Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, later today we will vote in the Senate on the question concerning whether the President's nomination of Thomas Perez to be the Secretary of Labor should be confirmed. I will vote no. I will vote against the confirmation of Mr. Perez. I do not believe he is the right man for this job.

The Secretary of Labor has immense influence over the lives of workers and the conduct of business in today's economy. Employees, employers, and unions must be able to trust the Secretary to faithfully and impartially execute our Nation's labor laws.

At a time when the official unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent-- meaning millions of Americans are looking for work and can't find it-- and at a time when there is a growing gap between our workers' skills and our employers' needs, we need serious leadership on labor policy. We need someone who understands how to create an environment in which the largest number of Americans can find good new jobs. We need leadership that is committed to working in the best interests of the country. Unfortunately, I don't believe Mr. Perez meets that standard.

Mr. Perez's life story is one with many worthy accomplishments in public service, a devotion to representing disadvantaged individuals, and I commend him for that. But he has demonstrated throughout his career that he is willing to, in his words, push the envelope to advance his ideology.

I believe there are three significant problems with the nomination of Mr. Perez:

No. 1, in my view, his record raises troubling questions about his actions while at the Department of Justice and his candor in discussing his actions with this committee.

The Department of Justice inspector general recently published a detailed report that discussed problems in the voting rights section. It talked about a politically charged atmosphere of polarization. Mr. Perez has administered that section since 2009. The report talked about the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and about blatantly partisan political commentary. It specifically criticized the management of the Department and Mr. Perez's actions while at the Department. When questioned by members of our Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Mr. Perez's answers were vague and nonresponsive.

No. 2, to preserve a favorite legal theory, Mr. Perez orchestrated a quid pro quo arrangement between the Department of Justice and the City of St. Paul in which the Department agreed to drop two cases in exchange for the city withdrawing a case, the Manger case, before the Supreme Court.

Mr. Perez's involvement in this whole deal seems to me to be an extraordinary amount of wheeling and dealing outside what should be the normal responsibilities of the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. To obtain his desired results, Mr. Perez reached outside of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice into the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office and into the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This exchange cost American taxpayers the opportunity to potentially recover millions of dollars and, more importantly, violated the trust whistleblowers place in the Federal Government. His testimony has been contradicted by the testimony of other witnesses in contemporaneous documents.

In short, it seems to me that Mr. Perez did not discharge the duty he owed to the government to try to collect money owed to taxpayers. He did not discharge the duty to protect the whistleblowers, who were left hanging in the wind. At the same time, he was manipulating the legal process to remove a case from the Supreme Court in a way that is inappropriate for the Assistant Attorney General of the United States.

No. 3, Mr. Perez's use of private e-mail accounts to leak nonpublic information is troubling to me.

Federal officials in this administration seem to have a penchant for using private e-mails to conduct official business. The Federal Records Act is designed to ensure that the government is held accountable to the American people to prevent the opportunity for a shadow government to operate outside of the normal channels of oversight. Using personal e-mails robs the Nation of the ability to know if the government is behaving appropriately.

Since Mr. Perez apparently is going to be confirmed despite my vote, I hope he will pledge to stop using personal e-mails to conduct official business.

For these three reasons, I cannot support the Perez confirmation. I will support and have supported the President's right to have an up-or- down vote on his Cabinet members. I always have. So I voted for cloture.

But what we have seen over the last several weeks--and I believe the reason the Senate did not come to a screeching halt this week--is that there is a widespread misunderstanding about what Senate Republicans have done with respect to President Obama's nominees for his Cabinet. The reality is that Republicans have respected the right of the President to staff his Cabinet. In fact, never in our Nation's history has the Senate blocked a Cabinet official from confirmation by a filibuster. Let me say that again. The number of Presidential nominees for Cabinet in our Nation's history who have been denied his or her seat by a filibuster, by a failed cloture vote, is zero.

The Washington Post and the Congressional Research Service have said that President Obama's Cabinet appointees in his second term are moving through the Senate at about the same rate as President George W. Bush's and President Clinton's.

Senators on both sides of the aisle have a long history of using the constitutional authority for advice and consent to ask questions. We have done that in the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions concerning Mr. Perez for the last 122 days. We have a historical right--and we have exercised it in a bipartisan way--to use our right to ask for 60 votes in order to advance our views. That is a part of the character of the Senate. But it is important to know that these fairy tales that have been suggested about Republicans somehow blocking President Obama's nominees are just that.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the end of my remarks an op-ed I wrote for the Washington Times yesterday supporting my remarks. The op-ed points out that most of this week's nuclear option debate about whether Senators should be permitted to filibuster Presidential nominees was not about filibusters, it was instead about whether a majority of Senators should be able to change the rules of the Senate at any time for any purpose.

Former Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan once offered the precise trouble with this idea. He said:

If a majority of the Senate can change the rules at any

time, the Senate has no rules.

In other words, all of this fuss was a power grab.

In fact, most of the filibustering that has been done to deny Presidents confirmation of their nominees has been done by our friends on the other side. As I mentioned earlier, the number of Cabinet members who have been denied their seats by a filibuster is zero. The number of district judges in the history of the country who have been denied their seats by a filibuster is zero. The number of Supreme Court Justices who have been denied their seats by a filibuster is zero. There was the incident in 1968 when President Johnson engineered an opportunity for Abe Fortas to get a 45-to-43 vote so he could feel better about staying on the Court after a majority of the Senate clearly wasn't going to confirm him for the Supreme Court. But throughout our history, the right to advise and consent has been exercised by a majority vote even in the most controversial cases. The vote on Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court was a majority vote. The vote denying Robert Bork an opportunity to go to the Supreme Court was a majority vote. While there never has been a Supreme Court nominee blocked by a filibuster, about a quarter of all of the Supreme Court nominees have been withdrawn or blocked by majority vote.

So elections have consequences, and I respect that whether it is a Republican or a Democratic President. Our tradition was that nominees were not denied their seat by a failed cloture vote. Other than Fortas, the only exception is that in 2003, about the time I came to the Senate, the Democrats, for the first time in history--the first time in history--filibustered 10 of President George W. Bush's nominees. That produced Republicans who wanted to change the rules of the Senate, and fortunately cooler heads prevailed. But five Republican judges--very meritorious people, such as Miguel Estrada; a real tragedy--were denied their seats by a filibuster.

So the usual and expected happened. Republicans have since denied two Democratic seats by a filibuster.

So my preference is much that Presidents have the opportunity to appoint their Cabinet members, to appoint their Supreme Court Justices, and if we don't like them, we can vote against them. There have been occasions where sub-Cabinet members have been denied their seats. The total number is seven, all since 1994, and there may be more again.

A simple objection by Republicans to the motion of the majority leader to cut off debate may simply mean we want more information. In the case of Senator Hagel, the majority leader sought to cut off debate 2 days after his nomination came to the floor, and we voted no. We were not ready to cut off debate. Then, 10 days later, we voted to confirm Senator Hagel.

I am glad that this week the Senate regained its equilibrium, so to speak, and stopped this talk of creating the Senate as a body where a majority of the Senate can change the rules at any time, which would make this a Senate without any rules.

I hope we do not hear any more about it because that is not appropriate. It is not appropriate in this body. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Senator Reid himself, and others have said that this body is different. It is a place where you have to come to a consensus. We are coming to one, for example, on student loans today. The President made a good recommendation to solve the student loan problem on a permanent basis. The House of Representatives passed something much like the President's, and hopefully we can do that later today.

So I believe the President deserves an up-or-down vote on his nomination for the Secretary of Labor and his nominee for any other Cabinet member. But in this case, for the reasons I stated, I am voting no on confirmation.

I see the Senator from Georgia is here.

I yield the floor.

I will wait until the majority leader finishes.

Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for his statement, for the time he has spent.

I was looking at the Executive Calendar. But, first, I have spent most of this week working on the student loan issue, as the majority leader knows. And we are coming to an agreement, it looks like, as we have with a number of other things. But I would like to renew to the majority leader the suggestion that we all get together next week and talk this through, as the Senator from Mississippi has suggested. I think it would be a wise thing to do.

There are other Senators here who wish to speak, so I will try to be succinct. Let me address just a few of the points the majority leader made.

One reason I think it would be wise for us to get together as Democratic and Republican Senators is what he is saying is different from the way I read the facts, and one of us has to be wrong about that.

For example, have Republicans used the filibuster to deny President Obama's nominees a position in government? The answer is a fact. I invited the Senate Historian and the Congressional Research Service over to my office. I asked them the question. Here is the answer to the question: In the history of the Senate, no Supreme Court Justice has ever been denied his or her seat by a filibuster. There was a little incident with Justice Fortas that Lyndon Johnson engineered, but that was different. So in the cases of the Supreme Court, zero.

How many district judges have been denied their seat by filibuster? The answer is zero.

How many Cabinet members have been denied their seat by a failed cloture vote filibuster? The answer, according to the Senate Historian and the Congressional Research Service, is zero.

How many circuit judges have been denied their seat by a filibuster? The answer is seven. How did that happen? Democrats, for the first time in history, when President George W. Bush came in, blocked five. And we said: Well, if you are going to change the precedent, then we will change the precedent, so we blocked two. That is what happens around here. But other than that, it is zero.

Then the majority leader said there has been some big delay about President Obama's nominees. These are not throwing statistics around. That is either true or it is not true.

Here is what the Washington Post says and the Congressional Research Service says. The Washington Post, by Al Kamen, on March 18, 2013: President Obama's second-term Cabinet members are going through the Senate at a rate that ``beats the averages of the last three administrations that had second terms.''

President Obama is being better treated in terms of his Cabinet nominees than the last three Presidents.

I asked the Congressional Research Service the same question. They said: As of June 27--last month--his nominees were still moving, on average, from announcement to confirmation, faster than those of President George W. Bush, faster than those of President Clinton.

Someone in the Democratic caucus needs to hear this. The number of Cabinet nominees who have been denied a seat by filibuster is zero. President Obama's Cabinet nominees are moving through the Senate faster than his last three predecessors. That is important information.

Now, are there a lot of nominees sitting around for too long a period of time? I have the thing we call the Executive Calendar right here. Senator McConnell referred to it. I could go through it quickly. I count 24 people on the calendar. The one who has been on there the longest was reported by committee on February 26 of this year. That is a little over 4 months ago.

Let's be very elementary about this. The only way you get on this calendar is to be reported out of committee. The only way you get out of committee is for the Democratic majority to vote you on to this calendar. So we can fill this calendar up any time the Democratic committee majority wants to.

Of the people here, there is a brigadier general named Long. The committee has asked that we hold that. There is Jacob Lew to the International Monetary Fund. Bring him up. Bring him up. He will be confirmed.

Let's go back to that. The only way you get a name to a vote on the floor is if the majority leader brings his name to the floor. Jacob Lew has been

reported from Committee since April 16. Bring him up.

Here is an Air Force person. Here is Ms. McCarthy from Massachusetts. She has been reported from the committee. Bring her up. The Republican leader has said she will get cloture. That means she will be confirmed. He said the same thing about the nominee for the Department of Labor. He has been reported since May 16.

Mr. President, I am not a very controversial person. I was held up for 88 days by an ill-tempered Democratic Senator, for what I thought was no good reason, relying on article II, section 2 of the Constitution's right to advise and consent. President Reagan's nominee for Attorney General Ed Meese was held up for 1 year, and nobody thought about changing the rules of the Senate because it used its constitutional authority to advise and consent. Former Senator Rudman was held up by his home State Senator until Rudman withdrew his name, and then he ran against that Senator and was elected to the Senate.

The advice and consent responsibility of the Senate has gone on since the days this country was founded.

If you go down through this list of people, there are only 24 on the list. He could bring them all up. And 24 is not very many.

Then it reminds me that right after that are the privileged nominations. What are those? Those are the result of our rules changes which removed a number of people from Presidential confirmation and created a whole new category for several hundred executive positions so they do not go through a more cumbersome process, and that is working very well.

So zero filibusters denying nominations, Cabinet members going through the Senate more rapidly than the last three Presidents. So what is the beef? What is going on? There are only three judges on this calendar, an embarrassingly small number for us to deal with. We could clear this calendar in one afternoon. How do we do that? The majority leader brings them up--except for three who are illegally appointed.

Now, I will not go into a long thing about the three illegally appointed, except to say they are illegally appointed.

Most of the Founders of this country did not want a king. They created a system of checks and balances, and they created a Congress, and they created an ability for us to restrain an imperial Presidency. That is what this advice and consent is supposed to do, and we should exercise that, as former Senator Byrd used to say most eloquently on this floor. It is our opportunity to answer questions. Just because the majority leader seeks to cut off debate does not mean that person is being denied confirmation.

I will give you an example: Secretary Hagel. The majority leader tried to cut off debate 2 days after he came to the floor from the committee. We said: We want a little more time to consider this. We will be glad to vote for him for cloture in 10 days. He went ahead with the cloture vote and called that a filibuster. But Secretary Hagel is sitting in his spot as Secretary of Defense today.

So you can go down through all of these nominations and really find no evidence--no evidence whatsoever. So we need a meeting of the two caucuses to say: What is going on? Why are you seeking to do this?

The last thing I would like to say is, it is appropriate from time to time in the case of subcabinet members to use the cloture to deny a seat. That has happened seven times. John Bolton was one that the Democrats did to President Bush.

As I conclude my remarks, I would like to say this: The majority leader said: Well, we have changed the rules 18 times.

Never like this. What he is proposing to do is to turn this body into a place where the majority can do whatever it wants to do. That is like the House of Representatives--so the majority can do whatever it wants to do. A freight train can run through the House of Representatives in 1 day, and it could run through here in 1 day if the Majority leader does this. This year it might be a Democratic freight train. In a year and a half it might be the tea party express. There are a lot of people on that side of the aisle who might be very unhappy with the agenda that 51 people who have creative imaginations on this side of the aisle could do if they could do anything they wanted to do with 51 votes.

I like to read a lot of history. John Meacham's book about Jefferson has a conversation between Jefferson and Adams at the beginning of our country. They were President and Vice President, I guess, at the time. Jefferson said to Adams he feared for the future of the Republic if it did not have a Senate. ``[N]o republic could ever last which had not a Senate. . . . [T]rusting the popular assembly''--that means the House, that means a majority vote institution--``for the preservation of our liberties. . . . [is] the merest chimera''--or illusion-- ``imaginable.''

One other distinguished public servant said the same thing in his book in 2007. This is what Harry Reid said in his book when he wrote about the nuclear option. He was talking about the then-majority leader Senator Frist. He decided to pursue a rules change that would kill the filibuster for judicial nominations.

I will be through in just a minute. I ask unanimous consent to speak for another minute.

So the leader said:

Senator Frist of Tennessee, who was the Majority Leader,

had decided to pursue a rules change that would kill the

filibuster for judicial nominations.

This is Harry Reid writing.

And once you opened that Pandora's box--

Said Senator Reid--

it was just a matter of time before a Senate leader who

couldn't get his way on something moved to eliminate the

filibuster for regular business as well.

Senator Reid wrote:

And that, simply put, would be the end of the United States

Senate.

I do not want Senator Reid to have written on his tombstone he presided over the end of the Senate. Yet if he does what he is threatening to do, that would be what he is remembered for in the history of this country.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank the Senator from Utah for his thoughtful remarks. I have been trying to think of a way to put in context what is at stake because the majority leader said in his remarks today: We have changed the rules 18 times. True. We have changed the rules a lot. But we are not talking about changing the rules of the Senate. We are talking about changing the Senate.

That is what the proposal is, changing the Senate from an institution that protects minority rights by requiring 60 votes out of 100 on major matters of importance instead of a majority of votes. You know we grow up and we go to first grade and we learn that the majority wins. So we get that ingrained in ourselves as we grow up in America. It is a good principle, the majority wins. It is a way to resolve disputes and work things out.

But from the very beginning of our country, our most thoughtful observers and visitors have looked at our country and said: But a democracy needs some protections for the minority, for the people with a minority view.

I have mentioned on the floor before that I have been reading Jon Meacham's book about Thomas Jefferson, about the conversation they had after dinner on February 15, 1798. Jefferson wrote about what Adams said to him. Adams said:

No Republic could ever last which had not a Senate.

Trusting the popular assembly for the preservation of our

liberties is unimaginable.

``Trusting a popular assembly for the preservation of our liberties.'' What did he mean by that? What he meant by that is that the passions in our country--and they particularly happen that way today because of the Internet--can suddenly grow very strong. They happened back at that time in France with the French Revolution, where the population got excited and began to behead people in connection with the French Revolution.

So popular passions can run strong. Our Founders said: We want a House of Representatives that reflects those popular passions, which is why when you go over to the House, they have a Rules Committee. Whoever wins the House by one vote gets nine of the seats and whoever loses gets four of the seats to make it clear that the party that has four of the seats does not have anything to say about anything, so they can bring it up on Monday and pass it on Tuesday.

That is what a popular assembly can do. So Adams was saying to Jefferson: We need another body. We need a Senate that is not so responsive to the popular passions. President Adams and President Jefferson said at the beginning of our country that they did not believe a Republic could stand without such a Senate. That is what they said then. Our most famous visitor to the United States was Alexis de Tocqueville, a young Frenchman who came in the 1830s.

He wrote a book, ``Democracy in America,'' which is probably the best book ever written about democracy in America. He said in this that there are two great dangers he saw in our future democracy. This is when it was very young. One was Russia. That was a prescient comment. But the other was the tyranny of the majority. That is what de Tocqueville said.

The great danger to our democracy is the tyranny of the majority. That means a majority can run over you with a one-vote margin. What does that mean today? Let's say you care about abortion rights. Let's say you care about gay rights.

Let's say you care about climate change. Let's say you didn't support the war in Iraq, you didn't support the war in Afghanistan. Let's say you don't like government snooping, but the majority does. The majority has a view that is different from your view, so they can run over you-- in the Senate they can't because they will have to persuade at least 60. It will take some time to do it, and it doesn't always work. You have to stop and think about any issues.

The House can say: No secret ballot in a union election, and they can pass it in a day. It will come to the Senate, and we will say: Let's think about it. We will think about it even if the Democrats are in charge and they are in favor of no secret ballot in a union election because we protect the rights of working men and women across the country who may be in the minority. But we have to stop and think about whether we want to abolish the secret ballot in union elections.

What the majority leader is proposing doing next week is not just changing a rule, he is changing this institution so that whoever has a majority of one can do anything they want to do, anytime they want to do it, and can run over any minority. It doesn't make so much difference that you run over a person in the minority in the Senate-- you know, we are just individuals. But what about the views we represent? What about the views of the farmers in North Dakota, mountaineers in Tennessee, or the civil rights workers in Alabama? What about the people in the 1970s who opposed the Vietnam war? The majority? The majority ran over it.

People who are accustomed to being in the minority know the advantage and the importance of having protection of minority rights. They know-- and they have studied American history--that the chief defender of minority rights in the history of our country has been the Senate. This is what the majority leader proposes to change. He proposes to make this place like the House, where a freight train can run through it overnight and change abortion rights, change the war attitude, change civil rights, change environmental policy. One vote can do it. Run the train through the House. Run the train through the Senate. Today it

might be a Democratic train. Tomorrow it might be the tea party express.

Our friends on the other side might wish to think about that. I have some very creative colleagues over here. I will bet they could come up with a pretty good agenda of things we would like to do if we had 51 votes and we could do it anyway.

This is not about a rules change. This is about changing the nature of a Senate that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the Founders of our country created to be an alternative to a popular assembly and that every majority leader in our history has, in the end, supported in this way.

We should not take this lightly--especially if you are an American person who has an unpopular view. If you feel as though you are in the minority, if you feel that a majority might not agree with you, might even run over you, you do not want the Senate to suddenly be a place where a freight train could run right through it overnight.

You may say: Well, we have the President and the White House.

You may. You do today. You might not tomorrow. You might not tomorrow.

When I came to the Senate 10 years ago one party had both the Senate, the House, and the Presidency. What if we were 10 years ago and we could run a freight train through the House, to the Senate, and send it down to President Bush? We might say that no State in the country-- every State in the country must have a right-to-work law. We believe in right-to-work laws. We might have new rules on public unions. We might have different ideas on abortion. We might have different ideas on climate change. If you are in the minority, you wouldn't be able to stop us. You wouldn't even be able to slow us down for a good conversation. We could just run right through town.

Nearly one-half of this body is in its first term. More than half of my Democratic friends have never been in the minority. I have been in the minority in a variety of ways in my lifetime, and I want some protection--more than just from the popular assembly that might run through.

That is why I said this morning that I hope very much that the Democratic leader will accept the request from those of us on the Republican side for all of us Senators to meet together in the Old Senate Chamber where we can meet privately, where we can talk face-to- face.

We can say: We need to understand how in the world the Democratic side could want to change the character of the Senate in this way when in 2 years they could be on the other side. What would make you so angry that you would want to do that?

If you would say to us, you have been filibustering our nominees, we would say to you, I guess you know that none of your nominees have ever been defeated by filibuster. I guess you know that--except for two circuit judges. And you started that because you did five of ours.

You will say: Well, you have been delaying our nominations.

We will say: I hope you know that the Congressional Research Service and the Washington Post say that President Obama's Cabinet nominees have been moving through the Senate more rapidly than President Bush's did and President Clinton's did in their second terms. I hope you know that.

You may say: But you have been holding people up for years.

We will reply: I hope you will look at the Executive Calendar.

It is on everybody's desk here. This is the list of people who can be confirmed in the Senate. How do they get on the Executive Calendar? They come out of committees. Who controls the committees? Democratic majorities. If there is someone who hasn't been confirmed, put him on the calendar. It is your committee that can do it.

Once they get on the calendar, how do they get confirmed? Only one person can manages that schedule--the majority leader. All he has to do is say: I move the nomination of Jacob J. Lew, of New York, to be U.S. Alternate Governor of the International Monetary Fund. He has been on the calendar since April 16, 2013.

You may say: There is an objection to that.

We will say: So what? The majority leader can bring it up, and under our rules we can ask for a 60-vote vote on Mr. Lew to the International Monetary Fund.

He is already in the administration, so that probably wouldn't happen, but let's say it did. The majority leader can bring it up on Monday. We would vote on Wednesday. He would get 60 votes, and then he would be confirmed. That would take one of the 24 people off of this Executive Calendar.

You might say: Well, they have been waiting for years.

We might say: Wait a minute, I have got it right here. The one who has been waiting the longest came to the floor February 26, 2013. That was 4 months ago. There is no one here who has been waiting longer than 4 months, who has been here waiting for us to do something about it. The only one who could move somebody off this calendar to a vote is the majority leader sitting right over there, so what are you talking about?

This is what we would say to you.

You must be angry about something else or you wouldn't be thinking about changing the character of the whole Senate because no one has been denied their seat by filibuster except a circuit judge, and you set the precedent for that. There is no one left to confirm except these nominees for the National Labor Relations Board that President Obama made unconstitutionally on January 24, 2012.

The Republican leader said: You have a Labor Secretary who is controversial.

We all concede that, but the majority leader hasn't moved that we have a vote on him. He has been reported since May; he has been sitting here since May. The majority leader could have been brought him up.

There is a lady nominated for the Environmental Protection Agency. Bring up her nomination. Let's vote on it. There are a couple of other controversial nominations, but all we have to do is vote--except on these unconstitutional nominees.

What do we do about them? Let's make clear what happened to the National Labor Relations Board. In December of 2011 the President sends us two nominees to the National Labor Relations Board. This is the way it is supposed to happen. Their papers then come over to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Senator Hatch used to chair that. I am on that committee now as a ranking member. Before the papers from the White House even get to the committee, the President recess- appoints them. In other words, he used his power to appoint these persons to the NLRB during a recess when the Senate was in session. How do we know it was in session? It was in session, in a pro forma session, which is a device invented by the majority leader, Senator Reid, when George W. Bush was President to keep President Bush from making recess appointments.

President Bush didn't like that, these 3-day pro forma sessions, but he respected it.

He said: Our Founders didn't want a king. They created separation of powers. That means checks and balances. I am the President, but I can't do everything. There is Congress over here, and there is a bill of rights over here.

President Bush said: I don't like what Senator Reid did. He created these pro forma sessions so I can't make a recess appointment, but I will respect that.

Senator Reid has a pro forma session when President Obama is in, and President Obama doesn't respect it and appoints two people. They are still there. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled that unconstitutional, as has the Third Circuit Court of Appeals--two of the highest courts in the land--and they are still there. They are still there making cases unconstitutionally. They have decided 1,031 cases, all of which will be subject to being vacated if the Supreme Court agrees with the Federal courts. We cannot ignore that in the Senate if we wish to preserve the principle of checks and balances in the United States.

I mentioned at the beginning that I like to read history. I said this on the Senate floor, and I will read it again and then conclude because I know other Senators are here.

I was reading Jon Meacham's book about Thomas Jefferson, which I mentioned, and John Adams and Jefferson and how changing the Senate, not changing the rules--but if you change

the Senate rules in this way, that means that the majority, on any day, any year, could come through and do anything it wants do.

They might decide: We don't like the gas in North Dakota, or we don't like the corn in Tennessee. So we are going to change the rules so we can have an advantage that 51 of us can do something about.

They could do that any day. Do it now; do it then.

I mentioned that history. I mentioned de Tocqueville's history. But here is the last piece of history I will mention once more. This is chapter 7 of Senator Reid's book in 2007. Chapter 7 is entitled ``The Nuclear Option.'' I had just come to the Senate. He talks about me in this chapter and gives me some credit for the gang that was formed to preserve the Senate at the time when another majority leader was trying to change the character of the Senate.

I see the distinguished majority leader, so I will defer to his comments. Maybe it is appropriate for me to read them. Senator Reid wrote in 2007:

Peaceable and productive are not two words I would use to

describe Washington in 2005.

I just couldn't believe that Bill Frist was going to do

this.

The storm had been gathering all year, and word from

conservative columnists and in conservative circles was that

Senator Frist of Tennessee, who was the majority leader, had

decided to pursue a rules change that would kill the

filibuster for judicial nominations.

This is Senator Reid's book. It is an excellent book, and I appreciate being mentioned in it.

Senator Reid continues:

And once you opened that Pandora's box, it was just a

matter of time before a Senate leader who couldn't get his

way on something moved to eliminate the filibuster for

regular business as well. And that, simply put, would be the

end of the United States Senate.

I believe that. I believe it would be. It is not a mere rules change. Anytime this body changes its rules in the middle of a session without following the 67-vote rules cloture requirement, anytime it does that, it doesn't matter what it is for, it could do it again for a matter of precedent. If it does it for judicial nominations, the importance of the change is not whether it is a good idea to have an up-or-down vote on judicial nominations, the importance of the change is that with 51 votes you can do anything you want at any time. That, in de Tocqueville's words, in his foresight and his prescience in the 1830s, takes away from the people of the United States their greatest protection of their liberties because it encourages the tyranny of the majority.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, if I may respond to the Senator from West Virginia.

First, I wish to congratulate Senators Manchin and Burr for helping the full Senate understand this issue. This is similar to a lot of issues we have to face. They are not simple. I used to be a college president and the U.S. Secretary of Education. I had to re-educate myself on this legislation. I still made some mistakes.

I was saying last night, for example, that there were only 2 million subsidized loans. What I was forgetting was the point that the Senator from West Virginia makes, which is that 80 percent of the students who have subsidized loans, the low-income students, also have unsubsidized loans. So when we only take care of these subsidized loans, we are leaving 7 million students with unsubsidized loans out here hanging high and dry, and nobody is taking care of them. So we are hurting both the middle-class families and the low-income families when we have an incomplete solution.

The Senator from West Virginia posed a question. Let's say I graduated from the University of Tennessee and I had two loans; I had a subsidized loan, which means the government paid my interest while I was in college. Typically, if I am similar to four out of five students, I also had an unsubsidized loan, so I accrued that interest. Suddenly the interest rates have gone up for me because the country's interest rates have gone up to 10 percent. What I can do is take all my government loans at once and turn them into an 8.25-percent loan. So that is, in effect, a cap on my loan, and then I would have the choice.

I would say this to the Senators from West Virginia and North Carolina. I have heard some Senators say that when I consolidate my loan at 8.25 percent, that means the student is going to have to pay a lot of interest because it spreads the loan out over a long period of time.

But does not the student have that choice? Isn't it similar to a 15- year mortgage, where you have higher monthly payments, but you pay less interest because you pay it off quicker?

Madam President, I ask consent that the Senators from North Carolina and West Virginia and I be permitted to engage in a colloquy for a few minutes.

That is how I understand it. I would say to the Senator from North Carolina,--I would presume a graduate of the University of North Carolina would be smart enough to make that decision for herself or himself?

If I could respond to the Senator who suggested that,--the answer is yes. I think it is fair to say that the consolidation option that a student has in case the rates go up, at 8.25 percent can be called a cap. It is not a hard cap, but it is a cap. And the second cap is the income repayment provision of which the Senator speaks. If you are making $40,000 a year, after they apply the formula you probably are not spending more than about 10 percent of your income--it is something called disposable income--to pay for your student loan. Loan repayment then continues for about 20 years. If at the end of 20 years you have not paid your loan off, the loan is forgiven.

Any student who has a loan has that opportunity. They can consolidate at 8.25 percent, and income repayment limits the amount they have to pay each year. So they have that.

One of the things I noticed about the Manchin-Burr bill that I would like to ask the Senators to talk about is that you have come up with-- what I am beginning to understand, as I study this more and more--a very significant contribution: the idea that all of the undergraduate student loans--which, as I understand it, are about two out of three of the loans--should have the same interest rate. First, it is confusing the way undergraduate loan interest rates are now, but the other reason is that about 80 percent of the people who have subsidized loans, the low-income students, also have unsubsidized loans. So your contribution is to say: Let's simplify it, provide certainty over a long period of time, and treat all undergraduates the same. Otherwise, it seems to me, you are leaving 7 million middle-income students who have unsubsidized loans high and dry, and the 80 percent of the low-income students who also have these unsubsidized loans, you are not helping them either.

I wonder if the Senator could comment on this idea? I notice, without a cap, you are able to get the interest rate for all undergraduate loans down to about 3.66 percent, which is a pretty low rate.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor to ask my Democratic colleagues to take another look at the student loan issue that will be before us tomorrow. We are playing with real lives here. These are about 11 million students who are going to college in the fall. They will be taking out 18 million loans for this year. Taxpayers will be loaning them over $100 billion. The only proposal we are going to be voting on tomorrow appears to be one that will leave over 7 million middle-income college students swinging in the wind, paying about twice as much in interest rates as they should be paying.

At the same time, we have a proposal that is based upon a recommendation by President Obama that is like legislation already passed by the Republican House of Representatives that is supported by an Independent and two Democratic Senators and three Republican Senators that would lower student loan interest rates on every single one of the 18 million new loans that would be taken out next year and cut nearly in half the interest rates on loans for undergraduate students, which make up two-thirds of the loans.

I ask the question, why would we do a 1-year political fix that only helps students taking 40 percent of the loans, when we have before us a bipartisan proposal that is close to the idea of the

President and the House that would help every single student, and especially why would we do that when we leave middle-income students twisting in the wind, paying hundreds of millions of dollars more in interest rate than they should be paying over the next 10 years?

The student loan issue is becoming like what we call the doc fix, where Congress, for political reasons, every year rushes around and makes a temporary patch. There is no need to do that here, no need whatsoever.

I ask my friends on the Democratic side to look at what the President has proposed and the reasoning behind it. It was in his budget. Look at what the House of Representatives has done. They actually passed a bill that lowers rates. Then look at the proposal by Senator Manchin, Senator Carper, Senator King, Senator Burr, Senator Coburn, and myself in the Senate. What our proposal would do is provide a long-term solution: if you are an undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee, instead of your rate being 6.8 percent, it would be 3.66 percent. The Democratic proposal, I repeat, does nothing for over 7 million middle-income students who are going to be paying 6.8 percent when they should be paying, if they are undergraduates, 3.66 percent under our proposal. That is nearly half as much. There is no need for that.

This is like other political situations, we have some misinformation going back and forth across the aisle. I hope my colleagues will take a look at the Burr-Manchin proposal. The right thing for us to do is to say to these 10 million students, all of them, every single one of them, that when you go to take out your 18 million loans this year you are going to be paying a rate that is fair to taxpayers and fair to students. It is fair to taxpayers because it will not be costing the government any money and it is fair to students because the government will not be making any money. It will not be reducing the deficit on the back of the students. That is the principle upon which we can agree--fair to taxpayers, fair to students; doesn't cost the taxpayers, doesn't balance the budget on the backs of students. On that basis we can say to students: Take advantage of these low rates. You can get a 10-year loan if you are an undergraduate at 3.66 percent. There is no need to pretend we are helping students when the alternative proposal only addresses 40 percent of the students. These are the subsidized loans. These are the loans for the low-income students, who already get, for the most part, Pell grants, who already have their interest paid while they are in school--that is a big subsidy. It is over $50 billion in the next 10 years. We leave the middle-income students over 7 million of them--over the next 10 years paying hundreds of millions of dollars they shouldn't be paying. I don't know why my friends on the other side want to leave the middle-income students of America twisting in the wind, paying higher interest rates than they should.

So let's step back and look at the facts. Let's look at the President's proposal, look at what the House passed, and look at the bipartisan Burr-Manchin proposal. I respectfully urge the majority leader to allow us to vote on that. I urge my colleagues on the other side to coalesce around that idea. Let's say to the students of America: As the Senate, we know a good idea when we see one, and the Burr-Manchin proposal is such an idea.

Mr. President, I am glad I stayed to hear the Senator from Washington speak because I think this highlights the issue. That is a terrific political speech, but it bears no resemblance to what is actually happening in the student loan debate.

The distinguished Senator from Washington talked about rates going up. Rates are going up for over 7 million--7 million--middle-income students in America who are going to be taking out loans this year, and the Democratic proposal does nothing for them. Their proposal does nothing for them.

All the Democrats are trying to do is a political fix for 1 year for students taking out 40 percent of the loans who are already the beneficiary of Pell grants, as she so ably expressed, who have their interest paid while they are in college. These students are borrowing subsidized loans. These students may receive a Pell grant of up to $5,550. They have their interest paid while they are in college. This accounting system used by the Congressional Budget Office is very generous to students as opposed to taxpayers, because it is done under the Federal Credit Reporting Act, which is more generous to students, in this case, than taxpayers.

What about the over 7 million middle-income students who are just swinging in the wind under the Democratic proposal? It does nothing for them.

On the other hand, we have the President of the United States, a Democrat, and we have the House of Representatives, a majority of Republicans, and they fundamentally agree on one idea: Let's have a permanent solution. Let's figure out what it costs the taxpayer to allow the government to issue loans--the government is lending over $100 billion a year--and loan it to the students at no profit--at no profit--so the students can use it--all of them, not 40 percent of them, not just low-income students but middle-income students as well-- and all of them will have their rates lowered.

So what will the effect be? Their proposal would fix at 3.4 percent for 1 year the student loan interest rate on 40 percent of the loans. Our bipartisan proposal would fundamentally--as does the President's proposal and the proposal passed by the House of Representatives--lower the rate to 3.66 percent for all undergraduates. It would be not just for the students borrowing 40 percent of the loans but for all middle- income students and graduate students as well. Their rates would be lower than 6.8 percent.

What is good about a short-term political fix that makes middle- income students and graduate students pay hundreds of millions of dollars more over the next 10 years? What is good about that? All it does is provide an opportunity to make a well-rehearsed political speech about student loans.

We all want to encourage students to go to college. We are looking for a way to give them some predictability and some certainty so students don't have to worry, when they graduate from Maryville High School in Tennessee where I went, that Congress isn't going to do its job. All the other side is going to do is stand up and make political speeches that have nothing to do with the issue.

In this case, the President has done his job by recommending a long- term solution. The Republican House of Representatives has done its job. It passed a long-term solution that lowers rates for everybody. A group of six Senators are doing our jobs. We have introduced a bipartisan proposal that reduces rates for everybody, and it is a long- term solution, while a number of the Democratic Senators are playing political games. They are ignoring reality. They are going to freeze for 10 years higher interest rates on loans for over 7 million--7 million--middle-income students across this country who are headed to college--rates that are nearly twice as high as the bipartisan proposal here, which is fundamentally like the proposal by the President and the proposal by the House of Representatives.

What is the wisdom in that? I don't see it, and I don't think the students will see it.

As far as balancing the budget on the backs of students, the only people around here who have done that are the Democrats when they passed the health care law. They put in that law a takeover of the Federal student loan program and, according to the CBO, they had an amount of savings of $55 billion, and they used part of it to reduce the debt.

So the CBO says these are savings because the Democrats took over student loans and the Democrats said they will use it to reduce the debt, use it for the Pell grant program, and they used it to help pay for the health care law. Every single year for the next several years, students are being overcharged to help pay for the health care law.

So if we want to get into a big political discussion about who is overcharging students in order to reduce the deficit or pay for the health care law, we can have that. But that is not what we want to do. We want a result, and we have suggested to the Senate--and I am going to say it one more time: Instead of a 40-percent political fix for 1 year, we have suggested a long-term solution for 100 percent of the students. It reduces their rates. It cuts nearly in half the interest rate for every single undergraduate loan--every single one, which is two-thirds of the loans--and it is based on an idea that was in the President's budget, that has already been passed by the House of Representatives, and that has been introduced by three on that side of the aisle and three on this side of the aisle.

A Senate that is interested in a result instead of political gamesmanship would be sitting down and trying to work that out. That is what we want to do.

We can play games, too, I suppose. I can go get my statistics and come back to the floor and say those over on the Democratic side, when they passed the health care bill, did it on the backs of students. When they balanced the budget--which they haven't done--they tried to do it on the backs of students. And when they found some money for Pell grants, they overcharged the students to whom they were loaning money. That is true. I could do that, and I could say that, but I didn't come here to spend all my time saying that. I came here to get results.

So this is not a game for 11 million students across this country. They are trying to figure out how they are going to pay for college. Just as the Senator from Washington said, it is not easy to do. They expect us to come here with our backgrounds and say: We are going to do the best we can. Instead of making this similar to what we call the doctors fix, where every year we play a little politics and add a little money to pay doctors who work with Medicare patients--that is a terrible thing to do, but we do it every year--and now we are going to treat student loans in the same way. In a Presidential election year, everybody will make a big speech about it. Eleven million students will sit around wondering how they are going to pay for college, waiting for the people in Washington to make a decision about that. We should not be doing that.

We have great promise here. We have a President making a long-term solution, the House of Representatives of a different party agreeing with him, and six of us on both sides of the aisle proposing a solution that is a permanent solution for 100 percent for the 11 million people who will be borrowing over $100 billion this year.

Why would they on the other side of the aisle insist on a solution that forces 7 million mostly middle-income students to pay 6.8 percent when they could be paying 3.66 percent? Why would you do that? Because you have not thought about it, I think.

A lot has been going on. We have had an immigration debate and a number of other things, so maybe Senators have not taken a look at that. I have. I have had a chance to do that. I have been the president of a university. I have been the Education Secretary. I know

something about the student loan program. I did not like it when the Federal Government took it over. I admire our U.S. Secretary of Education. I do not think he ought to be the banker of the year. I think we have banks to make loans, but that is not the way it is. The taxpayers now make all the government loans--over $100 billion a year.

Students are making their plans. They are going to be arriving at colleges in August and September. We have a bipartisan proposal that will lower interest rates for every single student taking out a student loan. Yet our friends on the other side want to leave middle-income students out of it, force them to pay twice as much as they should be in interest rates for the next 10 years. That makes no sense. We ought not do that.

Tomorrow what we ought to do is pass the Burr-Manchin proposal that is supported on both sides of the aisle. To the extent it differs with the President's proposal--which is very slight--and with the proposal of the House of Representatives--which is not much--we should then sit down, work something out over the next 3 days, pass it and send it to the President and go on to the next issue. Instead, we have political speeches about how hard it is to go to college. We all know how hard it is to go to college. It is difficult to do. We all want to help. But if we have a solution, we ought to adopt it.

I could play politics too. I know how. Every one of us in this room knows how, otherwise we would not be here. This is not a time for playing politics. This is serious business; 11 million students getting 18 million loans, $100 billion-plus from the American taxpayers. We have a proposal before us that is fair to the taxpayers--it will not cost them any money--it is fair to the students--it does not balance the budget or pay for the health care program or any other thing on the students' backs--and it gives students, many of whom who have no credit rating, no other way to get money, a chance to get several thousand dollars a year at one of the lowest possible rates available in the country. The proposal that is before the Senate that is bipartisan is a permanent solution. It says to the student going to the University of Tennessee or Alaska or Minnesota: If you get a loan this year from the government and you are an undergraduate, the interest rate is 3.66 percent. Your rate on that loan won't change. If you are a middle- income student, the Democrats' plan says it is 6.8 percent, and they say: Wait. Wait for what? Wait for rates to go up?

Why don't we establish this program for students at a time when rates are low? That is to their advantage. Let's have a permanent solution at a time when rates are low. They may go up and, therefore, students may pay more, but they will pay a lot less than they would in the private market. They will have a lot more certainty than if we just come around and play politics with this every year to try to gain some advantage with this student group or that student group.

So we have an opportunity before us. The immigration bill passed before the recess. It showed a good deal of the ability of people on both sides of the aisle to work together. We did that with the farm bill. We did that with the water resources bill. I would submit this is 100 times easier than any of those bills.

When I went home to Tennessee before the Fourth of July recess, I said to somebody who asked me: We are that far apart and we have the President and the Republican House and a bipartisan group of Senators all in about the same place. This ought to be easy to do.

It is still easy to do, but I would implore my Senators to look at the facts--those on the other side of the aisle--and realize I do not think they want to go home and explain why they are leaving over 7 million middle-income students twisting in the wind, paying twice as much on interest rates for the next year as the proposal that they are about to vote against tomorrow. I think that will be pretty hard to explain, and I will bet there will be a lot of explaining to do if that is the end result.

So I pledge--as I have been working with Secretary Duncan, with the White House, with Democrats and Republicans--to try to get a result here. I think we can still do it in the next few days. I would hope we can have a vote on both proposals tomorrow. My guess would be both would fail at this point, but at least that would show we are seriously working toward a solution, and we can sit down and merge these small differences that exist between the bipartisan group here, the Republican House, and the President of the United States.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I wonder if I might ask, through the Chair, the Senator from Michigan a question. I notice her chart on 7 million students, and I wonder which 7 million students she is talking about.

My understanding is there are 11 million students who will take out new student loans this year, I believe that 2 million of them are low- income students who get subsidized loans, and that the Democratic Senator's proposal would help those 2 million students by keeping their rate at 3.4 percent instead of 6.8 percent. So who are the 7 million students the Senator from Michigan is talking about?

I thank the Senator from Michigan.

It could be my numbers are wrong. I think the 7 million student figure is actually a very good billboard for why not to support the Democratic proposal but to support the bipartisan proposal because what the proposal of the Senator from Michigan will do is keep rates high for 7 million middle-income students whom her proposal does not help.

There are 11 million students across this country who are going to college this fall. They will take 18 million loans out. They will borrow over $100 billion. What happened on July 1 was that the rate went back up to 6.8 percent for the loans that are for the lower income students--only those. For the loans that go to the middle-income students--and my understanding is there are about 7 million of those-- it stays right where it is: 6.8 percent.

Under the bipartisan proposal, their rates would be 3.66 percent. In other words, the bipartisan proposal would not only create a permanent solution, but it would lower rates--it would lower rates almost half-- for the 7 million middle-income students who otherwise would be twisting in the wind for the next 10 years paying higher rates-- hundreds of millions of dollars of higher rates.

So the number 7 million, I believe, is correct, I would say to the Senator from Michigan, but that is the number of middle-income students who are going to be paying higher interest rates under her proposal. I am glad she brought up the number. If I am mistaken about that, I need to know it before tomorrow's vote because I believe there are 2 million students with subsidized loans. That is who the Senator seeks to help. There are 7 million students who are undergraduates who have loans that are unsubsidized. Those are middle-income undergraduates. They are going to be paying 6.8 percent under the Senator's proposal. They are going to be paying 3.66 percent under the bipartisan proposal.

I would be happy to, Madam President.

It is a fixed rate for the students who borrow the money this year.

Well, if you are 1 of the 11 million students who borrow money under the bipartisan proposal--let's say you are an undergraduate, and that is two-thirds of the loans--your rate would be 3.66 percent this year, next year, and for the next 10 years.

Next year it will be whatever it costs the government to borrow money. The government will loan it to the student, without overcharging the student, in order to reduce the debt to pay for government programs or any other reason. So the formula would be that we would not add any cost to the taxpayers, but we would not overcharge the students to reduce the debt or to pay for a program. Next year the interest rate might be higher. The next year it might be higher. But those would be for new loans.

Then, of course, there are already two caps in the law that would be continued under the bipartisan proposal. One says that any student at any time can consolidate his or her loan at 8.25 percent. So the loan cannot go higher than that.

The second says while you are paying off your loan, you will not pay more than about 10 percent of your income. If after 20 years or so you have not paid off your loan, it is forgiven. So these are two caps that are already in the law.

I would say to the Senator through the Chair, she is correct. The idea of this is instead of Congress playing political ``fix it'' during every election, we have turned this into a sort of doc fix where we are treating students the same way we treat doctors who serve Medicare patients. We run in here and have a big political fight about what we should be paying. Instead of doing that, we have a permanent solution that is based on what the market rate actually is. We say whatever it costs the government, whatever it costs the taxpayer, we loan it to the students at that level.

The Senator is correct; if it costs the government more to borrow the money because the rates are higher that year, the rate will be higher that year. But there is the 8.25-percent cap. Throughout the history of the student loan program, there have been caps in the past. There was a 10-percent cap for about 15 years. There was a 9-percent cap for about 20 years. If the Senator is suggesting there be a cap on the loan at a lower level than that, then the Senator will have to raise a lot of money.

For example, if we had a 6.8-percent cap on all loans going forward, my guess would be that it would cost $50 billion or $60 billion over a 10-year period of time. I do not know where we will get that money. So the President made the proposal that we have a permanent solution. He suggested that we take the amount of money--ask the Congressional Budget Office. This is not some Republican or Democratic figure. Ask the Congressional Budget Office: What does it cost to borrow the money and to make the loans? Let's then loan it to the students. Let's not overcharge them for any purpose. That is the proposal.

So my question would be, why would we do a short-term fix for 1 year that

benefits a small percent of students, and leave 7 million middle-income students twisting in the wind, paying an interest rate that is nearly twice as much as they would pay under the bipartisan permanent solution that is based on the very same idea the President proposed, that the House of Representatives has passed, and that a bipartisan group here has proposed?

I think the more Senators look into this and understand the cost of it, they will agree the goal is to say, we do not want to add any cost to the taxpayers, and we certainly do not want to overcharge the students on a loan, that they will come out with something about like what the bipartisan proposal is and what the House passed and what the President proposed.

If I could make one other comment, the Senator from Michigan was talking about large loans for students. I agree that is a problem. I am a former university president. I am a former Education Secretary. I have watched this for a long time. I think a lot of students are borrowing too much money. We need to think about ways to change that. Right now, they are entitled to borrow certain amounts, even if the college thinks it is unwise for them to do that. Maybe we need to change that. Maybe colleges need to have some skin in the game when they make a loan, whether they are a public, or nonprofit or a for- profit college. That is something we ought to look into.

But what we are debating this week is a simple question of what is a fair rate? What is a fair rate? The bipartisan proposal is an 8-page bill that says: Let's take what it costs the government to borrow the money, that is whatever the Congressional Budget Office says it is, let's loan it to the students without any profit, and let's have two caps on it going forward. One would be 8.25 percent. Any student could consolidate any loans at that level if it goes higher. The other would be a cap on how much you have to pay each year as you pay your loan back. I hope my friends on the other side recognize that unless I am mistaken, their proposal does help, for 1 year, 2 million low-income students who already have their interest paid by subsidy by the taxpayers, who also are eligible, for the most part, for Pell grants. But it does nothing for 7 million middle-income undergraduates whose rates on new loans will stay at 6.8 percent.

The bipartisan proposal would lower those rates to nearly half that level. Why would we leave those middle-income students--those 7 million middle-income students--twisting in the wind, paying twice as much in interest rates as they need to pay? That is the question. I hope after the vote tomorrow that we can sit down, talk this through, and come to a result. We should not be having political gamesmanship about this. We are talking about 11 million families here, 18 million loans, over $100 billion. We are talking about people who are making their plans to go to college. It is not easy to go. Many Senators have talked about that.

People might have $100,000 in loans, but they cannot get it through the subsidized loan program. You can only receive up to $23,000 that way. We can look at all of that at some point. But we need to pass this 8-page bill, set a fair rate, spare the taxpayers, spare the students. There is no need to deal with ``some of the loans,'' when we can lower rates for ``all of the loans'' and put it on a permanent fair basis, very much in the way the President recommended in his budget, very much in the way the House of Representatives passed it, and very much in the way the bipartisan group has suggested.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Senator from New York. I understand he has a previous meeting. I don't want to make him late because maybe it will produce some result. I hope it will produce a result--I don't see an issue that benefits either political party or any Senator.

The questions we who have been working on this have asked the Congressional Budget Office are very simple. We have said our goal is to create a permanent solution along the lines the President recommended, that the House of Representatives has now passed, that neither costs the taxpayers additional money or overcharges the student. Please give us what the interest rates would be and what the type of loan should be.

The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, goes through all of this and they suggest a variety of options that we have.

What they have told us is that the proposal of the bipartisan group comes as close to being equal as one can get. It is about nearly $1 billion over 10 years which, when you are loaning $100 billion a year, is sort of a rounding error.

The intention is to loan it to the students for what it costs the government to borrow the money, but we are not going to overcharge the students and we are not going to ask the taxpayers to pay an additional subsidy.

Within that, if you accepted that idea, then you could say there are a variety of ways to do that. You could do it as the bipartisan group has suggested or you could try to put a cap on it. Whenever you put a cap on, it costs a lot more to students. A cap at 10 doesn't cost very much because the interest rates aren't estimated to be that high for undergraduates especially. But as you go down to 9, 8, 7 or 6.8, it balloons very rapidly. We could meet that principle, fair to taxpayers and fair to students, but we are going to have to raise a lot of money to do it. I haven't heard anybody suggest where $50 or $60 million more is going to come from.

I think it is better to go ahead and amend the House bill, get a better bill, put the Senate's imprint on it, and send it to the President. Let's let all of today's students take advantage of today's low rates and pass a permanent solution that would reflect what the actual cost is. It may go up; it may go down. That is the reality.

As we know, with low-income students, those eligible for subsidized loans, the taxpayer already pays the interest on those loans while the student is in college. That is about $50 billion over 10 years. Those students are also eligible for Pell grants, most of them are, and that is about $350 billion over 10 years. This is a substantial subsidy.

The Senator mentioned the Federal Credit Reform Act. The Federal Credit Reform Act is the way the Congress has said the CBO should count when it is making these computations, so it does that. It also does it according to a fair value method of accounting. Maybe the simplest way to explain it is to say the Federal Credit Reform Act actually favors students pretty heavily in this computation. The fair market value accounting is more realistic, and favors the taxpayers' point of view. We are using the accounting system--or the CBO is--for this bill that is more generous to students.

I still, after listening respectfully to all I have heard, don't see why in the world we are going to insist that for the next year several million middle-income students are going to have to pay 6.8 percent when they could be paying 3.66. This is what I can't understand. I hope we continue this debate and tomorrow we will have at least one vote on it. I hope after that we have more discussion and that we come to a result because there are a lot of families waiting for us to make a decision.

The President has weighed in. The House of Representatives has passed a bill. We have a bipartisan bill on the floor. We need to come to a result, send it to the President so families can make their decisions about how they are going to pay the college bills.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I join my colleagues in complimenting the Senator from South Carolina, No. 1, because of his work ethic. I have the privilege of being the ranking Republican member of the committee that has maybe the broadest jurisdiction, the most diversity of any of our committees--Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions--and I have observed how hard Senator Scott has worked and how well prepared he has been in his first several months as a Senator. He has spoken out on labor issues, he has made a major contribution to the debate we had on whether we need a national school board or local control on

elementary and secondary education. When other Senators are doing other things, he is right there at the committee hearings. So he has made a quiet, effective, principled, studious contribution to the Senate, in my experience, these first few months, and I am delighted to have him here.

He has done so well I have invited him to come to Tennessee on Friday to speak to one of the largest gatherings we have annually in the State, and he has agreed to come, and we are grateful for that.

Finally, I would compliment him on one other thing. Sometimes I like to tell stories about the person for whom I came to the Senate to work--Senator Howard Baker. When Senator Baker first came in 1967, I would say to the Senator from South Carolina, the Republican leader was his father-in-law Everett Dirksen. Senator Baker made his maiden speech, probably from a back row about like Senator Scott is making his, and his father-in-law was sitting right where Senator McConnell sits, listening to the whole thing. It went on, and it went on, and it went on for nearly an hour. After it was over, Senator Dirksen came over to Senator Baker, and Senator Baker said to his father-in-law: Well, how did I do? Senator Dirksen, the Republican leader, said to the new Senator: Maybe, Howard, you should occasionally try to enjoy the luxury of an unexpressed thought.

So I congratulate Senator Scott for his succinct maiden address. He is not only effective, studious, and diligent, he knows how to speak his words clearly and succinctly, and it is wonderful to see him.

Mr. President, for the last few weeks, I have been listening to the Republican leader ask the majority leader not to turn the Senate into a place where a majority of 51 can do anything it wants. I am on the Senate floor today to suggest three reasons why I believe the majority leader will not do that:

No. 1, he said he would not. Senators keep their word.

No. 2, in 2007, the majority leader said to do so would be the end of the Senate. There have not been many majority leaders in the history of the Senate. I know none of them want to have written on their tombstone: He presided over ``the end of the Senate.''

No. 3, the majority leader is an able and experienced legislator. He knows if Democrats find a way to use 51 votes to do anything they want to do, it will not be very long until Republicans find a way, if we are in the majority, to use 51 votes to do whatever we want to do.

So let me take these three reasons one by one. First, the majority leader has given his word. The Republican leader mentioned that. At the beginning of the last two Congresses, at the request of the Republican leader, I worked with several Democrats and Republicans to change the rules of the Senate to make it work better. We succeeded in that. We talked about it, negotiated, and we voted those changes through.

We eliminated the secret hold. We abolished 169 Senate-confirmed positions. We expedited 273 more. We reduced the time to confirm district judges. We made it easier to go to conference. In exchange for all of that, the majority leader said he would not support changes in the rules in this 2-year session of Congress except through the regular order. He said:

The minority leader and I have discussed this on numerous

occasions.

This is the Democratic leader.

The proper way to change the Senate rules is through the

procedures established in the rules. I will oppose any effort

in this Congress or the next to change the Senate rules other

than through the regular order.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed, following my remarks, the majority leader's comments.

Second, I was a new Senator 10 years ago in 2003. I was absolutely infuriated by what the Democrats did in the first few months. For the first time in history, they used the filibuster to deny a President's judicial nominations for the circuit courts of appeal. It had never ever been done before. So Republicans threatened the so-called ``nuclear option.'' We threatened we would change the rules of the Senate so we could work our will with 51 votes.

Senator Reid said at the time ``that would be the end of the Senate.'' He wrote that in his book called ``The Good Fight'' in 2007. It is the most eloquent statement I have heard about why changing the rules of the Senate to give a majority the right to do anything it wants with 51 votes is a bad idea. I wish to read a few sentences from Senator Reid's book ``The Good Fight,'' written in 2007.

Senator Frist of Tennessee, who was the majority leader,

had decided to pursue a rules change that would kill the

filibuster for judicial nominations.

Sounds familiar.

And once you open the Pandora's box, it was just a matter

of time before a Senate leader who couldn't get his way on

something moved to eliminate the filibuster for regular

business as well. That, simply put, would be the end of the

United States Senate.

It is the genius of the Founders that they conceived the

Senate as a solution to the small state / big state problem.

And central to that solution was the protection of the rights

of the minority. A filibuster is the minority's way of not

allowing the majority to shut off debate. And without robust

debate, the Senate is crippled. Such a move would transform

the body into an institution that looked like the House of

Representatives where everything passes with a simple

majority. And it would tamper dangerously with the Senate's

advise-and-consent function as enshrined in the Constitution.

If even the most controversial nominee could simply be rubber

stamped by a simply majority, advise and consent would be

gutted. Trent Lott of Mississippi knew what he was talking

about when he coined the name for what they were doing the

nuclear weapon.

One more paragraph.

But that was their point. They knew--Lott knew--if they

trifled with the basic framework of the Senate like that, it

would be nuclear. They knew that it would be a very radical

thing to do. They knew that it would shut the Senate down . .

. there will come a time when we will be gone.

This is Senator Reid talking.

There will come a time when we will all be gone, and the

institutions that we now serve will be run by men and women

not yet living. And those institutions will either function

well because we have taken care of them or they will be in

disarray and someone else's problem to solve. Well, because

the Republicans could not get their way getting some radical

judges confirmed to the Federal bench, they were threatening

to change the Senate so fundamentally that it would never be

the same again. In a fit of partisan fury, they were trying

to blow up the Senate. Senate rules can only be changed by a

two-thirds vote of the Senate, or 67 Senators. The

Republicans were going to do it illegally with a simple

majority, or 51. Vice President Cheney was prepared to

override the Senate Parliamentarian. Future generations be

damned.

Those are the words of the distinguished Senator from Nevada in 2007 eloquently explaining why this body is so different from the House of Representatives.

I ask unanimous consent not only to have those remarks printed in the Record but several more pages from Senator Reid's excellent seventh chapter entitled ``The Nuclear Option'' in his book from 2007.

Third and finally, if the Democrats can turn the Senate into a place where a majority of 51 can do anything they want, soon a majority of 51 Republicans is going to figure out the same thing to do. After 2014, some observers have said we might even be in the majority. Senator McConnell might be the Republican leader and the majority leader. After 2016, we may even have a Republican President.

Preparing for that opportunity, I wish to suggest the 10 items, briefly, I wish to see on an agenda if we Republicans are able to pass anything we want with 51 votes, as the majority leader has suggested.

No. 1, repeal ObamaCare.

No. 2, S. 2, that would be the second bill if I were the leader. I would put up Pell grants for kids. Like the GI bill for veterans, Pell grants follow students to the colleges of their choice--creating opportunity at the best colleges in the world. Why don't we do the same thing for students in kindergarten through the 12th grade, take the $60 billion we spend, create a voucher for 25 million middle- and low- income children. It would be $2,200 for each one of them, just the money we now spend. Let it follow them to any school they choose to attend, an accredited school, public or private.

No. 3 on my list, complete Yucca Mountain. I have spoken often of the importance of nuclear energy to our country. It provides 20 percent of all of our electricity, 60 percent of our clean electricity for those concerned about climate change and clean air. Since 2010, the majority leader has stalled the nuclear waste repository in Nevada. That jeopardizes our 100 reactors. That jeopardizes our source of 60 percent of our clean electricity. If we had 51 votes in the Senate, we could direct the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to issue a license. We could direct the Department of Energy to build Yucca Mountain and we could fund the money to do it.

The junior Senator from Nevada, who shares Senator Reid's opposition to that, said something about this recently.

The day is going to come that either he is here or not--

That is the majority leader.

--or the Republicans take control and it's a 50-vote

threshold. Those kinds of issues are the ones that concern me

the most. When you are from a small State, you need as many

arrows in your quiver as possible to fight back on some of

these issues that you can be overtaken by. Frankly, the 60-

vote threshold is what has protected and saved Nevada in the

past.

I ask unanimous consent to have Senator Heller's comments printed in the Record.

If all the Democrats who voted once upon a time for completing Yucca Mountain were to do so again, we could get a bipartisan majority of 51 votes today in the Senate to complete Yucca Mountain. So make no mistake, a vote to end the filibuster is a vote to complete Yucca Mountain.

Here is the rest of my list--I will do it quickly--that I would suggest to the Republican leader, if he were majority leader, as his priorities for a Senate where we could pass anything we wanted with 51 votes.

Make the Consumer Protection Bureau accountable to Congress. That would be No. 4.

No. 5, drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and build the Keystone Pipeline.

No. 6, fix the debt. It ought to be No. 1. Senator Corker and I have a $1 trillion reform of entitlement programs that would put us on the road toward fixing the debt.

No. 7, right to work for every State. We would reverse the presumption--create a presumption of freedom, giving workers in every State the right to work. States would have the right to opt out, to insist on forced unionism, the reverse of what we have today.

No. 8, No EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.

No. 9, Repeal the Death Tax.

Finally, No. 10, repeal Davis-Bacon, save taxpayers billions by ending the Federal mandate on contractors.

The Republican leader and I have plenty of creative colleagues. They will have their own top 10 lists. When word gets around on our side of the aisle that the Senate will be like the House of Representatives and a train can run through it without anyone slowing it down, there will be a lot of my colleagues with their own ideas about adding a lot of cars to that freight train.

Jon Meacham's book about Thomas Jefferson is one I have been reading. He reports a conversation between John Adams and Jefferson in 1798. Adams said:

No Republic could ever last which had not a senate . . .

strong enough to bear up against all popular storms and

passions . . .

And that--

Trusting the popular assembly for the preservation of our

liberties . . . was the mearest chimera imaginable.

Alexis de Tocqueville, while traveling our country in the 1830s, saw only two great threats for our young democracy. One was Russia, one was the tyranny of the majority.

Finally, as the Republican leader so well stated, there is no excuse here for all of this talk. The Democrats are manufacturing a crisis. To suggest Republicans are holding things up unnecessarily is absolute nonsense. In fact, over the last two Congresses, we have made it easier for any President to have his or her nominations secured.

The Washington Post on March 18, the Congressional Research Service on May 23, said President Obama's nominations for the Cabinet are moving through the Senate at least as rapidly as his two predecessors. The Secretary of Energy was recently confirmed 97 to 0. There may be another three votes on Cabinet-level nominees this week.

Then as the Republican leader said, look at the Executive Calendar. Only three district and two circuit judge nominees are waiting for floor action.

As for filibusters, according to the Senate Historian, the number of Supreme Court Justices who have been denied their seats by filibuster is zero. The only possible exception is Abe Fortas, and Lyndon Johnson engineered a 45-to-43 vote so he could hold his head up while he continued to serve on the Court.

The number of Cabinet members who have been denied their seats by a filibuster in the history of the Senate is zero.

The number of district judges who have been denied their seats by a filibuster in the history of the Senate is zero. This is according to the Senate Historian and the Congressional Research Service.

So what are they talking about? I know what they are talking about. They are talking about circuit judges. That is the only exception. Why is it an exception? Because when I came to the Senate 10 years ago, the Democrats broke historical precedent and blocked five distinguished judges of President Bush by a filibuster.

Republicans have returned the favor and blocked two of President Obama's by a filibuster, which should be a lesson for the future to those who want to change the rules. About half the Senate are serving in their first term. They may not know about the majority leader's statements in 2007. They may not know about the history of the Senate. They may have heard all of these conflicting facts and not have the right facts.

What I have given you is what the Senate Historian and the Congressional Research Service say are the facts. Of course, there have been delays. My own nomination was delayed 87 days by a Democratic Senator. I did not try to change the rules of the Senate. President Reagan's nomination of Ed Meese was delayed a year by a Democratic Senate.

No one has ever disputed our right in the Senate, regardless of who was in charge, to use our constitutional duty of advise and consent to delay and examine, sometimes cause nominations to be withdrawn or even to defeat nominees by a majority vote.

Yes, some sub-Cabinet members have been denied their seats by a filibuster. The Democrats denied John Bolton his post at the United Nations.

Senator Warren Rudman told me the story of how the Democratic Senator from New Hampshire blocked his nomination by a secret hold. Nobody knew what was happening. I asked Senator Rudman what he did about it.

He said: I ran against the so-and-so in the next election, and I beat him.

This is how Senator Rudman got to the Senate.

In summary, the idea that we have a crisis of nominations is absolute, complete nonsense, totally unsupported by the facts. It should be embarrassing to my friends on the other side to even bring it up. They should be congratulating us for helping to make it easier for any President to move nominations through.

The advise and consent is a constitutional prerogative that both parties have always defended.

There are three reasons why the majority leader will not turn the Senate into a place where a majority of 51 can do anything it wants, in my judgment: one, he said he wouldn't, and Senators keep their word; two, he said the nuclear option would be the end of the Senate. No majority leader wants written on his tombstone he presided over the end of the Senate; three, if Democrats turn the Senate into a place where 51 Senators can do anything they want, it will not be long before Republicans do the same.

To be very specific, if Senator Reid and Democrats vote to allow a majority to do anything they want in the Senate and set that precedent, voting to end the filibuster will be a vote to complete Yucca Mountain.

I come with respect to the Republican and the Democratic leaders, and especially to this institution, to say let's end the threats, let's stop the nonsense, let's get back to work on immigration and the other important issues facing our country.

That was de Tocqueville.

I agree with the Republican leader.

Of course, the distinguished majority leader agrees with the Senator as well. He said in his book in 2007--I read it, but I will read it again--when talking about the Republican efforts several years ago, Republicans were so upset with actual obstructionism, as opposed to made up obstructionism, which is what we see here. They were so upset that this is what Senator Reid said: If the majority leader pursues a rules change that would kill the filibuster for judicial nominations. And once you open that Pandora's box, it was just a matter of time before a Senate leader who couldn't get his way on something moved to eliminate the filibuster from regular business as well, and that, simply put, would be the end of the Senate.

What that means is the Senate would be similar to the House. A freight train could run through it. Many Senators have not visited the House Rules Committee. I have. It is an interesting place.

The Republicans can run the House by a single vote. But if one goes up to the Rules Committee--and I am sure the distinguished Republican leader has been there--there are thirteen chairs, thirteen members.

How many Democrats do you suppose have those chairs? Four. How many Republicans have those chairs? Nine. It is 2 to 1 plus 1 majority in the House Rules Committee. In the House of Representatives, whatever the majority wants to do it can do.

If we have a body with 51 votes to make all the decisions, and if I and others are deeply concerned about the nuclear waste sitting around in some of these 100 reactors--we have several of us on both sides of the aisle who were working on legislation like that--and we want it put in a repository, legally, where it is supposed to be, we have 51 votes, if they all vote the way they voted before, to order the government to open Yucca Mountain and put the nuclear waste there. This is what we can do with 51 votes.

The way our government is designed, the House can order that, which they have. The Senate hasn't because the majority leader has been able to make this body stop and think about whether it wanted to do this. I may not like that result, but I prefer that process for the good of the country to give us the time to work things out.

I would ask the Republican leader, hasn't it always been the responsibility, maybe the chief responsibility, of the Republican leader and the Democratic leader to preserve this institution? Newer Senators may not know as much about it, may not have as long a view as they have.

Over the time the minority leader has been here, hasn't that been--I would ask through the Chair to the Republican leader, hasn't that been the responsibility of the leaders of the Senate?

I wish to congratulate the Republican leader on his remarks. It is important for those watching to know there are plenty of us here who know how the Senate is supposed to work, and we are doing that. We passed the farm bill, and we passed the water resources bill, involving locks, dams, and ports in this country. We did that the way the Senate is supposed to work. We worked across party lines. We got a consensus, got more than the majority, and did it.

We have eight Senators who have come forward with an immigration bill, a tough issue, but we are working together to see if we can resolve that.

I am part of a group of six or seven Senators who are trying to lower interest rates for 100 percent of students, not just 40 percent. We are not trying to ram it through with 51 votes, but we are trying to get a consensus and then pass it and send it to the House. Hopefully, they will do it.

When the great civil rights bills passed, they were a consensus, and the country accepted them because they were important pieces of legislation.

When the Republican leader and I were young--I was here and he was almost here--we saw Senator Dirksen and President Johnson work together to get a supermajority to say to the country it is time to move ahead on civil rights. That is the way the Senate is supposed to work. Let's stop the threats, stop the intimidation and recognize the progress we have made and get back to work on immigration.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about Doug Bailey. Doug Bailey died last week at age 79. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Doug Bailey helped define the role of political consultant in the 1960s and 1970s and that he founded the Hotline. He was much more than that to me and to countless others for whom he was an example of how to live a public life.

I am aware that when offering a eulogy it is good form to speak more of the deceased than of oneself, but that is hard to do with Doug because he cared so much about everyone he met and everyone he worked with. I first met Doug Bailey in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1977. I was here for a few months working with Howard Baker, the former Senator from Tennessee, who had just been elected to be the Republican leader of this body. He asked me to come work for him. I think part of that was to console me, to let me lick my wounds for having lost the Governor's race a couple years earlier in Tennessee. There wasn't much prospect for a political future for me then because the Nashville Tennessean had written that there wouldn't be a Republican Governor in Tennessee for another 50 years.

So I was here in Washington, and while I was here I became energized by the Republican Senators. It looked to me as though Jimmy Carter was already in trouble, and my friend Wyatt Stewart introduced me to Doug Bailey. The reason I thought it was an important meeting was because at that time he and his partner John Deardourff represented 7 of the 12 Republican Governors in the country who were still in office after the Watergate debacle of 1974.

Doug came to Nashville. He sat down with my wife Honey, Tom Ingram, and me, and we talked about the idea of another Governor's race--this time in 1978. Doug's view was that I had lost, among other things, because I wasn't a very interesting candidate, that I campaigned in a blue suit and talked to Republicans and to rotary clubs. So the talk was about what would be authentic, what did I really like to do.

To make a long story short, I ended up walking 1,000 miles across Tennessee over 6 months in a red-and-black plaid shirt, followed by a group of four University of Tennessee band members in a flatbed truck. And several times a day we would get up on the truck and play in Alexander's washboard band. Doug put all that on television, and I won the election.

Now, to some, that would seem like an ultimate political gimmick, but if you think about it, the idea of the walk across Tennessee was a good deal more authentic than the photo-ops and the press releases and the 5-second sound bites that are often what we end up with in politics today. But let me just say it this way: I would have never been elected Governor if it hadn't been for Doug Bailey.

He also did something else I had never seen anybody else do--no other political consultant. He actually wrote a plan and we actually followed it during the campaign.

The important thing for me to say today is that political consulting was not the end of Doug Bailey's help. He came to Nashville once a week during my first term as Governor not so much to talk about politics, but to talk about how to be a better Governor, which was his idea of how to be a political success. Our conversations were usually not about how to follow, but how to lead, and how to deal with the political implications, for example, of wanting to have three big road programs and do it on a pay-as-you-go basis so we could attract the auto industry to our State without running up debt and persuade all the Republican Members to vote for three gas tax increases, which every single one of them did.

Doug's advice was that a good tactic was to do the right thing because it would confuse your opponents; they wouldn't understand what you were up to.

His advice about recruiting people to work in the cabinet, for example, was not to just invite someone who might take the job, but to make a list of the four or five best persons to do the job and then ask the best one. He said: You might be surprised--that person might be waiting for an opportunity to serve the public. That was some of the best advice I ever got because some of the best persons were waiting for the right opportunity for public service.

All this sounds hopelessly naive, especially today, in a time when there is

so much cynicism about politics. But that is the way it was then, and that is the way I was trained, and that is the way I tried to do my job. I would wake up every day literally thinking about almost nothing else other than how I could help our State move ahead.

I called Doug Bailey throughout the last 30 or 35 years whenever I needed good advice. I called him when the Democrats swore me in early to remove a corrupt Governor who was selling pardons for cash in Tennessee, and he gave me a few words I used to speak to the public on that day.

One of the best pieces of advice he gave me was when the first President Bush called me while I was the University of Tennessee president. I knew President Bush was going to ask me to be the new Education Secretary, and I had about 2 hours to think about it.

Doug said: Ask these two questions. One, Mr. President, may I come up with a plan, subject to your approval? Two, may I go and recruit a team, subject to your approval? Well, that may not seem like much, but after I was announced by the President, I walked into the White House personnel office, and they tried to tell me whom to hire. I said: I don't have to do that. I already have the President's assurance that I can recruit a team subject to his approval. So I was able to recruit David Kearns, former head of Xerox, and Diane Ravitch and others who never would have ended up in President Bush's administration, and he was delighted with them.

Doug always had a project. Some were zany. Some were downright brilliant. One of the most recent was to try to persuade someone to run for President on an Independent ticket online. He didn't succeed at that. He was starting another project when I saw him last at a dinner at the end of January in Washington this year.

Ironically, Doug Bailey was an expert in the technology, TV ads, and the Hotline, which have contributed to today's polarization in politics. But he withdrew from politics after a while and from political consulting because he didn't like what politics had become. He thought more elected officials needed to understand that there is a difference between campaigning and governing and that differences should be resolved in the middle rather than entrenched in the fringes or on the extremes.

In a tribute, Judy Woodruff wrote about perhaps Doug's greatest passion and his greatest legacy: inspiring youngsters such as Chuck Todd and Norah O'Donnell--whom he paid almost nothing to work at the Hotline--to care about and be involved in America's political system. I am sure Chuck and Norah would tell you that Doug considered it even more important and an even nobler calling to actually serve in government, and that he spent most of his life teaching and helping those who were willing to do it.

I would never have been elected Governor without Doug Bailey's help. More important, I will give Doug most of the credit for whatever success I had as Governor and in politics. It has been a long time since I regularly checked with him before I made a political move, but when I did, I always felt as though the next step was a surer step and a step more likely to be in a direction that served a larger purpose other than my own political existence.

I have never known a person who cared more about each person he met in every issue he tackled. So I wanted to come to the floor today and express this tribute to a public life well lived, and to offer my condolences to his wife Pat, his children Kate and Edward, his brothers and his grandson.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record following my remarks the New York Times story about Doug Bailey's death and Judy Woodruff's blog about his passing. It has lots of comments from other people, and I have not seen a blog in a long time where all the comments are positive. Usually that is not the case.

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

Mr. President, I would like to congratulate the Senator from North Carolina for his proposal. The two votes we are having today are like the opening act at the circus, and hopefully the main event will attract some Senators who are willing to conduct this in a grownup way. We do not really have a disagreement here; we have a serious issue. We have students graduating all over the country from high school at about this time, and about 70 percent of them will go to college next year. The taxpayers want to encourage that. We spend about $35 billion in Pell grants to help pay for that. Then three out of four of those students who go to college will go to public colleges and universities--like the Universities of Michigan or Mississippi or North Carolina or Tennessee--the taxpayer helps foot the bill for that. Then the taxpayer is going to loan $133 billion this year in student loans to students of all kinds.

What the Senator from North Carolina and the Senator from Oklahoma

have suggested--and I have joined them--is that we take advantage of today's low rates and that we lower rates on all the new loans to something below 5 percent, fix that rate for those students who get their loans this year, and allow them to participate in the income repayment program so when they take a job they will not have to spend too much of their money repaying back the loan. In some cases, it can ultimately be forgiven. There is also a cap on a consolidated loan, if they choose to do that, which many do.

If we had a real disagreement about that, it would be one thing, but we do not have a real disagreement. The House of Representatives, which is Republican, has passed a bill based on the same idea. The President of the United States, President Obama, presented a budget to the Senate two months ago based on the same idea.

The idea is very simple. If we are going to loan $133 billion this year, let's loan the money to students at exactly what it costs the government, which today is at about 1.75 percent, and let's add 3 percent to that--all of which goes back to the Department of Education for the cost of collections, defaults, administration, so there is no profit on the students.

Then, let's fix that loan rate. We say that if it is 4.75 today, it is 4.75 next year and 4.75 the next year for that loan. If the rates go up, the rates on new loans next year will reflect that increase. So it is fair to the students, and it is fair to the taxpayers. It is a permanent solution. It is the same idea the House has already passed. It is the same idea the President has recommended. Yet our friends on the other side are so intent on playing political games that they want to have two votes today. If I may say so, they should hire somebody to come up with a better idea than they came up with. This is one of their weakest attempts at a political game I have seen in 10 years.

We have a permanent solution supported by the President, supported by the House Republicans--all the same idea. Senate Democrats have come up with a short-term fix for 40 percent of the loans. They leave 60 percent hanging high and dry. They raise taxes to do it. It is unconstitutional for them to do it because it originates a revenue bill in the Senate instead of the House. That is their weak idea.

Why are they not following the example of the Senator from Michigan and the Senator from Mississippi and working in a bipartisan way to get a result? Why are they not following the same idea of the Senator from California and the Senator from Louisiana on the water resources bill and working in a bipartisan way to get a result? Why are they not following the same idea the four Republicans and four Democrats did on the immigration bill and working to get a result? Instead, they hold a political stunt at the White House. They now hold another political stunt on the Senate floor at a time when students are graduating from high school, looking forward to college, and would like to have a permanent solution on interest rates by July 1, which we can easily do.

I guess it is inevitable that the opening acts of the circus are sometimes going to be like this, but I regret it. I really did not come to the Senate to engage in this kind of thing. I would much rather sit down with my Democratic colleagues, which I believe we can do, and I would much rather sit down with the White House officials, which I believe we can do, and with the House of Representatives and spend the next 3 weeks saying: Look, we all have the same idea. We have a serious issue. It affects millions of students.

So let's work together and show the country we can do this. It would be a nice prelude to the immigration debate to show that we can not only pass a water resources development bill and a farm bill but that we can also solve the student loan problem on a bipartisan basis. Then, we can take up this more difficult immigration question where we have some real differences of opinion and really need to have a debate.

I am here to congratulate the Senator from North Carolina and the Senator from Oklahoma for their suggestion and to fully support it. I will conclude by saying that there are two aspects to their bill that I believe are preferable to the version of this idea that passed the House and the version of this idea that was proposed by the President. Remember, it is the same idea in all three places--the President's budget, the House of Representatives bill, and the Burr and Coburn proposal.

The first thing that Burr and Coburn propose is to have a single interest rate for all student loans.

There are three types of student loans. It is very confusing even for those of us who have been around this issue for a long time. Let's assume there is a single student rate and you are graduating from Maryville High School. What is the cost of money? Right now, if you get a loan of any kind, it is going to be 4.75 percent. It is whatever it costs the government to borrow the money plus 3 percent to cover the Department of Education's costs. I like that proposal.

Then the second thing they propose that I would suggest is preferable to the House of Representatives bill is that if you get a loan at 4.75 percent in 2013, it is still set at 4.75 percent in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. It does not change over the life of the loan. The House bill would have the interest rate on a loan going up each year. I do not like that idea. I do not think many students would.

But I wish all of our serious issues opened with proposals from the President and the House of Representatives and Senate Republicans that were as close together as we are on this issue. If we cannot come to an agreement on this issue before July 1, based on these three major centers of influence all making the same proposals, then we ought to go back to seventh grade civics class. I do not think we all need to do that. I think we know how to do our jobs.

This is the opening act of the circus. It will not take too long. It will be a little embarrassing that we have to go through it, but after we go through it, maybe we can sit down and a Senate full of grownups will say: Let's take the President's idea and the House idea and the idea suggested by Senators Burr and Coburn, let's put it together, let's congratulate all of those students who are going to colleges, and let's encourage them and hope it is a ticket to the middle class. Let's show that our country supports those students as they seek to advance their higher education.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an op-ed from the New York Times yesterday written by Senator Coburn and Senator Burr and me.

Mr. President, how much time remains prior to the vote?

Mr. President, I urge a ``yes'' vote because this is a permanent solution for 100 percent of the student loans. It reduces rates for every single student's new loan. It has no profit on the student. It fixes the rate for the time of the loan, and it is the same idea as already passed by the House. It is the same idea as supported by the President's budget. There are only minor differences between the President, the House, and this proposal. If we can't agree on this, we can't agree on anything.

This is a manufactured crisis. Their proposal is a short-term political fix for 40 percent of the loans. This proposal is a permanent solution for 100 percent of the loans that would lower rates to below 5 percent; the same idea as in the President's budget, the same idea as passed by the House. I urge a ``yes'' vote.

Cloture Motion

Mr. President, I would like to say on behalf of several Republican Senators, including Senators Burr, Isakson, Kirk, Roberts, Hatch, and Enzi that I am introducing today the Every Child Ready for College or Career Act. This bill would let States decide whether schools and teachers are succeeding or failing. It would end the accumulation of Federal mandates that have piled up on States and local school districts and has created, in effect, a national school board. It would help 50 million children in 100,000 public schools learn what they need to know and be able to do by restoring responsibility to States and

communities and giving teachers and parents more freedom, flexibility, and choices.

I will have more to say about this on Monday in a floor speech, but I wanted to call it to the attention of our colleagues.

While it is being offered by Republican Senators, we do not see it as a Republican bill. We see it as a piece of legislation that will attract the support of classroom teachers, principals, Governors, legislators, and others who have been working for 30 years to set high standards, create better tests, create accountability systems, and pioneering in developing teacher evaluation systems.

We believe it is the proper role of the Federal Government to create an environment for better schools, but not to issue orders from Washington. The combination of No Child Left Behind mandates, Race to the Top mandates, and mandates as a result of the Secretary of Education's waivers have created such congestion in the U.S. Department of Education that it has become, in effect, a national school board.

We want to head in the other direction. We want to give back to States and local governments the responsibility for deciding whether schools and teachers are succeeding or failing. I hope all of our colleagues will read the Every Child Ready for College or Career Act.

Senator Harkin and I look forward to the markup next Tuesday in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. We will offer competing versions. His is more than 1,100 pages, and ours is 220 pages. This is a symbol of the differences in our approaches. We will begin a debate which I hope goes through the committee, moves to the Senate floor, combines with the House in conference, and produces a result that reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act this year.