Floor Statements

Mr. President, late in December, I announced that I would not be a candidate for reelection to the U.S. Senate in 2020, and that prompted this cartoon in the Knoxville News Sentinel by Charlie Daniel:

He says his name is Alexander. He says he is going to walk

across the State. Wonder how far he will go.

Here is some character wandering across the State in a red and black shirt, which is what I did 40 years ago when I walked across the State running for Governor.

I would like to return the favor to Charlie Daniel because he announced last week that he is retiring from drawing cartoons in the Knoxville News Sentinel, which is a much more significant event than anything I might do because Charlie Daniel has been a fixture in Tennessee for a long time with his gentle skewering of politicians in the Knoxville newspapers.

Charlie's cartoons have been the first things I have looked for in the Knoxville newspapers since the year I graduated from Maryville High School in 1958. That is when Charlie first began drawing for the Knoxville Journal.

Charlie is a self-taught artist who says he has been drawing ever since he ``picked up a pencil.'' After a stint in the Marine Corps, Charlie studied political science at the University of North Carolina, and he started drawing for the school newspaper. He moved to Knoxville, where he started drawing at what was known as the Knoxville Journal in 1958. That is when I first saw Charlie Daniel's cartoons. He worked at the Journal until it closed in 1992 and then moved to the Knoxville News Sentinel, where he has been ever since. Some of his main subjects for his cartoons have been sports, social causes, and, of course, politics.

Over the years, Charlie has had plenty of opportunity to skewer me, and he has done it with vigor. Actually, it has been honest, usually gentle, and always effective. For example, as I was working on legislation, which became law this past year, to ban the use of cell phones on airplane flights, Charlie drew a cartoon characterizing cell phone yappers on long flights as the ``perfect hell,'' with the Devil asking why he didn't think of that.

Charlie's drawings are well known not just in Tennessee but all across our country. In 2016, the National Cartoonists Society honored Charlie with a proclamation recognizing his career. He was inducted to the sixth class of the Tennessee Journalism Hall of Fame last year, and the University of Tennessee library has a special collections department with more than 20,000 of these drawings. There are about a dozen that the University of Tennessee doesn't have because I have them in my office or in my home.

Charlie's contributions have been recognized by Tennesseans for decades. Our former Governor, Bill Haslam, said: ``For as long as I can remember, Charlie has been making us laugh and think.'' Former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, Jr., also from Knoxville, as is Governor Haslam, said Charlie was ``the personification of civilized relevant political humor.'' Former Knoxville mayor and Ambassador to Poland, Victor Ashe, said: ``Charlie Daniel has been an icon and institution across the country.''

East Tennesseans have been fortunate that Charlie and his family have called our region home. For over six decades, Charlie's drawings have been the first thing that I and many others have looked for in the newspaper, and it is going to be harder to start each day without the humor and the touch of Charlie Daniel.

Thank you, Charlie. Congratulations to you on your retirement. I wish you and Patsy and your family the best on behalf of grateful Tennesseans.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I am glad the Senator from West Virginia is on the floor because if someone were to ask where do we go from here, her work is the best example of that.

Let's stop and think about this just a minute. The issue is whether we should include in a plan for border security some physical barrier. That is the issue. How do you resolve that issue? That is what we do.

I remember, I went to see Johnny Cash when I was Governor of Tennessee, and I didn't quite know what to say to him so I said: How many nights are you on the road?

He said: Oh, about 200.

I said: Why do you do that?

He looked at me and said: That is what I do.

This is what we do. Our job is not to take a position or to make a speech. We could do that at home. We could get a radio program or a television show. No one might watch it, but we could get one. It takes very little courage and very little skill to take a position or make a speech, but what the Senator from West Virginia has shown that she is able to do is to take issues of border security and do what we are supposed to do, which is to put different views together and get a result.

Now, this wasn't that long ago, what she just described. It was just last summer that the full Appropriations Committee of the Senate, which is about a third of all of us--almost equally divided, Republicans and Democrats--considered President Trump's budget request for border security. It included a request that included physical barriers--a wall.

What was the result? If I have my numbers right, I believe the committee recommended about $5.7 billion for border security, including $1.6 billion for a physical barrier, which is a wall. At least ten Democrats voted for that. You didn't read about that in the afternoon news as a big problem because we considered what a comprehensive border security plan would be for our southern border under the leadership of the Senator from West Virginia, and she responded to the President's request.

He is, after all, the President. I have read the Constitution. He does have to sign the bill for it to become a law. So we respected the President's request, considered it, and voted for it. That is where we were on the Senate floor as late as last summer.

Then the President came along more recently and said: We have a crisis on the southern border. We need more money for border security, and part of that money ought to include physical barriers.

That should surprise no one. The last four Presidents have said the same thing--President Obama, President Clinton, President George W. Bush, and President George H.W. Bush. We think they were pretty effective Presidents. They all asked for money to build physical barriers on the southern border of the United States--it is 1,954 miles long----those four Presidents who came before President Trump. Those Presidents asked for and Congress approved--Democrats and Republicans-- 654 miles of wall along the southern border.

This issue has gotten blown way out of proportion. As the President just said a few moments ago, he is not asking for a wall from sea to shining sea, and what this Congress has shown, under four Presidents of the United States, and more recently under the leadership of the Senator from West Virginia, is that we can take a President's request-- either a Republican President or a Democratic President, in the case of Clinton and Obama--for border security and come up with a comprehensive recommendation that attracts the bipartisan support of U.S. Senators and make it a law, and that is what we should do in the next 3 weeks.

Boy Scouts shouldn't get a merit badge for telling the truth, and U.S. Senators and Presidents shouldn't get a merit badge for keeping the government open. That is what we are supposed to do. But it is good that it is

open, and it is important for the people to know that we know what to do with it. We know what to do with it because we do it all the time.

There are two things wrong with the last few weeks. One is that the government was shut down. As the Senator from Alaska said, as the Senator from West Virginia said, and as I have heard almost every Senator say on both sides of the aisle, we should never ever shut down the government. Shutting down the government should be as off limits in budget negotiations as chemical warfare is in real warfare. I should not be able to say to the Senator from Alaska: If I don't get my way, I am going to shut the government down, whether it is on Planned Parenthood or military spending or a road in Alaska or a road in Tennessee or a coal mine in West Virginia. We have our strong opinions, but we don't say we are going to take our football and go home. We should say: We were elected to make the government work for taxpayers, not to shut it down, and we know how to do that. We know how to do that.

The first thing that was wrong with the last few weeks is we accepted the idea that shutting down the government is an acceptable bargaining chip in a budget negotiation, and it should never ever be, and we should resolve that that should never ever happen. If this President or the next President or this Speaker of the House or the next the Speaker of the House tries to do it, we should in a bipartisan way say: No, you can have your strong view, but we are not going along with your threat to shut the government down in order to get your policy goals.

The second thing that was wrong with it was that we didn't give the job to the people whose job it is to work these things out. For example, the Senator from West Virginia showed in her leadership of the Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee that she knows how, with her committee members, to work out differences of opinion on border security.

Instead, we were having a high decibel debate back and forth between the President and the Speaker of the House. He would say one thing on TV, and she would come out of her office and refute it in 5 minutes. That is not the way you get an agreement. That is not the way we ever get an agreement. They should leave that to what we call the regular order and allow us to have our discussions.

We began to make progress yesterday when we did something that we know how to do, which is to vote. The second thing that happened is the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, and the Democratic leader, Senator Schumer, walked back to Senator McConnell's office and they began to talk. And here we are, less than 24 hours later, with apparently a result. I commend Senator McConnell and I commend Senator Schumer for taking this issue, going back in the room and talking about it, and getting the Senate back to the business of doing what it is supposed to do.

I see other Senators on the floor, and I want them to have a chance to speak. I thank the Senator from Alaska, who has kindly presided when I was supposed to be so I would be allowed to speak.

I am glad the President did today what he said he would do. The government should be open, and we should be solving the problem. As I said, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts should not get merit badges for telling the truth, and Senators and Presidents shouldn't get it for keeping the government open. But it is good that it is open, and now there is a chance for us to work together.

The Senator from West Virginia has been one of the leaders in the last few days, along with the Senators from Alaska and West Virginia, saying: Let's open the government. Let's go to work, and let's take the proposal for comprehensive border security and make a result.

It is not that unusual for the President--any President--in the middle of a year to say: We have an unusual need. The country needs more money. It might be a disaster. It might be a hurricane. It might be a flood. It might be a war. It might be a crisis on the southern border. Let's not get hung up on this wall talk. Let's remember that the previous four Presidents asked for and we approved the building of 654 miles along the 1,954-mile southern border of the United States. That is Democrats and Republicans over 20 years.

Let's not forget that last summer, under the leadership of the Senator from West Virginia, the Senate Appropriations Committee considered the President's request and approved $5.7 billion for border security, including $1.6 billion for a physical barrier. Let's have the same sort of discussion again in the next 3 weeks. Let's let the Senators and the House Members, whose job it is to do it, do it.

I am glad to see this happen. I am glad that when I go back to Tennessee or fly out from Tennessee, I am not walking through the TSA and seeing one of 54,000 TSA workers who have been working without pay--in our State, cheerfully, never complaining, never saying an angry word to me. One did say he could use some money because he wasn't getting his check, and I appreciated that.

I am glad that is over. It shouldn't happen again. Let's get back to work. I thank the Senators on the floor--all three of them--from Alaska, Virginia, and West Virginia, for their leadership in getting us where we are today.

I yield the floor.

Could the Presiding Officer let me know when 60 seconds is up so the Senator from Alaska can have 60 seconds? And then we can go on with the colloquy people have been waiting for.

Mr. President, this is what we just heard. The Senator from Wisconsin asked unanimous consent that the Senate approve pay for 400,000 workers who are being forced to work without pay. No Republican objects to the Senator from Wisconsin's idea, but the Democratic leader does. That means the Democratic leader is saying to 53,000 TSA employees who make about $40,000 a year that he objects on behalf of the Democratic side to paying them while they are forced to work. He is saying to 54,000 Customs and Border Protection agents that he objects to paying them while they are forced to work.

Senator Johnson says that on the Republican side, we want to pay 42,000 Coast Guard employees who are forced to work and aren't getting paid. The Democratic leader says he objects to that and to 14,000 air traffic controllers, 16,000 Bureau of Prisons corrections officers, and 35,000 IRS employees. They are being forced to work. The Republicans are saying pay them; the Democratic leader objects.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule XXVI.2 of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I submit for publication in the Congressional Record the rules of procedure for the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, as unanimously adopted by the committee on January 16, 2019.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the Rules of Procedure be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my remarks, the Senator from Delaware, Mr. Coons, be recognized.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Corker, Senator Flake, and the leaders, Senator McConnell and Senator Schumer, for their discussions. I thank the Vice President for his presence here today.

In my own view, government shutdowns ought not to be a part of budget negotiations any more than chemical weapons should be a part of warfare. We were elected to make the government run for taxpayers, not to shut it down. My hope is that this will put us on a path toward a result and will recognize the President's desire for increased border security, which we support and many Democrats support, and we can finish our appropriations process.

What I would like to do now is to say a few words about what was described in a very famous movie in which Jimmy Stewart played, ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,'' as democracy's finest show--the right to talk your head off in the legislative filibuster. Lest someone says, ``Well, Senator Alexander, you just announced you are not going to run for reelection in 2 years, so you are going to change your tune,'' I am not changing my tune.

The remarks I made in 2011 at the Heritage Foundation about the tradition of the legislative filibuster--perhaps the best known part of the U.S. Senate--can be found at https://www.alexander.senate.gov/ public/index.cfm/speechesfloorstatements?ID=23BE8F64-7708-4E5D-86AD-

Madam President, I would agree with that. And we could get into a lively dispute among us about who shot John and who scratched whose back and whose fault it all is, whether the Democrats, who in 2003 began for the first time to require 60 votes for circuit judges, or the Republicans, who stopped a couple of President Obama's judges, are at fault. The fact is, I believe--I know for a fact that most of us believe we should keep the legislative filibuster.

How do I know that? Because Senator Collins, who is presiding at the moment, and Senator Coons, who will speak following my remarks, offered into the Record on April 7, 2017, a letter from 29 Republicans and 32 Democrats that said: We are mindful of the unique role the Senate plays in the legislative process. We are steadfastly

committed to ensuring this great American institution continues to serve as the world's greatest deliberative body. Therefore, we are asking you to join us in opposing any effort to curtail the existing rights and prerogatives of Senators to engage in full, robust, and extended debate as we consider legislation before this body in the future.

That is 61 Senators on record about the legislative filibuster. So one reason the legislative filibuster is going to stay is because there are not the votes to change it.

As I come to a conclusion, let me offer a better reason not to change it and a reason why we should change it if we consider it in the right way. We have rules in this body. In order to change a standing rule of the Senate, it takes at least 60 votes to get cloture. It has been proposed--and both sides have before--to use what we call the nuclear option, which is a parliamentary maneuver that allows the Senate to change a rule without getting 60 votes.

This is a country that prizes the rule of law. I have heard President Trump say that. I have heard President Obama say that. I have heard most of us say that. I would ask, if we don't follow our own rules, why would we expect the American people to follow the rules we write? We are the main rule-writing organization in the United States of America. We ought to follow our own rules.

When we didn't and used the so-called nuclear option in 2013, a Democratic Senator who is greatly respected, Senator Levin, said that ``a Senate in which a majority can always change the rules is a Senate without any rules.'' A Senate in which the majority can always change the rules without following the rules is like a football game where the home team can say: If you gain 9 yards, that is a first down; or if they make a three-point shot and they need four, they count it as four. That is not the rule of law.

I make these remarks--and I hope the Senator from Delaware is still here and willing to stay--I make these remarks just to remind the country and to remind the Members of the Senate that 61 of us have already signed a letter saying that the legislative filibuster--the right to extended debate, the opportunity to talk your head off in defense of what you want, the ability of this body to function as a bulwark against the tyranny of the majority and, in this fractured country, as an institution that can produce a consensus that is lasting and accepted by most people--is the most valuable part of this body, and we ought not to trifle with it whether we are in the majority or in the minority, and we ought to make that clear.

If we ever do decide we want to talk about it and change it, we should follow the rules. We have rules. It takes at least 60 votes to change a standing rule.

I want to put a stop to this talk about breaking the rules to change the rules of the Senate. I will not vote to turn the Senate into a rule-breaking institution, and I hope that if that opportunity ever arises, my colleagues will vote the same way, as 61 of them did in the letter Senator Collins and Senator Coons signed.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, before the Senator from Maine speaks, I thank the Senator from Ohio for his generous comments.

I defer to the Senator from Maine.

I thank the Senator from Maine and the Senator from Ohio. I often say to my constituents in Tennessee that they might look at Washington, DC, as if it were a split-screen television. On one side, for example, we had in September all the mudslinging back and forth during the Judge Kavanaugh hearings, but on the other side of the screen, at the very same time, in the very same Senate, in the very same Capitol, we had 72 Senators working together on opioids legislation. Senator Portman played a major role in that. We had the songwriters bill that Senator Hatch and I had been working on for 15 years. We had appropriations bills with a fourth year of biomedical funding. And we had, coming out of the Interior and Energy Committees in our Senate by a vote of 19 to 4 in the Senate and unanimously in the House, a piece of legislation sponsored by Senator Portman, Senator Warner, Senator King, and me--and others--that will do more for our national parks system than has been done in 50 years.

I don't know how often my colleagues here--someone says: Well, why don't you guys ever do anything? Why don't you stop arguing with each other? Just on the floor a moment ago, I heard the Senator from New Jersey talk about a prison sentencing bill that the Senator from Utah was talking about at lunch in the Republican caucus, and then President Trump was talking to me about it on Sunday night. They are all for it. It is a huge change in prison sentencing.

I mentioned a number of bills. So on the side of the split-screen television, which is the problem-solving part of the U.S. Senate, there is the Restore Our Parks Act, the Portman-Warner-King-Alexander bill that will do more for the national parks system--the 418 units of it-- than anything in a half century. It not only has our support, it has in the House of Representatives 228 bipartisan supporters. It has in the U.S. Senate 37 of our 100 Members already, and I suspect it will have more, and it is strongly supported by President Trump. It has 100 conservation groups for it.

Let's think about that for a minute. What else can you think of that has President Trump, 100 conservation groups, 228 House Members, and 37 Senators in favor of it that is such a good idea? I can think of nothing else. For example, in the Smoky Mountains--and Senator Portman and his family have been there, at our home, more than once; he is a great outdoorsman, he is a great leader for the national parks in many areas--there is a Look Rock Campground that has been closed for several years. We would have 5,000 families visit it if it were open. The problem with it is the roof leaks and the bathrooms don't work, so it is closed. We are going to fix that, but it is true all over the country.

So I guess the logical question is, Why don't we go ahead and pass it? The problem is the way we pay for it. Senator Portman is a former Budget Director, and Senator King discussed the funding of the issue. It is because we paid for it with something we call mandatory funding. But it is not the kind of mandatory funding that we usually worry about in the Senate. That is when we borrow money and use it to pay for Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, other entitlements, and that is running our debt way up. All of us are worried about that. This is different in three ways. The Senator from Maine talked about it. This is really debt that we are reducing. Deferred maintenance is debt, and this is the backlog that we intend to fix.

The second issue is that we are using real money. We are not borrowing money to spend; we are taking money from drilling for oil or for gas or for other energy on revenue, paying for other needs, and then we are using some of that money--up to $6.5 billion, I believe--to pay for about half of the deferred maintenance needs of the national parks system. That is not a budget gimmick; that is real money to reduce debt.

Then it is, in one other way, not the same as the mandatory funding we often talk about here; it is authorized only for 5 years. It is a limited, targeted program using real money to reduce debt. It is supported by Republicans and Democrats, the Senate and the House, the Office of Management and Budget, the Trump administration, and the President himself.

So I agree with the Senator from Maine, and I congratulate the Senator from Ohio. He and Senator Warner of Virginia were the two Senators who came up with this idea, working with conservation groups. Senator King and I had a similar idea, and we put the bills together. We thought the right person to be the principal sponsor is the former Budget Director, Senator Portman, because we are talking about spending money, and Senator Warner, who has been such a leader in the area, and Senator King.

So I agree that we ought to pass it this week with that kind of support. It is a terrific idea that almost all Americans will support. But if it doesn't pass this week, it ought to be the first order of business in the first month we get back. I look forward to working with the Senator from Ohio and the Senator from Maine to help accomplish that.

I thank my colleagues. I will conclude the colloquy, if that is all right with Senator King and Senator Portman, and then I ask unanimous consent for 10 minutes to speak about Senator Hatch.

Prior to doing that, I want to join Senator Portman in acknowledging the leadership of Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, along with the conservation community, in developing the bones of this bill. We had competing bills; he and Senator Portman were out there first, so we did what we should do. We put them together, and look at the result. That happens a lot more than people notice. When an airplane lands safely, it is not news; when it crashes, it is. This is an example of one landing safely. My prediction is that if all of those 100 conservation groups and all of those Senators in Congress who already support this will sign up with this quickly in January, we can get this train moving, and we can begin to fix the roofs and repair the bathrooms and build the roads and take America's best idea--our national parks--and make it what the American people expect it to be.

I thank Senator Portman and Senator King for their leadership as well.

Mr. President, in 1976, it was not a particularly good time in the Republican Party. Watergate had decimated the Republican Party in 1974, and the hangover still existed in 1976. But one good thing that happened was the election of Orrin Hatch from Utah to the U.S. Senate.

He was a boxer as a kid. He grew up the hard way. He joined the labor union, moved to Utah, and won the Senate race that he wasn't supposed to win.

I happened to be here in 1977, in January, as an administrative assistant to Howard Baker, who was the newly elected Republican leader of the Senate. There were then only 37 or 38 Republican Senators, but I was impressed with their vigor and enthusiasm. No one impressed me more than the young Senator from Utah.

Here is what he was doing by 1978. I want to read a paragraph from the ``American Senate'' by Neil MacNeil and Richard Baker, which I think is the best history of the Senate.

In the spring of 1968, Utah's Orrin Hatch and Indiana's

Richard Lugar, both freshmen Republicans, undertook a

sophisticated filibuster to defeat organized labor's prime

legislative goal, a complex bill to revise the nation's labor

laws. First, they relied on traditional tactics--much talk,

quorum calls, and all the other dilatory maneuvers. They

copied the Southerners' old strategy of creating three

platoons, each of a half-dozen senators, to spell each other

over the next several weeks. Next they adopted Senator

Allen's post-cloture strategy, introducing more than 1,200

amendments with which to continue their filibuster

indefinitely. Robert Byrd [who was the majority leader] tried

six times to invoke cloture and failed.

This victory by conservative Republicans was the most

notable that they had so far achieved, and the editors of the

Congressional Quarterly concluded that Republican

filibustering had changed the dynamics of the Senate's

legislating. The Republicans, they said, ``had retrieved for

themselves a weapon of enormous legislative importance,'' so

important that now, for practical purposes, the Senate could

not approve any controversial measure without producing a

sixty-vote super-majority.

So when we say you have to get 60 votes to get anything important passed around here, we can thank Orrin Hatch because, when he came to the Senate, in his first couple of years, along with Senator Lugar, he took on a task that nobody thought he could win--the primary objective of organized labor in a Democratic Congress, with a Democratic President, when Republicans had only 37 or 38 votes in the Senate, and he stopped it. That is typical of Senator Hatch's persistence.

He later became chairman of three important committees in the Senate in his 42 years here: the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee; the Judiciary Committee; and the Finance Committee.

Like many Senators, he realized not long after he was here that it is hard to get here, and it is hard to stay here, so you might as well try to amount to something while you are here. Amounting to something means getting a result, and getting a result means, if you have to get 60 votes to do it, working with people on the other side of the aisle.

He formed an important alliance with Senator Ted Kennedy, who was the leading liberal Member of the Senate. Hatch had proved himself to be one of the most partisan Republicans. But when they could agree, they passed some very important legislation.

There was the Hatch-Waxman Act. There was legislation about religious freedom. I won't try to list all of the legislation. I think it is accurate to say that no living Senator has passed more legislation than Orrin Hatch.

He also did me a personal favor. In 1991, I came back up here as President Bush's nominee to be U.S. Secretary of Education. I should have known better, but I sold my home and put my kids in school. I forgot that I had to be confirmed and that anybody might object to it.

I went before the Democratic-controlled HELP Committee. Senator Metzenbaum of Ohio said: Governor Alexander, I have heard some very disturbing things about you, but I don't think I will bring them up here.

Nancy Kassebaum said: Well, Howard, I think you just did. She was a Senator from Kansas.

For 2 or 3 months, I twisted in the wind, wondering whether I would be confirmed by the Democratic Senate. Late one night, somehow Orrin Hatch came to the Senate floor and got me confirmed by unanimous consent. I spent 22 months as President Bush's Education Secretary. I think he was a

consequential education President, with his America 2000, his summit of Governors on education, and his advocacy for start-from-scratch schools, which we now call charter schools. But I have Orrin Hatch to thank for that confirmation.

Of all the bills that Senator Hatch has worked on, my favorite is the Music Modernization Act. We call it the Hatch-Goodlatte Music Modernization Act because of his role in it. He likes it, too, because it is a bill that helps songwriters, mostly. We have thousands of songwriters in Tennessee, all around Nashville--Nashville is Music City. Memphis has a lot; upper East Tennessee has a lot; other places in America have a lot. Songwriters are typically taxi drivers, music teachers, waitresses, all sitting there, not making much money, but with the idea of writing a No. 1 song.

The problem is that as the internet arrived, more than half of the money in the music industry came from songs played online, and songwriters, No. 1, weren't getting paid often and, No. 2, weren't getting paid a fair market value. So a number of us took that on, and the result was the Music Modernization Act.

By the time it passed the Senate by unanimous consent and the House almost unanimously, too, it had 80 sponsors here. But it was a very complex bill, a once-in-a-generation copyright law change, and the principal sponsor was Orrin Hatch. It is right that he should be. He was chairman of the Finance Committee. But more than that, he is a songwriter himself. He has had a gold record and a platinum record. We think of him in Nashville as our third U.S. Senator. He is welcome to come back any time in his retirement after January and sit down and write some more songs because his Music Modernization Act, the Hatch- Goodlatte Act, is going to help thousands of songwriters and make this a more joyful country with more good songs.

So I come to the floor today simply to express my respect and appreciation for our Senator who is retiring, Orrin Hatch, who served 42 years--longer than any other Republican in the history of the U.S. Senate--and to say that if he decides he is running out of things to do when he goes back to Utah, the door is open in Nashville. He can come and write a few songs.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 30 minutes.

Madam President, today I am asking experts at the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institute, as well as other leading experts, for specific ideas about how Congress and the President can work together to reduce the cost of healthcare in the United States. Here is why.

Last July, at the Senate HELP Committee's second in a series of five hearings on reducing healthcare costs, Dr. Brent James, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, testified that 30 percent--and perhaps as much as 50 percent--of all the money spent in this country on healthcare is unnecessary. That startled me, and I hope it startles you.

So I asked another witness, Dr. David Lansky from the Pacific Business Group on Health, if he agreed with Dr. James' estimate that 50 percent of all the money spent on healthcare is unnecessary. Dr. Lansky said yes.

Then, in our next hearing on reducing healthcare costs, not one witness on our distinguished panel disagreed with Dr. James. That means we are spending as much as half of all we spend on healthcare on unnecessary treatment, tests, and administrative costs.

As a country, we spend a huge amount on healthcare--$3.5 trillion in 2017, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. When we use Dr. James' estimates, that means we spent roughly $1 to $1.8 trillion on unnecessary healthcare in 2017. That is more money than the gross domestic product of every country in the world except nine. That is three times as much as the Federal Government spends on all of our national defense, 60 times as much as it spends on Pell grants for college students, and about 550 times as much as the Federal Government spends on national parks.

For the last 8 years, most of the debate about healthcare has not been about this extraordinary fact that we may be spending up to half of what we spend on healthcare unnecessarily. Instead, we have been arguing about health insurance. In fact, really, we have been arguing about 6 percent of the health insurance market--the individual insurance market.

The truth is, we will never have lower cost health insurance until we have lower cost healthcare. Instead of continuing to argue over a small percentage of the insurance market, what we should be discussing is the high cost of healthcare that affects virtually every American.

Here is something we ought to be able to agree on. We are spending too much on healthcare, and too much of what we spend is unnecessary. The five hearings we held reminded us of something else we should be able to agree on. One major reason for the unnecessarily high cost of healthcare is that the healthcare system does not operate with the discipline and cost saving benefits of a real market.

Too many barriers to innovation drive up costs, and most Americans have no earthly idea of the true price of healthcare services they buy, which also drives up costs. Let me repeat that. One major reason for the unnecessarily high cost of healthcare is, the healthcare system does not operate with the discipline and the cost-saving benefits of a real market.

Too many barriers to innovation drive up costs, and most Americans have no earthly idea of the price of the healthcare services they buy, so that also drives up costs. As a country--American families, American Federal and State governments, and private companies--we spent $3.5 trillion on healthcare in 2017, according to CMS, almost as much as we spent on the entire Federal Government in 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

High healthcare costs impact everyone; first, the taxpayer because the Federal Government spends about one-third of all Federal dollars on healthcare. According to the Congressional Budget Office, of the $3.98 trillion the government spent in 2017, $1.1 trillion of that was mandatory spending for Medicare, Medicaid, and other healthcare programs.

This Federal Government runaway spending is the principal cause of the national debt. The principal cause of the national debt is not national defense, national parks, and the National Institutes of Health. The principle cause of the national debt is the runaway government spending on healthcare, which is squeezing the budget for national parks, national defense, and basic biomedical research.

Healthcare costs also impact States, all of which have to balance their budgets. When I was Governor of Tennessee a few years ago, Medicaid was about 8 percent of our State budget. That was in the 1980s. Today, it is 30 percent of Tennessee's State budget. That means States have less to spend on fixing roads, educating children, and helping adults and high school graduates get better job skills.

Second, healthcare spending adds to the cost of doing business in the United States. Warren Buffett has called the ballooning cost of healthcare ``a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.''

Third and most important, the rising cost of healthcare is squeezing the budgets of American families. According to the Gallup poll, 80 percent of registered voters before this midterm election rated healthcare as ``extremely'' or ``very important'' to their vote--a higher percentage than every other issue polled, including the economy, immigration, and taxes.

I imagine every Senator has heard stories from their constituents about struggling to stretch paychecks to afford prescriptions or to cover a surprise medical bill.

Any one of us who has received a medical bill in the mail has wondered, what am I actually paying for?

Here is a story I heard recently. Todd is a Knoxville father who recently took his son to the emergency room after a bicycle accident. His son was treated. Todd paid a $150 copay because the emergency room was ``in network'' for his health insurance, and they headed home. So Todd was surprised when he received a bill in the mail for $1,800 because, even though the emergency room was in network, the doctor who treated his son was not.

Todd wrote his Senator--me--trying to figure out why it is so hard to understand what healthcare prices really are. ``If I am expected to be a conscientious consumer of my own healthcare needs,'' he wrote, ``I need a little more help.''

The issue of surprise billing is a widely recognized problem. It was highlighted in a report from the White House on healthcare costs just this last Monday.

We want Americans like Todd and his son to be able to access quality care they can afford. So earlier this year, our Senate committee set out, in a bipartisan way, to see what we could find out about lowering healthcare costs. We held five hearings over 6 months.

In June, at our first hearing, we set out to better understand how much healthcare actually costs in the United

States to see if we could get some agreement on the numbers.

At our second hearing in July, we heard from Dr. James, who told us that up to half of what we spend on healthcare is unnecessary.

At our third hearing later in July, we looked at administrative tasks imposed by the Federal Government and how those burdens lead to doctors spending more time on paperwork, less time on treating patients, and all of this also increases costs.

In September, we looked at why, when you check reviews and prices before buying everything from a coffeemaker to a car, the cost or the price of your healthcare has remained hidden in a black box.

This is something even the Federal Government's top healthcare official knows personally. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar recently told a story of how his doctor ordered him to have a routine echo cardio stress test. He was sent down the street and admitted to the hospital, where, after a considerable effort on his part, he learned the test would cost him $3,500. After using a website that compiled typical prices for medical care, Secretary Azar learned the same test would have cost just $550 in a doctor's office. Secretary Azar said consumers are so in the dark, they often feel ``powerless.''

In an age where you can compare different prices and check a dozen reviews when you are buying a barbecue grill, you should be able to more easily understand what you are paying for healthcare.

Last month, at our fifth hearing, we heard about steps the private sector is taking to disrupt the healthcare system and what kinds of Federal barriers are preventing private companies from lowering costs. As we held our five hearings, two conclusions became clear.

The first is that we spend more on healthcare than does any other country, but we don't spend it well.

Again, Dr. James told us that 30 percent--maybe as much as 50 percent--of all of the money we spend on healthcare is unnecessary. That is really astonishing. It echoes what Dr. Ashish Jha said, who was a witness from our first hearing and is the Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. He said this:

The popular belief has been that the reason we spend so

much more on healthcare than other countries is that we just

use too much healthcare. Well, it turns out when you look at

the data . . . we are not using more healthcare. Why is it we

are spending twice as much? There are two reasons. One is

administrative complexity, [and second], every time we use

healthcare in America, we pay a lot more than any other

country in the world.''

That was Dr. Ashish from the Harvard Global Health Institute.

Second, while it would be convenient to have a moonshot to reduce healthcare costs, this will require people other than the Federal Government.

First, as the largest purchasers of health insurance, employers are really leading the way in the effort to reduce costs. For example, let's take International Paper, which is based in Memphis. It uses a service called Best Doctors. Employees can use it for second opinions on healthcare. Best Doctors reviews an employee's records, and then it either reaffirms the treatment that has been recommended by a doctor or it recommends a different course, such as physical therapy. The use of this voluntary program saved International Paper over $500,000 in 2017 by preventing unnecessary treatments.

Another way employers reduce healthcare costs is through wellness programs, which encourage employees to lead healthier lives. There is probably no greater consensus in healthcare than that wellness-- lifestyle changes, such as eating healthier and stopping smoking--can prevent serious illness and reduce healthcare costs. It is hard to think of a better way to make a bigger impact on the health of millions of Americans than to connect the consensus about wellness and reducing health costs to the health insurance that 181 million people get on the job. About 60 percent of insured Americans get our health insurance on the job.

Second, States are taking an active role in the cost of healthcare.

In 2017, the State of Maine required health insurers to split the savings with a patient if the patient shops around and chooses a doctor who costs less than the average price the insurer pays. In Oregon, the State compiles data on insured residents and uses this information to run a tool that allows patients to compare the costs of procedures at different hospitals.

Third, private companies are creating innovative tools to reduce healthcare costs. For example, Healthcare Bluebook, a Nashville company and a witness at one of our hearings, provides a tool that helps patients find the best prices for the highest quality care in their areas by using their employer-sponsored insurance, which, as I said, 60 percent of insured Americans have. This is useful in lowering costs because, for example, the amount a patient pays for cataract surgery in Memphis can range from as little as $2,000 to more than $8,000.

Fourth, hospitals, doctors, and other healthcare providers have the potential to make a large impact on the cost of healthcare.

On a smaller scale, one of our witnesses, Dr. Gross from Florida, runs a practice under what is called the direct primary care model. Dr. Gross charges a flat membership rate of $60, in cash, per patient for adults under the age of 65, $25 for one child, and $10 for each additional child. His practice does not bill anything to an insurance company for direct primary care members--not to ObamaCare, not to Medicaid, not to Medicare. In return for this membership fee, members receive an annual wellness exam, 25 office visits per year, including same-day appointments, and some in-office testing and chronic disease management without having to pay anything additional out of pocket. This gives patients access to a defined level of healthcare at a predictable price, which ranges from about $1,000 to $1,200 a year.

On a larger scale, HCA Healthcare, which also testified--it has 178 hospitals and 119 freestanding surgery centers that are located in the United States and the United Kingdom--is implementing new techniques to reduce the spread of MRSA, which is a drug-resistant bacterial infection that occurs in intensive care units.

These new techniques have reduced cases of MRSA by 37 percent in HCA facilities and have been so effective that the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have added them to best practices. According to HCA, this reduction in MRSA infections saves $170,000 for every 1,000 patients. These savings are shared among the hospitals, insurers, and patients.

Finally, information needs to be easily available so that patients, consumers, can find out the prices of their care and take an active role in choosing their healthcare and in planning for medical expenses whenever they can.

There is also a role for the Federal Government to play. The Federal Government spent, as I said earlier, $1.1 trillion on Medicare, Medicaid, and other healthcare programs in 2017. About one-third of all healthcare spending in America is by the Federal Government, so how we spend those Federal dollars will obviously make a big difference to the healthcare system. There may also be things Washington can do or is doing to increase healthcare costs or to prevent private companies from taking steps to lower those healthcare costs.

I want to find out what concrete, specific steps the Federal Government can take to reduce unnecessary healthcare spending or to at least stop making the problem worse. For example, after our committee heard about gag clauses, which prohibit pharmacists from telling patients their prescriptions would be cheaper if they paid in cash instead of through their insurance, Congress was able to act and ban those gag clauses earlier this year. In August, the CMS began to require hospitals to post online the amounts they charge for services and to keep that information up to date. These are the types of specific recommendations I am looking for.

In working with experts, I have had some success in asking them for recommendations in priority order and then turning those recommendations into legislation.

In 2005, I was a member of the Budget Committee, and I had become concerned about the rapid increase in the

Federal debt and how it was squeezing out some of the essential programs that make our country competitive. So I stopped by a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences on American competitiveness, and I said to them: Most ideas fail in Washington, DC, for there being the lack of an idea. If you, the academy, will give Congress 10 specific ideas in priority order to improve American competitiveness, I believe Congress will enact those ideas.''

The academy immediately got busy and recruited Norm Augustine and then put together a task force of American leaders, called the Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century. Under Norm's leadership, they produced a National Academies report entitled ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.'' They came up with 20 ideas, not just 10, and they were specific, such as doubling the funding for basic science research and creating an energy agency to be modeled after the Department of Defense's highly successful DARPA agency, which would invest in the high-potential, high-impact energy technologies--what we now call ARPA-E.

Congress used most of those ideas and put together a bill that we called America COMPETES. We passed it in 2007 and reauthorized it in 2010. It was introduced by the majority and minority leaders and had a large number of Republican and Democratic sponsors.

That is an example of what can happen when experts give us specific recommendations toward an important public goal and give them to us in a way that we can actually implement them.

That is what I am looking for in the letter that I am sending to experts today at the American Enterprise Institute and at the Brookings Institution--specific recommendations, preferably in priority order, about what Congress and the President can do to reduce the staggering healthcare costs, which is a problem in America. Our witnesses from the National Academy of Sciences and all across the board tell us that nearly half of everything we spend on healthcare is unnecessary.

I also want input from other leading policy experts, including economists, doctors, nurses, patients, hospital administrators, State regulators, legislators, governors, employers, insurers, and healthcare innovators. I am asking, in writing, for as many specific legislative, regulatory, or sub-regulatory solutions as possible by March 1, 2019.

I am especially interested in policies that bring to the healthcare system the discipline and lower cost benefits of a real, functioning market. One way to do that is to remove the barriers that discourage innovators from coming up with new ways to reduce healthcare costs. A second way is to make it easier for the consumers of healthcare to know the true price of what they are buying.

I welcome suggestions of how those policy ideas could be implemented--what law to amend, what regulation to change--and any potential downsides to the policy recommendations. I will share the recommendations with Senator Patty Murray, who is the ranking Democratic member of the Senate's HELP Committee, and with all of the members of our committee. I will share the recommendations with Senator Grassley and Senator Wyden, who are expected to be the chairman and ranking member of the Finance Committee. Our HELP Committee and the Finance Committee have shared jurisdiction over healthcare costs. It sometimes gets in the way of solutions, but there is no reason it should. We should all be able to work together in a bipartisan way to address this startling phenomenon that the experts tell us is true, which is that we are spending nearly half the money--wasting it unnecessarily on healthcare. Now we need the experts to tell us exactly what to do about it.

The Federal Government is not going to lower the cost of healthcare overnight, but I believe there are steps we can take to make a real difference to American families. It might be two or three big steps, or it might be a dozen smaller steps, but we shouldn't let this opportunity to make progress pass us by.

I ask unanimous consent that the letter I have written and am mailing today to experts at the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, as well as to other leading healthcare experts, be printed in the Record following my remarks.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, along with my colleague, the ranking member on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Senator Murray, I wish to pay tribute to Carolyn Bolden, a nondesignated employee on the HELP Committee staff. Ms. Bolden is retiring at the end of this month after more than 23 years of distinguished service to the Congress, including more than 12 years serving on the HELP Committee.

Ms. Bolden has served on the HELP Committee as an assistant editor on detail from the Government Publishing Office since September 2006, providing support in all aspects of editing and printing the committee's many documents.

Ms. Bolden is well-regarded on both sides of the aisle, having proven her professionalism, courtesy, and substantial expertise across four chairs and both parties. Without the support of Ms. Bolden and the rest of the nondesignated staff, the committee could not accomplish the important work the American people expect us to get done on their behalf. I, along with the ranking member and the rest of the committee's members, want to recognize Ms. Bolden for that tremendous contribution to the Committee as she exits her time in the Senate.

I would like to yield now to my colleague, the ranking member, Senator Murray, for her remarks.

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

Mr. President, let me begin where the majority leader stopped.

It is a true story about the tunnels. Senator Corker was curious about smuggling supplies from Egypt to Gaza. Others of us might have asked somebody about that--not Bob Corker. He hailed a Jeep, rode to the border, inspected the tunnels, took photographs, and as the majority leader said, when he met with Benjamin Netanyahu that afternoon, showed him the photographs. Netanyahu was startled. The Prime Minister of Israel might have been surprised by Bob Corker's conduct, but none of us who knew Bob Corker were surprised.

As Senator McConnell said, Bob Corker is always a man on a mission, with little regard for the obstacles in the way.

In 1978, age 25, he had saved about $6,000, and he started a construction company. A friend of mine in Maryville, my hometown, worked for him as he built a shopping center in Blount County. My friend said: I always knew that that Corker was going to amount to something.

After his experience in Haiti that Senator McConnell discussed, he also began to apply his skills of construction to help find decent homes for nearly 10,000 people in Chattanooga.

I met Bob Corker 25 years ago. It was 1993. His friend Jimmy Haslam, who was his roommate at the University of Tennessee, called me and said he had this friend who was thinking about public service, and he wondered if I would talk to him. Jimmy Haslam is today the owner of the Cleveland Browns. When they first knew each other, I believe, according to Corker, they spent a lot of their time sitting on the roof of the fraternity house at the University of Tennessee drinking beer.

Nevertheless, Bob Corker and I walked up and down the beach at Hilton Head, SC, for what must have been an hour and a half. In his typical Bob Corker way, he was weighing both sides--all sides--of the issue. Should I run for the U.S. Senate? Should I run for Governor of Tennessee--which might be better suited to somebody with his executive background.

He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1994, which would have been a very good year for a Republican to do that, with one exception. He had a primary, and he was defeated by Bill Frist, a doctor who had never before been involved in politics. Some people said it really amounted to Frist--for these two rookies who were running against each other in a primary-- Frist just spent more of his money to beat Corker than Corker spent of his to beat Frist. In any event, Frist came here and even served as the majority leader of the U.S. Senate.

Of course, that didn't slow Bob down more than about 10 minutes. The new Governor of Tennessee, Don Sundquist, invited him to become, in effect, the chief operating officer of our State government.

There, we saw the first indications of diplomacy that we now see today in his work around the world. He began to work with the Democratic mayor of Nashville, whom Governor Sundquist had just defeated in the Governor's race, and together they brought the Titans to Nashville and to Tennessee--which, by the way, play the Jaguars tonight at 7:20.

Bob earned so much respect from the Democratic legislature that existed then that they tried to persuade him to run for Governor as a Democrat, but he said no, and he returned to Chattanooga and jumped back into business. Real estate companies were what he became involved in, and then he became the mayor of Chattanooga in 2000.

Now, he would be the first to tell you that Chattanooga was already on a roll, that a lot of people had a lot to do with Chattanooga's success, but everybody else will tell you he was the best, fastest runner to have on the last stage of the relay team because he took what was already beginning to happen in Chattanooga and put it into high gear, lay the groundwork for what eventually attracted Volkswagen to put its

North American manufacturing plant there and to have the country generally regard Chattanooga as one of the most, if not the most, desirable, midsized cities in America. He was enormously successful as a mayor.

Then, in 2006, the man who had defeated him in his Senate race 12 years earlier, decided to retire from the Senate, and Bill Frist persuaded Bob Corker to run for his seat. Maybe Bill Frist didn't tell Bob the whole story. That was a tough year for Republican candidates, and it was a different race. It was the closest race in our State's history for the U.S. Senate, and Bob nearly lost it, but he did something that almost no one would do, whether they are a politician or an executive.

Six or eight weeks before the election, he understood he was about to lose it, and he completely changed what he was doing. He moved his campaign headquarters to Nashville; he hired a new team; and he began to tell the story of who Bob Corker really is, instead of some Washington ad man's version of it, and so we began to learn about his interest in Haiti and about the 10,000 people whose homes he had helped find in Chattanooga and about his work to restore that city and to lead our State and recruit the Titans. People liked that. He was elected. He had the privilege of being the president, the secretary, and the treasurer of the freshman Republican Senate class that was sworn in, in 2007. He was the only one.

When Bob first came here, the truth is, at first he was bouncing off the walls. He was a lot like many executives who come to this body and find it a very unusual place to be and to work. That didn't last very long. As the majority leader said, he jumped in right away.

Without repeating all of those things, there was the financial crisis, there were the problems with the auto industry. I would think Bob probably learned as much about General Motors as the General Motors board of directors knew, and he showed that as he worked with them. He was unafraid to talk to the managers or to the union about what needed to be done.

He became really focused on the Federal debt of this country and seeing it as our biggest challenge, and I don't think there is anyone in this body, over the last 12 years, who has been more consistent in trying to point out what the real problem is--the entitlements. He even came up with a plan and introduced a bill to deal with it. The only problem is, he and I are the only two cosponsors of that bill. So as he leaves, that is a problem he highlighted, but we still have to work on.

He thought about not running for a second term. He was discouraged, to some degree, about how the place works, but he had already accomplished so much that he decided to do it, and so he continued his habits of being up early, reading everything he could get his hands on, calling everybody he could think of, traveling to 70 countries, worrying about issues and saying what he thought--always trying to do it in a bipartisan way because he understood that is how you get results, and he wanted results.

Bob Corker voted with the majority of Republican Senators 85 percent of the time, but he always has been a conservative who prizes results over speeches. In 2015, he became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and began to deal with the issues Senator McConnell mentioned--Iran, sex trafficking, and others. His tough-minded pragmatism and grasp of economics has restored prestige to the Foreign Relations Committee. His skills are reminiscent of the skills of the man we honor this week and the team of George H.W. Bush and what he was able to accomplish in foreign policy.

When Time magazine picked him in 2015 as one of the world's 100 most influential leaders, I wrote about that incident at the border of Gaza and I said this at the time: ``If Bob Corker is not President of the United States himself, he is an obvious choice for Secretary of State or for the Treasury,'' which is exactly what happened when President Trump was running and was elected in 2016. He considered Senator Corker for Vice President, then for Secretary of State, and, more recently, for Ambassador to Australia. Of course, over this time, Senator Corker has demonstrated with President Trump the same thing he did with President Obama--that he was not afraid to work with him and he was not afraid to challenge him.

This produced some sparks. I have told both President Trump and Senator Corker that they shouldn't worry about those sparks very much because that is just the way developers and contractors talk to each other. I know both men well enough to know that deep down there is a lot of mutual respect between the two of them.

For me, these 12 years of working with Bob Corker have been a joy. It is well known that Senators--especially Senators from the same State, especially Senators of the same political party--don't always get along well with each other. This is a body that operates by unanimous consent. This is a body where relationships matter. Bob Corker and I have followed the old rule that Senator Howard Baker and Senator Robert Byrd followed: I won't surprise you if you won't surprise me. We not only didn't surprise each other, but we looked out for each other. We respected each other's work, even though we didn't always agree. Our staffers saw that. So they worked the same way, and I am convinced the people of Tennessee were the beneficiaries of that, because when they approached the Corker staff and the Alexander staff or either one of us, I think they found that one plus one equals three, not two, and that the people for whom we work are the beneficiaries.

Peyton Manning once said that he hoped Bob Corker would serve in the United States until he was 100 years old. I think that was really to get people to quit asking Peyton Manning to run for the U.S. Senate, because he knew better than to get involved. While I am looking forward to working with Marsha Blackburn, who is Bob Corker's successor, I have to admit that I agree with Peyton Manning.

Bob Corker has done as a U.S. Senator what every Tennessean and every American should hope a U.S. Senator should do. He has gotten up early, determined to find some way to make the country a little better, read everything he could find, talked to everybody he could find on the telephone--anybody he thought knew anything about an issue he cared about--and jumped into it with both feet, saying exactly what he thought was the right thing to do for the country and usually coming out with a result that did just that.

It has been a privilege to serve with him and to know better Elizabeth and their wonderful family. I look forward to watching what has to be one of the best upcoming shows in town, which will be whatever Bob Corker decides to do next.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, there is uncertainty reported in the news about the trade agreements and discussions that the President of the United States and the President of China had last weekend, but one thing is certain: The agreement that President Trump and the President of China made last Saturday concerning fentanyl--a deadly synthetic opioid which is mostly produced in China and which is the largest growing contributor to opioid deaths in the United States--will save thousands of American lives.

Last Saturday evening, President Trump and President Xi announced that China will designate all fentanyl-like substances as controlled substances, which will make the selling of fentanyl subject to the maximum penalty under Chinese law.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid. It can be 100 times stronger than opioid prescription pills. It is the source of the greatest increase in opioid overdoses in our country.

According to our Drug Enforcement Administration, one way or another, almost all of the fentanyl that is used in the United States comes from China. Here is how: Traffickers in China modify the chemical makeup of fentanyl to bypass the authorities. Scheduling all fentanyl-like substances as a class, which is what President Xi agreed to do, is the single most important step that could be taken to stop the flow of deadly fentanyl from China into the United States.

Let me tell you a story about one action that helped us get to that point. About 4 weeks ago, I led a senior delegation of five Senators and two Members of the House of Representatives to Beijing to meet with Chinese leaders. They, of course, expected us to talk about agriculture, energy, and trade issues, which are sources of major disagreement between China and the United States, and we did, but at the urging of the U.S. Ambassador to China, former Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, we made fentanyl and the opioid crisis the primary point of our visit.

President Trump had already mentioned fentanyl to President Xi a few months earlier, and China had already taken steps to help the United States by stemming the flow of fentanyl into our country. China announced that it was controlling 25 different substances of fentanyl. The Drug Enforcement Administration told us while we were in China 4 weeks ago that after China took those steps, there was a dramatic decrease in the amount of fentanyl available in the United States.

In other words, while we were there, we asked China to do more of what it was already doing--instead of controlling just 25 types of fentanyl, to control it all, make it all illegal. Controlling all of it allows China's narcotics agents to go after anyone in China who

uses or produces fentanyl illegally or improperly. The Chinese officials listened closely to us. They committed to working with us. They made no promises at the time about what they would do, but with each meeting we had, we found they must have talked to whomever we had talked to at the previous meeting, and they were responsive.

The truth is, I believe they were surprised. They were surprised first that we would make that the first point of our discussion when they had assumed that we would likely be there to talk about tariffs on soybeans and other issues. I think they were surprised to be reminded of or to find out for the first time what a massive problem it is in the United States. More people are being killed by opioid overdoses than are killed by automobile accidents, and the fastest growing source of those opioid overdoses is the synthetic stuff coming from China.

Some of them were surprised and a little defensive because they did not believe it when we said to them--and I said to them directly that one way or the other, almost all of the fentanyl we see in the United States comes from China. It comes in the form of chemicals that are made there in small processing plants. It is shipped to Mexico or to Canada or through the mail, and then it is smuggled into this country illegally. It is often in small plastic bags. It is a white powder.

One of the drug enforcement agents from Tennessee told me that once when he had seized just one package of fentanyl in Dixon County, he opened it, and he had to leave the room to keep from being overcome because enough of it escaped into the air that it had an effect on him. Just a few grams of this will kill an individual.

When we returned from China after our trip 4 weeks ago, I spoke about that trip on the Senate floor. I said that China had the opportunity to become the global leader in stopping synthetic opioids. I talked with Ivanka Trump about our trip. She was helping the President prepare for his trip to Argentina, where he saw leaders from many countries. He had his dinner with the President of China last Saturday night. She helped to make sure that it was a priority in his briefings and in his preparation.

I talked to the President directly to report to him the good work Ambassador Branstad had been doing in China; how 6 months ago, the Ambassador had said to me: When you come to China, make this the focus of your visit because the Chinese officials don't appreciate the importance of this to the United States.

China doesn't have a fentanyl problem. They don't have people using and overdosing from opioids. At one time, China had a terrible problem with opium, but they don't today. So I think it was a surprise to them to see how important it was to us.

I urged President Trump to thank President Xi when they met at the G20 summit in Argentina for what China had already done and to ask the Chinese to continue working with us to stem the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

Last Saturday, at the end of the G20 summit, President Trump and President Xi announced that China would do exactly what we asked them to do. China will control all forms of fentanyl as a way of stopping the flow of this dangerous synthetic opioid into the United States both by mail and by smuggling through Mexico and Canada. President Trump called this ``a game changer,'' and he deserves great credit for persuading China to make the selling of fentanyl subject to the maximum penalty under Chinese law.

In 2016, roughly 45 percent of opioid overdose deaths were due to synthetic opioids like fentanyl--nearly half of the deaths. Remember, there are as many deaths from overdoses as there are from automobile accidents.

To be clear, this is not a problem the Chinese Government has caused, but it is a problem the Chinese Government is helping us solve. Working with our Drug Enforcement Administration and classifying 25 fentanyl compounds caused an immediate and dramatic decrease in those chemicals coming into the United States months ago. Now President Xi has agreed to control all forms of fentanyl, which will make it easier for China to go after anyone in their country who uses or produces fentanyl illegally and improperly.

Opioid abuse is understood by the Senate and House of Representatives to be our No. 1 health epidemic in the country. While most of the country was watching the Kavanaugh hearings in October of this year, if you had a split-screen television, you could have seen on the other side of the television screen 72 Senators of both parties--5 committees here and 8 committees in the House of Representatives--working together to produce landmark opioid legislation to try to deal with our opioid crisis.

Fentanyl, the white powder synthetic opioid, can be 100 times more powerful than an opioid pain pill. A few grams can kill you, which is why we have seen such a spike in overdose deaths. Among drug overdoses, it is the fastest killer. Tennessee saw the number of deaths from fentanyl overdose increase 70 percent in 1 year, between 2016 and 2017.

As I mentioned, in the legislation the President signed in October, Congress has taken action. He called that new law ``the single largest bill to combat a drug crisis in the history of our country.'' Those were his words.

In addition to empowering the Food and Drug Administration to require manufacturers to sell certain opioid pills in so-called blister packs and expanding treatment and recovery opportunities, the new law contains Senator Portman's STOP Act, which will help stop illegal drugs, including fentanyl, at the border. It also includes the SALTS Act, which closes a loophole that allowed manufacturers and sellers of synthetic opioids like fentanyl to avoid prosecution by labeling the opioids as ``not intended for human consumption.'' Congress has also put the taxpayers' money where our mouth has been. Congress has approved $8.5 billion since last March to combat the opioid crisis.

What President Trump and President Xi announced this weekend is the single most important step that could be taken to stop the flow of deadly fentanyl from China into the United States.

I thank Ambassador Branstad, the former Governor of Iowa and now our Ambassador to China, for putting a focus on this, for leading our delegation on this specific request, and for setting up the meetings we had with Chinese officials. I also thank the staff members of the U.S. Embassy there for all of their hard work. They were very helpful--Steve Churchill, Rob Fordan, and Richard Jao.

I thank, again, the Chinese officials with whom we met. They gave us a lot of time. If it were to be an hour's discussion, it was an hour and a half. If we started out with fentanyl and it was news to them, they took the time to understand it and talk about it. I thank Premier Li Keqiang, Minister Zhao Kezhi, and Director Yang Jiechi. We saw all of them, which included seeing the head of narcotics control and the head of the police system in China.

I am grateful to the Chinese leaders for listening to our congressional delegation and for President Trump and President Xi's leadership in taking this action.

Some have asked since last Saturday: Well, will China do it? Will this make a difference?

We know it made a difference before. President Trump asked China to help with fentanyl, and China identified 25 forms of it. Our own Drug Enforcement Agency says that it saw a dramatic decrease in fentanyl in the United States immediately after that.

Now we are asking China to make all forms of fentanyl illegal. That means that the crooks in China can't say: Well, they have made illegal these 25 forms, but we will modify the chemicals enough so that we can create chemicals to send to Mexico, Canada, and then to the United States that are not illegal. That will not be possible once China implements this. Once it implements these rules, I expect the rules to be effective. China does a lot of things well. One thing it knows how to do is to be a good policeman when something is against the law. I would not want to be the person in China who is misusing, abusing, or selling fentanyl illegally after these new rules go into effect.

We are asking China only to do what the United States is already doing. We have learned that in order to be effective in controlling fentanyl, we have to control all of it. We have to make all of

it illegal so that our narcotics agencies, our drug agencies, and our policemen can deal with it.

What about the possibility that even if China does this, fentanyl might be made in other countries? Well, maybe it would, but we could take the same steps there that we are taking in China.

This is important in the larger sense. The President of China has listened to the President of the United States, who has said twice to him: Mr. President, fentanyl is a terrible problem in the United States. One way or the other, China is the source of most of the fentanyl that comes here. We believe the single most important thing you could do to help us control that is to make it all illegal. The President of China has said he will do that.

That kind of response, as President Trump said, is a humanitarian gesture that, while it doesn't have to do with trade--it doesn't mean more soybeans are going to be sold--it helps to develop a better relationship between two countries that are not enemies but that are competitors, and we have some big issues we need to work on.

There may be uncertainty in the air about some of the agreements that came out of the dinner that the President of China and the President of the United States had in Argentina last weekend, but there is no uncertainty about this--that the agreement by China, at President Trump's request, to make illegal all forms of fentanyl in China, all classes of it, will save thousands of lives in the United States. China will go from being the source of the biggest opioid problem that the United States has to the country that is doing the most about it. For that, all Americans should be grateful.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am delighted to hear the Senator from Delaware discuss some aspects of President Bush's time that aren't as well remembered, including his amendments to the Clean Air Act, on which the Senator from Delaware and I have worked.

In June of 1992, President George Herbert Walker Bush and his wife Barbara were walking across the South Lawn on a hot, sunny day to make a major announcement about school choice. Barbara turned to the President and said: George, you have on the wrong pants.

The President of the United States turned around, walked back in the White House, changed into the proper suit, came back out and made the announcement, one of the biggest of his time as President--to ask the Congress to provide one-half billion dollars to States and cities like Milwaukee and Wisconsin, which wanted to give low-income families choices of better schools for their children.

Before that, I can recall a 3 p.m. or so meeting on January 17, 1991. The meeting was about educational assessment--a very dull subject. The President had called it in the Cabinet Room. Governor Carper will remember educational assessment from his days as Governor. The meeting went on and on. The President got up and left and came back after about 10 minutes. The rest of us thought very little about it. It turned out that, later, we found out he was calling Gorbachev in the Soviet Union to let him know in advance that the United States was about to start bombing Baghdad at about 5:30 that afternoon U.S. time. He had constructed and put on the public schedule that meeting on educational assessment so that the world wouldn't know what was about to happen.

A few weeks later, we were having lunch, and he was mulling over the prospect of putting 1 million American military men and women on the ground in the Middle East in the first Gulf war. He had a special feeling about that because of his background as a combat pilot in World War II. He knew what it meant to risk even one American life in that exercise.

All of us have memories and stories we could tell about the President, but I want to talk about three aspects of his service very briefly: No. 1, gentleman; No. 2, well prepared; No. 3, pioneer--a pioneer especially in education.

I have suggested to Jon Meacham, the extraordinary biographer of President George H.W. Bush, that a better title for his book might be ``The Last Gentleman.'' Saying that to an author is like saying: You ought to rename your baby something else. That is not a very prudent thing to say.

I hope it is not true that he is the last gentleman, but his temperament and conduct when he won and when he lost in war and in peace, with adversaries and friends, remind us that you can be tough, you can win the Presidency, you can be a combat pilot in a world war, and you can still treat others with respect, which he unfailingly did.

I was thinking last night as we stood outside on the steps and watched the casket being brought up--a beautiful evening, the sunset looking out over the Library of Congress, looking out over the Supreme Court--that with all the rancor we sometimes have here, as we work out difficult problems, we are pretty lucky to live in this country. We are pretty lucky to have the form of government that we have. We are extraordinarily fortunate that we can produce men and women, like George H.W. Bush, who bring out the best of us, which leads me to my second point: What I think of when I think of our former President, and those are the words ``well prepared.''

We have had lots of different kinds of Presidents of the United States with varying backgrounds, and many have been successful. It is hard to say exactly what will make a President successful. I actually think temperament has more to do with it than anything else. What we had in President George H.W. Bush may have been the best prepared President in our history: Congressman, candidate for the Senate, head of his national political party, the first Ambassador to China, head of the United Nations, Vice President of the United States, head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

If you are going to put somebody through a training course, a boot camp in order to be President of the United States, that is what you would do. You would take someone of extraordinary intellect, someone who may have graduated, in 3 years, Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, with extraordinary courage, and someone who could fly combat--the youngest aviator in World War II. You put them through that boot camp and say: Now you are the President of the United States.

How fortunate we were that he happened to be the one who came along then because the things he accomplished in his 4 years, the things he presided over, the things he led us to do as a country weren't that easy.

Take the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It is a very dangerous situation. They have a lot of nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union and a history of antagonism toward much of Europe and the United States. But President Bush, because of his temperament and his skill and the extraordinary team he had around him, presided over that in a way that allowed Mr. Gorbachev and the Soviet Union to come apart. It could have easily gone in another direction.

There was the reunification of Germany. You can be sure that France was skeptical about the reunification of Germany. Wouldn't you be, as well, if you had been involved in two World Wars in that century with Germany?

Margaret Thatcher was quietly opposed to the unification of Germany, according to Vice President Quayle, who should know about such things. Mr. Kohl, from Germany, was for it. Our President had to know those individuals well enough and be adept enough to preside over the reunification of Germany and the disintegration of the Soviet Union at the same time.

Balancing the budget wasn't popular within the Republican Party. When you look at the portraits of the Presidents in the White House, you often think, what did that President do that went beyond his base--that his original supporters might not have agreed with but that put the country first? When you look at Nixon, you think China. When you look at Reagan, you think the Berlin Wall.

When you look at George Bush, you think a number of things, but one of the things he did was balance the budget in a way that most Republicans didn't like. He paid a price for it when he ran for reelection, but the country and President Clinton, during the 1990s, benefited greatly from that fact.

Then, as Senator Carper pointed out, he led the amendments of the Clean Air Act. I was in East Tennessee these last few weeks. We like the fact that you can see the Great Smoky Mountains, and they are not the ``great smoggy mountains'' anymore. That is true because of the Clean Air Act, which, more than anything else, has required coal plants when they operate to put pollution control equipment on them. They can still operate. There is nothing to keep a coal plant from operating in this country as long as you put pollution control equipment for mercury, nitrogen, and sulfur on it. Then they can be perfectly clean. That doesn't include carbon, but carbon you can't see. We like to see the mountains.

There were the decisions that were made that had to do with exhausts from trucks and cars. America is healthier, cleaner, and we can attract businesses to our State now that our air is clean. Before that, it was a problem.

The Americans with Disabilities Act was a difficult law to pass and a difficult law for many parts of our country to accept and, frankly, pay for. Think of the lives it has changed. No one who wasn't well-prepared for the Presidency could have passed that.

As I think of President Bush, I think first of a gentleman; second, well prepared; finally, a pioneer in education. Most of the time, when we think of President Bush, we think of his skills in foreign policy because they were considerable, and the challenges were great. For example, I didn't mention the Gulf War a moment ago--well, I did in a couple of cases, but I didn't mention putting 1 million troops on the ground, getting the rest of the world to pay for most of the war, and then deciding not to go into Baghdad and get mired down there. Those were decisions that a skilled, well-prepared man would do.

He was also a pioneer in education, and that is what I would like to talk about. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush assembled all the Nation's Governors in Charlottesville to talk about education. Terry Branstad, the current Ambassador to China, was then the Chairman of the Governors. Out of that summit came national education goals that every child by the year 2000 would learn math, science, history, and geography in a proficient way.

President Bush then came up with America 2000 in the last 2 years of his term. I was Education Secretary when he launched America 2000. That was to help States and communities reach those national education goals State by State, community by community. So we had Nebraska 2000 and Nashville 2000 as Democrats and Republicans sought to do that. The importance of it was that President George H.W. Bush understood that to have lasting reform in education, it has to be owned by the States. It has to be owned by the community.

We saw that in the recent exercise in common core standards. Common core was developed by the Governors. It was moving through the country State by State by State. Then, when the Federal Government mandated it, in effect, there was a great rebellion because there wasn't buy-in.

It was the same situation with teacher evaluation. I led a fight to evaluate Tennessee teachers, and it was the hardest thing I was ever involved in. There was a big fight with the National Education Association, but we did it, and 10,000 teachers went up the career ladder. They bought into it. When it is ordered from Washington, they don't buy into it, and President Bush understood that. So his national education goals, his voluntary national standards, and his voluntary national tests were all voluntary. They were not imposed from Washington, DC. He created an environment, through America 2000, where States, cities, and communities could adopt them, and they were lasting.

Most of the steps that States, including my State of Tennessee, have taken to make schools better in the last 30 years were either started by or encouraged by George H.W. Bush since the National Governors Summit in 1989. That includes charter schools. In 1991 and 1992, President Bush encouraged every community to create start-from-scratch schools, as he called it, and many did. He created New American Schools Development Corporation with the help of Deputy Education Secretary David Kearns and raised about $70 million and gave grants to that.

My last act as Education Secretary for President Bush was to write every school superintendent and say: Why don't you try one of these new charter schools that the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has created. There were only 10 at the time in 1992. Those start-from- scratch schools suggested by President George H.W. Bush are now 5,000 charter schools in the country or about 5 percent of all the public schools in America.

Then came school choice. I began with the story of his walking across the south lawn to announce the GI bill for kids, to give money to States and districts to encourage school choice. The Democratic Congress, at the time, didn't appropriate the dollars he asked for, for start-from-scratch schools, and they didn't appropriate the money for school choice, but his persistent advocacy using the bully pulpit gave us national goals, national standards, national tests, accountability systems, school choice, charter schools--all of that--and the difference was, he insisted we not have a national school board in the process.

His successors all tended to have Washington edicts--President Clinton, President George W. Bush, and President Obama. I can understand why they felt that way. They were eager to see results, and so they said let Washington order Texas, Tennessee, and Wisconsin to do it, but, unfortunately, that backfires. That backfired on common core and backfired on teacher evaluation. As soon as we stepped back and used advocacy instead of edicts, as President Bush understood, we got more lasting results.

He was well prepared, a gentleman, and a pioneer of education. Some people are suggesting he might have been the most effective one-term President in the history of the Presidency. He could very well be, when you add it all up, with the Gulf war handled like it was, the reunification of Germany, the successful disintegration of the Soviet Union, the clean air laws, the Americans with Disabilities Act, pioneering in education with America 2000, balancing the budget. That is a lot to do in 4 years. Maybe James K. Polk is the only one I can think of who might give him a good run for his money in terms of that accolade.

I remember when the Gulf War was over and President Bush came to speak to the Congress. I will close with this. It was the first time I had a chance to sit and listen to a Presidential address as a Member of the Cabinet. I remember thinking after that wonderful victory that was so well done--with a million men and women on the ground and very few casualties; the rest of the world paid for most of the war; we avoided going into Baghdad. It was a very successful operation. The President's approval rating was at 91 percent. I remember thinking, I wish he would say: Now that we have won the war, let's turn our attention to home and apply the same sort of energy to America 2000, and then make America 2000 his entire domestic program. Perhaps it would have been difficult for Bill Clinton to defeat him that year if that would have been his domestic agenda. No one will ever know.

What we do know is, he was a gentleman; he was as well prepared as any

President in history for the job; he served at a time when we needed that preparation because the challenges were immense; he was a pioneer in education; and he may have been the most successful one-term President in American history--a man who put the country first and whom we all admired. George H.W. Bush.

Thank you.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, within a few minutes, the Senate will vote on ending debate on the nomination of Stephen Vaden to be the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I am glad to see that. I am here to strongly support Mr. Vaden and urge my colleagues to support him.

Stephen Vaden grew up on a family farm in Union City, TN, way out in the west end of our State, and he has some academic credentials for this job which are also very strong. He attended Vanderbilt University and Yale Law School. He has had two strong mentors--Judge Julia Gibbons of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, who was once my counsel when I was Governor of Tennessee, and Judge Hardy Mays of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. He practiced with two distinguished law firms in Washington, DC. He has hands-on academic credentials. He has hands-on farming credentials. He has a strong background in legal training.

Mr. Vaden has the strong support of his Congressman, Mr. David Kustoff from West Tennessee. This is Davy Crockett's old congressional district in Tennessee.

Tennessee Farm Bureau President Jeff Aiken said that Mr. Vaden ``has a passion for agriculture that can't be taught but is necessary'' for the job of General Counsel.

Secretary Perdue, Agriculture Secretary, said that Mr. Vaden ``has a firm grasp of the legal issues facing American agriculture, and very importantly, understands the breadth and complexity of the regulatory burdens

placed on our producers.'' The Secretary finished by saying: ``Our farmers, ranchers, foresters, and producers will be well served by his counsel.''

I know the distinguished Presiding Officer has a strong interest and a hands-on background in agriculture, and so do many other Members of this body on both sides of the aisle. I am happy to strongly recommend Stephen Vaden to my colleagues. I urge a ``yes'' vote on ending the debate. Once that has ended, I urge a ``yes'' vote on confirmation of his nomination by President Trump.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I have come to the floor for three different reasons. Out of courtesy to the Democratic leader, who I see coming in, I will wait until he is here.

Good.

Mr. President, as the world knows, the country's largest public utility is the Tennessee Valley Authority and serves 9 million customers in our seven-state region. It is enormously important to our State of Tennessee. Its CEO, Bill Johnson, announced today that he is leaving. I will have more to say about him later, but he and the Board of Directors have led TVA in an excellent direction, and it is now up to the Board of Directors to choose his successor. It is a big job. As I said, it is a $10 billion-a-year company.

John Ryder, of Memphis, was nominated by President Trump 282 days ago to be one of those Directors. He has been approved by voice vote by the Environment and Public Works committee. For the last 176 days, he has been waiting for confirmation. He has the approval of the ranking Democrat on the committee, the Senator from Delaware, Mr. Carper. He has the approval of the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, Senator Whitehouse. It is time Mr. Ryder, who is consistently named one of the finest lawyers in Memphis--he has been recognized by Business Tennessee Magazine as among the 101 Best Lawyers in Tennessee and listed in Best Lawyers since 1987. In other words, he is a well-qualified, noncontroversial nominee who is needed by the people of our region to select a successor to Bill Johnson, the CEO. The other nominees have been confirmed. The nominee from Alabama was confirmed. The nominee from Kentucky was confirmed but not the nominee from Tennessee.

I am taking the step today of coming to the floor to ask that he be confirmed by consent. I can think of no reason why he would not be.