these exchanges, which saves $5 billion in and of itself. The overall cost of the bill is 17 percent lower than what CBO initially estimated--huge savings for the Federal budget and for the specific line items within the Federal health care act.

OK. Fine, they said, but young people aren't going to sign up. It is ultimately going to be older, sicker people, and you will not have the right mix.

I think I said WellPoint was the biggest insurer. It is in fact the second biggest insurer. They said the average age of enrollment has come down every single day in a meaningful fashion. The risk pool and the product selection seem to be coming in the manner we had hoped. It is very encouraging right now.

Big companies such as United are going to be offering new plans on exchanges similar to those in Connecticut because they as well see the risk pools are exactly as they had hoped.

But the uninsured will not sign up. This is just people who were insured shifting to other plans which are perhaps better or cheaper for them--bunk as well. The new Gallup survey, which is the best data we have on the number of people who have or don't have insurance in this country, shows remarkable decreases over the last two quarters in the number of uninsured people in this country--frankly, numbers which almost seem too good to be true--a 25-percent reduction in 6 months' time with respect to the number of people without insurance in this country. One-quarter of the Nation's uninsured are now insured in the first 6 months of the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Lastly, one of the biggest red herrings in this debate has been the issue of cancellations. No doubt there have been hundreds of thousands of plans all across the country that have been canceled since the Affordable Care Act was put into place, but Health Affairs, one of the most respected, nonpartisan health journals in the country, did an article, I believe a couple weeks ago, which said there is absolutely nothing different about the number of cancellations which happened in the wake of the implementation of the act as compared to what had happened in that same period before the implementation of the act; that there is high turnover in the individual market.

While there are certainly some plans which were canceled by insurers because they didn't meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act, there wasn't a surge in cancellations compared with the number of cancellations which happened prior to the act.

So if we just go through--whether it is the claim that no one is paying their premiums or that rates are going to go up or that nobody will enroll, that it will kill jobs, that it will cost too much or that young people will not sign up or that the uninsured will not sign up or that cancellations are higher than normal--every single one of these claims turns out to be wrong.

That is not to say this act and its implementation hasn't been without its significant warts. There are flaws in the bill. There have been big bumps in implementation, but the fact is that polls are starting to show a growing acceptance and approval of the law amongst the American public because they have listened to these claims that the sky is going to fall from Republicans, and not only has the sky not fallen, but 15 million or so people across this country have more affordable health care because of the Affordable Care Act. The uninsurance rate in this Nation has dropped by 25 percent. Taxpayers are saving $900 billion over the course of the 10-year period following the passage of the bill.

I haven't even gotten into the quality metrics. Rates of hospital- acquired infections are down. The number of people who are readmitted to the hospital after a complicated surgery is dramatically down.

This is why we passed the Affordable Care Act. It hasn't lived up to everyone's expectation, but to the extent that the goal of the act was to reduce the number of people who are uninsured in this country, lower the rate of growth of health care expenditures, and increase quality, the data coming in on a day-by-day basis is overwhelming and impossible to ignore. More people have insurance, cost is coming down, and quality is getting better.

At some point the facts have to matter. As former Senator Moynihan said: Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but you don't get to have your own set of facts.

Taxpayers, the uninsured, consumers of all stripes understand what the true story is; that all of the Republican prognostications about the failure of the Affordable Care Act have not come true in the past and they are not likely to come true in the future.

There is a lot of work to do to continue to make the Affordable Care Act better, and I hope every Senator is ready to do that work, but the data and the numbers tell us that increasingly, on a day-by-day basis, the Affordable Care Act works.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an intern in my office, Kathryn Martucci, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the calendar year.

Mr. President, I wish to very briefly join my colleagues here

in support of the effort being led by Senator Durbin, Senator Warren, Senator Reid, and Senator Harkin. They have done such incredible work on behalf of students all across the country.

One of the most amazing statistics to me is a simple one. Not so long ago the United States was No. 1 in the world when it came to the number of young people who had college degrees. In a very short amount of time, we have precipitously fallen from No. 1 to No. 12 due to the fact that other countries have caught up, which is an issue in and of itself, but it also has something to do with the fact that the cost of college has become calamitous for students all across this country, and it is taking kids a lot longer to complete their degrees--many of whom are starting and never even finishing.

I am an example of the squeeze that American families are in. I don't complain about the income my wife and I make, but we are both paying back our student loans and we are saving for our kids' student loans. So I know the amount of a family's income that can be gobbled up trying to pay back prior college and save for future college, and I know where that money would go if it weren't going to pay for those two costs. For us, that money would go into the local economy.

So this is the middle-class issue of our generation, as my colleague Senator Schatz often says, because it is not just about families trying to pay back college and save for college; it is also about all of the places that money could go if it weren't going to the banks and the Federal Government, which are making a pretty profit off of this system as it is.

Finally, I will make a pitch for a piece of legislation that Senator Schatz, myself, and Senators Murray and Sanders have introduced because I think we need to have two conversations. One is about making sure we reduce the financial burden for families, but there is also a conversation we need to have about putting pressure on schools to reduce the ticket price, the sticker price of attending college. We, frankly, haven't done a very good job of leveraging the $140 billion we spend on financial aid to pressure colleges to do the right thing.

There is one for-profit college in California that takes in 1.6 billion every year of taxpayer dollars, and the average student there spends only 3 months on campus because they start school and never finish it. Their loan default rates are above 30 percent. That is a terrible investment for those kids but also for the Federal taxpayers' dollars.

Our piece of legislation--which we hope will be considered in the broader reauthorization of higher education statutes in this country-- would say it is time we hold colleges to a different standard and force them to get serious about costs and quality. In the end, that will be just as helpful--keeping control of quality and cost at our colleges-- as the effort being led by so many of my colleagues on the floor here tonight.

I am very glad to join in this effort. It is a personal cause for me and my family given that we are living this reality today but one that is a much greater imperative for all families who have been struggling with this burden across the State the Presiding Officer and I represent.

I yield the floor.

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