Floor Statements

To my friend from New York, who is he talking about? He knows my record. I worked with him three times when President Obama was there, worked with him directly to make it easier for President Obama to have nominees.

Let me go through that because I think it is important the people know the efforts we made together. In 2011, working with the Senator from New York, we got rid of secret holds. We permitted waiver of the 72-hour rule that was used to block nominations and delay. We created 272 expedited privilege nominations. In 2012, we eliminated Senate confirmations for 163 positions, all to make it easier for President Obama to make Presidential nominations. In 2013, we created some new rules which said that Executive nominees could only be debated post- cloture for 8 hours and district judges for 2 hours.

I personally made sure the current chairman of the Democratic Party, Tom Perez, got cloture so the Senate could vote on him. I voted against him, but I made certain he could come to a vote.

When President Obama had a vacancy in the Department of Education in his last year, I went to President Obama and said: Mr. President, I think it is inappropriate for us not to have a confirmed Senate nominee in a principal position like U.S. Secretary of Education. If you will please nominate John King, with whom I disagree, I will make sure he is confirmed, and we confirmed him. That has been my record in terms of dealing with nominees of the President of an opposite party.

I ask through the Chair, why pick on Tennessee? Why confirm Kentucky nominees, why confirm Alabama nominees, why work with me in three different Congresses to make it easier for President Obama to confirm nominees, why applaud me for allowing the chairman of the Democratic Party today to be confirmed as Secretary of Labor and then block a nominee for the Tennessee Valley Authority, who is eminently well- qualified, who is supported by the Democratic members of the committee who have jurisdiction and who is needed on the Board to pick a CEO for the millions of people in the seven-state region? Why pick on Tennessee, I would say to my friend from New York through the Chair.

Mr. President, I don't know what he is talking about. I am the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. I have, during my time, regularly confirmed Democratic nominees and Republican nominees. I have worked with the Democratic leader to make it easier for President Obama to confirm nominees and now he gives me no specific reason why he is objecting to the nominee from Tennessee.

I ask him further--even though he has left the floor in what I would consider to be an act of discourtesy while I am speaking to him, and I mean that. I am very upset about this. I consider that an act of discourtesy when the Democratic leader leaves the floor while I am speaking directly to him through the Chair on a matter of importance to 9 million people in our area. I ask him what kind of precedent is he setting, the Democratic leader.

Let's think about this for a minute. One hundred and nineteen times the majority leader, Senator McConnell, has had to file cloture to cut off debate in order to just get a vote on a nominee like Mr. Ryder, named one of the best lawyers in Tennessee since 1987, approved by Democratic colleagues, needed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, certain to be confirmed here almost unanimously. One hundred and nineteen times the Democratic opposition has required the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, to use a whole week to confirm a nominee. That happened 12 times to President Obama. That happened four times to President George W. Bush. It happened 12 times to President Clinton and zero times to George H.W. Bush, whose administration I served in. That is the number of cloture votes on nominees required for previous Presidents in the same timeframe as President Trump. What kind of precedent does this set?

Let's talk about that for a moment. This is a body of precedents. For many years, we always confirmed nominees with 51 votes. That was until George W. Bush became President of the United States and the Senator from New York, before he was a Democratic leader, and others, decided they would use a cloture vote, a requirement for 60 votes, to block George W. Bush's nominees.

That was the first time that it had happened. Up until that time, the tradition of this body was that while you could require 60 votes, at least since about 1920, no one ever did. Even Clarence Thomas--and that was a very controversial Supreme Court nomination--was confirmed by 52 to 48. No one thought at the time of requiring that his nomination require 60 votes. They could have but didn't. So that was the tradition in the Senate--always nominations by 51 votes. The one exception in the Supreme Court throughout the history of the Senate was Abe Fortas, under President Johnson, and that was an unusual situation. Never had a Federal district judge been required to have 60 votes.

In fact, what the Democratic leader--I wish he were here on the floor to hear this--may have forgotten is that Senator McConnell tried at one time to require a cloture vote of Judge McConnell in Rhode Island, and I and a number of other Republicans objected because we had never done that before. We had never said that you have to have 60 votes to be confirmed as a Federal district judge. So we rejected that motion by the Republican leader, and as a result of that, never in the history of the Senate had we required 60 votes for a Federal district judge to be confirmed. Never in the history of the Senate had we required 60 votes for a Cabinet member to be confirmed. But then in the early years of George W. Bush, in 2003, I had just come to the Senate. The Senator from New York and others said: Well, we will do that for the first time. We will block George W. Bush's nominees.

I don't want to debate that back and forth today except to say that became a precedent. And, sure enough, what goes around comes around. A few years later, by 2013, things had gotten so that the Democrats decided to break the rules to change the rules and used the so-called nuclear option, and when Republicans did the same thing that the Senator from New York had done, Democrats overruled that and seated judges on the Court of Appeals.

So as a result of the precedent set by the Senator from New York on judges with George W. Bush, we had the nuclear option in the Senate, a using of that. Republicans then did what the Democrats did. That is what you call precedent.

Well, it happened a second time. That first use of the nuclear option left it so you could require 60 votes in order to have a Supreme Court Justice.

When President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to be a Supreme Court Justice, the Democrats filibustered Justice Gorsuch, an enormously well-qualified person. Remember, throughout the history of the country, we had not blocked a Supreme Court Justice by filibuster with that single exception of the Abe Fortas instance. Yet they did that. And as a result of that, the Republicans then said: Well, we will use the nuclear option and change the rules to 51. So that is what happened with the precedent.

Now let's look at this precedent. Are we going to block for 282 days--let me get my numbers exactly right; it is 176 days on the calendar awaiting confirmation--a noncontroversial Board of Directors member for the Tennessee Valley Authority. That is what we have come to.

So are we going to say, as the U.S. Senate minority, that we will effectively block--we will effectively block--those kinds of nominations and effectively keep an elected President from setting up a government? Is that what we are going to say?

It looks like that is what we are saying if you are going to say that 119 times the majority leader of the Senate of whichever party will have to invoke cloture. That means it takes 3 or 4 days to confirm even a noncontroversial Presidential nomination, when there are 1,200 such nominations.

Let's say we have a Democratic President one day and a Republican U.S. Senate, or a Republican President and a Democratic U.S. Senate. But let's just for purposes of discussion, since we are talking about precedent, let's say the Democrats make a big comeback and elect a Democratic President next time around. It is only 2 years before the Presidential election.

And let's say the Republicans stay in power and still have a majority in the Senate and Republicans say: Well, we are a body of precedent. We will do to the Democratic President exactly what the Senate did to President Trump.

If Republicans are in the majority, the Democratic President might not even be able to staff the government because the Republicans could say: We will not confirm anybody.

Or even if the Republicans were to be in the minority and there were a Democratic President and the Republican minority did to the next Democratic President what this minority is doing to this one, then 119 times you would see this happen, at least through the first part of the administration.

So where does that leave us as a Government of the United States?

Well, here is where it would leave us. It would leave us with a government of the United States with the Senate having no role in the appointment of its principal officers. That is what it would leave, because there is on the books legislation called the Vacancies Act, which allows any President of the United States to appoint acting people to all of the positions in the government. They can serve for 210 days at least, and there are a wide variety of people who can be chosen for those positions. They can be people who are confirmed or they can be senior people in the government.

We happen to have an example of that today in the United States Department of Justice--Matthew Whitaker. The Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, whom I admire and all of us know, resigned at the request of the President. And instead of nominating or picking a Senate-confirmed successor as the Acting Attorney General of the United States, President Trump did, as the Vacancies Act allows him to do, appointed Matthew Whitaker, Attorney General Sessions' Chief of Staff. I suppose a President could do that for every position.

I mentioned earlier that toward the end of President Obama's term, he had no Education Secretary. Arne Duncan had decided to leave, and they used the Vacancies Act to allow John King, who was not confirmed by the Senate, in effect, to be the Acting Secretary of Education.

As I said earlier, I had that conversation with President Obama. I said: Mr. President, I believe that, institutionally, we should have a Senate-confirmed Secretary of Education. Even if I disagree, as I did, with John King's education views, I will see to it that if you nominate him, he is confirmed. President Obama did that. He respected the importance of having institutionally confirmed principal officers in the government, and then we confirmed him.

So I don't know where this is leading us. I think this is the same kind of dangerous precedent that was established when Democrats for the first time used a 60-vote opportunity to block President George W. Bush's judges, and what the Democrats then did--what most of them tell me they wish they hadn't done--was that they used the nuclear option and required a 51-vote cloture. So now they can't eventually block anyone, even John Ryder, if we all decide that we want to take a whole week to confirm him. That is what Senator McConnell has been doing. He has been putting a priority on district judges and on circuit judges, and the Democrats have been saying: We are going to slow you down.

But you can't win that way. All that happens is that the Senate gradually gives up its advise-and-consent authority under the Constitution to help the President form a government. That is one of the important parts of what we do in this government.

The late Justice Scalia said: Every tin horn dictator has a bill of rights. What the United States has that is different is checks and balances. One of the most important parts of that checks and balances is for the Senate to advise and consent on about 1,200 different Presidential nominees.

That is why I worked with Senator Schumer and other Democrats, like Senator Levin, and Republicans, like Senator McCain and Senator Barrasso, and we took steps during the Obama administration three different times to reduce the number of Presidential nominees, to speed up Presidential nominees, and to put 272 of them at a privileged status so they could come through more rapidly.

This goes in entirely the opposite direction, and it is a terrible precedent for this institution. So I am extremely disappointed.

I am disappointed for John Ryder, who is a prominent lawyer, who thought he might get to be on the TVA Board and was nominated 282 days ago. I am disappointed for the people of Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley Authority region. There are millions of people who have had a very good Chief Executive Officer for the TVA for the last several years in Bill Johnson and now need a fully functioning Board of Directors to pick his successor, and yet the Democrats say: Even though we approve of him, even though we have no reason not to confirm him, we are just going to slow the train down just because we can.

Well, if they can, someone else can later. That does not serve the people well. I don't see any partisan political advantage to the Democrats for doing something like this. I never have thought that. I always thought that it was the right thing to do to let a President staff his administration. If you don't like the nominee, you can always vote no, but at least you can have a vote.

So he is talking about bipartisan packages. This nominee has been waiting for a long, long time. So I am not through with this. I think this is something that the people of Tennessee are going to be very disappointed about, and I would ask my friend from New York again: Why are you picking on Tennessee? Why would you confirm the Alabama nominee? Why would you confirm the Kentucky nominee? And why would you not confirm the Tennessee nominee? Why would you make him swing in the wind for 176 days when everybody approves of him--even the Democratic ranking member of the committee and Democratic ranking member of the subcommittee? Something smells here, and it is a bad precedent for the Senate. It is not good for our country, and it is completely contrary to the way that I have enjoyed working with the Senator from New York in 2011, 2012, 2013 to make it easier, then, for President Obama, but later for every President of the United States, to have his Presidential nominees promptly considered by the Senate and voted up or down.

While I am on the subject of the Tennessee Valley Authority, I want to mention the fact that Bill Johnson, who has been the Chief Executive Officer of the Tennessee Valley Authority for the last several years announced today in a Board meeting of the TVA of Mississippi of his intention to retire next year. My hope would be that John Ryder, whose term could have begun earlier this year, would be there to help select his successor. Bill Johnson and the board have done a good job for the last few years with TVA. They have reduced its debt. They have kept electricity prices low. They provided a reliable, ample supply of electricity for a rapidly growing part of America, making it easier for us to recruit jobs, and the air is clean.

As I will say more about this in just a minute, the new Foothills Parkway opened just outside the Great Smoky Mountains this past weekend, and it was packed with local people. On Sunday I was up there myself. We can see the mountains because TVA, over the last several years, has put pollution control equipment on all of its coal plants, and we could immediately see the difference. Other Federal regulations have made the air cleaner.

In fact, a lawsuit from North Carolina with TVA to keep dirty air from Tennessee from blowing into North Carolina has now been made a Federal regulation, and dirty air from Kentucky or Texas or other States can't

blow into Tennessee. The result is that when you come see the Great Smoky Mountains, you can call them the Great Smoky Mountains and not the great smoggy mountains, which they were some time ago.

So I would congratulate Bill Johnson on his tenure as CEO. He has got TVA on the right track, and I would urge the Board of Directors to think long and hard as they select someone to fill his shoes because as a former Governor of that State and now as a U.S. Senator from Tennessee for 16 years, I know the importance of having ample supply of low-cost clean electricity to heat our homes, run our computers, and attract our jobs.

Now, I have a Thanksgiving thought, to move away from the disagreeable, acrimonious dealings of the Senate for a moment.

Mr. President, I suggest two more things that Tennesseans can be grateful for this Thanksgiving.

One, there is a new 16-mile section of the Foothills Parkway, creating a spectacular view of the Great Smoky Mountains, and, two, because the air is now so much cleaner, you can actually see the mountains from this spectacular drive.

In the 1990s, on the clearest days, according to the National Park Service, you could see for around 50 miles in the Smokies. Today you can see more than 90 miles on the clearest days. Even on the haziest days, visibility has improved. In the 1990s, visibility was less than 10 miles. Today you can see more than 30 miles on the haziest days, according to the Park Service.

While that is still less than the natural visibility of 150 miles on the clearest days--by natural visibility, I mean the blue haze the Cherokees used to sing about that exists because of the moisture in the Smokies--and 90 miles on the haziest days, we have made great improvements in the last two decades, and visibility is continuing to improve in the park.

The new section of the Foothills Parkway between Walland and Wears Valley is one of the prettiest drives in America. If you want the best view of the highest mountains in the Eastern United States, you will drive the Foothills Parkway. Last Sunday, when my wife and I drove it on the third day, it was open; it was packed, most of it with local people taking pictures of each other because they were so astonished by the view. It was a view so magnificent it surprises even those of us who grew up driving through the Smoky Mountains. Soon this drive will attract many of the more than the 11 million visitors who come to our park each year--twice as many as any national park.

But 16 years ago, these visitors would not have had such a good view. In 2002, the year I was elected to the Senate, the National Parks Conservation Association said that the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was the most polluted park in America. There were 3.5 million people who would visit the park in the summertime and the air was hazardous to breathe. The views were extremely limited due to pollution. Instead of the blue haze I mentioned earlier, we saw smog. The Great Smoky Mountains had become the great smoggy mountains just 16 years ago. Then a lot of people went to work. Federal clean air regulations, which I supported, required cleaner burning diesel fuels and cleaner vehicle engines, which also helped lower emissions. This especially helped the Smokies because of the large number of visitors' vehicles and because three interstates carry heavy truck traffic through nearby Knoxville, TN.

I also voted to support other Federal clean air regulations that limited emissions from smokestacks of sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury and established rules to prohibit dirty air from blowing from one State into another. I have always thought that operating a coal-fired powerplant without air pollution control equipment on it was like driving at night without the lights on. We have equipment and TVA has proved, as other utilities have, that you can burn coal in a clean way if you will simply put on pollution control equipment for mercury, nitrogen, and sulfur.

One of the biggest impacts, therefore, came in 2008, when the Tennessee Valley Authority began installing pollution control equipment on some of its coal-fired powerplants near the park. TVA has invested nearly $6 billion to reduce air emissions. That is money out of our pockets--we ratepayers. These efforts have resulted in a 94-percent reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions and a 91-percent reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions. Nitrogen and sulfur emissions have harmful effects on human health, the environment, and visibility.

Those of us who live near the park can see the impact of TVA's actions almost immediately. Today, TVA has installed some type of emission control equipment on all of its coal-fired powerplants and continues to improve that equipment so that the air will become even cleaner.

Over the years, I met and worked with mayors in counties surrounding the park who did what they could locally to make the air cleaner; that is because one of their top priorities is clean air. The Sevierville Chamber of Commerce, when I walked in there not long ago, told me it was their top priority because tourists come to spend money in Sevierville and Pigeon Forge to see the Smokies, not to see the smog. Now ground-level ozone that creates the smog that is harmful to human health and the environment and reduces visibility has improved significantly--by 36 percent according to the Great Smoky Mountains Association. All of the counties in the region around the park meet the EPA's environmental quality standards for ozone pollution.

On the parkway, in 1944--that was the year Congress first authorized the Foothills Parkway--this is what was going on: Allied Forces were invading Normandy Beach, Franklin D. Roosevelt was President, and Bing Crosby was singing ``I'll Be Seeing You.'' The State of Tennessee began acquiring right-of-way to the parkway and donating it to the Federal Government.

In 1960, the construction of the parkway actually started. Dwight D. Eisenhower was President. Elvis had just come home from 2 years in the Army, and American women were wearing beehive hairdos. That was 1960, when construction on this parkway began.

When I became Governor in 1979, the State had completed acquiring the right-of-way, and the State took the lead on 10 miles of the parkway between Carrs Creek and Wears Valley. Then construction halted because of environmental problems.

By the time I got to the Senate in 2002--the same time the Smokies was declared the most polluted national park--all of the parties had agreed on a plan to build bridges to complete the so-called 1.65 mile ``missing link'' on the parkway. Then President Bush's administration and the 2005 Federal highway bill, President Obama's administration, and Governor Bill Haslam's State administration in Tennessee all chipped in effort, time, and taxpayer money to finish the job after 50 years and $200 million of construction.

Since it was first authorized, it has taken 75 years to build a parkway and two decades to make the air clean enough so that visitors can see the mountains for 90 miles. So if you are looking for something else to be grateful for on Thanksgiving, try being grateful for the many visionaries, park officials, road builders, engineers, scientists, editors, and political leaders who have had the foresight to make it a priority to build the Foothills Parkway and clean up the air so that we can see the mountains. It has taken 75 years, but the views are so picturesque that it has been well worth the wait.

Mr. President, the resolution by the distinguished Senator from Wisconsin is a resolution to say to the plumber who is making $60,000 a year in Wisconsin or Tennessee: We want to keep your insurance prices high. We don't want to reduce them by 70 percent, and we want to keep 1.7 million people, according to the Urban Institute, uninsured.

Let me say that again. If this resolution passes--if you vote yes-- you are saying to the plumber who makes $60,000 a year, who can't afford to buy ObamaCare because his insurance premium is $20,000: We are going to do everything we can to keep your insurance costs so high that you can't afford it, and we are going to do everything we can to keep 1.7 million Americans, according to the Urban Institute, from having the option this short-term rule allows.

Let's see what we are talking about. We just heard eloquent comments about preexisting conditions. This resolution has nothing to do with preexisting conditions. It doesn't change one single word in the Affordable Care Act, which guarantees that if you have a preexisting condition, you have a right to buy ObamaCare, and you can't be charged more because of it.

Let me say that again. This rule, which the Senator from Wisconsin seeks to overturn, not only keeps you from lowering your cost 70 percent, but it has nothing to do with preexisting conditions because it doesn't change one single word of the Affordable Care Act guarantee that if you have a preexisting condition you can buy insurance and you can't be charged more. A rule can't change a law. It couldn't if it tried. That is one thing.

The second thing is that the rule that the Senator from Wisconsin seeks to overturn is the same rule that was in effect during all of President Obama's term. President Obama's administration allowed 1 year of short-term plans for people who couldn't afford insurance, couldn't find it anywhere else, or who might be between jobs. Even after the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, President Obama and the Democratic Congress thought it was a good enough idea to allow these short-term plans to continue that they kept them in the law. The law supporting these plans has nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act. It was passed in the 1990s for the purpose of giving people who need a short- term option, which might cost less because it has less coverage, the chance to buy insurance.

States can regulate these plans. States may decide what protections they should have. States may decide what the price should be, but, typically, in 2016, the difference between the cost of an ObamaCare plan was $393 a month for an unsubsidized ObamaCare plan and for a short-term plan it was $124. In other words, the short-term plan, which the Democrats and the Senator from Wisconsin seek to overturn, which was in existence all during the Obama administration and was authorized in the 1990s, would cut the plumber's insurance cost by 70 percent.

Now, why should we put up with that? Why should we put up with that? The Urban Institute, not known as a conservative organization, has said that up to 1.7 million Americans will take advantage of President Trump's short-term plan, which was the same as the Obama short-term plan, except that under the Trump rule, you may do it for as much as 3 years instead of just 1 year. It says that 1.7 million Americans will take advantage of that. That is a lot of people.

Eighty-three percent of Americans who buy ObamaCare have a subsidy to help them pay for it. It is the 17 percent who don't have a subsidy who are most likely to be helped by this. Many simply can't afford a $20,000 health insurance plan if they don't qualify for a subsidy, and this says: We understand that. You can buy a different sort of plan if your State permits it. You can pay less with less coverage and at least you will have some insurance. At least you will have some insurance.

But our Democratic friends say: Oh, no, we don't want to do anything that would lower the cost of health insurance.

Sometimes I think our Democratic friends have elevated to the level of the status of the 67th book of the Bible the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare. They will not even change parts of it that they agree with.

Earlier this year, Senator Murray and I, and then Senator Nelson and Senator Collins, all worked together with many Senators in a great bipartisan way to come up with a piece of legislation that would temporarily help with the high prices of health insurance. Make no mistake about it. In Tennessee, health insurance has gone up about 170 percent since ObamaCare was passed. That means the plumber or the farmer or the person making 50, 60, or $70,000 a year can't afford to pay the $20,000 premium they might be required to pay.

So we had this temporary Alexander-Murray-Collins-Nelson proposal. I can still see Senator Collins standing on the floor offering it saying, as she said: Oliver Wyman--the respected Oliver Wyman agency--says this will lower insurance premiums by 40 percent over 3 years for people in the individual market--people who don't get a subsidy, hardworking people who can't afford health insurance.

What happened? Even though the Democratic leader said it contained provisions that every single Democrat could support, the Democrats pulled the rug out from under it at the last minute by insisting on a radical version of abortion funding that they had not required since 1976, except in the ObamaCare law.

In other words, they deliberately kept health insurance prices 40 percent higher than they otherwise would have been. Was it to have an issue in the Presidential election or in the election this year? I have no idea, but I could think of no reason why not to do that.

Then, there is another example. Secretary of Labor Acosta has come up with another very good idea that has been talked about a lot within this body before: Why not give employees of smaller companies the right to buy the same kind of insurance that employees of IBM or big companies buy?

About half of all of us who have insurance get it on the job. We are pretty happy with it. It has a lot of protections in it--not as many as ObamaCare but, apparently, Democrats thought those protections were sufficiently strong, including preexisting condition, and sufficiently strong not to tamper with it. So the idea was this: Let's let the people who work in the company with 10 or 15 or 20 employees in Alaska, Tennessee, or Wisconsin have the same opportunity to buy insurance as the employee of a big company has.

Democrats said absolutely not.

So we don't want to lower rates by 40 percent by a temporary proposal supported by President Trump, Speaker Ryan, Senator McConnell, and let the Democratic leaders say all Democrats could vote for that policy. We don't want to let employees of smaller companies have the same options that employees of big companies have that would lower their insurance and give them more choices. And now we are being asked to say you can't have a 70-percent reduction in your health insurance--the same kind of proposal you had all during the Obama years. Let me say that again. President Obama thought it was just fine to have short-term healthcare plans for up to 1 year during the entire Obama administration. They changed the rules 22 days before the end of his term and reduced it to 3 months that you could buy these plans, but that wasn't enforced until April.

So let's keep it simple. If you needed insurance, if you lost your job, if you couldn't afford insurance during the Obama years, if ObamaCare got too expensive for you during the Obama years, you could buy short-term insurance for up to 1 year if your State allowed it.

What the Democrats are saying is this: No, we are not even going to do what President Obama would do. So we are going to keep your insurance high today with a yes vote. We are going to

say to 1.7 million people who are uninsured: No, you can't buy this insurance because we know more than you do.

Some people who might know more than we do is the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Senate Democrats wrote to them asking them about these short-term plans and raising questions about them.

Here is what the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a bipartisan organization, wrote back:

Short-term, limited duration insurance meets the needs of

consumers for whom other types of coverage may not be

appropriate, affordable, or available.

State Insurance Commissioners say short-term limited duration insurance, the type that a ``yes'' vote today would ban--those are my words--meets the needs of consumers for whom other types of coverage may not be appropriate, affordable, or available.

I hope that across this country, as Americans look at this today, you would ask the Senator from Wisconsin and her Democratic colleagues: Why do you want to kill a rule that President Obama favored, that existed all during ObamaCare while he was there, that gave people who might lose their jobs or couldn't afford ObamaCare a chance to buy insurance that might be 70-percent cheaper? Why would you want to keep 1.7 million Americans who don't have insurance, according to the Urban Institute, from being able to afford this short-term rule? What do you have against lower cost insurance that doesn't change one word of the Affordable Care Act's protection guarantee of preexisting conditions?

In other words, with this rule, if you still want to buy ObamaCare and need preexisting insurance protection, you have it. This could not possibly change that because it is a rule, not a law.

I hope today that we vote no and that we affirm the Trump rule, which is the Obama rule, which is the rule that supports the Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Alaska plumber who makes $60,000 a year, can't afford $20,000-a-year ObamaCare, gets no government subsidy, and needs this in order to insure his family.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, it is sometimes said that today's Senate does not measure up to the Senate's previous years because we have no eloquent Senators who make compelling speeches. I think Senator Collins has just disproved that today. Whether or not one agrees with her, she was eloquent. Her speech was compelling, and she has presented her case in the tradition of another Senator from Maine who was serving here when I first came many years ago as a young Senate aide, Senator Margaret Chase Smith. It is that tradition of independence and diligence which is so valuable and so important, especially in times of stress like this.

I had thought of following Senator Collins with some remarks of my own about what I found when I read the background checks today. I went to the section where we read classified documents. I saw that over 25 years, 150 people had been interviewed about Judge Kavanaugh. They had specifically been asked a question about whether they saw any evidence of alcohol abuse, and every single one said no and that there was no evidence of sexual impropriety.

I want to thank Senator Collins for her insistence on an extra week so that we could have a seventh FBI investigation. I took the time to review that as well. I saw that no matter how credible Dr. Ford seemed--and she did seem credible to me--no one except Dr. Ford remembers that alleged incident. And the other four, as Senator Collins said, who Dr. Ford said were there either don't remember it or said that it didn't happen.

I think the takeaway from what the Senator from Maine has said is that we

have reached what she said she hopes is the rock bottom in the Senate confirmation process. This is not the way things should be. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, we know that the most awful allegations--sexual assault certainly is as awful as any--deserve a modicum--there is a standard of fairness. She used the words ``more likely than not'' in her case. But in the U.S. Senate, we should be able to deal with such issues in a much better way than we have dealt with this.

We--all of us; the confirmation process--have victimized Dr. Ford, and we have victimized Judge Kavanaugh. Until 2 weeks ago, Judge Kavanaugh had a reputation among most people who had ever heard of him as one of the leading scholars, judges, and teachers in America. I believe he is that, which is why I am voting for him. I am glad we are voting for him.

I hope we all pause for a moment and listen to what Senator Collins said.

I will conclude where I started. There may have been a time when there were more eloquent Senators who made more compelling speeches down the hall in the Old Senate Chamber--we know their great names--but her speech today stacks up with the best of them.

I have heard speeches in this body for nearly half a century, both as a young aide and as a Member of the U.S. Senate, and I will remember this one. It is not just because I happen to agree with her, but because she showed characteristic diligence, independence, fairness, and a suggestion of the lessons that we should have for the future of this unique institution and this unique country that we prize so much.

I am going to think about what she has said. I hope other Members of the body do, and I hope many other Americans do as well.

Thank you.

Madam President, I would like to extend my congratulations to the Senator from South Dakota. This is a significant agreement on which he and Senator Nelson and others have worked very hard. I want to especially thank him for including in the bill something Senator Feinstein of California and I have worked on for several years; that is, the provision to ban the use of cell phones on airplanes. There is nothing worse than sitting next to someone on a 4- hour flight who would make it his or her business of revealing all of the intimate details of their life to someone on a cell phone. This would take care of that.

I would say to the Senator from South Dakota that sometimes I suggest to my friends in Tennessee that they look at Washington, DC, as a split-screen television. On the one side are tweets and Supreme Court contention and cable television and arguments, and on the other side we are getting quite a bit done, like the FAA bill, like the songwriters bill, like the appropriations bills that have kept us first in the world in supercomputing. Thanks to the leadership of Senator Blunt of Missouri and Senator Murray of Washington, we have, for the fourth consecutive year, included record funding for biomedical research. That doesn't capture as much attention as the other side of the TV screen, but it demonstrates that we are capable in this body of both vigorous contention on arguments, and we are also capable of doing the basic work of the Senate, which is to take big issues, see if we can come to some agreement about it, and come to a lasting conclusion, which the Senator was able to do, and I congratulate him for it.

I want to speak for a few minutes about another example of that. We are in the midst of contentious disagreement about the Supreme Court, but at the same time we have an urgent, bipartisan consensus, of virtually unanimous agreement, to deal with the most urgent public health epidemic facing our country today in virtually every community; that is, the opioids crisis. Each one of us has stories about how the opioids epidemic is ravaging our hometowns and our home States.

For example, at one of the several hearings we had in the Health Committee which I chair, a mother, Becky Savage, talked about her two sons whom she found in her basement after a graduation party one night, both dead. She was happy they were in their basement because instead of out driving around town, doing what teenagers might be doing, they were at home, but someone brought alcohol, someone brought opioid pills from the medicine cabinet in some home, and someone mixed those two together, producing two overdoses for two children who were not drug addicts, who were not alcoholics but who made a mistake.

Another hearing involved visiting the Niswonger Children's Hospital in Johnson City, TN, where one-third of the babies born in the neonatal center there are born withdrawing from opioids because their mothers are addicted, and it takes them days or weeks more to get over that. We listened to two judges in Upper East Tennessee, two criminal court judges, State judges, who said that of 6,000 completed cases they heard last year, two-thirds of them had something to do with the opioid epidemic.

There was the drug agent from Tennessee who was in my office who deals with meth and all sorts of drugs, and he described for me what had happened when they seized some fentanyl. Fentanyl is the white powder that is 50 times stronger than opioids--which comes from China, often in the mail--and which this bill we are about to talk about deals with. This drug agent, who is an experienced law enforcement officer, told me that just by opening a small plastic bag with a little of the white powder getting into the air, he was almost overcome and had to leave

the room because it would cause him to pass out. That is the epidemic we are dealing with everywhere in America.

Before I describe the bill, let me talk about two things that have to do with the bill. One is money and one is moonshot. People often say, when I describe our bill--which we called the Opioid Crisis Response Act but is now called by, I think, a better name, the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act--when I describe the bill, people ask: Where is the money? Well, the money is not in this bill. This is an authorization bill. We do money in other bills. We call them appropriations bills. The Congress and President Trump have both been attentive to the money.

Since just March, including the appropriations bill passed in March and the appropriations bills approved by the Senate last week, we will have directed in the Congress $8.5 billion toward the opioid crisis-- everything from hundreds of millions for nonaddictive pain medicines to $1 billion for grants to States for more treatment--so $8.5 billion just this year. That is the money.

Then, so far as the moonshot, some people say to me, ``Well, we need a moonshot for the opioids,'' and I wish we could have one. We probably need the energy, we probably need the money, and we probably need the resources and the determination it took in the 1960s for President Kennedy to say: Let's go to the Moon in a decade. Unfortunately, we can't do that from Washington, DC. This problem will not solve itself from here.

We can't assign this task to an agency and say: Fix it in 10 years. That is why we call this bill the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act. The opioids epidemic is going to have to be solved in Ames, IA, and Nashville, TN, and Sacramento, CA, and communities all across this country by Governors who work with medical faculty to change the curriculum on how doctors learn about pain medicine; by States that, like Tennessee, have begun to limit the opioid prescriptions to 3 days at a time to try to avoid the 60-day, 60-pill bottle that someone might take home and use 15 pills and then have the rest taken by a teenager to a party, with a terrible result at the end; by the judges who deal with opioids and their criminal cases; and by the nurses and the treatment officials who try to help people with medication. All of this has to be solved community by community by community. We know that. We are not pretending that a single act here can fix the problem. We have had urgent bipartisan consensus on this. There have been contributions from 5 Senate committees, and 72 different Senators are reflected in this bill. That is why we have urgent bipartisan consensus, because we want to do everything we can do to provide tools to parents and patients and doctors and nurses and communities and Governors--anyone we can find--to deal with this crisis.

Senator McConnell has called this opioid legislation ``landmark legislation,'' and I believe he is right. In our State, as in most States, more people are killed by opioid overdoses than by car crashes--in Tennessee, 1,776 last year. That is why the House passed this bill by 393 to 8 last Friday. That is why, after we vote on this bill today at 3:15, it will go directly to the President, and I am confident he will sign it quickly.

With more than 70 different provisions, there is no way to talk about them all. Each one is important, but here are a few of the most important:

Senator Portman's STOP Act. I talked about fentanyl--the white powder that is 50 times more powerful than opioids--coming by mail from China. FedEx and UPS can stop it, but the U.S. Postal Service can't. This gives the government the authority to stop that powder from coming in from China.

Nonaddictive painkillers. The most common reason Americans see a doctor is because they hurt. They have pain. There are 100 million Americans with some pain, and there are 25 million Americans with chronic pain. They need help, and if opioids can't help over a long term, they need a nonaddictive pain medicine, which is why we have put in hundreds of millions of dollars and passed fast-tracked legislation to find that.

Blister packs for opioids. States have begun to limit the doses of opioids that can be prescribed. We give to the Food and Drug Administration the authority to require manufactures to sell opioids in blister packs of three, five, or seven.

Extend support for Medicaid patients. Again, Senator Portman worked hard on this one, as did others. This extends from 15 to 30 days the time for treatment for people with a substance use disorder, and it expands it to all those disorders.

The TREAT Act. Senator Paul and Senator Markey have pushed this. It permanently allows more medical professionals to treat people in recovery to prevent relapse and overdose.

The bill prevents doctor-shopping by improving State prescription drug monitoring programs, and it provides more behavioral and mental health providers and support for comprehensive opioid recovery centers--all three of the major techniques we know.

It provides help for babies born in opioid withdrawal and for mothers with opioid use disorders and more early intervention with vulnerable children who have experienced trauma.

As I said, there are more than 70 different proposals from Senators themselves, equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. That is why this bill, which is the most complex one, I suspect, I have ever worked on--I have worked on some complex ones, but it is as complex as any--it literally had to have the support of every single one of the Senators to move through this body once, to the House, and I suspect it will almost get it 100 percent again because of the urgency and the participation in this.

I mentioned the $8.5 billion. Senator Blunt says there has been a 1,300-percent increase in congressional funding to combat the opioid crisis over the last 4 years.

Eight committees in the House. Five committees in the Senate. Seventy-two Senators. Senator Portman's STOP Act. Senators Paul and Markey's TREAT Act. Senator Rubio worked with us as we moved the Senate bill forward, and in the final version is his Eliminating Kickbacks in Recovery Act, which we were able to include in this final consensus legislation.

I thank Senator McConnell, the majority leader, and Senator Schumer, the Democratic leader. They have lots to think about. They have many demands on them and their time. But they have made it possible through this whole process to make room for this because they understood the importance of it, and I thank them for that.

I thank the chairmen and ranking members of the other Senate committees--Senators Hatch, Grassley, Thune, Crapo, Murray, Wyden, Feinstein, Nelson, Brown--and their staffs. It is not that easy for that many committees to put down their jurisdictional jealousies and work across committee jurisdictions to work together, but we had an urgent bipartisan consensus that we needed a result here.

I thank Senator McConnell's staff, Scott Raab and John Abegg, as well as Senator Schumer's staff, Veronica Duron, for all of their work on the legislation. They expedited it when it needed to be expedited.

I thank David Cleary on my staff and Evan Schatz on Senator Murray's staff. They are the chiefs on those issues. When they work together and Senator Murray and I work together, we often can get a lot done.

On my staff, I especially want to thank Grace Stuntz, who was the policewoman on all of this, working with the various committees here and the various committees in the House, and her team: Andy Vogt, Melissa Pfaff, Margaret Coulter, Curtis Vann, Tyler Shrive, Brett Meeks, and Jen Boyer. They did a tremendous amount of work. I also thank Lindsey Seidman, Bobby McMillin, Jake Baker, Jordan Hynes, Liz Wolgemuth, Taylor Haulsee, Ashton Davies, Elizabeth Gibson, Christina Mandreucci, Evan Dixon, and William Heartsill.

On Senator Murray's staff, I thank John Righter, Nick Bath, Andi Fristedt, Laurel Sakai, Colin Goldfinch, Madeleine Pannell, Allie Kimmel, Katherine McClelland, Lori Achman, Sheri Lou Santos, and Remy Brim.

We worked closely with the House of Representatives. I called both Representative Walden and Representative Brady and talked with them before we went ahead with this, and they

worked seamlessly with us for the last several months. The chairmen and ranking members of the House who made contributions included Representatives Walden, Brady, Goodlatte, Foxx, Shuster, Pallone, Neal, Conyers, Scott, DeFazio, and their staffs.

Lastly, I would like to thank the staff of the Senate and House Legislative Counsel. They helped us write the bill. With all of the changes and all the Senators and all the provisions, they did a spectacular job. The staff of the administration provided technical assistance along the way, as well as the staff of the Congressional Budget Office. They worked literally around the clock. They worked on weekends to make it possible for us to get through the House and to now get through the Senate and down Pennsylvania Avenue to the President of the United States. This wouldn't be here without them.

This is a landmark piece of legislation. This legislation, with more than 70 contributions from U.S. Senators--really equally divided between both parties--and $8.5 billion of funding since March, is an important step toward dealing with the most serious public health epidemic in any of our communities. The Supreme Court debate is important, but in hundreds of thousands of families and literally every community across this country, this is more important. This is more important, and this legislation will help.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wish to say to the Senator from Washington that I fully subscribe to her remarks. She is the ranking Democrat on the HELP Committee, and we work together to produce results. I like it when we can, and I think the American people do as well.

I had a chance to come to the floor earlier this afternoon to thank Senator Murray and her staff and the other Senators and their staffs and the large number of people who made this bill possible, so I will not repeat all that.

I would like to say, I think it is worthwhile to stop and say that at the time of a contentious debate about the Supreme Court, the U.S. Senate has found something that is equally important and really more important to hundreds of families across this country, maybe thousands, in virtually every community because the opioid epidemic is our most severe public health epidemic, and we have worked together, and we literally have unanimously agreed on this bill in the Senate, all 100 of us--well, maybe not all 100 but almost all 100 of us. At least all 100 of us agreed to let it go forward, and almost all 100 of us will vote for it.

The House of Representatives was nearly as unanimous. We have a bipartisan sense of urgency to deal with this. Senator McConnell has called it landmark legislation.

It is not the first step the Senate and the House have taken. There was the CARA Act, Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. There was the 21st Century Cures Act, which Senator Murray and I worked on and presented to the Congress and which Senator McConnell called the most important piece of legislation in the last Congress.

There are the appropriations bills, which have produced this year $8.5 billion for the opioid crisis when you combine the money appropriated in March and the money that is being approved this month.

Then there are the provisions of this act. More than 70 Senators have made contributions to it. Senator Murray listed many of them: Senator Portman's STOP Act to stop fentanyl from coming through the mail; the Holy Grail, in my opinion, nonaddictive painkillers.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an extra 60 seconds to finish my remarks.

Authority for the FDA to require manufacturers to sell smaller doses of opioids; extending treatment for Medicaid patients from 15 to 30 days in covering all substances; the TREAT Act, Senator Markey, Senator Paul worked hard on this.

I want to especially thank Senator McConnell and Senator Schumer for creating the environment so we could put together the work of five different committees in the Senate and eight different committees in the House of Representatives. That rarely happens. It takes a good deal of restraint and good will, and the reason for it is because of this bipartisan urgency to deal

with this problem. This is not a moonshot from Washington. It is everything, though, we could think of to do; more than 70 different proposals to support patients and support communities as they continue to fight our No. 1 public health epidemic.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, building on Senator Hatch's comments, we are grateful for his service to the U.S. Senate for more than four decades and grateful he is a songwriter. Of course, he comes from a culture and a faith that emphasizes music.

As a little boy in the East Tennessee mountains, I remember every week listening on the Zenith radio to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I think everybody in Utah and in the Mormon faith actually grows up learning to sing and to enjoy music.

Orrin Hatch is not just a U.S. Senator, he is a genuine songwriter. He has a gold and a platinum record. I know many national songwriters who have cowritten with him, and they admire him greatly.

I can think of no more important tribute to him than the Hatch- Goodlatte Music Modernization Act, which should pass the House this week and be on its way to the President. Then it will be, as Senator Hatch said, the single-most important piece of legislation in decades or in a generation that changes copyright law in a way that is fair to songwriters.

Senator Hatch is correct. This has not been easy. It has taken several years. There are a great many different people to it. The heavy lifts and the unexpected developments were occurring all the way down to about 30 minutes before it passed last Tuesday night.

It has been a great privilege to work with Senator Hatch and his staff on this legislation whom I will have more to say about in a minute.

The Senator from Utah has done a very good job of explaining what the bill does, but the truth is, copyright law is complicated. About the first 25 times somebody explains to you the law governing songwriting, you will not have a clue what they are talking about. So let me tell a couple of stories about songwriting that might help make it clear.

Right after World War II, two national songwriters, Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart, were driving from Memphis to Nashville, back before the interstates were created, and one said to the other: Well, Missouri has a waltz and Kentucky has a waltz, why doesn't Tennessee have a waltz? So on that drive--probably about a 5-hour drive then--they took a matchbox, an old penny matchbox that held wooden matches, threw the matches on the floorboard, and on the back of it they wrote the words to the ``Tennessee Waltz.''

Now, the ``Tennessee Waltz'' was already a waltz. It was called the ``No Name Waltz.'' People played it and sang it in different places. It was just a random song, but they added these few words to it. Then, that night when he got back, Pee Wee King wrote it on a lead sheet. That is what you call a blank page of music. He took it in to Fred Rose the next day, who was his publisher. Fred Rose was the publisher for Hank Williams, Roy Acuff--all kinds of people. He made one change in the words. Where it said: ``Oh, the Tennessee waltz, the Tennessee waltz,'' he changed the words to ``I remember the night and the Tennessee waltz.''

That song went nowhere for a while. It was performed around by Pee Wee King until Mercury Records decided they had a song, a different song, called ``Boogie Woogie Santa Claus.'' They wanted the hottest young female singer in America to sing it so they flew Patti Page to New York in about 1950. She sang ``Boogie Woogie Santa Clause'' on Mercury Records, but they had nothing to put on the back of the record. So somebody suggested they just throw on the back of the record this ``Tennessee Waltz.''

Well, the ``Tennessee Waltz'' sold 5 million copies. It became the most recorded song ever by a female artist. In many ways, it is the Magna Carta of country music.

So the question is, How did that happen? What is the mystery that causes a waltz that is just kicked around for a long time, has a few words placed on it by a few songwriters driving from Memphis to Nashville, to suddenly sell 5 million copies? Well, none of us really knows. It is just a magnificent form of art.

All over my State of Tennessee, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of teachers, taxi drivers, waitresses, people thinking of songs, getting together and writing songs, hoping to have the next No. 1 hit.

I saw Bob DiPiero at the Bluebird Cafe a week ago Saturday.

I say to Senator Hatch, he was a guitar teacher in RiverGate Mall, outside of Nashville, in the early 1980s. At about 3, he would take a bus from downtown Nashville out to RiverGate Mall, and he would teach guitar lessons to all of these kids after school until 9. Then, during the day, he would write songs. He didn't do well at all until one day he wrote a song with the lyrics: ``My baby is American made, born and bred in the U.S.A.'' Well, everybody knows that song now, and Bob DiPiero is a great songwriter. So I guess he makes a living off of songwriting, but lots of people don't.

This bill is about songs that are played over the internet. The way Bob DiPiero or Redd Stewart or Pee Wee King's descendants would get paid for their creative work is whenever the song is played over the internet, this Hatch-Goodlatte legislation says: We have a way to make sure you get paid if you are the songwriter or you own the rights, and, No. 2, we have changed the law to make it more likely that you will get a fair market value for what you get paid--those two things.

I have asked several of the songwriters and the people in the music industry: Do you really think this will make a difference? They, to a person, say yes.

Will it make it as good as it was? No, it probably will not, but it will be fair, and it will create an environment where not just Bob DiPiero can get paid for ``My baby is American made'' but where a lot more songwriters can make a decent living because they get paid and get paid a fair market value for their work.

I will tell you another story I have repeated on the floor about that. Unfortunately, I don't have a gold record, and I don't have a platinum record, but I can play the piano. I am as grateful for music as Senator Hatch is. When I was 4, my mother took me to the Maryville College, and I began piano lessons, which I continued until I was 16.

Senator McConnell, the majority leader, who had a wonderful and sainted mother who helped him recover from polio, once told me the one thing he regrets about his mother is she allowed him to stop taking piano lessons.

I said back to Senator McConnell: I don't ever remember ever having a choice. I made a deal with my mother that I would practice 30 minutes in the morning, and I would get to do what I wanted to in the afternoon, and I had a wonderful time with music.

I say to the Senator from Utah, when I was Governor, I was trying to think what could unite our State. The Presiding Officer probably had thoughts like that when he was Governor of his State. All I could think of that would unite our big, long State, from Memphis to Bristol, was music, from Beale Street in Memphis through Music City in Nashville, to the home of country music in Bristol, TN, where they brought a recording machine in 1927 and called for the hillbillies to come down out of the mountains. Among the hillbillies who came and had their music recorded were Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family. That was the beginning of what we call country music, what you hear on the radio in Nashville.

So as I was thinking about what united Tennessee, I thought, well, music. I asked the legislature in our State in the 1980s--and they did it--to appropriate some moneys for endowments for all of our community orchestras. There are about two dozen of them. If we give the Nashville Symphony or the Greenville Community Orchestra some State dollars, if they matched it, then they would have a little endowment that would support that music. I went around the State and played the piano with all of those community orchestras and had a good time when people came out to see the Governor make a mistake or miss a chord or that kind of thing.

So music is terribly important to our State, as it is to Utah and as it is to our country.

Ken Burns has a new film coming out. I think Ken Burns is America's greatest storyteller today. I mean, we have other good ones, but today he is. He has done more than 30 films. There is one about the Mayo Clinic that is out today. There is the Civil War, National Parks, all of those films--Vietnam more recently. His new film is the film he thinks may be the most popular film of all he has produced, of the 30, and it is about country music. It is about the stories and the lives of the people whom country music is about.

I think of Jessi Alexander, whom I just heard play a song at the Bluebird Cafe. She had heard on the radio about the father from Texas whose son was killed in Afghanistan, and they asked him how he grieved, and he said: I drive his truck. She wrote a song, ``I Drive Your Truck,'' about that father and his son who had been killed defending our country. It won the song of the year, as it should have.

So these emotional stories about life and death and whiskey and love and romance and cheating and everything that goes into human nature, these are the stories that make it into these songs.

Sometimes--sometimes--they are like the ``Tennessee Waltz.'' You put some words with a waltz that has been around for a while, and out comes 5 million records sold.

Sometimes it is more like this story. I was coming out of the drugstore in Maryville, TN, and I ran into an old couple in a pickup truck. I walked by them, and I said: How are you all doing?

The older lady said: Well, we are just falling apart together.

So I told that story to Lee Brice and some songwriters who were at our home for the weekend writing songs.

They said: We could do something with that, and they wrote a song, ``Falling Apart Together.'' Lee Brice is a pretty well-known singer. He and Billy Montana and John Stone wrote it. According to Nashville tradition, they gave me a fourth of the royalties because that is what they do. If you make any contribution to the song, you get a little piece of the action.

I thought: Well, this is good. I can actually do that as a U.S. Senator. That is legal. The Ethics Committee will approve that. So in 2016, the royalty I received for ``Falling Apart Together,'' which was recorded by Lee Brice and is on one of his albums, was $101.75. You can't make a living on that.

What Senator Hatch and the Senate has done, and the House is about to do and it will go on to the President, is to change the law.

First, it will create an entity. Those two songwriters who wrote the ``Tennessee Waltz'' after World War II, let's say their great- grandchildren now own all of the rights, and they are spread all over the place. Let's say Spotify wants to play the ``Tennessee Waltz.'' Now all they have to do is to go down to this new entity to get a license. They have a right to do it, and nobody can sue them. It is the entity's job to go find all of these 100 descendants and pay them the royalty.

Then we changed the law to try to make sure the royalties are a fair market value. Now, in that case, if some company owns that, it might be easier to find them, but that is why everybody came together to pass this bill.

Specifically, the legislation will help make sure songwriters are paid when their songs are played by creating a new simplified licensing entity.

This new licensing entity will make it easier for digital music companies to obtain a license to play songs and ensure songwriters are paid when their music is played.

This new entity helps songwriters because it will collect royalties each time a song is played, look for the songwriter, and hold on to their royalties for 3 years until they can be found.

This new entity also helps digital music companies because it makes sure songwriters get paid, which means fewer lawsuits.

Second, the legislation will help make sure songwriters are paid a fair market value for their work by doing three things.

The legislation revises outdated songwriter royalty standards to ensure songwriters are paid a fair market rate for their work. The new royalty payments will be based on what a willing buyer and willing seller would agree to in a free market--not the statutory below-market standard of today.

The legislation allows ASCAP and BMI--the two largest performing rights

organizations--to present new evidence about the fair market value of a songwriter's works--like what the performer earns for their songs--to a Federal rate court judge when there is a dispute about royalty rates for songwriters.

The legislation allows ASCAP and BMI to have Federal judges in the Southern District of New York randomly assigned to hear their rate cases, rather than have all the proceedings occur before the same judge each time. This should lead to better outcomes for songwriters.

This change in the law made sense in the internet world. Today, in the world we live in, more than half of the revenues in the music business are for songs played over the internet. The internet has changed music just like it has changed everything else. This changes the law to put us into the internet age. It changes some laws that have been around for centuries, since the days of the player piano.

Since there are others who will be wanting to speak, I have had other chances to talk about the bill. I have said most of what I wanted to say, except for a couple of thank-yous.

First, Orrin Hatch is exactly the right leader for this bill in the Senate for a variety of reasons. He is chairman of one important committee and nearly ranking on another. Through his prestige and his position in the Senate and through the respect we have for him, he was able to ask Senators to step back and allow us to do this very complex piece of legislation in a situation where any one Senator could have blocked it--and many did for a while, until they were persuaded not to.

I want to thank Chairman Grassley and Senator Feinstein for moving it through the Judiciary Committee expeditiously. This could not have happened if Senator McConnell and Senator Schumer had not created an environment in which we could do this. Senator Hatch mentioned Senator Whitehouse and Senator Coons, who were among the lead Democratic cosponsors. We had 82 cosponsors of this bill. We only have 100 Senators, and we had 82 cosponsors of the bill.

I want to particularly thank Senator Durbin, who may be a Democrat from Illinois, but he loves to go to Nashville and go to the Grand Ole Opry, and he jumped on early. He is the No. 2 Democrat, and he has been a big help.

Doug Collins, Hakeem Jeffries, and Darrell Issa in the House of Representatives were real leaders from the beginning, and, of course, Bob Goodlatte and Ranking Member Nadler were as well.

I think it is important to join Senator Hatch in mentioning again those music groups whom we sat down with more than 2 years ago and said: Look, we have been here for a long time, and we could continue to argue about what you disagree on or we could try to pass what you can agree on. And for the last 2\1/2\ years, they have worked to compromise, to agree on what they could agree on, and they have done that in an important way.

I thank the Nashville Song Writers Association International--Bart Herbison especially, but a whole bunch of them, including the National Music Publishers Association, ASCAP, BMI, the Recording Academy, Sound Exchange, Digital Media Association, Song Writers of North America, Internet Association, Recording Industry Association of America, and the National Association of Broadcasters, which came with a strongly support recommendation in the end, which was a big, big help.

Senator Hatch was correct. The most valuable players in all of this most likely have been the staff members on both sides of the aisle and in both Houses who helped put the competing interests together--and there were many--in a way that produced this bill.

I would especially like to thank Lindsey Garcia, who is sitting here with me, and Paul McKernan, who worked on this for a long time, and David Cleary and Allison Martin on my staff.

Chris Bates, Matt Jensen, and Matt Sandgren on Senator Hatch's staff have been terrific and essential.

I thank Rita Lari from the Senate Judiciary staff. We were joking the other day. When we first talked to her about this, she said: Are you sure you can pass a bill like this? Most people didn't think it was possible to get all of the competing interests here to agree.

Congressman Doug Collins and his staff have really been at the forefront of this, including Sally Rose Larson.

Republican floor staff Megan Mercer was a big help.

A special shout-out to Reema Dodin, who works for Senator Durbin and who was a consistent help but was especially helpful on last Tuesday afternoon when we only had a little bit of time and we needed to get some last-minute changes cleared in the Democratic cloakroom as well as the Republican cloakroom.

This would be a good exercise for a chapter in a book on legislation sometime. But it is going to be the Hatch-Goodlatte Music Modernization Act, and the result is going to be that thousands and thousands of songwriters in this country for the first time in a long time are, A, going to get paid for their work, and, B, they are going to get paid more of a fair market value, as they should.

I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have worked on it, and I thank all of my colleagues for working so well with Senator Hatch and me to get it done.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, if the Senator from Utah has concluded his remarks, I would like to say a word or two.

We have just passed in the Senate a bill that is named the Orrin G. Hatch Music Modernization Act. It was an amendment I had offered to the bill, not Senator Hatch's amendment. He is the principal sponsor of the bill, along with Senator Whitehouse and 82 Members of this body, but I ask that it be named in his honor. It is fitting because it is the most important piece of legislation in a generation to help make sure songwriters in our country are paid and are paid a fair market value for their work. It is fitting because Senator Hatch is a songwriter himself and has long been an advocate for musicians. So I can think of no better way to memorialize his four decades of service in the U.S. Senate than by renaming this legislation the Orrin G. Hatch Music Modernization Act.

Under his leadership, as I just mentioned, the bill gained nearly unanimous support in the Senate. It passed in the House earlier. After its having been thoroughly vetted and compromised and changed, it passed unanimously. It went to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it was considered and passed by voice vote. Then, tonight, it passed by voice vote.

I join with Senator Hatch in especially thanking the other Senators who have worked so hard on this, both Democrats as well as Republicans--Senator Whitehouse; Senator Durbin, the Assistant Democratic Leader, who enjoys going to Nashville on a regular basis and has lots of good stories about it; and Senator Coons of Delaware.

The bill, which passed the House unanimously and has now passed the Senate, will go back to the House because we have made some changes in the bill. That is the way the process works. We have stayed in close touch with the House of Representatives as we have done this. Representative Doug Collins and a number of others in the House have been really extraordinary leaders in pushing this, so I

know Representative Collins and others will work hard. My hope is, the House will be able to pass the Senate's bill next week and that the bill will then go to the President and become law.

Earlier this evening, Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, was on the floor, but he had to leave. I join Senator Hatch in thanking Senator Grassley, who is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, for having expedited the consideration of this bill and for having been here to speak about it.

Senator Grassley asked me to read these words on his behalf:

The Music Modernization Act will really help songwriters,

artists, publishers, producers, distributors, and other music

industry stakeholders. This bill is the product of long and

hard negotiations and compromise. Senators Hatch and

Alexander especially--but many other Senators--contributed to

this bill. I am pleased to support this bill.

One reason this bill has been successful--and one of the senior members of the staff of the Judiciary Committee was talking to me tonight and said it was a really remarkable piece of legislation--is that it touches so many of the aspects of the creation of music in our country. I think that is true. It is a very complex piece of legislation.

I asked some of those who were working on it the other day: Will this really help the songwriters? The answer was: Yes, it will.

We have been able to get so far because the songwriters and the publishers and the digital music companies and the broadcasters and the record labels and others decided to work together over the last 2 or 3 years on what they agree on instead of on what they disagree. It has taken several years to do this, but I believe it has been worth the effort.

What has happened is that the internet has changed the music business in the way it has changed politics, other businesses, and the world. More than half the revenues in the music business now come from music that is played over the internet. The legislation is necessary because the copyright laws of our country haven't kept up with the arrival of the internet. In addition to that, they were way out of date before the internet ever got here. Those copyright laws haven't been modernized since the days of the player piano a century ago. As a result of that, today's songwriters are often not paid royalties for their songs when their songs are played online, and when they are paid, they aren't paid a fair market value. It has become almost impossible for songwriters to make a decent living. Songwriters in Nashville--and we have them all over Tennessee, but Nashville has thousands of them--are typically taxi drivers, teachers, waitresses who are all working to write their first hits.

Last Saturday, I was at the Bluebird Cafe, in Nashville, where Senator Hatch has been before. Bob DiPiero was there and was playing some of his songs. He told a story of how, in the 1980s, he was teaching guitar lessons at the Rivergate Mall. That is how he was earning a living. He had moved to Nashville from Ohio and had fallen in love with country music. He said he would take a bus out to the Rivergate Mall--that took about an hour and an hour back--to teach these kids in the afternoons, after school, from 3 to 9 o'clock. During the day, he would write songs. Nothing happened until he wrote a song called ``American Made,'' which almost everybody knows the words to, and that song has done pretty well.

To give you an idea of what this bill could mean to most songwriters, let me tell you a story. I mentioned that songwriters can be taxi drivers or teachers or waitresses. They can also be U.S. Senators, like Senator Hatch, who actually has a gold record--maybe two--to his credit, and he has often cowritten with national songwriters. I had an experience too.

A few years ago, I was in my hometown of Maryville, TN. I went into the drugstore, and as I was coming out, there was this older couple who was sitting in a pickup truck.

I asked: How are y'all doing?

The woman in the pickup truck said: We are just falling apart together.

It just so happened that over that weekend, my son, who is in the music business, had a group of songwriters at our home, and they were writing songs. So I told that story about the lady saying ``falling apart together'' to one of them whose name was Lee Brice, who is a well-known songwriter and performer.

Lee Brice said: Hey, we can do something with that.

So he and Billy Montana and John Stone wrote the song ``Falling Apart Together.''

``Falling Apart Together'' went on Lee Brice's album, and it was played a lot. According to Nashville's custom, I get a one-fourth royalty for the song whenever the song is played. Now, Lee is a pretty well-known singer, and you would think those royalties would add up to give me a nice income in addition to my salary as a U.S. Senator. I checked. In 2016, I reported on my ethics form, which I file each year, that my royalties only added up to $101.75. That was for one-fourth of a record that was played on an album of a pretty well-known singer and writer.

If you are a songwriter in Nashville or anywhere else, you can't make a living on that, but the Orrin G. Hatch Music Modernization Act will help to fix that. It will help to make sure songwriters are paid a fair market value when their songs are played and that they are actually paid when their songs are played.

First, the legislation will make sure songwriters are paid by creating a new entity. This is really an elegant solution to a complicated problem. This new licensing entity will make it easier for digital music companies like Spotify or Amazon or Pandora to obtain licenses. Let's say they want to play ``Falling Apart Together.'' All they will have to do is go down to the entity and get a license from that entity to make sure the four of us who helped to write that song will be paid whenever the song is played. This can be a big problem for one of the internet companies because they deal in hundreds of thousands--millions--of songs, and songwriters end up everywhere in the world. So finding them is sometimes impossible. That is not good for the songwriter who doesn't get paid. It is not good for the streaming company because it might get sued.

As I said earlier, half of the revenues in the music industry come from internet songs. This new entity will collect the royalties each time a song is played. It will look for the songwriter and hold onto the royalties for 3 years until the songwriter can be found. As I mentioned, it will help the digital music companies because it will reduce the number of lawsuits and make it a lot simpler to get a license for a song.

Second, the legislation will make sure that songwriters will be paid a fair market value for their songs by doing three things.

First, it will revise outdated songwriter royalty standards. As I mentioned earlier, go back a century to the days of the player piano. It will replace those with a standard of willing seller and willing buyer. What would the song be worth in the free market, not as to the statutory rate that is set today?

The second thing the legislation will do is to allow ASCAP and BMI-- the two largest performing rights organizations--to present new evidence about the fair market value of a songwriter's work--like what the performer of the song might earn for performing the song--to a Federal rate court judge when there is a dispute about what the royalties are.

Finally, the third thing it will do to make sure songwriters are paid a fairer rate is to allow ASCAP and BMI to have Federal judges in the Southern District of New York, which is where these cases are heard, to be randomly assigned to the cases rather than to have all of the proceedings before the same judge. We believe that will produce a fairer outcome for songwriters.

This is a big day for songwriters in Nashville and in Memphis and in Knoxville, TN, as well as all over the country. It is the most important piece of legislation in a generation that will help make sure songwriters will be, A, paid when their songs are played and, B, that songwriters will be paid a fair market value.

I thank Senator Hatch for his leadership on this. Because he led this effort and because of his prestige in the Senate, we have 82 cosponsors of the legislation. We were able to pass it by voice vote tonight after it went through the Judiciary Committee.

I would not want anyone to think that because it passed by such a wide

margin that this was a simple exercise. It was a very complicated exercise, and it was in doubt until about an hour and a half ago in terms of whether we would be able to do this tonight. Yet we wouldn't have been able to have done it without Senator Hatch, so I thank him.

I think it is fitting, as he retires this year after spending four decades in the Senate, that we name the most important piece of legislation to help songwriters in a generation after the Senate's songwriter, that being the Orrin G. Hatch Music Modernization Act.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Utah for his remarks. I think we both would feel remiss if we didn't properly acknowledge all of the Senators and especially all of the staff members who have put in such long hours and used such professionalism to help with this. We will come back to the floor next week and do that properly.

Lindsay Garcia is here with me, as well as Paul McKernan and David Cleary. I see Senator Hatch's staff is on the floor, some from the Finance Committee. I want to make sure that we do a complete job of acknowledging their highly professional work in this complex and important piece of legislation. As I said, it is the most important piece of legislation in a generation to help make sure that American songwriters are paid fairly for their work.

Thank you.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn to then convene for pro forma session only, with no business being conducted, on Thursday, September 20, at 3 p.m. I further ask that when the Senate adjourns on Thursday, September 20, it next convene at 3 p.m., Monday, September 24, and that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; further, that the Senate be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each, until 5:30 p.m., and that then, at 5:30 p.m., the Senate proceed to the consideration of the Wolcott nomination under the previous order; finally, that notwithstanding rule XXII, the cloture motions filed during today's session ripen following disposition of the Wolcott nomination.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

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

Mr. President, this morning, in Nashville, as I got on the plane, the headlines were not about tweets or collusion with Russia or even the Supreme Court nomination. The headline was this: Senate set to OK bill on opioids.

Within a few minutes, we are about to vote in the Senate on legislation that Senator McConnell, the majority leader, has called ``landmark legislation.'' It is legislation that 72 of the 100 Members of this body have made a contribution to. They are not just cosponsoring it. They have a piece of this bill. This legislation has come through five different committees of the Senate, and we have been working on it for several months.

The reason it is on the front page of the newspapers in Tennessee and the newspapers in Kansas and the newspapers in Wyoming and the newspapers in Maine is because opioids are our most serious public health epidemic, and the Opioid Crisis Response Act that we will be voting on in a few minutes is the Senate's response to this crisis.

We will be voting on another important piece of legislation that the Senator from Maine, Ms. Collins, who is here, has talked about, and Senator McCaskill is a cosponsor. It is the Patient Right to Know Act. It basically does something that I think almost every American would think is a good idea. It says that when you go into a drugstore, your pharmacist must be allowed to tell you that if you can buy your prescription for $5 by paying out of your own pocket, you should do that, rather than using your insurance, which might require a $100 copay out of your pocket. Right now, there are contracts between pharmacy benefit organizations and pharmacists that prohibit your pharmacist from telling you. Senator Collins deserves a lot of credit for her leadership in this area, as she does in so many other areas, and I fully support what she is proposing. It passed unanimously out of our Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Let's go back for a moment to the Opioid Crisis Response Act, which we will be voting on within a few minutes. I mentioned that it is on the front pages of the newspapers today, despite a lot of competition for other news. I mentioned that Senator McConnell, the Senate majority leader, had called it ``landmark legislation,'' and I mentioned that it is because the opioid crisis is the most serious public health epidemic in our country. It is ravaging virtually every community.

We all have stories that we have heard, that we know, that we have told--stories like the story of Becky Savage, who testified at one of the seven hearings before our HELP Committee that her sons had a graduation party in her basement. She was happy about that. They were not running around town doing other things; they were in the basement. Unfortunately, someone had brought opioid pills to the party that got mixed with alcohol, and she found both her sons dead the next morning. They were not drug addicts. They were not alcoholics. They were good boys, but somehow they made a mistake because they and their friends didn't know the consequences of this opioid epidemic.

That is why five different committees in this body have reported bills that have made a contribution to the Opioid Crisis Response Act, which we are about to vote on. That is why 72 different Senators have provisions in this bill. That is why, last June, the House of Representatives passed its own version of the bill, also involving several committees in the House.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for another 5 minutes.

Mr. President, that is why we have had so much support for this amendment.

The bill is so large, some people have had trouble seeing the significance of it. Let me quickly mention two aspects of it: One is money, one is moonshot.

Some people say: Where is the money? This is not a money bill. This is an authorization bill. The money bills are in the Appropriations Committee, and they have been generous.

In March, the Congress addressed $4.7 billion in the omnibus appropriations bill toward opioids. In the bill--which we should approve tomorrow for the next fiscal year--there will be another $3.8 billion. So that is $8 billion within a few months for the opioids crisis.

The second is moonshot. Some people say this needs a moonshot. It does need the energy and resources of a moonshot, but, unfortunately, this isn't a crisis that we can assign to a Federal agency in Washington and say: Let's fix it in 10 years. What we can do is everything we can think of to do to create an environment so that doctors, nurses, judges, patients, parents, and everybody in communities that are affected by the opioid crisis can deal with it there, and we do our best to do that.

For example, Senator Portman's STOP Act addresses fentanyl and other synthetic, illegal drugs being mailed into this country through our Postal Service from China. Fentanyl is 50 times more powerful than an opioid pill, 50 times more dangerous. There is a 70-percent increase in deaths from overdose by fentanyl in our State of Tennessee.

Here is what I think is the Holy Grail of this crisis; that is, finding a non-addictive pain medicine or treatment. One hundred million Americans live with pain; 25 million Americans have chronic pain. They need help. They need something other than an addictive pain medicine-- something that works. Dr. Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health and Scott Gottlieb at the Food and Drug Administration have advanced research and created fast tracks, and we have provided hundreds of millions of dollars to find that Holy Grail.

A third is to reduce the prescriptions of opioids that can be diverted, so you can reduce the chance that you might get a 60-pill bottle of opioids, use 12, take it home, put it in your medicine cabinet; then your teenager picks it up and takes it to a party, and someone is hurt or overdoses. We authorize the Food and Drug Administration to require manufacturers to sell opioid pills in blister packs of, say, three or seven. Already, two dozen States have established their own limits. In Tennessee, it is a limit of three days.

What are the next steps for this piece of legislation, the Opioid Crisis Response Act with 72 provisions? We are already working with the House of Representatives. We are working very well with them. I appreciate the leadership of Senator McConnell and Senator Schumer in creating an environment where we can move this bill rapidly. We are working with Congressman Walden and Congressman Brady in the House and with Democrats on both sides of seven committees in the Senate on this phase and several in the House of Representatives.

Our goal is to have all of our language in a combined bill ready by Friday of this week, along with Congressional Budget Office numbers, so that the House of Representatives can vote on the bill next week before they go home. Then we can vote on it the following week--or whenever Senator McConnell can put it on the floor--and send it to the President for action.

There are too many Senators for me to thank at the moment for their leadership as chairmen and ranking members of committees or for their agreeing to show some restraint in insisting on provisions. Senator Portman had provisions, Senator Rubio did, Senator Paul did, and Senator Lee did, but they all said: Let's go ahead and vote on this today, work out the remaining differences we have over the next few days with the House, and hope that the

final version of the bill that comes back from the House is even stronger.

I am convinced that this piece of legislation, the Opioid Crisis Response Act of 2018, will help deal with the worst public health epidemic we have had. We have a sense of bipartisan urgency about finishing our work in the Senate and combining our efforts with the House. Their bill is a good bill. I think combining it with ours will help make it stronger, and we will get our bill to the President.

We may have the same amount of money and the same amount of energy that we had for the moonshot in the 1960s, but the real work is going to be done on the frontlines because the only way to deal with the opioid crisis is community by community by community.

I thank the President.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate proceeds to S. 2554, amendment No. 4011 be made pending.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the committee-reported substitute amendment to S. 2554 be agreed to.

Mr. President, the next vote is on Senator Collins' amendment on the gag rule with Senator McCaskill.

Following that, we will vote on the Opioid Crisis Act of 2018, which has the contributions of 72 Senators.

I would like to especially thank Senator McConnell and Senator Schumer for creating an environment in which we could get this done.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the votes following the first vote in this series be 10 minutes in length.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each, and I ask consent to speak for as long as I may require.

Mr. President, Boy Scouts shouldn't get a merit badge for telling the truth, and Senators shouldn't get an award for passing an appropriations bill, because that is what we are supposed to do. But it is worth noting that for the first time in at least 10 years, these appropriations bills that we just passed are on time and within the budget Congress has set.

With this vote today, we are moving toward restoring the practice of regular order in the Senate from start to finish. This is what the right way means: hearings--we held three. Mark up the bills--all 12 bills are completed before the Fourth of July recess. Consult with other Senators--in the case of the Energy and Water appropriations bills, 87 Senators, we believe, had their wishes reflected in our bill. Floor debate, amendment votes, then a conference committee, and then we had the vote today.

I look forward to President Trump signing these appropriations bills into law. They will help to keep our country first in science, technology, and supercomputing, and they will build the ports and waterways that create jobs.

This bill supports funding for several important agencies, including the Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Bureau of Reclamation, and regional commissions, including the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Delta Regional Authority.

The amount of funding in the bill is also consistent with spending caps agreed to as part of the bipartisan budget agreement. It sets priorities while reducing unnecessary spending.

Let me start with the Army Corps of Engineers, which affects the lives of almost every American. Based upon the appropriations request we received, this is the most popular agency in the budget. The Corps maintains our inland waterways; it deepens and keeps our ports open; it looks after our recreational waters and lands; it manages our rivers to prevent flooding; its dams provide emission-free, renewable hydroelectric energy. The bill restores $2.3 billion that was cut from the President's budget request, bringing the Corps' budget up to $6.999 billion--a new record level of funding in a regular appropriations bill.

For the fifth consecutive year, the bill makes full use of the Inland Waterways Trust Fund revenues for water infrastructure projects, including up to $117.7 million to continue construction of Chickamauga Lock in Chattanooga and $2.125 million for dredging at Memphis Harbor McKellar Lake.

The bill also provides funding that exceeds the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, a spending target established by the Water Resources and Development Act of 2014. This is the fifth consecutive year that the bill has met or exceeded the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund spending targets, which is necessary to adequately fund our Nation's harbors, including Mobile Harbor in Alabama, Savannah Harbor in Georgia, Long Beach Harbor in California, and many others across the country.

For the Department of Energy, for the fourth consecutive year, we have included record funding levels in a regular appropriations bill for the following activities: No. 1, for the Department's Office of Science. This is the Nation's largest support of research in the physical sciences. It is funded at $6.5 billion, a new record funding level. The Office of Science provides funding for our 17 national laboratories--I call them our secret weapons--including the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. No other country has anything like them.

Let's take supercomputing. The bill provides a total of $1.6 billion for high performance computing, including $935 million within the Office of Science and $723 million within the National Nuclear Security Administration. This includes $6.76 million to deliver at least one exascale machine in 2021 to reassert U.S. leadership in the critical area of supercomputing.

This accomplishment is not the result of 1 year of funding, but of 10 years of bipartisan effort through three different administrations, Democrat and Republican, to try to make sure that the United States is first in the world in supercomputing. We continue to do that in this appropriations bill.

Nuclear power is our best source of inexpensive, carbon-free baseload power. It is important for national security and competitiveness. Nuclear power provides 20 percent of our Nation's electricity and more than half of our carbon-free electricity. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees our 99 nuclear power reactors, is also funded in this bill. We wanted to make sure it is prepared to review applications for new reactors, particularly small modular reactors and advanced reactors, and to extend the licenses of existing nuclear reactors, if it is the safe thing to do.

The bill also provides $47 million for research and development at the Department of Energy to support existing reactors, $27 million for the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, and $30 million for the Transformational Challenge Reactor.

It advances efforts to clean up hazardous materials at Cold War-era sites. The bill provides $7.2 billion to support cleanup efforts, which is $578 million above the President's budget request.

A key pillar of our national defense is a strong nuclear deterrent. That is in this appropriations bill, as well, including $11.1 billion for weapons activities within the NNSA, including nearly $2 billion for six life extension programs, which fix or replace components in weapons systems to make sure they are safe and reliable. Congress must maintain a safe and effective nuclear weapons stockpile and keep big construction projects on time and on budget.

I want to compliment Senator Feinstein, of California, my partner on the Energy and Water Subcommittee. We worked hard together on all aspects of this bill, but especially on keeping those big construction projects on time and on budget.

A principal reason the United States produces 24 percent of all the money in the world for just 5 percent of the people in the world is the extraordinary concentration of brain power in the United States supported by Federal dollars through our National Laboratories, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies. It is important that the American people know that the Republican majority in Congress worked together with Democrats to provide record levels of funding for science, research, and technology.

I would state to all of those who might not have noticed this quiet new development that Congress is funding science and research at record levels, and if we continue to do so, we will make America more competitive and help spur innovation and create good-paying jobs.

A lot of hard work went into these negotiations over the last several months. Our staff members have worked over weekends and over vacations to make that happen, including the last few days. On my staff were Tyler Owens, Adam DeMella, Meyer Seligman, Jen Armstrong, Molly Marsh, and Rachel Littleton; on Senator Feinstein's staff, Doug Clapp, Chris Hanson, Samantha Nelson; and on Senator Shelby's staff, Shannon Hines, Jonathan Graffeo, and David Adkins. I am deeply grateful to them for their professionalism and their bipartisan work.

Mr. President, now I would like to say a word about legislation that the majority leader, Senator McConnell, has described as landmark legislation, which I expect the Senate to move to early next week, and that is the legislation dealing with the most serious public health epidemic in America today, the opioid crisis.

We will be voting on the Opioid Crisis Response Act. This landmark legislation is the work of five different committees in the Senate. More than 70 Senators--half Republican, half Democrat--have provisions in this bill.

A big bill is hard to talk about, so let me just mention 10 key provisions: first, Senator Portman's STOP Act to stop illegal drugs, including fentanyl, at the border coming through the mail; second, new nonaddictive painkillers, research and fast-track. I call this the holy grail of the opioids crisis because 100 million Americans hurt. They have pain; 25 million have chronic pain. They need help, and we need new nonaddictive treatments to help them. Blister packs for opioids, such as a 3 to 5 days' supply--we authorized the FDA to require manufacturers to do that. More medication-assisted treatment, preventing doctor shopping by improving State prescription drug monitoring programs, and more behavioral and mental health providers. No. 7, support for comprehensive opioid recovery centers; No. 8, help for babies born in opioid withdrawal; No. 9, help for mothers with opioid use disorders, addicted to opioids; and No. 10, more early intervention with vulnerable children who have experienced trauma. Those are 10 of the 70 provisions that change the authorizing law, but in addition to that, we have placed unprecedented amounts of Federal dollars toward the opioid crisis.

In March, in the omnibus bill, Congress and the President directed $4.7 billion toward the opioid crisis. Tomorrow, the conference committee considering the Labor, Health, and Human

Services, and Education Appropriations bill will meet. When that appropriations bill is approved, as we expect and hope it will be by the end of the month, that is another $3.7 billion. So that is $8.4 billion in the last few months that will have been directed toward the opioid crisis.

We have had seven hearings in our committee on opioids. On June 14, Becky Savage talked to us about two of her sons. She lost both of them after they accidentally overdosed on a combination of alcohol and opioids that they took in their own home after a graduation party.

At our hearing, Becky Savage said:

How could two boys who have always seemed to make good

decisions in life make a choice that would ultimately cost

them their lives? [H]ow did someone's prescription end up in

the pocket of a teenager at a graduation party?

Nick and Jack were just two of the 33,000 Americans who died in 2015 from an opioid overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 2016, the number had increased to 42,000 Americans. We suspect those numbers are even higher now. Last year, 1,776 Tennesseans died of a drug overdose, according to the Tennessee Department of Health, up from 1,630 the year before. We know that the opioid crisis is ravaging virtually every American community.

Becky Savage's story was just one of the heartbreaking stories the Senate HELP Committee heard last year in our seven hearings. Senator Isakson in Georgia told us of waking up to answer a phone call at 3 a.m. in December of 2016. His son John called to tell Senator Isakson that his grandson had passed away from an opioid overdose.

We heard Dr. Omar Abubaker, who lost his youngest son, Adam, 21 years old, after he overdosed on a mixture of heroin and benzodiazepines. At our hearing he said, ``Since my son's death 3 years ago, more than 165,000 other parents in this country have experienced the same agony.''

I imagine every Senator has heard heartbreaking stories of how the opioid crisis has impacted patients and children, doctors and nurses, entire communities in our States.

But at our hearings, we also heard stories of hope. Jessica Hulsey Nickel knows ``firsthand the devastating impact that addiction can have on families,'' having lost both of her parents to addiction. Jessica has since dedicated her life to helping others battling the same disease.

Trish Tanner, the chief pharmacy officer at Ballad Health in Johnson City, TN, lost her nephew Dustin to an opioid overdose. As part of an executive fellowship program, she worked on a project on ways to reduce opioid prescribing, saying that ``as Dustin's aunt and as a pharmacist, I have a duty and a desire to bring about change now.''

To spread awareness and tell the story of losing her two sons, Becky Savage and her husband have created the 525 Foundation in memory of Nick and Jack. When she testified before our committee, Becky told us that ``you could have heard a pin drop in many of the auditoriums I speak in.'' After hearing her story, you could hear a pin drop in our committee room as well.

The challenge of solving the opioid crisis has been often been described as needing a moonshot. I wish we could do that. I wish we could appoint a single agency in Washington to solve this problem in every community in America, but what we have found is that will not work. Solving the opioid crisis might require the energy and resources of a moonshot, but ultimately it is not something that can be solved by a single agency here. What the Federal Government can do is create an environment so that everyone--Governors, mayors, judges, counselors, law enforcement, doctors, nurses, and families like the Savages--can succeed in fighting the crisis.

This is a package of more than 70 proposals from nearly three- quarters of the Members of the U.S. Senate--72 Members--that includes the work of five committees: the HELP Committee that I chair, the Finance, Judiciary, Commerce, and Banking Committees.

Since last October, the Senate HELP Committee, which I chair and Senator Patty Murray of Washington is the ranking member of, has held seven hearings on the opioid crisis. We heard from Governors, from doctors, from addiction experts, family members, and others on how the Federal Government can be the best possible partner as we work to solve the crisis.

We took the input we heard at the first six hearings, and we turned it into a draft package of proposals, which Senator Murray and I released on April 5. On April 11, we held our seventh hearing to review the draft proposal. On April 17, we introduced an updated package of 40 proposals, based on the feedback we heard at the seventh hearing. On April 24, the Senate Health Committee voted 23 to 0 to pass this legislation, which included proposals from 38 different Senators.

Because this crisis is so widespread, the Finance, Judiciary, Commerce, and Banking Committees also have been working on their contributions to this bill.

On May 22, the Commerce Committee passed two provisions; May 24, the Judiciary passed six; June 12, the Finance Committee offered 22 more provisions. We have also included a provision that the Banking Committee has been working on.

Senator Murray and I have since worked with Senators Hatch, Grassley, Thune, Wyden, Feinstein, and Nelson to combine all of these proposals, along with other proposals, such as Senator Portman's STOP Act, into one package of legislation--the Opioid Crisis Response Act. We thank all of them.

Over 20 Senators contributed to the Finance Committee provisions, 25 to the Judiciary provisions, and 7 to the Commerce Committee's provisions. I think it is a testament to just how far-reaching this crisis is and why we feel a sense of bipartisan urgency in passing this legislation in the Senate and in the Congress.

In June the House of Representatives passed its own package of legislation to fight the opioid crisis by a vote of 396 to 14. The Senate and House staff combined our legislation and what the House has passed, and we believe it will produce an even stronger bill to fight the crisis.

My hope is that the five Senate committees will work quickly with our House colleagues to reach an agreement by September 21, so the House can pass a final opioids package, the Senate can pass it, and we can send it to the President's desk as quickly as possible. That is the bipartisan sense of urgency I feel so that we can help States and communities fight the opioid crisis.

This act builds on the work already done--the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, or CARA, passed in 2016, which gave a substantial boost to States on the frontlines, providing grants to expand access to lifesaving opioid overdose reversal medications and to support State efforts to help individuals.

Later in 2016, Congress enacted the 21st Century Cures Act, which included $1 billion over 2 years in State grants to fight the crisis. It sought to accelerate research for major discoveries, like new nonaddictive pain medicines, which, as I mentioned, I believe is the Holy Grail of solving the opioid crisis.

Then, the omnibus appropriations bill in March provided $4.7 billion of funding, and $1 billion of that is for grants. We believe another $3.7 billion is coming from the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations bill, which we hope to pass this month.

According to Senator Blunt, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, Federal funding to help combat the opioid epidemic has increased nearly 1,300 percent over the past 4 years. The bill we are voting on next week builds on this funding.

So we will be passing the STOP Act, new nonaddictive painkillers, blister packs for opioids, more medication-assisted treatment, and efforts to prevent doctor shopping, to provide more behavioral and mental health providers, to support comprehensive opioid recovery centers, and to provide help for babies born in opioid withdrawal, help for mothers with opioid use disorders, and more early intervention with vulnerable children who have experienced trauma. These are just a portion of the more than 70 provisions in the Opioid Crisis Response Act.

This is, as the majority leader, Senator McConnell, has said, ``landmark legislation'' that represents the work

of nearly three-fourths of the Senate, five committees, and countless staff who have worked to try to help States and communities put an end to this crisis that is ravaging virtually every community in America.

The House of Representatives has passed its version. We have our bipartisan urgency to work together. No mother should have to go through what Becky Savage has gone through. It is time to finish our work and help States and communities bring an end to the opioid crisis. This legislation would give us many of the tools we need to do just that.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I am glad I traveled to Phoenix Thursday for John McCain's funeral. You learn a lot more about a U.S. Senator in his hometown than you do here in Washington, DC.

What was clear in Phoenix last Thursday was that John McCain and the State of Arizona were well connected with one another. Frankly, I had wondered about that because it is a long way to Phoenix. It is a 5-hour flight. Sometimes John took a connecting flight. He must have taken hundreds of trips around the world. So I wondered if he really was connected to the State the same as he was to Senate. But I shouldn't have had any doubt about that because you are not going to get elected six times in a primary and then six times in a general election, in a State where both primary and general elections are competitive, without being well connected to your State, and he obviously was.

Listening to those who remembered John in Phoenix, it was clear that John McCain kept his feet on the ground in Arizona. Grant Woods, the former attorney general, spoke first. He was very good. He captured John perfectly. He had been his chief of staff. He had been the attorney general of Arizona. In his remarks, he captured John's erratic driving and his mercurial personality.

Tommy Espinoza, a friend of Senator McCain, helped us understand, again, how John thought his job was to serve everybody, whether they were Republicans, Democrats, or from whatever walk of life.

We all knew John McCain was a sports nut, and I don't guess that any of us were surprised to see Larry Fitzgerald speak, who is entering his 15th year in the National Football League. I was impressed when Larry Fitzgerald talked about having so much respect for John McCain that he--Larry Fitzgerald--flew to Hanoi, went to the lake where McCain crashed his plane, and then went to the cell in Hanoi where he spent nearly 6 years.

Joe Biden brought the only touch of Washington, DC, to Phoenix last Thursday, but it really wasn't that big of a touch because what Joe mainly talked about was his friendship with John McCain and their relationships, which all of us know is the heart and soul of the Senate.

The service in the big Baptist church, concluding with Frank Sinatra singing ``My Way,'' was a reminder that the service was, well, pure John McCain.

Those of us who eulogized John are honest enough to say that he was an equal-opportunity insulter. He took the head off of almost every one of us in the Senate at one time or another. He was filled with passion for every issue he touched, and that often led to explosions. After the explosions and after the inevitable apologies, which usually didn't take very long, he would say: I never expected to be elected Mr. Congeniality. I chalked up those explosions--and I think almost all of us

did--to those 6 years of captivity in Hanoi. All of us wondered and admired how someone who suffered that much pain in those circumstances for the rest of his life could lead such a productive life and be so useful to our country.

John brought the same passion and generosity of spirit that he had for his issues to his friendships--and I was glad to be included as one of those--and the extent of that generosity of spirit to people he didn't know, whom he had just met in many walks of life.

I can remember when he was campaigning in Tennessee with me. He was spending the night with me at our home in East Tennessee. It was late when we got there, 10:30 or 11. My son had a group of national songwriters who were writing what they all hoped to be the next No. 1 hit. Of course, they were eager for John to hear their No. 1 hit. He stopped, and he listened. He spent some time with them. One of them said to me last week how thrilled he still is that he got to meet John McCain.

The next morning, Eugene Caylor, who is a craftsman from Townsend, TN, was coming to work, and John was leaving. It turns out that Eugene had been in Vietnam when John had been there. So they talked about that for a few minutes. Eugene told me this past week how much he valued those few minutes with John McCain.

John McCain came to the Senate in 1976 or so. John was then a Senate liaison. He got his hair cut by Mario D'Angelo, who is still here cutting hair. I saw Mario the other day. He has been cutting my hair over a long period of time, as well as Orrin Hatch's and many of us. Mario said that about the time Senator McCain was running for President, he was on television, sitting there with his wife Cindy, and some interviewer asked him if he had any friends in the Senate.

He thought for a moment, and finally Cindy said: Well, there is Mario.

And McCain said: Mario the butcher; he is responsible for all these scars on my face.

Last week, after John McCain's death, Mario laughed and said: That is what he always called me, ``the butcher,'' but he was my buddy.

When he found out I was going to Phoenix, he said: Say a big good-bye to my buddy John McCain.

That is how Mario felt, and that is how many, many of us felt.

We have heard so much said about Senator McCain during the last week that one would wonder if there was anything left to say. What I want to say is not something different, but I would like to emphasize something, and that is the commitment Senator John McCain had to the Senate as an institution. His devotion to the Senate as an institution is, by far, not his most newsworthy accomplishment, but it underlay many of his most important decisions. He said he voted against the ObamaCare repeal because it didn't go through the regular order, the kind of order an institution ought to have. The last chapter of one of his books is entitled ``The Regular Order.''

In 2005, when Democrats balked at George W. Bush's judicial nominees--Republicans were seeking to change the very nature of the Senate by turning it into a majoritarian institution--Senator McCain worked with Republicans and Democrats in sort of a gang, as they called it, to try to make sure that didn't happen. He wanted to preserve the Senate as an institution.

I worked with him many, many hours in 2011, 2012, and 2013 on the same sort of thing. We saw the difficulty that President Obama at that time had in getting some of his nominations confirmed. So we worked to change the Senate rules so that President Obama and subsequent Presidents could get their nominees approved in a reasonable time.

We worked with Senator Carl Levin, for example, who insisted that we needed to be successful or else we would have one of those nuclear explosions that would change the nature of the Senate and make it a majoritarian institution that ran roughshod over the minority. Senator Levin said at the time--with which Senator McCain and I both agreed-- that a Senate in which the majority can change the rules at any time is a Senate without any rules. What Senator Levin might also have said is that the Senate is a weaker institution, deserving less respect.

In a speech at Morristown, NJ, a few years ago, the late Justice Scalia said that ``the reason America's basic freedom has endured for 200 years is not the amendments to the Constitution but the Constitution itself.''

Justice Scalia said this:

Every tin horn dictator in the world today, every president

for life, has a Bill of Rights. That's not what makes us

free; if it did, you would rather live in Zimbabwe. But you

wouldn't want to live in most countries in the world that

have a Bill of Rights. What has made us free is our

Constitution.

Think of the word ``constitution.'' It means structure.

Scalia continued:

That's why America's framers debated . . . the structure of

the federal government. The genius of the American

constitutional system is the dispersal of power. Once power

is centralized in one person, or one part [of government], a

Bill of Rights is just words on paper.

John McCain understood that. He sensed that a nation as fragmented as ours has become in this internet democracy in which we live today especially needs strong institutions. The most important institution designed to reach a consensus, a compromise, an agreement, the kind of agreement most Americans will support and the kind of agreement that will last a long time--the institution most suited to do that is the U.S. Senate. That is our job, just as it is our job to weigh in against the excesses of the popular will and the excesses of the Chief Executive. If we don't do our jobs, as Justice Scalia said, we are risking creating in our country an authoritarian government.

The U.S. Senate is a representative body, so some Senators stand out above others. There is usually one Senator who stands out over all the other Senators, and, for the last few years, that has been John McCain. For me, one of the most enduring contributions John McCain made to this institution was his continuous efforts to help strengthen the Senate as an institution, to see to it that we do our jobs, providing checks against the excesses of the popular will, excesses of the Executive, and that we work hard to find the kind of compromise and consensus and agreement that most Americans can support and that can last for a long time.

I yield the floor.