Floor Statements

Mr. President, I come to the floor to pay tribute to Rev. Dr. Samuel B. McKinney, a civil rights icon from the Pacific Northwest.

In August of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired the Nation from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial here in Washington, DC, boldly proclaiming: ``Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.''

Meanwhile, in the basement of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Seattle, WA, Dr. Samuel McKinney was already taking up that cause. He stood before his fellow religious leaders--pastors, rabbis, and priests--and asked them to join him in the struggle for equality and justice for all.

For more than 40 years, he never gave up the fight, advocating for economic and social justice in Seattle, WA, and throughout our Nation. Refusing to yield to deep-seated prejudice and threats of violence, he became known as a visionary civil rights leader, a pillar of Seattle civic life, and a moral consciousness of our community.

Tomorrow, many Washingtonians will come together to celebrate Dr. McKinney's life--to remember his wisdom, his advocacy, his deep and unshakeable belief in justice, his steadfast commitment to his community and his church, his service to our Nation in the U.S. Air Force, and his devotion as a husband, father, and friend.

He was a third-generation Baptist minister. He took up the struggle for justice at an early age. He was inspired by the athletic prowess of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis and by civil rights leaders of our generation.

No influence was more profound than the sermons of his own father. The Rev. Dr. Wade McKinney never shrank from an opportunity to use his pulpit to fight back against racism and segregation, and decades later, from his own pulpit at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Seattle, Dr. Samuel McKinney continued his father's efforts. He repeatedly fought back against injustice in every form, leading civil rights marches in the sixties, protesting school segregation in the seventies, and demonstrating against apartheid in the eighties. He led boycotts against companies that refused to hire Black workers and developed and promoted workforce training programs for people who were struggling to find employment. He protested unfair education policies and started an accredited preschool and kindergarten program that helped establish the first Black-owned bank in Seattle. He served as an original member of the Seattle Human Rights Commission, helping to pass our city's first Fair Housing Act.

Through his leadership, Dr. McKinney also brought to the national stage the only visit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Seattle in 1961, featured in this historic photo. Dr. McKinney also participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965. In 1980, he was arrested for speaking against apartheid at the South African consulate in Seattle. At 86 years old, Dr. McKinney was still fighting back against injustice, speaking at the prayer vigil in Seattle for Trayvon Martin.

Dr. McKinney's legacy lives on through his courageous actions, his visionary leadership, and his quest for justice. But perhaps most of all, his legacy lives on through the extraordinary community that he built at Mount Zion Baptist Church.

It was at Mount Zion that he mentored fellow ministers and imparted inspirational guidance. It was where he baptized newborns, presided over weddings, helped families bury their loved ones, and maintained his steadfast commitment to his parishioners.

At Mount Zion, he raised his two daughters--Dr. Lora-Ellen McKinney and Rhoda McKinney-Jones--along with his wife. They made sacrifices for the community. She, too, was a savvy businesswoman and a strong supporter of education and the arts.

Under Dr. McKinney's leadership, Mount Zion flourished and tripled its membership. His church and its community stand as a true testament to Dr. McKinney's life and what it meant in Seattle. Today, it shows the enduring faith that drove him in all that he did. Dr. McKinney made the fight for justice and equality his lifelong mission.

Another picture shows him with Jesse Jackson, who I believe also came to Seattle at Dr. McKinney's request. Dr. McKinney fought for justice in Seattle and helped to impact our Nation. His leadership and dedication to the community will be sorely missed. As I said, tomorrow, many Washingtonians will be there to commemorate his life, along with his daughters and many of his parishioners--people from Mount Zion.

As we honor and remember Dr. McKinney's lifetime of advocacy, I am reminded of a fitting quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: ``The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.''

In good times and through difficult ones, Reverend McKinney stood on the side of justice, and for that, all of us in the Pacific Northwest are grateful.

Thank you.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak in opposition to the nomination of Kyle Duncan for the U.S. Circuit Court for the Fifth Circuit.

I find his nomination troubling, but I find many of President Trump's nominees for judges troubling because they want to restrict established rights or roll back privacy issues, whether it is Roe v. Wade or LGBT rights.

In many cases, Mr. Duncan has tried to take away these very important reproductive rights for women. From 2012 to 2014, he was the lead counsel on the Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius Supreme Court case. That flawed decision allows closely held corporations to deny FDA-approved contraceptive coverage to women employees if the company owners object to the contraception based on religious beliefs.

More than half of the working-age women in Washington State get their healthcare coverage through their employer. They pay for their coverage through hard-earned wages and compensation. Their employer should not be able to just cherry-pick what benefits they get because the owners have a self-professed religious objection.

Mr. Duncan also tried to go after State laws protecting birth control access. Thanks in part to Washington State pharmacist Jennifer Erickson, Washington State has a law on the books requiring all pharmacies to stock and deliver all lawfully prescribed drugs, including contraception, but Mr. Duncan worked to take that hard-fought access away.

In 2016, he filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to take up a challenge to the Washington State pharmacy law in order to strike it down.

He also worked to deny access to constitutional rights to terminate pregnancies. In the Whole Women's Health case, Mr. Duncan filed a brief defending an unconstitutional Texas law that restricted access to safe and legal abortions at qualified health providers.

Ultimately, in the Whole Women's Health case, the Supreme Court rightly struck down this very deceptive Texas law, finding it had nothing to do with medical necessity and placed an undue burden on women.

In the landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges, Mr. Duncan authored an amicus brief which argued against same-sex marriage, and he has represented North Carolina in their defense of the ``bathroom bill,'' which discriminated against transgender individuals. We need to expand the rights of the LGBT community, not nominate a judge who believes we should roll back these laws that are so important to the individuals in my State.

Mr. Duncan also defended North Carolina's restrictive voting laws which limited early voting, prevented same-day registration, and placed limitations on where people could vote. The appeals court found that these restrictions violated the Voting Rights Act because they were disproportionately affecting African Americans. We do not need to see a judge on our bench who is trying to limit people's participation in our democracy as we are trying to protect their access to voting.

It is no secret the Trump administration has been chipping away at women's healthcare and constitutional rights by using every tool at their disposal. I am especially troubled that the President is intent on nominating judges, such as this one, who do not respect the settled law of Roe v. Wade.

The administration is making every attempt to roll back these important privacy laws. Kyle Duncan, the nominee we are considering, has spent decades doing the same. That is the reason I oppose his confirmation, and I urge my colleagues to do the same. I hope they will follow in making sure we protect these important rights.

Thank you.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I come to speak tonight because I did not support the Coast Guard bill as it came out of committee. We wanted to see changes to it, and the legislation that was brought up and the final language on Monday night gave our colleagues very little time to consider it.

Washington State is very proud of the rich maritime heritage the Coast Guard provides, and our fishermen, Tribes, shipbuilders, sea trade, and thriving coastal tourism all count on us to work together for our maritime economy.

Thousands of Pacific Northwest fishermen call Washington State home, with over 35,000 Washington State jobs supported by Alaska fisheries. The ports of Tacoma and Seattle are combined to be the fourth largest container gateway in the United States.

The Coast Guard plays a pivotal role in national security, in fishing, in overseeing and, in many ways, keeping our waterways safe. That is why we would love to see a Coast Guard bill which moves forward without the controversial pieces of language that are included.

I know many of my colleagues have thought this is a way to get our colleagues from the Midwest, and other places, to just swallow wholesale huge changes that could cost our economy billions of dollars--such as the zebra mussel, which alone would cost $6.4 billion a year, and an ecosystem full of rampant and sometimes toxic algae growth, which would and destroy recreation. This is from a letter regarding the Coast Guard Authorization Act.

I would like to see us move forward tonight on the things we can agree on--Why? Because I know these things are important as well--and continue to work on a resolution for some of the thornier issues that still remain.

I would like to see us move forward. I would like to see a recapitalization of the Coast Guard icebreaker and Polar Star. The Polar Star is homeported in Seattle and is operational only for our heavy icebreaker capabilities.

This bill also includes language to improve the Coast Guard oversight of ships that pose an oilspill risk, which is a constant threat to us in Puget Sound and throughout the West, given the large amount of oil traffic that comes through Puget Sound out our strait.

The bill also includes language to strengthen paid family leave policies at the Coast Guard. We just had the commandant nominee before the Commerce Committee. One of the reasons I questioned him on the paid family leave strategies and moving forward is that I want to give him every tool to continue to keep the workforce of women that they have in the Coast Guard. His commitment to me is that they would love to see this strengthened paid family leave policy in the underlying Coast Guard bill. Why not give that to them tonight? Our Coast Guard families should not be forced to choose between serving their country and supporting their families, and this bill would be a good step forward.

Lastly, this bill includes bipartisan language that would help us protect shipyard jobs by making sure we fix the problem related to Dakota Creek and also making sure our permanent fishing vessel exemptions would be allowed in this legislation.

I know we face challenges on continued definitions of best technology. But that is better than having a definition that exists in the underlying bill, which I think we should separate the good policy from, that would really make no indication or an economic analysis that would leave us with the Great Lakes, and many areas, without the kind of clean water that will allow us to continue to do good science and good fishery policy in that area of the United States.

I hope we can move forward on the policies that my colleagues know we can get agreement on. I just heard the debate between the majority leader and Senator Schumer, so I understand there is an objection to moving the Coast Guard bill.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague, who I know considers the efforts of the Commerce Committee as great, hard work, and I appreciate his hard work. As I mentioned, I did not support the bill as it came out of committee.

I know there are things we are trying to work on to keep this process moving. But I would say to my colleague, the small vessel discharge bill has been something that has been part of an exemption process related to this for a long time. It has been considered many times over. Our fishermen need the certainty of this.

Mr. President, I see my colleague from the Midwest is on the floor, and I am sure he has something to say about this. But I would just say to the chairman of the Commerce Committee: You are right. Years and years of discussion about ballast water has been a challenge.

The question tonight is whether we are going to hold up other legislation just to get that language or to push through a proposal that really doesn't give security for our waters not to be polluted or to be greatly impacted or to threaten the sea life and the opportunities for a vibrant waterway in many parts of the country.

All I am trying to do, as I have always tried to do, is be constructive in the process--both in the Commerce Committee with this issue and for the very issues that affect the Coast Guard and the Pacific Northwest.

I know this will not be the last time we hear about the fishing vessel issue. I am sure we will hear about it many times because it has been on the calendar. So we will continue this discussion, but I thank him for at least coming here tonight to discuss these issues. There are other issues that are being held up as hostage in this legislation, and they shouldn't be held hostage.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I rise to voice my opposition to the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to be Deputy Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Senators standing up this afternoon to fight this nomination are not just opposing Mr. Wheeler. We are trying to shine a light on the fact that this administration has one of the worst environmental records in history. And you don't have to take my word for it because this unprecedented assault on our Nation's bedrock environmental laws has drawn strong criticism from former Democrat and Republican Environmental Protection Agency Administrators.

The American public overwhelmingly supports the laws and regulations that protect our air and water. And my constituents don't buy the false trade-off between protecting the environment and jobs. To them they come hand in hand. The facts on the ground have proven that these are red herring arguments.

There are so many examples of how this administration's disdain for science has led them to try to undo decades of progress on the environment. I want to focus on three issues that are particularly damaging and serve as an indication of why Mr. Wheeler's nomination and record are so troubling.

First is the example of Mr. Wheeler lobbying on behalf of fossil fuel interests. My concern is that Mr. Wheeler would have a prominent role in reviewing the air pollution rules that govern coal plants, rules that he got paid millions of dollars to help attack.

A number of press reports have exposed how one of Mr. Wheeler's biggest lobbying clients, Murray Energy, was a driving force behind Secretary Perry's ill-considered resilience proposal. That proposal ignored the Energy Department's own staff report and was an attempt to try to say that coal was the only reliable source of energy for the electricity grid, which would have forced citizens to pay more on their utility bills. They said that is a wrong conclusion. And it was a transparent attempt to try to prop up one of the administration's favorite energy sources, which really would have made everything more expensive for consumers and certainly would have changed the focus of what we need to do to decarbonize our energy system.

But the biggest problem here was how the proposal would have hit consumers, as I said, with billions of dollars in added costs. Bailing out old coal plants wasn't just bad policy; it was a breathtaking raid on consumer pocketbooks. The regional grid manager found that the Secretary's proposal would nearly double the cost of wholesale energy in the Nation's largest electricity market.

Fortunately, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission unanimously rejected this proposal. But if Mr. Wheeler comes to EPA as the No. 2, what other misguided proposals like this are they going to propose or try to fight, even though the science within the own agencies says they are wrongheaded? How much time will we have to waste exposing these bad ideas? We should instead be making investments in policy and infrastructure that will help us be more competitive in the future.

I am also troubled by the administration's backward view on how the United States can achieve so-called energy dominance by focusing more on coal. In my assessment, the days of this strategy are numbered.

Selling away our cheap natural gas to foreign buyers. Or eking a little more life out of our grandfathered coal plants. Or drilling, as the administration has proposed, in every part of the United States and off our shores, is not the way to be competitive for the future. I am concerned that Mr. Wheeler holds and will support these backward views.

When he was criticizing the Paris Climate Agreement, he called it a ``sweetheart deal'' for China because it gave them a manufacturing edge, but he really got it backwards.

That is because China itself has been investing in renewable energy. By 2040, it will have invested over $6 trillion in clean energy technologies, according to the International Energy Agency. China also adopted a 5-year solar energy plan calling for 105 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2020. They have proposed an aggressive stance moving forward, and I want to make sure that U.S. companies who have great technology get a fair crack at making investments there and particularly in the area of energy efficiency, which is already accounting for about a $2.2 trillion investment in 2016.

So we know that we can move forward on a cleaner energy economy, and we want to know that we have the leadership that are going to support this critical transition. I am perhaps most troubled that, during his confirmation hearing, Mr. Wheeler refused to acknowledge the indisputable reality that humans are the cause of dangerous accumulation of greenhouse gases.

The fact that greenhouse gases are going to warm our planet and cause acidity in our oceans is something my State knows well.

In Washington, climate change has serious consequences for human health and our economy. Climate change has resulted in extreme weather patterns, putting lives and property in danger. It has impacted water quality, and it has caused other impacts to our salmon and shellfish industries, big parts of our seafood economy. Climate change has created drought conditions, has jeopardized our farm economy, and it is even changing the chemistry of Puget Sound.

Mr. President, responding to climate change is more than just an environmental issue. It is an economic imperative.

Senator Collins and I requested from the Government Accountability Office an analysis about the full costs of climate change.

That is because, after seeing how it impacted us with fires, how it impacted our shellfish industry, how it impacted so much of our coastline, we wanted to know how much climate is costing taxpayers. Well, the GAO report said it will cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion in the next 10 to 15 years.

So I know that Mr. Wheeler thinks this may not be part of his day job, but rolling back strong environmental laws that help us move forward will put us further and further behind and cost us billions of dollars more than we need to be paying.

We need to uphold these critical environmental standards and laws that protect our clean air and clean water so that we can make progress, so that we can diversify our economy, and so that we can make the right investments.

I believe Mr. Wheeler is the wrong choice for this position. I think he is the wrong person to help us meet those standards.

We need a Deputy Administrator who isn't there trying to just jam coal down the throats of American consumers and businesses, but rather advocating for the next generation of Americans, who will need to be able to compete and compete in a cost-effective way.

I urge my colleagues to join me in voting no on Andrew Wheeler to be the Deputy Administrator at EPA.

I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about H.R. 4851, legislation that just recently passed the Senate in the last hour or so. Hopefully it is on its way to final reconciliation with the House and hopefully will become law later today.

Before I talk about that, I want to take a second to recognize some provisions that are in the omnibus that we also are going to be voting on in the next few hours, two provisions that are very important to the Pacific Northwest--one, finally a fix on fire borrowing, which is so important to the entire Northwest but particularly in the State of Washington, which has seen the great impact of forest fires in the last several years. This will end the fire borrowing that we have seen that has prevented us from doing the kind of fuel reduction that we would like to see to protect our communities, and it will help us better manage with stewardship contracts and release the funds that should be going to recreation management within our forests.

This fire funding fix has been long in the making. I thank my colleagues, Senators Wyden, Risch, and Crapo, for their hard work, and I thank Bryan Petit from my office, who has worked tirelessly on this as well. We are starting a new day in how we treat our forests and hopefully one that will reduce the risks to many communities.

I thank our colleagues for working so diligently on including a provision on

affordable housing. This is the first affordable housing increase in a decade. I want to thank specifically Senator Schumer and Senator McConnell and Senator Hatch, my cosponsor on this legislation, for helping us get this done. This is not everything we would like to see in affordable housing, but certainly it is starting to point in the right direction.

I also thank Anna Taylor, Artie Mandel, Lara Muldoon, and Jay Khosla for working so diligently on trying to make the housing crisis something that we have to deal with here in the U.S. Senate. For us in the Pacific Northwest, the homelessness crisis, our returning veterans, our aging population, and workforce housing have become the No. 1 issue. For Seattle and the whole Northwest, starting to put more resources on the table to build affordable housing is the right direction, and we need it desperately now, and this legislation will help us.

Kennedy-King National Commemorative Site Bill

Now, Mr. President, I come with my colleague Senator Young--and I know Senator Donnelly wishes he could join us--to talk about the legislation that Representative Andre Carson has sent to the Senate and we just recently passed back to the House. This bill designates the Landmark for Peace Memorial, which is located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Park in Indianapolis, and it designates it as the Kennedy-King National Commemorative Site.

This legislation provides that this commemorative site shall be part of the African American Civil Rights Network that Congress established last December, and it will be only the second commemorative site in our beloved National Park System. The other designation went to Charleston, AR, the location of the first public school in the South to be fully integrated.

This national commemorative site, which will remain as part of a city park, is not going to be part of the National Park System, although I am happy to discuss that with my colleagues moving forward. The National Park Service is authorized to enter into cooperative agreements to help provide for education and interpretation of this site.

The Young-Donnelly amendment removes language in the bill authorizing the Park Service to conduct a special resource study and assess its potential for inclusion in the National Park System. I know my colleague Senator Young is here on the floor, and I thank him for his leadership. I hope that some day he and I can continue, with Senator Donnelly, to expand on this and revisit this issue. The original legislation passed unanimously out of the House of Representatives, and I know Senator Young worked hard to clear the one objection, but I don't think that one objection should delay us from furthering our interest in this issue.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the full text of Robert F. Kennedy's speech in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, the 50th anniversary coming up next week.

Mr. President, some days we need a reminder of what perspective in the face of crisis really accomplishes. We know that 50 years after this historic speech, we have an understanding about how incredibly magnificent this moment was, so I am so glad to join my colleague in commemorating it. It was about holding the consciousness of a society and how to respond to an unbelievable, tragic, violent event and to hold the consciousness of a society with words--just words. And that is the point--that words matter; that words matter to a society. They are what holds us together. They are what creates unity. They are what creates perspective. In this case, they also created history.

Senator Kennedy spoke to a crowd in Indianapolis and announced the death of Martin Luther King--an unbelievable responsibility. If you watch now in videos of the speech, you will hear the gasps of the audience, who was unaware that that event, in that moment, had taken place. Yet he spoke to the crowd about why violence and retribution should not be pursued. He created calm among chaos. He created a moment where everybody realized that they were commemorating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, that his life had been about a nonviolent response to tragedy and to the challenges we face.

When we commemorate this moment with this designation, we are commemorating a moment, in my opinion, of the human spirit. We are commemorating a moment--the incredible pain Robert Kennedy must have felt, knowing that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. Yet he spoke to the crowd about keeping the peace and remembering the lessons of Dr. King.

We will never know what kind of Presidency RFK might have given our Nation, but we know this from his speech: We know what kind of man he was, and we know what kind of human spirit and soul can communicate, in that moment of tragedy, the direction of a nation.

It is so important at this moment in our history that we reflect on this 50th anniversary. At a time when it is better to use words to speak calmly and competently in the face of tragedy, I hope that here in Washington, we will remember one of the greatest political speeches of all time.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, in every corner of our country today and across my State in Washington, countless students are taking part in a walkout in support of reforms to combat gun violence. I stand in solidarity with these students who are trying to provide an example of why we must make progress on this issue. No student should fear for their life while attending school, and I will continue to work on solutions here to curb gun violence.

We in Washington State have been able to make progress by passing initiatives to close gun show loopholes and to move forward on extreme person legislation. I should say that that was passed by the citizens of our State. We should look at the example of Washington's initiatives and the success we have had in our State in curbing gun violence as commonsense solutions that should be considered here in Washington, DC.

When we look at these issues, I am reminded of the tragic shootings in our State--of Sam Strahan, from Spokane, who was killed, and individuals who were killed in Washington in a Marysville-Tulalip shooting when Jaylen Fryberg, at just 15 years old, opened fire on students and killed Gia Soriano, Andrew Fryberg, Shaylee Chuckulnaskit, and Zoe Galasso and wounded Nathan Hatch.

These tragedies are more than we can take at our schools. These tragedies are something that we need to address here in Washington. So I stand in solidarity with our students who are trying to address these issues and address our Nation's need to come together and provide better solutions to protect our students.

We are still heartbroken about this shooting in the sense of it being an example of the challenges we face--a young man who took his father's gun. He was a father who never should have had the gun to begin with because he was on a domestic violence restraining order. Yet he was still able to go to a store, get the gun, and keep the gun in the home. Then the young student was able to take that to school.

I want all of these families to know that we still think of them, that we are still mourning the loss of these individuals, and that we are working very hard with our colleagues to come to some resolution.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wish to speak about an urgent challenge facing my constituents and my colleagues in the Pacific Northwest that unfortunately was ignored in this massive legislative mishmash we were asked to vote up or down on in the middle of the night: wildfires.

Communities across the West, including my home State of Washington, are being torn apart by these disasters. Last year, the Diamond Creek fire burned 128,000 acres in my State. In 2016, the Okanogan Complex burned 305,000 acres. Just those two fires alone burned an area around two-thirds the size of Rhode Island, and both devastating events spewed ash and toxic smoke across a vast region and destroyed billions of dollars' worth of forest products.

I am very concerned that these are not freak or rare, once-in-a- generation events. According to our best scientists, the killer combination of climate change and decades of inadequate forest management has made these monster infernos the new normal.

The numbers speak for themselves.

Ten thousand, that is the number of houses that have been burned down in wildfires last year.

Eighteen billion, that is the initial estimate of how much damage wildfires caused just in California last year.

Sadly, 54 Americans were killed by these wildfires in 2017.

That is why I have spent years collaborating with other Senators from affected States to hammer out commonsense, bipartisan solutions to this increasingly urgent challenge.

First and foremost is the inadequate funding for fire prevention and suppression programs.

How much longer are we going to shortchange fire programs? The fire budget Congress allocated for this last year was short by over $1.4 billion.

Under current law, when there is a funding shortfall like this, the Forest Service has to rob its own programs to make it up. What programs? The ones dedicated to fire prevention and forest restoration that could help prevent future fires. That is crazy and very short- sighted.

Also, we need a better management strategy for our national forests-- an innovative strategy to manage our forests in smarter, more efficient, and more sustainable ways. There are many case studies of how we can reduce fire risk and increase local forestry jobs, all while restoring forest ecosystems.

For example, the Colville National Forest has been using innovative management tools to reduce the risk of wildfire in northeast Washington. The forward-thinking restoration work being performed by Vaagen Brothers Lumber in Colville has enabled this small National Forest to be ranked in the top three forest products-producing national forests in the country. Their holistic approach to forest restoration has also earned them the proud spot as the No. 1 national forest for number of culverts replaced to improve fish passage and water quality.

The success of local projects cannot help but inspire me and my colleagues. I am pleased to report that all of the Senators from the Northwest--both Democrat and Republican--have agreed on what is needed to enable the Forest Service to be proactive rather than simply reactive when it comes to wildfires.

Senators Risch, Wyden, Crapo, Murray, Merkley, and I agree that the Forest Service's fire-borrowing problem needs to be fixed. All of us cosponsored legislation to do that.

Senators Risch, Wyden, Crapo, Murray, Merkley, and I also all agree that we should treat the most at-risk parts of the national forests before they burn up and do so in a way that is supported by science. All of us cosponsored legislation to also do that.

These bills have been endorsed by environmental groups, timber industry, firefighter organizations, and local governments. All of these local and national stakeholders are in agreement, that we need to supply the Forest Service and impacted communities with funding, provide jobs in rural communities, and reduce the fire risk in our most at-risk forests.

Unfortunately, despite the urgency of the problem, despite the strong consensus on both sides of the aisle and amongst a diverse range of stakeholders, despite the fact that we have hammered out legislative text, it appears the inclusion of our bipartisan measure is being blocked from being included in the pending bill.

It is hard to overemphasize my frustration at the current situation. It took weeks, months, and in some cases years to develop these proposals and vet with affected stakeholders this suite of bipartisan bills.

The bipartisan consensus legislation we offered last week included a permanent fix to the Forest Service's fire-borrowing problem. That was legislation cosponsored by 15 Senators. Our proposal also included funding for Secure Rural Schools. That bipartisan legislation was cosponsored by 32 Senators.

It turns out there were actors set on blocking our attempts to enact reasonable wildfire legislation. We received a counteroffer at the eleventh hour, and it contained only a short-term funding solution, with eight new radical land management policies that they knew we could not accept.

The new provisions ranged from repealing protections for old-growth trees on the Tongass National Forest to giving away Federal land. Other objectionable provisions included allowing exemptions for large clearcuts from environmental review and removing people's ability to file lawsuits on Forest Service projects in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. That is ridiculous.

Instead of working to forward bipartisan ideas, Republican leadership decided to inject ``poison pill'' environmental riders into the process in a ``take it or leave it'' midnight offer.

This leaves many of us with a lot of doubt as to whether Republican leadership has ever been serious about fixing wildland fire budgeting. History tonight shows that they see it only as a vehicle to sideline long-established environmental laws that protect people, wildlife, and our public lands.

Well, I want to tell everyone here that we are not giving up. There are so many bipartisan, noncontroversial improvements to Forest Service management that can be enacted.

Members, like my colleagues from the Northwest, want to get something done. Our constituents are demanding it, and we need to do it before the next fire season starts in just a few months.

I want the record to reflect that, while there were many provisions I supported in the underlying legislation, I could not in good conscience vote for a bill that purposely left urgently needed wildland firefighting legislation on the cutting room floor. We can and must do better next time, and I am going to keep working at it until we get this problem addressed.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak against the Trump administration's egregious attack on our pristine coastlines in the Pacific, the Atlantic, Alaska, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

Dramatic increases in oil and gas development offshore pose a direct threat to our coastal economies in the United States, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. I know many of my colleagues are going to join me on the floor this afternoon to talk about this and about the specific impacts in their areas.

The draft leasing plan, which is what has been put forth by the Secretary of the Interior, is an unprecedented attempt to allow offshore oil and gas drilling in over 90 percent of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, including in Washington and Oregon.

The truth is that instead of creating new jobs in the oil and gas sector, the administration is poised to choose big oil jobs over the ocean-dependent industries like fishing, shipbuilding, and tourism on our coasts. I know this because I just traveled to many of our coastal communities in the State of Washington, which make their livelihoods off of fishing or tourism, that are very concerned by this proposal. And just yesterday, a public hearing was supposed to take place in Tacoma, WA, which was canceled. The Trump administration failed to account for the value of the existing robust coastal and ocean economies that could be jeopardized by expanding offshore drilling in those areas.

Our ocean-related economy is so important to our State that expanding drilling directly threatens the ocean environment and marine resources that support millions of jobs in construction, fishing, shipbuilding, tourism, recreation, and maritime transport. The ocean-related industries in the areas targeted by the administration's plan contribute over 2.2 million direct jobs, nearly $75 billion in wages, and over $150 billion in GDP. The reason I bring this up is that the economic benefits of these industries cannot be overstated: nearly $8 billion from fishing and seafood, nearly $70 billion from marine transport, and over $125 billion from tourism and recreation.

We know that oilspills or other natural disasters related to oil and gas activities, such as the Exxon Valdez or the Deepwater Horizon disaster, can disrupt entire coastal economies. For example, if you took just the Deepwater Horizon spill in size and compared it to the coastal areas of Washington and Oregon, the impacted area would cover all of Washington and a big chunk of Oregon. We know that these can be devastating.

The shore-adjacent counties in the targeted areas host over 39 million jobs and contribute over $2 trillion in wages. The economies of the shore-adjacent counties represent 65 percent of the affected coastal States' GDPs. That is just one way of saying that coastal States and their economies are big drivers in our U.S. economy and that they are extremely dependent on clean water, coasts, our oceans, and our fisheries.

The Washington coast economy relies on healthy, sustainable oceans, which support our fisheries in places such as Grays Harbor and Pacific County and in many other parts of our State, to make sure they have seafood processing, recreation, and tourism. Our Washington maritime economy is worth $50 billion in economic activity and 191,000 jobs, and tourism on the coast adds jobs for anglers, charter boats, cruise guides, restaurants, hotels, and more, which are so iconic in the Pacific Northwest. They are the culture and heritage of our coastal communities.

The fact that so many recreational fishermen can be out on our healthy oceans and attracting more people to come and explore is so much a part of the Northwest that putting it at risk to oilspill activities or activities related to exploration is just not something these communities want to do. Just this past week, I received resolutions from various communities on our Pacific coast that urged that this idea be turned down.

The Washington and Oregon coasts are not really suited for oil and gas development. First of all, there are extreme sea states, treacherous storms, and the remote nature of our coastlines. As one of our maritime communities told me, it doesn't really have the resources for cleanup in the area. If a spill happened, who would be there to clean it up? In the meantime, our fishermen, if they have oil sheens behind their fishing boats, can be fined. If we are ready to fine fishermen for oil sheens behind their boats, why are we proposing a plan in the treacherous waters of the Pacific Northwest without having any idea who is going to clean up the mess?

Adding to the risk in the Pacific Northwest is the Cascadia Subduction Zone--one of the most dangerous faults in the United States. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is long overdue to create a significant earthquake. You hear from lots of people about this. In fact, after The New Yorker wrote a big story called ``The Really Big One,'' many people from across the country emailed me to ask: Are we ready for this to happen? I can tell you, with what happened in Japan, people are very concerned about how we prepare for that in the Pacific Northwest. So it makes no sense to put an oil rig on one of the most high-risk, earthquake-prone zones in the United States.

In a 1991 spill, the dangerous and choppy seas prevented first responders from being able to contain more of the spill. That is why I have fought to improve oilspill prevention and response in the State of Washington by deploying our Neah Bay tug, which is a full-time tug, to make sure we get boats safely through our waters; by increasing oilspill response equipment throughout the Strait of Juan de Fuca; and by pushing for the Coast Guard to invest in research on tar sands oil.

Those are some of the things we can do to protect ourselves, but we need to do much more.

We must weigh future decisions about where we should allow oil and gas exploration with the costs to our coastal economies.

We must incorporate the lessons we have learned from disasters such as Deepwater Horizon, which is part of this picture, or the Exxon Valdez in order to improve oilspill prevention, response, and safety. Herring fish from Prince William Sound are still very much impacted and have not fully recovered after the Exxon Valdez. So telling our fishermen that this is a great idea, that Washington fisheries, whether they be crab or other fisheries, should be susceptible to these kinds of spills--that is just not something our fishermen want to hear.

In addition to these efforts to drill off of our coasts--efforts that have been repeatedly blocked in the past--President Trump wants to roll back important safety regulations that were put in place after Deepwater Horizon, such as blowout preventer systems, well control, and production safety systems.

Now Secretary Zinke wants to open these coastal areas. Our State has been responding to his proposal for months and months. We gave very important data to say that this was not a good idea off the coast of Washington. It is interesting because Secretary Zinke made a last- minute decision with regard to Florida, which didn't turn in its information about its State on this issue. Then later, after a visit with the Governor, Secretary Zinke said that this was something he didn't want to see happen. The people of Washington don't want political games played. They want to have their say on this issue, and they want to make sure their voices are heard loud and clear. Our coastal economies are too important to us, from a jobs and cultural perspective, to go about even proposing the research on drilling in our coastal areas.

I am disappointed that yesterday there was a last-minute postponement of a public meeting that was supposed to take place in Tacoma, WA, to hear from our citizens about their opposition to expanding oil drilling off our coasts. I am not sure whether there will be a hearing rescheduled or exactly what was behind the cancelation, but it was one of the first opportunities Washingtonians could have had to express their views on this issue.

Based on the vocal opposition of our communities, I sent a letter to Secretary Zinke, with 15 of my House and Senate colleagues from the Pacific Northwest, calling on Washington and Oregon to not be part of a future lease program. I know that many people, including our Governor, have done the same. Members from the Pacific, Atlantic, gulf coast, and even Alaska are writing to Secretary Zinke, asking him to exclude their areas from future drilling activities.

I am very concerned that we are wasting taxpayer money in reanalyzing what we have analyzed before--that oil and gas development in the Pacific Northwest does not make sense for our coastal communities. We will fight to protect our fishing jobs, our tourism, our recreation, and all of the things that are part of the center of our culture on our coasts. We hope Secretary Zinke will follow science, protect our coastal economy, stop this foolish idea that drilling off of our coast is either necessary or prudent, and move about to protect our Federal lands.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I join many of my colleagues in voicing my strong opposition to S. 2311, the 20-week abortion ban bill. This legislation puts political ideology ahead of women's health and tramples on women's constitutional rights.

First, the 20-week abortion ban intrudes on private healthcare decisions. Reproductive health choices are highly personal and individualized and should be left squarely in the hands of women in consultation with their physician, healthcare team, and loved ones. S. 2311 violates this principle by subjecting private healthcare choices to an arbitrary and unscientific blanket ban.

Second, the 20-week abortion ban violates the longstanding constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. In 1973, a 7-2 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that the constitutional right to privacy includes the right to terminate a pregnancy. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected bans on abortions before viability, which generally occurs well after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Today, 7 in 10 Americans support upholding Roe v. Wade.

A diverse coalition of Americans--including physicians, civil rights advocates, and faith organizations--has come out against this legislation for a number of reasons. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American College of

Nurse-Midwives, for instance, have said that the legislation ``. . . would dictate how physicians should care for their patients based on inaccurate and unscientific claims.'' The American Civil Liberties Union has said this legislation ``. . . directly contradicts longstanding precedent holding that a woman should `be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion' when deciding whether to continue or terminate a pre-viability pregnancy.'' And Three dozen faith-based organizations have written in opposition to this legislation, saying, ``The proper role of government in the United States is not to privilege one set of religious views over others but to protect each person's right and ability to make decisions according to their own beliefs and values.''

We should be working to open up access to reproductive healthcare for more women and families, not fewer. Effective family planning services, including birth control, have a proven record of boosting health and economic mobility while reducing unwanted pregnancies.

The U.S. Senate has urgent priorities to address. We should not be wasting time on another misguided attempt to take away women's healthcare and constitutional rights. I strongly oppose S. 2311.

Mr. President, today the Senate will vote on the nomination of Alex Azar, President Trump's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services. I join many of my colleagues in expressing concerns about this nominee.

First, I believe Mr. Azar will accelerate the Trump administration and

congressional Republicans' harmful agenda on Medicaid, which I view as nothing less than a war on Medicaid.

Medicaid is a lifeline for millions of Americans and a smart healthcare and economic strategy for our country. Last year, I spent hours on the Senate floor presenting data and information to my colleagues showing why cutting and capping Medicaid is a very bad idea. I met with Medicaid patients, safety net hospitals, community health centers, and local elected officials in every corner of my State. They had a crystal-clear message for me: Cutting and capping Medicaid will be bad for patients, bad for the healthcare delivery system, bad for local economies, and bad for our State. They expressed a consensus view that capping Medicaid is not healthcare reform, nor is it innovation; it is simply a budget mechanism to throw people off of healthcare.

Mr. Azar has stated that he favors a block grant or per-capita cap financing approach for Medicaid. He speaks highly of the current Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, CMS, Administrator and their troubling regulatory agenda for Medicaid. Mr. Azar has been a cheerleader for the partisan legislation we debated last year that would permanently eviscerate Medicaid. These bills, depending on each iteration, would take Medicaid coverage from 14 million Americans, sunset the successful Medicaid expansion, and eliminate up to one-third of Federal Medicaid investment over the next two decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office. I have every reason to believe that Mr. Azar would continue and accelerate the Trump administration's war on Medicaid.

Second, I have no evidence to suggest that Mr. Azar will stop the Trump administration's track record of throwing needless chaos into the individual health insurance markets.

There is bipartisan agreement that we need to make health insurance more affordable, particularly in the individual market, where about 7 percent of Americans buy coverage; yet the Trump administration has rejected bipartisan consensus and moved us backwards. This administration has proposed to unleash ``junk insurance'' under the guise of association health plans, cancelled cost-sharing reduction payments, created roadblocks to insurance enrollment, and pursued backdoor schemes to rescind protections for people with preexisting conditions. I have every indication that Mr. Azar will continue this trajectory of higher costs, less coverage, and more uncertainty.

I believe we can and must tackle rising healthcare costs by innovating in the delivery of healthcare, instead of simply capping programs and kicking people off coverage. To that end, I hope that Mr. Azar will advance true delivery system change in the Medicare Program, as he says he wants to, and engage with Senators of both parties to work on good ideas to bring more value and efficiency to our healthcare system.

For these reasons, I will oppose Mr. Azar's confirmation to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak about this legislation.

At the outset, I thank my colleague from Georgia and the Senator from Utah for their work on the affordable housing tax credit. The Senator from Utah said: Let's work together. I stand ready to work with him on affordable housing in the future, and, hopefully, with the Senator from Georgia, we can make progress on what is a crisis in America.

I come to speak in opposition to the legislation before us today, the tax reconciliation bill.

One of the requirements of the legislation that I most ardently oppose is including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas development.

Basically, this bill pays for the tax cuts for corporations and millionaires by raising taxes on the middle class, undermining healthcare, and requiring oil drilling in one of our Nation's most iconic national wildlife refuges.

Everyone should understand that a vote for this reconciliation bill is a vote that will go to the biological heart of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and require drilling. I believe that opening up the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling is being done as a supposed revenue raiser to offset the soaring costs of this tax bill for corporations and the wealthy, but the process that it went through is a sham.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge will raise less than $1 billion over 10 years. This doesn't even meet the $1 billion reconciliation instruction, and it certainly doesn't represent a serious offset to the huge deficits in the bill. To put this in perspective, less than seven one-hundredths of 1 percent of the $1.5 trillion increase in the national debt will be from this policy in this legislation.

Drilling in the Arctic really has nothing to do with serious budgetary policy, but it has everything to do with evading regular order to pass something that could never pass in the regular order of the legislative process.

In addition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, this bill would sell 7 million barrels of oil from our Nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. A portion of that sale is simply to meet the reconciliation instructions--that is to say, to make this bill work. Yet the sale of oil from our petroleum reserve would also provide a $300 million windfall to four States--Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. So this bill is selling off oil in order to pay for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I do not believe that that makes sense.

Under this sham process, the bill will turn one of our Nation's wildest and most pristine areas into an oil field. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the largest refuge in our Nation and is one of the crown jewels for us in the United States for wildlife refuges. I believe it is a U.S. Serengeti.

We received a letter from Jane Goodall, who basically said:

Around the globe so many indigenous people have been harmed

in the name of ``progress''--let us not add one more tragedy

to the list. We have other sources of energy.

I ask unanimous consent that the entire letter we received from the Jane Goodall Institute be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, describes it as ``the only conservation system unit that protects, in an undisturbed condition, a complete spectrum of the Arctic ecosystems in North America.'' It is home to an incredible diversity of wildlife--47 different species of mammals, including polar bears, grizzly bears, wolves, Dall sheep, moose, musk ox, and caribou. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge also provides important habitat for over 40 species of fish and more than 200 species of migratory birds.

So why would we want to destroy this refuge?

It was first established by the Eisenhower administration. Congress later protected this amazing Arctic area and its ecosystem in order to protect the wildlife and protect the habitat because of its incredible diversity. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is really known as the ``last great wilderness'' in our country, one of the great, last wild places, but this legislation turns that on its head.

It would make oil and gas development one of the statutory purposes of the Wildlife Refuge, and under this legislation, this Refuge would become the only Refuge where oil and gas development is required by law. It opens up the entire 1.5 million-acre coastal plain for oil and gas exploration and requires the leasing of at least 800,000 acres. It requires the leasing of areas with the highest oil and gas potential, no matter the consequences for the wildlife or the environment.

The bill requires that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be managed as a petroleum reserve, which is unprecedented, and it undercuts managing the Refuge for wildlife.

The bill includes no clear requirements to comply with environmental laws or to protect wildlife. Its sponsors, however, say that they are not preempting environmental laws and that, in fact, laws like the National Environmental Policy Act will ``fully apply.'' Yet this bill undercuts those assurances of compliance with environmental laws by adding oil development as a purpose of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Adding oil development as a purpose is contrary to the purpose of a wildlife refuge.

The purpose of a wildlife refuge is to protect wildlife and to make sure that the managers of wildlife do so in a sound fashion.

At every other wildlife refuge in the country, development within the refuge is only permitted to the extent that it is compatible with protecting wildlife. This bill tries to waive one of the most important management protections that applies to every other national wildlife refuge--that development must be compatible with protecting wildlife. They have to do this because they know that oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is not compatible. It is just the opposite.

It is important to note also that this bill does not provide any energy security. There is no prohibition in the bill against exporting oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and in all likelihood, much of the oil will be exported.

In addition to opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to development, the bill also requires the sale of 7 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to give $300 million, as I mentioned earlier, to several States--Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

So at the same time as we are being told that we must ruin a national wildlife refuge because we need the oil, we are selling oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It does not make sense for America. It just doesn't add up.

The impact of oil and gas exploration in the wildlife area and the danger to our wildlife cannot be overstated. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's coastal plain and nearby waters are designated as critical habitat for polar bears, which are listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Female polar bears head to the Arctic Refuge's coastal plain so that they can create snow dens, where they give birth to their young. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has a higher concentration of polar bear denning habitat than any other area on Alaska's North Slope.

The refuge is also the summer calving grounds for the porcupine caribou herd. This herd's range extends into Canada, and we actually have a treaty between both of our countries to protect this herd. The almost 200,000-member herd has an annual migration of hundreds of miles--and in some cases, thousands of miles--wintering in the south of the Refuge.

I think that this herd of caribou is so important because scientists say that it has an entirely different kind of migration pattern than other caribou in Alaska, that it has been adept at dealing with the adaptation that comes along with climate change.

Why not, instead of ruining their habitat, study and understand this migration that has been studied since the 1950s? It has been part of our national investment in understanding wildlife. It has been supported by both Democratic and Republican administrations, to understand the science and background of this caribou herd. These caribou are an important food source for many Alaska Natives but in particular the Gwich'in people who live south of the Refuge. Wildlife biologists argue that the risk to the caribou herd and to those who rely on them could be quite significant.

So why are we doing this? Why are we doing this?

The last few years have been a difficult budget situation in Alaska. Relying on oil for 90 percent of the budget, I agree with many others, is unsustainable. Every dollar the price of oil per barrel drops, reduces the State budget by $30 million, or close to 1 percentage point per dollar. The general revenue fund in Alaska dropped over 80 percent after 2012, and that situation caused Alaska's $4 billion deficit projection last year. Difficult choices had to be made about taxes, savings, spending, and what the State government should do. Thankfully, their economy hasn't collapsed, but in the last big oil-driven recession in the 1980s, Alaska's banks failed, housing prices collapsed, and 15 percent of the population left.

Why am I bringing this up? Because the good news is today's Alaska economy is more diverse than it was 30 years ago. I know this because I talk to my colleagues and because we are interacting in a lot of ways in the Pacific Northwest.

Alaska is well known for its tourism. Two million visitors to Alaska spend $1,000 per person in the State, supporting a $7.3 billion outdoor industry. My colleagues here may not realize what my colleagues from Alaska and Washington know, and that is that the State of Alaska and Washington have a lot of interdependence. A recent study found that 113,000 jobs in Puget Sound are tied to Alaska's economy, and this number has doubled in the last 30 years.

What are those jobs? One-quarter of those are in the seafood industry. Almost 1,000 commercial-vessel owning fishermen who work in Alaska's fisheries are part of the trade between us. The Alaska trade accounts for one in five containerized shipments through the Port of Seattle and the Port of Tacoma. Another 14,000 jobs are tied to passenger transportation to Alaska, including 430,000 cruise ship passengers who come through Puget Sound every year. That is just one way of saying the Washington-Alaska economies are tied

together, and as a hub for Arctic commerce, I have worked with my colleagues Senator Murkowski and Senator Sullivan on issues such as new Coast Guard Arctic icebreakers that are so needed for the future. I have supported more funding for demonstration programs for renewable energy and microgrids in an effort to help the local economy. I feel the same way about rural broadband across the Nation, and we want to make sure we are deploying and helping with everything we can to bring more connectivity to Alaska, but I really question how opening the Arctic Wildlife Refuge is a solution to these problems.

Even under CBO's aggressive view, if leasing occurs in the Refuge, it will be many years before Alaskans see any significant revenue. So my colleagues should be aware that doubling down on oil by sacrificing one of the great wildlife refuges will not, in my opinion, help close Alaska's budget deficit, and it will not help them diversify for the future.

This Arctic Wildlife Refuge is too special, too important. It is one of the crown jewels of our National Wildlife Refuge system. We should be preserving it. We should not be destroying it. We should not be turning it into an oilfield.

I am reminded that many people over many decades have fought for this great area of our country, to maintain its environmental stewardship, starting with Olaus Murie, who went there and did great explorations and convinced many people here in this Washington that it was something so special and worth preserving.

After decades of his scientific exploration in Alaska, Olaus testified in 1959 in support of creating the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. He said: ``We long for something more, something that has a mental, a spiritual impact on us. This idealism, more than anything else, will set us apart as a nation striving for something worthwhile in the universe.''

So what is setting us apart today? Some very short-term gains. In 100 years, when this economic tax bill will long be forgotten, the question will be whether something important in the universe still exists in the Arctic wildlife area. We didn't create the Arctic Coastal Plain, but I can state this: We cannot recreate it. What we are doing today is taking a step toward destroying it.

I urge my colleagues to oppose this reconciliation bill. Do not sacrifice the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to oil development. Don't take one of the great, wild, pristine places on this planet and turn it into an oilfield. We can do better as a nation. I know we can do better as a region, and we can do better with a better Arctic strategy for our Nation's future.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I wish to call attention to several urgent and bipartisan health programs that Congress must renew without further delay.

The Republican majority has spent much of this year trying to pass partisan healthcare and tax legislation. As a result, they have neglected to extend numerous uncontroversial healthcare programs, threatening these programs' very existence and causing needless chaos and uncertainty.

It is past time that the Republican-controlled Congress extend these programs to provide healthcare access and certainty to millions of Americans.

First, I would like to address the Children's Health Insurance Program, CHIP. CHIP is a bipartisan healthcare success story. Enacted 20 years ago, thanks to the leadership of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch and the late Senator Ted Kennedy, CHIP brings affordable health coverage to children in families who are not eligible for Medicaid but struggle to afford private insurance.

Washington's successful CHIP program, Apple Health for Kids, covers about 60,000 children. Through CHIP, parents get peace of mind, and States and the Federal Government pitch in to share the cost.

CHIP means affordable healthcare for 9 million children. On average, a family of four pays $158 per year in premiums and deductibles for each CHIP-enrolled child. The same family would likely pay more than $1,000 in annual out-of-pocket costs on a commercial insurance plan, even after counting available financial help. That is a difference of more than $800 per year for millions of families across the country and represents real affordability.

Because of CHIP, children have a medical home. In fact, more than 90 percent of Washington children with CHIP coverage visited a primary care

provider at least once in 2014, the most recent year in which data were available. CHIP also provides kids with benefits that are often more comprehensive than those offered in the commercial insurance market, including immunizations, periodic screenings, hearing exams, and dental care. We know that prevention and early detection are key to reducing the burden of disease and health costs. CHIP emphasizes these early interventions during the critical early years of a child's life, helping kids grow up to be healthy, productive, and successful adults.

Yet, despite CHIP's near-universal popularity and lack of partisan controversy, this Congress has allowed CHIP to go unfunded since October 1, 2017. This long and unprecedented lapse threatens CHIP's very survival. Already, it has thrown States, including Washington, into crippling uncertainty and administrative disruption. Some States have been forced to send letters to CHIP families informing them that their coverage will end. Moreover, if Congress fails to extend CHIP, my State will be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars to make up for Congress's failure to act.

Next, I would like to highlight the urgent need to reauthorize funding to community health centers.

Community health centers are a bedrock of the healthcare safety net and are the preferred medical home for tens of millions of working Americans. Washington's 26 community health centers serve 1 million people in every corner of my State, from Spokane to Seattle, Omak to Port Angeles.

Community health centers are a lean and efficient healthcare delivery model, focusing on primary care, prevention, case management and social services for their patients. They are also good for the economy, supporting more than 9,000 jobs and $1 billion in annual economic output in my State alone.

The Community Health Center Fund, which comprises the majority of these health centers' Federal funds, expired on October 1, 2017. As a result, community health centers in my State are at risk of having to turn off the lights and turn away patients. Already, the expiration of the Community Health Center Fund has threatened these centers' ability to retain and hire nurses and doctors and make financial arrangements for the coming year.

The Community Health Center Fund was enacted in 2010 so that millions of newly covered Americans would have a medical home. The fund is doing just that. Moreover, the Community Health Center Fund was extended with strong bipartisan support in 2015, when an overwhelming majority of the House and Senate, myself included, supported its extension as part of the Medicare and CHIP Reauthorization Act, MACRA. It is past time for Congress to extend this program without delay.

In addition, Federal funds have been allowed to expire for a number of additional but equally important health programs. All enjoy a history of strong bipartisan support. These programs include the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program, the Special Diabetes Program, the Teaching Health Center Program, and certain Medicare provisions.

The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting--MIECHV-- Program is an evidence-based grant that is helping States and Tribes improve early childhood and maternal health. MIECHV-funded home visiting programs, which are voluntary, have benefited 1,650 Washington families in 15 counties and have reduced in half the likelihood of child abuse and neglect. MIECHV is a prime example of evidence-driven policymaking that is improving the health and well-being of vulnerable mothers and children. It is also strongly bipartisan. Unfortunately, MIECHV's Federal funding expired on October 1, 2017.

The Special Diabetes Program and the Special Diabetes Program for Indians are modest investments with a proven track record of combatting diabetes. As a senior member of the Senate Diabetes Caucus, I recognize that diabetes is a leading cause of death and a major driver of healthcare costs. In particular, the Special Diabetes Program for Indians supports 27 community-driven grant programs in Washington's Tribal communities, helping Tribal members prevent, diagnose, and manage this condition through lifestyle changes, counseling, and treatment.

The Teaching Health Center Program is also a small investment with a big return. Teaching Health Center funds are currently being used to train 722 primary care medical residents in 27 States and the District of Columbia. Data show that many physicians eventually practice close to where they train, and the Teaching Health Center Program is training physicians where they are needed most. In Spokane, Toppenish, Tacoma, Yakima, and Auburn, Teaching Health Centers are training a new generation of safety-net physicians to serve those most in need. While the Teaching Health Center Program has received a short-term extension, its funding will expire on January 1, 2018, if Congress does not act.

Lastly, several temporary Medicare provisions have expired and must be renewed. These provisions help rural Medicare patients get hospital, ambulance, and home health services where they live. Additional Medicare ``extenders'' prevent essential services like physical therapy from being arbitrarily capped for Medicare patients. Extending these provisions is important to preserving healthcare access in rural Washington State and empowering our healthcare delivery system to continue to improve and innovate.

The programs I have highlighted and many more are vital to my constituents, my State's economy, and our healthcare delivery system. They are also strongly bipartisan. I call on my Republican colleagues to work with us in a good-faith negotiation to extend these programs immediately.