Floor Statements

Mr. President, today the State of Georgia lost a great citizen and America lost a great patriot. Truett Cathy, 93 years old, the founder of Chick-fil-A restaurants, passed away this morning. One of the great entrepreneurs of all time, Truett Cathy started a restaurant called the Dwarf House in College Park, GA, years and years ago. He turned it into the Chick-fil-A restaurant, which now has over 1,800 restaurants in 40 States and the District of Columbia. It is a family-owned business. It is not a public corporation. It is a business that is built on the principles that Truett Cathy believed in and believed in to this day. Truett Cathy's stores are never open on Sunday. He is a devout Christian and believes Sunday is a day of rest. So he operates 6 out of the 7 days. Everybody who competes with Truett Cathy operates for 7 days. But everybody who competes with Truett Cathy finishes second in gross sales, second in quality, and second in the line.

Truett Cathy was an extra-special man whose life has been a great tribute to all the right things in life that all of us believe in.

Truett Cathy also gave back to his community probably more than any other person I know of. He founded WinShape Homes, WinShape to build boys, WinShape to take children who could not find a foster parent, put them in a home and turned their life around. He was a prolific writer of book after book after book about his belief in life. His greatest book is one I gave to each Member of the Senate about 5 years ago: ``It's Better to Build Boys than Mend Men.'' Because he knew the citizens of our country would be better if we had good foundations from the beginning. So he tried to make sure all those who were less fortunate, who did not have the advantages he or others had, had a chance to grow up in a home with a warm and nurturing environment, a Christian environment, an environment that was dedicated to the principles of this country, and freedom and democracy.

Atlanta and Georgia will miss Truett Cathy. He is irreplaceable. It is said that nobody is irreplaceable. Truett Cathy is. But the legacy and the legend he built and his restaurants will go on as a flagship for everything that is right about free enterprise and about the United States of America.

On this day on the floor of the Senate, to his family and to his legion of friends and to all he stood for and stands for, I mourn the loss of Truett Cathy, a great American and a great citizen.

I urge everybody, when they get the chance, to read the story of his life, because it is the story of the American way of life. It is the story of principles you are committed to, vision you hope for, taking a risk to try and create a reward, and giving back to the community when you earn the money from that reward, to see to it you leave this world a better place than you found it.

For America and Georgia today, Truett Cathy has left us. He has gone to a much better place. But he has left our city, our State, and our country a better place than what he found. May God bless the life of Truett Cathy.

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

Mr. President, in about 19 minutes the Senate will exercise one of its constitutional responsibilities of advice and consent to President Obama on the appointment of Jill A. Pryor to be a U.S. Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit of Georgia. I urge all of my colleagues to vote favorably for Ms. Pryor, a lawyer from the city of Atlanta and the State of Georgia, a great nominee and a great appointee.

As I make this recommendation, I want the Chamber to know loudly and clearly that I praise the President and his staff--particularly Kathy Ruemmler--for the job they did in coordinating with Senator Chambliss and myself in seeking advice and consent to come up with a series of appointees to the district and circuit courts of Georgia.

Jill Pryor is an outstanding lawyer and an outstanding attorney. She is a graduate of William & Mary and Yale University, and was editor of the Yale Law Review.

An outstanding jurist and an outstanding person, she has practiced and specialized in business law, representing plaintiffs and defendants--not in the same case, I might add--in the areas of business torts, corporate governance, and shareholder disputes, class actions, trade secrets, fraud, intellectual property fraud, and the Georgia and Federal RICO statutes.

She is an outstanding member of the firm of Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore, and clerked for an Eleventh Circuit judge when she got out of Yale University Law School. She is an outstanding individual of impeccable credentials, impeccable integrity, and will be a great credit to the Federal bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

I commend her to each of my colleagues here today with my highest recommendation, and I again thank the President of the United States and his staff for their cooperation in nominating a superior judge to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Mr. President, I yield the floor and I ask unanimous consent that the time be equally divided.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to address the Senate for up to 5 minutes.

Madam President, I want to commend Chairman Sanders for his leadership. Last night at 9:30 p.m., I came back to the Capitol and executed a conference agreement that he has worked very hard on, and ranking member Senator Burr worked very hard on, and pulled together disparate factions to address the needs of our veterans in a bill that is going to be a toolkit for Robert McDonald, who I hope will be unanimously approved as the next Secretary of the VA in the President's Cabinet.

I rise to talk about Mr. McDonald, but before I do, I want to talk about that conference report.

Our veterans have been abused in the last 10 to 12 years because of a veterans' medical service that has not performed the services they need to perform for our veterans in America. One of the reasons they did this is, Admiral Shinseki, who was the former Secretary, was actually insulated from a lot of the information that was going on in his own Department by the senior leadership at the VA who had become comfortable and passive and not active in terms of the operation of VA medical services.

The bill we signed last night that the Senate will vote on in the next few days is the bill that gives Mr. McDonald and the next Secretary to come the tools they need to enhance the VA and to make it a responsive organization to the 22 million veterans, 6.5 million of whom use veteran medical services, and to the 774,000 veterans in my home State of Georgia who deserve and demand, if you will, the services they were promised when they went into the U.S. military.

Bob McDonald is an outstanding American. He was president, CEO, and chairman of the board of one of the most respected companies in America, Procter & Gamble.

He is the father of two, grandfather of two additional children. He is an outstanding American and his wife Diane is an outstanding lady in support of him and his job at Procter & Gamble. He is going to need that support now as he heads to the VA.

He was a captain in the U.S. military. He graduated from West Point, was trained in airborne warfare, desert warfare, and subtemperature warfare, and he is going to need those talents at the VA in each and every case because it is a mess.

The conference committee report we have passed gives him two tools that are essential. It gives him the authority to hire and fire title 38 and title 5 employees. Title 5 employs the senior leadership and title 38 the next step in leadership down, which is what the VA needs. The VA is an organization of 340,000 people which in the last 3 years has averaged 3,000 disciplinary actions a year. Each of those disciplinary actions meant people were moved from one job to another within the VA and did not lose pay. There is no accountability in the VA and there really has not been. That is why the systemic problems on appointments and veterans services and everything else going on in the VA has not happened. By giving him the opportunity to hire and fire, he will have the respect and attention of those who work in the VA to understand full well they are going to have to carry out the game plan of this leader.

He understands metrics. He understands accountability. He understands leadership. He has taken a job he didn't have to accept, a job he didn't need to have to do at this time in his life, but a job he wants to do to give back to the country he loves and the country he served in the military.

I am confident Bob McDonald will be an outstanding Secretary of the Veterans' Administration, and I commend him to my fellow Senators with my highest recommendation in the hopes that he will be approved unanimously.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from the Dakotas for yielding the floor to me. Before he leaves, I wish to say something about what the Senator just said. In fact, I was sitting here listening to him. I am going to prove I was actually listening to his speech. I don't think we always do--sometimes I think we don't--but I did that because he was right on target.

But my thought process went back to the 1970s. In the 1970s, OPEC and the Arab oil embargo basically held the United States of America hostage. I remember lines where we would wait for an hour and a half to get $10 worth of gasoline because we had a limited supply.

Now we sit here in a country, some 40 years later, that has unlimited resources available to us if we will just take the political moves and the regulatory moves and the practical moves to exhibit our power and extract those resources.

For example, the Keystone Pipeline that the Senator talked about--not a single molecule of carbon will be generated by bringing that petroleum underground through a pipeline from Canada to Houston. We will refine it more soundly and more environmentally than the Chinese would or anybody else would, and then we will have an almost infinite supply to take care of our own country internally and also use it as a part of our soft power around the world.

The Senator is absolutely correct about Germany and about the Ukraine and about Russia. If we become the surrogate and we replace Russia in terms of supply of natural gas to that part of the world, we take away the only asset Russia has. As Senator McCain has so often said, Russia has relegated itself to being a gas station with a flag. If we become the competitive gas station down the line, we can lower our price by nine-tenths of a cent, we can sell more gas than they can, and we can use the soft power of our natural resources to bring back what we need in terms of peace and stability in that part of the world. The byproduct of doing that is not just energy security, it is not just better diplomatic and international policy, but it is jobs for Americans--jobs to build the pipeline, jobs to operate the pipeline, jobs to extract or frack the natural gas out of Haynesville and Marcellus.

We are sitting on a ham sandwich, starving to death as a country with our assets because governmental policy will not let us do some of what we ought to do.

So I came to the floor to talk a little bit about job creating and bringing

jobs home. The bringing jobs home bill is a $214 million bill, which is a rounding error in terms of the way we do business around here, and will do nothing except penalize companies for doing what they have to do and offer a reward that is not a carrot at all to bring jobs back.

I thank the Senator from the Dakotas for his speech and for his continuing and persistent emphasis on our energy and our energy power and our energy independence. It is voices such as his that need to be heard more and more in this Chamber so we can create jobs for the American people and solve the economic problems we have.

I commend the Senator from South Dakota--thank you--from North Dakota.

I apologize. I am a southerner, so I slipped up on that.

Mr. President, I rise to talk for a minute about the issue of the day that is before us, the bring jobs home bill. I appreciate any effort to bring jobs home and to create new jobs at home, but I want to talk about how we are making a false promise and giving idle hope to people about bringing jobs back because we are not doing the things we should be doing.

If you ask me to make my choice, what should we do in the Senate, on the floor of the Senate, in this body as legislators to create as many jobs as we can as fast as we can, a tax credit for bringing jobs home will not do it and a tax penalty for taking jobs overseas will not do it, but approving the Keystone Pipeline will do it and giving the President of the United States trade promotion authority will do it. Both of those are pending on the floor of the Senate right now before us. We could take them up tomorrow. If we did, we could make a massive impact on job creation in America and further empower our economy.

I happen to be the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee's subcommittee on trade. We have two major trade agreements pending in the United States of America that we are a part of current negotiations--one of them is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, called TTIP.

Those two trade agreements are free-trade agreements with our biggest trading partners--Asia and Europe and Scandinavia--but the Asians and the Scandinavians both ask me, when I talk to them in meetings discussing trade: When are you going to give your President trade promotion authority? Because we know until the U.S. Congress gives the President that authority, you are not serious about negotiating trade deals.

I first came to the Congress of the United States in 1999, 1 year after we gave President Bill Clinton trade promotion authority. Then we had a plethora of free-trade agreements that passed at that time because of the negotiation power we gave the President. Trade promotion authority just means we give the President the authority to negotiate the trade agreement, and then the Senate gets an up-or-down vote on the agreement. But we do not get to vote on amendment after amendment after amendment, we get a vote on the totality of the agreement. In other words, we give sincerity to our foreign trading partners that what we say is what we mean and that we are going to give our President the authority to negotiate those deals, and we will make them subject to our ratification in the Senate. Trade promotion authority is important for America, for jobs, for our economy, and it is, quite frankly, important for bringing jobs home to the United States of America.

The Keystone Pipeline, which I mentioned a minute ago in talking about Senator Hoeven's remarks, is a job creator. The unions are for it. Business is for it. Most Americans are for it. It only takes the signature of the President to let it go. The State Department has signed off on it. There is only one reason, I suppose, we are not building the Keystone Pipeline; that is, because of environmental fear of the Keystone Pipeline generating some kind of an environmental problem.

Think about it for a second. If we do not put it in a pipe and bring it underground, we can put it on a truck that burns gasoline or diesel fuel and bring it to Texas and create a whole lot of carbon molecules. We are trying to reduce carbon in the air, so building a pipeline is environmentally friendly. It is safer than putting it on the roads or railcars or trucks or tractors. It is the way to do it. I do not understand why the President will not do it. But I think we need to continue to talk about it because the energy independence Senator Hoeven talked about is exactly what America is on the cusp of having. We suffered when we were energy dependent in the 1970s and 1980s. We paid a big price for it. We paid the price of inflation, reduced authority around the world, and we lost our position and stature in business. We now have a chance to secure it not just for this decade but for this century in the United States of America, and I hope the President will reconsider his unwillingness to sign the Keystone Pipeline and do so.

On the jobs issue and on the inversion issue, which has brought about this entire discussion--and for those who might be listening and watching, inversion is where American corporations decide to acquire a foreign company and invert to where their headquarters are in the foreign country rather than in the United States of America to take advantage of a better corporate tax rate.

We have now the highest corporate tax rate in the world--the highest in the world. Japan, which used to be up there above us or right with us, has now lowered theirs. Canada has lowered theirs. Ireland has lowered theirs.

Jobs are going offshore because the cost of taxes is lower, because it is a tax code that promotes growth, promotes business, and promotes development.

We need a progrowth tax policy in the United States. We need a simpler tax code. We need a fairer rate of taxation. We need to get rid of corporate welfare. A lot of my friends on the other side are always talking about corporate welfare. They are right. We did it on ethanol subsidies when we were subsidizing people to make ethanol. That was an intent, through a tax incentive, to cause something we thought would be the right thing to happen for the environment, which did not work. Those are the types of things we ought to stop doing--those types of corporate welfare. But what we should do is give a progrowth tax code to the American businesspeople, whether they are C corps or S corps-- and I am going to talk about that for a second--so they know what kind of tax rate they can count on, they know it is simple, they know it is fair, and they know it is predictable for the future.

I find it interesting, when the old Soviet Union fell, when the Soviet satellite states such as Estonia and Latvia became independent countries, if you go back and study that--and that was not too long ago--if you go back and study what they did to separate themselves from the Soviet Union--take Estonia, for example. The new President of Estonia, after they became independent, did three things. He gave the state-owned apartments to each person who rented them and let them own them as a home and then created a housing market instantaneously.

That was No. 1. No. 2, they cut the tax rate from 50 percent to 25 percent and revenues went up and not down, because people thought 25 percent was a fair rate and they did not cheat--because there was a lot of cheating going on under the 50-percent rate. Then on the corporate taxes in Estonia, they went to businesses and said: We are not going to tax your profits as long as you reinvest those profits in jobs or in research and development. The rest of it will be taxes. So they incentivized research and development. They incentivized employment. They made corporate Estonia feel as though they had a fair tax system.

What happened? If you fly into a town in Estonia today, it is similar to flying into Dallas or Atlanta. There are cranes everywhere. There is economic development and improvement everywhere. Why? Because they have what people perceive to be a fair code. They do not have a junk code. They have a good tax code, and they incentivize people to do business and make money.

You raise revenue in America by raising prosperity, not by raising rates of taxation. We have proved that every time we have lowered the capital gains tax. Every year following the lowering of the capital gains tax, revenues from capital gains went up and not down.

Why? Because people who had a mature investment were incentivized to pay the lower tax rate, sell the investment, and reinvest in a maturing, developing investment rather than just hold onto it because they did not want to pay what they considered was a confiscatory tax. Tax policy drives economic decisions. There is not one of us in this room who does not make decisions every single day on our own personal finances where we do not consider--in some part or in whole--the tax consequence of it.

That is why you have a tax code. But we all look at fair and equitable corporate tax relief. We ought to do it for S corporations and for C corporations. I want to talk about that part for just a minute. C corporations are the major corporations and dividend-paying companies in America. Their tax rate is 35 percent. S corporations are corporations where they file as partners. The profits of the company flow through on what is known as a K-1 statement. It flows through as ordinary income.

Today the ordinary income tax rates for people making more than $450,000 can go up to 39 percent. It is already higher than the 35 percent C corporations have. If we lower the C corporation rate from 35 to 28 percent through comprehensive tax reform, then there will be a big disparity between the S corporations and the C corporations. The S corporations employ a lot of Americans. They are the mom and pop Main Street businesses. They are 72 percent of the jobs that are created in America. So we ought to take the whole enchilada. We ought to reform both the corporate tax rate, the C corporation rate, the S corporation rate, and the individual tax rate and modernize them together and make them fair, equitable, less complex, and more productive.

If we incentivized American business to invest and to grow, we will raise revenues, we will raise prosperity, and we will raise hope. If we continue to pass bills that say: If you doing something, we are going to tax you or if you do something, we are going to give you a benefit-- if we think that is going to cause people to bring jobs back to the United States of America, we are dead wrong.

What would cause them to bring jobs back to America is a fair tax code and to take our strong investments and our strong assets, such as petroleum and liquid natural gas, which we were talking about, and use them to our advantage through the soft power of economic power. So my message today is very simple. If you want to create jobs, build the Keystone Pipeline and give the President Trade Promotion Authority and do it now.

If you want to really stop corporate inversions, just modernize the American Tax Code like every other country in the world has done. There are a lot of people who are talking about offshore profits who are stranded in the Cayman Islands in these secret bank accounts because they do not come back to America. We created the Cayman Islands secret bank accounts when we passed a tax code that was confiscatory in nature.

When it is better off for your company and your stockholders to keep the money you make offshore--somewhere else offshore--so it is not subject the second time to taxes, we created those Cayman Islands tax havens. We will do it again if we do not get our Tax Code fixed. So my message is simple: Build Keystone, explore our natural resources, give the President Trade Promotion Authority, and make a fair equitable change in S corporations, our C corporations, and our individual rate. Let's incentivize prosperity and hope and not penalize and punish Americans for doing business.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for up to 5 minutes.

Mr. President, in a few moments the Senate will be called upon to confirm the nomination of the Honorable Julie Carnes to the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Georgia. I stand, along with my colleague Senator Saxby Chambliss, the senior Senator from Georgia, to commend Ms. Carnes to the entire body as an outstanding appointment.

I thank the President. Senator Chambliss and I recommended Ms. Carnes when the openings took place on the 11th Circuit Court. He, with the advice of Kathy Ruemmler, his able assistant in the judicial part of his advisory board, brought the nomination forward to the Judiciary Committee of the Senate. I thank Pat Leahy, the Senator from Vermont, the chairman of that committee, and Chuck Grassley from Iowa, the ranking member of that committee, for doing a judicious hearing, for giving all sides a chance to be heard, and for commending unanimously, on a voice vote, Julie Carnes to the Senate.

I am not going to talk for a long time, but I want to make a couple of very special points. Julie Carnes is a very special lady. For 22 years she has been a judge for the Northern District of Georgia, and the last 5 years she has been the senior judge. Before that she was on advisory panels for judicial sentencing and many other technical and judicial issues.

Her nomination is the nomination of someone with immense capacity, outstanding integrity, and outstanding ability. She is just the type of person the Presiding Officer and I would want to go to the bench. She is, as we call them in Georgia, a ``double dog.'' She graduated from the University of Georgia with her undergraduate degree and got her juris doctor degree from University of Georgia Law School, whose emblem is a bulldog. We call her a ``Double dog.'' She is an outstanding individual and will be an outstanding judge on the bench.

But there is a point of personal privilege I want to take for a minute. Up in heaven right now, at a sunset, Charlie Carnes is looking down, about to see his daughter Julie confirmed to the United States 11th Circuit Court.

Charlie Carnes was my mentor in the Georgia General Assembly for 12 years before he was appointed to be a State court judge in Fulton County, the largest county in the State of Georgia. Charlie is looking down on the daughter he is so proud of, and he is so proud that she is going to be confirmed by the Senate to one of the highest court appointments she could possibly achieve.

She is a chip off the old block. She is proof that an apple does not fall far

from the tree. Charlie was an outstanding Georgian, an outstanding American, an outstanding member of our State and our bar and our bench. I am so proud to be a part of those who recommended this nominee to the President of the United States.

I yield for my colleague, Senator Chambliss.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

I ask to be recognized to speak as if in morning business.

Madam President, I wish to share an experience I had a couple of weeks ago while riding the mountains of North Georgia to my home. I was in the pickup truck alone, driving my red Silverado from a place in the mountains. I spent a lot of time thinking--which I try to do when I get a few moments to myself--about all the difficult positions we are now in as a country. I thought about our border with Mexico and all the Central American children who are coming through, huddled on the border, and the crisis there. I thought about Syria and the tragedy of that civil war. I thought about the fact that the Israelis and Hamas are firing rockets back and forth from Gaza and into the mainland of Israel. I thought about the fact that we are now negotiating with Iran, our archenemy. I thought about the fact that Vladimir Putin decided to take advantage of the vacuum that has been created in world leadership and moved into Crimea, threatening Kiev and threatening Ukraine. I thought about all the crises we have along the way.

Then I came to Ellijay, GA, a little town known for its apples and its population of 2,000 great Georgia citizens.

I came to Poole's Bar-B-Q, which is a landmark along the highway in Ellijay, GA. I stopped, and all of a sudden all those thoughts I had of the wars going on, the conflicts going on, the strife and the trouble going on all culminated in Gilmer County, because in Gilmer County in 2005 I attended the funeral of Noah Harris. Noah Harris was killed in Iraq in 2005.

I thought about his story, and I thought about our position now, and I thought about some message I want to send to my country and to this body of the Senate.

Let me talk about Noah Harris. Noah Harris was a cheerleader at the University of Georgia. On the Saturday before 9/11 in 2001, he was in Sanford Stadium with 92,000 fans of the Georgia Bulldogs cheering on the team.

Then, like the rest of the world, he saw the terrible attack of 9/11 in 2001--in New York City, in Shanksville, PA, and in Washington, DC.

On the morning of the 12th, he got out of bed in the dormitory and he went straight to the Army ROTC building in Athens, GA, and told them he wanted to sign up for an ROTC commission because he wanted to go fight whoever it was who killed those 3,000 citizens of the world tragically in New York City.

They said: Noah, you can't get a commission in just a year. You only have a year left.

He said: I can double up and do it. I want to go for my country. I want to go for what is right. I want to go fight for America.

He became a second lieutenant in the 3rd Infantry Division, and, sure enough, 3 years after that, he was in Iraq. He became known as the Beanie Baby soldier because he had his pockets stuffed with Beanie Babies. And as he would go through Ghazaliya, where he was stationed near Baghdad, he would hand out Beanie Babies to the Iraqi children. He was like a pied piper. Unfortunately, in the 11th month of his tour, a rocket-propelled grenade his hit humvee and he and two of his buddies were killed instantly in Iraq.

I didn't know Noah Harris, but I went to the funeral that day because, as a Senator from Georgia, I wanted to pay my respects to a soldier who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror.

So as I was riding through Gilmer County a couple weeks ago, thinking about the crises we have today around the world and then thinking about Noah Harris, I thought to myself, there is a message all of us need to remember: Those soldiers should never have died in vain, and we have to make sure they did not.

In Iraq 4,486 American soldiers were killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In Afghanistan, to date, 2,319--a total of 6,805--most of them Americans, some of them immigrants seeking their citizenship in America and fighting for America in our Armed Forces--fought for the rights and freedoms that all our Founding Fathers stood for, fought for all the reasons we serve in this body today, fought for all the reasons that America is the great and noble country it is around the world.

But right now there is an absence of leadership in the world, and because of it we are seeing one crisis come up after another. I worry that Noah Harris, who died in Iraq in 2005, might--and I underscore the word ``might''--have died in vain if we don't recognize our responsibilities and see to it that we try and prevent what has been happening lately from continuing to happen.

There is a decision point coming to the United States of America--it is coming next year. It is one I want to encourage the President to think about deeply and for all of us to think about deeply.

We have lost Iraq to ISIS. ISIS is a renegade group of terrorists who have basically taken over that country and partnered with some of the terrorists in Syria to control Iraq.

One of the reasons they did that is we left a huge vacuum in Iraq when we pulled out. We pulled every American soldier out. I know it was our goal to leave after the surge worked--and that was the right thing to do. But it wasn't the right thing to pull out every single soldier, because we abandoned all the infrastructure that we had built. We abandoned the image of American strength and power. We abandoned the ability for us to be agile in a dangerous part of the world.

In Afghanistan, we are supposed to pull our troops out at the beginning of next year. Some of them should come home but not all of them. We have invested billions of dollars in American hardware and American money to see to it we had the best support in the world for our soldiers in Afghanistan. If we abandon Bagram, if we abandon Kabul--if we abandon Afghanistan, the same thing will happen in Afghanistan as happened in Iraq. And those soldiers, the 2,319 who died in Afghanistan, will have in part died in vain because we abandoned what they built. We abandoned what they protected. We abandoned the investment they made.

We need also to remember what happened on 9/11 of 2001, when we decided to go into Iraq and then later into Afghanistan. We didn't have enough infrastructure in that part of the world to make an invasion. We had to rent the Kyrgyzstan airport near Russia to be able to fly our troops in to begin positioning outside of the Tora Bora area in Afghanistan.

We have built tremendous infrastructure, we have built tremendous bases, and we have tremendous assets for which the taxpayers of the United States have paid. We should maintain a presence there so we are agile; so our SEALs teams, if needed, can be positioned; so that the rest of the world knows that while the war may be over and America has come home, it hasn't left. It hasn't abandoned us. An American presence will remain--just as we have in Germany, just as we have in Japan, just as we have in South Korea. Our best friends today were our enemies 40, 50, and 60 years ago, because America didn't leave when the fight was over. We need to make sure that relationship happens in Afghanistan so we can begin to build our presence in that part of the world and be that somebody who prohibits and inhibits terrorism and people like ISIS from taking over countries.

Make no mistake about it. Vladimir Putin has been encouraged by an absence of leadership, and ISIS took advantage of an absence of leadership. What is going on between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip is an absence of leadership, in part on our part. We can't sit around and be bystanders. We have to recommit ourselves to the effort in that part of the world because

in the end the peace and security of America from terrorism and from those who would bring us down is not our looking the other way and not living up to our responsibility to the Noah Harrises of the world who gave the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq in 2005--all because he watched what we all watched that morning of 9/11 in 2001, and said: This shall not stand. I want to volunteer to fight for my country. And he joined our Army and did so.

God bless Noah Harris. God bless his parents, Rick and Lucy. God bless the United States of America. May we remember our responsibility not to leave what we have built and remain a beacon of peace, liberty, and democracy around the world.

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

I have to say first and foremost that it has been a real privilege to work with Senator Murray from the State of Washington. We are across the hall from one another. We see each other coming and going and coming back to the floor and from the office.

We have worked hard, our staffs have worked hard, and finally today lightning has struck. We are about today--in the Congress of the United States--to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act and address one of the significant challenges that face America today.

As we sit in this Chamber and talk about this bill, there are 10.6 million Americans who are unemployed. There are also 4 million jobs waiting to be filled by people who need specific skills. This bill deals with the skills deficit in America, and it is going to match some of those unemployed with some of those jobs to lower our unemployment rate and raise the rate of prosperity in American families. This is an important bill.

A lot of people who have watched the Senate over the past few years might have said: How in the world did you reach an agreement on anything? You always seem to be fighting, you always seem to be arguing.

I want to tell a brief story. About 1 month ago Senator Murray and I joined a few other Members of the Senate--Senator Harkin, Senator Alexander, a couple of Members from the

House: Representative Foxx of North Carolina and Representative Kline, the chairman of the Education & the Workforce Committee in the House.

We didn't sit around a table and say: What is it that divides us? We said: What is it that unites us?

What unites us is the fact that the American people are looking for leadership from us to deal with the unemployment issue and the training issue. We have been languishing to try to authorize this bill for 12 years. So we sat down and identified what we agreed on. We identified what the problems were. We worked with the Members of the House who opened up and said: Well, we passed the SKILLS Act, but we will sit down, listen to your side, and try to find common ground.

After a few days, really--not weeks--we found common ground on 80 percent of the issues that confront us in workforce and investment areas. There are a few places where we found disagreement, sure--and so did those stop us? No, because the perfect should never be the enemy of the good, and this bill is the good of the Senate in terms of dealing with issues.

I want to brag about a few people in this body, if I can, besides Senator Murray. I want to talk about Scott Cheney for a second, her loyal assistant. He sat in my office with me--about a week and a half ago--side-by-side, staff and Senator, working out some of the details on this bill.

I thank Tommy Nguyen on my staff who has worked countless hours for countless years to make this happen.

David Cleary, the aide to the committee, the aide to Senator Alexander, has done a yeoman's job. In fact, he did probably as much of the hand-holding in the past couple of weeks over amendments as anybody I know.

I thank Senator Enzi from Wyoming, who is my mentor in the Senate. When I was first elected to Congress, I was appointed to a Web-based education joint commission between the House and the Senate. Mike Enzi was the Republican Senator who was appointed to that commission. I was the Republican Congressman. I didn't know Mike Enzi, but I watched him work. I watched him find solutions to problems. I watched his quiet, patient work to find a solution, and I said: That is the guy I want to be like.

He is the guy who really got Mrs. Murray and myself to this point today, because he has forged ahead when nobody else would.

When Chairman Kennedy was chairman of the committee before his tragic loss, Mike continued to work with Senator Kennedy and said: Let's try to find a way to do workforce innovation and opportunity.

I am glad we are doing it today, and we are doing it in large measure because of Senator Enzi.

Senator Tim Scott, who did yeoman's work, introduced the SKILLS Act that was passed in the House and Senate. He could have folded his arms and said: I am going to be recalcitrant, I am not going to cooperate. But he said: What can I do to help? There are some things I want to make sure we do, but one thing I want to make sure we don't do is not address the problem of unemployment and training.

Rob Portman was of tremendous help to us too. We had so many Members whose ideas have been incorporated in this bill to deal with the issue of skill and deal with the issue of unemployment. I am so appreciative of each and every one of them, and I think the American people will appreciate them too.

I want to highlight a couple of features in here that are most important. Unlike most of what government does, we have scaled down the size of workforce investment boards in the States and in the local communities so they are working numbers, not numbers that are so big they can't work.

We put more money into training and less into bureaucracy. We scaled down a number of workforce programs and consolidated them to maximize the Federal dollar to benefit the State level. We gave the State level the local authority to determine the curriculum of what was best for Washington or best for Georgia.

Washington is not a one-size-fits-all town, and workforce development is not a one-size-fits-all issue. Through the labor departments of the various States, we now are going to empower them to train people for the jobs they need in their State, not the jobs Washington might think they might have needed in their State. That is a tremendous advance forward in this legislation and equally very important.

Some people will sit on the floor and say: Well, did we get all we wanted? No, we didn't. Nobody did.

Did you get enough?

We got plenty.

There are a lot of labor commissioners and Governors who are going to be celebrating. In fact, I have had two calls this morning from Governors' offices or from labor department offices saying: Thank you, you are finally giving us the power to address what we need to do in our State to address unemployment and address job training.

It has been a privilege for me to work with Senator Harkin, Senator Alexander, and Senator Murray.

To close, before I turn the floor over to Senator Harkin--who I think will be next on the floor--I commend Senator Harkin on his leadership as the chairman. He and Senator Alexander gave us the encouragement that we could get a bill done. They didn't insist on something they wanted in the bill to be there exactly like they wanted it.

As we all know, Senator Harkin is a champion for those with disabilities. The disability section in this bill is outstanding to provide training, opportunity, and rehabilitation for those who operate with developmental disabilities; and that is what we should be doing on the workforce, because their contribution is as important as the contribution of any other single American.

Today is a great day for the Senate. It is also a great day for the workforce in America. It is a great day for training and for the skills.

We want to fill the 4 million jobs that are vacant in America with 4 million of those 10.6 million who are unemployed in America--to raise prosperity, raise opportunity, and raise hope in America.

With that said, I yield the floor for the distinguished Senator from Iowa, Senator Harkin.

Madam President, I thank the Senator from Arizona for his input, and I want to acknowledge his remarks with regard to the amendment process.

One of the reasons we have a bill which is on the floor today--the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act

is here--is because it is one of the few bills where we have had a process in working toward a final passage where we have had a lot of amendments.

This bill has a lot of input from a lot of people. We did that. The fact that he is having his first vote, after offering 85 amendments, is a testimony to the reason we ought to have more voting on amendments, more debate on the floor, and we will pass things and be more productive in our process.

So I thank the Senator for his leadership. I thank him for helping us as we brought this legislation forward and encourage him to continue to offer amendments and work to perfect legislation coming before the Senate.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, could the Presiding Officer inform us as to the time remaining on both sides?

Madam President, I wish to ask unanimous consent that the majority side yield an additional 10 minutes of their time to the minority side in order for Senator Portman to make his speech.

Madam President, I yield for Senator Portman.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

How much time remains on the Republican side?

I ask unanimous consent that 5 additional minutes be extended from the Democratic side to the Republican side.

I yield the balance of our time to the Senator from Utah, Mr. Lee.

Mr. President, as we close the debate, I enthusiastically support and endorse the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act. This is a statement the Senate can send to the United States of America and all people who are on unemployment, looking for better opportunities. We are now going to offer training to see to it those 10,600,000 Americans out of work can find jobs, and hopefully it will be the 4 million jobs available today in America where skilled workers are not trained.

I thank Senator Murray for her kind comments and reiterate my appreciation for her, her staff, Scott Cheney, my staff, Tommy Nguyen.

Chairman Harkin has been a fearless leader on our committee and allowed us the chance to get to where we are today.

Senator Alexander's velvet glove on an iron hand helped us get through an amendment process that was difficult at times but got us to the point we are today.

I urge my colleagues to vote for the bill and against the two amendments.

I yield back the remainder of our time.

I want to associate myself with the remarks of Senator Harkin and Senator Patty Murray from Washington. I reiterate what I said in my opening statement about how much regard and respect I have for Senator Murray, for the job she has done. We would not be here today if it were not for Patty Murray. I am grateful for her support and her kind words.

I want to reiterate all of the names she said, all the thanks that we have. But I want to particularly thank my staff who have made me once again look good. That is a difficult job to do sometimes. I thank Tommy Nguyen, Amanda Maddox, Michael Black, Brett Layson. I appreciate all they have done; Joan Kirchner, my chief of staff, who came to our aid last week and pulled a rabbit out of the hat in the Republican conference that allowed us to be here.

We all get a lot of credit as Members of the Senate. But it is our staff who make or break what we do. We are very grateful to our staff or the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act would not become law, would not get to the President's desk.

So to Patty Murray, to Senator Harkin, to Senator Alexander, thank you. And to all of our staff, thank you for day in and day out doing the real work of the Senate and for the people of the United States of America.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized for up to 3 minutes and that immediately following my remarks the Senator from Iowa, Mr. Harkin, be recognized for as much time as he might consume.

I thank the distinguished Senator from Iowa for relinquishing a little time to let me step in. I am very grateful.

Madam President, on the evening of June 8, this past Sunday, in Gainesville, GA, CAPT William Hall Davison, U.S. Navy retired, passed away.

It was a significant day in our family for many reasons. He is my wife's father. He is my children's grandfather. He is my grandchildren's great-grandfather. His wife Gay, 97 years old, survives him.

Bill Davison was 99 years old. He was a pilot in World War II in the South Pacific, tracking submarines of the Japanese Navy and cargo ships of the Japanese Navy to make sure our intelligence was the best it could be.

Like so many of America's greatest generation, he sacrificed 4\1/2\ years of his life in defense of our country. He made a career of the U.S. Navy. He never talked about it, and only rarely did he say anything about it. But when he did, he talked about how proud he was to be able to wear the uniform of the United States of America.

So while it was a tragic night for my wife, a tragic loss for our family, it is a reminder to all of us as Americans that our greatest generation is passing at a very rapid rate. Soon none will be here with us who stormed the beaches at Normandy, flew the skies of the Pacific or fought on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge.

But we are all here today--you and I, Madam President--because of the sacrifice of those people--the greatest sacrifice in the history of mankind. In fact, the most unselfish act of humanity I have ever read about or heard about or was ever taught about was by that generation that landed on Normandy Beach on June 6, 1944, and freed America and freed the rest of the world from the totalitarian government of Adolph Hitler.

So as my family pauses to mourn the loss of a father-in-law for me, a grandfather for my children, a great-grandfather for my grandchildren, and a father for my wife, we take joy in knowing that one member of our family was a part of a generation that saved all of humanity for democracy and for freedom and for liberty.

To his wife Gay, who is in morning today, at age 97, we wish her a continued, prosperous life, and we thank her for her sacrifice, because like so many women--the wives of the soldiers during World War II--she kept the home fires burning. They worked in the factories. They made sure that America worked while their husbands were off to defend us.

So while we had a tragic loss of life in our family on Sunday night, June 8, we had a positive remembrance of all that has been done for our family by the brave men and women who fought for the United States of America.

May God bless William Hall Davison for his life and may God bless the United States of America.

I yield back.

Madam President, I request the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I rise for a moment to talk about the Sylvia Burwell nomination, pending confirmation to be Secretary of Labor at HHS, and also to talk about the Affordable Care Act, because you can't separate the two.

I have the good fortune of being on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the Finance Committee. The good fortune of that is it allowed me to twice be able to interrogate--and I use the word interrogate understanding its many definitions--Ms. Burwell over issues that were important to me both in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, as well as in the Finance Committee.

I found her to be articulate, forthright, straightforward, and candid--something we haven't had in the Secretary of Labor-HHS for the last year or so. I am looking forward to having somebody in there who will be able to answer the hard questions. I might not like the answer, I might not agree with the solutions, but I like having somebody who has the intellect, the capability, and the willingness to communicate with Members of Congress, regardless of their party. So I will vote for Sylvia Burwell to be confirmed as Secretary of Labor and HHS, and I wish her the best.

No one should confuse that vote, however, for being a vote in support of the Affordable Care Act and what it is doing to health care in the United States today. I want to talk about that for a second. Some of these things I want to talk about are questions I asked Ms. Burwell in the confirmation hearing.

When I was on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and we did the markup in terms of the health care bill, we met for 69\1/2\ hours. I heard every debate on every amendment; I heard every debate on every philosophy; I heard every proposal that was made, and it became quite clear to me that the premise of that legislation, based on the President's recommendation, was diametrically opposed to my personal philosophy in terms of where government's role should be.

I think the President--and it has been said by the leader Harry Reid recently--thought a single-payer health care system was the right way to go. I think the Affordable Care Act is designed to drive America toward a single-payer health care system.

I would rather have a competitive private sector system that is on a playing field that the government makes sure is fair and level but that the winners and losers in health care become those who compete the best in terms of quality and service.

In fact, the intent of the ObamaCare act and Affordable Care Act has directed a lot of things to happen. Three of them were not good.

Premiums have gone up. The costs to the consumer have gone up, principally because taxes have been levied on the insurance industry. That is No. 1.

Access has been more limited and more restricted based on the Bronze Plan, the Silver Plan, the Gold Plan, and differences between the exchanges.

Third and foremost, there is a great uncertainty in America about what happens next and where health care is going, because the President has selectively given waivers and put off the impact of certain provisions of the law, while lifting up and actually repealing with his own signature and his own pen provisions that were in the law. So there is a lot of uncertainty.

Two things I want to focus on from the cost standpoint. One of them is what is called the HIT, the health insurance tax, which went into effect this year. This year $8 billion in taxes were levied against small- and medium-size group insurance providers in the exchanges for health care. It is an arbitrary number that was used to help determine and pay for the Affordable Care Act, and it is assessed based on the market share of the companies.

Think about this for a second. The U.S. Government is taxing health insurance providers based on their market share of health insurance, and adding that cost to where? To the premium that is paid by the consumer.

It has been estimated that the premium cost is going to go up about $512 a year for the average consumer, just in order for the moderately small- and medium-sized group provider to pay the fine or pay their share of the tax of $8 billion. That $8 billion in 2014, in 2019 goes to $14.3 billion and will go up ad infinitum as it will continue to climb--which means costs will continue to climb.

Access has been restricted because a lot of people aren't playing in the system. A lot of specialty hospitals have chosen not to join the plans. That has meant that specialty care to a lot of children and adults is not available.

Another problem we have had is with navigators, and I want to focus on the navigator point for a second, because it fundamentally underscores my belief in the private sector.

For years I ran a business. It was a business where we had some employees but mostly had independent contractors. We provided group medical benefits for our employees, but only access to salesmen who would sell group plan health plans for independent contractors.

They got a commission when they sold a plan, when they provided the services, and the employee or the independent contractor in my company decided to buy. What we did in the Affordable Care Act--or what the Affordable Care Act and those who voted for it did--it basically did away with all the salesmen in the country who were selling group medical plans to individuals and small businesses. Why? Because it had a medical-loss ratio maximum of 80 percent or 85 percent, meaning your medical costs had to be 80 percent to 85 percent of the premiums. Administrative costs could only be 15 to 20, and it counted the commission for selling the product as an administrative cost, which meant commissions weren't available to be paid.

So what happened? All the people in sales in terms of group medical insurance got out of the business and went to selling something else. What happened because of that? Navigators came about.

So we ended up hiring a bunch of unqualified, unknowledgeable, limited-talent people as navigators to offer to try and sell insurance under the new exchanges created by the ObamaCare act. What happened is sales of those policies were not very robust. In fact, it was very difficult for the President to get his minimum goal of 7 million people being covered. Why? Because the navigators weren't salesmen, No. 1; No. 2, they weren't as well educated as they should have been; and, No. 3, the States did not embrace it.

So that is the private sector solution that had been used for years and years in our country; that is, independent agents making sales of independent insurance products through independent contractors. That has now gone away. They have to now go find an employee who is a navigator, who has no incentive, because they are on a salary and not a commission, to provide a plan or to sell a plan. They merely are there to collect their paycheck and offer information, if in fact somebody can find them.

My point is this: Ms. Burwell is taking on a serious challenge in terms of Labor HHS. The Affordable Care Act presents a lot of problems in terms of access, cost, and quality of health care for the American people that will only get greater as the years go by. We are going to take somebody of her competence and her candid nature to help us join together to see to it that what has become a major problem that looms for our country, the Affordable Care Act, is revisited to look at a new way to go back to the private sector, go back to competition, go back to a level playing field and out of the business of selective taxation, less access, more cost, and more bureaucracy. That is what we have with the Affordable Care Act right now. That is what is untenable.

I wish Ms. Burwell the best. I intend to be very aggressive and active in my work on the Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Committee and the Finance Committee in trying to get to the bottom of some of the questions that have gone unanswered from the Department. I wish her the best, and I hope I get the answers to those questions when she is confirmed as the new Secretary of HHS.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wish to honor CDR Robert Adams Hatch, who retired from the U.S. Navy on June 1, 2014, after more than 28 years of honorable service.

Commander Hatch is a supply corps/logistics officer 3105 and retired following his final assignment in Voluntary Training Unit 6767 Atlanta at the Navy Operational Support Center at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, GA. Prior to his service at Dobbins ARB, he most recently completed a 3-year assignment in Joint Operations with Navy Reserve Joint Staff South in Suffolk, VA, supporting the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Additionally, he was commanding officer of the 50-member Operational Support Unit 0867 in Atlanta, GA, from May 2007 through April 2009.

From 1994 to 2003, Commander Hatch spent much of his career overseas with the Joint Contact Team Program military-to-military contacts program in Eastern Europe as part of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff initiative established in 1992 to illustrate the standard of U.S.-style military under civilian control, and to promote peace, stability, military professionalism and closer ties to NATO for former Communist countries in Eastern Europe. He served on the Military Liaison Team, living and working in Albania under arduous conditions from 1994 to 1998, and was twice evacuated from Albania in March 1997 and August 1998. After the second evacuation in 1998, then-Lieutenant Commander Hatch worked at Headquarters, United States European Command/ ECJ5-J, as joint contact team program desk officer for Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan. He returned to the United States in 2003.

Commander Hatch is also a key team leader on the Atlanta Funeral Honors Team, having conducted more than 450 Navy, Coast Guard, and joint military funerals for Reserve and Active Duty veterans since 2008.

Born in Abington, PA, Commander Hatch moved in 1972 to Atlanta, GA, and grew up in that great city. His father, CAPT James C. Hatch, served in the U.S. Navy Supply Corps, and was a classmate of President Jimmy Carter at the Naval Academy. His father retired after dedicating 26 years of active service, including World War II, and in the Korea and Vietnam wars. Following his retirement, I had the pleasure of working with Jim Hatch at Northside Realty. And the family's Georgia credentials don't stop there. Captain Jim Hatch's brother, Edwin I. Hatch, was president of Georgia Power Company, and the Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Plant, located near Baxley, GA, was duly named in tribute to his leadership.

In addition to his distinguished military career, CDR Robert Hatch has had a meaningful civilian life, including 4 years with Coca-Cola USA. He is currently managing director and independent marketing associate of Ignite/Stream Energy, a funeral attendant with Service Corps International in Atlanta, and an actor participating in movies and television shows filming in Georgia.

Commander Hatch's military decorations include the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, four Joint Service Commendation Medals, Navy Commendation Medal, six Joint Meritorious Unit Awards, Navy Meritorious Unit Commendation, two National Defense Service Medals, Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, nine Navy & Marine Corps Overseas Service Ribbons, Armed Forces Reserve Medal and a Navy Pistol Marksmanship Medal.

I send my great thanks to Commander Hatch for his extensive meritorious service to our proud nation, and I thank and congratulate his family and friends for supporting his service to the United States of America.