Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask that Alexandra Merrill, my intern, be given floor privileges for the duration of the day.

Mr. President, I applaud my colleague from Ohio for his stories from his home State on the families who have been dramatically impacted by the broken bridge between a lost job and the next job. Indeed, in my home State there are about 26,000 folks who are affected in this manner. We can think of it as the space between two jobs, as a chasm--a chasm that threatens the success of every family. They are hoping to make their payment on their light bill. They are hoping to make their rent payment or their mortgage payment. But they have to make it to that next job, and savings run thin, particularly when savings are very hard to come by when our economy is generating fewer and fewer living-wage jobs.

In the last recession of 2008, 60 percent of the jobs lost were living-wage jobs. But of the jobs we are getting

back, only 40 percent are living-wage jobs. Indeed, that means millions of families have gone from a strong foundation--the ability to raise children, to buy a modest home, perhaps take an annual vacation, perhaps to save a little bit of money to help send their kids to college--to struggling and chasing minimum wage or near minimum wage jobs, part-time jobs, and jobs that often have no benefits. All of those wrestling with this situation aren't going to have a big pile of savings to get from one position to the next.

That is why, during periods of high unemployment, we have created a longer unemployment insurance bridge to get them successfully to that next job. When people fall into the chasm between one job and the next, it is not just the family that is hurt; it is not just the worker who is hurt. Our entire society is impacted. It is impacted in several ways. First we have the situation where people go through foreclosure, and that is devastating to the family, devastating to the children, and certainly it also impacts the value of every home on the street. We have the situation of families who lose their home, who lose their rental home and become homeless. It isn't just the parents who are impacted. The children are deeply impacted, and they go through a traumatic event. That is certainly a terrible situation to endure and mal effects throughout. Indeed, of those 26,000 families in Oregon, right now there is a couple sitting at their kitchen table trying to figure out just how many meals they are going to skip in order to make their next rent payment, or they are struggling with how long they can defer a health care bill while they make their mortgage payment. These are tough decisions.

This is why we developed a bipartisan agreement under President Bush that during periods of high unemployment, we would have a longer bridge to the next job. The logic is very simple. The logic is that during periods of high unemployment, the average time between jobs is longer and the chasm is wider, so people need a longer bridge to get there. This is a program that automatically pulls itself back in, retires itself, as the unemployment rate drops. As the unemployment rate drops, the number of extra weeks become fewer and fewer. That is why there is so much logic behind it. That is why there was no partisan divide.

Today we are going to vote, again, on whether to keep this logical, bipartisan, self-retiring, critical bridge in place, and I hope we have a broad bipartisan vote to support it. Then we need to say to the House of Representatives: This is not another bill we can lock in the basement and throw away the key. This is a fundamental piece of legislation that affects the welfare of our families, the health of our economy, the strength of our communities, and it merits a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. It is certainly a reasonable expectation that everyone in America should see where their Congressman or their Congresswoman stands on such a vital economic strategy for individual families and for the broader community.

So let us not disappoint those 26,000 families in Oregon. Let us not disappoint those 1.7 million families across America that have counted on problem-solving common sense rather than partisan warfare to address this issue.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, Theodore Roosevelt said:

Of all the questions which can come before this Nation,

short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great

war, there is none which compares in importance with the

great central task of leaving this land even a better land

for our descendants than it is for us.

We should reconsider those words now in the context of carbon pollution--carbon pollution which is a direct assault to our rural resources, on our farming, fishing, and forestry. In Oregon we had three worst-ever droughts we have faced over a 13-year period, devastating to the farmers, their families, and the farm economy.

In fishing, everyone who goes to their favorite trout stream knows that if there is no snowpack, the stream is warmer and smaller in summer and a poor place to fish, and certainly worse for iconic salmon and steelhead.

The forests are burning, from pine beetles, which spread throughout the land in the context of not having those cold snaps in the winter, and in the context of tinderbox conditions on the forest floor. Those forest fires have been some of the worst we have seen in a century, and more is yet to come. We cannot wait for 20 or 30 or 40 years to act.

We cannot wait for 2 or 3 or 4 years to act. The carbon pollution is real and the damage is real. It is time for this Chamber to act.

Mr. President, I appreciate so much the comments of my colleague from Maine, bringing his insights and his expertise through the years and his stories about how the land and waters of his home State are being impacted and our responsibilities to the broader planet.

I am reminded of the comment that Henry David Thoreau said, which is, ``What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?'' His comment now seems very much ahead of the time and the context of the issue we are discussing tonight.

Then we have the insight from Theodore Roosevelt, who said, in terms of our responsibility, ``Of all the questions which can come before this Nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendents than it is for us.''

But right now we are failing that challenge. Carbon pollution is a direct threat to our resources on this planet, a direct threat to our forests, to our fishing, and to our farming. So I am going to take a little bit of time tonight to talk about those aspects.

I would like to start by taking a look at our forests. Indeed, if there is something that symbolizes some of the dramatic impacts carbon pollution is making, it is the spread of the pine beetle.

This is a picture of a forest devastated not by fire, not by drought, but by the spread of the pine beetle. I have gone up in a plane and flown over a vast zone of the Cascades known as the red zone, where the pine beetle has killed thousands of acres in my home State. They start out looking red because the needles turn red. That is why it is called the red zone. Then the needles fall off, and you have essentially this brown desolate remainder of what was once a thriving forest.

Timber is something that is very close to our hearts in the State of Oregon. So many of us--myself included--are children of the timber industry. My father was a millwright--that is the mechanic who keeps the sawmill operating--a job he absolutely loved. He used to say that if he did his job right, then everyone had a job to come to, and the mill made money and everyone was happy as long as the machinery ran. Oregon is still the top American producer of plywood and softwood lumber. The industry certainly is a big component of our gross domestic product in my State.

When this happens, then not only do we have zones that are not good environmental zones, but they are not good timber zones either. It is a lose-lose situation. It happens, and it is spreading for one reason: The winters are not as cold as they used to be, and the pine beetle is very happy about that because it is not knocked back and largely wiped out with cold snaps each winter, and it is easy to spread much more quickly, and it is able to spread to much higher elevations.

Then these dead forests become a component in another huge problem, which is forest fires.

This picture you will see in a moment is a picture of the Biscuit Fire in 2002--a wall of flames.

The summer before last, I went down and flew about the State of Oregon to look at the innumerable forest fires that were burning. One of the reasons we had so many forest fires--10 years after this fire-- was because the floor of the forest was so dry. It is estimated

that a 2-by-4 that you see in a Home Depot has about a 6-percent moisture content. The material on the floor of the forest was even drier than that. Then you throw in far more lightning strikes due to the pattern of the weather, and you have this magic combination, this combination of tinderbox dryness, pine beetle devastation, and then lightning strikes. What you have are some of the largest fires we have ever seen. Indeed, the Biscuit Fire in 2002--500,000 acres. Half a million acres. Fast-forward 10 years. In 2012, 750,000 acres burned in my State. With the combination of the ongoing effects of carbon pollution--that being pine beetle damage, more lighting strikes, and far drier, drought-driven fire seasons--it is going to get worse and worse.

The seven largest fire years since 1960 have all happened in the last 13 summers. It is pretty amazing to recognize how that transition is occurring. If we think about projecting into the future, the National Research Council predicts that for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit temperature increase, the area burned in the western forests will quadruple.

This led our Energy Secretary to tell me a few weeks ago about a draft of a study that says the western forests will be dramatically impacted, devastated in the course of this century due to these factors.

We have a triple threat, that of drought and bark beetles, increased temperatures, and the result is decimation of an incredibly important world resource, our forests.

But carbon pollution is not only an attack on our forests, it is also an attack on our farming. Indeed, drought across the U.S. is a huge and growing threat to agriculture.

In the State of Oregon, we have had the three worst-ever droughts in the Klamath Basin in a 13-year period. It was 2001, then the worst-ever drought of 2010, then the worst-ever drought of 2013--and now we are looking at the possibility of a drought even worse than any of those-- the worst-ever drought of 2014. Hopefully, we will have a lot of precipitation and a lot of snow in the coming weeks and that won't be the case, but if we are looking at the snowpack, it is possible that we will have the fourth worst ever in a 14-year period. It is absolutely devastating to our rural economy, absolutely devastating.

Let's look at the impact coming from smaller snowpacks. Snowpacks are a significant piece of this puzzle. If we were to look at the Pacific Northwest, we would basically draw a circle like this. What we see are these zones where there is a huge percentage decrease in those snowpacks. The snowpacks then provide far less irrigation and water available, and therefore dry their foundation for the summer drought, which then has a devastating impact on agriculture. This is not good for our farming families, and it is certainly not good for our farm economy.

Those snowpacks have another impact. I am going to skip forward to the impact on our streams and our fish.

Folks who like to fish for trout and go to their summer streams know that it is going to be better if the stream is large and cold than if it is small and warm. But the last of those snowpacks means that the summer streams are smaller and warmer, and they are very bad for trout. That is what we are seeing in this particular picture: dead trout from the Deschutes River. Last fall thousands of fish died in the river from low flows attributed to drought.

Clearly, not only is it bad for trout, it is bad for salmon; it is bad for steelhead. It is certainly bad for our fishing industries.

Let's turn to another part of our fishing industry, and this is an impact that we see over on the coast of Oregon.

I specifically want to take a look at the impact that we see on our oysters. Oysters have to fixate a shell at the beginning of their life. They are called oyster seed, the baby oyster. We have hatcheries, and those hatcheries have been having challenges. The Whiskey Creek oyster hatchery in Oregon has had a big problem. Indeed, at one point it had a huge impact.

I will read part of an article:

Peering into the microscope, Alan Barton thought the baby

oysters looked normal, except for one thing: They were dead.

Slide after slide, the results were the same. The entire

batch of 100 million larvae at the Whiskey Creek Shellfish

Hatchery had perished.

It took several years for the Oregon oyster breeder and a

team of scientists to find the culprit: a radical change in

ocean acidity.

This is why, because when we have greater carbon pollution in the air, that carbon then is absorbed by the ocean, a significant portion of it. That dissolved carbon dioxide combines with water and becomes H2CO3, otherwise known as carbonic acid.

That carbonic acid is preventing the baby oysters from forming their shells. We can think of this as the canary in the coal mine for our world's oceans because if baby oysters are having a challenge forming their shells because of a 30-percent increase in acidity since the start of the Industrial Revolution, what other impacts are there going to be along in the shellfish world and the food chains that depend on those shellfish, not to mention the impact on our shellfish farmers.

I was noting this in Washington State and I was told: You know, our oyster farmers are experiencing a similar problem, and they are going to Hawaii and to Asia. This is not only an Oregon problem.

The manager of the hatchery in Oregon, David Stick, said in an article:

I do not think people understand the seriousness of the

problem. Ocean acidification is going to be a game-changer.

It has the potential to be a real catastrophe.

Let's recognize another part of the planet that is having a problem with warmer waters and ocean acidification; that is, our coral reefs. We have, in Oregon, a researcher at Oregon State university. His name is Professor Hixon. Professor Hixon is recognizing that the coral reefs around the world are in trouble. As he said in a presentation, he studied dozens of reefs. They are his children. Then he said: My children are dying. One of the key reasons is acidification, but another is the oceans are getting warmer.

I have a chart showing the warming of the ocean. The oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide, and they are also absorbing heat. As they become warmer, they create a real problem for coral reefs. Coral is an animal. We may think of it as a plant, but it actually is an animal, and it lives in a symbiotic relationship with a type of algae.

They depend on each other. What happens when the water gets warmer around a coral reef is that the algae start to multiply in a fashion that overwhelms the coral.

The coral, in an effort to survive, ejects the algae, throws them out of the host. Then the coral, having ejected the algae, dies. This is called bleaching, and it is something we are seeing in coral reefs around the world. That is why Professor Hixon noted: My children are dying.

I will state something else about the warming that is occurring, and this is more about warming that is occurring in terms of the temperature of our planet. It is affecting our recreation industry and our snow industry.

I am going to start by taking a look at what is driving that in terms of a chart related to carbon dioxide. Specifically, this chart shows the dramatic change that has gone on. We see the fluctuations in carbon dioxide over hundreds of thousands of years, into the modern time and then, boom, 400 parts per million of carbon pollution.

What does this come from? It comes from burning fossil fuels.

This carbon--carbon dioxide, as a component of the atmosphere, traps heat. To summarize, our planet has a fever. The temperature is going up. Let's take a look at how that carbon dioxide correlates with temperatures.

We have, in this case, showing since 1880--basically, the start of the Industrial Revolution--the increase in temperature on our planet, the global surface mean temperature. We have seen a significant increase.

If we want to find a way that this impacts our economy, let's take a look at how it impacts our recreation industry. This is an article that I grabbed from the New York Times. It is a lengthy article, but it is the title and the picture that I really wanted to show. It is from the Sunday Review and it is called ``The End Of Snow.''

This article basically documents how our ski resorts around our planet are suffering because they don't have as much snow as they used to have. There is a picture of artificial snow being created and put on the slope. It notes how much energy this requires, how many dollars it costs to provide that energy,

how this is making many of our resorts not feasible, and how many of them will go out of the business. This is just another angle on the impact that carbon dioxide is having, in this case, on our recreation industry.

Of course, it is having other impact on our recreation industry. When we think of those smaller streams, we can think of fewer kayaks, for example, and rafting companies operating.

Let's turn from these multitudinous impacts. First, before we return to recognizing that we have the power to take on carbon pollution, let's recognize when folks say isn't that global warming issue about some computer programmer using some assumption and some model. Isn't there some dispute about it; is it real.

Put all of that aside. We don't need a computer model to show us the impact from the pine beetle. We don't need a computer model to show us the impact on our trout streams. We don't need a computer model to show us the impact today on droughts. We don't need a computer model to show us impact on forest burning. We don't need a computer model to show us the impact on our coral. We don't need a computer model to show us the impact on the oyster industry, and we don't need a computer model to show us the impact on our snow-based recreational activities and the industries that are associated with it.

In other words, carbon pollution is here and now. Global warming is here and now. It is making an impact wherever we look. We can feel it, we can touch it, we can see it, and we can smell it. It is here, and it is our responsibility, our responsibility as American citizens, our responsibility as policy leaders in this esteemed Chamber of the Senate to take on this issue.

There is so much we can do because it boils down to this. We have to replace our appetite for fossil fuels with renewable fuels, renewable energy. We can do that. We can do that in a host of ways.

I will start. Let me start by noting a little bit about the growth of solar energy. When one realizes this chart is just from 2001 to 2013, it is phenomenal the deployed amount of installed capacity in megawatts in solar energy. From 2012 to 2013, we have more than 3,000 additional megawatts of energy, solar energy, solar potential, deployed.

A similar explosion of renewable energy is happening in the source of wind. Let's take a look at that.

We have deployed capacity in wind energy. If we were to recognize that, again, from 2001 to 2013 there was a huge growth in the industry--and I want to point out a particular factor here going from 2011 to 2012. This large bump on the chart was 13,000 megawatts of installed capacity and wind energy in 1 year. The next year there was only 1,000.

The difference, as pointed out by one of my colleagues earlier on this floor, is the difference in tax credits, of consistently available production tax credits that the wind industry can depend on.

We give all kinds of subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Why can't we create a steady, reliable source to promote renewable energy to help replace those fossil fuels. We have this policy potential in our hands, and we need to exercise it. There are many other forms of renewable energy. There is offshore wind, there is geothermal energy, and there is wave energy. Oregon has some of the best winds for offshore wind energy and waves for wave energy, but we already have the ability through the technologies we have today to dramatically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.

What this chart shows is that in different parts of the country the mix between biomass and geothermal and wind onshore, wind offshore, wave energy and solar energy, concentrated solar power energy would be different in different parts of the country, but everywhere around the country there is the potential to essentially replace our appetite for fossil fuels.

Then there is the conservation side. We can certainly do a tremendous amount in our fuel standards for cars, a tremendous amount in our fuel standards for trucks, and a significant amount in terms of energy- saving retrofits to our buildings.

In the farm bill we just passed, we have a program for low-cost loans for energy-saving retrofits, and that program--the Rural Energy Savings Program--will help retrofits occur in commercial buildings and residential buildings, and it will allow people to pay back the loan on their electric bill. Often, they will be able to pay back that loan simply with the savings in energy--electricity consumption--from the changes they make to their building. So it is a win-win--creating jobs, saving energy, yet being paid for without much additional expense for the consumer.

All of these possibilities exist and more. It is our challenge as policymakers to take on this issue, to work on how we can generate electricity with far fewer fossil fuels, how we can conserve electricity in transportation. How do we conserve electricity and other fuels? In fact, in both cases--transportation and heating our homes, energy consumed in our buildings--how do we do this with far fewer fossil fuels and do it with renewable energy?

I applaud my colleagues for coming here tonight to raise this issue and say we must come together and take on these challenges. My colleague from Delaware is about to speak and share some stories from his experiences that bear on this, but every Senator in this Chamber can talk about issues from their home State and where they see the impact of carbon pollution and call upon us, call upon our moral responsibility to tackle this issue.

With that, I yield the floor to my colleague.

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

Mr. President, I am thrilled that we are here at this moment debating benefits for our veterans. Our veterans have stood up for America by fighting for us overseas, and when they come home we need to be standing up for them. Over time we have come to recognize that there are a number of shortfalls in the way we address our benefits for veterans that need to be corrected, and that is what this bill is all about.

Yesterday we had a motion to close debate on whether to debate this bill, and that was successful, so here we are at this moment. Let's recognize that America has been at war for more than 12 years, that more than 6,000 Americans have lost their lives in service to our country, that more than 50,000 Americans have been wounded in combat.

At some point 2\1/2\ million Americans have left their homes and their families to serve their country in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of these men and women have served more than 1 deployment, and 400,000 men and women have served more than 3 deployments. They have gone back to the theater of war repeatedly, with sacrifices on a personal level, sacrifices for their family and sacrifices for their health. They have gone into perilous situations on behalf of our Nation. Today we need to make sure the benefits promised are there, and where the benefits are insufficient, that they are improved.

I am hearing there is a possibility there may be an effort today to block this bill--this bill on behalf of our veterans. I certainly hope that will not be the case. How can we explain that the ongoing partisan politics that have so poisoned and paralyzed our Nation are more important than addressing the benefits of our veterans--our service men and our service women--who have fought for our country. Today is not a day for partisan politics. It is a day for keeping faith with those who have served our Nation.

I will address a particular provision that is in this bill today. The bill takes on many issues, one of which is to work very hard to shorten and eliminate the big lag in time that occurs when our veterans apply for benefits. Benefits delayed are, for a period of time, benefits denied. The Department of Veterans Services has made progress with more progress to come. This bill will make a difference in eliminating the backlog and will address the needs of our veterans in a timely fashion, and timeliness is very important.

There is another provision in this bill that I particularly want to emphasize because it comes out of conversations that occurred 6 years ago when I was talking to folks about running for the Senate. People in Oregon said: We need to take care of our Gold Star families--our families who are striving and struggling to be on their feet after they have lost a servicemember in combat. This is a challenge, of course, for the children and it is a challenge for the spouses.

A veteran brought up the fact that we needed to provide much better educational benefits. I am very pleased to have a bipartisan sponsor, Senator Heller of Nevada, because there is nothing about helping our veterans that should be a partisan issue. There is nothing about addressing the needs of our Gold Star families who have lost a member of the family in combat that should be a partisan issue.

Mr. Robert Thornhill, a veteran, talked to me in 2008, right before I came to this Chamber, about this issue of educationed benefits for the children and for the spouses. When the primary wage earner for a family is struck down in battle, the rest of the family needs a lot of help regaining their feet, and that means educational opportunities for the children. But let's not forget that the spouse who has to take over major financial responsibilities also needs educational benefits.

Shortly before I came here, the post-9/11 GI bill went into effect creating the Machine Gunnery Sergeant Fry Scholarship. That scholarship fulfilled the vision that Robert Thornhill and I had talked about, and it went even further to include housing and book stipends and support for attendance at private universities, but it only did so for the children of the fallen.

Mr. Thornhill followed up with me. He noted that we need to take on and extend these benefits to spouses as well. Over the long term children need help going to college, but in the short term spouses often have to be retrained to adopt their new role as the major breadwinner for the family.

For several years I have been advocating that we fulfill this vision of taking care of the educational opportunity issues for our Gold Star families. Education is a powerful tool to rebuild a family's financial foundation, but it has to be affordable.

There is a provision in this bill that Mr. Thornhill championed, a provision that is fundamental to fairness for our spouses of those who have fallen, and it is a provision that is fundamental to the future success of our Gold Star families.

This provision--this Spouses of Heroes Education Act--is one element among a number that our Committee on Veterans' Affairs has so ably assembled to address shortfalls in the programs that assist those who have stood for our country.

Let us not forget what we are working to do: to keep faith with those who have served our country. Let us set aside the petty, partisan, poisonous games and let's hold the faith and keep our veterans in mind.

Let's get this bill done. Let's get it to conference with the House. Let's get it to the Oval Office. Let us keep faith with those who have stood for our country.

I thank the Presiding Officer. I yield the floor.

Madam President, in a moment I will ask unanimous consent to withdraw this amendment. I think there is a better way to tackle this particular issue. But I will use this moment to note for my colleagues that I appreciate all the Senators who have come to me to say they share the outrage at the exploitative, predatory pricing of force-placed insurance on our homeowners. This drives homeowners into foreclosure, which is not good for families, not good for the communities, and it is certainly not good for the U.S. Government because we insure the vast bulk of these mortgages. Therefore, if we are going to be responsible from an accounting sense for the investment of the U.S. taxpayer, this needs to be addressed.

I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment No. 2709, as modified.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside so I may call up amendment No. 2709, and that the amendment be modified to correct a typographical error.

Mr. President, I will take this occasion to make a couple of remarks about the content of this amendment.

This amendment is about a predatory practice that is involved in the flood insurance world, and that predatory practice occurs when a servicer of mortgages places flood insurance on a property--be it a home or a business. They sometimes arrange a very expensive policy to be placed on the property. The reason they do this is that the insurer--the insurance company that has prepared the policy--is charging many times the market rate, but in exchange they pay the servicer a large bonus.

We remember how bonuses in the subprime world were used to steer families from prime mortgages into subprime mortgages. In this case the bonus is being paid to the servicer so the servicer will steer the family into an expensive insurance policy rather than a fair market rate policy.

My amendment takes a very simple approach and says that these bonus payments or incentive payments--or whatever name you would like to give to them--from the insurer to the servicer in order to utilize their very expensive, above market rate product rather than a fair market rate product will not be allowed. That eliminates this conflict of interest and will enable the servicer to provide a fair service of placing flood insurance on a property if it is required under the terms of the mortgage, but not to do so in a predatory manner.

I hope that all of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle will take a look at this practice and realize that the overall scope of this bill is about a fair deal for families who are in the situation of being required under their mortgage to obtain flood insurance. Part of that fair deal should involve ending this particular predatory premium practice on force-placed flood insurance.

I note the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I have come to the floor to talk about the

Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act. This bill is a bill that is designed to fix the damage that has been done by the Biggert-Waters Act, and this damage is extensive. This bill would freeze dramatic rate hikes, and these rate hikes have several impacts.

We have, of course, the impact on families who currently have flood insurance who will be paying much higher levels than they bargained for when they bought their home and may not be able to afford those much higher levels, raising questions about their ability to stay in those homes.

We have the impact on commercial enterprises and the fact that now that they are paying higher rates, they may not feel they can add on to their business in that location.

Then we have the impact, of course, on selling your property, whether you are a homeowner or you are a business, because the folks who might be buying might have to jump to a full rate that would be many times-- in some cases 10 times--the price the current owner is paying, and when that happens the property becomes unaffordable and, therefore, the value that one has in their home or business drops dramatically.

All of this is of great concern, and we need to reverse the features of Biggert-Waters that are causing this economic havoc.

This bill comes out of discussions that were in my Subcommittee on Economic Policy several months ago. This discussion is now led by Senator Menendez, and he has been ably assisted and partnered with Senator Mary Landrieu and Senator Isakson and Senator Vitter and I compliment them all for being vocal advocates and instrumental in helping to move this bill forward.

The Biggert-Waters Act, while well intentioned, is creating massive burdens for our middle-class homeowners in Oregon and certainly across the Nation. Flooding is something of an equal opportunity disaster. For some, it is the coastlines. For others, it is broad flood plains along major rivers. For others, it is narrow valleys and flash floods. But in all of these situations, the common impact is dramatic devastation.

Something is very wrong though when families are more worried about dramatic spikes in their flood insurance premiums than they are worried about dramatic floods, and that is where my Oregon families are right now. I wish to share a letter from Kelly. She lives in Tigard. She says, in her own words, she is ``a middle class, single mother currently working to get [her] daughter through college.''

She bought her home 13 years ago to provide stability for her daughter. This is a goal of so many parents, to have a piece of the American dream, to have the stability that goes with home ownership, to have the equity that you build in your home as a financial reservoir with which to assist your children going forward in life.

She thought about selling a few years ago but decided to stay in that house and keep that financial foundation. But now, with Biggert-Waters going into effect, she has been caught between two bad choices. If she stays in her home, her flood insurance rates will go up precipitously, making her home increasingly unaffordable and squeezing an already tight budget. But should she try to sell, the new owner will face annual flood insurance premiums of $15,000 or more, making her home completely unaffordable for middle-class buyers.

Keep this in mind: For every $1,000 a buyer pays in flood insurance per year, the value of a home drops by about $20,000. So if the flood insurance is $15,000, we are talking about a value of a home dropping $300,000. Many middle-class homes in Oregon are not priced at $300,000. They might be valued at $200,000 or $220,000 or $250,000 or, in more rural areas, $150,000 or $175,000. So we can wipe out the complete value of a home and certainly easily wipe out the equity a homeowner has built over a number of years. Essentially, you have to give the home away. That makes no sense.

To read from Kelly's letter, she says:

Here is where I see a problem. There is an old saying,

``you can't get blood from a stone.''

She continues:

I know I am not alone in my predicament of barely getting

by financially.

Middle income folks like me are squeezed from all sides. .

. .

While living expenses rise every year, our income generally

does not raise enough to make up for it. . . .

We tighten our belts and wait for better times. So, the

problem here is, we can't afford to pay these, much higher

rates. We just don't have the money.

She continues in her analysis:

There are options, of course. We can come up with many 10's

of thousands of dollars to raise our houses up and make them

flood friendly. . . .

But wait--we don't have 10's of thousands of dollars. And,

we can't sell--that's the beauty here. Who will buy a small,

middle income type home that has a flood insurance bill

annually of 15-30k [a year]?

She continues:

So what will we do, the over 1 million homeowners in this

situation? To our utter frustration and humiliation, many of

us have no choice but to walk away. . . .

Whatever the attitudes about us are, most of us are good

Americans who believe in paying our debts. We have worked

hard our entire lives, and asked for little or no help along

the way.

This will crush us, and since we don't have the money to

give, there is no benefit to be had.

That is how she concludes her letter: ``This will crush us. . . . '' She is right. It will crush her family. It will crush millions of families across this country. It will include foreclosures. It will include equity wiped out. It will result in families having to walk away from their home and hope they are not pursued by their mortgage company that will be unable to sell the home on a secondary market for the debt owed and, therefore, could pursue the owners.

It is wrong and counterproductive to squeeze middle-class homeowners such as Kelly when it will only result in more foreclosures or families trapped in their homes unable to sell them.

Making flood insurance more solvent is a laudable goal, but it is one we have to approach in a manner that involves fairness over time. Achieving solvency by putting a huge burden, a huge financial shock on the backs of our middle-class families is not just wrong, it is a financial disaster that is unfolding now and will continue to unfold across this country.

We cannot get to solvency by asking families to pay sums they simply do not have or, as Kelly said, ``You can't get blood from a stone.''

We need to immediately stop these dramatic rate hikes for our homeowners and our businesses while FEMA goes back to the drawing board to figure out how to make this program affordable and effective for our middle-class families.

That is exactly what this bill does. This bill has several important provisions that help ensure affordability and fairness for our middle- class families.

The first is it delays implementation of flood insurance rate increases. It does so on primary residences and on businesses until FEMA can complete an affordability study, propose regulations to address the problem of affordability, and give Congress time to weigh in.

Second, unlike Biggert-Waters, the bill ensures that FEMA will truly have the funding they need to complete a comprehensive affordability study.

Third, this bill takes on a catch-22 in the current system, which is that when homeowners face unaffordable rates that they think are inaccurate, they have to pay out of their pocket for a flood map appeal to prove that their premiums should be lowered. So when someone else makes a mistake, they have to pay for that mistake, and that is wrong.

The studies necessary for an appeal can cost between $500 and $2,000. It is a prohibitive cost for many families to undertake. This bill ensures that any homeowner who can successfully appeal a flood map finding will be reimbursed by FEMA for their expense, making the system fairer for the homeowner and giving FEMA an added incentive to get it right.

Finally, this bill does something very important in creating a flood insurance rate map advocate within FEMA, someone to educate and advocate for homeowners. One of the complaints my office has heard is that FEMA has not been responsive to homeowners' concerns or questions about changes in their policy.

It creates this position. An advocate will do several things. The advocate will educate policyholders about their flood risks and their options in choosing a policy. The advocate will assist

those who believe a flood map is wrong and assist them through the appeal process. The advocate will improve outreach and coordination with local officials, community leaders, and Congress.

My colleagues Senators Hoeven and Heitkamp have also done great work on this bill to ensure that homeowners in certain communities are not hit by unfair rules on how their basements impact a flood policy.

I would like to address one other issue that is not in this bill that hopefully I will be able to offer an amendment on; that is, protection for consumers whose policies are purchased by their mortgage servicer or their bank rather than by themselves. This is the issue of predatory force-placed premiums.

Let me explain. Let's say, for example, that you are notified by your servicer that they have reviewed the records and they now consider you to be in a flood plain they had not noticed before and you have to get flood insurance. But that flood insurance, unsubsidized, is so expensive you cannot afford it. So then the servicer says: Well, we are going to put on flood insurance for you. The rate might be 5 to 10 times the market rate. In other words, the homeowner who already cannot afford flood insurance is gouged by predatory premiums on force-placed insurance.

Let's consider that perhaps you had a transition in your family. Maybe you have one partner paying the bills and another partner takes it over while the first partner is sick and you miss the fact that your annual premium was due on your flood insurance. So what happens? That lapse can trigger much higher rates that you cannot afford. Then suddenly you are in the situation of force-placed insurance.

How about if new maps are issued. The new maps now put you into a 100-year flood plain that you were not in previously. It is not that the geography changed; it is that a different set of engineers, doing a different study, different assumptions about where the rain will fail, which creek will swell the quickest, puts you into this 100-year flood plain.

So now what are you going to do? You are going to be in this situation. You cannot afford that insurance, that newly placed requirement for insurance, so the servicer or bank puts it on for you. Well, they should put it in at a fair market rate, not at a rate which is 5 to 10 times the fair market rate and which is designed to gouge.

I have an amendment that addresses this by saying the servicers or banks cannot take fees--or, as some would say, ``kickbacks''--for placing this insurance and therefore have an incentive to do a nonmarket rate policy that is 5 or 10 times higher than the actual market rate.

This is a significant problem in force-placed home insurance. Certainly, we do not need to add to this problem by allowing predatory premiums on force-placed policies in the realm of flood insurance. I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take a look at this issue, to support banning the anticompetitive features of the market that have led to these predatory premiums on force-placed flood insurance.

In closing, I again thank my colleagues who have worked so hard. This is an important issue, an incredibly important issue for families across Oregon. Let's stop these dramatic rate hikes. Let's work together for an affordable flood insurance program that will be effective and fair for all Americans.

I yield the floor.

I am going to speak briefly. My Republican colleague across the aisle has noted he would like to speak next.

I want to take a moment and talk about what has been unfolding on Capitol Hill, with the House, Senate, the Republican caucus, and the Democratic caucus working together to produce an appropriations bill, a spending bill, a bill we refer to in Congress as an omnibus, meaning that it covers all 12 sections that are normally allocated within the appropriations or spending bill world.

I am a new member of the Appropriations Committee. This is the first time I can stand on the floor and feel as though I have gone through a process that is something similar to what our colleagues have done in a bipartisan way over many generations. But that bipartisan collaboration has been sorely missing in the time since I first

came to the Senate. I am pleased to see in this particular moment it is a ray of hope that perhaps we can restore a rational budgeting and spending bill process to address the issues facing America.

I was delighted that Senator Murray led the Senate, working with Congressman Ryan, to produce a budget that went through both Chambers.

I am very pleased that our two leaders in the Senate, the Senator from Maryland and the Senator from Alabama, brought the two sides together to work with the House to produce this spending bill, because in the absence of a spending bill that has been deliberated on, what we have is a continuing resolution--which means we might continue to keep spending the money as we did in the past, even though the needs of the present have diverged from the needs of the past. That is inherently wasteful to keep doing the same thing we did before when different challenges are presenting themselves to our Nation.

I wanted to note a few of the things that were done in the course of this bill that I think are very relevant to the challenges we face in Oregon.

Let me start with the Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program. When I went over to visit Oregon's men and women in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan, they said: When we come home, we hope we will have a job, and we hope our public leaders will work to try to help those jobs be there.

Indeed, when someone comes out of that theatre of war and back into civil society, the structure of a job is very important to your sense of purpose, your sense of rhythm, your financial stability, your role in the family. So we have in Oregon a robust Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program to help bring employers together with our men and women who were in uniform overseas but have now come home. We have so many who serve in the Guard who have gone overseas. They don't come home to work on a military base and still have a daily rhythm, they come home to civilian life.

Restoring and preserving this Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program that was done in this bill is very important to many of our men and women who were in uniform overseas and have come home. It was zeroed out in the President's budget. It was restored in this process. I was delighted to be part of the effort to make sure that happened.

A second item that is very important to Oregon is hazardous fuels reduction in our national forests. Our forests are dryer than they were before. We have more lightning strikes due to the changing weather patterns and, therefore, we have had more acres, thousands of acres, burning.

We need to invest not only on the back end when there is a fire, we need to invest in the front end to thin out the forests that are overgrown, to get rid of the fuels that are on the floor of the forest that increase fire intensity and make it more likely that the fire will go from the ground of the forest to the canopy and be out of control. Those funds were dramatically cut by the administration and largely restored in the appropriations process. We need more in that area. We need to do more on the front end, but it was a big step forward to do what was done in this bill.

A third issue affecting Oregon is small ports. The last fiscal year there was no set-aside for small ports. I have many small ports on the Pacific coast of Oregon, as I know many States have ports on either coast or the gulf coast. These small ports are very important to our economy, and they shouldn't be neglected. The set-aside is very important to make sure they have the chance to repair their barriers, their breakwaters, to dredge out the slips or to dredge the anchorage in general, and so this is very good.

What about the debris that has been floating over from the tsunami in Japan and then cleaned up on the Oregon coast? Yes, this bill says yes, the funds that are available can be used to reimburse the communities that had to do this on their own because we had not yet acted in this Chamber to provide them with resources. That too is addressing an evolving issue.

I want to speak particularly to the investment in education, the extra $1 billion for Head Start and the extra $1 billion that will go to support IDEA and title I funding, large formula allocations.

We have 200 school districts in Oregon. Those school districts are often way too small to have a grant writer to compete in some newfangled competition for X, Y, or Z. They need core funds to reduce the number of students in the classroom, to address the challenge of providing education for students with disabilities. This budget helps significantly in that direction.

I wish to say thank you again to the leadership that was displayed, the bipartisan leadership of the Senator from Alabama and the Senator from Maryland. Well done. I am honored to be part of this process of trying to shape our Senate spending plan, our congressional spending plan, to address emerging challenges in America.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to utilize a visual aid.

Mr. President, I am very pleased to be here with my colleagues, from Ohio, the Senator in the Chair, and the Senator from Connecticut who just spoke, to draw attention to this incredibly important health issue here in America: addiction to tobacco and the diseases that come from that addiction to tobacco. We are here to commemorate a report put out 50 years ago by Dr. Terry, the Surgeon General. His report was called ``Smoking and Health.'' The contents of that report shocked the world because it was issued in defiance of a powerful and profitable industry that had repeatedly denied there was any link between smoking and disease. This report made national news by telling the American public things that we now take for granted: that smoking is bad for the heart and lungs; that smoking causes cancer; and that the lives of Americans are routinely cut short due to the use of tobacco products.

This single report created a powerful ripple throughout society, a ripple that has continued in the decades since, growing into a wave that has transformed public health in America and saved an astonishing number of lives. Thomas Friedan, the current Director of the Center for Disease Control, says no other single report has had as large an effect on public health. The Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that 8 million have been saved by the antismoking measures that were launched, directly or indirectly, because of this report. That is a reminder of how far we have come in identifying a significant risk, understanding it, educating the public, and reducing the consequences.

There would have been millions of lives lost had a brave Surgeon General not acted 50 years ago, in 1964. If that Surgeon General had said, as others before him, that is too sensitive, that is too provocative, it will be too much of an irritant to a powerful industry, how many lives would we have lost?

If we do not act now to address tobacco addiction from new forms of the product, how many more American lives will be lost? We must take the courage from 50 years ago and channel it into the courage of today to address a significant health risk and to educate the American public and to change the consequences.

The best way to save lives and improve the quality of life 20 or 30 years from now is to prevent young Americans from taking up tobacco products

today. But big tobacco knows this is true. They know the best way to create lifelong reliable customers for their deadly products is to get kids hooked as young as possible, because in general people do not take up tobacco products after the age of 21. These children are what the industry calls ``replacement smokers.'' It is what I call children today who will suffer from tobacco addiction, disease, and death tomorrow.

The tobacco industry is working night and day to come up with new strategies to create more children as replacement smokers, to keep their industry alive. They have come up with quite a variety of strategies. I thought I would share some of them with you today.

This poster is of a product that is essentially presented as a mint. Here you have an Orb or a mint with a clever little dispenser, shaped like cell phones were shaped 6 years ago when they went in your pocket. The understanding is if kids have this in their pocket the teachers would think they have a cell phone and therefore they would not get busted at school.

It seems kind of incredible that dissolvable tobacco has developed into mints to addict our children; that you eat them. I have one of these right here. These were marketed in Oregon as basically an experiment to see could you get young people to consume them and become addicts to tobacco.

How about toothpicks made out of tobacco, called ``Sticks''? This is unbelievable. How about breath strips that you put under your tongue? Hw about flavors of all kinds?

I note that our time is running out. I ask the Chair for unanimous consent to speak for 3 more minutes.

Mr. President, this is an example of the cigarillos my colleagues were talking about. This one is flavored apple. This one is flavored sweet cherry. How about this one. That is strawberry. These products are all about addicting our children.

Here is the long and short of it. In 2009, this Chamber and the House signed a bill that gave the FDA the power to regulate these products. The President signed that bill and, since then, the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, has done nothing to utilize that power to regulate these addictive products that are going to destroy the health of our children in the years to come.

Finally, from June 2009 until October of last year--so more than 4 years--they finally sent a draft deeming regulation to GAO, the General Accounting Office, and there it sits.

To summarize, let us not accept inaction by the FDA. Let us not accept inaction by the GAO. Let's have the courage the Surgeon General had 50 years ago to take on dangerous products damaging the health of Americans so our children will live better lives.

I yield.

Madam President, I wish to make a few very brief comments, and the first is this: In the budget agreement that was hammered out right before we left for the holidays, a provision was inserted by Congressman Ryan that changed the COLA details for our veterans. This provision is outrageous. It is changing the retirement deal in the middle of a person's service or, for many of our veterans, even after they have retired--between the time they have retired and the time they reach age 62. In the coming days of this week, I hope this body can come together and reverse this provision which unfairly changes the terms of retirement for our veterans. Our veterans stood up for us as a nation when they were overseas, and we must stand up for them here at home.

Secondly, I would like to express hope for the bipartisan spirit that led to an agreement to debate the bill regarding restoring emergency unemployment. I had eight townhalls over the weekend, and I can tell you that it strikes people as fundamentally unfair that States with high unemployment, such as my home State of Oregon--that these weeks of emergency unemployment, which was a deal hammered out in a bipartisan fashion under a Republican President, President Bush, should be set asunder.

Indeed, on December 28, 18,000 Oregon families got a lump of coal in their stockings, and in the course of this coming year another 58,000 Oregon families will be thrown out in the cold, if you will, due to the failure to reauthorize this program. Indeed, the failure to reauthorize it not only affects directly those families who need a longer bridge to the next job because of the high unemployment levels, but it also affects the economy, destroying an estimated 4,000 jobs. Our citizens want to see us create jobs, not destroy jobs.

So I hope the bipartisan spirit that led to our agreeing to debate restoring the emergency unemployment program will lead to our actually reauthorizing the emergency unemployment program.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on January 7, 2014, at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate, on January 7, 2014, at 2:30 p.m., in room SH-216 of the Hart Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``The Syrian Refugee Crisis.''

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate recess from 12:45 p.m. until 2:15 p.m. and that the time in recess count postcloture; further, that the time from 2:15 p.m. until 2:35 p.m. be controlled by the majority leader or his designee and the time from 2:35 p.m. until 3:15 p.m. be controlled by the Republican leader or his designee.

Madam President, my voice is a little weaker than usual thanks to a winter cold, but I nevertheless come to the floor today because there is an issue on which it is important not to remain silent; that is, just a few days from today more than 1 million people across America are going to lose their unemployment benefits. Those benefits are a bridge to the next job. Those benefits are the foundation for a family during a rough time while searching for that next job. Those benefits ensure the stability of the family and provide a solid foundation for the children during those weeks and months. But instead of maintaining this important bridge for more than 1 million American families, we are going to allow it to be dismantled on December 28 of this year, 3 days after Christmas.

This chart gives a little bit of a feeling for how unemployment is working. We have the total number of those searching for work in Oregon who cannot find a job. We can see how it grew dramatically in 2008 when the economy collapsed and how it has gradually improved. Yet unemployment remains quite high in Oregon--not as high as it was but still quite high--and it remains quite high across this Nation.

We have a structure in place where every State provides 26 weeks of unemployment, and then, depending on the unemployment level in different States, States take advantage of a Federal program for emergency unemployment, which works a little bit like this: If the State's unemployment rate is below 6 percent, the State is eligible for 14 additional weeks of unemployment for families, so the total goes

from 26 weeks to 40 weeks. If the State's unemployment rate is between 6 percent and 7 percent, the State is eligible for 28 weeks, for a total of 54 weeks--still less than 1 year of unemployment insurance. If it is between 7 percent and 9 percent, as it is in Oregon, the total goes to 37 additional weeks, which means, with the 26 underlying weeks with the State, 63 weeks. If the unemployment rate is over 9 percent, then the amount is 10 weeks more, for a total of 73.

On December 28, just days from today, there will be about 17,000 Oregonians who will be completely cut off from their unemployment--not tapered, not a few at a time; all of those who have more than 26 weeks right now will instantly be cut off. So that is 17,000 families or, at an average of 3 individuals per family, 50,000 Oregonians who are going to get from the Republicans in this Chamber a big lump of coal in their stocking.

Their argument is that we shouldn't keep this program in place because those folks should just go out and get jobs. I would remind them that this program was set up under a Republican administration, and it was set up to balance the fact that in States where jobs are more readily available, the number of weeks of provided unemployment assistance is fewer, and in States with higher levels of unemployment, where it is virtually impossible to find a job because there are so many applicants for any one job, then the number of unemployment weeks is greater.

This was a bipartisan plan, and this plan was implemented when the national unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. The unemployment rate today is 7.3 percent. The bipartisan emergency unemployment program that provided more than 26 weeks was implemented when there were 137.3 million Americans working--more Americans who were working than today.

So what was good enough under a Republican administration, under bipartisan support--that created a careful balance between unemployment; that is, the challenge of getting a job, and the bridge to the next job--if it worked then, why not now? Why throw 17,000 families in Oregon out in the cold? I hear silence in this Chamber. I don't hear a reply. Why is it justified to terminate this program when unemployment is still high?

Some of my colleagues want to keep all the special tax breaks for the oil companies and all the special tax breaks for the coal companies. But what do they want to give to the families who are looking for work in high-unemployment areas, where it is virtually impossible to find a job? They want to give them a lump of coal. It is wrong.

Moreover, not only does this program help those families directly, but it helps the entire economy improve gradually because those benefits are immediately spent by these families. These benefits help families get through a hard time. They help them pay the mortgage, which solidifies not just this family but by preventing foreclosures solidifies the street and the community from the impacts of foreclosure, of empty homes. It has guarded the family between getting to the next job and ending up homeless.

I call upon my colleagues to come to this Chamber and pass immediately the extension of this carefully balanced program which not only directly benefits families who are doing the hard work of finding the next job but provides a solid foundation for our economy. This is no time to try to deflate our economy and throw more people out of work, but that is what happens when we cut this program.

I encourage my colleagues to think carefully about the fact that this program was neither a Democratic program nor a Republican program. Think carefully about the fact that it was developed during a Republican administration, that it was designed to carefully pull itself back in as employment improved. But what isn't right is for it to be cut off completely in this period of ongoing high unemployment.

While the average in Oregon is between 7 percent and 8 percent unemployment, we have communities with far greater than 10 percent or 12 percent unemployment. So many families are wanting that next job. There is nothing better than a job in terms of any type of social program. It creates a sense of self-worth, it creates a sense of structure, and it creates a sense of satisfaction. The families in Oregon want jobs and they are applying, but there are not enough jobs to go around.

That brings me to my next point. This Chamber should be considering program after program to invest in infrastructure and invest in manufacturing to create jobs. But there are those here who have sought to paralyze this Chamber in every possible way, to prevent any improvements, in terms of trying to sustain partisan campaign warfare rather than problem solving. This is an abdication of responsibility as a Senator. The responsibility is to be here working hard to solve the problems for families across this Nation, not continuing the partisan politics of the last campaign.

The American people see this partisan campaigning, and they do not like it. They want to see problem solving. They want to see us coming together to fix things.

A few moments ago the colleague from Texas was on this floor. He was saying some things that were extraordinarily misleading. He said, basically, that all of the paralyzing strategies that his party has employed stem from a lack of amendments. We have seen those paralyzing tactics in every possible responsibility that this body has. We have seen them on executive nominees. There are no amendments on executive nominees. You either approve them or you do not. We have seen this paralyzing strategy on judicial nominees, but there is no tree--the tree he referred to, the amendment tree--on judicial nominees. We have seen this on conference committees, unparalleled blockade of letting the House and Senate meet together to resolve differences in their bills.

Madam President, I know we are closing down this body, according to the unanimous consent agreement. I am thankful for the opportunity to address this important issue, about the fact that it is wrong to put lumps of coal into stockings of working Americans rather than extending the emergency unemployment insurance provisions.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of my colleague from New York. He has been a tireless champion for the terrific, dedicated, self-sacrificing firefighters of New York City.

Tonight we are on the floor addressing the question of whether we should confirm Cornelia Pillard as a candidate for the DC Circuit Court. She is a law scholar with a long track record of public service. She served twice in the Justice Department and successfully defended the Family and Medical Leave Act, a crucial piece of legislation for working families. She now teaches law at Georgetown University, one of the top law schools in the Nation.

The truth is, she is an extremely well-qualified nominee who will be an excellent addition to the DC Circuit Court. She has personally argued and briefed Supreme Court cases brought or defended by government lawyers from Republican administrations, and Republican- appointed Justices have often authored majority opinions in her favor.

She is currently the codirector of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law, where she personally assists lawyers preparing for the Supreme Court on a pro bono, first-come basis, without regard to which side they represent.

In fact, Professor Pillard chaired the American Bar Association Reading Committee that reviewed Samuel Alito's writings during his nomination process for the Supreme Court. Her committee's assessment led the ABA to give Justice Alito their highest rating of ``well- qualified.''

Professor Pillard's unbiased approach to the law has won the respect of her colleagues in law and in government, including former Department of Justice officials in Republican administrations who have endorsed her nomination to the DC Circuit.

In short, Professor Pillard is a fairminded, highly accomplished litigator, with an outstanding reputation for public service.

Then why are we here now, after midnight, carrying on this debate? To get to the root of that question, we have to examine the dysfunction that is present in the Senate.

Virtually all Americans know Congress is not working well. Virtually all Americans know the Senate is broken. I saw a poll that said 92 percent of Americans believe Congress is dysfunctional, and I wondered: What is wrong with the other 8 percent? They must not be paying attention. Because what we have experienced in the Senate is a continuous campaign of obstruction and paralysis of the normal proceedings.

There was a time when we had a Senate that had a core principle, which was up-or-down votes, with rare exception--up-or-down votes, with rare exception. That was the tradition of the Senate. That tradition was rooted in the courtesy--the courtesy--of hearing out every Senator who wished to share their opinion on a topic before the Senate would make a decision.

Maybe that was something easier to do when there were only 26 Members of the Senate. We now have 100 Members of the Senate. So maybe it takes a while to hear the opinions of every Member, but still that courtesy has been honored through the years. But the counterpart to that is that folks knew in the end the Senate, with very rare exception, would get to a simple majority vote. The entire structure of our Constitution and the vision of our Founders was that this body would make decisions with a simple majority vote.

Recall, if you will, that the Founders put into the Constitution special occasions for a supermajority. Those special occasions were things such as overriding a Presidential veto. Those special occasions were things such as reviewing a treaty. But they envisioned a simple majority vote for the legislature because they felt the majority decision most of the time would be a better direction to go than the minority opinion. That is the principle of democracy. The direction that most Senators believe is the correct direction is the basis for going forward.

This principle has been completely lost in the last few years. A small

group of Senators decided they should replace the constitutional principle of a simple majority with a supermajority, that virtually every action would be subject to a requirement to have 60 votes to close debate rather than the constitutional 51.

This has been applied in ways American citizens cannot even imagine. Let's take motions to proceed. A motion to proceed simply says it is time to take up this bill. Let's vote yes or no on taking up this bill. That is the motion to proceed.

But in recent times the minority has said: You know what. We can use this motion to proceed as an opportunity to paralyze the Senate. We can object to having that simple majority vote, and then we can deny--there being this supermajority to close debate--even if we have nothing to say, and we can simply waste the Senate's time on debating whether to debate.

I have argued for a long time that this abuse must end. It is time to get rid of the filibuster on this motion to proceed. But nonetheless we have it and my colleagues in this permanent campaign to paralyze the Senate have chosen to exercise this filibuster, if you will, this supermajority requirement, simply on a motion to debate an issue as opposed to actually being in debate.

Let's take conference committees. It was extraordinarily rare for conference committees--the formation of them--to be subject to a supermajority in the history of the Senate. Conference committees were very common in the seventies and eighties. I was first here as an intern in 1976 with Senator Hatfield, here on Capitol Hill working for Congress in the 1980s.

If one Chamber of Congress and the other Chamber had both passed a bill, well then automatically you had a conference committee meet and resolve the differences. That is just common sense. Why would you delay that for a second? But when I came to the Senate in 2009 as a Senator, I was mystified to discover that conference committees were not being held. So I inquired why that was. The answer was that the minority had decided to use the filibuster, the supermajority, on establishing a conference committee; in other words, block the House and Senate from even talking to each other to resolve differences between two houses.

That drove the debate out of the public realm, in a public room with a TV camera, into private discussions as negotiators tried to resolve and develop a common version of the bill. There too I proposed that we need to get rid of this filibuster on conference committees. It is disrespectful of the most valuable commodity of this body; that is, time; that is, time is wasted on filibusters on whether to start a discussion with the House when both the House and Senate have passed a version of the bill.

Then, of course, we have the ongoing campaign of subjecting virtually every nomination to a supermajority. In fact, in the history of America, in the entire history, before President Obama, only three times was there a filibuster of a district court nominee. But in the time President Obama has been in office, we have had 20 filibusters of district court nominees. Only 3 in our history until President Obama is President and then 20 filibusters when he became President until now-- 20 out of 23.

That is just a pure deliberate campaign of paralysis and obstruction, undermining the contribution of this body, its responsibility as a legislative body. It is not only judicial nominees, it is executive nominees as well. In our entire history as a nation, 168 nominations have been filibustered--168 in our entire history--82 of them have been nominations by President Obama; 82 nominees just in the 5 years President Obama has been in office out of the 168 in our entire history. So we see, whether we are looking at motions to proceed or conference committees or judicial nominees or executive nominees, a campaign of deliberate paralysis and obstruction rather than a dedication to serving our Nation as the Constitution requires.

Indeed, some have justified this ongoing paralysis. Some of my colleagues have said: But remember, President Washington said the Senate should be a cooling saucer. That concept is that you have a cup of hot tea, and it is too hot to drink, you pour it into a saucer, it cools and then it is just right.

President Washington would never recognize this strategy of obstruction and paralysis as legitimate under the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, there were elements designed to make this body deliberative. But there is a difference between deliberation and the destruction of the legislative process. There is a difference between a cooling saucer, thoughtful deliberation, and a deep freeze.

But certain Members of this body have decided they did not come here to fulfill the constitutional vision of the Senate as a deliberative body, they instead have come to paralyze the function of this body, to obstruct this body.

So there we see it in the filibuster of the conference committees, in the filibuster of the motions to proceed, in the filibuster of the executive branch nominees, filibuster of the judicial nominees, and, of course, the filibuster of legislation that has reached extraordinary levels never seen in the history of our Nation.

Just a little while ago one of my colleagues chose to quote Alexander Hamilton in defense of this strategy of paralysis. I would encourage my colleague to actually read more of Alexander Hamilton because he actually directly addressed this question of filibusters and the potential to obstruct the will of the majority.

What did Alexander Hamilton say? He said: The real operation of the filibuster ``is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices of a significant, insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junta, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.

He went on to say: When the majority must conform to the views of the minority, the consequence is ``tedious delays, continual negotiation and intrigue, contemptible compromises of the public good.''

That is a pretty good description of what Americans see happening in this Chamber as a result of the deliberate campaign of paralysis and obstruction: tedious delays, continual intrigue, contemptible compromises of the public good.

Many in this Chamber have tried to reason and convey to Members that we should return to the tradition of the Senate, up-or-down votes with rare exception. In 2005 it was the Democrats in the minority and it was the Republicans who were in the majority. At that time the Democrats decided to filibuster a series of judicial nominees. So this was certainly a tactic employed by both Democrats and Republicans.

Our Republican friends who were in the majority said: That is not acceptable. They said: That is not consistent with the philosophy of up-or-down votes with rare exception. They said that is not consistent with the power vested in the Constitution and the President to be able to place forward his nominees for consideration under the advice and consent clause of the Constitution.

Our Republican colleagues were persuasive. The Democrats in the minority agreed not to filibuster judges except under rare exceptions, exceptions of extraordinary flaws of character and experience. Then the clock turned. We came to 2009. Now we have a Democratic President and Democratic majority. The deal that was cut in 2005, agreed to by both sides, that there would be only rare filibusters based on exceptional flaws of character or experience disappeared. It disappeared completely. The new minority did not honor the deal that had been negotiated in 2005.

So come January 2011, there was a debate on this floor about trying to again restore the traditional understanding, up-or-down votes with rare exception. There was a deal made. It did not last but a few weeks. Then there was another attempt in January 2013. On this occasion, there was a promise made on the floor of the Senate. The minority leader came to the floor and said: The Republicans will return to the norms and traditions of the Senate regarding nominations.

What are those norms and traditions? Those norms and traditions are a simple majority vote with rare exception. Within weeks, that promise was completely shattered. The first ever filibuster in U.S. history of a Defense nominee, ironically a former colleague from the Republican side of the aisle.

Then we had 43 Senators write a letter and say they would not allow anyone to be confirmed for the position as

Director of the Consumer Federal Protection Bureau, certainly inconsistent with up-or-down votes with rare exception for issues of character.

Then there was another big effort in July of 2013, just earlier this year. We all got together in the Old Senate Chamber and we shared our frustrations and our views. Again, the promise was put forward: We will stop filibustering except under rare circumstances related to character or qualifications.

Well, that was terrific.

We had confirmation of the person who was awaiting to be Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy. We had confirmation of the person who had been waiting for a very long time as the nominee of the Labor Department, Tom Perez. We had the confirmation of the folks who had been waiting to be confirmed to the National Labor Relations Board. In fact, I think that was the first time we had all five members Senate confirmed in 10 years.

We had the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray was finally confirmed. Shortly thereafter, we had Samantha Powers confirmed to the United Nations, and so forth. The norm was restored but only for a couple of weeks.

Then came the nomination of Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Suddenly the commitment for up-or-down votes disappeared. Then we had a whole new strategy on the judiciary. This strategy had never been experienced in U.S. history. It was: No matter whom President Obama nominates for the DC Circuit Court, we are going to block that nominee because we only want to leave in place the nominees that were put in place by President Bush.

That is in direct contravention of the vision of the Constitution where each President as elected has the power to nominate. This Chamber is a check. It gets to vote up or down and decide whether they should be in office. But this was a deliberate strategy to pack the Court, to say that when a President of my party is in power, there will be up-or- down votes, as was insisted in 2005 when the tables were turned, but when the President is of the other party, we are going to have a perpetual campaign and we are going to block up-or-down votes.

Let's picture down the road and the new President is a Republican President. Is there truly any Member here who would say, from the Republican side, that when the Republican President is in place, they were still going to believe they should not fill vacancies on key courts around this country?

It is too bad this campaign of paralysis has been allowed to go on so long. We should have acted long before to fulfil our responsibility to have a deliberative body because that is what legislation is. It is doing enormous damage to the United States of America. First, because of the paralysis, we are not doing the work we should be on legislation. We are not addressing the big issues facing America. There are all kinds of job creation bills that have not been able to get to this floor because they have not been able to get through the gauntlet of paralyzing filibusters that have been laid down.

Americans actually want to work. Americans want to have living-wage jobs. They expect us to act, to make that happen, not to paralyze this institution so it is unable to do so. Indeed, in addition, we are damaging the view of the United States around the world because it used to be the world looked to the United States and said: Look how well their Congress works. They had this Great Depression. They took on and fixed all kinds of flaws in their financial system. They established insurance for bank accounts so there would not be runs on the banks. They replaced a flawed mortgage strategy, which involved callable balloon mortgages, with noncallable fully amortizing mortgages so we did not create a series of dominoes.

They took and created organizations, the Securities and Exchange Commission, to oversee stock markets so folks could have faith, invest in stocks, and put their capital in knowing there was a very good chance that capital would be well utilized because there were accounting standards and qualifications that block predatory practices on Wall Street.

The world saw the U.S. respond to World War II and convert our economy through enormous amounts of legislation in a single year to apply it to the war effort and take on the big challenge of defeating the Nazis.

Then the world saw America use its legislative power to build the largest middle class the world has ever seen. Those living wage jobs, every one of them means a foundation for a family. If we want to talk family values, then fight to have this body, this Senate, work on legislation that creates living-wage jobs. Quit paralyzing the Senate.

Then we have, of course, the fact of this new strategy in these recent months, a deliberate attack on the balance of powers. The Constitution envisioned three branches in balance. It has no hint of any kind that a minority of one branch should be able to undermine the operation of the other two branches. Some colleagues have seized upon a strategy of trying to undermine the integrity of our judiciary. Some colleagues have seized on a strategy of trying to undermine the capability of the elected executive branch, the President and his executive branch.

Read your history--balance of powers, not the ability of the minority or one branch to undermine the success of the other two branches. We need these three branches each doing their assigned roles.

We are at this point after this long set of strategies of paralysis, on motions to proceed, on legislation, on conference committees, on executive branch nominees, on judicial nominees. We have taken the first step toward restoring the function of the Senate, and we have said we should return to the notion of up-and-down votes as envisioned under advise and consent. This is as envisioned by Alexander Hamilton and the other Founders who railed against the notion that a minority would be able to block the will of a majority in the Chamber.

We have done that with nominations. In a continuation of a strategy of paralysis, we are here tonight rather than having voted much earlier in the day. Instead of working on legislation that would create jobs, we are standing here through a series of nominations as the minority insists on wasting the valuable commodity of time in this Chamber.

I hope my colleagues who are intent upon creating this huge imbalance between the branches will reconsider, that they will decide they want to see this Chamber become what it was when I was first here in the 1970s and when I worked for Congress in the 1980s, a great deliberative body. What it was when we took on the Great Depression, what it was when we took on World War II, what it was when we built the great middle class, this is what the United States wants to see. May we make it so.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I rise today to talk about an issue that is extremely important to the Central Oregon economy. For over 40 years, an agreement has been out of reach in the Crooked River Basin in central Oregon on how to allocate water from the Prineville Reservoir to meet the diversity of needs. Over the last few years, Senator Wyden and I have worked with a broad group of water users in the Basin and have come to a solution.

Today, Senator Wyden and I are introducing the Crooked River Collaborative Water Security Act of 2013 that will provide a comprehensive framework for improving the management of water in the Crooked River, while creating opportunities for economic growth and new jobs in central Oregon. This is especially good news in central Oregon, a region that has been plagued with unemployment since the beginning of the Great Recession and is in need of new jobs.

This legislation is built on a broad coalition of stakeholder support. I want to thank those stakeholders who put aside preconceived notions, came to the negotiating table, and worked out a solution that could achieve such a broad range of support.

The key elements of the legislation include meeting the municipal water needs for the city of Prineville long into the future, so the city can continue to attract new businesses like the data centers of Facebook and Apple that have recently moved to the region; providing greater certainty for the agricultural community that depends on the Crooked River for irrigation and is the heart and soul of the Central Oregon economy; allowing water to be released from Bowman Dam to help maintain healthy steelhead, salmon and trout fisheries, which are cherished by local fisherman; allowing the Bowman Dam to be retrofitted to install a hydroelectric turbine and generate low-cost, clean power and create construction jobs; and creating a process to help better plan for dry years, including the impact on fish habitat and fishing, as well as boating and other recreational activities.

This bill is a comprehensive solution to a problem that has plagued the region for 40 years and it has the support of numerous groups in the Central Oregon region. The time is now for the Senate to quickly move on this bill and help the Central Oregon economy move forward.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.