Floor Statements

I thank Senator Johnson for his interest and support for this legislation and for his shared interest in strengthening cyber security. I also thank my colleague from South Dakota for drawing attention to the potential impact of this provision on financial regulatory authorities under the Banking Committee's jurisdiction, including those of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the prudential regulators. I would like to assure the Senator that the consensus-based voluntary process for developing cyber security standards established in Title I of this bill is not intended to alter or limit financial regulatory agencies' regulatory authority in any way. Title I, particularly new section (e)(2) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Act, encourages private entities to participate in NIST's standards development process, but is in no way a ``safe harbor'' for participants who are subject to the jurisdiction of financial regulatory agencies. An entity that participates in the standards development process established in Title I is still fully subject to the regulations, supervision, and other requirements of its financial regulatory agency. Sharing information with NIST as part of the process established in Title I is not a valid basis for withholding information from a regulator, including information about cyber threats.

NIST is the Federal government's premier science and standards agency. It is not a regulatory agency, nor is it a national or homeland security agency. NIST's unique role is to bring together knowledgeable players from government and industry and to build consensus around common technical standards. NIST has no authority to require any private entity to follow standards it develops. The cybersecurity standards development process established in Title I is therefore not a rulemaking process. It in no way imposes new or duplicative regulations on entities that are subject to the authority of financial regulatory agencies, and it in no way disturbs or diminishes agencies' authority to exercise their important oversight duties.

It is not intended to prohibit an agency from taking a regulatory action, such as an action to require an individual entity to protect against future cyber threats, if the agency independently obtains such information pursuant to other statutory or regulatory authority--even if an entity has shared this information with NIST. Nothing in this bill is intended to modify, limit, or otherwise affect the authority of the federal financial regulators under any other provision of law.

Madam President, it is my great privilege to recognize the distinguished career of John S. Pistole, on the occasion of his retirement as the Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration. He has been a dedicated public servant and leader for the past 31 years. Next year, John will take on an exciting new leadership role when he returns to his alma mater, Anderson University, as its president.

I am privileged to have worked with John and received his counsel on important issues like addressing the terrorist threats facing our Nation in the post-9/11 era, and helping to guide the FBI and TSA to successfully meet the challenges brought on by those threats.

Throughout his career, John has taken on many of the most challenging roles in law enforcement. He's fought against organized crime in the FBI and led frontline counterterrorism efforts as head of the TSA. However, for a person who has had to maintain a tough exterior in these roles, John has remained thoughtful, compassionate, and courteous-- important traits which he demonstrated in his appearances before the Commerce Committee.

After earning his law degree at Indiana University in 1981 and spending 2 years in private law practice, John decided to enter public service by joining the FBI. John rose through the ranks as a special agent in Minneapolis and New York. He worked hard--first becoming a supervisor at FBI Headquarters, where he was recognized as a role model for new FBI agents, and then chosen to be an instructor at the FBI Academy. A few years later, John was recognized for his capabilities with an opportunity to teach the first sessions at a new International Law Enforcement Academy in Budapest.

In the late 1990s, John got involved with the FBI's efforts to fight white-collar crime. In Indianapolis, he created task forces fighting fraud and public corruption, and was promoted to Assistant Special Agent in Charge at the Boston Field Office. When Egypt Air Flight 990 crashed off the coast of Rhode Island, John investigated this aviation attack that would serve as a prelude to his post-9/11 roles.

When our Nation was attacked on September 11, 2001, John had just been assigned to the Inspections Division at FBI Headquarters though he was quickly reassigned to help build FBI's Counterterrorism Division. He rose steadily through the ranks, eventually serving as the FBI's Deputy Director for more than 5 years. John's exemplary service in that role, combined with his experience in counterterrorism and excellent management of and care for the FBI workforce, culminated in 2010 when he was nominated to be the TSA Administrator.

John assumed the leadership of TSA at a time when the agency had been without a confirmed administrator for a year and a half. During this time, the agency had been grappling with the fallout from the Christmas Day attack of 2009, and had become a political and media punching bag. TSA needed a strong leader to take on the formidable task of improving the agency's stature. TSA needed to be effective in its duty to protect our Nation, while also finding a way to respond to the public outcry over onerous and invasive search procedures. TSA needed to deal with dissatisfaction within its own ranks, while navigating a tough fiscal environment. We were fortunate when John accepted the President's nomination and was confirmed by the Senate unanimously to this important role.

Under John's exceptional leadership, the TSA has maintained a compelling track record in preventing terrorist attacks against our Nation's transportation networks. The agency has taken a more risk- based approach to security so as to lessen the burden on the average American traveler. Many people point to the TSA's successful PreCheck program, which I signed up for last week, as an example of John's great work. PreCheck is popular because it makes airport security more convenient and predictable, while freeing up TSA resources so the agency can be more focused on high-risk areas.

While John was improving both TSA's effectiveness and the security experience for the traveling public, he was simultaneously focusing on improving the TSA workforce. By exemplifying the traits he expected of his officers, and by taking the time to meet with his workforce and address their concerns, he earned their loyalty.

John took important steps to implement policies that would hold TSA staff accountable, and he also demonstrated that security interests can be safeguarded while allowing officers to unionize. This was a great step forward for officers' labor rights, and has provided a constructive way to handle officers' concerns.

Appointed from outside the organization, John quickly earned the respect of TSA employees, who then supported him in reforming outdated policies. When TSA moved away from its one-size-fits-all approach, his workforce overcame many challenges to implement a more complex risk- based security process. Without the support John earned from TSA employees, that shift would not have been possible. We will always want better security and more convenience for less cost, and John has done better than anyone yet at striking the right balance.

John Pistole has long shone as a beacon of integrity in government service. Today it gives me great pleasure to commend him--and thank him--for his enormous contributions to improving the Nation's security. I am grateful for his service to this country and it is an honor to call him a friend. I wish John and his family the best as he embarks on a new chapter in his distinguished career.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in a seated position.

Madam President, I come to the floor to wholly support the comments of my colleagues, the Senator from California and the Senator from Arizona, to speak about a matter of great importance to me personally but more importantly to the country.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's entire study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program--I will just call it the program-- is the most in-depth, the most substantive oversight initiative the committee has ever taken. I doubt any committee has done more than this. It presents extremely valuable insights into crucial oversight questions and problems that need to be addressed by the CIA.

Moreover, this study exemplifies why this committee was created in the first place following the findings of the Church Committee nearly 40 years ago, and I commend my friend and the committee's leader, the Senator from California, for shepherding this landmark initiative to this point. For years, often behind closed doors, without any recognition, she has been a strong and tireless advocate, and she deserves our thanks and recognition.

It is my hope and expectation that beyond the initial release of the executive summary and findings and conclusions, that the entire 6,800 pages, with 37,500 footnotes, will eventually be made public--and I am sure it will--with the appropriate redactions. Those public findings will be critical to fully learning the necessary lessons from this dark episode in our Nation's history and to ensure that it never happens again. It has been a very long, very hard fight to get to this point. Especially in the early years of the CIA's detention program, it was a struggle for the committee to get the most basic information or any information at all about the program.

The committee's study of the detention and interrogation program is not just the story of the brutal and ill-conceived program itself; this study is also the story of the breakdown in our system of governance that allowed the country to deviate in such a significant and horrific way from our core principles. One of the profound ways that breakdown happened was through the active subversion of meaningful congressional oversight--a theme mirrored in the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program during that same period.

I first learned about some aspects of the CIA's detention and interrogation program in 2003 when I became vice chair of the committee. At that point and for years after, the CIA refused to provide me or anybody else with any additional information about the program. They further refused to notify the full committee about the program's existence. My colleagues will remember there was always the Gang of 4, the Gang of 6, or the Gang of 8. They would take the chairman and vice chairman, take them to the White House, give them a flip chart, 45 minutes for the Vice President, and off he would go. Senator Roberts and I went down by car and were instructed we couldn't talk to each other on the way back from one of those meetings. It was absurd. They refused to do anything to be of assistance.

The briefings I received provided little or no insight into the CIA's program. Questions or followup requests were rejected, and at times I was not allowed to consult with my counsel. I am not a lawyer. There are legal matters involved here. They said we couldn't talk to any of our staff, legal counsel or not, or other members of the committee who knew nothing about this because they had not been informed at all.

It was clear these briefings were not meant to answer any questions but were intended only to provide cover for the administration and the CIA. It was infuriating to me to realize I was part of a box checking exercise that the administration planned to use, and later did use, so they could disingenuously claim they had--in a phrase I will never be able to forget--``fully briefed Congress.''

In the years that followed I fought and lost many battles to obtain credible information about the detention and interrogation program. As vice chair I tried to launch, as has been mentioned, a comprehensive investigation into the program, but that effort was blocked.

Later in 2005, when I fought for access to over 100 specific documents cited in the inspector general report, the CIA refused to cooperate.

The first time the full Senate Intelligence Committee was given any information about this detention program was September 2006. This was years after the program's inception and the same day the President informed the Nation.

The following year when I became chairman, the vice chairman, Kit Bond, and I agreed to push for significant additional access to the program. For heaven's sake, at least allow both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, on a full basis, to be informed about this and also to include our staff's counsel on these matters. We finally actually prevailed and got this access. I think I withheld something from them until they agreed to do that which enabled us to have much-needed hearings on the program, which we proceeded to do.

As chairman, I made sure we scrutinized it from every angle. However, the challenge of getting accurate information from the CIA persisted. It was during this period that the House and Senate considered the 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act and a potential provision that set the Army Field Manual--which is the only way to go--as the standard for the entire American Government, including the CIA. This would have effectively ended the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, a term eerily sanitized in bureaucratic jargon for what, in a number of cases, amounted to torture.

As chairman, I knew the inclusion of the Army Field Manual provision would jeopardize the entire bill. I thought it might bring it down. People would think it was too soft or too radical or whatever, but I was committed to seeing the bill signed into law. In the end, it was an easy decision.

I supported including the provision to end the CIA's program because it was the right thing to do. I did it because Congress needed to send a clear signal that it did not stand by the Bush administration's policy.

The House and Senate went on to pass the bill with bipartisan votes. Although the Bush administration vetoed the bill to preserve its ability to continue these practices, it was an important symbolic moment.

In the same period, I also sent two committee staffers, as our chairwoman has indicated, to begin reviewing cables at the CIA regarding the agency's interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri. I firmly believed we had to review those cables, which are now the only source of important historical information on this subject, because the CIA destroyed its tapes of some of their interrogation sessions. The CIA destroyed those tapes against the explicit direction from the White House and the Director of National Intelligence.

The investigation that began in 2007 grew under Chairman Feinstein's dedication and tremendous leadership into a full study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. The more the committee dug, the more the committee found, and the results we uncovered are both shocking and deeply troubling.

First, the detention and interrogation program was conceived by people who were ignorant of the topic and made it up on the fly based on the untested theories of contractors who had never met a terrorist or conducted a real-world interrogation of any kind.

Second, it was executed by personnel with insufficient linguistic and interrogation training and little, if any, real-world experience.

Moreover, the CIA was aware that some of these personnel had a staggering array of personal and professional failings--enumerated by the committee's chairman--including potentially criminal activity, that should

have disqualified them immediately not only from being interrogators but from being employed by the CIA or anybody in government.

Nevertheless, it was consistently represented that these interrogators were professionalized and carefully vetted--their term-- and that became a part of the hollow legal justification of the entire program.

Third, the program was managed incompetently by senior officials who paid little or no attention to critical details. It was rife with troubling personal and financial conflicts of interest among the small group of the CIA officials and contractors who promoted and defended it. Obviously it was in their interest to do so.

Fourth, as the chairman indicated, the program was physically very severe, far more so than any of us outside the CIA ever knew. Although waterboarding has received the most attention, there were other techniques I personally believe--one in particular--that may have been much worse.

Finally, its results were unclear at best, but it was presented to the White House, the Department of Justice, the Congress, and the media as a silver bullet that was indispensable to saving lives. That was their mantra. In fact, it did not provide the intelligence it was supposed to provide or the CIA argued that it did provide.

To be perfectly clear, these harsh techniques were not approved by anyone ever for the low-bar standard of learning useful information from detainees. These techniques were approved because the Bush officials were told, and therefore believed, that these coercive interrogations were absolutely necessary to elicit intelligence that was unavailable by any other collection method and would save American lives. That was simply not the case.

For me, personally, the arc of this story comprises more than a decade of my 30 years of work in the Senate and one of the hardest fights--I think the hardest fight--I have ever been through. Many of the worst years were during the Bush administration.

However, I did not fully anticipate how hard these last few years would be in this administration to get this summary declassified and to tell the full story of what happened. Indeed, to my great frustration, even after months of endless negotiations, significant aspects of the story remain obscured by black ink.

I have great admiration for the President, and I am appreciative of the leadership role he has taken to depart from the practices of the Bush administration on these issues. His Executive order formally ended the CIA's detention program practices, and that is a good example. It is a great example.

It was, therefore, with deep disappointment that over the course of a number of private meetings and conversations I came to feel that the White House's strong deference to the CIA throughout this process has at times worked at cross-purposes with the White House's stated interest in transparency and has muddied what should be a clear and unequivocal legacy on this issue.

While aspiring to be the most transparent administration in history, this White House continues to quietly withhold from the committee more than 9,000 documents related to the CIA's programs. I don't know why. They won't say, and they won't produce.

In addition to strongly supporting the CIA's insistence on the unprecedented redaction of fake names in the report, which obscures the public's ability to understand the important connections which are so important for weaving together the tapestry, the administration also pushed for the redaction of information in the committee's study that should not be classified, contradicting the administration's own Executive order on classification.

Let me be clear.

That order clearly states that in no case shall information fail to be declassified in order to conceal violations of law and efficiency or administrative error or prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency.

In some instances, the White House asked not only that information be redacted but that the redaction itself be removed so it would be impossible for the reader to tell that something was already hidden. Strange.

Given this, looking back, I am deeply disappointed, rather than surprised, that even when the CIA inexplicably conducted an unauthorized search of the committee's computer files and emails at an offsite facility, which was potentially criminal, and even when it became clear that the intent of the search was to suppress the committee's awareness of an internal CIA review that corroborated parts of the intelligence committee's study and contradicted public CIA statements, the White House continued to support the CIA leadership, and that support was unflinching.

Despite these frustrations, I have also seen how hard Chairman Feinstein has fought against great odds, stubborn odds, protective odds, mysterious odds, which are not really clear to me. I have tried to support her thoughtful and determined efforts at every opportunity to make sure as much as of the story can be told as possible, and I am deeply proud of the product the committee ended up with.

Now it is time to move forward. For all of the misinformation, incompetence, and brutality of the CIA's program, the committee's study is not and must not be simply a backward-looking condemnation of the past. The study presents a tremendous opportunity to develop forward- looking lessons that must be central to all future activities.

The point has been made--I thoroughly agree--that the vast majority of people who work at the CIA--and there are tens and tens of thousands of them--do very good work and are working very hard and have absolutely nothing to do with any of this. But if this report had not been released, the country would have felt that everybody at the CIA-- and the world would have felt it--was involved in this program. It is important to say that that was not the case. It was just 30 or 40 people at the top. Many of the people you see on television blasting this report were intimately involved in carrying it out and setting it up.

The CIA developed the detention program in a time of great fear, anxiety, and unprecedented crisis. It is at these times of crisis when we need sound judgment, excellence, and professionalism from the CIA the most.

When mistakes are made, they call for self-reflection and scrutiny. For that process to begin, we first have to make sure there is an absolutely accurate public record of what happened. We are doing that. The public release of the executive summary and findings and conclusions is a tremendous and consequential step toward that end.

For some, I expect there will be the temptation to reject and cast doubt, to trivialize, to attack or rationalize parts of the study that are disturbing or are embarrassing. Indeed, the CIA program's dramatic divergence from the standards that we hold ourselves to is hard to reconcile. However, we must fight that shortsighted temptation to wish away the gravity of what this study found.

How we deal with this opportunity to learn and improve will reflect on the maturity of our democracy. As a country, we are strong enough to bear the weight of the mistakes we have made. As an institution, so is the Central Intelligence Agency. We must confront this dark period in our recent history with honesty and critical introspection. We must draw lessons, and we must apply those lessons as we move forward. Although it may be uncomfortable at times, ultimately we will grow stronger, and we will ensure that this never happens again.

I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to engage in a colloquy with Senator Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, regarding S. 2520, the FOIA Improvement Act of 2014.

I thank Senator Leahy for attempting to address my concerns about this bill. I thank his committee staff for working with my committee staff to insert clarifying report language.

From the beginning, I have recognized that this bill would make important changes to the Freedom of Information Act. My concerns have been rooted in the possible unintended consequences this bill would have on consumer protection. I was concerned this bill would make it harder for our consumer protection agencies to bring enforcement actions against corporate wrongdoers.

Specifically, I am concerned that requiring government law enforcement agencies to show foreseeable harm that is not ``speculative or abstract'' when invoking FOIA exemptions for attorney-client, work- product, and deliberative process privileges will undermine law enforcement efforts.

Hundreds of years of American legal tradition has generally protected work-product documents and attorney-client communications from the discovery process in civil litigation. Further, the deliberative process privilege has allowed government agencies' law enforcers to freely exchange ideas and legal strategies as part of their internal decision making process.

I am concerned that the bill could have a ``chilling effect'' on internal communications and deliberations of agencies' law enforcement personnel who are preparing law enforcement actions against alleged wrongdoers, in order to avoid the prospect of increased litigation.

We do not want to hinder the robust, internal exchange of rigorous ideas and legal strategies within government agencies when they are bringing enforcement actions.

Given this, courts should review agency law enforcement decisions on the new foreseeable harm standard under an ``abuse of discretion'' standard.

Furthermore, if we are going to potentially burden our government agencies with increased costs that will be associated with complying with the bill, then I think Congress should also provide these agencies with sufficient funding to deal with what is sure to be an increased workload.

While I still have concerns about this bill's effect on consumer protection, I think the accommodation made by Senator Leahy will help. I thank him for inserting clarifying language in the report with regard to this congressional intent on review of information withheld under the foreseeable harm standard.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to give my remarks while seated at my desk.

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

For hours and hours.

Madam President, I come today with a spirit of reflection and optimism about our future. I am also compelled towards an honest assessment of where we are as a body--of the promise of what we can achieve when we don't shy away from compromise and what we can't achieve when we refuse to compromise.

I also have very much on my mind that the job of public service is very hard work, and it is an extremely noble and honorable calling. Here in the U.S. Senate we have the unique ability and responsibility to do very big things: ignite innovation in our schools and industries, grow and protect a healthy country, foster global change borne from policies that lead the globe. At the same time, we have the opportunity to touch individual lives with case management. One on one, with casework, we often reach people in their darkest hour.

I love the Senate. I love the Senate. I love the intensity of the work, the gravity of the issues, and I love fighting for West Virginians here. I learned to love this fight, as many of you know, as a 27-year-old VISTA worker in the tiny coal community of Emmons, WV. It was a place that set my moral compass and gave me direction, where everything in my real life actually began. It is where I learned how little I knew about the problems people faced there and in other places in the country, how little I knew, and what a humbling experience that was for me.

My time there was transformative. It explains every policy I have pursued and every vote I have cast. It was where my beliefs were bolted down and where my passions met my principles. Emmons was where I came to understand that out of our everyday struggles we can enlarge ourselves. We can grow greater. Truly making a difference couldn't be an afterthought. It never could. Rather, it requires a singular focus and relentless effort. It would be hard, but the work mattered. That is the deal here.

Important undertakings can't be halfhearted. You have to commit your whole self--almost like pushing a heavy rock uphill. With both of your hands you push, because if you let up for a split second with either hand, you and the rock go tumbling backwards into the abyss. There is always so much at stake.

Even today in West Virginia too many are struggling. They are fighting to survive. I called them hardworking

when I really should say hard-surviving, but they are hardworking and trying to survive. They are wary of the future. They are scared of their possibilities. Sometimes they are afraid of themselves, which is partly a tradition which says that change is bad, that strangers are bad. I was bad for quite a long time. But that is the way people are. They don't really want to change. So change comes slowly. We just simply fight twice as hard, and nothing stops us.

There is vast dignity and vast honor in helping people. You cannot let go of it. I believe genuinely in the ability of government to do good, to serve, and to right injustices. This is why the Senate must be a place in which we embrace commitment to be deliberative, passionate, and unrelenting. But it must be a place in which we are driven only by the duty and trust bestowed upon us by the people who put us here. This is where everything else should be put aside--boxed out, as it were.

Yes, politics led us here. But this is where we shed the campaign--or should--and embrace our opportunities to lead, to listen, to dig in, to bridge differences, to govern, and to truly make a difference. At our core we must be drawn to the hard, all-consuming policy work that lives in briefings, hearing rooms, and roundtables back in our States. Yet our North Star must always be the real needs of the people we serve.

So policy to me starts with listening. It is seeing the faces of our constituents--not just thinking of a policy in terms of a policy, but a policy in terms of the people whom it would affect. You see your constituents, you hear them out, and you understand their needs and their problems. You get to know them very well, especially in a small State such as West Virginia. Listening to constituents and colleagues here alike is absolutely necessary. Good policy is born out of compromise. Compromise is not easy, but it can happen. If we truly listen to each other, it very well could.

We separate our campaign selves from our public service selves. The cruelty of perpetual campaigns destroys our ability to fulfill our oath of office. It is hard to build a working relationship in this institution without an honest and open approach with our colleagues-- Republican or Democratic. But we must build that relationship because together we can do so much, and without it, we can do--as we have seen--nothing.

Listening and compromise were key to the work of the National Commission on Children in the 1990s. I was the chair of that Commission, which included a bipartisan group of government officials and appointed experts in various fields from all backgrounds. There were many of us--32--and we went all over the country for 2 years.

I can tell you that reaching consensus was tough, but we listened, we debated, and we came to trust. Even the most liberal and conservative among us knew that each of us had the best interests of our party. That was not in dispute.

While meeting in Williamsburg, VA, which was where we had been meeting at the time, I had to leave suddenly for an important Senate vote on Iraq. I handed over the gavel to our most conservative Republican Member, someone in whom I had trust. That shocked people, but it helped on the consensus.

In the end we were proud to vote 32 to 0 in support of the legislation that we put forward and our policy statement as a whole, and it included both policies. It included the creation of a new Republican child tax credit for the first time and a major expansion of the earned-income tax credit, which has lifted millions of American families out of poverty.

It worked because we listened to one another, respected one another, and we wanted to come to an agreement. It was clear, it was obvious, and there it was--32 to 0. Unbelievable, but it happened.

Is that possible these days? My answer is yes, and I believe that we can see that spirit again as we address the future of the bipartisan Children's Health Insurance Program--CHIP, the way it is known. It currently provides health care to 8.3 million children and pregnant women nationwide, and 40,000 of those are in West Virginia. CHIP is so important to me because it offers health care which is tailored to children; to wit, it has both mental and dental health care tailored to children. It is, in fact, better coverage than the Affordable Care Act provides children.

From those early days at Vista, I have seen the devastating toll that lack of medical care can extract from a child's well-being and their health, their self-esteem--particularly their self-esteem--and even their will to succeed.

Many of you also know the names and faces of children who have gone without access to proper health care, and those are the ones we fight for. That is why CHIP has always been a bipartisan effort, driven by the needs of real kids and their families. Senators Grassley and Hatch were instrumental in its creation over a period of a couple years and long arguments, and they continue to be strong advocates.

The bipartisanship program has opened doors for millions who desperately needed to get into a doctor's office and had never been able to do so and now are able to do so.

But a warning--every door that CHIP opened will be closed unless we can agree to carry CHIP funding past mid-2015, and I don't know what the prospects for that are. All I know is that if they aren't done properly, those doors close; those kids had access to doctors, but they don't anymore. That is unconscionable to me. We have to look at the faces of those children in our own States and think about that. It is those individual faces that I remember.

Remembering for whom we work is paramount. When any corporate CEO comes to my office, I show them a prized birthday gift to my four children--our four children--my wife is here--a picture of a hardworking coal miner whose face is honest but hurting and very proud. That picture means so much to me because it embodies the spirit of those whom I am here to serve, and silently reminds us of why we must work towards a common ground--why this is not about Democrats and Republicans, but it is about the people whom we are here to serve, bringing different viewpoints to what that means.

Senator Mike Enzi and I are not on the same side of every vote--to put it mildly--but we are very, very good friends--a friendship that was made years ago when I was serving on the President's HOPE mission and he was the mayor of Gillette, WY, going slightly crazy trying to build houses for all the people moving in there through coal. He also had sideburns. I say that oftentimes--off the record.

On a gray day in January 2006, West Virginia was frozen in disbelief when we learned that 12 trapped miners were killed in Sago Mine--a mine in the north central part of the State.

In the days that followed, as we struggled to make sense of what had happened, Senator Enzi and Senator Isakson joined Senator Kennedy, Senator Manchin, and myself in West Virginia. The first two did not real merely visit--they came to understand. They came to learn. They came to share in the grief and to offer their support to the community, and you could tell that in their faces.

Together, out of tragedy--and because they were members of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee--we forged a compromise on mine safety legislation that brought about, frankly, the strongest safety improvements in a generation. It was huge for us. Only 16 States mine coal, but we are one of them.

To this day, Senator Isakson carries a picture of one of the Sago miners. It is not in the wallet that he is carrying today, but it is in the other wallet back in Atlanta. I don't care where it is, that picture is in his wallet every single day. We knew that, as public officials, compromising and really leading, men govern--which is why we were there.

Answering the needs of our country is our responsibility, and we do the best when we work shoulder to shoulder. It was working shoulder to shoulder when we set our country on a path to future innovation.

A few years ago, America's domination in our innovation--our inventions and creative problem-solving--was eroding, and we all knew it. We needed to act. We needed to reinvigorate our leadership in those areas and to keep our jobs and our future more secure.

We answered that call with a bipartisan compromise that delivered the

America COMPETES Reauthorization Act. I will never forget that. This legislation made historic investments in basic research, science, technology, engineering, and math education.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who preceded John Thune on the commerce committee, Senator Alexander, and I sought unanimous consent to get the bill passed--because we thought we worked out the details pretty well-- and do it prior to the recess. Therefore, we had to do it by unanimous consent. But there were five objections holding the bill still.

Instead of retreating to party corners and pointing fingers, we compromised right on that center aisle--right there next to Senator Collins. We wound it up and down, we added a little money and we took a little bit of money off. Mostly we took several billion dollars off. We removed a couple of programs that weren't absolutely necessary to satisfy Kay Bailey or Lamar Alexander. And we had ourselves a $44 billion bill over 5 years on which we agreed. We didn't have to have a vote. Senator Hutchison and Senator Alexander tenaciously worked to clear the holds. It was absolutely beautiful. It was just beautiful--a $44 billion program to reinvigorate our Nation, cerebrally and productively. Together we passed a bill to revive our country's flagging global performance ranking and catapult us to success. Reaching moments like those requires persistence. It demands collaboration. It demands trust and compromise, and it is so worth it.

I am driven by the process of creating policy. I love doing that. It is grinding, it is intense, it can be frustrating and sometimes heartbreaking--often heartbreaking. But when we accomplish something that is meaningful to the people who have entrusted us to represent them, there is no greater reward.

We have to know who and what we must fight for in our work and in our own personal views. We have to know and understand those who will benefit and those who will lose. And we have to be ready for it to take a long time--much longer than we thought--sometimes 5 years, sometimes 10 years. That makes no difference. You keep at it. You don't let go of it, because if you keep at it, somewhere along some combination of Senators is going to say, yeah, that is OK. And then we get ourselves a bill.

Also we keep in our souls the faces of the people we try to help, the people in my case who were all too often left behind. The Senate must face serious social and policy issues from health care to cyber security, caring for veterans coming home, building up our infrastructure, making our economy work for everyone. These are our core responsibilities. I am proud that we have made some measure of progress. While we seem right now to be at an impasse, I know the Senate will rise to the position of addressing our issues and at some point in some way it will happen. As a governing body, we must not allow recent failures to take root, to mean too much to us. We must not be focused on episodic ``gotcha'' issues rather than working to address broader, more systemic problem solving. No one else is going to step in to do this if we don't.

The truth was on full display a few weeks ago when the Senate failed to move forward on National Security Administration reforms necessary to uphold the mission of protecting our Nation. These are issues on which I have very strong views. I have taken very seriously my 14 years on the Intelligence Committee, as a member and as chairman, because the global threats we face increase daily as the world becomes more connected. We depend on the highly trained professionals at NSA to zero in on those threats. There are only 22 of them that make sort of final decisions. They are highly trained. They have taken the oath of office to protect our Nation.

Now I don't think we have any excuse to outsource our intelligence work to telecommunications firms. I work on the Commerce Committee. I have seen what the telecommunications companies do when they can get away with it--you know, everything from cramming to--just all kinds of not very nice things. It is the job of government to address this issue. The private sector and the free market alone cannot solve those kinds of problems and should not. That is a government responsibility being carried out with great success.

A lot of people say, oh, what if? But the fact is nobody has ever been able to show me somebody whose privacy has been influenced or broken into by the NSA. Good, hard-working people can be destroyed by circumstances beyond their control. It is our job to not let that happen. It is our job to help to give everyone a fair shot. It is much easier to say than to do, but that is our charge.

Too many children come into a world where circumstances preclude the opportunities they should have. We cannot discount the many challenges our society still faces. It is unconscionable in a country like ours that people go without health care or go hungry or have no place to call home.

When shareholders and the free market cannot or will not solve our problems, it is government's responsibility to step in every time. People can decry government all they want, but we are here for a reason. When private companies decide there isn't enough profit to provide Internet to rural areas, then we step in and we expand broadband, allowing the E-Rate to go farther and farther out. It now covers 97 percent of all schools in the country.

Maybe the private sector decides they cannot make enough by insuring the sickest of our children. We must act. That is our core mission. It is who we are as an institution. It is who we must always be.

We have worked to give children a fair shot through the E-Rate Program which introduces the most rural classrooms and the smallest libraries to the world through the Internet, access to a foreign language class or research, but it gives every child a key to unlock their potential. It doesn't mean they will, but it means they can.

We know health care is fundamental to a fair shot as well. We cannot learn or keep a job if we are sick. But providing that care has not always been as profitable as some companies would like. So we make sure millions of Americans could have the dignity of access to health care under the Affordable Care Act.

My friend Sam is one of the faces I will never forget. When he was battling childhood leukemia and hit his lifetime insurance cap--it is a technical term for a savage consequence--his parents' insurance companies walked away from this courageous little fighter. His parents, both schoolteachers, were left with heart-wrenching decisions such as getting divorced--which they considered--so Sam could qualify for Medicaid. Well, in the end it didn't matter; Sam lost his battle with cancer. But today under the Affordable Care Act we have made sure that no insurance companies can abandon someone like Sam when they need help the most. Health care reform will never take away the crushing agony of parents with sick kids. Heartbreaking situations like Sam's drove us to say no more, and we changed the law. Parents deserve to focus every bit of their energy fighting for their kids in every way, not fighting profit-obsessed insurance companies. So we did the right thing. We did the right thing.

Government also did the right thing when I fought for what I thought my life depended on, because it did, to pass the Coal Act of 1992, long forgotten. We had to step in and stop some coal companies from walking away from benefits which they had promised by contract to retired coal miners and their widows--folks who were mostly in their seventies and eighties. Passing the Coal Act was enormously important to our country. It not only prevented in absolute terms a national coal strike in 1993, but it delivered on the promise of lifetime health benefits earned by 200,000 retired coal miners and their widows. They would not have been taken care of if those companies had their way.

Nor can we rely on the private sector alone to take care of our veterans. It is government's duty to provide the health care they earned. We do this through community-based clinics and improved services for PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and family support. It is expensive. Senator Rob Portman and I wanted to pass a bill which would cause the Department of Defense to give all people entering the military mental health screening--not when they came back from Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere else, but before they

went in, and then on an annual basis do that again to build a database, to make sure we knew that we could take care of them better when they came home.

We rightly asked the government to take on some of society's most fundamental needs. What I found in Emmons was a community of genuinely strong and incredibly hard-working people who were essentially on their own trying to survive. The free market had not made sure that communities such as Emmons had good roads or any schools or any schoolbuses or any clean drinking water or safe jobs. But from my point of view they deserved all of those. They deserved to have their shot. Working together on the needs of places such as Emmons speaks to our core human connection and to an aspiration for the greater good.

That is what drove me into public service. It was not something I could help. I just had to do it, to help people with everything that I have. Every individual in every community such as Emmons deserves to have public officials who will fight the big fight and the personal ones, the casework.

Extending a hand on those personal challenges is incredibly meaningful work. Our constituents face these fights with Herculean courage but not always the resources to solve the problems in front of them. People like the 8-year-old who needed a bone marrow transplant, a procedure that in 1990 was considered experimental. Our office intervened. We helped that boy get that transplant and he still lives today. As a Senator, you take on those fights with the same vigor as any policy or ideological debate and you are equally proud when you win and you are equally hurt when you lose.

When I came to West Virginia 50 years ago, I was searching for a clear purpose for my life's work. I wanted the work to be really hard, and what I got was an opportunity to work really hard along with a real and utterly spiritual sense of mission. This work demands and deserves nothing less than everything that we have to give.

I will miss the Senate. Some days I don't want to leave, but it is time, which brings me to some profoundly important notes of gratitude.

To my colleagues, I say thank you.

I have mentioned some. I could mention so many. You are dedicated, you are brilliant, and you are public servants. I love you for putting up with what you have to, particularly the way elections are these days. I respect you for it so much. Thank you for fighting alongside me. Thank you for challenging me.

To my staff, a Senator is really nothing without his staff or her staff, and there is not a more committed, talented, and deeply passionate staff in the United States Senate. To my staff, you live and you breathe your work everyday. You inspire me with your endless capacity for redressing injustice and fighting for people who need you and come to you in need. You never turned a single West Virginian away. I glory in my gratitude to you.

To my family, who has sacrificed so much, I thank you. I have been selfish in my devotion to my work, and I have been vastly inept in balancing family and work. Public service is not encouraging of balance.

Sharon, you are everything--an extraordinary mother, a remarkable businesswoman, and you are a public servant. You have been a visionary in public broadcasting. Our entire Nation is indebted to your efforts to educate and inform us. The impact you continue to make on public life is truly remarkable. Any achievement I am proud of I share with you eternally.

(Applause, Senators rising)

Our children--John, Valerie, Charles, and Justin--have all been very thoughtful and endlessly supportive in my absences. Our grandchildren bring me so much joy, and I really hope to see a lot more of them.

To West Virginia, thank you for placing your faith in me--I know it was hard at first--and giving me the greatest reward: the chance to fight for meaningful and lasting opportunity for those who were too often forgotten but absolutely deserve the best.

My fellow West Virginians, I am forever inspired by you, and I am forever transformed by you.

I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

(Applause, Senators rising.)

Mr. President, today, I rise to reintroduce the Incentives to Educate American Children, or I TEACH, Act of 2014. With teacher retention rates on a steady decline nationwide, it is my hope that this legislation will encourage our best and brightest teachers to remain in the classroom.

In the past two decades, the number of years of experience for the average teacher has decreased from 15 years to 5 years. Almost half of our education workforce today has less than ten years of experience. This is partly because teachers continue to be paid less than those employed in other fields, earning approximately 79 percent of the average wage of other workers with a bachelor's degree. In addition, their salaries have remained static since 2009, with the average starting salary for a new teacher estimated at just $36,141. At the same time, college debt levels continue to increase. The average student graduating in 2014 had $33,000 worth of student debt, making it difficult for young, eager graduates to pursue a career in teaching while paying down student loans and other living expenses.

No dedicated young person should have to decide that they simply cannot ``afford'' to be a teacher, but this happens. If passed, the I TEACH Act would invest in our most critical educators by providing a $1,000 refundable tax credit to teachers serving in rural or high poverty schools. It would also provide every teacher, regardless of school or district, the chance to earn a $1,000 refundable tax credit if they receive accreditation from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. This means that a National Board Teacher in a rural or high poverty school would be eligible to receive $2,000 in refundable tax credits.

In doing so, the I TEACH Act will provide meaningful incentives to teachers willing to serve in rural or high poverty schools, as well as rewarding quality teachers for staying in the classroom and continuing their professional development by earning National Board certification. Today, the majority of States see the value in this effort, providing some type of financial incentive to National Board certified teachers, and this refundable tax credit will work in tandem with those efforts. My home State of West Virginia, for example, offers a $3,500 bonus for National Board teachers. If I TEACH is enacted, a National Board teacher in my State would receive a nearly 12 percent bonus. That is a clear sign of appreciation for their hard work and a meaningful incentive to continue teaching.

Our teachers are among the most important members of our society. They inspire and educate our children, preparing the next generation for success. They deserve our respect and full support, and that is why I urge my colleagues to work with me to enact I TEACH and invest in our children's education.

Mr. President, today, I rise to reintroduce the Incentives to Educate American Children, or I TEACH, Act of 2014. With teacher retention rates on a steady decline nationwide, it is my hope that this legislation will encourage our best and brightest teachers to remain in the classroom.

In the past two decades, the number of years of experience for the average teacher has decreased from 15 years to 5 years. Almost half of our education workforce today has less than ten years of experience. This is partly because teachers continue to be paid less than those employed in other fields, earning approximately 79 percent of the average wage of other workers with a bachelor's degree. In addition, their salaries have remained static since 2009, with the average starting salary for a new teacher estimated at just $36,141. At the same time, college debt levels continue to increase. The average student graduating in 2014 had $33,000 worth of student debt, making it difficult for young, eager graduates to pursue a career in teaching while paying down student loans and other living expenses.

No dedicated young person should have to decide that they simply cannot ``afford'' to be a teacher, but this happens. If passed, the I TEACH Act would invest in our most critical educators by providing a $1,000 refundable tax credit to teachers serving in rural or high poverty schools. It would also provide every teacher, regardless of school or district, the chance to earn a $1,000 refundable tax credit if they receive accreditation from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. This means that a National Board Teacher in a rural or high poverty school would be eligible to receive $2,000 in refundable tax credits.

In doing so, the I TEACH Act will provide meaningful incentives to teachers willing to serve in rural or high poverty schools, as well as rewarding quality teachers for staying in the classroom and continuing their professional development by earning National Board certification. Today, the majority of States see the value in this effort, providing some type of financial incentive to National Board certified teachers, and this refundable tax credit will work in tandem with those efforts. My home State of West Virginia, for example, offers a $3,500 bonus for National Board teachers. If I TEACH is enacted, a National Board teacher in my State would receive a nearly 12 percent bonus. That is a clear sign of appreciation for their hard work and a meaningful incentive to continue teaching.

Our teachers are among the most important members of our society. They inspire and educate our children, preparing the next generation for success. They deserve our respect and full support, and that is why I urge my colleagues to work with me to enact I TEACH and invest in our children's education.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Mother's Day Commemorative Coin Act. I am proud to be joined by Senator Manchin in this important effort.

Mother's Day is a special event for all West Virginians because this annual tribute to mothers began in our state. In 1908, a West Virginia woman by the name of Anna Jarvis petitioned her local church to declare May 9th as Mother's Day. She hoped that this holiday would serve as a day to remember and honor our mothers, and to promote peace and understanding. Within a year, all 46 States celebrated Mother's Day in some fashion, and in 1914, Congress and the President declared the second Sunday of May ``Mother's Day.'' This May 9 will mark the centennial for the national recognition of Mother's Day, and this bill provides an opportunity to commemorate this important holiday and further recognize the

millions of American mothers whose essential role in all of our lives canna be overstated.

The legislation I am introducing today would recognize Mother's Day by authorizing the Treasury to mint a commemorative Mother's Day coin. Profits generated from the sale of these coins would be donated to the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the National Osteoporosis Foundation. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has advanced cures for catastrophic pediatric diseases through research and treatment; and the National Osteoporosis Foundation is considered our Nation's leading voluntary health organization.

In the U.S. alone, 10 million people have osteoporosis, and 80 percent of those who suffer from this disease are women. This legislation not only honors our nation's mothers, but also helps to raise funds to fight a serious disease that disproportionately impacts women. Thousands of mothers and their children have benefited from the efforts of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the National Osteoporosis Foundation, and they are well-deserving of our support. Therefore, I encourage my colleagues to support this legislation to honor every mother in our country.

I can think of no better way to celebrate Mother's Day than by helping to promote the health of American mothers and their children.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Mother's Day Commemorative Coin Act. I am proud to be joined by Senator Manchin in this important effort.

Mother's Day is a special event for all West Virginians because this annual tribute to mothers began in our state. In 1908, a West Virginia woman by the name of Anna Jarvis petitioned her local church to declare May 9th as Mother's Day. She hoped that this holiday would serve as a day to remember and honor our mothers, and to promote peace and understanding. Within a year, all 46 States celebrated Mother's Day in some fashion, and in 1914, Congress and the President declared the second Sunday of May ``Mother's Day.'' This May 9 will mark the centennial for the national recognition of Mother's Day, and this bill provides an opportunity to commemorate this important holiday and further recognize the

millions of American mothers whose essential role in all of our lives canna be overstated.

The legislation I am introducing today would recognize Mother's Day by authorizing the Treasury to mint a commemorative Mother's Day coin. Profits generated from the sale of these coins would be donated to the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the National Osteoporosis Foundation. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has advanced cures for catastrophic pediatric diseases through research and treatment; and the National Osteoporosis Foundation is considered our Nation's leading voluntary health organization.

In the U.S. alone, 10 million people have osteoporosis, and 80 percent of those who suffer from this disease are women. This legislation not only honors our nation's mothers, but also helps to raise funds to fight a serious disease that disproportionately impacts women. Thousands of mothers and their children have benefited from the efforts of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the National Osteoporosis Foundation, and they are well-deserving of our support. Therefore, I encourage my colleagues to support this legislation to honor every mother in our country.

I can think of no better way to celebrate Mother's Day than by helping to promote the health of American mothers and their children.

Mr. President, today I am introducing two bills, S. 2287 and S. 2288, to help advance commercial deployment of clean coal technologies. The Carbon Capture and Sequestration Deployment Act of 2014 and the Expanding Carbon Capture through Enhanced Oil Recovery Act of 2014. These pieces of legislation would invest in carbon capture and sequestration, CCS, research and development; expand tax credits for companies investing in CCS technologies; and create loan guarantees for construction of new CCS facilities and retrofits of existing facilities.

As I have said many times before, the reality remains for West Virginia and our Nation--we need coal and we simply cannot meet our energy demands without coal.

That being said, it is unrealistic to think that coal is as clean as it could be, or that it will be around forever. Yet to think that we can stop burning coal and shift to cleaner sources of energy immediately is simply not viable. We must place our focus on a feasible alternative, and carbon capture and sequestration technologies can provide just that.

The legislation I am introducing today combines several of my proposals in past years with new ideas for improving CCS deployment, including an expansion of tax credits for companies utilizing and improving upon CCS technology.

The Carbon Capture and Sequestration Deployment Act of 2014 would authorize $1 billion over 15 years for an industry-government research program through the Department of Energy and authorize $20 billion in loan guarantees to be used for the construction or retrofitting of facilities utilizing CCS technology, and for the construction of CO2 transmission pipelines. Moreover, it modifies the existing Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Tax Credit, 45Q, currently capped and available on a first come-first served basis, by allowing projects to apply for an allocation of credits to use in the future, and ensuring that multiple projects will have the opportunity to take advantage of these important credits. Finally, it creates a new investment tax credit. Carbon capture and sequestration facilities that operate with at least a 65 percent capture rate would receive an investment tax credit of 15 percent of their costs. Those operating with a higher capture rate, up to 100 percent of CO2 emissions, would receive a maximum credit of 30 percent of their costs.

The second piece of legislation, the Expanding Carbon Capture through Enhanced Oil Recovery Act of 2014, expands the Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Tax Credit, 45Q, tax credit to help advance capture technology through the greater use of carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery, CO2- EOR, in the United States.

A decades-old and proven practice, CO2-EOR involves injecting CO2 into already-developed oil fields to coax additional production. According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory, increasing the supply of CO2 captured from man- made sources has the potential to increase American oil production by tens of billions of barrels, while safely storing billions of tons of CO2 underground.

The existing 45Q tax credit remains insufficient to take advantage of CO2-EOR's potential. New, additional 45Q credits would be awarded via competitive bidding in a way that will make certain that the government is incentivizing carbon capture to be used in EOR without overpaying, and that credits are available and sufficient for the range of potential man-made sources of CO2.

According to the National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative's analysis, new 45Q credits allocated over ten years would generate more than 8 billion barrels of oil, while storing 4 billion tons of CO2 over 40 years.

I remain committed to meeting the challenges facing the coal industry while also protecting our environment for current and future generations. I hope that others with a stake in meeting coal's challenges will join me in this effort as well.

Mr. President, today I am introducing two bills, S. 2287 and S. 2288, to help advance commercial deployment of clean coal technologies. The Carbon Capture and Sequestration Deployment Act of 2014 and the Expanding Carbon Capture through Enhanced Oil Recovery Act of 2014. These pieces of legislation would invest in carbon capture and sequestration, CCS, research and development; expand tax credits for companies investing in CCS technologies; and create loan guarantees for construction of new CCS facilities and retrofits of existing facilities.

As I have said many times before, the reality remains for West Virginia and our Nation--we need coal and we simply cannot meet our energy demands without coal.

That being said, it is unrealistic to think that coal is as clean as it could be, or that it will be around forever. Yet to think that we can stop burning coal and shift to cleaner sources of energy immediately is simply not viable. We must place our focus on a feasible alternative, and carbon capture and sequestration technologies can provide just that.

The legislation I am introducing today combines several of my proposals in past years with new ideas for improving CCS deployment, including an expansion of tax credits for companies utilizing and improving upon CCS technology.

The Carbon Capture and Sequestration Deployment Act of 2014 would authorize $1 billion over 15 years for an industry-government research program through the Department of Energy and authorize $20 billion in loan guarantees to be used for the construction or retrofitting of facilities utilizing CCS technology, and for the construction of CO2 transmission pipelines. Moreover, it modifies the existing Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Tax Credit, 45Q, currently capped and available on a first come-first served basis, by allowing projects to apply for an allocation of credits to use in the future, and ensuring that multiple projects will have the opportunity to take advantage of these important credits. Finally, it creates a new investment tax credit. Carbon capture and sequestration facilities that operate with at least a 65 percent capture rate would receive an investment tax credit of 15 percent of their costs. Those operating with a higher capture rate, up to 100 percent of CO2 emissions, would receive a maximum credit of 30 percent of their costs.

The second piece of legislation, the Expanding Carbon Capture through Enhanced Oil Recovery Act of 2014, expands the Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Tax Credit, 45Q, tax credit to help advance capture technology through the greater use of carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery, CO2- EOR, in the United States.

A decades-old and proven practice, CO2-EOR involves injecting CO2 into already-developed oil fields to coax additional production. According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory, increasing the supply of CO2 captured from man- made sources has the potential to increase American oil production by tens of billions of barrels, while safely storing billions of tons of CO2 underground.

The existing 45Q tax credit remains insufficient to take advantage of CO2-EOR's potential. New, additional 45Q credits would be awarded via competitive bidding in a way that will make certain that the government is incentivizing carbon capture to be used in EOR without overpaying, and that credits are available and sufficient for the range of potential man-made sources of CO2.

According to the National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative's analysis, new 45Q credits allocated over ten years would generate more than 8 billion barrels of oil, while storing 4 billion tons of CO2 over 40 years.

I remain committed to meeting the challenges facing the coal industry while also protecting our environment for current and future generations. I hope that others with a stake in meeting coal's challenges will join me in this effort as well.

Mr. President, for the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation I report favorably the following nomination lists which were printed in the Records on the dates indicated, and ask unanimous consent, to save the expense of reprinting on the Executive

Calendar that these nominations lie at the Secretary's desk for the information of Senators.

Madam President, I wish to speak about the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. I am joined on the floor today by my friend Senator Baucus, the Chairman of the Finance Committee, to stress the program's importance.

Today CHIP provides health coverage to over 37,000 children in West Virginia and over 8 million children across the United States in working families who cannot afford private health insurance. These kids deserve a healthy start in life. They are our future leaders and decisionmakers. They deserve the opportunities this program provides.

I agree with Senator Baucus. Without the funds to run this program, millions of children will lose health care coverage. Before CHIP was established in 1997, 23 percent of low-income children were uninsured. Today, according to the Urban Institute, that number has dropped to 12.8 percent. I believe that number should be zero; no child should be without access to the coverage they need to grow up healthy and happy. Thanks to this program and other sources of coverage, we are on our way to achieving

full coverage: more than 9 out of 10 American children now are insured.

Studies have shown that children enrolled in CHIP have demonstrated improvements in their ability to pay attention in class, school attendance, reading scores, and participation in school and childhood activities.

Our efforts are working but we must do more. We must continue to work to enroll kids who are eligible but not yet covered. We must ensure that funding for this essential lifeline for families does not expire. I, too, regret I will no longer be in the Senate in 2015 to continue this work. That is why I hope that we can solve the problem this year, and I am very glad my good friend, the senior Senator from Montana, and I could come to the floor today to deliver this important message.

Mr. President, today, I am introducing the Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 2014. I introduce this bill with my good friend, Senator Feinstein, Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as well as Senators Pryor and Nelson, valued Subcommittee Chairmen on the Senate Commerce Committee. I want to express my particular gratitude to Senator Pryor for his work on this issue. He has long been the champion of data security legislation on the Commerce Committee, and his well-known commitment and expertise on this issue, as well as his support of our current bill, have proven to be indispensable.

While the recent breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus have made headlines, these breaches are nothing new. Data breaches have happened before, and they will inevitably occur in the future. Understanding this, there is much more that can be done to prevent breaches and, when they occur, respond to them.

Similarly, the concepts in today's bill are not new and have been considered by Congress before. The bill that Senators Feinstein, Pryor, Nelson, and I introduce today is not a significant departure from the bill that Senator Pryor and I introduced in the past two Congresses. Like the earlier bills, it is predicated on basic principles: companies should adopt strong security protocols to protect consumers' personal information; they should quickly notify affected consumers in the event of a breach; and the Federal Trade Commission, FTC, and State attorneys general should be empowered to fully enforce the law. With those principles as a framework, the bill we introduce today has four key elements.

First, it directs the FTC to promulgate rules establishing robust data security protocols that companies and nonprofits must adopt when collecting and storing consumers' personal information. These rules will be strong, but they will also be flexible. We recognize that security measures for a large multi-billion-dollar corporation may not be appropriate for a small business. As such, the Commission is required to consider the impact on small businesses and other mitigating factors in developing its rules.

Second, the bill requires breached companies to notify affected consumers unless there is no reasonable risk of identity theft, fraud, or other unlawful conduct. In so doing, the breached company must also provide those consumers with free credit reports. If companies adopt advanced technologies that render their personal data unreadable, indecipherable, or otherwise unusable, there is a rebuttable presumption that no risk to consumers exists. The FTC, in consultation with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, shall establish guidelines identifying the technologies that would qualify for this rebuttable presumption.

Third, the bill will establish a two-pronged enforcement system, whereby the FTC and state Attorneys General are afforded not only traditional equitable remedies but civil penalty authority as well. Moreover, the bill makes it a criminal offense for anyone to knowingly conceal a data breach.

Lastly, our bill will require companies to report data breaches to a designated Federal government entity as established by the Department of Homeland Security. This entity will serve as a central repository for information on all data breaches of a certain magnitude and will, in turn, notify other relevant Federal and law enforcement agencies, such as the Department of Justice, Secret Service, FTC, and affected State Attorneys General.

I would like to note that, while the impetus behind introducing this bill is to provide consumers with the strongest protections possible, the bill will also provide businesses with regulatory certainty-- something they currently lack. Our bill will finally codify into regulation what the FTC is already doing; that is, the Commission has a long history of bringing enforcement

actions against companies for negligent data security practices as violations of the FTC Act's broad prohibition against ``unfair or deceptive acts or practices.'' Indeed, the Commission is currently embroiled in numerous data breach cases. The FTC's new data security rules mandated by our bill will finally provide more explicit detail to industry regarding the rules of the road. Importantly, the bill will create one set of Federal rules; it will preempt State laws with regard to data security and breach notification so that companies no longer have to operate under a patchwork of differing state laws.

Notwithstanding my frustration over Congress's decade-long failure to pass meaningful data security legislation, I remain hopeful that this year will be different. The American public is demanding that we do something about a problem that is only getting worse. As I noted earlier in my remarks, there will be more data breaches in the future-- it is inevitable. And the consequences are not trivial. Not only do these data breaches impose potentially devastating financial consequences on consumers who are victimized by identity theft and other financial fraud, these breaches also threaten basic consumer privacy. Companies continue to collect, aggregate, and house an unfathomable amount of personal information about all of us. These same companies must guard that information with the highest of security standards. While I am not naive to think our bill will prevent all data breaches of the future, I am confident that it will go a long way towards pushing companies to do more--much more. And it will finally provide consumers with peace of mind that--when a breach does occur-- they will be notified as soon as possible so they may take the necessary steps to protect themselves.

I thank Senators Feinstein, Pryor, and Nelson for helping me on this important bill.

Mr. President, today, I am introducing the Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 2014. I introduce this bill with my good friend, Senator Feinstein, Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as well as Senators Pryor and Nelson, valued Subcommittee Chairmen on the Senate Commerce Committee. I want to express my particular gratitude to Senator Pryor for his work on this issue. He has long been the champion of data security legislation on the Commerce Committee, and his well-known commitment and expertise on this issue, as well as his support of our current bill, have proven to be indispensable.

While the recent breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus have made headlines, these breaches are nothing new. Data breaches have happened before, and they will inevitably occur in the future. Understanding this, there is much more that can be done to prevent breaches and, when they occur, respond to them.

Similarly, the concepts in today's bill are not new and have been considered by Congress before. The bill that Senators Feinstein, Pryor, Nelson, and I introduce today is not a significant departure from the bill that Senator Pryor and I introduced in the past two Congresses. Like the earlier bills, it is predicated on basic principles: companies should adopt strong security protocols to protect consumers' personal information; they should quickly notify affected consumers in the event of a breach; and the Federal Trade Commission, FTC, and State attorneys general should be empowered to fully enforce the law. With those principles as a framework, the bill we introduce today has four key elements.

First, it directs the FTC to promulgate rules establishing robust data security protocols that companies and nonprofits must adopt when collecting and storing consumers' personal information. These rules will be strong, but they will also be flexible. We recognize that security measures for a large multi-billion-dollar corporation may not be appropriate for a small business. As such, the Commission is required to consider the impact on small businesses and other mitigating factors in developing its rules.

Second, the bill requires breached companies to notify affected consumers unless there is no reasonable risk of identity theft, fraud, or other unlawful conduct. In so doing, the breached company must also provide those consumers with free credit reports. If companies adopt advanced technologies that render their personal data unreadable, indecipherable, or otherwise unusable, there is a rebuttable presumption that no risk to consumers exists. The FTC, in consultation with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, shall establish guidelines identifying the technologies that would qualify for this rebuttable presumption.

Third, the bill will establish a two-pronged enforcement system, whereby the FTC and state Attorneys General are afforded not only traditional equitable remedies but civil penalty authority as well. Moreover, the bill makes it a criminal offense for anyone to knowingly conceal a data breach.

Lastly, our bill will require companies to report data breaches to a designated Federal government entity as established by the Department of Homeland Security. This entity will serve as a central repository for information on all data breaches of a certain magnitude and will, in turn, notify other relevant Federal and law enforcement agencies, such as the Department of Justice, Secret Service, FTC, and affected State Attorneys General.

I would like to note that, while the impetus behind introducing this bill is to provide consumers with the strongest protections possible, the bill will also provide businesses with regulatory certainty-- something they currently lack. Our bill will finally codify into regulation what the FTC is already doing; that is, the Commission has a long history of bringing enforcement

actions against companies for negligent data security practices as violations of the FTC Act's broad prohibition against ``unfair or deceptive acts or practices.'' Indeed, the Commission is currently embroiled in numerous data breach cases. The FTC's new data security rules mandated by our bill will finally provide more explicit detail to industry regarding the rules of the road. Importantly, the bill will create one set of Federal rules; it will preempt State laws with regard to data security and breach notification so that companies no longer have to operate under a patchwork of differing state laws.

Notwithstanding my frustration over Congress's decade-long failure to pass meaningful data security legislation, I remain hopeful that this year will be different. The American public is demanding that we do something about a problem that is only getting worse. As I noted earlier in my remarks, there will be more data breaches in the future-- it is inevitable. And the consequences are not trivial. Not only do these data breaches impose potentially devastating financial consequences on consumers who are victimized by identity theft and other financial fraud, these breaches also threaten basic consumer privacy. Companies continue to collect, aggregate, and house an unfathomable amount of personal information about all of us. These same companies must guard that information with the highest of security standards. While I am not naive to think our bill will prevent all data breaches of the future, I am confident that it will go a long way towards pushing companies to do more--much more. And it will finally provide consumers with peace of mind that--when a breach does occur-- they will be notified as soon as possible so they may take the necessary steps to protect themselves.

I thank Senators Feinstein, Pryor, and Nelson for helping me on this important bill.