Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I come to the floor to join my colleagues who have been speaking this morning about the access to healthcare for women in America. Today, as women take action across the Nation to bring focus to this issue, I would like to join my colleagues, particularly the senior Senator from Washington, and I thank her for her leadership on this important issue. She knows better than most how many times the Senate and the Congress in the last decade have fought over access to healthcare for women. It seems like every budget debate, every fiscal cliff, every budget negotiation, and every issue had to have a debate about whether we were going to defund Planned Parenthood. So it is not a surprise that we are out here today as States across the Nation try to roll back access to healthcare. I guarantee you, I believe and my State believes that access to healthcare should be and is protected under the Constitution as a right to privacy. We believe that and codified Roe v. Wade into statute by a vote of the people in the 1990s. So any time anybody is going to take on access to healthcare for women and erode what is a basic right in our State and, I believe, a basic right protected in our Constitution, we are going to raise our voices. You are going to hear from us. So it is amazing to me that every budget battle and every debate here in the Senate comes down to rolling back access to women's healthcare.

Now we see Supreme Court Justices who may or may not uphold those basic rights as were established in Connecticut v. Griswold, as did a Supreme Court Justice, who just happened to hail from the State of Washington, who understood that the privacy rights protected in the Constitution are in the penumbra of rights. So, yes, I believe that our Supreme Court Justices should also continue that well-established practice of observing those privacy rights. So it is hard to say what all of these State actions will lead to, whether they will make it to the Supreme Court and what this Supreme Court will have to say about it. But I can tell you that we here in the Senate--women who understand the access to healthcare--are so emphatic that we not erode these rights.

I had the very unfortunate situation of having to speak at a funeral this weekend for a 28-year-old former staff member who died of cancer. I know how much fight she had in her, but it was afterward where one of her relatives said to me: Senator, you cannot leave this unaddressed.

Young women at college campuses are not getting the breast exams to do early detection that they should. They should be out there. We should do more to evangelize that young women need to pay attention to their healthcare. Yet we are here across the Nation having this debate, and I guarantee you that the access to healthcare to do those early detections in a lot of communities comes with the access that organizations like Planned Parenthood and others deliver. So while they are not what is immediately under attack by these States, I guarantee you that it is all a part of a larger debate that needs to stop.

Healthcare should be the right of women to be discussed with their doctors and continue to be protected under our Constitution.

I thank the President.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the chairman of the Finance Committee, Senator Grassley, for his leadership on these issues. I look forward to working with him on the assigned task forces and to working hard on very important issues that he and I have been working on in the past--from biodiesel, to energy policy, to a variety of things. I thank him for that.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak in favor of confirming the three nominees before us for the Board of Directors at the U.S. Export-Import Bank. All three of these nominees are well qualified, with years of experience in relevant fields, and all three have received support from Democrats and Republicans. In fact, all three advanced out of the Banking Committee earlier this Congress by a voice vote.

We must confirm these nominees to ensure that the Export-Import Bank is once again fully operational. It is critical for jobs and for our economy, not just in my home State of Washington but throughout the United States.

I believe in an export economy. I believe the United States of America manufactures and makes great products, and we should be shipping them around the globe to customers in a growing middle class. To do that, we have to have a functioning export credit agency that works with the private sector as a tool to get more of our products to markets where that kind of banking and assistance does not exist. If the United States fails to participate here, customers receive products from other countries--other countries that may not necessarily want that foreign product over our U.S. product, but clearly the foreign export credit agency support by creates an incentive for them to purchase other products.

Since 2015, the Bank has not been fully operational due to the lack of a quorum on the Board of Directors.

I am not going to go into a lot of why that has happened. I will just say that if you truly believe in an export economy, you believe in having a credit agency, such as the Export-Import Bank, existing as a fundamental tool.

Basically what it has meant is that, with a lack of Board of Directors, we have not been able to approve financing transactions over $10 million--a situation that has left nearly $40 billion in limbo. That is $40 billion worth of American exports unable to reach those new markets and new customers. That is $40 billion worth of exports supporting high-paying American jobs and economic output held hostage every day that the Bank is not fully operational.

According to the National Association of Manufacturers, since the Ex- Im Bank lost its quorum in 2015, American manufacturers have lost billions of dollars of sales, which meant the loss of at least 80,000 American jobs in manufacturing in 2016 and 2017 and a loss of at least $119 billion in economic output.

Trust me, as I have followed this issue from U.S. equipment to impacts to GE and to other companies, I have seen people lose business simply because we haven't had a functioning credit agency to take the best valued product--that is, some of the most high-priced U.S. manufacturing product--and help get it to overseas markets.

At least 95 percent of the world customers live outside the United States, and every day that the Export-Import Bank is not fully operational, American manufacturers and small businesses lose opportunities. These opportunities are lost throughout our country, from Mack Trucks losing out on an opportunity to export Pennsylvania- manufactured vehicles to Cameroon, to the aerospace industry in my State losing out on a commercial satellite deal in Asia, to impacts on small businesses in the supply chain.

Losing these opportunities means losing high-paying American jobs. In fiscal year 2013, when the Bank was fully operational, it supported nearly 39,000 jobs in my State of Washington and over 200,000 in the United States. In fiscal year 2018, without a quorum, the Bank only supported 650 jobs in Washington and only 33,000 nationwide. That is a decrease of nearly 84 percent. So we need to take action. Every day that the Bank is not fully operational, American businesses lose ground to their competitors.

I believe American businesses are some of the best in the world. They make great products, and they can compete on any stage with other countries. But without the Export-Import Bank, there is simply not a level playing field.

There are more than 100 other export credit agencies worldwide helping foreign companies reach new markets. Without the Export-Import Bank, American companies are forced to sit on the sideline and watch as other countries fill that void. In fact, China has done more export financing in the last 3 years than the Export-Import Bank has done in its 85-year history. What does that mean? It means that if other countries continue to use credit support financing as a tool to help products reach markets and the United States doesn't, they will have an unfair advantage.

So it is not only time to confirm these nominees to ensure the Export-Import Bank is fully functional, it is also important to make sure we have a functioning Export-Import Bank. With its authorization set to expire in September, we need to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank so it can continue to provide new financing that supports American jobs and American exporters.

For many U.S. companies, the Export-Import Bank guarantees financing in emerging markets where private financing is very difficult or impossible to obtain. These tools have been essential. For example, Spokane-based SCAFCO makes grain storage bins, silos, and other agricultural processing and storage equipment. It sells its product to more than 80 markets around the world. We are very proud of that company and what they have achieved. Financing from the Export-Import Bank helped SCAFCO sell a grain storage system to Cambodia. Cambodia is normally a very tough market for U.S. businesses to reach, but thanks to the Export-Import Bank, SCAFCO was able to make the sale.

The Senate should not be in the business of making it harder for U.S. companies to compete; we should be making it easier for them to compete. We should not be putting American companies at a disadvantage and costing American jobs. It is time to recognize that in order to compete in a 21st-century global economy where there is huge growth and economic opportunity outside of the United States, we have to have a very aggressive export strategy.

I hope my colleagues will not only help us get these nominees finally to support a functioning Export-Import Bank, but they will also work very collaboratively to make sure the Bank does not expire again this September.

Mr. President, I come to the floor to join this debate. I thank my colleagues, the Senator from Illinois and certainly the Senator from Alaska for her comments because I think some of what I am going to say will probably overlap in the context of working together to get things done.

Why do I say that is so important? Because she and I worked on a bipartisan energy package that we passed out of the Senate over 2 years ago that had very important, what I would call implementation strategies, for allowing our businesses and our communities to be more cost-competitive when it comes to energy.

Certainly, in the State of Alaska, I can't imagine paying $9 a gallon for fuel just to heat a home or to have your hospital or your school available for kids to go to play in after school or just meet the healthcare needs of a community.

Getting energy right not just in big urban cities like Seattle, which is a lot easier to do--we have net zero buildings, probably some of the best net zero buildings in the country--already establishing how you can create energy and sell it back to the grid and be more energy efficient, but we have to have solutions that are going to meet needs all across the United States of America.

So, good news to hear that the chairwoman of the Energy Committee is planning another energy bill. Hopefully, some of those provisions we worked on 2 years ago, like smart building strategies to help reengineering of energy systems within our buildings to make them more energy efficient, would also go a long way. That is about 40 percent of America's energy use. Every dollar we help a business save in energy costs just gets plugged back into that business's competitiveness in today's economy. I thank her for that, and I look forward to seeing what she and the ranking member, Senator Manchin, push forward, and, certainly, I know we will have our ideas.

We are here to debate about energy policy and getting it right for our future prosperity and our competitiveness. I also agree with my colleague that getting things done is important because I think what we have proven over the last decade, maybe 15 years, is that we can transition to cleaner fuels; we can become more energy independent; we can become more energy efficient; and doing so actually creates new jobs that are higher wage jobs and help us in the future.

What Americans want to know is whether we can make it through this transition without doing great damage to our economy, and I think the results of us working together to pass these legislative ideas in the last decade have proven to be very strong incentives.

First of all, let's talk about incentives writ large, tax incentives. We have been involved with the Finance Committee over the last several years to put in place tax credits that rebalanced our incentives towards the side of renewable energy and away from fossil fuels. In 2008 with my colleague, then-Senator Ensign of Nevada, we were able to work to make sure we were driving down the costs of solar, wind, and biofuels. This legislation, which was extended in the Recovery Act, now helps us with wind supplies to over 6 percent of the U.S. supply.

I know my colleagues in Iowa know how important this is because their State's electricity generates millions of dollars in economic activity. So the fact that we focused on renewables in our tax incentive policy has helped that industry grow and become a very big part of our system.

Today's grid economy is also being modernized, and we have worked to put R&D on the table and allow communities throughout the United States to invest in smart grid technology.

The Presiding Officer comes from a State where there are probably leaders in a lot of renewable energies. I know there are wind projects in the State of Washington from companies in his State that are showing just how efficient wind has become over a long period of time. Who would have originally thought, as I was talking about the Presiding Officer's State of Florida, that we would be talking about wind? You would think I was talking about solar. But this is to show you that the era of distributive generation--that energy can be created from a lot of different sources, put on the grid, moved around cost-effectively, in smart ways, to become more efficient--would help us move toward the future of giving people better opportunities rather than the pollution we see from carbon-intensive areas of the United States.

Even in areas around the United States that still do rely on coal, people are starting to see that renewables are becoming cheaper. The Northern Indiana Public Service Company found that building renewables is cheaper than keeping existing coal plants open. According to the company's 2018 Integrated Resource Plan filed in October, they can save their customers $4 billion over the next 30 years by ramping down the amount of coal they use from two-thirds of their generation mix today, to 15 percent by 2023, to eliminating the use of coal entirely by 2028.

These aren't just places like my State of Washington, where we have, as I said, a lot of technology and a lot of efficiency, but also States that are making the transition off these fossil fuels, showing it is a good investment and is cheaper for their customers.

We know new wind power purchase agreements continue to set records for the lowest cost power, putting downward pressure on electricity costs nationwide. I can't tell you how important that is. Coming from a State where we have had cheap hydropower for decades, decades, and decades, it has built our economy over and over again. I like to say it has helped us store apples. After you pick apples and want to store them for a while, guess what helps? Cheap electricity.

Now we store bits--actual software bits. There are data centers that want cheap electricity. So the very nature of cheap electricity keeps driving Washington's economy over and over.

I know that other States in the Nation would benefit from cheaper electricity sources too. It would help their businesses and it would help their consumers. So today, despite the fact that over 94 percent of all electricity generating capacity added over the past century has been in the renewable area or natural gas, consumers are paying 4 percent less per kilowatt hour for electricity than they did a decade ago. So this diversification off of fossil fuel and this investment in these cleaner sources of energy are helping to lower rates for consumers, and that is why we need to keep going in this direction.

There is a reason that Fortune 500 companies are among the largest renewable energy investors in the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, corporations as diverse as Budweiser, The Gap, and MGM International have invested over $16 billion in wind and solar in 2018, and that is expected to double in 2019. Even the utility industry is waking up to this new reality. The CEO of NextEra, the largest U.S. electricity company in the world by market capitalization, recently told investors that solar and wind, plus storage, will be cheaper than coal, oil, or nuclear.

So this is something that we need to realize. Specifically, he said that the subsidy for wind generation costs will be 2 to 2.5 percent per kilowatt, and large scale solar will only be a little higher than that. Adding storage to this will help us to get those prices down even more.

That is why getting the R&D budget right for the Department of Energy right now and ARPA-E is so critical. We can't cut these programs. We need to make sure that we are continuing to make an investment so that our Nation's electricity sector provides not only more affordable and more reliable energy, but also cleaner energy that will help our atmosphere.

We already now have 3.2 million people working in the clean energy sector. That is nearly three times as many jobs as in the fossil fuel industry. Yet people continue to act like this is an economic debate only about one sector over the other. It is about how we make the transition and how we skill and train people for these future opportunities that support millions of jobs here in the United States of America.

Now, why do I want to continue on that route? Because I want the United

States to be a leader in clean energy technology. I don't want to leave this up to our competitors in other countries for them to reap the benefit of better technology and higher wage jobs. I want us to reap these benefits. I have seen many companies that have made their transition in the energy sector from a fossil fuel focus to renewables, and I hope that will continue to happen.

There is another area that we have incented over the last 10 years that has, I think, proven to be a good investment. Senator Hatch and I teamed up in 2007 to introduce legislation providing a $7,500 tax credit for plug-in electric vehicles.

Now, I know that at the time people thought: Well, what is this electric vehicle market all about? But I think we can look here in 2019 and see exactly what it is about. Consumers have more choices, there are more competitors in the market, and we are reducing our dependence on fossil fuel. That is why we need to fight President Trump's budget request to take away those tax incentives for people who buy electric vehicles. We need to continue to move forward on driving down the cost.

Another area that we made progress on in the last decade was fuel efficiency for automobiles. I can tell you what that fight was like in 2007 as we struggled here to move forward. Fuel-efficiency economy increases will result in oil savings in 2030 of about 3 million barrels per day--more than we import from the Persian Gulf and Venezuela combined. So we should not roll back fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. I believe this is a red herring.

We know that fuel efficiency helps consumers to drive to work every day and to afford to fill up in a more economic way. If the Trump administration does roll back these fuel efficiency gains, owners of an average model vehicle from the year 2025 will have to fill up their gas tanks 66 times more and cost drivers over $1,620 more than what they currently pay. So why roll them back?

Another great area of success was establishing a renewable fuel standard back in 2007 in that same bipartisan energy package that was worked on by so many Members of this institution and successfully by so many Members in this institution.

So, to me, it stands in stark contrast to where we are today in this debate, because all of the people working together--our colleagues, the late Senator Ted Stevens, and the late Senator Danny Inouye--played key roles as chairman and ranking member of the Commerce Committee, the EPW Committee, and the Energy Committee. They all added to that legislation in 2007. This bipartisan increase in expansion of the renewable fuel standard was a great way to look at homegrown fuels for the future and making up a larger source of that supply today from renewable clean energy.

So all of these show that we have made progress working together over the last decade or so in a bipartisan way to demonstrate that this transition is necessary, that this transition can be made, that we can make it successfully without hurting our economy, and that we can drive down costs for businesses and consumers and better protect our environment. That is so, so critical.

I am so concerned about the cost of extreme weather and the impact of climate change that I asked my colleague, Senator Collins, to request with me, from the Government Accountability Office, what the costs of these impacts were. Why did I want that information? Because, in the Northwest we are already seeing more damage from fires that have become a constant threat every summer. We have seen a shellfish industry that has basically been threatened by warmer waters. We have seen our challenges to our coastline and changing sea levels. So we wanted that information.

The result of the study showed that current estimates for the impacts as a result of climate change would exceed $1 trillion by 2039. These are costs that we are going to pay in response, mitigation and adaptation. I would rather get about the task of diversifying now and reducing those costs that are going to be paid out by the American taxpayer. We can do better.

So moving toward a cleaner economy off of fossil fuels is what we need to do. With today's energy infrastructure turning over every three or four decades anyways, which will take an investment of $25 to $30 million, making the right choices from the private sector, is with whom we need to partner.

I look forward to working with my colleagues on that, working with my colleague from the Energy Committee, Senator Murkowski, and my colleague Senator Manchin, and all the other colleagues on that committee to help us get these strategies right.

We know the answer to this question. Moving forward on cleaner sources is better for our environment and we have made great strides in the last decade in doing so and driving better economic opportunity for both the consumers and the future energy workers of the United States.

I thank the President, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise in opposition to a nomination we are going to be vote on very soon--the confirmation of Eric Miller to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

As a U.S. Senator, I take my obligation to advise and consent on judicial nominations very seriously, and I believe Mr. Miller's confirmation process has gone against longstanding Senate tradition and norms and limited our role to advise and consent on his nomination.

This nomination has proceeded over the objection of both myself and my colleague from Washington, Senator Murray. For more than 100 years, conferring with Senators and allowing them to advise and consent on judicial nominees in their home State has been our process.

Since 1936, only eight judges have been confirmed when one home State Senator objected. In every case, confirmed nominees have been supported by at least one Senator from the nominee's State, and to this day no circuit court judge has ever been confirmed despite opposition from their home State Senators. All that would change if Mr. Miller is confirmed.

His confirmation hearing was held during a recess last Congress, when the vast majority of Senators were back in their States. In fact, only two Members of the U.S. Senate were present at the hearing, and neither one of them were Democrats. Mr. Miller was questioned for less than 5 minutes--5 minutes--and when the Judiciary Committee Democrats requested another hearing, that request was rejected.

Confirming Mr. Miller without a full vetting by both Democrats and Republicans is the wrong way to proceed on a lifetime appointment. Moreover, confirming Mr. Miller without approval from Senator Murray and I would set a damaging precedent.

I do have concerns about Eric Miller's record. He has spent much of his career fighting against the interests of Tribal governments and Tribal sovereignty. He has argued cases opposing Tribal fishing rights, challenging Tribal sovereignty, and fighting against the protection of Native American religious and traditional practices, so it is no surprise that organizations representing all 573 Tribal nations around the United States, including the National Congress of American Indians, oppose Mr. Miller's confirmation.

I urge my colleagues to stop this process and oppose Mr. Miller's confirmation to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Mr. President, I rise in strong opposition to tonight's vote to advance S. 311. This legislation would reduce families' access to reproductive healthcare, interfere in personal medical decisions that should be left between families and doctors, and criminalize doctors and health professionals.

Tonight's vote is part of a broader strategy by this administration and some in Congress to take away women's access to reproductive healthcare, including the constitutional right to an abortion affirmed in Roe v. Wade.

For instance, the administration has already installed two Supreme Court Justices who threaten Roe v. Wade, repeatedly tried to de-fund Planned Parenthood and cut off family planning grants, and given employers the green light to take away birth control coverage from their employees. In the last Congress alone there were 14 anti-women's health votes and 34 anti-women's health bills introduced.

Reproductive health choices are highly personal and deeply sensitive, and they should be left between families and their doctor. S. 311 would effectively overrule these personal decisions by imposing arbitrary standards--based on political ideology, not medical appropriateness--on health professionals.

This bill would effectively criminalize doctors and healthcare clinicians for providing the best plan of care to their patients. It would impose civil and criminal penalties including up to 5 years in prison onto providers if they don't comply with the bill's mandates. These mandates could scare medical professionals away from helping women and families obtain reproductive care, including an abortion, further reducing families' access to care.

More than 17 of the Nation's leading medical, public health, and civil rights organizations oppose this bill. The American College of Nurse-Midwives, the American College of Obstetricians

and Gynecologists, and the American Public Health Association state that the bill ``. . . injects politicians into the patient-provider relationship, disregarding providers' training and clinical judgement and undermining their ability to determine the best course of action with their patients.'' The American Civil Liberties Union states that the bill ``. . . shows a callous disregard for patients in need of compassionate, evidence-based care when they face difficult decisions.''

The majority of Americans want more access to reproductive healthcare, not less. More than 7 in 10 Americans do not want women to lose access to safe, legal abortion. In 1991, a majority of voters in the State of Washington passed the Washington Abortion Rights Initiative, declaring that a woman has a right to an abortion.

S. 311 is another misguided attempt to reduce women and families' access to reproductive healthcare. I strongly oppose S. 311 and urge my colleagues to vote no.

Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about S. 47, a bill I authored with Senator Murkowski. It is a package of public land issues that has been working its way through the Congress now for several years.

I would like to point out to people who may not be as familiar with the Interior side of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee's work, that the Interior side has a long history in our Nation. We decided a long time ago that we needed to have oversight and management of our public lands. S. 47, the legislation that is before us today, is a recognition that our climate is changing and that we need new tools to carry out new responsibilities as it relates to managing those public lands.

I thank my colleague from Alaska, Senator Murkowski, for her incredible leadership. I know we are going, hopefully, to go to final passage of this bill sometime today, and I thank her for her good bipartisan work on this legislation. It is safe to say that even though we both come from the Pacific Northwest, we don't see eye to eye on every issue, but we have worked hard to try to give local communities the resources they need and to maintain the national interest where the national interest was at stake. So I can't applaud my colleague enough for her hard work and for her dedication to getting this particular package moving through the Senate.

I also want to thank a lot of the staff who have worked on this issue because I know that it is about the hard work of legislating. There are many issues about which maybe not everybody understands all of the details to, but, I guarantee you, all the details were critically important. So I want to in particular thank Mary Louise Wagner, the minority staff director for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee

until recently. I certainly also want to thank the dynamic duo of David Brooks and Sam Fowler who, as counsel to the committee, have played an incredible role over the last many years in preserving what is most important about our public lands. I also want to thank, additionally, Bryan Petit, Rebecca Bonner, Amit Ronen, and several of the staff who have worked on many of the aspects of this package; Camille Touton, Melanie Stansbury, and David Reeploeg and Megan Thompson who played key roles in the Yakima provisions. And Angela Becker-Dippmann who previously worked on this legislation.

I also thank Senator Murkowski's staff, Brian Hughes, Kellie Donnelly, and particularly, Lucy Murfitt. I don't think we ever could have gotten this package through without her due diligence and hard work. I thank Lane Dickson and Michelle Lane.

I also thank my colleagues in the House of Representatives. I certainly want to thank the staff director for Congressman Grijalva, David Watkins, but I also thank Chairman Grijalva for his hard work and Congressman Bishop. It is safe to say that all four of us, working together--Senator Murkowski, myself, Congressman Bishop, and Congressman Grijalva--definitely didn't always see eye to eye on these issues, but we worked hard to resolve these issues. I also thank my colleagues, Congressman Dave Reichert and Congressman Dan Newhouse, for their work on provisions related to Washington State.

Before I get started in talking about the major provisions of this legislation and why they are so important, I also have to call out several of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have played key roles.

Certainly, the historic Utah wilderness provision would not be this lands package without my former colleague, Senator Orrin Hatch. He played such an incredible role over a long period of time in shaping the provisions as they affect Utah, and I thank him for that and for working with our colleague on this side of the aisle, Senator Durbin, on that important aspect of the package.

We would not be where we are today on the fire provisions without my colleague Senator Gardner. Both Washington and Colorado have taken it on the chin time and again with devastating forest fires, and we know why it is so important to give firefighters and the land managers the best possible tools available to locate the fires and keep track of frontline firefighters.

We need a more hasty response to putting out fires, and having GPS and tracking systems are going to help us do that. So I thank my colleague from Colorado for helping with this legislation.

It is safe to say that without the strong determination of Senator Burr, we probably wouldn't be here right now on the permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Making the Land and Water Conservation Fund permanent represents the ethos that we have in the Senate here today that public lands are important to our Nation. They are important for recreating, for hunting, for fishing, for moving forward on access to these lands that are important for our veterans, for our school children, and for those who just may want to go out and access the outdoors and reconnect.

We have had a big discussion here about whether we should return public lands to oil and gas drilling, and this bill basically says no, we are going to make a bigger investment in our public lands.

We are going to make this program permanent, and we are going to make sure it is a key tool to continue to solve our problems of access to public land, particularly in parts of the country where access to those public lands is being eroded by development. That is exactly what the Land and Water Conservation Fund helps us do--to protect those areas so that either we can continue to have, for example, elk hunting, for which we did a big project in southwest Washington, or whether it is helping to improve access to Mount Rainier, a huge economic asset to the State of Washington, or whether it is as simple as giving a community like Auburn or Gas Works Park in Seattle access to a program that can help us keep open space in some of our most developing areas.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund has been a preeminent program for access to public lands, but it had been threatened when Congress allowed it to expire 3 years ago, then only having a temporary reauthorization, and then failing again to reauthorize it last September.

What we are doing here now is saying that this is a bipartisan issue, that more than 60 Senators here in the Senate didn't just see that we needed to further adjust this program but we needed to save this program. I emphasize this because I know my colleagues here in the Senate are going to go on to a larger discussion, which is to secure the funding that is set aside for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and how it is spent, and we are going to get into a conversation about how we take care of our maintenance and the backlog at our national parks. I definitely believe that the mandatory spending for LWCF should be in a future budget, and I certainly believe we should do more to take care of our backlog and maintenance at our national parks. So I look forward to working with both sides of the aisle to push that through the U.S. Senate.

This legislation is amazing because there are some--particularly in this administration--who want to use public lands to oil and gas drilling, but there is a bipartisan group here in the U.S. Senate who has said: No, we want to put more focus on saving our public lands. This legislation preserves over 1.3 million acres of new wilderness, and 367 miles of wild and scenic rivers. It allows conveyances of land but also protects lands from potential mining and development projects--like removing the threat of mining and development in the Methow Valley in the State of Washington. It also continues to make investments in heritage areas that are important to many parts of the United States of America.

I want to talk about how this bill invests in water. The water issues are like fire; they are not going to go away. The only question is going to be this: What kinds of tools do we give communities across the West--and I should say probably throughout the United States--to deal with the changing climate and the impacts of less and less water?

What this legislation says for ideas like the Yakima Basin Project is that we are not going to divide people and choose farming over fish. We are not going to divide people and choose one aspect of the environment over the other. It says that we are going to look to smart, holistic, and cost-effective ways to preserve more water and enact smart conservation across our State and country.

This is so important because the water issues are not going to go away, but this legislation represents important new tools to fight those challenges and to move forward in a way that I think will prove to be an example of what we should be doing in other parts of the United States.

I look forward to working with my colleagues in trying to fund more water infrastructure improvements and conservation. I think this is just as important as any other infrastructure investment we are talking about in the U.S. Senate today. I know we see congestion in our streets. I know we need to do more on aviation infrastructure. But I guarantee you that we need to do more on water, and I look forward to working with my colleagues on these challenges in the future.

One aspect that I don't know if my colleagues on the floor have as much interest in as Senator Murkowski and I do, but there is a provision on volcano monitoring that is very important to us.

Having experienced the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State and having active volcanoes in both Washington and Alaska, it is so important for us to have the right science and monitoring of these volcanoes. I was glad to work with my colleague Senator Murkowski on that provision to give the latest and best tools to our scientists so that they can give us the best information for the future.

All in all, this legislation is a major investment in our public lands. It is the kind of hard work that happens behind the scenes that not everybody pays attention to. I guarantee you that when you use the word ``land,'' there are a lot of people to pay attention to.

There are local communities. There are landowners. There are environmental interests. There are all sorts of very, very thorny issues that have to be worked out. I thank all of my colleagues for their due diligence on this.

Some people have said: Why is it that a lands package comes together only at the end of a Congress or, in this case, held over from last Congress into this session? I hope our colleagues will give more attention to these important public policies.

Public lands and access to those lands is an economic juggernaut. Behind finance and healthcare, the outdoor economy is the third most important sector. So for something that important, let's pay more attention. Let's give the tools to local communities and to these resources to manage this, to give more access to the American people, and to do the things that will help us grow jobs and help us recreate for the future and preserve against a very challenging and threatening climate.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I come to the floor to join my colleagues who were speaking earlier today about the many U.S. citizens who are Federal employees who are impacted by the shutdown. Coast Guard PO2 Amy-Erin Hamilton, stationed in Seattle, WA, is one of those individuals. She is the mother of three children: Sienna, age 10; Tucker, age 9; and Annabella, age 5. Amy-Erin is married to Dan Hamilton, who is also an Active-Duty member.

Amy-Erin is a shining example of the service and leadership we see in our Coast Guard today. In December, she was given a meritorious advancement, which is rare and an incredible honor. Despite this, though, she is working without pay and has had to seek outside income to support that family I just mentioned.

This is the 26th day of a Federal Government shutdown. Yesterday, 55,000 Coast Guard personnel did not receive their midmonth paychecks. The Coast Guard Commandant issued a letter to the workforce explaining what was happening, explaining that this is the first time that a branch of our military has not been paid during a government shutdown.

There are 41,000 Active-Duty members, 6,200 Reservist members, 8,500 civilians, and 50,500 Coast Guard retirees. That is the U.S. Coast Guard family. Thirty-one percent of the Coast Guard families do not have enough emergency savings to make it through the shutdown. A junior enlisted Coast Guard member with less than 2 years of service makes only $23,200 a year in base pay. That is below the poverty level. Coast Guard members are currently being deployed overseas--they could be in a combat zone--and these members are not receiving pay.

I hope our colleagues will take into consideration this issue with our Coast Guard families. They are working hard to provide great care for us throughout our country and overseas. When I think about the fact that a Coast Guard member could be deployed overseas in an area that has seen combat, an unstable region of the world, and that they are not even receiving the childcare subsidy and support to make sure their families are taken care of while they are gone taking care of us, that is just wrong.

So I come here to join my colleagues who were here earlier today on the floor giving examples of Americans throughout the United States who are working hard for us. It is time we work to get them their paycheck and continue to support them so they can support us.

I know my colleague from Connecticut is here and would like to speak as well, and I thank him for allowing me to fit in this time to talk on behalf of the Coast Guard families.

I hope the Commandant's letter can now be seen as an example of why we need to act. We need to act to give these Coast Guard families their pay and to make sure we are addressing the shutdown and reopening government.

Mr. President, I come first and foremost tonight to thank the staff who worked so hard on this package--and I mean not just over the last few weeks but for literally years--to try to get to an agreement on something we could vote on.

It is not a surprise to the Senate that it is December and people are voting on a lands package. My colleague from Colorado outlined it very well. When you have these bills that deal with water, that deal with public lands, that deal with giving Federal land back to communities so they can improve their communities, and yet designating some special places so they can be preserved for the public, yes, not all of your colleagues care about the details of that, and you are never going to get the leader, who is in control of the Senate, to give you floor time on that bill.

So every December, we are here with a lands package to be considered, and it is a package that has a lot of input from a lot of people, negotiated, in this case, with the House and the Senate, with Democrats and Republicans--a four-corner negotiation.

The missed opportunity tonight, as my colleague from Colorado said, is that we don't get to vote on it. My colleague from Utah is not being correct in that he was offered a chance to have that vote. He was offered a chance to have this bill brought up and to have his ideas voted on. He knew he was going to lose, and he knows he is going to lose in January, but he wants to insist tonight on prevailing. I am not

sure why, because, as my colleague from Colorado said, why continue to hold up these small communities from getting the resources they need?

Trust me, communities like Yakima, WA, want answers to the challenges of changing conditions that impact water and the fact that fish and farmers and Tribes and environmentalists all have to get together to solve those problems. So they worked for years on coming up with a solution collectively at the local community and then put that before the U.S. Senate for a hearing and for consideration, and that proposal passed the U.S. Senate, I think, in an 85-to-12 vote 2 years ago, as did permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, 2 years ago, which passed the U.S. Senate.

So if my colleague from Utah is imagining that somehow the Land and Water Conservation Fund being made permanent is not going to pass the U.S. Senate, he is just dreaming of something that is really going to take place and become reality in the very near future. But what you have done tonight is made it a lot harder for us to make sure that we are moving ahead.

This legislation that he refused to allow us to vote on tonight also includes important--I would say one thing. The one thing that maybe you could say hasn't had constant, constant attention over 2 years but certainly has grown in importance is new technology to help our firefighters fight fires, locate where the fire is happening, and GPS systems to help make people more safe. That was in this package and probably, yes, has gotten enhanced a great deal over the last 6 months as we have seen the tragic, devastating impacts of fires throughout the West. So, yes, that was in here and it was part of consideration, and, yes, there was legislative action. Ninety percent of this package either saw legislation passed by the House of Representatives or passed by the Senate--legislation that basically passed out of either a Senate committee or a House committee.

So it is not like these ideas came out of nowhere. They are, as my colleague from Colorado said best, parochial issues that we find very hard to get the rest of our colleagues to ever want to pay attention to the details.

So this has been the tried and true fashion by which the Senate has passed land packages, as long as I have been here, for 18 years. That is what you do in December. You pass a lands package. I wish it were different.

My colleague from Colorado made a good suggestion about 7 or 8 months ago: Why don't we do some right now? Thanks to his initiative, we actually bundled together 15 or 20. But he was right. Guess what. Everybody said: Where is mine? Where is my package? Where is this? I am not going to let you do this, and we were in the same boat. So the best answer to all of that is that in December we will do a lands package.

The notion that people didn't know this was coming is a little bit facetious. Everybody has known that this is the time, and these are the packages and these are the proposals.

To my colleague from Utah, I get it. He is not necessarily in agreement with some of his own delegation who pushed things for Utah that are in this package. I get it. He has a different philosophy about what should happen. I guarantee you that Utah is going to have a lot more debates about what it wants to see for its future, and I think that is ultimately healthy. I can just answer for my State, which has three National Parks and generates millions of dollars from them. I can just answer for my State, which thinks that the outdoor economy is the No. 1 reason we attract and keep high-skilled and unbelievable manufacturing jobs in the Pacific Northwest. Why? Because businesses want to locate there because their workers want to have access to that. My State knows that the outdoor economy--because it has companies like REI--is over $800 billion of annual economy. So, yes, when you invest in public lands, you get more access for hunters and fishers and people who want to go and enjoy and recreate, and for our veterans. So guess what. It is a great economic development tool.

The notion that a State that has public lands doesn't have economic opportunity is not telling the whole story. We all get it. We all represent counties that have nothing but an outdoor economy or public land, and then they want to know how to build a school or a fire station or keep the lights on for basic services. We get that complexity too.

But our colleagues did consider these ideas, and our colleagues did consider the notion that there are diverse opinions. It is just that, at the end of the day, you have to have a vote. You have to be able to come here to the Senate on this subject--that is, lands packages--and have a process.

Listen, if my colleagues who care so much about this want to create a new norm in the Senate that the first week of December will be the deadline for all lands packages, and then by the end of that session we will have lands packages always considered in the Senate, I am all for it. I am all for that right now, because I see devastation happening on water writ large. I see unbelievable problems happening throughout the West just on water.

Now, you can say we are going to do nothing and we are just going to let the courts and the lawsuits and everything play out. But guess what. That is where we were on fire, until what happened? Until the Senators from Montana and the Senators from Idaho and the Senators from Oregon and the Senators from Washington all got together on a fire bill and we said: This is what we think would be great for the West to do to move forward. That is what we were trying to do tonight on water, on other fire measures, and on public lands, and helping veterans and Native Americans in Alaska who never got a fair deal on access to their own land.

So I get that these solutions may take a few pages to print out and for people to read, but they are important public policies that need to have this body's attention, and you are doing nothing but shortchanging the public debate if you will not even allow the bill to come to the floor for that debate.

We are always, always going to get sidelined as individual bills, not being important enough to take up the time of the Senate. It is only collectively, in a bundle like we saw tonight, that they can be considered. But I guarantee you--I guarantee you--that they are not going to grow into a package that becomes less important with time. They are just not. They are just not. They are going to continue to be amplified as important public policies, where a local government--a county or a city--and the Forest Service and BLM and a school district and a community are going to have to work together. They are going to have to work together. They are going to have to work together on water, on fire, on public access, on conveyance, on how we are going to preserve open space, on how we are going to recreate. It is going to be demanded.

I know my colleague from Utah doesn't agree with all these philosophies, but I guarantee you that there are lots of people in Utah who would have loved to have a vote tonight to see how those issues would have played out.

I just want to thank staff. They have worked night and day, literally--literally for months, if not years--on these policies. They have worked so hard to try to find the common good and a place to move forward, and I so appreciate that our leaders are now committing to us to help move this forward in January. We are definitely going to take them up on it. Even though it will be a new Congress and a new House of Representatives, we are going to take it up, and I am sure that our colleagues, Congressman Grijalva and Congressman Bishop, will be there to work with us.

There will never be an easy day to vote on public lands--never. It is just never going to happen. So we had better own up to the responsibility and get the commitment to these cities and communities that need us to help them hold Federal Agencies accountable, to make the investments our constituents want to see, and to solve these problems so our communities can continue to grow and thrive.

I believe these people are bubbling up some of the best ideas on how to move forward. That is what they did in various parts of the West. Whether that was in Montana with what to do at Yellowstone, or whether that was in Alaska with what to do with the Native issue, or Yakima on what to do with water, they are bubbling up the ideas. At least what we can do is give them

the courtesy of having a vote so that they can be considered.

I thank the President. I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I just want to thank the Senator from Alaska for her great work and working in such a collaborative way. I am certainly not leaving the Energy Committee and certainly not going to back away from any of these big issues, but certainly, as she said, I will not be working as closely as the ranking member with her as chair. But I am certainly and definitely going to continue to work in a collaborative way.

So I thank her for her kind comments and look forward to what we can do in the new year.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Lauren Vernon and Tom Schaff on the staff of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee be granted floor privileges for the duration of the 115th Congress.

Mr. President, I come to the floor to urge my colleagues to vote no on the nomination of Bernard McNamee to be a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. I thank my colleague from Oregon for coming out here to explain why this nomination matters and why my colleagues on both sides of the aisle should turn it down.

This is a very important time as we move forward on energy policy in the United States. I am pretty sure that my constituents probably already know what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission does because, when it came to the Enron crisis, they had to count on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to make sure energy markets were properly policed. In the end, the FERC did do that, protecting consumers from what were unjust and unreasonable rates.

However, the fact is that a lot of Americans don't understand what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission does. That is because the job of the Commission can range from overseeing the reliability of the electricity grid to ensuring that wholesale electricity and natural gas rates are just and reasonable. That was what we argued in the Enron case. They were going to make utilities pay for 9 years on what were fraudulent contracts. We emphasized: How could fraudulent Enron contracts ever be just and reasonable if they had admitted to manipulating them?

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission also oversees the licensing of hydroelectric dams and approves construction of natural gas pipelines. We also rely on FERC to protect the electric and national gas markets, as I mentioned, from manipulation.

After Enron, we ended up putting even stronger language in the law to make sure the definition of manipulation was clear and people were protected. I remember my colleagues from Texas joining me in getting that language passed because they knew how much the Enron manipulation cost all of us and our economy.

These are important responsibilities. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission deserves due diligence of their record done by Members of the Senate because FERC decisions affect many energy projects and how people will pay to heat their homes and keep the lights on. It is also about how we protect our energy infrastructure for the future. Trust me, the number of cyberattacks that are going on in energy, we want to exercise strong oversight of these nominees.

It is important that the Commission remain independent and impartial because its role is quasi-judicial. Like judges, they need to be impartial, making decisions about important energy projects that get built around the United States.

For this reason, one of the qualifications written into the law creating the Commission is that members be ``individuals who, by demonstrated ability, background, training, or experience, are specially qualified to assess fairly the needs and concerns of all interests affected by Federal energy policy.''

I would add that it is the duty of the Senate to make sure that these commissions remain free from political influence. I know that, from time to time, people have been on the Commission and there have been issues about how those on the outside have tried to influence them. We must continue to make sure that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission remains above this kind of political influence and that they remain unbiased as decision makers on these important policies. I believe that this nominee, Mr. McNamee, does not meet this standard. I believe that he is too ideologically motivated to undertake a job where fact-based decision-making is essential to outcomes that affect people's individual energy rates.

The Commission has to police and regulate energy markets without regard for fuel source, market power, or political lens. I want to see Commissioners who have the words from the Federal Power Act of ``just and reasonable rates'' practically tattooed into their psyches. Why? It is the standard by which they should judge our nation's energy projects.

Like many of my colleagues, I have been troubled by this administration's effort to try to subsidize high-cost, coal-fired power plants at the expense of American ratepayers. According to a July report by experts at the Brattle Group, the administration's bailout plan would have cost consumers $34 billion over 2 years. That would have been a $34 billion tax on American consumers. How would they have done that? By saying that you have to use coal-fired electricity as a way to keep the grid reliable. I disagreed with that. I would say, probably, many members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee disagreed with that, and, clearly, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as it is currently comprised, also disagreed with that.

Why was there such an adamant reaction? It is almost as if you were saying that, instead of letting the market make these decisions, people were going to force utilities to do projects that included coal-- forcing coal onto the grid, even though the renewable energy was driving down costs and helping consumers to diversify. This is important because the bailout proponents have argued that coal is needed to ensure the grid is always working. When you look at this analysis, it does not hold up under the scrutiny. Trying to prop up uneconomical coal plants for the sake of the reliability of the grid is a fake rationale that the administration tried to use, and it would have impacted the free market and consumers.

I know that these rate increases would hurt manufacturers--because we have a lot of manufacturers in the State of Washington--who rely on affordable hydro to help drive down the cost of manufacturing. I think the cost of doing business and electricity rates all through the United States are going to be key issues for how we drive manufacturing competitiveness in the future. I certainly don't want to see a mandate by this administration that you have to use coal and drive up the costs for that manufacturing base and our consumers.

A fuel security report that was issued last month by the PJM Interconnection, which extends from Pennsylvania to New Jersey and all way to Illinois, found that there was no need to prop

up uneconomical power plants. They were confident that their grid-- which is the world's largest competitive wholesale electricity market-- would remain reliable over the next 5 years without having this mandate to use coal-fired electricity.

And this conclusion has nothing to do with the temperature outside. Even in a severe cold snap, the grid would continue to operate. In fact, the Washington Examiner--hardly a newspaper from which I quote a lot on the Senate floor, but I am going to in this case--reported that the largest power grid operator dismisses the threat of coal and nuclear power plant closures. It was referring to this report. It was referring to the PJM report that basically says: No, we don't have to worry about our grid reliability. This report dismisses the notion that the coal plant closures would somehow put us all at risk.

People are asking: What does that proposal have to do with Mr. McNamee?

As a senior political appointment at the Department of Energy, Mr. McNamee had a key role in promoting and defending this policy. He had a hand in ignoring the other experts at the DOE, who basically told him that his facts were wrong. He ignored the fact that this bailout proposal would place an undue burden on ratepayers and, as I mentioned, would impact our economy moving forward. He ignored the fact that we are seeing changes in clean energy markets--that they are cheaper and more effective than coal--and that this proposal, even though he continued to push it, was not going to help us keep an open and free electricity market.

Part of what the energy regulators do is to make decisions about projects moving forward that are based on what the market is bringing them. It is based on pure economics. Their job is to determine the return and the rates that would impact consumers. That is where the term ``just and reasonable'' comes into play. Their job is not to pick winners and losers in the market. Their job is to determine whether there will be just and reasonable rates for the individual consumers in those markets. It is their job to make sure that there are not excessive prices but true competition in the market--not to favor a high-cost fuel source like coal and try to protect it from other fuel sources that might be more economical for consumers.

As the Supreme Court has said, FERC is the guardian of the public interest in these matters. The duties of Commissioners is to protect the public interest, not the private interest, and they are to make sure there are fuel supplies for the future.

I view this threat of really trying to disrupt the free market as one of the most important things we need to continue to protect. Why? Because innovation shifts markets over time. We are trying to make decisions about distributed energy, and there will be major discussions by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on how to achieve that, particularly as we deal with the impacts of climate change.

Our historic energy system is at an inflection point, but it doesn't mean we should hold on to more expensive sources to generate electricity. It means that we should make sure that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission does its job as a quasi-judicial arbiters and are not politically motivated or coming to issues with non market-based rate solutions.

The fact the cost of wind has declined an incredible 69 percent over the last 9 years and solar a whopping 88 percent. If coal or nuclear costs had dropped that much, we would be having a different conversation about their future, but it hasn't. Even in States where coal has been a big part of the mix, building renewables is cheaper than keeping existing coal plants open.

According to the Northern Indiana Public Service Company's 2018 Integrated Resource Plan, they found that they could save their constituents $4 billion over 30 years by ramping down the amount of coal it uses from two-thirds of its generation today, to 15 percent by 2023, and by eliminating coal entirely by 2028.

I would like to have taken Mr. McNamee at his word when he came before the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee and said that he would be a ``fair, objective, and impartial arbiter.'' That is what you want from a Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner. He also said that he would decide matters that would come before him based on the law and not based on politics. Yet, after his committee hearing, which I still remain very concerned about, we asked further questions. And a video of a speech Mr. McNamee gave earlier in the year on fossil fuels surfaced. I believe it shows that he has a continued bias beyond the President's asking him to draft a coal bailout. And he has tried to push it through the Federal Department of Energy even when scientists and others have told him that the facts just did not support the proposal.

Mr. McNamee's words reveal a very strong bias in favor of fossil fuels against renewable energy. For example, he claimed that fossil fuels were ``key not only to our prosperity'' but ``to a clean environment.'' And he continued to make comments that, I think, are demonstrably false. Now, as a private citizen, he is free to say whatever he wants. Yet, when you are hired to put a report out and have scientists within the agency correcting your false information and you are continuing to push these ideas, I think it puts you in a different category. It is hard to believe that you will be quasi-judicial and a fair arbiter.

I know that he has had many conversations, and I include the information in the video. One of his most striking statements is this: ``The green movement'' is in a ``constant battle between liberty and tyranny.'' Then he said that his son should just deny climate science even if it hurts the boy's grades. These are not the words or sentiments, I believe, of someone who is going to play that role of an arbiter for Federal energy regulatory policy.

And these policies will come up before the Commission. I know the administration plans on continuing to find ways to have coal mandated into the market instead of allowing the free market to take place. I want to make sure that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission does not subject itself to some sort of bias in this process.

If Mr. McNamee becomes a Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner and if he continues to try to overturn relevant FERC decisions in court by arguing against these things, what kind of process will we see at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in response to his biases?

To me, you have the threat of legal uncertainty. Projects could be put on hold. Investments could be further delayed. Grid reliability rules could be impacted. Why? Is it because he is right? No, people already believe his previous statements have shown sufficient bias that would put in question his decisions on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. These energy policies, particularly in the area of cyber security, are going to be so critical for us to move forward on. Every day, our grid is impacted by these attacks by foreign entities. It is so important that we get about the task of making our grid more reliable and better protected against cyber security, not getting weighed down in a bunch of arguments against someone who does not appear, in my opinion, to have that quasi-judicial approach of making sure that the market and market decisions are fair and reasonable and just and reasonable rates for consumers. All of this is particularly distressing as Mr. McNamee's speech surfaced just days before the U.S. Global Change Research Program released its fourth quadrennial report.

Why is this important? Because the report showed the cost to the Federal Government and individual citizens of continued fossil fuel use. We all know that we need to have a diverse sources of energy. We know that we have to do better than what we are doing today. Yet, by pushing Mr. McNamee's name forward, this administration is simply trying to hold onto the past.

That approach could cost taxpayers trillions of dollars over the next few decades. The climate assessment basically estimates that, if we do nothing, by the end of the century the impacts will cost the United States upward of a half trillion dollars a year in crop damage, labor loss, and extreme weather damages. We can't afford that. We need to keep moving forward, and we need to let the market do its job.

For over 40 years, an independent and impartial Federal Energy Regulatory

Commission has provided Americans with decades of fuel-neutral competition, which has resulted, as I said, in those just and reasonable rates. Now, thankfully, technology advances are helping us to step up to new opportunities while still having the Commission oversight, based on just and reasonable rates. The Commission is making sure that we are doing all that we can to hold down the costs to consumers and move things forward in energy markets.

I ask my colleagues to review the video and this nominee's remarks in the video and to come to the Senate floor to vote against this nominee in the hopes that we can get someone else to take this job at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. I hope my colleagues will realize the importance of this before it is too late and that we will move forward with someone who can help us continue to have a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Clearly, this is not viewed as just politics on our side. There are many people who are on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who have very strong political backgrounds. A few used to work right here in the Senate. So this is not about that. This is about somebody's having the quasi-judicial mindset to review these issues and not advocate, at all costs, a market-eroding notion that utilities should be forced to purchase uncompetitive coal and raise rates on consumers.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I come to the floor this afternoon to speak about the Coast Guard reauthorization legislation that just passed the Senate today. I thank my colleagues for all of their hard work on this important measure that literally has taken years to piece together. I thank Chairman Thune and Ranking Member Nelson for working on this legislation and for incorporating many of the things that the people of Washington were interested in seeing as part of this comprehensive bill. I certainly want to thank Senator Carper and the EPW staff for working on major provisions of this bill relating to ballast water and the solutions they put forward. This bill includes many provisions important to our Coast Guard, our environment, and to our shipbuilding community. It represents a true bipartisan effort to find solutions and to put those solutions into action.

Our State of Washington is rich in its maritime heritage. The Coast Guard is a large part of that. With so much coastline, and so many rivers and streams, the Coast Guard is so important. Our State is home to fishermen, shipbuilders, Tribes, trade operators, and a thriving tourism economy. So for places from Cape Disappointment and

Grays Harbor to Neah Bay and all the way up the Columbia River, our Washington State Coast Guard works tirelessly to protect the Northwest and our environment.

In our State, there are more than 2,000 Active-Duty coasties, 440 reservists, 192 civilian employees, and an impressive 869 volunteer auxiliary members in the Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard plays an important role in the safety and oversight of our fisheries. Thousands of Pacific Northwest fishermen call Washington State home, and over 35,000 Washington State jobs are supported by the Alaska fisheries.

While we usually talk about big assets here on the floor, like icebreakers and national security cutters, Washington State is also home to heavy surf stations that serve in some of the most extreme conditions that people have to operate under.

This bipartisan Coast Guard legislation has many provisions that I would like to talk about this afternoon. I want to again thank my colleagues for their great bipartisan work on this legislation.

This legislation has many different solutions for many of the challenges our agencies face. I want to again thank Senator Thune for working across the aisle on the various Coast Guard provisions that are included in this bill, and I want to thank Senator Sullivan for helping to cosponsor the authorization of the recapitalization of the Coast Guard heavy polar icebreaker, the Polar Star. The Polar Star is home- ported in Seattle and is our only operational heavy icebreaker, crucial for Arctic operations.

The language that we just passed improves the oversight of ships that pose an oil spill risk in Puget Sound. This is so important for us moving forward to have these types of assets in these critical waters.

This bill also includes language to strengthen the Coast Guard's family leave policies, as they moved forward to meet other branches in adding paid family leave. The legislation included language that helps to improve the flexibility of that paid family leave for various parts of our State that are most hard to serve.

The Coast Guard families should not be forced to choose between serving their country and supporting their families, and I so appreciate the incorporation of this language into this legislation.

This bipartisan deal also helps to protect good shipbuilding jobs at Dakota Creek Shipyard. I am a very strong supporter of the Jones Act, and I believe it is important that we continue to have the Jones Act in the future. I am proud that we were able to work together to find a solution to save good jobs at the Dakota Creek Shipyard, and I appreciate my colleagues working on the incorporation of that language.

This legislation also included a critical compromise to address the threat of invasive species and the threat they pose to our waterways in many different parts of the United States. We worked hard on this solution, consulting with the State of Washington, and believe that this version, which does create regulatory certainty for maritime operators but does so while still protecting our environment, is critical.

The bill allows the State of Washington, which has a strong history of protecting our waters from invasive species, to modify the west coast ballast water management practices, which is very important for us to protect our waterways for the future. It requires that the most rigorous scientific standards are used--including the Clean Water Act's best available technology standard so important to us in the Northwest. The bill also creates tools for emergency response to invasive species so they can be stopped before they take a stronghold in our environment. Lastly, it includes a permanent fishing vessel exemption for incidental discharges which do not pose a threat to our environment.

All of these things were part of a very comprehensive Coast Guard bill that tried to give us the best tools possible to continue to operate in our coastal areas of the United States, to have the right resources, to have the right oversight, to have the right assets, and the right protection of our environment.

Again, I thank our colleagues on both sides of the aisle for working so diligently to finally get this legislation over the threshold and on to the President's desk.

The Coast Guard represents such an important maritime piece of our economy. I hope our colleagues will realize we need to give the Coast Guard the resources and assets to do their jobs, not just now in this legislation but moving forward as well.

I also want to thank our Coast Guard fellow, Lieutenant Commander Michelle Rosenberg, for her time working on this comprehensive legislation for the last several years.

I, again, thank my colleagues.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I rise today to thank my colleagues for passing America's Water Infrastructure Act of 2018 and to discuss the importance of it to the State of Washington. This legislation is going now to the President's desk, and it is very needed to help make our ports more competitive, to protect thousands of jobs, and to help protect our salmon habitat in the State of Washington.

This legislation means the ports of Seattle and Tacoma will be able to deepen their harbors to allow them to meet the much larger cargo demands to compete with other ports on the west coast, specifically in Canada.

This legislation also improves the critical habitat for salmon and waterways like the Puget Sound and the Columbia River, and it also helps utilities make commonsense investments for the future and helps to protect our ratepayers and the environment.

I am proud to have worked on this legislation with our colleagues because we need to keep moving forward on investments that help make our region competitive.

Our ports are essential to our economic growth in the Northwest. I always say ``ports are us'' because we have so many along the Columbia River and on the west coast, and trade is a cornerstone of our economy, with $95 billion in exports and $92 billion in imports each year.

The fact that this legislation helps us on important maintenance and operations for both large and small ports and for locks, dams, and waterways is so important to our future. It also helps us with the important alliance that Seattle and Tacoma formed together to help our marine cargo operations at the ports, which generate $4.3 billion in economic activity and on which 48,000 jobs are dependent.

What happened is that as the world market changed and large containerships could double in size the amount of products they were shipping, it was so important for our west coast ports to be competitive and to be able to serve these large ships. These megaships, which are twice the length of the space needle and wider than a football field, carry twice the number of containers compared to ships that typically call on west coast ports and need deeper waterways.

To maintain a top-grade lane through the Pacific Northwest and to compete with the Canadian ports, the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma have to deepen their ports and make the navigational changes to address the large container ships.

The Army Corps and the Northwest Seaport Alliance teamed up with the Seattle Harbor Navigational Improvement Project study, the Tacoma Harbor Navigational Improvement Project study, and many other partners to make sure we were making the right investments.

In this legislation, the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma are big economic winners. They are economic winners because we are authorizing over $29 million to deepen the East and West Waterways in the Port of Seattle to 57 feet. When the project is completed, the Port of Seattle will be the deepest in the country. It will allow us to serve those megaships. Instead of having just 1,000 to 12,000 cargo containers, it will be 18,000 cargo containers or more. We are expecting to complete a feasibility study at the Port of Tacoma, which is currently at 51 feet.

These two projects are going to help us continue to build the reputation of the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma, moving our products throughout the United States to Asia quickly and reliably and reaching critical markets.

We don't want our shippers to have to pay more because we haven't made these infrastructure investments. Moving freight is what we do.

This bill is about making it in our waterways as well. Deepening the waterways in the Ports in Seattle and Tacoma will ensure they can compete with Canadian ports. It will help us to continue to grow our jobs in the maritime sector, and it will help us to continue to be a gateway from North America to Asia and around the world.

This legislation also helps us in restoring waters adjacent to Puget Sound and helps us with our salmon recovery efforts. For the last 18 years, the Puget Sound Adjacent Waters Restoration Program has focused on protecting and restoring habitat within the Puget Sound Basin.

Using this program, the Army Corps was able to work with places like the city of Burien to remove a seawall on the Seahurst Park shoreline. Now that shoreline is a habitat for endangered salmon and the home to bald eagles and osprey, and it is attracting visitors to the park.

The Army Corps was also able to use the program to work with the Tulalip Tribe to restore critical habit along the Snohomish River. That was lost in the early 20th century. The estuary now provides access to spawning, rearing, and feeding areas for salmon.

Puget Sound--the second largest estuary in the United States--is home to thousands of species that this bill will also help. Over a dozen of these species are listed as endangered or threatened, and our helping by making these improvements to clean up Puget Sound and restore habitat is so important to the viability of the Pacific Northwest.

The bill increases funding for the Puget Sound Adjacent Waters Restoration Program from $40 million to $60 million and the per-project funding from $5 million to $10 million.

These are just expanded numbers, but they mean everything to meet the goals of the projects around Puget Sound. We are returning to Puget Sound waterways that are unblocked and providing cleaner habitat for salmon--for threatened juvenile salmon--and opportunities in areas like Spencer Island in the Snohomish River estuary near Everett, WA.

Another project will restore tidal flows and create open coastline inlets at the creek originating near Joint Base Lewis-McChord, in South Puget Sound. This will help us to restore spawning habitats for forage fish, support salmon recovery, and improve those shoreline conditions that are so important.

These projects are an example of the diversity that our region uses when it helps our ecosystem, known as Puget Sound, and in helping salmon recovery.

This legislation also helps in making sure those who make great improvements to water infrastructure, particularly our hydrosystems, get rewarded for doing that and ensures that they don't wait or hesitate to get that done. This legislation provides an early action provision for licensees on hydrosystems to make improvements and makes sure they will be recognized later. This provision would remove an impediment, and it encourages people to take corrective action sooner rather than later.

That is good for our environment, and it is good for taxpayers and helps us save on energy. Most importantly, it does not take away any regulatory oversight from the agency but simply rewards people earlier for doing the right thing.

I know that Chelan PUD is a good example of this and will take advantage of this as they plan to rehabilitate units at Rock Island hydro project--a significant investment of over $500 million. This area needs to have these upgrades, and this provision will help them get them done sooner.

In this legislation, we are also helping with one of the most challenging things we see in our waterways, and that is protecting the physical infrastructure and waterways in our hydro system from invasive species. The highly invasive Quagga and Zebra mussels have invaded our waterways in 20 different States. If invasive mussel populations invade the Pacific Northwest, it is estimated that it could cost our region over $500 million in annual costs. That would be devoting way more of our resources just to manage that infestation.

The Columbia Basin is the last major uninfected watershed in the United States, much of it to the credit of watercraft inspection stations on the Columbia River. The Columbia River inspection stations help inspect the boats that travel up and down the river for such invasive species, and an inspection of all watercrafts is required. I am pleased that this bill authorizes money specifically for the Columbia River inspection stations. This helps us because, as I said, with a river that hasn't seen these invasive species, the fact that we still do these inspections is critical.

Last year, over 9,000 boats were inspected throughout Washington, and because of the funding for the Columbia River, these invasive species were kept out of our waters. That means they were kept out not just in Washington but in other parts of the Pacific Northwest as well.

This legislation also continues the great downpayment on the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, which was created in 1997 and has helped our State--millions of dollars in annual grants. This is so important. As we saw with the many problems in Flint, MI, and other places, many of our colleagues know that this Drinking Water State Revolving Fund is necessary for us to keep clean water in the United States.

These funds helped the city of Lynden replace its 1926 surface water treatment plant and ensured a reliable water supply to the Lynden community and surrounding area. The funds also helped the city of Prosser make improvements to its aging water system to ensure that communities have access to a clean water supply. At the end of this week, the city of Kelso will be celebrating the completion of the Minor Road Reservoir, which replaced two aging reservoirs that were leaking and that would have failed in the event of a natural disaster in the area. The city was able to complete the project with the help of the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, and I am so glad that is going to help secure more resources for that part of our State.

This also provides States and communities with additional financial resources to make investments in their economies for the future, and it also helps to right wrongs from the past.

I am pleased that the bill also delivers on an 80-year-old promise from the Army Corps to complete the Tribal Village Development Plan for four Tribes who were displaced when the dams of the Columbia River were constructed. The Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla, and Warm Springs Tribes all signed treaties with the Federal Government in the 1850s, and these treaties reserved the right of the Tribes to fish, hunt, and gather at ``all usual and accustomed fishing places.'' The Army Corps and treaty Tribes entered into agreements on fishing access. These sites were designed for day-to-day fishing, but out of need and the desire to be close to the Columbia River, they have turned into permanent housing. This has resulted in very challenging and unsafe living conditions along the river. I am so glad that my colleague Senator Murray and my colleagues from Oregon, Senator Merkley and Senator Wyden--that we have been able to make it crystal clear to the Army Corps of Engineers that we need to correct this problem. This bill ensures that those families will get what they were promised years ago.

In closing, I want to thank our colleagues Senator Barrasso and Senator Carper, as well as the leadership of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, for all the hard work on this bipartisan legislation.

When it comes to our waterways, infrastructure investment means jobs. It means the continued protection of clean water, and for us in the Northwest, it means helping us preserve our salmon populations.

I am so happy that we have finally taken another step to strengthen the competitiveness of our ports in the Northwest. These are real jobs. In the future--near future--with this deepening, we will be able to serve larger cargo container ships, which will help us keep our competitiveness in moving product.

While we move about $77 billion worth of products in Washington, we move much more than that from all States of the United States, moving through our ports. So while it sounds like an investment in two very large port infrastructures on the west coast, I guarantee you that it affects many Midwestern States and many products and the ability to cost-effectively ship to other parts of the world.

I yield the floor.