Floor Statements

Madam President, is this controlled time?

The Senator, my colleague, is able to speak on Republican time, I believe.

If he wants to go first, I am happy for him to go ahead.

I thank my colleague.

I thank my colleague for his courtesy. I am perfectly happy to wait and listen to his comments.

We have a sort of Alphonse and Gaston thing going back and forth.

Madam President, I thank Chairman Leahy for his work on the Judiciary Committee in helping bring this nomination to the floor, and, obviously, Senator Brown and I are here, having worked together to choose this nominee and to send his name to the White House. We are very grateful, both of us, to President Obama for acting favorably on this nonpartisan recommendation which we made, and we are grateful to the other members of the Judiciary Committee who approved the nomination and brought it to the floor expeditiously so we can fill a very important vacancy in Massachusetts.

I think both of us believe the President could not have nominated a more qualified individual than Judge Hillman. He is already a judge, as we know, but a broad segment of the judicial community in Massachusetts agrees with us completely. Senator Brown and I agreed on a team made up of some of the top lawyers in our State who would get together and screen these candidates before we even view them, and so this candidate comes with the endorsement of the Massachusetts Bar Association, the Worcester Bar Association, the Hampden Bar Association, and the backing of this nonpartisan search committee that gave us several names to evaluate. We sat down and interviewed the judges, and I think both of us are extremely pleased with the results.

In Judge Hillman, we see what President Obama has recognized--a thoughtful, fair, honest jurist who has a long record of public service as counsel to several municipalities in Massachusetts and as a magistrate judge in Worcester.

There is not going to be any learning curve for Judge Hillman if he is confirmed by the Senate this afternoon. Serving on the District Court in Worcester would be an enormous capstone to his decades of tireless public service, and I know he will bring his signature brand of thoughtful deliberation to the Worcester District. I am very grateful for his many years of public service.

As the current Presiding Officer of the Senate knows, having been a former Governor who has made her own nominations, it is tough to get lawyers nowadays who are willing to give up the compensation of the private sector to come and work for very little in a tireless public way. So I wish to recognize Judge Hillman's family--his wife Kay, and his children Zachary, Molly, and Patrick--for their contributions toward his ability to be able to share his life in public service with all of us.

I ask my colleagues to support his nomination this afternoon, Judge Timothy Hillman, to the U.S. District Court of Worcester, MA.

I yield to my colleague.

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

Madam President, I believe there is a vote due at this hour, is there not? I ask for the yeas and nays with respect to the Hillman nomination.

Madam President, this would be the first time Congress has ever interfered in an FDA-based, science-based approval process. If we open that, we would be opening an extraordinary can of worms.

I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment.

Mr. President, as we recognize May as National Foster Care Month, we should take a minute to think about what foster care means for children in America. We currently have over 408,000 children in our foster care system due to abuse or neglect by their biological families, with 107,000 as eligible for adoption. Every year nearly 28,000 of these children age out of our foster care system with no place to call home. On average, foster children spend over 3 years in the system and around 16 percent languish in the foster care system for over 5 years. These numbers are a stark reminder that we must do more to connect children in our foster care system with a safe, loving, and permanent home.

I have worked with my colleague Senator Grassley on a bipartisan bill that will provide supplemental funds to programs that directly impact children in our foster care system. The Families for Foster Youth Stamp Act will provide additional funding for the Court Improvement Program and the Adoption Opportunities Program by giving an easy option for individuals to pay a few cents more for their postage stamps if they choose to.

By providing a boost in resources to the Court Improvement Program, states can enhance their capacity to serve children in the system, build upon best practices, and improve the quality of representation our children receive. Funds going to the Adoption Opportunities Program will support programs that target improvement in permanency outcomes for youth in foster care through adoption, guardianship, or kinship care. We know that youth who are served by effective programs targeting permanent placement options have shown to be more likely to find a forever family than the national average. No teenager should exit our foster care system alone, facing possible homelessness and without the type of support system that only a family can provide. The Families for Foster Youth Stamp Act provides a unique funding option to supplement programs that make a real and tangible difference in the lives of our most at-risk children.

A number of organizations are supportive of this bill, including the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, Children's Action Network, Children's Advocacy Institute, Child Welfare League of America, First Focus Campaign for Children, Foster Club, National Association of Council for Children, National Children's Alliance, National Council for Adoption, Northwest Adoption Exchange, The Adoption Exchange, and Voice for Adoption.

I would like to recognize Senators Grassley, Landrieu, Cardin, Wyden, and Cochran as original cosponsors of this bill. I look forward to continued progress in developing a more effective child welfare system and ask all of my colleagues to support this important legislation.

Mr. President, as we recognize May as National Foster Care Month, we should take a minute to think about what foster care means for children in America. We currently have over 408,000 children in our foster care system due to abuse or neglect by their biological families, with 107,000 as eligible for adoption. Every year nearly 28,000 of these children age out of our foster care system with no place to call home. On average, foster children spend over 3 years in the system and around 16 percent languish in the foster care system for over 5 years. These numbers are a stark reminder that we must do more to connect children in our foster care system with a safe, loving, and permanent home.

I have worked with my colleague Senator Grassley on a bipartisan bill that will provide supplemental funds to programs that directly impact children in our foster care system. The Families for Foster Youth Stamp Act will provide additional funding for the Court Improvement Program and the Adoption Opportunities Program by giving an easy option for individuals to pay a few cents more for their postage stamps if they choose to.

By providing a boost in resources to the Court Improvement Program, states can enhance their capacity to serve children in the system, build upon best practices, and improve the quality of representation our children receive. Funds going to the Adoption Opportunities Program will support programs that target improvement in permanency outcomes for youth in foster care through adoption, guardianship, or kinship care. We know that youth who are served by effective programs targeting permanent placement options have shown to be more likely to find a forever family than the national average. No teenager should exit our foster care system alone, facing possible homelessness and without the type of support system that only a family can provide. The Families for Foster Youth Stamp Act provides a unique funding option to supplement programs that make a real and tangible difference in the lives of our most at-risk children.

A number of organizations are supportive of this bill, including the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, Children's Action Network, Children's Advocacy Institute, Child Welfare League of America, First Focus Campaign for Children, Foster Club, National Association of Council for Children, National Children's Alliance, National Council for Adoption, Northwest Adoption Exchange, The Adoption Exchange, and Voice for Adoption.

I would like to recognize Senators Grassley, Landrieu, Cardin, Wyden, and Cochran as original cosponsors of this bill. I look forward to continued progress in developing a more effective child welfare system and ask all of my colleagues to support this important legislation.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, today I am introducing the Vocational and Technical Entrepreneurship Development Act to provide critically needed support to help expand entrepreneurship education programs for young adults. At a time when young adults ages 18 24 face an unemployment rate of approximately twice the national average, it is more important than ever to provide additional resources to help them start their own business. Young entrepreneurs need our help to give them the skills necessary to turn their passion into a successful career.

The Vocational and Technical Entrepreneurship Development Act provides support through small business development centers for high schools, technical schools, and nonprofit organizations serving young adults to develop and implement entrepreneurship education programs. Entrepreneurs who have access to business education programs are more likely to succeed, which often translates to jobs not only for them but for their communities as well. Small businesses are the engine of our economy and the ingenuity of young American entrepreneurs will continue to help drive our economic growth in the future. It is critical that we do everything possible to support our young entrepreneurs and harness their great ideas today that will turn into jobs tomorrow. I ask my colleagues to support job growth and the entrepreneurs who are the future of our economy by supporting this legislation.

Mr. President, today I am introducing the Vocational and Technical Entrepreneurship Development Act to provide critically needed support to help expand entrepreneurship education programs for young adults. At a time when young adults ages 18 24 face an unemployment rate of approximately twice the national average, it is more important than ever to provide additional resources to help them start their own business. Young entrepreneurs need our help to give them the skills necessary to turn their passion into a successful career.

The Vocational and Technical Entrepreneurship Development Act provides support through small business development centers for high schools, technical schools, and nonprofit organizations serving young adults to develop and implement entrepreneurship education programs. Entrepreneurs who have access to business education programs are more likely to succeed, which often translates to jobs not only for them but for their communities as well. Small businesses are the engine of our economy and the ingenuity of young American entrepreneurs will continue to help drive our economic growth in the future. It is critical that we do everything possible to support our young entrepreneurs and harness their great ideas today that will turn into jobs tomorrow. I ask my colleagues to support job growth and the entrepreneurs who are the future of our economy by supporting this legislation.

Mr. President, I would like to congratulate Professor James Olesen from the Department of Music at Brandeis University, the winner of the 2012 Festival of the Creative Arts Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Arts.

The Festival, which began in 1952, celebrates the idea that ``art activates dreams, revolution, and the future,'' and Professor Olesen's career is certainly deserving of this special recognition amid the creativity and community of the Festival that blooms on the Brandeis campus every spring.

Professor Olesen has spent his career striving for excellence and fostering musical greatness in his students as the Choral Director at Brandeis since 1972. He has served as Music Department Chair and collaborated with faculty members and other departments on various music programs. He was instrumental in the creation of the Office of the Arts and School of Creative Arts.

Throughout his long and illustrious career, Professor Olesen has sung as a professional chorister with numerous conductors, including Charles Munch, Gustav Meier, Leopold Stowkowski and the founder of the Festival, the legendary Leonard Bernstein.

Professor Olesen also has performed with premier musical organizations including the American Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Robert Shaw Chorale and the American Ballet Theater at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera.

Professor Olesen has also recorded for Columbia, RCA and Decca Records. He is former Director of the Back Bay Chorale and founded and directed the Orpheus Singers. In 2008, the University Chorus, under his direction, made the first international tour by any Brandeis student music ensemble.

His career reflects Mr. Bernstein's belief that ``the art of an era is a reflection of the society in which it is produced, and through creative endeavors the thoughts and expression which characterize each generation are revealed and transformed.''

I congratulate Professor Olesen on this wonderful achievement, thank him for his service to our young people, and salute all that he's accomplished.

Mr. President, what is the parliamentary situation?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be permitted to proceed as in morning business.

Mr. President, later I want to speak for a few minutes about our colleague Senator Lugar.

First, I want to comment about what the Senator from Wyoming was saying on the health bill.

Very quickly, I could not disagree more with the Senator from Wyoming in his comments with respect to the health care bill. This morning we had a meeting with Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who was outlining to us all of the gains we are making with respect to health care in America as a result of the legislation.

What is interesting is that our colleagues who keep coming to the floor and saying repeal the health care bill never offer alternatives to Americans. I hope Americans who are buying into this notion that somehow the health care bill doesn't serve them because they are angry about one thing or another will look at what the health care bill does because, in point of fact, if you were to repeal the health care bill, and they have no alternative to replace it, here are some of the things that happen: One, you immediately add $2 trillion to the deficit of our Nation. Bang, done deal. That goes right away on that. The health care bill is judged by the CBO to reduce the deficit. It has specific savings in it. If you get rid of it, those savings go away and, bang, the deficit goes up.

No. 2, 47 million to 50-some million Americans who have no health care or didn't have it before the bill will return to the status of having no health care.

Now, does everybody in America think it is better to have 50-some million Americans walking around without health care who, when they walk into a hospital--perhaps they get hit by a car or have an accident and go to a hospital--receive care that everybody is paying for but they are paying for it in the most inefficient way possible? The burden is being paid for by people who have the health care. It goes into their premiums. It isn't shared by people buying their insurance and sharing the risk of getting sick. So all of a sudden, if you get rid of the health care bill, we return America to the days when millions of Americans had no care. And guess what happens when they have no care. They jam the emergency rooms because that is the only place to get the care. The emergency room becomes the place of primary care. But my colleagues do not answer that question. They never deal with reality. They deal with politics and ideology and they throw a lot of baloney at people.

The fact is, if we were to get rid of the health care bill, all those people who used to get sick and would get a letter from their insurance company saying: Gee, sorry to hear you have terminal cancer, but you are not covered--and that is what happened all the time in America-- that would start happening again. People were thrown off their policies that they had been paying for for years, and all of a sudden they had no coverage. But they do not address that.

There is another issue: preexisting conditions. Again and again and again, people would be denied the ability to buy health care coverage because they had a preexisting condition of some kind. So if 10 years ago someone had a cancer, even if they were cured of their cancer, the insurance company could either refuse them or charge them a higher set of premiums. People were denied coverage--they just didn't get it. Women who were pregnant and were applying for insurance heard: Oh, sorry, that is a preexisting condition. You are pregnant. We are not going to cover that.

So in America we drove people into poverty for a long period of time. They had to sell their homes or sell down everything they had to become impoverished in order to get to a point where they could get some help.

What about kids in school today? Under the health care bill, up until the age of 26, a child can now be covered by their parents' program. It is not free, it has to be paid for, but they can be covered by it. That would be eliminated.

So all of a sudden we would have a whole bunch of people who would be automatically eliminated and going out fighting to get insurance in the marketplace.

Let me tell you what else happens. There are a whole bunch of reforms to the health care system that our friends never talk about. Today Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, laid out for us the enormous gains we are making in Medicare fraud. We are beginning to make huge savings for people. The average senior is now saving over $4,000 on their health care bills because of what has been put in place by the health care bill. There are a whole series of things. I don't have them all here at my disposal now because I wasn't planning to talk about this when I came to the floor, but there are a series of reforms about how we pay hospitals, bundling the payments to a hospital, requiring greater accountability from hospitals. I mean, don't we want greater accountability from hospitals? That will vanish. That will be gone if we do away with the health care bill.

We also have greater coordination of care for patients from the beginning of their private care through their admissions and into their discharges. What happens today is there is no coordination of that care, and so a lot of people are discharged, and the readmission rate is staggering because there isn't the coordination between their postoperative, postsurgery care and their

primary physicians and the hospitals. Now there are a number of different pilot projects in place to help coordinate that.

Similarly, we are coordinating the care of what are called dual eligibles--the people who are eligible for Medicare but also eligible for Medicaid. That care has not been well coordinated, so we have huge duplication, enormous costs we don't need, and the result is a waste of money. All of that is being eliminated and/or reduced to a significant level.

There are so many other examples. Let me cite another one. The Senator talked about wanting to take money out of preventive medicine. Preventive medicine? We are told by the doctors, who are the experts and who deal with diabetes, that if we had early screening, which comes by having health care coverage, we could eliminate an enormous amount-- maybe as much as $100 billion--of surgery costs and dialysis costs as a result of people not discovering they have this ailment until it is too late for treatment by the more accessible and easier means. There are some oral medications and other things people can take to deal with this disease, but they have to get there at the early stage. If they get there too late, they wind up having to do amputations of limbs or the patient winds up on dialysis, all of which is far more expensive.

There are also pilot projects in the health care bill for helping people receive care at home and not be forced into a higher priced care environment, such as a nursing home or a longer term care kind of environment. This allows them to receive care at home and be in the dignity of their own home and independent and, obviously, with much less cost. All of those things would be wiped out by this notion that we are just going to get rid of this bill.

What this whole notion is built on is the early negative branding-- very effective negative branding--that took place and was wrapped around the so-called death panels and the other things, none of which are in this legislation. It is not in it. So this is political. That is why they call it ObamaCare, not health care. They call it ObamaCare to make it a pejorative and to do their best to try to wrap it up in the negativity of politics in our country today. And it is a tragedy because it doesn't do justice to the kind of thinking that ought to go into and did go into this bill in terms of how we do things that really create competition in the marketplace and allow people to get better health care.

What is astonishing is that we spend something like, I think, $15,000 per patient in America. I think that is the average cost. There are countries spending half of that and a lot of countries spending around $11,000 a patient that, I am sad to say, are getting better health outcomes than we get in the United States of America. The United States of America is not No. 1 in health outcomes for the money we are spending in the system, and there are a whole lot of reasons for that, but that is part of why this reform is so critical to our country.

I could say a lot more about this, but I am not going to say it now. Every time we hear from people who are just talking now about how we have to get rid of the health care bill, we have to stand and make it clear to people why this bill is good. A lot of Americans have not heard enough about how this legislation works for them, works for the country, and will improve our system. Is it the cure-all--no pun intended--of the health care system? No. I don't pretend it is. We will have to do more. We will have to tweak it. But it is a beginning step, with critical components that take 4 and 5 and 6 years to put into place so that we can get the full measure of their impact.

I will say this. We have it in Massachusetts. We have it now, and businesses are not complaining. In fact, we have one of the best economies of any State in the country. I think our unemployment rate is now down around 4.9, 5 percent, somewhere in that vicinity. So we have this program. We have had it for a few years now, and 98.6 percent of the people in our State are covered. It has been mandatory since the beginning, and it is working. It is beginning to bring down costs in the individual marketplace. The premiums have gone down by something like 45, 50 percent.

So I think we have to look at facts, as we do on a whole lot of issues here facing this country today, rather than continuing this silly talking past each other, completely contrived, political, ideological debate that is calculated to win power and not calculated necessarily to serve the best interests of our Nation. I hope we are going to engage on this over these next months, and I look forward to defending this health care bill because I think the bill is good for America. I think this bill, while it obviously needs some refinement, some changes, and some tweaking here and there, has accomplished an enormous amount already and is on track to accomplish an enormous amount going forward.

I think the administration has a much better story to tell about it than has been told, and I am glad the President has said he looks forward to going out and talking to the country about it because I believe that as the country learns more about it, in fact, they will say: Wow, that makes sense; that seems like a pretty sensible thing to do.

For our opponents who want to just get rid of the legislation, they have an absolute obligation to put the full deal on the table about what they are going to do in return, and not just Medicare, with the Ryan proposal--which makes it more expensive for seniors and undoes Medicare as we know it, not just that part of it--but the whole of it. How are they going to cover the uninsured? What will they do to take care of all those medical institutions that are struggling to teach doctors for the future? How are they going to hold those folks in a way that continues medical education in our country and so forth? They owe it to the Nation to answer those questions.

Mr. President, that concludes the portion of my remarks I wanted to make in response to the Senator from Wyoming.

Tribute to Senator Richard Lugar

Mr. President, I wish to take a few moments to share a few thoughts, not about the results of the election last night in Indiana per se, but I do wish to talk about the consequences for the Senate of the loss of Senator Lugar as of next year and particularly for the Foreign Relations Committee.

It is no secret that Dick Lugar's loss last night is going to be particularly felt by all of us who have had the privilege of working with him on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whether he was the chairman of the committee--and I served under him when he was chairman--or whether as a member of the committee and the ranking member, as he is now and as I am now privileged to serve with him.

Whether we agreed with him or not, whether he had the gavel or he didn't have the gavel, Dick Lugar had an approach to the Senate and to governing that was always the same: He was serious, he was thoughtful, and he refused to allow this march to an orthodoxy about ideology and partisan politics to get in the way of what he thought was the responsibility of a Senator and, indeed, the need of the country to have people come together and find the common ground. He dug deeply into some of foreign policy's most vexing issues, and his expertise on complicated issues that were honed over 36 years really can't be replicated. That is something we are going to lose--the institutional experience, the judgment, and the wisdom of the approach on some of those issues, such as the constitutional questions he would call into account when no one else would, the question of not being stampeded by popular opinion with respect to the use of force in one instance or another. All of those are essential to making this institution live up to its full capacity.

Already since last night's news, we have been hearing again and again on some of the news shows and elsewhere about the work of the Senator from Indiana on nuclear nonproliferation. It is no secret his Nunn- Lugar efforts have become almost shorthand for bipartisanship in foreign policy, and they should be recognized. But I want to emphasize here and now that is not all Senator Lugar contributed to this field of foreign policy. He is a leading expert on some of the urgent issues that are off the beaten path, from food security and the eradication of hunger worldwide, to his work with Joe Biden and then with me, I am privileged to say, to change our relationship with

Pakistan, helping prevent their economy from unraveling and encouraging them to cooperate with interests vital to America--indeed, to the stability of that region--and to establishing what he called a ``deeper, broader, long-term strategic engagement'' with Pakistan.

I am privileged to say, for me, the personal journey with Dick Lugar began before that, and I think it epitomizes who he is and why he will be missed. It has nothing to do with ideology.

Back in 1980, shortly after I came here--I was elected in 1984, and I started on the Foreign Relations Committee in 1985. Right away, we began to work together on the issue of the Philippines, free and fair elections in the Philippines. I had traveled over there a number of times as a freshman Senator. I had met with Ferdinand Marcos. I was concerned about the torture taking place and the political prisoners and other violations of rights. Yet we were sort of aiding them notwithstanding our values and our standards.

Well, Dick Lugar joined with me in that effort. He didn't have any reason to join with a freshly minted Senator, wet behind the ears, but he did. Together we sort of became a team that started to focus on the Philippines to figure out how we could hold Marcos accountable. He was serious and he was fair-minded, and I saw firsthand during our trip to the Philippines which we made at the time of the election--after we had done a whole lot of groundwork to set up an accountability system for that election--that he had a very personal and special understanding of what the United States meant to the rest of the world with respect to our values. That cause animated this man whom we all know is dignified and reserved and humble but who proudly came back and recounted with some animation to President Reagan the difference that the United States of America makes when it gives voice to people's aspirations for freedom--and, in this case particularly, the people of the Philippines.

The fact is it was that discussion with Ronald Reagan and the results that came out of the accountability in that election that forced Ferdinand Marcos to leave and we saw Cory Aquino come to power and the Philippines move back into genuine democracy.

I saw the same commitment with Senator Lugar a number of times over the years, but never more so than 2 years ago when we worked together on the New START treaty. His wisdom and his patience was invaluable in laying out the case, particularly in building support across the aisle so we could find the path to 71 votes.

I said then, and I say it again today, given the bitter, divisive, partisan, continual political squabbling that seems to dominate life in the city today, 71 votes is probably the equivalent of the 98 votes we used to get on those kinds of efforts. So I am grateful to him for his willingness to work to do that. He worked to give Members more time to work through problems, to find a way to solve individual objections. It reminded me of the way you actually work in what is now sometimes, unfortunately, sarcastically referred to as the world's greatest deliberative body. He deliberated and he helped us deliberate.

I thought it was one of the finer and prouder moments of the Senate in recent years.

I am confident Dick Lugar's record in our committee is going to be one of those which is remembered for a long time. Sadly, last night it was remembered in the context of Senator Fulbright, who also came to lose a primary in the end and paid a high price for his concern about global affairs and his involvement with those issues. But I think he is also remembered significantly for the enormous legacy he built about American foreign policy and how to make our country stronger.

Dick Lugar does that, and I think he has made it clear--there is no doubt in the mind of anybody on our side of the aisle--that Dick Lugar is a conservative and his votes through the years have shown that. He is a proud Republican.

But I think probably because he served as a mayor before he came here, he applied what we call the LaGuardia rule to foreign policy-- which is the rule that Theodore LaGuardia applied to doing things in New York. It didn't matter whether you were a Republican or Democrat as long as the streets got cleaned and the potholes got filled, and they didn't have any labels on them. That is pretty much the way foreign policies ought to be.

It used to be under Arthur Vandenberg that we said that politics ends at the water's edge, and we do what is in the best interests of our country. Only in the last years in the Senate have I seen a complete diversion from that where, unfortunately--as has been true on both sides--politics has entered into choices people have made with respect to major issues of conflict, potential war and peace, and interests of the security of our country.

So about 4 years ago this time, Dick Lugar received the Paul Douglas Award just off the Senate floor over in the Mansfield Room, and he summed up his approach to the Senate. I think after last night it is important for all of our colleagues to be mindful of his words and to think about them as we go forward in these next 6, 7, 8 months.

Dick argued that bipartisanship isn't an end to itself, and it is sometimes mistaken for centrism and compromise when, in fact, it is the way he called being a constructive public servant. It is the way a constructive public servant approaches his or her job--with self- reflection, discipline, and faith in the goodwill of others.

He said:

Particularly destructive is the misperception in some

quarters that governing with one vote more than 50 percent is

just as good or better than government with 60 or 70 percent

support. The problem with this thinking is that whatever is

won today through division is usually lost tomorrow. The

relationships that are destroyed and the ill will that is

created make subsequent achievements that much more

difficult. A 51 percent mentality deepens cynicisms, sharpens

political vendettas, and depletes the national reserve of

good will that is critical to our survival in hard times.

That is actually about as fundamentally, philosophically, as conservative as one could ask for. I think every one of us who have seen the difficulty of the last few years of our politics, who have been frustrated by the sheer inability of the institution to work, would agree there is nothing liberal or conservative or moderate about what Dick said. It is just common sense about how human nature works, about how people work. It seems to me we would do well to get back in touch.

I often hear people talk about how we need to change the rules here in order to get something done. Actually, we don't. These are the same rules we operated with when Everett Dirksen was here, when Bob Dole was leader, George Mitchell was leader. But we got things done.

In the 1990s, we balanced the budget of our Nation four times in a row without a constitutional amendment. It didn't take a piece of paper to tell us to do it or new words written in the Constitution. It took the common sense and courage of people on the floor of the Senate to do what was right. We don't have to change the rules. We have to change the thinking--or change the people who don't want to do it.

But every great moment in this great institution, when people look back at the history with pride and point to the Missouri Compromise or point to Henry Clay or Daniel Webster or all these great Senators--or Ted Kennedy more recently and others on the other side of the aisle-- when they do that, they are talking about people who operated by the same rules but found the common ground because they had the intelligence and willpower to put the country and its interests ahead of everything else.

So that is what Dick Lugar's loss last night means to us. I don't know who will replace him. We certainly know the cross-currents of some of the campaign, and we certainly know what Senator Lugar himself chose to say last night about his opponent's quest for more partisanship, not less.

So the alarm bells have been sounded. My prayer is that this election year is going to help purge this country of this incredible waste of opportunity that we are living through.

This Congress isn't over. For those of us who were here and remember 1996, it bears repeating that even in Presidential years the Congress can actually defy conventional wisdom and get some things done. That is why I know that Dick Lugar is going to finish out his

sixth term in the Senate with the same determination and effectiveness that has marked every year of his service. He is going to have a lot more contributions to this institution that he reveres and that respects him so enormously.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, there are a number of us who wish to speak. I will cede to the Senator from Montana, my senior. So if I could ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Montana speak, then the Senator from Massachusetts, and then--I think the Senator from Louisiana had a request for 1 minute. So if we could allow the Senator from Louisiana to go first, then the Senator from Montana, and then I would follow, and then Senator Reed would follow me. So I ask unanimous consent for that order.

Mr. President, I am very grateful to my colleague. I was happy to wait, but I am grateful to him. I thank the Senator from Montana, my friend Senator Baucus.

I am privileged to work with a lot of extraordinary staff members here in the Senate, as we all are. We often say that none of us is any better than our staff allow us to be. It is rare that I have had somebody on my team who predated my time in the U.S. Senate. I have been here--oh, this is my 28th year now.

Mary Tarr, who I would like to say a few words about, is my office manager, up until today--a veteran staffer of 31 years here in the Senate. She is about to retire and looks forward to going into the grandmother business over the course of these next years, after three decades here.

I think sometimes people miss or are unaware of the difference that an office manager could make in a Senate office. It is hard to quantify sometimes. But without any negative inference to the Senate itself in drawing this analogy, which is sort of a prison-and-inmates analogy, a great manager is a little bit like the character Red in the movie ``The Shawshank Redemption.'' In that movie, Red is described as the guy who can get stuff, not unlike the sergeant in ``Catch 22.'' There are these special people who know how to make things appear out of nowhere and make everything work. That is exactly the quality Mary Tarr has brought to my office over these years--a mix of relationships, building relationships, institutional memory, and a lot of guile at times. And she gets things done. So since the summer of 1997 when she came aboard in my office, Mary has literally been my ``Red'' in my office.

Over the course of nearly 15 years, no matter what I needed, no matter what the office needed, no matter what we needed to get done, she managed to make that happen. I must say I was very lucky, because I didn't have the ability to show her any tricks; she taught me the tricks. The reason is that she came to me already a master of Senate procedure. I was privileged to be the fifth U.S. Senator for whom she worked--and for 15 years, I might add. Before me, she split her assignments down the middle between Democrats and Republicans. She worked for Patty Murray and Brock Adams, and she worked for Republicans, including Jim Abnor and Charles Percy. She knew this place. She has always loved this place, and she knew pretty much everybody who worked here.

She did all of the things one needs to do to make the trains run on time: kept the records, maintained the office accounts, prepared the budget, kept the payroll, preaudited expenses, ordered supplies, made sure we were in compliance with all the rules, requirements, and procedures, and followed them as they changed, as we tie ourselves in various knots with various requirements we dump on ourselves. She was my liaison with the Senate Sergeant at Arms Office, the Senate Disbursing Office, the Senate Service Department, and the Senate Computer Center--an extraordinary amount of work. She performed the endless tasks that all of us here understand are critical to enabling our offices to be able to work--much more complex than obviously the average citizen ever sees.

She wrote the emergency evacuation manual for my staff after 9/11. She trained the staff on emergency procedures, and she restructured and ran what I think is one of the best intern programs, if not the best internship program, in the U.S. Senate, for which the summer interns at the end of the summer got to have a terrific intern pool party at her home. Office managers all over the Senate constantly consulted her on how to run an effective intern program, and she was always ready to help because she understood how important it was for young interns to have a positive experience. Part of that belief came out of the fact that she was only 17 when she came to work full time for the U.S. Senate--younger, obviously, than some of the interns who come here and work with us.

When I said she could do the impossible, what I was referring to is the fact that she helped me move my office not once but twice, which is an enormous undertaking here in the Senate.

Mary Tarr has worked for the Senate since 1981. In those 31 years, I will tell my colleagues she has become a fixture on Capitol Hill, well- known by everybody, perhaps legendary with some.

If you needed a room at the last minute to host a function, people would call Mary Tarr--from outside of our office, I might add.

If you needed a desk repaired or a light repaired or air-conditioning work done, mention Mary's name and people would say: Right away.

Printing? My legislative director told me a story about how he went to get some printing done, and the folks at the Senate Printing Office asked: Did Mary OK this?

Extra ice cream at the great ice cream party we have in May at the Dirksen buffet? She would just say: Go in and ask for the ``Mary special,'' and they made it.

Everybody seemed to know Mary, from the hundreds of former interns she mentored over the years, who are now working in government or public service, to Bill Gates, who once conveyed a hello from Mary to a former colleague in Patty Murray's office.

Hundreds of American soldiers, I might add, stationed abroad have received care packages from Mary, the daughter of a wounded Vietnam veteran.

In my Senate offices, I have a shelf of scrapbooks filled with e- mails, letters, and photos from soldiers who have received care packages, Christmas stockings, Easter baskets, and Halloween candy--all of which Mary has organized and shipped year after year. And the words of those soldiers underscore just how important Mary has been to them.

Our former intern, Army 2LT Rory McGovern, wrote:

It always helps to have a piece of home come in the mail.

Army Private Jacob Adkins:

I appreciate the fact that someone who I don't even know

supports me enough to send a care package. You make me proud

to serve.

From Marine battalion chaplain Capt. Pat Opp:

Little things go a long way with morale. Send more

lemonade--the troops mix it with cold water as the

temperature is super hot over here.

Army MAJ James Maloney, upon receiving clothes, school supplies, and personal grooming items to share with a children's and women's clinic in Afghanistan, wrote:

It has done wonders for our interaction with the local

population.

All of that organized--every time--by Mary Tarr.

One of my favorite e-mails in the scrapbooks comes not from a soldier but from a marine's mother, Kathy Lavin, whose son Ryan had received one of our care packages. Kathy wrote to tell Mary that she can finally get a good night's sleep because of the message she just received from Ryan. Ryan wrote:

It's almost time to take the candle out of the window, mom.

I am coming home. I love and miss you.

So how did Mary Tarr come to send a care package to Ryan? So typical of

Mary, she was in Massachusetts attending the funeral of a friend, and while there she went into a shop in Hull to buy gifts for her mother and father, Carolyn and Tom Corbe. Mary chose a Marine Corps kite for her dad, who received a Purple Heart in Vietnam. Ryan's mother was in the shop and asked Mary if she had a marine because of what she was buying. Mary told her she was a Marine Corps brat and the kite was for her father. She asked if Kathy had a marine. When Kathy told her about Ryan, Mary immediately wrote the information down, got his address, and then, seeing her job through--like every single one she has ever undertaken--she stayed in touch with Ryan until he came home.

I personally know how important those packages are, and I will tell you, one of the things I am proudest of is what Mary has done on behalf of her country and certainly those of us who make decisions to send people into combat. And I am proud of her.

She may be retiring, but she has enormous plans ahead of her. She and her husband Brian are planning to move to Roswell, GA, where her daughter Angela and her husband Daniel live. Mary jokes that Angela and Daniel may be the only two Democrats in the whole town of Roswell, so the arrival of Mary and Brian will double our party's strength there. But Angela is going to have a baby in October, so there is hope even for Roswell yet. Her plan is to babysit her new grandson for a few years, and then eventually she and Brian are going to retire to Florida, where her daughters Chrissy and Lindsay are in college.

No matter where she goes or how far from Capitol Hill, she is always going to be a very special part of the family here, the extended Senate family. She has always represented our Senate well. She is extremely hard working, honest, bright, conscientious, and knowledgeable. She has handled her responsibilities with great dedication. I think she has viewed every challenge as an opportunity to prove herself, and she did that again and again.

So, Mr. President, as she departs my staff today, the principles she represented in her work and the standards she established are going to remain for a long time as a guide to those in our office and here in the Senate, and we say thank you to her for all she has done for our country, the State of Massachusetts, and for me personally. I wish her and Brian and her family the very best as they take on a new chapter in their lives.

Mr. President, again, I thank my colleague from Montana.

Mr. President, for the Committee on Foreign Relations 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.

Mr. President, at its best, the Senate is an extended family--we spend an unbelievable amount of time working here, Senator to Senator, staff to staff. And in the course of those efforts, we get to know each other not as members of a party or as ideological caricatures or cutouts but as people. In particular, we get to know and appreciate on a personal level not just our staff but the staffs of our State delegations. There are staffers from the Massachusetts delegation who have been here as long as I have. And certainly on my late colleague Ted Kennedy's staff there were professionals I knew as friends and turned to as easily as Teddy himself did for so many years.

That is why I know Ted himself would be here this morning doing what I am doing in his place, which is acknowledging with sadness the passing on Saturday, April 21 of Stacey Sachs--a longtime health care staffer for Ted--whom we lost to complications from a hard-fought battle with cancer. Stacey was just 50 years old.

For many of us, Stacey was a steady and unchanging sight in this ever-changing institution. She spent more than a decade on Capitol Hill as senior health counsel on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, HELP, Committee. She came to the Hill to play a role in making universal health care reform a reality; her life's work--as it was for Ted--is a legacy she leaves behind that should be a gift to last.

But it is not her only legacy. Over the years, I came to know Stacey, and I came to know firsthand so much of what impressed and inspired her friends and her colleagues: her health care expertise, her honesty, and her dedication. She devoted her career to making sure Americans had access to health care coverage. It was that simple. For her, that work was personal. It was not statistics or spreadsheets or the arcane minutiae of legislation. For Stacey, she cared first and foremost about the effect public policy has on everyday Americans, and she touched the lives of countless people who never met her. But every American, in part, can thank her for real changes that made their lives better.

I am not just talking about legislation, but I could be. Stacey's outsized role in the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 and the recently enacted Affordable Care Act of 2010 were just two examples of the ways she focused and made a real difference on a wide range of issues during her time on the HELP Committee. She worked on Medicare prescription drugs, Medicare reimbursement, health insurance coverage and reimbursement, Medicaid, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. In each instance and every effort, Stacey brought to the task at hand not just her policy expertise but her compassion and professionalism. The same could be said about an effort that came

to be associated with Ted Kennedy and then-Governor Romney but with which Stacey was unbelievably engaged: the development of the Massachusetts health reform law in 2006. That law provided the Commonwealth with the highest rates of health care coverage in the Nation and served as the blueprint for national health reform. While the rate of the uninsured grew by millions in our country, today in Massachusetts, 98.1 percent of our residents have health insurance, including 99.8 percent of our children. And if Ted Kennedy were here today, I know he would share with all of us that without Stacey, it wouldn't have gotten across the finish line.

Still, there was more to Stacey than big legislation. She saw government and public service not just with a human face but on a human scale. Despite the breadth of her legislative portfolio, Stacey became most widely known among fellow staffers, constituents, and friends for her ability and willingness to help individual patients identify and secure the personal health care services they desperately needed in times of crisis. She was the person you turned to when someone could not find the right doctor, reach the right specialist, or make an insurance company do the right thing. And whether that person was from Massachusetts or Montana, Stacey fought for them with the same ferocity as she would have for Ted Kennedy or for the most landmark piece of legislation because for Stacey Sachs, it was pretty fundamental--if you were in government to solve big problems for the whole country, why wouldn't you work equally hard to solve those problems for the average person who came to you looking for help?

Mr. President, as so many know, after Senator Kennedy passed away, Stacey continued her Senate service working for Chairman Harkin on the HELP Committee. She was determined to finish the job of health reform-- and finish it she did, even as she went on to, in a tragic irony, fight her own battle for life itself against the same disease which took Ted Kennedy away from us all.

Today, we are all fortunate for Stacey's dedication to public service and the example of her commitment as we continue in the work of her life. Stacey was a member of our extended Senate family, but we should remember what she meant not just to us but to her own family. Our thoughts and prayers are with Stacey's mother, Sandy Sachs, and her two brothers, Bruce and Howard, during this unbelievably difficult time.

Madam President, all of us who work here in the Senate and who are privileged to serve as Senators know on a personal level that we are always only as good as our staff and staff work that we are privileged to have from them. I think every Senator is enormously grateful for the hours all of our staffs invest to help us do our work. Oftentimes, that means missing weekends, deferring, delaying, or plain canceling vacations, or working away on a beautiful Saturday morning when other people are out and about, and I am sure the best of them would readily admit they would rather be spending their time somewhere other than perhaps the Russell Senate Office Building.

That is why today I mark a very bittersweet transition on my team because tomorrow is Kathy Kerrigan's last day on my Senate staff. After having been confirmed at the end of the last work period, she is leaving the Senate to serve as a judge on the U.S. Tax Court, and that is the capstone in an already distinguished life spent in public service.

As proud as I am to see her serve on the Tax Court, it is really difficult to imagine my office without her. She has had the title of ``tax counsel,'' but she really was a lot more than that. The chairman of the Finance Committee, Max Baucus, and my colleague from Massachusetts in the House, Kathy's old boss, Richie Neal, all know better than anyone just how much--on almost every single issue in the Congress, it always somehow comes to be a tax issue, a Finance Committee issue. So for 6 years Kathy has been my indispensable utility player. It didn't matter if it was on health reform, climate change, energy, infrastructure, or supercommittee, if it was anything I was working on with a fairly high level

of focus, you can bet Kathy was there. I can tell my colleagues that she wasn't just there, she was invariably the indispensable player.

I don't know if she will like it, but I would say at times she was a wonk's wonk. She knew the Finance Committee brilliantly, and sometimes I had to struggle to follow Kathy because Kathy talked tax, and tax is a different language. She was almost a charter member of the very unique clique of the Finance Committee staffers, and Max Baucus knows what I am talking about from his staff director, Russ Sullivan. They actually had their own annual tax prom, and that is how exclusive a bunch they are. There are a lot of us who are a little scared to think of what a tax prom looks like. I once said it was probably a prom for people who didn't go to their own proms once upon a time, but, in fact, it is a party for the smartest, most detail oriented, hardest working staffers the Senate has because they are always in the middle of everything around here and, boy, do they deliver.

That is really where Kathy was in her element--driving into the minutiae of issues, crystal-balling legislation better than just about anybody with whom I have ever worked. I will tell my colleagues, if she had chosen the Navy instead of the Finance Committee, we would be here today saluting Admiral Kerrigan. She comes to an issue always armed with facts. She has always thought through every question a Senator or anybody else might ask about a particular issue. She is driven to get the job done, and she always did.

On health care, she was a phenomenal thinker as we worked through the Finance Committee issues and the funding mechanisms.

Last summer, she was nominated for the court. But then, nevertheless, I asked her to serve on the deficit committee. She promised to stay until the work was done, and I cannot emphasize how valuable she was there also. On the Joint Select Committee, there were many times when committee members from both parties would ask if Kathy could join a meeting. That is a sign of respect and of ability. She was someone who quietly, head down, did the work, and let the work try to find a way toward a solution.

Everything I admire about her as a public servant is written into her DNA. I think it is the result of growing up in Springfield, MA, where her father Bill Sullivan served as mayor. She had a front-row view of what it is like in public life, of what the demands are, and of what a difference earnest people like her father can make in government-- people who do the work without worrying about the limelight or who gets the credit.

She never lost sight of that through Boston College and Notre Dame Law School and 14 years on Capitol Hill working on tax policy. As much as I admire the special energy Kathy brought to her job, what I admire most about her is her ability to distinguish between right and wrong and her moral compass that always guided her in her public service.

I will just share one quick story before I wrap up. Last summer, deadly tornadoes clippered through her hometown of Springfield, MA. The first thing Kathy did was, obviously, make sure her parents were safe. But the second thing she did was get in her car and drive to work immediately. Instead of going home to Massachusetts, she came to work in the Senate on a bright Sunday morning and immediately got busy working on tax disaster legislation to help the people of Springfield, the small businesses, the people who had been impacted. She did not see arcane tax legislation; what she saw were bricks and mortar, lumber and nails and lives that had been disrupted.

That is the Kathy Kerrigan I know. That is the Kathy Kerrigan I have been privileged to have working with me through some of the most interesting, most grueling, most productive legislative years I have had the privilege of being part of in 27 years in the Senate. I will miss her energy, her creativity, and the dedication she brought to my office.

But it is good to know and we will all be reassured by the fact that she will bring those same qualities, heart and head to the Federal bench. She will be a phenomenal tax judge, and she will continue to make her family and her friends and her home State of Massachusetts very proud.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, for the Committee on Foreign Relations 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.