Floor Statements

Mr. President, I wish to recognize the 90th birthday of Albert Ratner on December 26, 2017. Albert has lived a life of faith and service. Whether as a loving father, life-long philanthropist, or a successful businessman at Forest City Realty Trust, Albert has worked tirelessly for his community.

Over his career, Albert has shown a particular passion for giving back to the Jewish community, improving our schools, and supporting innovation at the community level.

In Denver, Albert led the charge to transform the Stapleton Airport into a thriving community center with high-quality, affordable housing, green spaces, and new schools. Among those schools is Denver's Science and Technology High School, which has attracted many brilliant students over the last 13 years. Albert's work to revitalize downtown areas across the country have earned him numerous awards, including the National Building Museum Honor Award, the Urban Land Institute's J. C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development, and the Michigan State University's Distinguished Alumni Award.

Albert is the proud father of Deborah and Brian, who follow his lifelong values of service, community, and faith. He is also a loving husband to Audrey, his wife of 36 years, and before that, to his first wife, Faye, who tragically died in an automobile accident. On Albert's 90th birthday, we celebrate his accomplished life, one defined by good humor, compassion, family, and faith.

Mr. President, in 2008, the Senate took up the question of whether to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wasn't here at the time, but I remember the issue prompted a rigorous debate.

The Senate spent months on the topic. Experts weighed in, and the American people had a chance to share their views in a fairly open process.

It is worth pausing to recall the context for that discussion. In 2008, America produced nearly 7 million barrels of oil a day and imported another 12 million. The price of oil was roughly $150 a barrel. There was talk about the world hitting ``peak oil.''

In that context, one side claimed that drilling in the Arctic Refuge was needed to boost domestic production, reduce foreign imports, and lower prices at the pump. The other side countered that any economic benefit from drilling was far outweighed by the need to preserve the Arctic Refuge, a jewel of our public lands, a vital habitat for wildlife, and a sacred place for the Gwich'in people--a place so sacred they are reluctant to even enter it.

In the end, after weighing the facts and considering the costs, 56 Senators, included 6 Republicans, voted to protect the Arctic Refuge from drilling.

That was 2008. Now fast forward to 2017. The Arctic Refuge remains a jewel of our public lands. It remains a vital habitat for so many flora and fauna. It remains a sacred place for local tribes, and one of America's most spectacular wild places. The case for preservation has not changed.

By contrast, the case for drilling has never been weaker. Compared to 2008, domestic oil production has nearly doubled. Oil imports are down 22 percent. The price of oil has fallen 50 percent. Terminals we built to import oil and gas are now being used to export oil and gas.

For all these reasons, unlike 2008, oil companies are not clamoring for more opportunities to drill. Just last week, oil companies had the chance to bid on 10.3 million acres open for drilling in Alaska. In the end, less than 1 percent of the land was leased.

Think about that. We are not even using all of the land now available for drilling in Alaska. It defies reason that we would open up even more, especially in a place as treasured as the Arctic Refuge.

All of this is to say that, if it made little sense to drill in 2008, it makes no sense to drill now.

So it should surprise no one that the other side doesn't want a real debate. That is why they tucked this into their massive tax bill, hoping to sneak it in under the hood.

Their justification? We need revenue from the oil to pay down the deficit that we are creating with this tax bill.

There are two problems with that. First, the Congressional Budget Office found that, because of low demand, revenue from drilling would be far less than projected, potentially hundreds of millions less.

Second, the only reason we are having this conversation is because the other side wants to spend $1.4 trillion on tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

Consider this: Their plan spends $37 billion to give an average tax cut of $64,000 to those lucky enough to make over $1 million a year.

To help pay for that, we are about to drill in one of the most stunning places in America.

I am not opposed to oil and gas production. We need transition fuels as we move toward low-carbon, renewable energy. I also recognize that, for many small towns across America, the oil and gas sector is a rare source of steady, high-paying jobs.

In Colorado, we have managed to increase energy production to meet our growing demand. But we have done so in a way that protects our public lands and creates jobs, for those in oil and gas and our thriving outdoor economy. We have found a way for all sides to win.

If my colleagues from Alaska want to increase energy production, create jobs, and spur growth, I stand ready to help, but let's not pretend that drilling in the Arctic Refuge is the only way to do that.

There are places in America where you can set up an oil rig, lay down

roads, and run pipelines in responsible way. The Arctic Refuge is not one of those places. It is a treasure we should leave for our children, not a place to drill for no good reason.

Sadly, the Senate voted to allow drilling in the Arctic Refuge when it took up the broader tax bill.

For every American who opposed this move, know that this isn't over.

Senator Markey and I have authored a bill, which now has 41 cosponsors, that would shield the Arctic Refuge from drilling.

So I urge everyone to keep fighting, to keep speaking out for America's public lands, which are the envy of the world, to keep standing up for the beautiful places in America we must pass on to the next generation, as our parents and grandparents did for us.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor tonight, once again, to talk about this tax bill being rushed through the House and the Senate. This is the first time in 31 years that a tax bill of this magnitude has been considered. I don't refer to this as tax reform because it is barely reforming anything.

It seems a shame that we didn't follow in the footsteps of what then- President Reagan chose to do when he had the opportunity to reform the Tax Code. The bill he worked on, which was every bit as consequential as the one in front of us, commanded the vast majority of votes in this Chamber--Democrats and Republicans voting together--after years of process, years of committee hearings, years of hearings even out in the country, listening to business owners, economists, and citizens talk about what they thought our

Tax Code needed to be competitive and to be fair to the American people.

I would say through the Chair to the pages that I was in college when the last bill was passed. Now, 31 years later, we are on the verge of passing a bill in the Senate without one Democratic vote--not a single one--and without a single hearing in the Senate Finance Committee, on which I serve--not a single hearing about the text of this bill, not a single hearing to tell the American people that, on the individual side of this bill, we are borrowing $34 billion from our kids to give a tax cut to the 572,000 taxpayers who are fortunate enough to make more than $1 million a year. That is 572,000 taxpayers who are fortunate enough to make $1 million a year. We think it is so essential that each one of them get a $59,000 tax cut that we are willing to borrow that money from our children to do it. We can't think of a better use than that.

A better use is not to give a tax cut to the middle class, because we know what those numbers look like in this bill. There are not a half million people who make $50,000 and less in this economy. There are 90 million people. Those people are not getting $34 billion. Those people are getting $13 billion. If we do the math, it adds up to about $160, on average, per taxpayer making $50,000 or less, in the first year. That is the best year. So 2019 is the best year. That $160 per taxpayer works out to about $7.50 a paycheck.

So we are justifying $34 billion going to 572,000 families because we say at the essence of this is a tax cut for the middle class that is worth $7.50. I think it is disgraceful to call this a middle-class tax cut. What is as disgraceful is the fact that we are blowing a $1.4 trillion hole in our deficit.

There are people on the other side--and I grant them this--who say we will grow out of this and that the tax cut will pay for itself. This is exactly what President Bush said in 2001, when he cut taxes. It is exactly what he said in 2003, when he cut taxes. Remember that when George Bush became President of this country, he inherited a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion. Then, he cut taxes and said it would pay for itself, in 2001. He cut taxes and said it would pay for itself, in 2003. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Not only did he not ask the American people to pay for those wars, but the 2003 tax cut actually came after the invasion of Iraq.

Today we have massive readiness problems with our military. Today we confront the potential for conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Today we confront uncertainties in the Middle East and behavior by Russia that we need to worry about. Are we going to go in debt to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut they are not asking for?

I am more sympathetic on the corporate side. I believe our corporate rate is too high. If we had worked in a bipartisan way, I think we could have gotten to a deal that 75 or 80 people would have voted for. That would have been beneficial for two reasons. It would have represented more widely the American people's view of what we ought to do here. I have heard the majority leader on the floor talking about partisan efforts like this, and how they are doomed to fail because most of the American people will not support it. We can see that in the polling numbers on this bill. But we could have cut a deal that said: Let's bring our corporate rate down to 25 percent. By the way, let's get rid of some of those loopholes. As for all of the stuff we said over the years about lowering the rate and broadening the base, let's actually do that.

That is not what this bill does. This bill cuts the corporate rate to 20 percent and leaves all of the loopholes in place. There is no broadening of the base. So if the effective rate today is actually in the low twenties, even though the published rate is 35 percent, the effective rate is going to be far below 20 percent if we don't actually reform the Tax Code.

I think there would have been bipartisan agreement about doing something with the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit, as my colleague from Florida has tried to do to a degree. I think there would have been bipartisan support for the idea that we ought to do something to repatriate the money stuck overseas and invest it here in the United States in infrastructure. But there was no effort to make a bipartisan effort here--none.

There have certainly been cases where Democrats have been guilty of that. This is a profound case of the Republicans being guilty of that, and the result is that they have a lousy bill that speaks to the extreme wing of their party rather than to the middle of America, because only in that way could you end up with a piece of legislation that the President is describing as a middle-class tax cut that is not one. Nothing about the math in this tax bill suggests it is.

By the way, the $34 billion I talked about does not include the estate tax. When we include the increase of the estates not subject to the estate tax in this bill, it adds, on average, another $10,000. Now we are talking about borrowing $69,000. So we are now borrowing an additional $10,000 from the sons and daughters of police officers, firefighters, and teachers in order to finance an estate tax cut that we will not pay for.

Pay for it. Don't borrow the money.

I got here 9 years ago at the depth of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Our economy had locked up. Because of the two tax cuts under President Bush, because of the two wars we didn't have the decency to pay for, and because President Bush passed so-called Medicare Part D--which is a prescription drug program for seniors that he didn't pay for--and then with the supply-side economics, they drove our economy into the worst ditch since the Great Depression.

When President Obama showed up, the surplus was not a surplus. It was a $1.5 trillion deficit. I was here when we tried to work in a bipartisan way to figure out how to respond to a terrifying circumstance--not for the Senate but for our country.

A woman who came to a townhall told me that her plan was to die sooner because overnight she had lost half of her net worth, and she didn't know how to make it through because the stock market had cratered and her pension was cut in half.

We had more than a 10-percent unemployment rate in the United States of America, and we couldn't get a single person to lift their finger on the other side of the aisle because they said that the deficit was too big. They said that President Obama was pursuing what the pollsters told them was ``job-killing government spending.'' Those were the words. It wasn't his $1.5 trillion deficit; that is what he inherited. He left with about a $550 billion deficit. It was cut by two-thirds.

Today, we stand here talking about this absolutely irresponsible tax bill. It is already at $666 billion. We have a government where we are collecting 18 percent of the GDP in revenue. It is actually about 17.9 percent before this tax cut goes through. We are spending more than 21 percent, and our answer is: Let's cut some more taxes, so we will be spending 17 and change. That is a big delta--17 to 21. That is a conversation we should be having together, not in pieces.

All of these people who say: Don't worry about it; it will pay for itself--remember what they said in 2001 and 2003. They said the same thing. They are going to show up here after this Christmas season has passed, and they are going to say: That is why we need to cut Medicaid and Medicare.

There is no doubt we have to have a conversation about the sustainability of these programs, and there is no doubt we have to have a discussion about how we are going to get out of the fiscal issues we confront. I have no doubt that the moment we face the next crisis, whether it is a national security crisis or an economic crisis, we are going to wish we hadn't passed this tax bill. We are going to wish that when this economy was at full employment, when interest rates are what they are, that we had thought about how to come together in a bipartisan way and actually do something responsible for once.

There is a mayor in Indiana who sent an op-ed piece to the Washington Post last week. He said: Let me break this down for you in terms of my local community. The equivalent of what the Republican tax bill is for my community would be that we would go out and borrow $400 million, which is a staggering sum, not billions and billions of dollars but, on the basis of the size of their government, $400 million--four or five times what our indebtedness is today.

Then, what I would do is say: We didn't borrow this money to build infrastructure. We didn't borrow this money to make sure we end poverty in my community or to make sure the water is clean. We gave it to the people in the biggest houses, the richest neighborhoods in our community, hoping that somehow the benefits would trickle down to everybody else.

He said that they would be run out on the rail--and they should be.

There are some politicians who say that it will pay for itself. There is no economist who has said that this is not going to create a deficit. There is probably a consensus, around $1.4 trillion--I have seen some math that says $1 trillion, and others that say $2.5 trillion. Let's take the $1.4 trillion and consider, as an order of magnitude, if we didn't care about our deficit--which apparently we don't anymore--what else we could spend the money on besides giving this tax cut to the very wealthiest Americans in our country.

In the 9 years I have been here, we have gone from no opioid crisis to an opioid crisis that is killing 50,000 Americans. There are communities all over our States, especially in rural parts of the States, where we have no answer. We have provided no additional treatment, even though we have an emergency today that we didn't have before. That is not the America I grew up in. That is not the America our parents and grandparents set up for us. Look at what you can do to create treatment in every United States county for 10 years. That is this $60 billion. That is this little orange part of a $1.4 trillion hole in our deficit. That is one thing you could do.

Another thing you could do would be to provide universal pre-K for low-income children for a decade. That might be worth borrowing from the next generation for because they would actually be getting a benefit. They are not getting any benefit from this $59,000 that we are giving to people who make more than $1 million a year.

You could double Federal funding for research and development on clean energy for over a decade. You could maintain our technological advantage over China in emerging industries for a decade. That is a huge concern. That would be $50 billion, just this little slice--a foregone priority if we pass this bill, just like the response to opioids. You could fund a 20-man mission to Mars. Because of our fecklessness, we can't even put an astronaut into space without putting them on a Russian rocket. That has nothing to do with our lacking the engineering talent. That has nothing to do with our lacking imagination or, for some of us, a sense of mission. It has to do with the fecklessness of this Congress and the inability of it to walk and chew gum at the same time.

We could repair all of America's aging dams, which our parents and grandparents were thoughtful enough to build for us but which we feel we don't need to maintain for the next generation of Americans. We would rather give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America.

You could end the backlog of infrastructure repairs in America's airports--end it. Five years of funding, that is only $100 billion. I say ``only.'' That is a huge number, but not compared to $1.4 trillion.

You could end the U.S. Air Force pilot shortage. Why do we have a shortage of Air Force pilots? Because this place, for 9 years, has run itself on continuing resolutions. The military can't plan, so we have airplanes that are being scavenged for parts and cannot fly. If they can't fly, the pilots can't get the training hours. If they can't get the training hours, they can't move ahead in their careers, and they can't be ready when the battle comes. You could easily pay for that here.

You could fund the first 5 years of the Navy's plan to build a 355- ship fleet. Everyone around here walks around saying: We don't have any money; we are broke. It is matter of choices and priorities. I cannot think of a set of priorities less out of whack with what Republicans think of in Colorado, much less our Democrats and Independents.

Here is one we really do care about in Colorado and all across the country. You could pay for all deferred maintenance at our national parks and other land management agencies. That is right here, this tiny purple square--$19 billion. If you look at the bottom right, that includes over a dozen priorities for rural communities that have been kicked around by this Congress and our CRs year after year.

Here are a few things that fit in there. Extend high-speed internet to every rural community in America. That might be a good use of money or a good reason to borrow money--to extend high-speed internet to people who don't have it. This is a world where telling a kid in a rural school that they don't have access to high-speed internet is no different than telling them: Sorry, you are not getting textbooks, but these other kids do.

We could reimburse rural areas with significant public lands for lost tax revenue, the PILT payment.

I promise my colleague from Pennsylvania I am coming to the end. I know he doesn't believe it.

These PILT payments are a pain point for my rural counties. Every year we go through the same nonsense at the end of the year. Every single year they say: Is it going to be funded in the CR? They are using it to pay for something else. Yet it would cost a tiny fraction of just the rural priorities part of it. That is $111 billion for all the rural priorities. Eliminating the national backlog for the USDA rural water program--can you imagine what that would mean for rural America and economic development in rural America? They wouldn't have to wait for someone in New York to trickle down to them because they would have an investment in their community. It would create jobs. It would allow them to do economic development and keep their children in their communities and their schools open and their banks open. That is not a priority for the people writing and voting for this bill.

President Trump cut Essential Air Service in his budget--zeroed it out. We could fund Essential Air Service for 10 years, providing a critical economic lifeline to small towns across America and in my State.

We could fund the U.S. Forest Service fires suppression for a decade, so they wouldn't have to keep cannibalizing other parts of the budget. This year, for the first year, they spent more than half of their budget fighting fires because we don't have the sense to budget them so that they can do fire mitigation. Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.

In Colorado, we could clean up the Gold King Mine spill, fund the Arkansas Valley Conduit to provide drinking water to some of the poorest areas in Southeastern Colorado, which we have been promised since John F. Kennedy was President of the United States.

We could do everything I just mentioned, all of these investments-- infrastructure, research, public health, housing, national security, and rural communities--for the cost of this tax plan. This is yet another illustration of how profoundly Washington's priorities have decoupled from the priorities of the American people. Beyond that, this bill confirms every other suspicion about how Washington operates.

President Trump ran for office saying that he would drain the swamp. This tax plan is a creature of the swamp. It was jammed through with last-minute changes, scribbled by hand in the dark of the night, with 2 a.m. votes--shameful, 2 a.m. votes on legislation that no one had a chance to fully understand. There was input from lobbyists on K Street but not a single hearing where the American people could express their view.

Given the process, it should surprise no one that the bill substituted the priorities of the American people with a litany of carve-outs and loopholes that powerful special interests have gotten into this bill.

I am going to skip this part because I want to yield to my friend from Pennsylvania, but let me just finish by saying that today, incredibly in America, the top 10 percent of earners take home more than half of America's income. We have not seen that since 1928, the year before the Great Depression. I know the President knows these folks as well as I do. Everybody on this chart is working hard, whether it is the top 10 percent or the bottom 90 percent, but this is not the way our economy ought to work. For almost all of our history, this is not the way it did work.

I was a businessperson before I came to Congress, before I was a school superintendent. I have nothing against

anyone who has done well, but it is preposterous to suggest that the real problem in our economy, when we have a record stock market and record income inequality, is that wealthy individuals and businesses don't have enough.

My final chart is this chart, which shows median household income. Since 1980 until now, the cost of housing, cost of higher education, and cost of healthcare--we have done nothing to address or help this. We have turned our back on this.

I think we could have written a bill, as I said at the outset, that had a real middle-class tax cut in it, but we chose not to do it.

Last year, I met a mom in Rifle, CO, at an early childhood center. In the course of our conversation, she said to me: ``I've got a job so I can have health insurance, and every single dollar I earn goes to pay for this early childhood center, so I can work.''

That is the story of too many people in my State. My State has one of the most dynamic economies in the United States of America, and still too many people whom I represent are middle-class families whose incomes haven't really gone up, not over 10 years but since 1980, for whom the cost of housing, cost of healthcare, cost of higher education, and the cost of early childhood education have conspired to create for them impossible choices that their parents and grandparents never had to make.

Tax reform should have been the opportunity to have addressed that. It should have been a chance to remind that mom in Rifle that our government or at least someone in our government understands the struggles she faces and has the capacity and the will to help to do something about it. This bill squanders that opportunity. This tax bill squanders it. Worse than that, it reminds Americans of the vast space between their lives and the priorities in Washington. It reminds them of the yawning gap between their voices and the voices of powerful special interests.

We should reject this bill. It fails on the merits. We should reject it because the bill makes a mockery of how our government should work. There is still time to set aside this legislation and do bipartisan tax reform. I know the other side may believe that it has to forge ahead for a political win, but I would ask, at what cost?

As with so many actions around here, we have put it on the next generation of Americans. We have kicked all the hard choices to them ever since I have been here. We have told them that we are going to continue to live in the house of our democratic Republic but that they are going to pay the mortgage. We are so fortunate that our parents and grandparents didn't behave the way we have--they had the decency to look ahead and think of those to come. We have enjoyed years of peace and prosperity in this incredible country. I think, tonight and this week, it is worth all of our asking, will our children be able to say the same of us?

I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for his indulgence.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, 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 ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, just this morning, a newspaper here on the Hill had an article with the headline ``Experts find tax plan riddled with glitches.'' That is because, without a single hearing on the legislation, last week the majority rushed through a complete overhaul of America's Tax Code for the first time in 31 years, and we never had the opportunity to have full consideration of the merits of the proposal. We have now discovered that they have even screwed up the research and development tax credit, which is something American businesses rely on every single day.

This process, I am sad to say, was no accident. Had we had time to digest and debate this bill in the full light of day, it would have never withstood public scrutiny. My hope is that over the coming week or so, when the American public can actually see what is in this bill, it will not withstand their scrutiny.

Instead of making an honest case to the people, which they deserve, the proponents of this bill have sold this legislation not based on what is actually in this bill but with falsehood after falsehood.

First, they claim that the tax cuts wouldn't benefit the wealthiest Americans. Last week in Missouri, President Trump said:

This is going to cost me a fortune. . . . This is not good

for me.

That was entirely consistent with a conversation that I was part of-- which has also been reported publicly, so I am not revealing any confidences--when the President called in from Asia to a room full of Senators and said that this tax bill is so bad for the rich, that he had to throw in the estate tax on top of it in order to give wealthy Americans something, and he continues to perpetuate this myth in front of the American people.

The reality is that under this plan, the 572,000 taxpayers in America who are fortunate enough to make $1 million or more will have an average tax cut of $59,000. By 2027, 62 percent of the benefits in this plan will go to the top 1 percent--those with an income level of over $2 million. As I said on the floor last week, we are borrowing $34 billion from our children to give to the approximately 500,000 taxpayers in America who are lucky enough to earn more than $1 million.

The point I want to make today is, that claim is false.

They also say that this plan is focused on the middle class. Last week, President Trump said: ``The beating heart of our plan is a tax cut for working families.'' Under this plan, in the first and best year--and when I say ``best year,'' this means the year that the tables look the best for the Republican argument, for the sponsors of the bill. Every year after that, it gets worse. The 90 million taxpayers in America who make $50,000 or less will get an average tax cut of $160 a year. That is what they will get on average. Millions of middle-class taxpayers, under this bill, will actually see a tax increase if this law passes, and that number will grow over time. So it is not true that this is a middle-class plan. This is a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans masquerading as a middle-class tax plan.

They have passed around a few crumbs to the middle class and said: You should be satisfied with this. We promise you that you will benefit from the trickle-down benefits of the massive tax cut we are paying for by borrowing from our children.

The next thing they say is, we will supercharge economic growth, and that will lead to more jobs and higher wages. But today corporations are sitting on record amounts of cash. The highest income Americans are earning a larger share of income than at any point since 1928, right before this country fell into the Great Depression.

I was in business for a long time, and I believe in our capitalist system. I believe that people who do well and are successful are living the American dream. But the argument that these businesses and high- income households need a tax cut just doesn't add up.

On the other hand, most Americans have not had a pay raise in a generation, even as the cost of housing, healthcare, childcare, and higher education climb ever out of reach every year. Helping these Americans is not only the right thing to do, but if you want to jump- start the economy--these are the customers who shop at businesses--this bill does nothing to address their needs.

Bank of America recently surveyed companies to ask what they would do with their tax cuts. A vast majority said they would use the money to pay down their debt and buy back shares. At least corporate America is being honest about what they will do with this bill, unlike politicians in Washington. Neither of that does much for workers. Maybe that is why, in the full glare of the TV lights--again, you can't make it up. It is not fake news. When President Trump's top economic adviser, just before we were having a vote on this bill, asked a room full of CEOs to raise their hands if they plan to reinvest the tax cuts, hardly any did. He asked, why aren't hands up? According to Goldman Sachs, the effect on economic growth in 2020 and beyond ``looks minimal and could actually be slightly negative.''

Fourth and finally--and this is the one that is in some ways most galling--they claim the tax cuts will pay for themselves. They said that in 2001 when George Bush first cut taxes, that it would pay for itself. It is exactly the same rhetoric we are hearing today--no difference. Some of the people are different. Some of the people are the same. Guess what. In 2001, after those cuts, the deficit rose. Then they cut taxes again in 2003, and the deficit rose.

I remind us all that when George Bush became President, Bill Clinton had left behind not a deficit but a surplus--a $5.6 trillion surplus projected over 10 years.

Every credible analyst who has looked at this bill has said these tax cuts will not pay for themselves. In the face of that history and in the face of the experts, they continue to maintain that they will pay for themselves.

It seems to me that if you think the best thing we can do with this money and the best thing we can do to deal with this massive deficit is to cut taxes for the wealthiest people in America, you should pay for it. Pay for it. We can't get the Children's Health Insurance Program passed--which is a drop in the bucket compared to this--because it has been hard to find a pay-for. We can't get the disaster assistance that so many of our States need because it is so hard to pay for. If you have conviction that this really is going to do what you are going to say it is going to do, pay for it. Don't borrow the money for this.

If we are actually going to borrow $1.4 trillion from our children, then it would seem to me that we should have the decency to at least invest in their future.

It seems Washington has the money to spend $83 billion to cut taxes on estates worth over $11 million--which is what they call the death tax, which now applies to estates worth over $1 million--but it can't lift a finger to do something about the fact that today in America, just 9 out of 100 kids born into poverty will complete college.

We apparently have the money to give the wealthiest Americans a $59,000 tax cut, but we don't have the money to extend reliable high- speed broadband to rural America, which would cost about $40 billion-- less than 3 percent of the entire cost of the bill.

Apparently, Washington has the money to borrow $1.4 trillion from our children, but we don't have $8 billion to pay for the Children's Health Insurance Program, which covers 9 million kids and pregnant women who cannot afford private health insurance.

We care enough, it seems, about special interest carve-outs that we made in the dead of night as a way of passing this tax bill by getting this vote based on that tax break and this vote based on that tax break, but we cannot lift a finger to tackle the opioid epidemic ripping across our country and claiming 50,000 lives a year.

Every year I come to Washington and hear from my colleagues on the other side that we don't have the money to prevent forest fires across the West, to keep rural schools open, or to find $400 million for the Arkansas Valley Conduit and bring clean drinking water to some of the poorest counties in Colorado. Now, they have spent $1.4 trillion not to invest in the health and opportunity of our communities but to fritter it away on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. If Republicans pass this flawed, partisan, budget-busting bill, do not ever, ever let them say to you that we don't have the money to tackle the challenges that are most meaningful to our communities.

We should have passed a bipartisan bill to begin with. We could have crafted a bipartisan bill. I believe the corporate rate is too high and isn't competitive. I believe that. I know there are people on the other side who, like Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Lee, believe we should increase the child tax credit for middle-class families and for families who are poor.

We had an opportunity, if we were faithful to the rhetoric I heard around this place for years, to actually remove special interest loopholes, focus on the middle class, and not add to our debt. For years, on the corporate side, I have heard people say we are going to broaden the base and reduce the rate. Instead, we are lowering the rate without cleaning up the code. A once-in-a-generation opportunity, after 31 years, and we say, you know what, we are going the leave those loopholes in place, and we are going to lower the rate. Forget about broadening the base.

The same thing is true on the individual side. It is adding complexity to our code. All this stuff that they are doing on these passthroughs is going to add complexity and require more accountants and more lawyers for people to fill out their tax return. This is all as a result of the majority wanting to go it alone. When you don't look for votes from the other side, it means you are going to be stuck with the most extreme wing of your party. When you don't have to make a compromise because you are reaching across the aisle, it means the people who are the most absolutist on your side get their way. That is what happened here.

Furthermore, there are no hard decisions made in this bill. This is another example of Washington, unlike county commissioners, city council people, superintendents, mayors, and Governors, who actually have to make hard choices year in and year out to make their budgets work--this place always finds the path of least resistance. Forget about broadening the base and closing loopholes. We are going to give you a tax cut because it is easier.

I really hope that over the next week, the American people learn what is in this bill. If they do, I think we will have the chance to defeat it and then pass a bipartisan bill, which actually cleans up the code, lowers the corporate rates to make it more competitive, and enhances the child tax credit to give the American people who work for a living a tax cut.

Do you know what else we could do? We could invest in our infrastructure to create American jobs here and be able to help ensure this generation of Americans does what previous generations of Americans have done, which is to invest in the next generation, to make sure they have more opportunity, not less. This bill is the worst of all worlds from the perspective of the high school students I met with before I came to the floor. Not only are we not investing in them, we are borrowing the money from them. This is no different than any one of us living in a house and sticking our kids with the mortgage. That is what is happening as a result of this bill, and we should defeat it.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wish to recognize and thank a dedicated community leader and civil servant, Charlotte Bobicki. She served as my regional representative in Alamosa, CO, and the San Luis Valley for 8 years.

Charlotte began her career as a first grade teacher in Albuquerque, NM. In the early 1960s, she taught second grade in Yellow Springs, MD, while her husband, Tom, served in the Army at Fort Detrick, MD.

In the late sixties, Charlotte and Tom returned to Alamosa, CO, where she was born and had attended college. Charlotte taught fifth and sixth graders at Alamosa Evans Intermediate School. She then worked with special education students before transitioning to Alamosa Middle School, where she taught math and science and served as the assistant principal. Later she became principal at Polston Primary School.

In 1997, Charlotte was elected as an Alamosa County Commissioner, where she served two 4-year terms. In 2005, Senator Ken Salazar hired her as his regional representative in Alamosa. When I was appointed to the Senate, I asked Charlotte to continue as the regional representative to Alamosa for the San Luis Valley, and she has served in that role for the last 8 years. Since

then, I have repeatedly relied on her counsel and deep knowledge of the valley.

Her relationships and devotion to the community have been invaluable, and I will miss her insights and perspective. It has been an honor to work with Charlotte, and I wish her a long and happy retirement. I know our friendship will continue for years to come.

Mr. President, on the matter that was being discussed--I am on the Finance Committee. There has not been a hearing on this bill, not a single hearing. A markup is not a hearing. People might say, well, why is that a big deal? Why is that relevant? Because a hearing is an opportunity for the American people to say whether they want this bill or not. A hearing is an opportunity for an economist to come to the Senate and say whether they want this bill. A markup is a chance for Senators to say what is on their mind, not for the American people to be able to say what is on their mind. That is what I am thinking about today.

I wanted to start my remarks with a little bit of a history lesson because this Chamber seems to forget what it has said, where it has been, and it is only if you have a case of terrible amnesia that you can support this legislation.

When Bill Clinton left the White House, he left his successor a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion. That is what George Bush inherited when he became President. The Senate was actually having hearings about what to do with the surplus and whether that surplus constituted some sort of threat to the economy. That is what he left behind. Then, George Bush, with this Congress, cut taxes in 2001. They didn't pay for those tax cuts. They didn't need to because they would pay for themselves. That is what they said. It is exactly

what they are saying today. It is exactly what they are saying today. In 2003, they passed another tax cut, and they didn't pay for it, but they said it would pay for itself. Incredibly, the 2003 tax cut came after we had invaded Iraq under a pretext by that administration. Not only did we never ask the American people to pay for those wars, we cut their taxes and put the burden on their children. That supply-side economics, which is exactly the same movie we are seeing today, resulted in the worst recession since the Great Depression.

We had a 10-percent unemployment rate when Barack Obama became President of the United States. Guess what else we had. We had a $1.5 trillion deficit, not a $5.6 trillion surplus--a $1.5 trillion deficit because of two unpaid-for wars, because of two tax cuts that weren't paid for that were going to pay for themselves, and because they passed something called Medicare Part D--the prescription drug program for seniors--that they didn't pay for. The minute Barack Obama became President, they said it was his deficit. They wouldn't lift a finger to help working people in America who had lost their jobs in the worst recession since the Great Depression, brought on by their own economic policies and by the fecklessness of some of the largest banks in this country. They wouldn't lift a finger.

Then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in 2011--this is in 2011-- ``Now, we've reached the point where our deficits and debts are so large they're suffocating job growth, threatening the wider economy, and imperiling entitlements.'' That is when we were in the depths a recession we had not seen since the Great Depression.

When Barack Obama left office, the deficit was about $550 billion. Today, it is $660 billion. As a result of this plan, J.P. Morgan was telling us, yesterday or the day before, that this will be the largest nonrecession-caused deficit in our history since World War II. What a disgrace. And for what? To give taxes to the wealthiest people in America.

This is an unusual thing to do, but I am putting up the Republicans' chart. This is their chart. The Senator from Pennsylvania is on the floor. This is their chart, where they are telling my farmers and ranchers in rural Colorado that they should be satisfied with these percentages they are giving them, these rate cuts they are giving them. You can't eat percentages. You can't feed your family on rate cuts. You can't run your farm or your ranch on rate cuts.

Do they think they are not going to get it figured out? Colorado's Republicans are too smart for this bill. They are too smart for this bill. So are Colorado's Democrats and Independents. Unlike us, they actually have to worry about the next generation of Americans. That is all they do. They know our politics is not up to that. It is not up to the aspirations they have for their kids and for their grandkids.

No piece of legislation could illustrate how right they are than this piece of legislation and the mistruths that have been used to sell--the President going to Missouri and saying: This is a middle-class tax cut. This hurts the rich like me.

No, it doesn't. What people are concerned about, and what they will be concerned about is, their aftertax income as a result of the changes that are being made, and this is the best year. I didn't bring out the worst year. This is 2019. This is what you are going to be getting. It is great if you are up here, and you are making more than $1 million-- where, by the way, I have not met a person who says they have cashflow problems that this tax cut is going to help them with.

I know a lot of people in Colorado--and I will bet you in Arkansas and in Pennsylvania--who are still struggling because middle-class family incomes have been flat for 20 years, and the costs of housing, higher education, early childhood education, and healthcare are forcing them to make choices that their parents and grandparents never had to make for their kids.

What a shame to be taking healthcare away from 13 million people in this bill, instead of trying to make the system better. This bill rejects all the testimony we had in hearing after hearing on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

This is my final chart. This is the math of this bill. This bill takes $34 billion a year--not 1 year, a year--in tax cuts and gives it to 572,000 taxpayers. You can't even see that. I know you can't see it on the TV. It looks like a pencil line because that is the scale. That is how few people there are in our economy--572,000 people getting $34 billion. If you include the estate tax, which I didn't here, it is $39 billion. It is $40 billion going to families who are lucky enough to make more than $1 million a year. These are the taxpayers who make $50,000 or less in our economy. There are 90 million of them, not 572,000. There are 90 million of them. They get $14 billion out of this bill. That is an average tax cut of $160--$7.50.

These aren't talking points. This is the math that is at the heart of the deal the Republicans have said is a middle-class tax cut. You know what is even worse about it? Just like the 2001 tax cuts, just like the 2003 tax cuts, they are not paying for it. They are borrowing the money from middle-class families all over the country, from the sons and daughters of teachers, firefighters, and police officers. That is who is going to have to pay back that bill. And for what? To end poverty in America? No. To invest in infrastructure or healthcare or to strengthen our safety net? No. To fritter it away on $34 billion worth of tax cuts for the wealthiest people in America.

I am going to close by saying this. Before I got here 9 years ago, I never would have believed that something this cynical could happen on the floor of the Senate. I wouldn't have believed it. Colleagues of mine who said for years that this is all just about getting to cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, I would say: No, it is not. People care about this. They want to sort out our fiscal condition. I was wrong. They were right. This is about that. That is what they are going to come back here and do. It is going to be really hard to withstand it.

President Trump, after all this for the last 10 years around here, since we were fighting, trying to fight out of the worst recession since the Great Depression--which we did, by the way--in the name of fiscal responsibility, we had fiscal cliffs; in the name of fiscal responsibility, we had government shutdowns; in the name of fiscal responsibility, we passed 30 temporary budgets that no school district in Colorado could get away with once. Have we managed to restore our fiscal health? No. Have we piled on more debt for our kids and grandkids? Yes. That is what is going to happen here.

It is no wonder, when we elected a President, somebody who told the American people--and was nominated by the Republican Party and elected by the United States of America--President Trump promised that he would eliminate our debt ``over a period of eight years''; that he would deliver ``a giant, beautiful, massive'' tax cut--that was supposed to be for the forgotten man. Unless the people making over $1 million are the ``forgotten man,'' he didn't deliver on that--pass ``one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history;'' while saying, ``I'm not going to cut Social Security . . . and I'm not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.''

There is a job that every American has to do for the next generation of Americans; that is, to leave more opportunity, not less, to the people who are coming after us. This bill that has been so falsely described and written in such a way that it actually denies the middle class in America benefits it really could use and does so by putting a bunch more debt on the backs of their children is something this Senate should reject.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I don't want to get in the way of my friend from South Carolina, for whom I have tremendous respect.

Point 1, nothing that I said was about anything other than real people. The real people in Colorado are going to be able to do this math, and they are going to know what it says.

Point 2, those 1920s that you mentioned ended up with, then, the worst depression since the beginning of the country, and we had the worst income inequality in 1928. Guess when the next time was that that happened. It was when George Bush handed over the keys to Barack Obama. That was the next moment in time, when he was leaving, that we had that kind of income inequality. That has not been fixed, and that is not being fixed by this plan. It is being made worse by this plan for all of the reasons that I said.

The final point that I will make--and then I will stop and get out of the way--is that, if you have this much conviction, at least you could pay for it. It would be nice for you to pay for it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, talk about the swamp. All of the folks who voted in this election do not have the swamp in Washington, DC--they are watching this happen right in front of their eyes tonight. We have a bunch of amendments that were dropped in by lobbyists here last night that we haven't seen, except that we received a list from them, and we have illegible amendments now at the desk that, even if we could read them, we wouldn't be able to. It just doesn't make any sense.

I will tell you something else that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense that, in our economy, 90 percent of our folks-- the bottom 90 percent--earned the same amount of income as the top 10 percent. The top 10 percent earned 50 percent of the income in this country, and the bottom 90 percent earned the other 50 percent. You can see the direction that these lines have headed over a number of years.

That is the issue that we confront in our economy. That is what we all should be working on in a bipartisan way to try to address. Unfortunately, instead of improving the circumstances for people in the bottom 90 percent of earners, the decision has been made, because of an economic philosophy that has to do with trickle-down economics, to give the benefits to the people who are doing pretty well--and not just pretty well but better than they have done since 1928, and we stated earlier today on this floor what a miracle the tax policies were in the early 1920s.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 2 minutes.

I thank my colleague from Pennsylvania.

In addition, we cannot afford to do this. Right now, we are collecting, before this tax cut goes into effect, 18 percent of our gross domestic product in taxes and revenue. We are spending 21 percent of our gross domestic product, and that leaves us with a deficit.

Because this place lacks the courage to deal with the issues that we must confront, unlike our parents and grandparents, we have hollowed out discretionary spending. We are spending 35 percent less than we were in 1980 as a percentage of our GDP.

Yesterday, we had testimony in the Armed Services Committee that we need a trillion additional dollars to modernize our defense. We know how dangerous this world is with what is happening on the Korean Peninsula and with what is happening in the Middle East.

Why was it OK for our parents and grandparents to invest in us, but we are unwilling to invest in the next generation of Americans? Not only are we unwilling to invest in them, but we are saddling them with the debt that has arisen from our inability to make proper decisions. We are doing it now in plain sight of budget projections that show that the money is just not here.

I think we have a decision to make as to whether we want to live up to the example our parents and grandparents set for us and whether we are willing to make the kinds of investments in the next generation that they were willing to make in us.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise to express my support for our renewable energy tax incentives. The production tax credit, PTC, for wind and the investment tax credit, ITC, for solar must remain intact as agreed to in this Chamber 2 years ago. These two credits are necessary to continue to create clean energy jobs in Colorado. Although the Senate tax package does not modify the PCT and ITC, the House version includes harmful changes to the existing credits.

During the Finance Committee mark up, I asked the majority if they intend to preserve the ITC and PTC credits in current law during conference. Senator Grassley stated that, in private conversations with the administration, it indicated it would preserve the bipartisan compromise on energy credits. I urge the leadership to retain existing law on the energy tax credits during conference. I take this opportunity to ask unanimous consent that our exchange from the Finance Committee markup be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I only have a few minutes of time on the floor so I want to be relatively brief.

I want to share with you a chart that shows what is actually happening as a result of this proposed tax bill. Here is what is happening. There are 572,000 taxpayers. That is about half a million taxpayers in America who are fortunate enough to make more than $1 million a year. As a result of this proposed plan, they will receive $34 billion in tax cuts. They will receive $34 billion in tax cuts this year, next year, and the year after that. That is an average tax cut of roughly $59,000 a person. That is $34 billion going to 572,000 taxpayers.

What about the middle-class people the Republicans claim this bill is about? There are 90 million taxpayers--not half a million--90 million taxpayers who make $50,000 or less. Do you know what they get under this bill? They don't get $34 billion. By the way, if you include the estate tax, that number is $39 billion, $40 billion. They get $14 billion. That is an average tax cut per taxpayer of $160 a year, and that is in 2019. That is the best year these guys have--after that, it goes negative--and $160 a taxpayer is equivalent to $7.50 a paycheck. So I suppose in 1 year, you could say there is a $7.50 tax cut per paycheck.

That doesn't sound like a tax bill that is a middle-class tax bill to me. These are the tax cut levels under the Republican plan also in 2019. This is the $59,000 number. If you are making between $40,000 and $50,000, you get $492. If you are making between $10,000 and $20,000, you get $48, and so on and so forth.

There is nothing middle class about this tax cut proposal. I was asked today by somebody: How could these Republicans go home and explain--in the States Donald Trump won--how could they explain they didn't vote for that tax bill, when I was saying: I think we still have a chance to defeat this tax bill. How can you say that? How could somebody go home? I can't wait to go home to rural counties in my State that voted 80 percent for Donald Trump--75 percent for Donald Trump-- and tell them I voted against this tax bill. My only regret is I will not be able to tell them I voted against it twice.

They are not stupid. People in Washington think that somehow by selling something based on percentages or selling something based on rates, people aren't going to understand what is actually happening to their aftertax income. My farmers and ranchers will understand that. They voted for a guy who said he was going to Washington to drain the swamp. They voted for a guy who said he was going to go to Washington and not help the rich people--or the rich, as the President says. They voted for a guy who said he was going to defend, support, and fight for what he called the forgotten man.

It turns out that when the rubber hits the road, we see the same movie that was happening before he got here--unless you want to argue that the forgotten man is making more than $1 million in an economy where people at the top earn more of that economy than they ever have, at least since 1928. If you want to make that argument, you can. My farmers and ranchers will not believe you. They will not believe that argument. This is a disgraceful bait and switch.

Wait until you have to tell them that in order to make that tax cut for the wealthiest people in America, you are going to borrow the money from their children. You are going to borrow the money from the children of people here to pay for the tax cuts at this end. You are going to borrow the money from teachers' children, and police officers' children, and firefighters' children. You are going to blow a $1.5 to $2.5 trillion deficit. Today, J.P. Morgan came out and said this will result in the largest nonrecession deficit this country has ever had since World War II. That is what J.P. Morgan said.

We do have problems in this economy. In Colorado, we have problems because even though we have one of the most dynamic economies in the country, middle-class families are still having a hard time paying for early childhood education. They are having a hard time paying for housing. They are having a hard time paying for higher education, which this bill makes even worse. They are having a hard time paying for healthcare, which this bill makes even worse. You can't even make it up. They are taking healthcare away from 13 million Americans in a tax bill, and the Congressional Budget Office tells us that because of the tax cuts they are producing for the wealthiest Americans, there is going to be an automatic cut to Medicare of $25 billion in January.

So I say, let's go after those 80 percent Trump counties and 70 percent Trump counties in Colorado and have a debate. They are not going to like what is in this plan. They will hate what is in this plan. It is the opposite of what they were told they were voting for.

I would implore my colleagues--before I yield the floor--that we stop this. Let's stop this bill. This bill doesn't deserve to be on the floor of the Senate. It is a disgrace. There was not a single hearing in the committee of jurisdiction--the Finance Committee--about this bill. There was not one hearing about a bill that touches every recess of our economy. It touches every household in our economy.

It has been 31 years since we did tax reform, and back then we did it right, in a bipartisan way. This time, we don't even have the decency to have a single hearing so the American people can hear what is in this bill and make a judgment about whether it is a good bill or not a good bill.

I am telling you, I know what they are going to say when they know what the details are. We should stop this, and we should work in a bipartisan way.

My colleague from Florida is on the floor. I know how important the child tax credit is to him and my colleague from Utah. It is important to me too. That is the basis for a deal.

I believe the corporate rate is not competitive with the rest of the world. That is the basis for a deal, but borrowing money from middle- class taxpayers to finance $34 billion in tax cuts for 572,000 people is not a basis for a deal.

The American people are not going to be fooled by this. They are too smart for this.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, all year the majority has tried to ram through legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with proposals that, in effect, cut healthcare for millions of people to finance tax cuts for those who make millions of dollars in income. All year the American people have made it perfectly clear that this was the opposite of what they wanted. Fortunately, those repeal efforts failed.

Now, instead of listening to the American people and learning from that failure, the majority has doubled down on its tax plan. Like healthcare, they have made no attempt to bring both sides together. In the Senate, we only saw the bill last Thursday. I am on the Finance Committee. I have been on there for years. It wasn't even in legislative language on Thursday.

I remember back in the healthcare debate, 9 years ago, when people were saying: Read the bill. Read the bill. We came to the markup yesterday to offer amendments. There still wasn't a bill. There was not a bill.

Thomas Jefferson used to say--and it didn't happen--that he hoped that when these legislatures were put together in the U.S. Congress, you would have to introduce a bill and, then, it would take 365 days before it could be enacted into legislation. Maybe that is where the tea party got the idea in 2009. Where are they now? We have not had a single hearing on this bill.

Now they are marking up the most consequential tax policy in 31 years, one affecting every single American and moving around trillions of dollars in this economy.

Remember back during the healthcare debate when it was 16 percent of our economy and people were saying: Read the bill. You had better read this bill. There is not a school board in Colorado that would accept this process. There is not a city council that would accept this process. We have more process for a small decision about where parking meters should go than we have had in this process.

People are upset for good reason. When you rush big things, when you don't listen to different views, you get bad policy. I have heard the majority leader say that on this floor.

There is a reason why they are trying to rush it through. There is a reason why they don't want America to have a chance to read the bill or for their representatives to this Chamber to read the bill. That is because, just like the healthcare proposals they made, the majority's tax plan is fundamentally flawed. Over the course of the campaign, President Trump--then Candidate Trump--promised the American people: ``No cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.'' That is not fake news. That is what he said.

He said that ``everybody's got to be covered,'' speaking of health insurance.

He said:

Everybody's got to be covered. . . . Everybody's going to

be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now.

He promised the public: ``You're going to end up with great healthcare for a fraction of the price.'' That is what he told the American people.

Yesterday, a year after the election, and after 8 years of saying repeal and replace, repeal and replace, repeal and replace, it turned out that, because there was no idea how to replace it--there was no consensus on the Republican side about how to replace it; they failed twice to do it until yesterday--they added changes to a tax bill, literally in the middle of the night, that would cause 13 million people, according to the Congressional Budget Office, to lose health insurance. It would increase premiums by up to 10 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office, on the individual market each year. You can't make it up. It would lead to a $25 billion cut in Medicare. That is what is happening here while people are distracted by what is going on in the Senate race in Alabama.

How does this proposal in any way square with the President's promises during the campaign? All year we saw tax cuts masquerading as a healthcare point.

I went home to Colorado and people said: Michael, you work with people in a bipartisan way all the time. Why aren't you working on this healthcare bill? There is no one in Colorado, including the critics of the Affordable Care Act, who said to me: Michael, I have a good idea for helping me with my healthcare: Give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut. Nobody came and said: Let's cut Medicaid by 40 percent when we are facing the opioid crisis that we are facing.

So they masqueraded it as a healthcare plan, and now we have a healthcare plan masquerading as a tax plan. On top of that, this plan doubles down on the claim that tax cuts for the wealthiest people in America and businesses not only trickle down to everyone else but also pay for themselves. That part is not surprising because that has been the Republican answer for what ails our economy.

When our economy was up and our deficit was down, they cut taxes for the top 1 percent of Americans, making an average of $2 million. When our economy was down and our deficit was up, they cut taxes on the top 1 percent, making an average of $2 million. Now, they are embracing exactly the same game plan in their tax plan.

The Senate bill overwhelmingly benefits people and businesses who have done extremely well in this economy. As a former businessperson myself, I have nothing against that success. In fact, I embrace that success. My issue is that trickle-down economics as a theory for economic growth has been entirely discredited by our own experiences. This is not a theoretical exercise anymore. It is not as if these arguments haven't been made time and again and then proven to be false. That leaves me to wonder why this plan or at least the version we debated yesterday--I am not as sure about it today--gives roughly $50,000 in tax cuts to those making over $1 million.

For Americans earning under $200,000, which is 19 million households, they would actually see a tax increase. Another 54 million households would see virtually no benefit at all.

I agree that America needs tax reform. It is not about a political imperative for doing tax reform. America needs tax reform. That is why I joined the Finance Committee. Tax reform means we should clean up special interest carve-outs.

I have to stop for a minute and pause on that point. For years, as part of the Gang of 8, as the Simpson-Bowles Commission came through and was crushed, and as there were bipartisan discussions, always what people said was that, on the corporate side, what we are going to do is to lower the rate and broaden the base. That was the plan. The way we were going to do that was by getting rid of a whole bunch of special interest loopholes.

What this bill does is to lower the rate, but it forgets about the second part of the equation. If you look at the broadening of the base, you actually have to take away someone's loophole, and that is hard to do. So instead, what they are doing is lowering the rate and leaving the loopholes where they are--what a disaster. It took 31 years to get tax reform in this Chamber, and that is the answer?

Today, if you don't like the situation, we have the highest published corporate rate in the world. I don't like that because that is uncompetitive for the United States at 35 percent. But one of the things we know about it is that, because of all those loopholes, very few people pay the 35 percent. Some do, and that is very unfair. The average effective rate is more like 23 percent, not 35 percent, and that is because companies can use loopholes. They can move money overseas. If you are a newspaper company or you are a trucking company here, you can't do that. That is why you pay the 35 percent. That is not fair, but this bill does nothing to take on those challenges-- nothing.

We need tax reform to get rid of those special interest carve-outs. We should take steps to help our businesses compete, to unlock our energy economy, and to modernize the electric grid. We need comprehensive and bipartisan reform.

This cannot be done. I want to give Republicans the chance to blame Democrats for things they don't like and Democrats to do the same, so we can actually get a result that is real reform, not something crammed through with 51 votes and a healthcare bill on top of it. It has been a terrible thing to see this Senate slide into the place where it is today.

Mr. President, I say to the Presiding Officer, I know enough about you to know that you are not satisfied with the fact that we have been running this government on 30 continuing resolutions for the last 10 years and that we can't pass a proper budget. We don't have an appropriations process anymore in the Senate. It is disgraceful. We would not accept it for any other institution of government or business on the planet. Certainly, we wouldn't accept it in Colorado.

When I was superintendent of schools, if I had told people: Well, we have a little bit of a disagreement; so I am going to shut the government down until we can deal with this continuing resolution, they would have thrown me out. But that is what we have been doing here for the last 10 years.

Now we have sunk to a new low. There has been no attempt to bring the parties together on this--none. The result is a deeply flawed proposal, completely at odds with what our economy needs.

If you accept the logic of the Republican plan, the problem with our economy is that the wealthiest institutions and individuals in the United States don't have enough money to invest and create high-paying jobs for everyone else.

Sometimes I hear people at home say: I don't have anything against rich people--neither do I. But the logic that somehow, if you give somebody at the top a tax cut, that is going to result in an increase to other people's income is completely contradicted by the facts.

Here is what has happened in America since 1987, over the last 30 years. This is the median family income. This is middle class in America, which basically for 40 years hasn't had a pay raise--has not had a pay raise. This can't be blamed on some Socialist who is named Barack Obama; this is 40 years of American economic history--no pay raise.

Over that period of time, here is what has happened to corporate profits. If the logic were true, if the logic were correct or right, we would see the middle-class income rising more and doing better as corporate income statements and balance sheets hit alltime highs, which they have. Shown here is the great recession. Here is where we are today. Here is where we were before the great recession. Here is median household income--stubbornly flat.

The balance sheets of the biggest companies in this country are awash in cash--awash in cash. It has not led them to help lift this line. The result of this has been a huge widening of the income gap in America.

If trickle-down economics really worked, every American would do better as incomes at the top rose. Instead, what has happened is that the top 10 percent, which is roughly 11 million people out of a total of 330 million people in America, are earning an average of $475,000. That top 10 percent now represents a larger share of America's wealth than everyone else.

Look at this. Here is the 10 percent. These are the folks who on average are making $475,000. Obviously, many people in here make a lot more than that, but that is the average. They now earn more than the bottom 90 percent of earners in America. That is not the way this country has been. You have to

go back to 1928--the year before the Great Depression--to see that level of income inequality in America. In between then and now, what we saw was a rise in the middle class, an economy that benefited everybody and lifted up everyone and gave them a chance to save and provide for their families. That is not happening anymore. The top 1 percent are earning about 20 percent of the income.

It seems to me that the challenge with our economy is not that the folks at the very top don't have enough. They have more than they have ever had by a lot. The top 10 percent have over 50 percent of the income in America. The bottom 90 percent--it seems crazy to even say bottom 90 percent. It is not the bottom 10 percent; it is the rest of America, it is 90 percent of America who earns less. That is the challenge we confront, the challenge that incomes for everyone else haven't kept pace with the rising costs of housing or healthcare or higher education or childcare.

Several months ago, I met a mom in Rifle, CO, at an early childhood center. That is on the West Slope of Colorado. She and the other moms were so happy that they had this early childhood center because before that, they had to drive 30 miles to Glenwood Springs for childcare. This mom said to me during the course of our conversation: ``I have a job so I can have health insurance, and every single dollar I earn goes to pay for this early childhood center so I can work.''

There are families all over my State who are stuck in that place, where at the end of every month, they have to decide what they are going to go without. They can't afford housing. They can't afford college. They can't afford early childhood education. Their not being able to afford housing is increasingly becoming a huge issue. There are too many Americans who are facing those unbelievably difficult choices.

Those of you who are here might say: Well, just tough it out. That is your issue. Work harder.

These folks are killing themselves. They are killing themselves, but they are having to make choices and decisions because our economy is not working well enough for everybody and not working at all for everybody. They are having to make choices their parents and grandparents never had to make.

Erin Barnes is another one of my constituents. She lives in Thornton, CO, with her husband and two kids. Both Erin and her husband have college degrees and middle-class jobs. They are working. They are educated. Erin works in marketing, and her husband runs an IT department.

Earlier this month, she wrote to my office, describing how they ``don't have luxuries like cable television, haircuts, lattes, manicures, or even new clothes. . . . My children all wear hand-me- downs from friends. And yet, we make $1,200 less per month than we spend. . . . It's not that we're irresponsible: our monthly mortgage payment is only 25 percent of our income. How are the pieces not fitting together?''

As the Presiding Officer knows, in America, consumer spending drives 70 percent of our economy. When costs rise and middle-class families' wages stay flat, families like Erin's cut back, forgoing books for their kids, birthday presents, healthcare. Multiply that across millions of Americans--the 90 percent we are talking about here--and that has a dramatic effect on our economy because they are the folks who drive the 70 percent of our economy that is driven by consumer spending. That is the problem we need to solve. That should be our focus for their sake but also to drive our economy, not folks who have done the best in the economy and who are doing great. I am glad they are doing great.

One way to help families like Erin's is the American Family Act, which I wrote with Senator Sherrod Brown, which triples the tax credit. Under our plan, Erin's family would gain $300 per child each month. Not only does the Republican plan largely ignore families like Erin's, it burdens her children with another $1.5 trillion in debt for the favor of doing nothing for them.

You will hear over and over again the Republicans' claim that their tax cuts pay for themselves. We heard that in the committee today. Anybody who has lived through what has happened since President Clinton was President of the United States knows that is false. It was the logic that was used in 2001, the logic that was used in 2003, and it is what took us from having a $5 trillion projected surplus--you don't hear that word around here very often--when Bill Clinton finished being President to the record deficits we have today.

Let me make sure I have the right chart up here. I do.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan signed major tax cuts and claimed they would pay for themselves. By the end of his term, our national debt had risen 62 percent.

In the 1990s, President Clinton raised taxes at the top and cut spending to balance the budget, and the economy boomed. That was with a Republican Congress, I was reminded today by Chairman Hatch--one of the truly decent people in this place.

By 1999, the U.S. Senate, believe it or not, actually held hearings on what to do with a $5.6 trillion projected surplus. I am not making this up.

I know that Democrats have a reputation for not caring about fiscal matters and that Republicans have a reputation for taking them seriously. I don't know how that happened, but that is not the history. That is not the history.

When George Bush was elected President, he passed two tax cuts, prosecuted two wars that were not paid for, and signed a $400 billion prescription drug benefit without paying for any of it. Medicare Part D--didn't pay for a dollar of it. The reason that today we collect $1 for every $3 we spend in Medicare is largely because of what was done under President Bush.

When President Obama assumed office, from day one, he inherited a $1.2 trillion annual deficit and an economy in free fall. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month, and unemployment was climbing to 10 percent.

Back then--and I was here--during the worst downturn since the Great Depression, Republican leaders all of a sudden remembered their conservative fiscal discipline, just when the American people needed their help the most. It was not when the economy was going well at the beginning of the Bush administration, not when we had a surplus, but when we had a $1.2 trillion deficit caused by the policies of the previous administration and a failure in the housing market. That drove us into the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Citing the debt that we had then, which Barack Obama had not put on the balance sheets of the U.S. Government, every Republican opposed President Obama's economic recovery package to stabilize our economy, and not only that, they called it a Bolshevik takeover of the United States of America.

Now, after inheriting a booming stock market and 4 percent unemployment, Republicans propose to add $1.5 trillion to our debt to give roughly $50,000 in tax cuts to those making over $1 million in this country--again, to this line, as shown on the chart.

Today, America's debt is over $20 trillion. We could face another economic downturn 4 months from now or 6 months from now or an armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula. The debt suffocates our ability to respond, just as it has suffocated our ability to deal with the opioid epidemic.

When I got here, there was barely an opioid epidemic in America, and over the last decade, it has flooded our country. But if you live in a rural part of my State, if you live in the San Luis Valley in Colorado, your access to addiction treatment is the same as it was 10 years ago because we are broke, because we can't work in a bipartisan way to deal with these issues. It is disgraceful, just as it was disgraceful to cut taxes in 2003 just after we sent our troops into Iraq. That was maybe the height of disgraceful.

When we know there may be something imminent on the Korean Peninsula, when we know the Middle East is in the turmoil it is in, is this really the moment we want to do this?

I will say this on this floor: If my colleagues vote for this plan, they forfeit any right to claim they are fiscal conservatives. And I am sad to say this--I really am; I think my colleague from Colorado would know I am telling the truth when I say I am sad to say this--but I have learned over the past 9 years that the only time the majority seems to care about fiscal responsibility is when they are not actually responsible

for it. In a sense, it is a devastatingly brilliant political strategy. You come to Washington arguing that the government is incompetent, then you explode the debt, then you point to the debt as evidence of Washington's incompetence. And here is how it all ended in 2016: You elect a President who promised that he would eliminate our debt ``over a period of 8 years,'' that he would deliver ``a giant, beautiful, massive'' tax cut, pass ``one of the largest increases in defense spending in American history,'' while saying, ``I'm not going to cut Social Security . . . and I'm not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.'' Why not, he told the American people, since our national debt can be solved by ``eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, ending redundant government programs, growing the economy,'' and ``renegotiating all of our deals.''

Here is the real problem. And I realize my colleagues are here. I am going to take a few more minutes, if that is OK.

Last year, two-thirds of the Federal budget went to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other mandatory spending. Of the remaining third, half goes to national defense. After interest on the debt, that leaves just 10 percent for all of our investments in the future--in our future and our children's future--in infrastructure, research, innovation, and education.

Over the years, because of the insanity around this place, Washington has slashed that part of the budget--which is called the domestic discretionary part of the budget--by 35 percent as a percentage of GDP. We have been really good at hacking on the stuff that is easy to get to.

This should all seem deeply unfair to Americans in their twenties and younger to know that we are investing--simultaneously, we are investing less in them than our parents and grandparents invested in us, and then we have the nerve to say you need to pay back the debt we accrued; we are not going to pay it back. We are not going to invest in you, and we are going to make you pay it back. We are going to live in the house, but you are going to be stuck with the mortgage.

When I served as the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, we had to make hard choices to close schools, to modernize curriculums, and to fix unfunded pensions. We had intense fights. Like here, people had strong and principled disagreements, but unlike here--unlike in Washington--in Denver, the next generation was cause enough for us to set aside our differences and move forward. We understood that our children had no voice in our townhalls. Their future had no votes at the school board meetings. They only had us to do it for them.

We have forgotten that here in Washington, in these marbled halls and on the carpeted floors of the Senate and the House. We have abdicated our duty completely to the next generation. Instead, we impose on them all the hard questions we fail to answer in our time.

We are burdening the future with our debts. We are burdening them with the hard choices we avoid, with the easy path we follow, with the baseless claims we accept that tax cuts for folks who are doing great somehow trickle down and pay for themselves. That is false.

If this plan passes, Washington will once again encroach on the rights of our children and our grandchildren to enjoy the same freedom and opportunity our parents and grandparents handed us. What a shameful legacy that would be. What a surrender of our responsibility as Americans.

We have to set aside this flawed proposal and this broken process and instead have an honest, bipartisan effort that contends forthrightly with the substantive challenges of our fiscal condition and the political difficulties attendant to solving them. I may be wrong, but I suspect what history will prove is, no meaningful solution can be found by one party alone.

I thank my colleagues for their indulgence, especially my friend from Missouri who is here.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, in recent months, Americans have been hit by a string of natural disasters--from devastating hurricanes in Puerto Rico, Florida, and Texas, to catastrophic wildfires in Oregon, Montana, and California. Earlier this week, the Senate voted to provide urgent relief to our communities in need.

Although Colorado was fortunate this year--we could have easily had fires, but we were very fortunate, unlike Montana, this year--we know the devastation of wildfires all too well. In 2012, the Waldo Canyon fire raged for 16 days, incinerating 18,000 acres, destroying over 300 homes, and forcing the evacuation of more than 32,000 Coloradans. Years later, our communities are still recovering from the damage.

Out West, wildfires can be catastrophic events. Yet Washington continues to fund them differently than other major disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods. When those disasters strike, we pay for emergency response from an entirely separate account. When a wildfire catches, that cost falls entirely on the U.S. Forest Service. If it is a catastrophic fire, as we see now in Montana and Northern California, those costs can easily exceed the Forest Service budget for fire suppression. That forces the Forest Service to borrow funds from other accounts to make up the difference. That is something no one has to do for any other disaster in America. This is often at the expense of efforts to prevent the next catastrophic fire.

It stands to reason that if we spend less and less on fire prevention, which is what the Forest Service is doing every year because of the way the Congress has set this up, we are going to spend more and more on fire suppression, fighting fires, and that is what is happening. That is exactly what has happened.

In 1995, the Forest Service spent around 16 percent of its budget on fire suppression--16 percent. Last year, it spent over half of its budget. For the first time in the Forest Service's history, they spent over half their budget fighting fires. You might as well call it the fire-fighting agency, not the Forest Service agency. In fact, the number was closer to 60 percent. The Forest Service had to borrow over half a billion dollars from other accounts in the agency--accounts that are important to Colorado, Wyoming, and Alaska.

While we replenished those accounts in disaster aid packages earlier this year, we once again failed to address why they were depleted in the first place. Until we do, we are going to find ourselves in the same position every year. This is no way to run a government. It makes no sense from a fiscal perspective, and it makes no sense from a public welfare perspective. This is not how we should manage our taxpayer dollars. Undercutting fire prevention is the definition of being penny wise and pound foolish. Every dollar we

spend on disaster prevention leads to $5 of savings down the road.

We need to reinvest in fire prevention and in forest mitigation. In Colorado, our forests are in terrible shape. And it is not just Colorado citizens who need to care about that; anybody who lives downstream of our rivers, which are States all across America, needs to care about the condition of those headwaters. Those headwaters that are owned by the public, entrusted in the Forest Service, are in terrible shape because of this Congress's inability to deal with this.

We have over 800 million dead standing trees in the State of Colorado alone. Our communities, our watersheds, and our infrastructure are at risk. The Forest Service knows how to do this. They know how to mitigate that--by thinning timber and managing prescribed burns. But right now, all of those projects are on hold because the Forest Service anticipates having to fight more catastrophic fires next season. This is ridiculous. This is an affront to the people of Colorado and the people of the West.

We have a solution. It is a simple solution. Let's pay for fire suppression the same way we pay for other disasters. Our bill, the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, would do just that. It is backed by seven Democrats and, I am very proud to say, by four Republicans. Unlike a lot of issues in Washington, both parties actually agree on the solution.

I know the administration is eager to fix this problem. Secretary Perdue knows that the current system makes no sense. He said as much at his confirmation hearing and again when he invited--and I so much appreciated this; we didn't ask--a bipartisan group of Senators to the Forest Service in September to discuss this. He knows that important wildfire mitigation projects are not getting done. He wants to fix the problem, and we should. It is far past time. This makes no sense from a fiscal point of view.

I know some colleagues in this Chamber would prefer to couple our proposal with broader forest management reforms. I have been part of forest management discussions in the past, and I want to continue those discussions. In fact, in the last farm bill, we worked across the aisle to improve forest management.

Let's be clear. For years now, efforts to link broad forest management reform with a funding fix have failed. They will not pass the Senate. Each year we do nothing, we continue to shortchange fire prevention, the good people who work for the Forest Service all across the country in our States, and we needlessly expose our communities to greater risks.

We have to act--Colorado and the West cannot wait another year--and we will have a chance when Congress votes on another disaster package over the next few months. We should use that opportunity to finally fix this problem and put the Forest Service in a stronger position to prevent the next catastrophic fire.

I thank my colleague from Wyoming for his patience and for his leadership on the Budget Committee.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wish to honor the remarkable life of Senator Gloria Tanner.

Throughout her career, Senator Tanner has excelled in the face of adversity and carried out her work with integrity, strength, grace, and humility. All of these qualities are rooted in a unique authenticity that she possesses, something that is seemingly lacking in today's politics.

Born in Atlanta, GA, in 1934, Senator Tanner witnessed the growth of the civil rights movement firsthand. She rose to become the first African-American woman to serve as a Colorado State senator and the second African American to be elected to a leadership position in the Colorado House of Representatives, where she served for five terms and as the chair of the minority caucus.

In 1974, Senator Tanner received a B.A. in political science and graduated magna cum laude from Metro State University of Denver. She subsequently received a master of arts in urban affairs at the University of Colorado in 1976 and graduated from the American Management Association Program for Women in Top Managerial Positions. She also graduated from the Women in Leadership Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Leadership College, Executive Education, Keenan-Flagler Business School at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Senator Tanner became active in politics when she moved to Colorado in 1960 in unison with John F. Kennedy's election. She has served many roles in government, ranging from an administrative assistant to the Office of Hearings and Appeals at the U.S. Department of Interior, the executive assistant to Colorado Lieutenant Governor George L. Brown, to an elected member of the Colorado House of Representatives. In the Colorado House, she has served as chair of the minority caucus. She was also elected president of the National Organization of Black Elected Legislative-Women and served as an executive board member and chairperson of the finance committee of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators. She has also served on the Colorado Black Round Table, as a member of the Women's Forum of Colorado, and finally, as a Colorado State senator.

Senator Tanner succeeded Regis Groff in 1994 and held a seat until 2000.

Within her 6 years of service as a Colorado State senator, Senator Tanner sponsored legislation on key issues such as marital discrimination in the workplace and worked tirelessly for civil rights for women and minorities and parental rights for adoptive parents. She was one of six legislators selected to serve on the powerful joint budget committee. In serving on the JBC, Senator Tanner secured a quarter of a million dollars to help restore the town of Dearfield, CO, which was originally created to assist former slaves and their families. She was a strong legislative advocate for women and children throughout her service as a senator.

In retirement, Senator Tanner continues to serve the public. In 2001, she established the Senator Gloria Tanner Leadership and Training Institute for Future Black Women Leaders of Colorado, FBWLOC. Senator Tanner believes the institute is ``essential to the well-being and growth of our community'' to identify, prepare, educate, and encourage Black women to take on leadership roles in the public and private sectors.

Senator Tanner's contributions to our community and State are abundant and unprecedented. Through all of her life experiences, she has continued to serve the American people with unwavering integrity and grace. A recipient of the Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award, her success is immeasurable.

We all owe a debt of gratitude and deep respect to Senator Gloria Travis Tanner for her life achievements and service to the people of Colorado. I thank her for her service to Colorado, our Nation, and I wish her the best in her future endeavors.

Mr. President, last weekend a man camped out on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. He stockpiled 23 weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He set up bipods and scopes. He brought a hammer to knock out the window. Then, on Sunday, he opened fire. He kept firing for 15 minutes, stopping only to reload and switch weapons. Over 15 minutes, he murdered 58 Americans and injured more than 500.

The day after the shooting, I was in Washington. I had seven or eight meetings, and not a single person in those meetings brought up the worst shooting in modern American history--not one.

I am not sure if it was two mass shootings ago or three when we started to accept this as a normal condition of American life, when we lost our belief that it was within our power to protect our fellow Americans at a country music concert or at a nightclub or at a movie theater or at a school.

I know there are strong beliefs about guns in America--principled beliefs--but there are also steps that the overwhelming majority of Americans want us to take. There are 90 percent of Americans who think we need background checks for every gun sale, including 74 percent of NRA members. There are 89 percent of Americans who think we should prevent the mentally ill from purchasing guns. There are 82 percent of Republicans who want us to bar gun purchases for people on the no-fly or terrorist watch list. Yet Congress has done nothing to respond to the American people. We did nothing after Aurora, after Newtown, after Orlando--nothing.

Unlike Washington, in Colorado, after the two mass shootings in Aurora and at Columbine, our legislators rose to the occasion and made tough choices after we suffered two of the worst mass shootings in our Nation's history. After the massacre at Columbine, we closed the gun show loophole. After the tragedy in Aurora, we strengthened our background checks in a Western State. Last year, those background checks blocked 8,704 people from buying guns. That may sound like a lot, but 380,000 people applied for guns in Colorado last year. That means just 2 percent of those folks who applied were blocked and that 98 percent were able to buy guns without a problem.

Who were the 2 percent whom Colorado is blocking but whom this Congress fails to block? Among them were murderers and rapists and kidnappers and domestic abusers.

No one could come to this floor and tell me Colorado is worse off because we have kept guns out of the hands of those people. The average wait time for those background checks is 12 minutes. That strikes me as a fair tradeoff to keep guns out of the hands of murderers and kidnappers and rapists. Yet here in Washington, despite now an annual tragedy--tragedy after tragedy--Congress has done nothing. We haven't even done the simple things like close the gun show loophole or stop people on the terrorist watch list from buying weapons.

This is not about taking guns away from people who have them. It is about keeping guns out of the hands of people who nearly everybody agrees should not have them. It is about stopping more people like the Las Vegas killer from modifying his rifles to become almost fully automatic and far more deadly. I cosponsored a bill this week to ban those modifications, and I am encouraged that some of my Republican colleagues seem to be open to that idea.

I know we cannot stop every madman or every random act of violence in this country--we cannot--just as we cannot stop every murder from happening, but that does not mean we should not make them less likely or that we cannot take steps to limit their harm, steps that are backed by the overwhelming majority of Americans and that are fully consistent with the Constitution.

I remember, after the shooting at the Pulse Nightclub, I was supposed to take my daughter to camp that day.

She was going to be away from us for a month. I can remember I did everything I could to keep her from hearing the news that day, as the numbers of fatalities increased during the course of the day, because I didn't want her to leave us--she was about 12 at the time--with a sense of fear, the fear I felt and the country felt. I am so sorry my children and America's children have to grow up in a country where mass shootings are common, where we are beginning to see them just as part of our lives.

I heard somebody the other day on television say that is the price of freedom. What a shame that somebody would say that in the United States of America. What a surrender that represents to our children and to the victims of these crimes. I didn't grow up in that America, but conditions have changed. We have let it happen. The result is, we now have an entire generation of Americans--of our countrymen, our sons, and our daughters--who are growing up with a reasonable fear that they could be victims of a mass shooting or that their moms or their dads might not come home one day.

I think our kids have enough to worry about. They have every right to see a movie with their parents, to go dancing with their friends, or to see a concert on their one night off without having the fear of being shot down by people who have no business carrying such powerful weapons. They have a right to expect that this Congress will finally do something about gun violence in our country--violence which is far greater than anywhere else in the industrialized world.

In the wake of these horrific acts, as always, Americans spring into action. First responders secure the area and care for the wounded. Neighbors hold vigils to honor the victims and support grieving families. Journalists shed light on what happened and why. Citizens speak out to demand action from their elected officials. They are doing their jobs, and it is time for Congress to do ours.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I am not sure exactly what those words mean, but I know it allows me to speak so I am glad to have done it.

I thank you for your leadership on the natural disasters we are having, particularly in Puerto Rico. There are 3.4 million American citizens who are living in conditions that nobody in this country should have to tolerate. They are without fuel, they are without food, they are without water, they are without energy, and they are without electricity. Some reports have said it is going to be months before that electricity is repaired. We have to do everything we can in this body to make sure these American citizens are supported and that they can rebuild, and I know the Presiding Officer feels the same way. We have to work together to do this.

Healthcare

Mr. President, that is not the reason I am coming to the floor today. I wanted to say a word about healthcare now that the decision has been made, apparently, to not even have a vote on this latest version of the repeal and replace bill. This was going to be, I think, the fourth time we had a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The House of Representatives, over the last 7 years, has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act somewhere on the order of 67 times or almost 70 times. They have gone back to their constituents year after year after year saying they voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act; that it was a Socialist takeover of the United States of America that they were trying to correct. They distorted what the Affordable Care Act actually was. I am not going to litigate that today.

It is clear, from my perspective in Colorado, whether people support the Affordable Care Act or whether they don't, it often turns on--not always--what party they are in or whether they supported President Obama or whether they didn't. I say not always because I get a lot of email and have people in my townhalls who aren't Democrats but who have preexisting conditions or whose children have preexisting conditions who have health insurance for the first time as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

Having said all that, whether they support the Affordable Care Act or whether they don't, in my State--and I bet it is true all over the United States of America--people are deeply dissatisfied with the way they interact and their families interact and their small businesses interact with the American healthcare system. They should be because it doesn't work very well. I am not talking about the Affordable Care Act. I am talking about the Affordable Care Act, plus our healthcare system. They are not the same thing, and we should be addressing that.

We should be addressing the costs in our system. We should be addressing the lack of transparency in our system. We should be making sure people in the richest country in the world have access to health insurance, but they also have to have access to quality care. In too many rural areas in Colorado--and it is true all over America--there are not enough primary care doctors, not enough primary care nurses. We are not delivering healthcare in those places very efficiently, and we are not delivering it well enough, especially when we know a lot of our veterans live in those communities, and we know increasingly there is a profound opioid addiction that needs to be dealt with.

After 7 years of saying repeal, repeal, repeal and then some years of saying repeal and replace, we have now wasted 7 months of the American people's time on an entirely partisan effort to try to pass two bills that could not have been more unresponsive to the critics of ObamaCare in Colorado, to say nothing of the supporters. So it is not a surprise to me that the last attempt failed, and it is not a surprise to me that people weren't even going to vote on this bill because it is such a terrible bill that they didn't want to vote on it. So they have withdrawn it, which is

good for the American people, except the people in Colorado are still facing challenges in healthcare, including challenges from the Affordable Care Act. There, I said it. I voted for it.

There are things we should fix, and one of those things is a problem that is common--I heard both Members of the Republican Party on the Finance Committee and Democrats on the Finance Committee yesterday at the hearing talk about it--which is the problem that people have in the individual market affording insurance. They say to me, as somebody who voted for the Affordable Care Act: Hey, Michael. You have required us to buy something--insurance because of the individual mandate--that in my area is too expensive because there is not enough competition of insurers, and the deductible is so high it is of no use to me and my family. Why would you make me buy something like that?

I think that is a completely legitimate criticism of the bill. It is important to recognize that when we are talking about this group of people who are very important, it is 7 percent of the population that is covered in America--7 percent. Ninety three percent of the people are getting their insurance someplace else--from their employer, from Medicare, from Medicaid. This is 7 percent we are talking about.

By the way, the issue around that 7 percent--not the people--the issue around that 7 percent, that is what has consumed our politics for the last 7 years. It is not how to make it less expensive for 100 percent of the American people, not how to make it more transparent for 100 percent of the American people, more predictable for 100 percent of the American people but what are we going to do to cover 7 percent. Of those, the folks who aren't getting subsidies, are about 1 percent of people who are insured in America. I say that not to diminish those people at all because they are struggling--and I meet them all the time in my State--I say it to show just how small that set of issues is and how easily they could be resolved by the U.S. Congress if we could work together instead of having this pitched battle about healthcare, instead of calling each other names and Bolshevik takeover and all the rest.

Fortunately, there is a solution that is being worked on not in the Finance Committee but in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. The two leaders of that committee--Lamar Alexander, who is the Republican chair, and Patty Murray, who is the Democratic ranking member, are among two of the finest legislators in this body. Time after time after time, even when Washington has not worked, they have managed to lead that committee to what Lamar Alexander refers to as a result. It has come to the floor after going through a process in our committee, an amendment process. It has come to the floor for an amendment process, whether we were reforming the FDA or rewriting the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which used to be known as No Child Left Behind. That bill actually got a unanimous vote in our committee--a committee that has on it Bernie Sanders from Vermont and Rand Paul from Kentucky. That is quite an achievement.

So I have absolute confidence in their ability to deal with this set of issues related to this 7 percent of our population. And I hope that bipartisan process will then become a model or a foundation for the work we need to do on healthcare going forward. We have to turn the page on the last 7 years or 8 years of these repeal votes.

From my perspective, having failed to repeal, the answer can't be to say: We will not help you fix the Affordable Care Act because if we participate in the process to fix the Affordable Care Act, it somehow legitimizes the Affordable Care Act.

You should not hold the position that if you fail to repeal, you can't fix it. If you are going to repeal it, repeal it. And I think we know where that has gone. If you are not going to repeal it, you better be part of fixing it, or you are going to own the problem.

There are a lot of people on this side who want to address that issue, and I believe there are a lot of Republicans who want to address that issue. We are now out of excuses for why we can't do it because Graham-Cassidy has been pulled, as it should have been because that bill, far from stabilizing our insurance system, would have actually made it worse, would have injected even more volatility.

Sometimes people say: Well, don't you think there is already volatility in the system? My answer to that is yes, I do. That is why we have to fix it. The last thing we need to do is make it more volatile. The last thing we need to do is make matters worse. We should stabilize it, based on the bipartisan testimony we have had in the HELP Committee.

The other thing it does--and the Senator from Minnesota is here, so I am going to stop--the other thing it does is it throws millions of people off of insurance. This is not a healthcare bill. It is not a healthcare bill; it is ``we are going to take your healthcare away'' bill. It couldn't be sustained in front of the American people. They wouldn't even vote on it because they knew how bad it was. We had no hearings before yesterday's Finance Committee. It is like watching ``Veep.'' It is not the way the government ought to work. So they have an excuse for a hearing. They decide to have the hearing. The Congressional Budget Office report, which we should have had months to look at, if not weeks, comes out in the middle of the hearing and tells us that millions of people are going to lose their health insurance as a result of this bill--flying completely in the face of President Trump's promises.

Let's get this short-term thing done, let's stabilize the individual market, which we need to do, and then let's address healthcare in a bipartisan way, and I will accept President Trump's goals for what it should look like. Let's make sure everybody is covered at a lower price, with higher quality. That is what he promised on the campaign trail, and we have the opportunity to deliver that if we are willing to work in a bipartisan way.

I know that is what people in Colorado want out of this place. They are so tired of the Affordable Care Act being litigated in this way, and it is clear that the repeal effort has failed. But that is not enough. We have to continue to fix the system. And I wish Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray all the best as we try to do this in the HELP Committee, and then I hope Democrats and Republicans will support that effort on this floor, and we can actually do something useful, after all of these years, for the American people and their families and their small businesses.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, might I interrupt?

I want to observe--I don't know how to phrase this question, but the Senator from Minnesota made such an excellent point about dropping this on the States. I hadn't made that point. That was one of the things that came up over and over again in the Finance Committee hearing, was that in the name of federalism, we were basically imposing on all of the States the obligation to decide that they had to reinvent their healthcare system over the next 2 years whether that was something they wanted to do or not. I am glad the Senator raised that. I also want to thank her for her leadership.

I yield the floor.