Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes.

Mr. President, I want to make a few comments about the crisis that is unfolding before us. Right now some colleagues in the Senate and others over on the House side are holding the entire American economy hostage to make their favorite point on policy. I must say that this blackmail against ordinary working class Americans-- threatening to steal whatever momentum our economy has rather than build greater momentum and greater job growth--is deeply misguided. That is really as polite a way as I can possibly put it.

Think about what working families have been through over the last few years. The deregulation of Wall Street leading to predatory mortgages that hurt millions of families, and then the securities that those were based on, proceeded to derail our entire economy, hurting millions more. Families lost their savings. They lost their jobs. They lost the equity in their house.

All that working families are asking for is a little bit of common sense. Don't do further damage to the economy that is struggling to recover. Yet certain colleagues here in the Senate and over in the House seem to believe that the little people don't matter, the working people do not matter, the stability of the foundation for families and living-wage jobs doesn't matter because they can play whatever political games they want and the only people hurt are ones they do not see in their life. Maybe they live in a gated community. Maybe they live in a bubble. But I see those people. I see them every day. They are the salt of the Earth. They are the workshop that takes America forward. They are the small businesses across this Nation. All they are asking for is a little reasonableness and common sense.

Some of my colleagues have said this crisis comes because the majority party in the Senate has refused to negotiate. Nothing could be further from the truth. Negotiation in the budget process starts with each side passing a budget resolution and holding a conference committee. But it is Members of the minority of this Chamber who have come to this floor at least 18 times to block the start of a conference committee in order to work out the budget. I cannot imagine in my wildest dreams why they are terrified of there being a conversation between leadership in the House and leadership in the Senate, meeting with the television cameras on to work out the details of a budget compromise. But they seem terrified, petrified, scared to death that there will be a conversation between the House and Senate that would lead to a compromise.

So, indeed, there has been obstruction on compromise, and we know exactly where it is. They are the same individuals who are trying to drive the economy over the cliff right now. Moreover, members of this party said let's go further. The Senate has a number. The House has a number. But the budget conference committee is being blocked. Let's simply accept the House number, and not split it down the middle, not insist on our number, let's take the House number. That is going far beyond the middle path, if you will. That is a major compromise. If you are looking for compromise, it is happening with the leadership of the Senate putting forward a compromise that takes the House number for the budget. It appears that certain individuals in this body just do not want to take yes for an answer.

I am going to conclude my remarks. I see my colleague, the esteemed Senator from Illinois has arrived. I want to close with this notion. This is not the first crisis that has been artificially manufactured that has damaged the American economy. Let us remember that similarly we faced this in April 2011 with the continuing resolution. We faced a manufactured crisis with the debt ceiling in July of 2011. We faced the December 2012 fiscal cliff that did substantial damage; in March of this year, the continuing resolution, which brings us up to right now.

This is not all. The same individuals who are threatening at this moment to drive our economy over a cliff are saying we will do it again in a couple of weeks over another debt ceiling issue and when this continuing resolution expires a few weeks from now, if we get one done, we will do it again a few weeks from now--three crises in a period of just a few weeks. If you want to destroy the economy for working Americans, this is how it is done, and it is unacceptable. We need a bipartisan, commonsense caucus to come together and simply say no to those who are trying to create this terrible blackmail using American working families in the process.

Madam President, do I need to request a specific amount of time in which to speak? Are we under any rules?

Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to express my feelings this evening.

Quite frankly, I was one of the optimists in this body. Many of my colleagues have been saying the determination to run our economy over a cliff is so powerful, we are going to end up with a government shutdown. I kept saying, I don't think so. I think in this Senate and across the Capitol in the House there are reasonable folks who know that this type of brinkmanship is doing intense damage to our Nation, and I don't believe we will end up there. So here is my faith in the common sense of a collection of 435 Members of the House and 100 Members of the Senate--my faith in their reasonableness. Apparently, that faith has been misplaced, because we are now just 27 minutes away from a government shutdown. And to what point?

We have just heard from the House leadership they want to have a conference discussion over the budget. Well, certainly, so do we. Six months ago, we passed a budget. The Senate passed a budget. We sought to have a conference committee to resolve those two budgets as a common foundation for a set of spending bills--our appropriations bills--and our Republican colleagues blocked that budget conference committee. They have come to this floor 18 times and blocked the dialogue necessary to take the conversation forward over our budget and spending plan. That is what led us here tonight. The obstruction didn't start a week ago or 2 weeks ago; it started 6 months ago, in not allowing a common conversation.

I am deeply disturbed about the profound dysfunction that now grips this body. I first came to the Senate when I was 19 years old as an intern for Senator Hatfield. When legislation was brought up, it would be debated, there would be a simple majority vote; sometimes we won, sometimes we lost. We then send a bill over to the House. Then we have a conference committee and we get on with things. We make decisions. We test ideas. Sometimes those ideas work well and we keep them and sometimes they don't work so well, and we either amend them or throw them out or the public says, the bums who brought us those ideas that didn't work, we will throw them out. We had a completion of the democratic circle.

We don't have that completion now because we can't have a simple majority vote. Our colleagues have so abused the filibuster process; the courtesy of letting everyone have their say is to never let us get to a final up-or-down vote. So instead of 12 appropriations bills being passed year after year after year, we have zero this year. We only had one in 2011-2012, only one.

Citizens across the country are seeing this and saying, what is wrong with the Senate and what is wrong with the House? The House has its own form of supermajority: the Hastert rule. They are saying, We are not going to put on the floor things we know will pass unless they belong to the ideology of the far right, because we know that right now, if the Speaker of the House wants to put on the floor of the House the bill passed by the Senate--a clean, simple extension of a continuing resolution--it would be adopted. The leadership does not believe in allowing a vote in that Chamber, just as a minority of colleagues here in this Chamber have blocked us from having a simple majority vote time and time and time again.

We need to have a more substantial conversation about how to make both Chambers work better. But in the near term we have to find a path in which we stop careening from crisis to crisis.

Let's say, in the final 23 minutes now before midnight, that we were able to find an answer to pass a continuing resolution. Let's say we were able to do that. Is there no harm done? Well, I wish that were the case, because there has been a lot of harm done; because what businesses know across America is that this process of brinkmanship, of hostage-taking, of threatening to throw the economy over the cliff is happening time and time and time again. Already, Members on the House side are saying, Well, let's not only make these arguments tonight, let's make them in a couple of weeks over the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling--the decision on whether to pay the bills we have already incurred; the decision on whether to honor the good faith and credit of the United States of America.

President Reagan spoke on this multiple times, telling folks, We don't mess with the good faith and credit of the United States. His team undoubtedly recognized that when we do so, we raise the interest rates, we endanger the dollar as a reserve currency, we weaken our purchasing power around the world, and we do deep damage. But that reasonableness, that common sense that we don't take hostages and we don't threaten to destroy the economy that is going to hurt the middle class is gone.

I live in a working class community. Folks don't have a lot of savings. They have been hit hard. They lost a lot of their savings in the 2008 meltdown, a meltdown that came from deregulatory actions, that allowed predatory mortgages and securities based on predatory mortgages. They know that governance matters. They know we could create a lot of jobs if we could pass those bills for low-interest loans, for energy saving renovations that would put a huge amount of the construction industry back to work. That bill passed here in the Senate, but the House hasn't taken it up. They haven't passed it.

They know we would have a lot more jobs if we invested in infrastructure. China is spending 10 percent of their GDP on infrastructure. Europe is spending 5 percent of their GDP on infrastructure. And what are we spending here in America? We are spending 2 percent--not enough to repair the infrastructure that is wearing out across America, that needs replacing, let alone establishing infrastructure for the next generation. In a 10-year period, 2 trips to China, I saw Beijing go from bicycles to a bullet train. That is what happens when a society spends 10 percent of GDP on infrastructure. We build the economy of tomorrow for the generation of tomorrow that is going to thrive in that city.

When we underinvest, we imperil the future. When we underinvest in education, we imperil the future of our kids, and we are certainly underinvesting in education. But for each of these policy issues we have to be taking on, we can't succeed if a small number in the Senate and in the House can paralyze this process, can go to extraordinary lengths to basically hold hostage and damage the United States of America.

This process must end. The Senator from Vermont who spoke a few moments ago said, If we yield to this hostage-taking now, we will see it time and time and time again in the future. We will see the threat to end Social Security, et cetera. Well, we are not going to go in that direction.

The House has said they want a conference. Great. Let's not do so at the same time we are taking down the economy. So put the Senate resolution on the floor of the House right now, with 20 minutes left, give it an up-or-down vote, pass that bill so that we have just these few short weeks, from now until November 15, to hold that conference and to work out a deal without taking the American economy down with ObamaCare.

We wait for common sense and reasonableness to return to a dialogue so

that we can have a legislative process the American people can believe in, because we are tackling the big problems facing America. But as of tonight, with now 18 minutes to go, we do not have that process, and that must change.

Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. I appreciate the point the Senator is accentuating. When the Senator says this has not gotten enough attention, he is absolutely right. The House has refused to have a budget resolution pursued--a continuing resolution that does not have extraneous policy attached to it. They have absolutely said they will not take the Senate version, which did not put on the things the Senator and I might wish to attach, and did not put on the things my colleagues from across the aisle might wish to attach. It said: Let's keep the government open. Let's keep it operating, using, by the way, the budget number proposed by our colleagues in the House.

So if our colleagues in the House say, wouldn't it be great if the Senate would compromise with us, well, we went farther than a compromise. We did not say: Let's split the difference between the Senate number and the House number. We will take their number. And let's get rid of these extraneous policy issues and then put it up for a vote. I think it is a simple request to make.

Doesn't it make sense to give a bipartisan group the opportunity now, with just 14 minutes left, to actually end this process of driving our economy over a cliff?

At least have that vote.

My colleague is exactly right. They sent it to us and we voted on it.

The Senator is right.

Yes.

Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes of proponent time to Senator Cornyn.

Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes of proponent time to Senator Sanders.

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

Madam President, I rise today to address some of the challenges we face here on September 26. The significance of that date is it is only 4 days before September 30, the close of the financial year, and October 1, the following day, starts a new financial year. So it has been our responsibility as a Congress to prepare for October 1 by passing a budget, reconciling that budget with the House of Representatives, then using that budget to produce 12 appropriations bills, reconciling those 12 appropriations bills, and have a spending plan completely in place so that we smoothly begin the start of a new financial year. No crisis, just adults working out a spending plan for the next 12 months on time.

I would like to say that is where we are today. But instead, as I stand here on the floor of the Senate, we are only 5 days away from a shutdown of the U.S. Government, a shutdown because that spending plan has not been put together. For the many Americans who have been following the challenges of the last couple of years, this will sound a little like deja vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra, because we have been here before. We have been through this crisis before.

Indeed, it was April 2011 when we had a near government shutdown, and that had a huge impact on job creation, and it had a big impact on the stock market. In other words, it wounded our economy at a time when Americans wanted us to build a strong foundation for a better economy, to create jobs for the middle class, to put people back to work, and to get momentum built up to put American families in a better place. Instead, we had this manufactured crisis in April 2011, courtesy of my colleagues, who felt more about exercising partisan warfare than caring about the success of our middle-class families. Quite simply, that is just wrong.

Then it was just months later, in July of 2011, when we had a debt ceiling crisis. This is quite interesting, because the debt ceiling is simply a term for paying the bills we have already incurred. President Reagan had something to say about this. President Reagan said: Don't mess with the good faith and credit of the United States of America. We pay our bills on time. And we have always paid our bills on time. We didn't manufacture crises to do damage to the economy because of extremely poisoned partisanship gripping this Chamber and the Chamber on the other side of Capitol Hill.

Not only did that combination of crises do significant damage, but in 2012 we faced the big fiscal cliff. This is where the tax structure developed under the Bush Presidency was set to expire, so a new set of policies had to be worked out. We were unable to have that adult, responsible conversation due to the extreme partisanship gripping this Chamber and gripping the other Chamber. So we had a crisis at the close of that year that, quite frankly, did damage as well. Suddenly businesses were seeing that not only did we have the great recession of 2008, as a result of out-of-control failures in regulation that allowed predatory mortgages and predatory securities--securities that melted down and took a large part of America's financial world with them--but we had this follow-on of not being able to have a reasonable, thoughtful, commonsense budget plan in place to take us forward.

So 2012 led to March of 2013--3 months later--and now we had the delayed implementation of the sequester. The sequester comes from the Budget Control Act--an Act I voted against because Members on both sides of the aisle described it as ``dumb and dumber,'' so dumb we will not let it happen. I thought it was so dumb it should never be written into law, so I voted against it. But I was on the losing side of that battle. So this diabolical financial plan exploded onto the American scene in March 2013, creating a significant problem for the American economy and doing significant damage to the American economy. And here we are, 6 months later, unable to complete our budget and our appropriations bills for the coming financial year.

This has become a pattern where we see ourselves lurching from crisis to crisis--manufactured crises--due to this poisoning partisanship, rather than working together to address the challenges of working families and the middle class. The American people are

quite tired of it. That is why they rate the quality of work we are doing so low. That is why they rate Congress so low.

There was a time not so long ago when it was a very different story. When I was growing up, the story about Congress was that we had had this Great Depression but we came together as a Nation and recognized many of the problems that contributed to that. Those problems included allowing banks to stop doing loans and start gambling on risky ventures, and we stopped that when we put in Glass-Steagall. It included having mortgages that were balloon mortgages, and those could be called in at any time, which meant an individual had to return to the mortgage market to get a replacement loan. That created a crisis for a family if the loan was called and they couldn't actually get another loan. So we fixed that by creating full amortizing long-term mortgages with no balloon payments, and we got rid of that callable feature.

We also created the Securities and Exchange Commission to take on the predatory scams and practices of Wall Street so people would have faith in investing. Faith in investing meant you had the capital to fuel a strong comeback.

We created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation so people could trust putting their money in banks, knowing the bank wouldn't collapse and take their money with them.

We did all these things as a Congress, coming together to respond to great national problems. Sure, there was some partisanship, some disagreement between the parties, but there was a deeper understanding that we as Americans must work together as Americans, including on the floor of the House and the Senate, for the greater benefit of our American families.

Unfortunately, that has apparently been lost. It has been lost not just in these last few days but in these last few years.

When World War II was thrust upon us, in a short period of time, with congressional help, we transformed our economy into a war economy and played a big role in basically resolving a terrible worldwide crisis. After World War II we rebuilt, through our loan programs and our trade relationships, much of the world economy as well as our own economy, creating the largest middle class the world has ever known.

All of this is what we did in this Chamber and in the Chamber on the other side of Capitol Hill--decisions that were made together to put America back on track. But today we don't have legislators thinking about the health of America. They are thinking about the next election. They are thinking only about their own election. They are thinking about how to undermine our President. Yet he is our President. He is America's President. He is not the Democrats' President or the Republicans' President. He is our President, and he only gets to sign or veto bills that we send to him.

It is our responsibility in this Chamber to work together in a respectful, responsible fashion to do the basic work that is at the foundation of our ongoing expenditures--to get the budget in place and to get the spending bills in place.

The story of this year is really one that belongs in a fiction novel, because here we go: The U.S. Senate passed a budget, the U.S. House passed a budget. Immediately, the next day, the conference committee should begin. But, no, it didn't happen because Senators in this Chamber decided to filibuster that conference committee and stop any conversation from occurring between the House and Senate about getting a common budget.

This is really akin to burning down the house--blocking the House and the Senate. And by ``the house'' I mean a house that encompasses this whole legislative process. It is like lighting a bomb and letting it blow up. Don't let the budget process proceed; don't let there be a conference committee. ``Completely irresponsible'' should be the sign worn on every legislator who has blocked there being a conference committee on the budget. Without a budget we can't get common appropriations bills because they are based on different numbers.

Let us look at this appropriations process. There are essentially twelve spending bills, called appropriations bills. If we look at the period from 1988 through 2001--that 13-year period--we passed the vast bulk of appropriations bills every year through this Chamber before the next fiscal year started--the vast bulk of them. Some years we got every one done and some years most of them done, but the process worked.

Now let's come to the modern era: 2008, zero appropriations bills passed through here; 2009, we actually got half of them done, six; 2010, zero; 2011, one; 2012, zero; this year, 2013, zero. Any schoolchild in America grading the Senate on their success in getting the spending bills in place would give us an ``F'' for ``failure'' because we can't come together as responsible parties and have a debate on this floor, adopt amendments, and have an up-or-down vote.

This does enormous damage in multiple ways. The first source of damage is that we end up with late-night emergency continuing resolutions. And when you have a continuing resolution, it means you keep doing what you did before whether they made sense or not. So for every person who believes we should spend a dollar wisely--and I certainly do--we should take advantage of a year's worth of conversations and testimony about what is not working and we should end those programs, not keep continuing them. And when those hearings show that more money is needed in certain areas to make America work better, then we need to spend more in those areas, not continue spending less.

So this effort to blockade the budget process is a determination to continue government waste and inefficiency. I propose that Senators who are blocking the Budget Committee from even getting the numbers and blocking the spending bills should come to this floor and say: Yes, I am for government waste. Because that is what they are doing. They are wasting the taxpayers' dollars. They are investing in inefficiency.

Meanwhile, businesses across America are looking at these sets of crises--April 2011, July 2011, December 2012, March 2013, September 2013--and saying: We are not reinvesting in America until this Chamber and the other Chamber on Capitol Hill get their act together--so that we are not legislating from crisis to crisis, doing great damage to the economy. They know they can't sell their wares unless there is a middle class ready to buy them, and there can't be a middle class unless there are jobs, and there can't be jobs lurching from crisis to crisis.

The end is not in sight. We have colleagues in this Chamber right now planning to have another crisis over the next debt ceiling, the responsibility to pay the bills we have already incurred. We have Members who are not remembering that President Reagan said: Do not mess with the good faith and credit of the United States of America. They want to mess with the good faith and credit of the United States of America, which increases interest rates, which puts an essential tax on all Americans. So the fact that we don't have momentum of the amount we want in the economy is the result of this deliberative determination to force us to lurch from crisis to crisis.

Our middle-class families are worried about a lot. They are deeply concerned about the cost of college. They are deeply concerned about living-wage jobs. They are deeply concerned about funding for K-12. They are concerned about things that affect the real quality of life and the success of our families in every way. And they wonder why it is that we are lurching from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis rather than getting a spending plan in place and doing more of the things that make sense.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for an additional minute.

I will wrap up. Anywhere you look in America, you see problems for public safety, for public education, for college education, for living-wage jobs. These are the pillars of success of the middle class. Let's focus on those problems and do right by the American people and quit the irresponsibility and self-manufactured damage that is happening here on Capitol Hill.

Mr. President, I look forward to the remarks of my colleague, Senator Baldwin.

Mr. President, I thank my senior colleague from Oregon. I appreciate very much his calling up this amendment and for his leadership on energy, and specifically energy efficiency.

I would also like to compliment my colleagues from Ohio and New Hampshire, who have worked so hard on this very valuable piece of the energy puzzle: How do we more efficiently utilize energy that we generate?

Specifically, this amendment is related to standby power, the power that is wasted keeping devices ready to use at a moment's notice. I prefer the term ``vampire'' power or ``vampire'' electronics. This is the power our electronics suck out of our power system when they are doing absolutely nothing. So this challenge of loss to vampire electronics is certainly something we ought to take on.

Many electronic devices, from televisions to desktop computers, cell phone chargers, microwaves, use energy when they are turned off but are still plugged in. Often, you will see that little light that tells you it is still plugged in. This wasted energy accounts for roughly 5 percent of residential electricity use. So about 1 kilowatt in every 20 or $1 in every $20 is utilized to keep those little lights blinking.

The United States has yet to establish standards for efficiency in products related to standby power. Some States have done so, and other industrialized nations have taken action. This amendment would simply tell the Department to look at the standards established elsewhere in the world, or in individual States, compare them and analyze them, so we can consider whether a lot more could be done in

the United States to make us more efficient. That efficiency is like producing free, available power by ending the waste. In fact, the EPA estimates 100 billion kilowatt hours of electricity are wasted by vampire electronics each year. That adds up to $10 billion in extra energy costs.

Depending on the age of components, running a cable box or large- screen TV, a DVD player, a gaming console, surround sound setup, could be like running a significant refrigerator, a significant power draw, and DOE believes it is feasible to reduce this waste from standby power by about 75 percent.

The value of that 75-percent reduction would be equivalent to erecting 25,000 3-megawatt wind turbines for free. That is a lot of wind power being utilized. So let's do it.

Under this amendment, the Department of Energy is instructed to conduct a study of standards of standby power appliances and electronic devices that have been implemented by other States or other industrialized nations, and to evaluate which of the standards studied would be feasible and appropriate in the United States. It is a simple idea and an important study that can contribute substantially to the use of power effectively here in our economy.

I thank my colleagues for bringing this amendment forward.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Donnie Turner, have privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Allan Van Vliet be given floor privileges for the balance of the day. He is an intern in my office.

Mr. President, in approximately 8 minutes from now we are going to have a moment of silence for Officer Jacob Chestnut and Detective John Gibson in recognition of the sacrifice they made in defending the Capitol against an armed intruder.

I want to say how much we appreciate the forces deployed to protect us in our ability to share our thoughts on a host of issues that we speak to on the floor. If somewhere across America someone violently disagrees with us, if they decide they want to not engage in democracy but engage in violence, they might come to the Capitol, and our wonderful force protects us and gives us the ability to speak our hearts and minds on this floor on behalf of our constituents every single day.

So not only are we paying respect today to the officer and detective, but we are also paying respect to the entire delegation of security forces who work at the Capitol.

I am going to be brief in order to pause appropriately for that moment of silence and tell you that the conversation we are having today is part of a broader conversation about how to build the middle class in America.

There are some core pathways to the middle class, and one of those is fair mortgages. Indeed, when we were having a debate on Dodd-Frank in 2009 and 2010, we decided to put an end to payments in which mortgage originators were steering people from fair loans into predatory loans and getting big bonuses for doing so.

Today, the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that they are bringing a case against a company that was doing exactly this, paying $6,000 to $8,000 per mortgage to an originator so they would betray their customer and not put them in the best mortgage they qualified for but into a much higher interest mortgage.

I am delighted that in this Chamber we decided to end such practices. I am delighted we proceeded to confirm the first Senate-confirmed Director just last week so that this agency can do its job. Its announcement today shows it is hard at work in this critical area of fair home mortgages.

Another key pathway to the middle class is living-wage jobs. We are going to have a lot of debate about what creates and destroys those jobs in America because there is no program that substitutes in terms of a foundation for a family more than a living-wage job.

Another key pathway is education. Now, this is very personal to me. I grew up in a working-class community. My dad was a mechanic. I still live in that same community today, and I am surrounded by families that are struggling with near minimum wage jobs with often no benefits, hoping and praying that their children will be able to get the education necessary to have one of those remaining living-wage jobs. They are hoping we will do our job in Congress to help steer the economics of this Nation so there will be more of those living-wage jobs. But the viewpoint from the street is it doesn't look as though there are going to be a

lot of jobs for those folks graduating from college.

They are also concerned if they send their child to college and their son or daughter ends up with a school loan the size of a mortgage, that is going to hang like a millstone around their neck and haunt them the rest of their life.

My colleague from California has just spoken eloquently to this issue. She has just been sharing stories of people on the ground and what they are facing in the context of how these big massive loans for school are weighting down the opportunities for our children.

In addition, it is discouraging our children from believing that they can even get that education. If they don't believe that, then they don't put in the work in high school to prepare themselves to get that higher education to fulfill their potential.

I grew up from a small child with President Kennedy speaking of a vision in which we could aspire to great things, of fulfilling the maximum opportunity for ourselves and for our families and for our Nation. But right now, on the ground there is an undercurrent of deep discouragement, almost desperation, not seeing a broad boulevard into the middle class but seeing a cooked, broken path complete with tricks and traps. That is what this conversation is about: How do we create that broad path into the middle class?

I am going to stop here, and I will come back later and talk specifically about the loan program.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Moment of Silence

Mr. President, on behalf of so many of my colleagues, I want to thank the security forces at the Capitol for the incredible job they do in protecting these rooms where debates and democracy take place.

The debate that we are engaged in right now is about how to create a broad path to access education, as education is one of the key factors in developing and realizing the dream of middle-class jobs in America.

I was starting to share that this is very personal to me because I come from a working-class family. My parents and my grandparents had not gone to college. I didn't know people on my street who had gone to college. I didn't have siblings who had gone to college. I didn't know anything about college. But it was a scholarship, a loan, and jobs that enabled me to attend a university and pursue an education that took me into this realm of public policy, the realm that we are still in right now.

My first deep interest was Third World economic development, and I was blessed with a chance to work in Central America and India and to live as an exchange student in West Africa. Then that same education gave me a chance to go to graduate school, and there I was able to prepare for working here on strategic nuclear policy.

Education took me into realms that matter to our Nation, to our world, and matter in terms of creating the foundation to be able to have a living wage. So this is critically important to our children.

The proposal we have before us is that we are going to set up a loan program, and the loan program is going to take the cost of funds that are lent out and put on an additional 2.05-percent cap or add-on in interest for those who are getting undergraduate loans. For those who are getting graduate loans, it is going to add a 3.6-percent spread, as it is called. And for parents who are getting loans to help finance their kids' education, it is going to add on a 4.6-percent spread.

This 2-percent spread on undergraduates, 3.6-percent spread on graduates, and 4.6-percent spread on parents produces a lot of profits. I had my team consult with CBO to make sure the net profits of this program over the next 10 years are going to be $185 billion, and make sure we understand that they are taking the profits that come from those spreads, the higher interest charged over the cost of money, and they are subtracting out the fact that some loans will be defaulted on. They are subtracting out the cost of administering the program, and they end up with a net profit. How much is that net profit? It is $185 billion.

That means we are providing a service to our students, not at cost, but we are building in an equivalent of a massive $185 billion fee on the children of working families who are aspiring to get an education. That is not a great deal. In fact, it is a terrible framework.

My colleagues who have worked to put this together point out that right now this may be the only option compared to locking in the 6.8 percent for the next 10 years. In the first few years it produces a lower interest for our undergraduates than they would otherwise get. That is an important point to observe, that for a couple of years the loans our students will be getting will be at a significantly lower rate under the deal that is being proposed today. But over the course of the 10 years, the best estimate from CBO of the profits generated is still $185 billion, in fact $1 billion more, rounding off, than it is under the existing program.

To those who believe this is a great long-term solution, I disagree. Is it better in the next couple of years? Yes, it is. But I ask you, exactly why do we believe that adding on $185 billion in fees as a profit center for the U.S. Government is a great idea if our goal is to create an affordable pathway to higher education? I have yet to have anyone explain that. In fact, I often hear: Well, you know, built into the existing law, which doubles to 6.8 from the 3.4 percent right now-- that has profits built into that too.

That is a fair point. But let's step back and ask ourselves, sustaining the situation when we are charging extravagant fees to generate extravagant profits and lock them in for 10 years, is that a good idea?

There are a couple of proposals that would make this a much better program. One is to say, no, we are not going to have this big spread with a high cap of 8.25 percent on undergraduate loans and 9.5 percent on graduate loans and 10.5 on parent loans. But we are going to cap it at 6.8 percent. That makes a lot of sense. I applaud my colleague from Rhode Island who has come to the floor to speak for that proposal, and certainly I will be supporting that proposal.

Senator Sanders has said: You know what. This is a pretty good solution for a 2-year period, so let's sunset this after 2 years so we can have this debate again. Because if we lock this in for 10 years and if we maintain the pay-for rules of the Senate in which if you eliminate the profit margin in one area you have to increase the profit margin in another, we might never be able to unlock this and we will continue treating college loans as a profit center for the U.S. Government, so let's terminate this after 2 years. Let's sunset this and rethink this.

That is a pretty good idea too. I encourage my colleagues to consider doing that. I certainly will be supporting that.

Nick writes to me from Oregon. He says:

After receiving paperwork the other day from DoE servicer

``Direct Loans,'' I dove into my student loan [application]

to see what I was filling out an application for.

I took out $5,500 my Freshman year of college, $6,500 my

second year, $7,500 in my third, and $7,500 to finish my

senior year. So in total I borrowed $27,000.

In January I deferred payment on my loan because I had not

found full time employment.

With a stroke of luck, in February I landed two part-time

jobs making a whopping $12 per hour doing manual labor to

supplement my $10 per hour part time gig in the health care

field.

Since March I've been full-time with the healthcare

company, and earned a $1 raise. I've gained a lot of

experience on the job, but from a monetary perspective, I

wish I could be earning more so I could pay off my loans.

My loans are currently at 6.8 percent with a total owed as

of today: $32,266.

That is up from the $27,000 he had owed before. He continues, saying:

At 6.8 percent my loans are accruing over $1,800 in

interest each year. That's about $150 per month.

That is just the interest. Then when he is able to stop deferring and start making payments and include the capital being paid off it will be much more, and on a near minimum wage job that is extraordinarily difficult.

Here is a letter from a mother in Oregon, Melissa.

I graduated with a Master's degree in 1993. My loans have

been paid off for over 10 years.

My husband enrolled in college when he was 36, 3 year ago.

He will graduate next year with over $60,000 in debt for a

Bachelor's degree.

At this rate of increase in what it costs to get a college

degree, I don't see how it is possible for our son, who is

now 2, to ever have a college experience.

Please do the right thing and help make education

accessible to everyone.

That is the plea of Melissa, to do the right thing. The right thing would be to cap the interest in this program so it doesn't go over 6.8 percent. The right thing to do would be to sunset this program after 2 years. Both of those amendments will be available to all of us here on the floor. I encourage my colleagues to support those amendments.

Our students already face $1 trillion in debt. It is weighing them down. It means they are postponing getting married, they are postponing having children, they are perhaps postponing moving out on their own because they cannot afford an apartment with this debt. It is hurting the economy and it is hurting our future because children are discouraged about the possibility of going to college.

That is not the vision we want to have for America, where our children do not believe there is a path to the American dream for them. Today, if these amendments fail, it will be a very difficult choice, a very difficult choice between a couple of years of interest that is better than the status quo but a program that locks in a profit center for college loans, and we will have a very uncertain prospect about whether we can unlock that program a couple of years from now. I hope we pass those amendments.

I am not sure, frankly, which side I will come out on if we fail in that effort. But I will tell you this. If this deal becomes law we must return to this floor time and time again because adding $185 billion in fees so we can have a profit off working-class students trying to find a pathway to the middle class is wrong and deeply damaging to the American dream.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I wish to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the city of Tualatin, OR.

Since its founding, the city of Tualatin has exhibited continued growth and increasing prosperity. The city began as the small town of Galbreath in 1853, comprising just 23 families. With the construction of the first bridge across the Tualatin River in 1856 and the arrival of the Portland and Willamette Railway Company in 1866, which attracted business from Portland and throughout the Willamette Valley, the town's population and economic importance increased.

Over the 100 years since its incorporation on August 18, 1913, the city of Tualatin grew from a rural suburb to a vibrant urban city that supports 27,000 residents and 20,000 jobs. Located only 12 miles south of Portland and bisected by two major railways, Tualatin hosts new high-tech industries and upscale shopping centers such as Bridgeport Village.

The city's economic success is complemented by city officials' impressive leadership on environmentally aware urban development initiatives, enhancing residents' quality of life and providing an example to other Oregon cities of responsible urban planning. The Tualatin Commons, a public/private partnership featuring a three-acre manmade lake, a wide public promenade and plaza, and an interactive fountain provides recreational and entertainment opportunities. With over 200 acres of parks, trails, and natural areas, Tualatin also preserves green spaces for the public to enjoy.

The citizens of Tualatin are engaged and motivated, fostering a close-knit and thriving community. Each year area organizations organize the Crawfish Festival, which attracts an estimated 12,000 people and features local food, crafts, and music. The locally developed Citizen Involvement Organization program encourages residents to further improve life within Tualatin by funding community projects.

Throughout the last 100 years, the leaders and citizens of Tualatin have made invaluable contributions to the Portland metropolitan region and to the State of Oregon as a whole. I offer my sincerest congratulations during this celebration and look forward to many more years of prosperity for Tualatin.

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

Mr. President, I thought I would make a couple of comments regarding the activities of this Chamber a few minutes ago. We had 71 votes in favor of closing debate on the nomination of Richard Cordray to be Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB. The CFPB is vested with the responsibility of protecting consumers from predatory financial practices.

We all discovered in the runup to the great recession just how important this protection is. We had many crazy predatory practices.

On credit cards we had fees that came out of nowhere and shifting time periods from month to month in terms of when the payments were due, even shifting destinations of where the credit card payments got mailed to, and also fees that could be wracked up on unsuspecting consumers.

We certainly found out on mortgages how important financial protection is because we had, starting from 2003 forward, a booming industry in predatory teaser rate mortgages, where the mortgages might be 4 percent for 2 years but then were changed after 2 years to 9 percent. One would think most would-be homeowners would look at that deal and say: That is not a good deal. But here is what happened. They went to a mortgage broker, and the mortgage broker said: I am your financial adviser. Mortgages have gotten very complex, they are very thick, and there is a lot of fine print, so you are paying me to sort through and find the best deal for you.

So first-time home buyers trusted their mortgage brokers. Unbeknownst to the new homeowners, those brokers were being paid kickbacks called steering payments. They were being paid special bonuses outside the framework of the deal in order to steer the unsuspecting first-time home buyer--the customer--into a predatory loan when the first-time customer actually qualified for a prime fixed-rate mortgage. Well, those predatory mortgages proceeded to be put into securities, and those securities were bought up by financial institutions across America and beyond because the folks who were buying the securities understood that in a couple of years the interest rate would go way up and they would make a lot of money off those securities.

So this was a system rigged against the first-time home buyer, against the home buyer who wanted to start their journey to owning their piece of the American dream.

Those predatory practices should never have been allowed. Some here will remember the responsibility for consumer protection was vested in the Federal Reserve. But what happened in the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve carried on with its responsibility on monetary policy, but it put its responsibility for consumer protection down in the basement of its building. They locked the doors, they threw away the key, and they said let the market be the market. They abandoned our consumers across this country.

That is why we need a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It doesn't have a conflict in its mission. It is not obsessed with a different mission such as monetary policy. We need a bureau that says: New predatory techniques will crop up and we will try to end them, try to end practices in predatory payday loans that can charge 350 to 550- percent interest on unsuspecting citizens. We need a bureau that will look out and say we need to stop the practice on which online payday lenders get your bank account number and, without your permission, do a remotely generated check and reach in and grab the funds out of your account. The list of predatory practices is endless because the human mind is endlessly inventive. So we have an important bureau--but an important bureau that cannot do its job unless there is a director to run it.

Two years ago Richard Cordray was nominated to head the Bureau. He has been waiting to get cloture on his nomination and a subsequent vote for 2 years. He has been an interim appointee during that period of time and, by all accounts, from everything I have heard from folks in this Chamber, doing a very good job, working very hard with the great technical details of the financial world to find a fair and solid way forward.

The fact is his nomination, so long delayed, is not a reflection on him personally. In fact, many Senators who have opposed allowing the vote to take place have come forward and said it is not about him personally; it is about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Forty-three Senators in this Chamber wrote a letter to say they would oppose any nominee for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It was a bold attempt to change back to a situation where there was no one to fight for consumer protection for our citizens in this Nation.

Today we end that drama in favor of fairness for American citizens, in favor of taking strong action against predatory mortgages and the predatory practices of the future. In 8 hours we will be voting up or down on his nomination, as we should have long ago.

But let me shift gears here and say the vote we took today is symbolic of much more than the important function of establishing an effective Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The vote we took a short while ago is central to ending the paralysis that has generally haunted this Chamber. That paralysis is something new. In

the time from Eisenhower's Presidency through Ford's Presidency, there was not one filibuster of an executive nominee. In President Obama's 4\1/2\ years, there have been 16 such filibusters. So if we talk about the norm and tradition of the Senate, the norm and tradition of the Senate is a reasonable and timely up-or-down vote. That is the tradition, and it is a tradition that fits with the Constitution. The Constitution calls for a supermajority for treaties to be confirmed, but it only embeds a simple majority requirement for nominations. There is reasoning behind that: because our Founders envisioned three coequal branches of government. They could never have envisioned it would be OK for the minority of one branch to be able to deeply disable another branch, be it the executive branch or be it the judiciary.

So the vote we took today is part of a larger conversation about ending the paralysis and focusing on the challenge of executive nominations getting timely up-or-down votes.

Absolutely.

I would say to my colleague from Illinois that, indeed, these are key milestones where the journey is to restore the functionality of this Senate so it can take on the significant issues Americans expect us to take on.

The path forward is not yet one without obstruction. We have these two important milestones--one of going forward on immigration, a second of going forward in terms of putting a functioning Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fully together. We have had some other recent moments that fit this pattern, including passing the farm bill out of this Chamber for the second time, passing a Water Resources Development Act that would fund enormous amounts of infrastructure across this country to help provide both water supply infrastructure and wastewater treatment infrastructure. These are good moments. But we also are reminded that the path is not completely clear.

For example, at this moment we should be in the middle of a conference committee on the budget. The Senate passed a budget and the House has passed a budget, but the conference committee is being filibustered by this Chamber. That is evidence of the model we are trying to break that is unexplainable to the American people. Folks back home want to know why we can't get a bill on the floor of the Senate to address the sequester. Because fewer kids are getting into Head Start, fewer kids are getting their inoculations, title I schools are not getting their funding. And, of course, there is a lot of concern within the military world about our national security where programs are being compromised. But we couldn't get the bill to the floor of the Senate because it was filibustered.

So we have important milestones to grab hold of that are presenting a vision of the restoration of this Senate as a deliberative body, but we are going to have to work together in this bipartisan fashion we speak of to continue on this road.

Madam President, I appreciate my colleague from Illinois emphasizing the important role of bipartisanship in making this Chamber work. His question gave me an opportunity to talk about what has just transpired as an important victory--an important victory for this Chamber and its deliberation, an important victory for people across America, families working to have their financial foundation solid rather than torn asunder by predatory practices.

In this journey, this effort to achieve a Senate that can again function as a deliberative body, I want to take this moment to thank my colleague Tom Udall. Tom Udall and I came into the Senate together. Tom Udall immediately recognized that the Senate needed to address its internal functioning because we were becoming more and more paralyzed. He proposed before this body that we have a conscious debate every 2 years about how to adjust the rules and to make this Senate Chamber work much better, because we are not only being paralyzed on executive nominations but we have this terrible paralysis on legislation, with a few important exceptions that my colleague from Illinois and I spoke about.

I want to thank Tom for his work to help motivate this body to take on these issues and to restore the functionality. I have been pleased to be a partner with him on this journey. I know it is a journey that is not yet done, but I do thank my colleagues--across the aisle and on this side of the aisle--for the very frank discussions last night in which for 3 hours we bared our hearts, if you will, about what is working and not working in this Chamber. That too is an important moment

in this journey to make the Senate work. So I applaud the spirit that came into the Chamber today that resolved the 2-year standoff in regard to having a functioning chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and to set the tone, hopefully, for changing dramatically the partnership to restore the functioning of the Senate going forward.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, this morning a significant debate began on the floor of the Senate as to how to make the Senate function within the framework of the Constitution and within the norms and traditions of the Senate.

Indeed, the Constitution envisioned three coequal branches of government, and it provided checks and balances. One of those was that when the President nominates individuals for executive branch positions, Congress could serve as a check. Specifically, the Senate was given that power, to review the qualifications and make sure there was not something outrageous about the nomination, as a check on the Executive.

This principle was embedded as a simple majority review. Indeed, in the Constitution, it is in the same paragraph that lays out a supermajority standard for treaties, but retains a simple majority standard for reviewing executive branch nominations.

The Senate in recent times has started, however, to use the privilege of having your say; that is, everyone should be heard before a decision was made, as a way to change that fundamental principle in the Constitution from a simple majority to a supermajority. We can't close debate here in the Senate without a supermajority. Even though no one has anything else to say, that power has been used to prevent a simple up-or-down vote.

Under this theory of three coequal branches of government, no one could envision that a minority of one Chamber of the legislature could, in fact, completely undermine either the executive branch or the judicial branch. That certainly was never anticipated. Indeed, the reason it was left as a simple majority is that our Founding Fathers who were writing the Constitution had experienced the challenge of what a supermajority would do. Madison said, regarding the supermajority, ``The fundamental principle of free government would be reversed.''

He said in Federalist Paper No. 22, speaking from the painful experience as a New York representative to the Congress that created the Articles of Confederation, that supermajority rule results in ``tedious delays; continual negotiation, and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.''

Madison was not the only one to observe the deadly nature of paralysis to a Congress. In Federalist Paper No. 76, Alexander Hamilton lays out the nomination process in great detail. Indeed, he says he has kept the nomination power with the President and not the legislative branch to avoid the ``party likings and dislikes, partialities and antipathies, attachments and animosities, which are felt by those who compose the assembly.''

He then went on to argue the Senate is necessary to vet nominees for the ``intrinsic merit of the candidate'' and continued, ``the advancement of the public service.''

Hamilton states that he expects nominees would be rejected only when there were, and I quote, ``special and strong reasons for the refusal.''

This principle of oversight to make sure that something that is outside the bounds of reason is done by the executive branch has now reached a point of deep abuse.

Our majority leader came to the floor earlier today, and he laid out the history of how the nomination process has been bent from an unrecognizable process that neither Madison nor Hamilton nor any of our other Founders could have envisioned, a process that allows this Senate to utilize the privilege of having your say on the floor and turn it into a weapon of destruction against the legislative branch and the judicial branch.

We can take a look at how long it has taken folks to be able from the announcements and their waiting time to get a vote, such as Richard Cordray, 724 days and counting; Alan Estevez, 292 days; Jack Lew, 169; and so on and so forth.

The traditional norm of the Senate, a timely up-or-down vote with rare exceptions, is certainly missing today.

The executive branch is headed by the President, who was elected by the citizens of the United States. In this case President Obama was not elected once, he was elected twice. He was elected with a vision, and people expect, the citizens expect, that the President will operate the Presidency consistent with implementing that vision and carry out the responsibilities of an executive branch.

This cannot be done if the folks necessary to lead different agencies or sit on different boards cannot get through the nomination process in this Senate.

For those who are passionate about believing in the vision we have, the constitutional vision, the balance of power, the coequal branches of government, we must act to remedy the deep abuses we are experiencing today.

Let me first emphasize the extensive delays. Executive nominees who are ready to be confirmed by the Senate have been pending an average of 258 days, the better balance of a complete year, more than 8 months since they were first nominated--258 days. This hardly meets the norm or the tradition of the Senate of timely consideration. This has been a prime cause of the difficulty filling executive branch slots. Not only does it make the vacancies extend for a long period of time and, therefore, dysfunction in executing the responsibilities of government, but it certainly makes it more difficult to recruit qualified folks who don't want to be held in limbo and procedurally tortured by a minority of the Senate in this fashion. This is not new. This did not start this year, but it keeps getting worse.

In that context, let's go back to January. In January, there were a series of bipartisan modest changes in the rules, and they were accompanied by a promise of comity. That is c-o-m-i-t-y, comity. Specifically, the pledge by the Republican leader was this:

Senate Republicans will continue to work with the majority

to process nominations, consistent with the norms and

traditions of the Senate.

What are those norms and traditions? Those are timely consideration, up-or-down votes, with rare exception.

Let's take a look and see if what has happened over the last 6 months is consistent with the norms and traditions of the Senate and let's start first with looking at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Only weeks after the January pledge, 44 Republican Senators sent a letter that said: ``We will not support the consideration of any nominee, regardless of party affiliation, to be the CFPB director''-- February 1, 2013, just days after the Republican leader pledged a return to the norms and traditions of the Senate.

This is not within the norms and traditions of the Senate, even going back to our Founders, who pointed out that they were worried about partisan, party-affiliated differences and animosities permeating the system. They laid out a simple nomination-confirmation process about the qualifications of the individual, not about the legitimacy, if

you will, of the agency. It is a policy decision. It is a policy that has been passed in this Senate saying the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a valuable addition to end practices that are predatory financial practices.

We had a consumer safety group that looks at things such as keeping lead out of the paint on children's toys. That is very important, and it goes on to monitor the safety of toys and many other aspects.

I ask unanimous consent to speak for an additional 10 minutes.

We indeed in this case are talking about an agency that will protect our families from predatory financial practices. We all know what those are. They are hidden charges on prepaid credit cards. They are exploding interest rates on mortgages, where there is a teaser rate for 2 years and then the mortgage zooms up from 4 percent to 9 percent, driving defaults. In fact, that was a major factor, not only in the loss of homes of millions of families but also a major factor in the meltdown of our economy.

What is good for the family, building successful families, is also good for building a successful economy. We had that debate, and we as a Senate approved creating this organization. Now we have 44 Senators who say they are going to destroy this agency by blocking a Director from ever being appointed. This is 100 percent outside the norms and tradition of the Senate.

Of course, that restoration of the norms and traditions was the promise made on this floor by the Republican leader just days before this letter was sent.

According to the Senate Historian, this is the first time in history a political party has blocked a nomination of someone because they didn't like the construction of the agency. Let me repeat that. This is the first time in history.

A few weeks later we had another first, the first ever filibuster of a Defense Secretary nominee. The New York Times wrote: ``The first time in history that the Senate has required that a nominee for Secretary of Defense clear the 60-vote hurdle.''

This is the first time in history. The irony, of course, is that the nominee was a former Republican colleague of this Chamber, Chuck Hagel. Certainly this was out of sync for the norms and traditions of the Senate.

Then we come to this spring, again, unprecedented delay tactics. A Republican former House Member called the boycotting of Gina McCarthy ``an unprecedented attempt to slow down the confirmation process and undermine the agency.''

Is that consistent with the norms and traditions that were promised in January? It is not.

In fact, I sit on the committee that voted Gina McCarthy out. When we tried to have the vote, we were faced with the boycott; that is, a quorum was denied because our colleague, Senator Lautenberg, was extremely sick and could not attend. Taking advantage of his illness, Republicans decided not to show up and therefore block that nomination from coming out of the committee. Only when Senator Lautenberg came in, in the midst of an extreme illness, did the Republican members attend the committee. This is part of this ongoing process of unprecedented obstruction.

Real delays involve real hurt. It is not an academic debate. This obstruction is having a real impact on people's lives.

Let's turn to the National Labor Relations Board. In a few weeks in August, there will no longer be a quorum of the NLRB. This means for the first time in 78 years there will be no referee in place between the rules for the conduct of employers and employees. That referee makes sure that illegal practices by workers don't occur and illegal practices by employers don't occur. We lose that referee in a few weeks and that, as Members of this Senate have expressed, is their goal. Again, this is unprecedented--not putting forward a policy debate over eliminating the National Labor Relations Board but instead undermining it by blocking the ability to hold up-or-down votes on the nominees.

Workers are deeply affected by whether this referee is in place. Kathleen Von Eitzen, a Panera baker who tried to organize her fellow bakers, came to Washington, DC, to talk about how they have been unable to get to a final contract and how, in the process, their members have been cut, in some cases their hours have been cut, and a whole host of other retaliatory measures. These are the things you need a referee for--to say that is not acceptable or to judge the evidence as both sides present it. That is why we need the NLRB.

How about Marcus Hedger, who was fired for taking a friend through the shop floor. It just so happened Marcus was a union leader in his shop. He asked permission to escort a friend through the floor and it was granted. Then the employer said: Aha, we got you. We can fire you because you know you are not allowed, under the rules, to escort a friend through the shop floor.

The NLRB ruled quickly, saying this was an extraordinarily flimsy pretext for firing someone because he happened to be a shop steward, and it was during the timeframe of a labor negotiation. The company was trying to send a message. They were trying to say: If you support workers organizing to fight for living wages, you may get fired, and here we have just set an example.

It is the NLRB that is the referee that says those sorts of unacceptable tactics cannot occur.

Back to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It has refunded Americans $425 million in savings by getting rid of credit card tricks and traps.

I think it is important we fight for the success of our families. These are family values. We should not measure the success of our Nation by the size of the gross domestic product. We should measure it by the success of our families, and eliminating predatory tactics is an incredibly important piece of that puzzle that touches millions.

What we have seen is this: The pledge made on this floor by our Republican leader in January--the pledge that said we will return to the norms and traditions of the Senate for nominations--has not occurred. The Republican leader may indeed have had every good will in making that pledge, but it requires the cooperation of the entire caucus and that certainly has not occurred and we haven't heard a strong effort to abide by that pledge made in January.

So it is time to restore the norms and traditions in the Senate, where the Senate provides a check on outrageous nominations, but it is a check, not a form of paralysis. It is advise and consent, not paralyze or veto.

For those who love democracy, it has been sad to see this Chamber, once considered the premier deliberative body in the world, fall into such a State of paralysis and dysfunction. It is up to us, as Members of this body, to come forward and say that is absolutely unacceptable.

That is the debate that was started today. I applaud the majority leader who in January of 2011 strived to resolve this dysfunction through a gentleman's agreement, but within weeks that gentleman's agreement was in tatters. I applaud the majority leader for his instinct in January when he sought modest bipartisan rule changes with the promise of comity and a pledge from the Republican leader to return to the customs and traditions of the Senate. His instinct was right. We should be able to accomplish these things by restoring the social contract.

The leader, Harry Reid, has gone the extra mile and then another extra mile in seeking to adopt the social contract that held this body together, but now what we see is it has not been reciprocated. The pledges made, the promise of comity, the gentleman's agreement has not resulted in material changes in tactics employed on the floor of the Senate. So now we have to work to restore the vision of our Founders, the vision of simple majority, with timely up-or-down votes on nominations. We owe this to the executive branch, and we certainly owe it to our citizens who reelected President Obama.

I wish to address one last point; that is, it has been argued what the majority leader is proposing--that we, if necessary, change the rule or change the application of the rule in order to make this place work again--is unprecedented.

I ask unanimous consent to speak for 1 more minute.

I have in my hands a document entitled ``The Senate's Power to Make Procedural Rules by Majority Vote,'' and this lays out a whole host of viewpoints expressed in 2005 that I think would be interesting reading for my colleagues across the aisle because it was their document.

I also have a long list of cases where every other year, on average, we have changed the application of a rule in order to make the Senate function in a different way, a better way. So this is far from unprecedented.

It is time for us, together as Senators, to live up to our responsibility and restore the power to the executive branch to put their folks in place, operating under our advise and consent in the way envisioned in the Constitution.

I yield the floor.

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

Are there any rules currently on how long one may speak?

I have been listening carefully to the debate that has been taking place here on the floor, and the esteemed minority leader had a couple of phrases that he used any number of times.

One of those was that this debate is about whether to break the rules in order to change the rules, and the second phrase, also involving the word ``break,'' was to repeatedly say to the majority leader: You have broken your word. Those are very powerful words. My mother always told me that when people start saying things like that, it is because they are at a loss for a real argument, but I found them disturbing. I found both of those phrases disturbing. I found them disturbing because they are so at odds with what this conversation is really about.

We are here in the midst of a constitutional crisis. Our Constitution was set up with a balance of powers between three coequal branches, with checks and balances. Never in their wildest dreams did the crafters of our Constitution envision that a minority of the Senate, a minority of one Chamber, would undermine the functioning of the other two branches. In fact, they were very deliberate--very, very deliberate--in their determination that there not be such a possibility. They laid out with clarity that advise and consent on treaties took a supermajority, but when it came to the other branches, the judicial branch and executive branch have a de facto simple majority standard in the Constitution. They are in exactly the same paragraph, so you can compare them, one to the other.

Our Founders talked about this, and they talked about it because they had the experience with the Continental Congress in which a supermajority had caused all sorts of difficulties. So I thought I would remind us a little bit about the framework they laid out in the Constitution.

Alexander Hamilton said on a supermajority it would lead to ``tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.'' Alexander Hamilton felt so strongly that there should be a simple majority standard. He wasn't alone. We have Madison, who wrote that ``the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed'' if a

supermajority was the functioning principle.

So we have this system of coequal branches with simple majority votes on nominations as a check against extraordinarily ill-advised nominations by the executive branch. Indeed, that has been the tradition throughout our Nation's history--simple majority votes on a timely basis on nominations, interspersed by very, very occasional blockades put up by exercising the will to filibuster but very rare use of that until the last few years. Indeed, it was just a few years ago that our Republican colleagues were in charge, and they were upset by a small number of filibusters by the Democrats on judicial nominees, and they came to this floor and they said that is not acceptable. They reminded us of this constitutional history, of this constitutional framework, and they asked for a deal. The deal they asked for was they wouldn't change the rules if Democrats wouldn't filibuster the nominations, and that deal was struck.

But now the tide has turned. The parties are reversed, and suddenly that deal is not holding because we see filibuster after filibuster after filibuster obstructing the ability of the executive branch--with a President reelected by the citizens of the United States--and with vacancies in the judicial branch, with judicial emergencies from hither to yon, with the largest number of judicial vacancies and the largest number of executive branch appointments piled up. Yet my colleagues on the other side are saying: The Senate is functioning just fine. Only about 8 percent of the American people think the Senate is functioning fine, and those 8 percent one would have to recognize are just not paying attention.

This is not the Senate I knew as a young man, coming here as an intern and sitting up in the staff gallery for Senator Hatfield. I would come down to the floor to brief him on the amendments and the debate before each vote. At that time, we had simple up-or-down votes on nominations, with rare exception. Even if we turn the clock back to the time of Lyndon B. Johnson, in the 6 years when Lyndon B. Johnson was majority leader in this Chamber, only once in his 6 years did he need to file a motion in order to close debate, and that wasn't just on executive nominations but a combination of executive nominations, judicial nominations and legislation--just once in 6 years.

Senator Reid, in his first 6 years as majority leader, had to file 391 motions. This cloture process is designed to take a long period of time, often up to 1 week, because it was envisioned it would be used rarely.

So here we are with the minority in the Senate doing deep damage to the executive branch, deep damage to the judiciary by the abuse of the filibuster, creating an imbalance or creating unequal branches of government that is completely out of sync with the constitutional vision. Are we, as Members of this body--having taken a pledge to uphold the Constitution and having that responsibility--going to allow this deep abuse of the constitutional vision of equal branches? I don't think anyone who takes their pledge seriously can come to this floor and argue that a small group of the Senate should be able to do deep damage to the other branches.

The Republican leader said the strategy is to break the rules in order to change the rules. I thought I would just remind him that--and I believe he came here in 1985--since the time he first arrived, there have been many times the Senate changed the precedent on the application of rules. Using a simple majority, the Senate changed the application of a rule. It was done once in December 1985, once in September of 1986, then twice in 1987, once in 1995, twice in 1996, once in 1999, and once in the year 2000 and in the year 2011. That is 10 times during the time the Republican leader has been a Member of this Senate.

The minority leader described this as a nuclear option. So using his reasoning, there have been 10 nuclear option bombs exploded in this Chamber during the time he has served here. Yet I didn't hear that mentioned in the presentation he put forward. It might interest the Republican leader to recall that of these instances, where under the standard of a simple majority the application of a rule was changed during the time he has served here, that seven of those times were under Republican leadership. It has occurred three times under Democratic leadership. So seven times under Republican leadership the type of action we are discussing--of reorienting the application of a rule in order to make the Senate work better--and three times under Democratic leadership. All of these instances occurred during the time he has served in this Chamber.

So to come to the floor and talk about breaking the rules in order to change the rules, the Republican leader would have to go back and talk about those 10 times and explain how 7 of them happened under Republican leadership, but somehow that doesn't qualify as being the same standard. I think it is important to get away from the overinflation of the rhetoric that has been put forward.

The second piece that bothered me in this debate was saying the majority leader broke his word. I think everyone who is party to a deal understands there are two parties to a deal and those two parties need to uphold their half. So I would remind folks about what the Republican leader's half of that deal was. I put on this chart, ``The January Pledge.'' This is the pledge made by the Republican leader on the floor of this Chamber. He said: ``Senate Republicans will continue to work with the majority to process nominations, consistent with the norms and traditions of the Senate.''

What are those norms and traditions? Those norms and traditions are that nominations are able to be voted on in a modest period of time with up-or-down votes. If we should have any doubt about what the minority leader meant about norms and traditions, we can go to the Republican policy document from 2005. Here we have the last major debate over the abuse of the filibuster--Democrats in the minority, Republicans in the majority--and this is what the Republican policy argument said:

This breakdown in Senate norms is profound. There is now a

risk that the Senate is creating a new 60-vote confirmation

standard. The Constitution plainly requires no more than a

majority vote to confirm any executive nomination, but some

Senators have shown that they are determined to override this

constitutional standard.

I will stop quoting there for a minute and just note this was a very clear delineation of the constitutional standard during the time the Republican leader was in this Chamber, in 2005--not so many years ago. The document goes on to say:

Thus, if the Senate does not act . . . to restore the

Constitution's simple majority standard, it could be

plausibly argued that a precedent has been set by the

Senate's acquiescence in a 60-vote threshold for nominations.

The document goes on to talk about the role of the Constitution in advise and consent:

One way that Senators can restore the Senate's traditional

understanding of its advice and consent responsibility is to

employ the ``constitutional option''--an exercise of a Senate

majority's power under the Constitution to define Senate

practices and procedures. . . . Exercising the constitutional

option in response to judicial nomination filibusters would

restore the Senate to its longstanding norms and practices.

So if we want to know what norms and traditions meant in this pledge made in January, it is all laid out in extensive detail in the Republican policy document, and it is laid out in the history of the United States. It means a modest amount of time to have a vote after a nomination comes out of committee, with a simple up-or-down vote, with rare exception.

But that is not what we have had. So I would ask the Republican leader to engage in a discussion about our constitutional role, much like the debate the Republicans led in 2005. Because otherwise we are just casting aspersions, and the citizens looking in wonder at what happened to that great deliberative institution--the Senate.

This standard of processing nominations according to the norms and traditions of the Senate did not materialize after January. Within days, there was the first ever--first ever in U.S. history--filibuster of a nominee for Defense Secretary. Ironically, that nominee was former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

Within a short period of time after that, we had a letter from 44 Senators saying they would not allow a vote on

any nominee for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Any nominee? That is the advice and consent role embodied in the Constitution that calls for a simple up-or-down vote? They are going to use the filibuster to oppose any nominee, regardless of the person's qualifications?

That is actually using the filibuster in a whole new way to basically say we don't have the votes to undo the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau--which, by the way, is charged with stopping predatory practices that undermine the success of families--so instead of trying to get rid of this institution that protects families--and I am not sure where family values fits in there--we are, instead, going to prevent anyone from exercising leadership authority and sitting in the Director's chair at the CFPB.

I see my colleague is here and waiting to speak, so I will conclude with this. Let's recognize that the deal laid out in January just didn't work. It didn't work. It doesn't make sense to keep saying who didn't make it work. Certainly, from my perspective on this side of the aisle, this issue of continuing to work to process nominations consistent with norms and traditions didn't work. My colleagues across the aisle have a different concept of why it didn't work. But at the heart of it, as they argued in 2005, there is a constitutional vision for the use of advice and consent, and that constitutional vision is in deep trouble. It is not permission for one coequal branch to undermine the other two branches.

That is why the Members of this body need to have this debate. It is why I am on the floor now, and it is why we need to wrestle with restoring the role of this Senate, the proper role in the nomination process.

I yield the floor.

Will my colleague yield for a question?

I have in front of me the list of the number of times the application of a rule was changed from the precedent. It was done each time under a simple majority structure, and it was done 10 times since 1985.

I pointed out earlier--I am not sure if my colleague was on the floor--that seven of these times this was done

under Republican leadership. So seven times Republicans came to the floor and said: We are going to change the application of a rule under redirection of the precedent or overruling of the precedent. I want to ask if the Senator is familiar with that because the way he was speaking, it sounded as if this conversation is about something--a procedure that had never been done. Yet it was done seven times since 1985 by my Republican colleagues.

I will be happy to do that. I have that in front of me. Let's start on December 11, 1985:

The Senate allows a conference report on the basis that

everything included is ``relevant,'' even though multiple

provisions have been ruled to violate the scope of the

conference committee's authority.

The ruling of the Chair changing the precedent was reversed.

This happened again in September-- Mr. SESSIONS. Was there a vote on that?

Yes.

Yes. I can assure my colleague that each and every one of these involved an actual vote, and each and every one of these 10 occasions did reverse the previous precedent. That happens in two fashions.

Absolutely.

I will get the Senator a personal copy.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Chris Riegg, be granted privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Madam President, I thank my colleagues from Connecticut and Maryland and Rhode Island who are down here sharing their stories and their concerns about carbon pollution and its impact on climate around the world.

Indeed, it was just last October that I was engaged in a triathlon. In the first stage, the swimming was in the ocean in North Carolina. I had been told to expect temperatures of 62 to 65 degrees. As I went down to the water with the first group of participants getting off the transport bus, the first in front of me stepped in the water and said: Hey, folks, this water is really warm. Come on in.

The temperature was not 62 degrees or 65 degrees, the temperature of the ocean was 72 degrees. A week later Hurricane Sandy struck the Northeast with incredibly devastating consequences, powered by this much warmer ocean water. That is one of the many effects we are seeing of increased carbon in the atmosphere, trapping the Earth's heat.

Perhaps the most important number we should all be aware of is the number 400. I put the number 400 on a chart so we could ponder it--400 parts per million. What that represents is a roughly 50-percent increase in carbon dioxide as it is represented in the broader atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution, going from 270 to 400. That is a lot of heat-trapping gases added to the atmosphere.

Indeed, when we were at 350, scientists started to say, before we hit 400, we need to dramatically reduce the burning of fossil fuels so we will never hit 400 and the number will come back down and stabilize around 350.

If we were being graded as human civilization on this planet on our effectiveness in decreasing the burning of fossil fuels and keeping the concentration from increasing, we would be getting an F. We would be failing because not only did we soar from 350 to 400, but the rate of carbon pollution has doubled in the last 30 years. Thirty years ago the rate was, on average, one part per million per year. Now the average rate is two parts per million per year. So not only have we not decreased and leveled out, but the steepest of the curve has doubled, which means that 5 years from now we will be at 410 and 10 years from now we will be at 420. What this represents is a very bleak future for humans on this planet.

By various estimates, it has been somewhere between 3 million and 10 million years since our atmosphere had this level of carbon concentration. That means that in the time humans have been on this planet, which is less than 200,000 years, humans have never witnessed-- have never lived in an atmosphere of this concentration. We have never left footprints in the sand when the atmosphere has this level of heat- trapping gases.

Now we see it everywhere. We see it in Oregon in terms of our cascade glaciers are getting smaller and our cascade snowpacks are getting smaller. Our pine beetle infestations--normally knocked down by cold winters--are getting larger. Our fires are getting larger, fed by drought and dead trees from the pine needles. Indeed, we have had three record-setting droughts in the Klamath Basin in the last 30 years--the worst ever droughts three times in the last 13 years.

We are even seeing it in our Pacific Ocean oysters. Those oysters, when they are tiny, are very sensitive to the acidity of the water. The acidity has gone up because carbon dioxide in the water has gone up.

We have many examples just in my home State. If we look across the rest of the United States, if we look across the globe, there are huge impacts everywhere, with multiples of impact at the poles, where the temperature change is faster.

I applaud the President for saying we must have a bold strategy to take on climate change. There are three big areas of carbon dioxide generation, and those are electricity generation, transportation, and buildings. His plan lays out strategies in all three areas, and that is good. That is a starting point for a much broader discussion on how we end our fossil fuel addiction. Addictions are hard to kick, but they are particularly hard to kick if we have someone who is trying to keep us hooked, and those who benefit from the profits of burning fossil fuels are very much trying to keep us hooked. So we have to recognize that requires an extra degree of dedication and effort on all of our parts.

I will wrap up and turn this over to my colleague from Maryland, who has been a terrific champion on this topic and who has seen firsthand in Maryland many of the effects of global warming.