Floor Statements

Mr. President, I thank my friend from Oklahoma for yielding.

I wish to speak about the farm bill which, thanks to months and months and actually years of tireless work by Chairwoman Stabenow, Ranking Member Cochran, and other conferees on the bill, Democrats and Republicans in both Houses of Congress--thanks to all of this work, we are going to be able to pass this bill this afternoon.

There are 16 million people working in agriculture in our country. These workers and our rural communities are demanding the certainty which comes with a long-term bill. I am pleased to say we are passing not a 2-month extension, not a 10-minute extension, not an ``I hope we get it done tomorrow before we leave town'' extension but a genuine 5- year farm bill, which is going to give us a lot of certainty.

This bill eliminates direct payments made to farmers regardless of market conditions or what they planted and prioritizes what is working for producers; namely, crop insurance.

I have spoken on the floor before about Colorado's battle against historic drought conditions. Some of our farmers lost half their corn yields in 2012. It is hard to imagine any business losing half its production in 1 year, but that is what has happened to many Colorado corn producers. Mr. President, 2013 was a little better for corn in our State, but it is hard to celebrate when producers still face significant losses fighting against this dry soil. The Crop Insurance Program is what is keeping these farmers and rural economies in business during these tough times. That is why it is a priority.

That is why we should have passed it 1 year ago, 2 years ago, but today we finally have the chance to do it.

Beyond crop insurance, another key highlight of this bill is its conservation title. I spoke last week on the floor about the revamped easement programs, and the important linkage between conservation practices and crop insurance which has been preserved in this conference agreement.

But beyond those highlights, the bill places a new emphasis on water conservation, which is so important to the West. Programs such as EQIP and the Regional Conservation Partnerships Program are going to be critical as the West faces record drought conditions brought on by climate change. New conservation tools, coupled with crop insurance to help hedge risk, will help our producers as we move into a new normal of a drier American West.

The conservation title programs help producers, but they also help the fish in our rivers and the wildlife on our lands.

Here is a great illustration of why sportsmen groups support this bill. This is a photo taken of my friend John Gale hunting pheasants in Yuma County, CO. The Conservation Reserve Program, CRP--a program reauthorized through this farm bill--provides important habitat for pheasants and other upland birds all across the country. The land surrounding this photo is all CRP land.

The program protects habitat but also helps hold highly erodible soils in place--such as the soil in Baca County, CO, where over 250,000 acres are enrolled in CRP. As the Presiding Officer may know, Baca County in many ways was the epicenter of the area devastated by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Thanks to CRP, Baca County has weathered recent droughts a lot better than their forefathers did. Healthy grasslands, open landscapes, and abundant wildlife are a fundamental part of the West, to be a part of the West, and we need to preserve those grasslands, those open spaces, and our species. That is what the conservation title of the farm bill does. A lot of people don't know about it, but it is a very important part of the farm bill.

As a result, this farm bill is supported by over 250 conservation and environmental organizations--groups such as Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, National Wildlife Federation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and the National Rifle Association, among others.

This legislation not only ensures we have healthy croplands and grasslands but also prioritizes the health of our forests--an issue of huge importance to western States as we deal with our massive wildfires.

Here we can see the Waldo Canyon fire from 2012. I chair the agriculture subcommittee on forestry, and we held a hearing on wildfires not too long ago. We looked at the terrible fires which have raged across the West, the budgetary nightmare they have caused, and Washington's inability to understand what we are actually facing out there. My clearest takeaway from this hearing was that when it comes to our forests, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

If we prioritize the fuel mitigation work on the front end, we will save on fire suppression and recovery costs on the back end. If we don't, we will break our budget and not preserve our forests. The Congressional Budget Office has found that for every $1 we invest in forest health, we save $5 in costs associated with wildfire.

This farm bill conference report makes these investments and gives the Forest Service new tools to treat areas in need of restoration and mitigation. This bill makes commonsense reforms, reduces the deficit, and will bring certainty and continued prosperity to rural America. It passed the House last week with broad bipartisan support.

I strongly urge a ``yes'' vote when we vote on the farm bill conference report later today. With all the uncertainty our farmers and ranchers are facing in these tough times, in these drought times, it is the least we can do.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, before he leaves the floor, I wish to thank the Senator from Georgia through the Chair for all of his extraordinary leadership on the agriculture committee for so many years. As a new member of that committee, I saw firsthand how important he was to our getting to a compromise.

So through the Chair, I say thank you to the Senator for his great service, and particularly his great service to farmers and ranchers all across his home State and also across the great State of Colorado.

I too wish to speak today on this compromise bill, this bipartisan bill, this farm bill which has such a long history. In 2012 the Senate agriculture committee was the only committee in the entire Congress with a bipartisan deficit plan. It passed the Senate. The House didn't take it up. I think it was an enormous disservice to rural Americans that we didn't pass this bill 2 years ago, particularly when farmers and ranchers in my region are facing an unprecedented drought.

I distinctly remember being out during the summer of 2012 on the eastern plains and the western slope of Colorado right before the Presidential election. While this town was completely consumed with who was going to win that election, people in Colorado weren't talking about it at all. They were asking: Why in the world can't we pass the farm bill through the Congress and get it to the President's desk?

Now finally, after a series of extensions and half measures, we actually got to a conference committee. I think it may be the only conference committee in this Congress. This is how we used to do business around here, I am told. I was glad to be a member of the one conference committee in this Congress. We got to committee on a long- term bill.

I have stood on this floor before talking about the land of flickering lights. This town has become a place where the standard of success is keeping the lights on for 2 more weeks or 2 more months. Here we have an honest-to-goodness 5-year farm bill.

Agreed to by both Republicans and Democrats, it has now been passed by the House of Representatives, and next week we will have a chance to pass it here. Thanks to the tireless work of Chairwoman Stabenow, Ranking Member Cochran, and the other conferees, we now will have the chance to vote.

Our rural communities are demanding the certainty that comes with a long-term bill. Under the last farm bill--and history ought to be our guide here--our farmers and ranchers were remarkably productive. They delivered the strongest 5-year stretch of farm exports in the history of the United States of America. Now it is time to make some reforms to farm policy and to once again give rural America the stability it needs to provide food, fuel, and fiber to the Nation.

This bill reflects the values and process we want to see in other areas of the budget. We came together as Republicans and Democrats to identify priorities, to streamline duplication, to get rid of things we didn't need to do anymore, and to focus in the areas that were important--to break away from old, inefficient habits, to eliminate for the first time direct payments issued to farmers regardless of economic needs or market signals. That is a significant reform.

This bill prioritizes what is working for producers instead; namely, crop insurance, which is a large part of what keeps farmers and rural economies in business in this country, and that is why it is a priority.

Beyond crop insurance, another key highlight of this bill is the great tools it includes for livestock. It includes resources for much- needed livestock disaster programs that are critical to southeast Colorado, where ranchers are battling dry conditions we haven't seen since the dust bowl.

When I visited last August, producers who are facing stubbornly persistent drought and feed shortages told me that nearly 70 percent of their livestock had been liquidated or relocated from the region in just 2 years. That is part of a boom and bust cycle that comes with our livestock industry which makes it difficult to build for the future. This farm bill couldn't come sooner for Colorado's ranchers.

Beyond livestock disaster, there is a lot to support our ranching community in this bill. We have included a revamped conservation title--and I chair that subcommittee--which will keep our ranching lands in the West in their current state, rather than being divided for development.

The conference report also carries over important conservation title reforms from the Senate bill. Notably, it carries forward a Senate provision to ensure that recipients of government-supported crop insurance comply with basic conservation requirements. That measure was the result of a historic agreement between the commodity groups and our conservation groups. It is supported by a wide variety of people, from the Farm Bureau to the National Wildlife Federation.

This revamped conservation title is huge for rural America. It is huge for farming and ranching families looking to keep their land and agriculture. It is huge for sportsmen. It is huge for anyone who cares about the long-term health of our soil, our air, and our water. I thank again the groups who traditionally represent producers and the groups who traditionally represent the environmental community and conservationists and sportsmen for coming together on commonsense reforms. These conservation measures will help us improve the efficiency and production of agriculture and improve the quality of the environment in farm country.

We recognize that keeping these landscapes in their historical undeveloped state is an economic driver--for our State, anyway, and I suspect for many States--for tourism and for wildlife habitat.

As I have traveled the State of Colorado, farmers and ranchers are constantly talking to me about the importance of conservation and their commitment to be stewards of the land for the next generation. They highlighted in particular conservation easements which provide the Department of Agriculture assistance to help landowners voluntarily conserve the farming and ranching heritage of their land. I will spend a couple of minutes sharing a story I have told on this floor before about one of the many Coloradans who have benefited from the easement program.

This is a picture of the Music Meadows Ranch. I actually liked this photo so much when I was on the floor the last time with it that I now have a copy of it hanging in my office here in Washington. It is outside of Westcliffe, CO, which is at an elevation of 9,000 feet. There are 4,000 acres in the ranch. Elin Ganschow raises some of the finest grass-fed beef in the country on this family ranch. Thanks to the grassland reserve program, Elin's ranch now has a permanent conservation easement, providing critical wildlife habitat for elk, mule deer, black bear, and mountain lions--species prized by Colorado's sportsmen--that contribute millions to our State's economy. Thanks

to an amendment included in the conference report, we will see even more of these easements happen on high-priority landscapes such as the Music Meadows Ranch.

It is critical to our legacy and to the next generation of Coloradans to make sure we can find a way, when the land prices are rising the way they are, to keep farms and ranches in the hands of our family farmers and our family ranches. That is what this bill will help us do.

I thank Chairwoman Stabenow and Senator Cochran for working with me to get that amendment approved and carried into the final bill. I thank all the Colorado ranchers, sportsmen, and advocates of the outdoors for their support in drafting this legislation.

Also important to the West, this legislation makes great strides on forest help. This is a huge issue for Colorado and all Western States as we deal with terrible droughts, overgrown forests, and massive wildfires--a number of which have occurred in Colorado.

This conference report gives the Forest Service new tools to treat areas in need of restoration, like acreage suffering from the bark beetle epidemic that has ravaged Colorado.

The forestry title also reauthorizes important programs such as stewardship contracting and so-called good neighbor authority for our national forests.

So all in all, I again say thank you to my colleagues on the committee for working so hard together, for acknowledging regional interests that we have in the West which may not be shared with everybody. Although anybody who is downstream from Colorado--and that is basically the entire country--ought to care about forest health in Colorado and ought to care about water quality in Colorado. I think we were heard in this bill, and I deeply appreciate that.

The final point I would make is something which just came up in the last 2 weeks and we were able to resolve. We had an appropriations bill which passed a couple of weeks ago that failed to include a very important provision to States that have a high percentage of their land occupied with Federal land, and that is the so-called PILT payments, payment in lieu of taxes.

The program helps rural counties containing Federal land within their boundaries offset the revenue they lose because they can't derive property taxes from their land. Dozens of Colorado counties derive significant portions of their operating budget from PILT. By the way, they use those operating budgets to help maintain a lot of these Federal assets out there by, for example, providing search and rescue missions. I can say, most of the people they are rescuing are not even from Colorado.

So I am very grateful to Chairwoman Stabenow for working with me and other Senators from the West to include a PILT extension in the conference report. It is only 1 year, however. Unlike the 5-year farm bill, this is not going to give us the predictability that we need. I will continue to work with my senior Senator, Mr. Udall, and others to make sure people hear the voice of the West in this Chamber.

Finally, this bill reduces the deficit by $23 billion. As I said, it is going to bring certainty and continued prosperity to rural America. From our forests, to our farms, to our ranches and rural communities, it is long overdue.

This bill has been supported across my home State of Colorado, from the orchards of the Grand Valley, to the wheat fields of Washington County, and on the editorial pages of the Greeley Tribune and the Denver Post.

This is a good bill. It passed the House with strong bipartisan support, and I urge a yes vote when we take up the farm bill conference report next week.

Madam President, I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I have to say what a joy it is to see the Presiding Officer in that Chair, and welcome to the Senate.

I am here to talk about the Drug Quality and Security Act for a few minutes because at this moment of dysfunction in the Congress, we are at the brink of accomplishing something we have not been able to do for the last 25 years--the last quarter of a century.

This bill, which we are about to send to the President, reforms our drug distribution supply chain, making it more secure and safer for families. It puts us on a path to electronic interoperable tracing at the unit level for drugs.

It also raises the bar for wholesale distributors around the country and weeds out bad actors who find loopholes in the system to stockpile drugs and create shortages. This bill cannot come soon enough.

Our Colorado pharmacies fill over 60 million prescriptions every single year, and the Coloradans who take these prescriptions, just like people all over the country, expect their medicine to be safe. The sad fact is that given the current laws in place, we cannot guarantee this. Pharmacists cannot determine with any certainty where a drug has been and whether it has been secured and safely stored on its way to a pharmacy. Right now you can get more data from a barcode on a gallon of milk than you can from one bottle of aspirin two aisles over in the store.

The normal chain moves drugs from the manufacturer to a wholesaler to a pharmacy. Under the current patchwork of State laws, drugs travel back and forth across State lines among repackagers, wholesalers, and pharmacies with no real oversight by anybody.

The more times a drug goes back and forth and changes hands, the more opportunities criminals find to enter the system. In the last decade this lack of oversight has created an enormous gray market in the United States of America. Companies can stockpile drugs that are in high demand and sell them later at dramatically higher prices.

Hospitals in Colorado are bombarded by daily calls and messages from various businesses around the country offering them drugs that are on the FDA drug shortage list and unavailable through their contracted wholesaler.

According to a recent study by Premier Alliance, which includes 30 Colorado hospitals, sale prices of drugs that are in shortage are, on average, 650 percent higher than the contracted prices. These hospitals have absolutely no idea whether the businesses that are approaching them are reputable and how they can have supply of these drugs that are in shortage.

Investigations into the gray market have shown that the current law offers a huge incentive to make outrageous profits at the expense of patients, whether through selling and reselling or counterfeiting or tainting drugs.

A little over a decade ago, criminals in Florida made $46 million by counterfeiting 110,000 dosages of Epogen, a drug used to treat anemia-- a side effect of chemotherapy and dialysis. These criminals sold the counterfeit drugs to pharmacies around the country. The FDA recovered less than 10 percent of the counterfeit product.

In 2009, nearly 130,000 vials of insulin, a temperature-sensitive drug to treat diabetes, were stolen and later found across the country in a national pharmacy chain. The FDA--which had been notified that patients who used some of this insulin were reporting poor control over their insulin levels--was able to recover less than 2 percent of these stolen drugs.

A few years ago $75 million worth of drugs were stolen from an Eli Lilly warehouse and later found in south Florida--becoming the largest drug heist in the country's history.

Just this year the FDA notified the public about counterfeit Avastin, a drug used to treat cancer, which was being sold from a licensed wholesaler in Tennessee.

These stories should scare any person in any State who takes a prescription. Fortunately, the practical compromise before us today will give consumers and businesses around the country peace of mind.

Over the next decade, manufacturers, repackagers, wholesale distributors, and pharmacies will form an electronic interoperable system to track and trace drugs at the unit level. The barcode on our pill bottles will soon tell us who has actually handled the medicine we take and give to our children.

Starting in 2015, the FDA will also know where every drug wholesaler is located across the country and begin to ensure that all wholesalers meet a minimum national standard.

This legislation, after 25 years, is a model of what can be accomplished through hard work and pragmatism in the U.S. Congress. This bipartisan effort has the support of business groups, such as PhRMA, GPhA, and BIO, as well as consumer groups, such as the Pew Charitable Trusts, and many others.

I cannot say enough about the leadership of Chairman Harkin and Ranking Member Alexander in driving us to get consensus on this bill. Their commitment to track and trace, as well as compounding, sets an example that I wish could be replicated many times over.

I thank Senator Franken and Senator Roberts for their leadership on the compounding part of this bill.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the relentless--and that is the only way to describe it--effort of Senator Richard Burr. He has been a true advocate and outstanding partner with me and my staff. His tireless efforts, and that of his staff, helped us move this legislation into law.

While we are on that topic, and to close, I thank all of the staff who have worked on this important legislation.

I ask unanimous consent that their names be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

I hope we have a strong show of support for this bill--as I know we will--on the floor of the Senate so we can get it to the President's desk. This bill will restore a sense of safety about our pharmaceutical distribution chain.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to a period of morning business with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. President, I understand the Chair is ready to announce the conferees for H.R. 3080, the water resources bill.

The Presiding Officer appointed Mrs. Boxer, Mr. Baucus, Mr. Carper, Mr. Cardin, Mr. Whitehouse, Mr. Vitter, Mr. Inhofe, and Mr. Barrasso conferees on the part of the Senate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to Calendar No. 233, S. 42.

I ask unanimous consent the committee-reported amendment be agreed to, the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. Res. 277, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 285, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I understand that H.R. 3204 has been received from the House and is at the desk.

I ask for its second reading and object to my own request.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m. on Tuesday, November 5, 2013; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; that following any leader remarks the Senate resume consideration of the motion to proceed to S. 815, the Employee Non- Discrimination Act postcloture, and that the Senate recess from 12:30 p.m. until 2:15 p.m. to allow for the weekly caucus meetings; and finally, that all time during adjournment, recess, and morning business count postcloture on the motion to proceed to S. 815.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent it adjourn under the previous order.

Mr. President, in an increasingly global economy, we must find ways to promote innovation, increase college access, and make college affordable so that our students can remain competitive. In light of today's Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing which focused on these important topics, I want to recognize Colorado's own Colorado State University-Global Campus for their impressive work in this area. This year marks CSU-Global Campus' 5-year anniversary, and I would also like to congratulate them on reaching that milestone.

CSU-Global Campus, and its president, Dr. Becky Takeda-Tinker, have demonstrated a remarkable commitment to ensuring a quality education at an affordable price. As the first and only 100 percent online, fully accredited public, non-profit institution in America, students enrolling at CSU-Global today will not see any tuition increases as long as they take at least one class per year, even if tuition rates increase five years down the road. CSU-Global does this because it wants students entering today to be able to plan their education and anticipate the full cost of graduation.

CSU-Global Campus has been at the forefront of new innovative approaches to learning, including offering competency-based courses. Students have access to CSU-Global's full course content online for free and can receive

academic credit for passing an exam with a score of 70 percent or better. A 3-credit exam costs $250 and a 1-credit costs $150; the fee covers 2 exam attempts in 12 months. There is no additional fee for students to access the materials, faculty, and resources during their study period leading up to the exam. Many of these resources are innovations themselves and include a 24-7 online tutoring service, 24-7 tech support, and a virtual library.

Its students' progress are carefully tracked electronically and student support is a priority. Students partner with faculty or receive other student support if it seems they have struggled in a certain class. Students at CSU-Global are given the flexibility needed to accommodate the many demands on their time, but are still counseled through to completion.

Thirty-four percent of CSU-Global's students are first-generation college students and 23 percent are from the underserved population. Finally, at a time when our country continues to recover financially, 95 percent of CSU-Global graduates are working for pay as of February 2013.

As the cost of college continues to rise, CSU-Global Campus is an innovative alternative. After repaying its $12 million start-up loan a year ahead of schedule in 2012, it now operates a sustainable model without future appropriations from the State of Colorado.

Mr. President, in April 2013, CSU-Global ranked seventh in U.S. News & World Report's ranking of the Best Online Bachelor's Programs. On the occasion of its fifth anniversary, I congratulate CSU-Global on its tremendous achievements.

Madam President, before he leaves the floor, I want to thank the Senator from Oklahoma for his commitment to this issue, for his candor. We do not necessarily agree on every single thing, but I do know he is a man of great conviction and we are lucky to have him in the Senate. It is my hope we can get to a place where we actually are together addressing these budget issues in a way that is not management by crisis or one across-the-board cut after another but actually is a thoughtful plan to relieve our children and our grandchildren of this burden we are threatening them with.

So, through the Chair, I thank my colleague.

Madam President, I come to the floor today, after the Senator from Oklahoma described today as a day of petty kindergarten political games, to talk about a place where they are not playing any of those right now, and that is a town in Colorado that I represent called Estes Park, which has been a beacon of resilience. It is in the mountains just northwest of Boulder. It is the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park.

I can see from the Presiding Officer's reaction that she may have been there.

The town has several thousand residents and hosts close to 3 million visitors a year, including an average of over half a million visitors in the month of September.

This time of year is peak tourist season. The weather is beautiful. The aspens' leaves are even more beautiful than the weather, and the elk famously wander through the park and through the town. Whether you are coming to rest or recreate, Estes Park welcomes you, and it always has.

In 2011 visitors generated $196 million in tourism spending and supported more than 2,700 jobs. By some estimates tourism accounts for 43 percent of local employment. But when the floods hit in Colorado, Estes Park was almost entirely cut off from the outside world.

As shown in this picture, here is Route 34 going to Estes Park.

Two of the major roads into town were wiped out for miles at a stretch, leaving only one road into town. Many homes and businesses were destroyed. But the residents of Estes Park picked themselves up and began the recovery process. Limited access to the town has been restored. Folks had just started opening their businesses again. Visitors had just started to return to Rocky Mountain National Park. And then Congress stepped in and dealt an unbelievably cruel blow by shutting down this government.

Let me quote what Estes Park resident Tom Johnson said on the Tuesday of the shutdown:

I think politicians are playing around, like they do, and

it's the people who wind up--

``And it's the people who wind up''--

with all the problems for it. Man, they did it to Estes Park,

when they shut down that park.

Rocky Mountain National Park closed with the shutdown. Hundreds of campers have had to cancel their reservations, and likely thousands more canceled their plans to visit.

The Denver Post reported that if visitors to Estes Park decline by 70 percent, it could mean the loss of 1,100 jobs, $90 million in spending, $5.8 million in State sales tax revenue, and $4.4 million in local taxes. This is one community in Colorado, one community in the United States of America tonight, as we horse around here in the Congress.

The shutdown is a kick in the teeth to our local governments and small businesses in their efforts to recover from these floods.

One of the area's more famous businesses is the Stanley Hotel. John Cullen, the hotel's owner, told us that while it is booking visitors for long weekend trips, it has been slow to bring in the usual number of guests during the week. He says it is because locals cannot come to Rocky Mountain National Park for the fall foliage. He tells us they have done everything they can to keep the hotel open because it is a major employer in Estes Park, but he is losing money on a daily basis.

Diane Muno is a local business owner in Estes Park, with four retail shops. The Spruce House and the Christmas Shop are two local Christmas and holiday stores; the White Orchid and the White Orchid Bridal Shop sell clothing and other apparel.

Some of these businesses have been serving customers in Estes Park since 1969. They are institutions in this Colorado community.

The flooding damaged three of four of her businesses. One was seriously damaged and has not yet reopened. The other two rushed to reopen to recover, and they would have been fine except we closed Rocky Mountain National Park, and that has slowed foot traffic in a significant way. Diane's October revenue for these four stores is down 67 percent--two-thirds down--from this point in October last year. She typically has 12 to 15 employees, but she is working a skeleton crew of 6.

Another business damaged by the floods was Kind Coffee. Its owner, Amy Hamrick, has been relying on Internet sales while she is working to reopen the store. The community has rallied around the store, as our communities that have been struck by the floods have done. It bought coffee beans and mugs and T-shirts online and helped clean up floodwaters. But the same story holds: She took a huge hit when the government shut down. Making horrible things worse, Amy's husband David Hamrick, a firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, has been furloughed.

This is what this inability of Washington's politicians to get done the most basic function we have--to keep the government running--has wrought in this one Colorado community.

Amy told National Public Radio:

We carry on through the middle of October with tourism

dollars and locals coming to see the elk rut and to go into

the park and see the color. . . . And the national park is

also our largest employer in town. So our community now has

lost a lot of jobs in the interim.

This is exactly why it is the wrong moment for Colorado, for Estes Park, to have Washington's dysfunction come crashing down. They do not deserve it. They do not deserve it. But, as they are now saying in Estes Park, they are mountain strong and they will get through it. And I know they will.

Amy Hamrick took the time to remind us that 90 percent of the town is open, dry, and ready for customers. She said:

The town . . . is beautiful and the golf courses have elk

on them 24 hours a day.

Estes Park, like much of Colorado, has taken a hit, but it will not stay down. The community continues to pull together and recover. As expected, its neighbors are going the extra mile to help everybody out.

This quote from Jeannie Bier captures the spirit of Colorado. She said:

We live down in Loveland and it is difficult for the people

down there right now--

I know it is difficult down there because I was there last week with the mayor and county commissioners and others looking at devastation in Loveland--

but we also knew it is just as difficult up here in Estes and

they are our neighbors, so we took the roundabout way to get

up here to support Estes as well.

The floods will not deter them, and neither will the outrageous stupidity of this shutdown.

Rocky Mountain National Park is closed, but there are still plenty of other reasons to come and enjoy Estes Park.

Earlier today somebody who works with me named James Thompson spoke with the town's mayor Bill Pinkham and asked him what is the one thing he would want me to say on this floor. The message was plain and simple. He said:

Michael, tell them it's spectacularly beautiful up here.

It's still a great experience. We're open for business!

This town has been through a lot and has risen to its challenges.

So I say to everybody, come to Estes Park. Enjoy the beauty. Shop at our businesses. Dine at our restaurants. And meet the folks who would not let a natural disaster or a manmade disaster stop them from succeeding. You can learn more about a trip to Estes Park at visitestespark.com.

To my colleagues, I urge you to come to Colorado for a different reason. Maybe we could all learn something from these incredible people about what it means to pull together in the face of a crisis.

For those of us playing politics with this shutdown and playing politics with this fiscal cliff, I would really encourage you to spend a single moment in one of our flood-ravaged towns. That

might bring some welcome clarity to the debate.

With that, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, most of us here in the Senate have read at least something about our Nation's founding. Although it is striking, what is almost always overlooked is the Founders' use of the language of ``the republic.''

Asked by a citizen on the street which was being created behind closed doors in Philadelphia, ``a Republic or a monarchy,'' Benjamin Franklin famously said: ``A republic, if you can keep it.''

As with most foundational decisions, the Founders made this choice deliberately. The idea of democracy frightened Hamilton, Adams, and others, because they equated it with mobs in the street. They worried that mob rule would overcome rights bestowed not by their government but by their Creator. They studied the classics and their models were the Greek and Roman republics.

They set out to do something never done before, to create a republic of the scope and scale never before attempted, and one that could expand as the country grew.

Today we are the world's oldest and greatest democracy. During the last century, America has expanded the constitutional rights of women and people of color well beyond landowning White men, originally privileged. In our time, we have come to understand that democracies are about the rights of citizens, but a republic, the Founders understood, is about the duties of citizens, the obligations a citizen has to a society whose constitution guarantees his or her rights.

Basic duties are to pay taxes levied by a representative government, to defend our country when called upon, and to obey the law. Our Founders had something even greater in mind, qualities that would make a republic endure. Like republics from ancient Athens forward, they believed in popular sovereignty, based on citizen participation in government. They believed in the commonwealth, all those things we hold and value in common, such as our defense and our shared infrastructure, and the welfare of the next generation of Americans.

They believed in putting the common interest above personal or narrow interests, a sense of the national interest. How else could committed slaveowners and abolitionists form a country and a government?

They believed in resistance to corruption, those who would turn the national interest to personal gain. We were founded as a republic and we have become more democratic across time. We are democratic and republican. Interestingly enough, what came to be the semblance of the first political party in America called itself the Democratic Republicans. It was founded in 1791. Sounds pretty weird today, I know, but it simply meant those who believed in democratic equality and freedom, working to uphold the ideals of the Republic. One of our bedrock American principles is that we must protect our rights through performance of our duties. That is not some abstract political theory. This is a definition of who we are and how we must govern ourselves.

We have rights and responsibilities as citizens and as Senators. We have the right to free speech but the responsibility not to shout ``fire'' in a crowded theater. We have the right to assemble but the responsibility to do so peacefully. In this body we have the right to filibuster but the responsibility to govern on behalf of the American people.

But the fewer the Americans who exercise the most fundamental right, I would say duty, of voting, the more political influence extreme groups in our society have. This is where we find ourselves at the dawn of the 21st century, with a Senate that at times is dominated by a small faction that does not represent the mainstream of American political thought, and a House that is gerrymandered into dysfunction. This institutional paralysis has created a vacuum into which a million special interests happily roam.

Actually, I should call them narrow, not special, interests. From ancient Athens onward, narrow interests have been the enemy of every republic. That has never been truer than it is today. Keeping the Republic created by our Founders should concern every generation of Americans, including our own. The sovereign power belongs to all the people, not just a vocal few. It is our responsibility, it is our duty, as elected officials when that ideal is tested, to work together to restore a sense of the commonwealth and the common good that enabled us to prevail in world wars and to overcome depressions.

This is our cause, but we are stuck. We are stuck because we are fighting over yesterday's battles instead of seeking to anticipate, as our Founders did, how we will manage change. To one degree or another, all Senators and possibly all Americans are conservative. If conservative means to protect our Nation's principles and ideals, I am a conservative. If conservative means to preserve a culture of tolerance, justice, and equality, I am a conservative. If conservative means to respect the unique cultural heritage of America, I am a conservative. If conservative means to protect our natural heritage, I am very much a conservative.

But while we protect and preserve the best of what makes us who we are, we must adapt to change. Scarcely one of us in the Senate has ever sought office without advocating some kind of change: change of officeholder, change of party, change of policy. That is good, because the future is arriving faster and faster and we have gotten no better at anticipating it.

Even with the seemingly endless crawls of the words ``breaking news'' at the bottom of our screens, no one predicted the Arab spring before it sprung. That is the most closely watched region in the world.

There are great historic tides that demand that we change and adapt to them in order to preserve and protect and conserve our central values. We do not live in a stagnant world. Indeed, we are living in the midst of great revolution that makes the 21st century as different from the 20th as the 18th century was from the 17th. We are living through what may be the peak years of change on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. But even though we may come here oriented to change, the institutions of government, Congress included, are oriented to the past. Our committee structure and our regulatory agencies imagine an economy that existed deep in the last century. We are designed to support incumbent interests, not the innovators that will drive job growth and wage growth in the 21st century. This is a fatal flaw, if we are ever going to tackle the growing income inequality that our Nation faces, an inequality that has been unmatched since 1928.

We are regulating the telegraph when the world is wireless. Just one example: Almost a year ago I visited Apple out in Silicon Valley to learn something about their work in education. A little over 4 years ago, when I was superintendent of Denver Public Schools, I did not spend one second thinking about how to apply a tablet to the education of our kids, because there was no such thing as a tablet--a little over 4 years ago.

Today the tablet, combined with platforms such as the iTunes platform, presents an unbelievable opportunity for our children and children all over the world to learn and to teach each other. It was amazing to see.

In any case, Apple presented a slide showing that 75 percent of their last 12 months of revenue was derived from products they did not sell 5 years before--75 percent of their revenue came from things they did not sell 5 years before.

We have not updated our Tax Code since 1986. I was in college in 1986. What are the chances that our Tax Code is helping drive job and wage growth in 2013, 27 years later, more than a quarter of a century later?

In this Congress and in this government, we are desperately out of sync with the world as it is. It is, in fact, an irony that we must change and adapt to preserve the principles that we treasure. But we must.

Today, many flying the tea party banner resist all change. Indeed, they

want to go back, often to a past that never existed, or to a time that has no relation to our time. Too often, their politics embrace old interests that will not drive us forward to an economy that is creating jobs and raising wages.

Our founding principles should not change. I agree with that. But our practices and methods must change to become relevant. These two parties, or three with the tea party, have to escape their orthodoxies for this to be possible. Efforts to maintain the status quo or to return to some mythical past are doomed to fail. That is simply because time and the tides of human affairs will not stand still. We do not control history and cannot dictate to it. Change is the one constant. How we attempt to shape it to our purposes, by creative, imaginative public policies will determine whether we can preserve the best of our past, our principles, our heritage, and our values.

Those who seek to protect our Nation against change by sitting on the beach before a massive incoming tide with shovel in hand will be swept away as surely as King Canute. As I mentioned earlier, anyone who believes their orthodoxy or their ideological orientation prepared them for the Arab spring or made us safer is deluded. Our job must be to create a shared understanding of the facts when we work in a town that is arranged to obscure them.

Despite the desires of nostalgia, we are not going back to the laissez faire world of Herbert Hoover. Social safety nets are here to stay to protect children, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, and to protect our ability to call ourselves a civilized nation. But even they will have to be changed if they are going to survive for the next generation of Americans.

The revolution of globalization and information has transformed the world's economy and cultures and societies all across the globe, including here in the United States. These revolutions, like the Industrial Revolution before them, cannot be stopped. It is up to us to decide whether we can accept this new reality and position our country to lead, as it has since our founding, or whether we shrink into an imaginary conception of what the world once was and what the United States once was.

With all of this change and pace of globalization comes fear of the future and a sense of loss of what once was. That is human nature. I do not exempt myself from that. At a time of uncertainty, it has become fashionable in some political circles to capitalize on it politically. This kind of demagoguery is not unknown in American history. Anytime Americans become fearful or worried, there have always been those who saw personal advantage in fanning those flames. But they do not join an honor roll of history, an assembly of our greatest leaders. Media attention, which is easy and cheap, is not a measure of leadership. Division does not require moral authority.

If we are at another of history's turning points, as many believe, as I believe, one road leads to the worst of our past. The other leads to a new definition of our freedoms. We treasure the freedoms incorporated in the First Amendment to our Constitution.

We remember at the height of the Great Depression that Franklin Roosevelt declared four new freedoms: Freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want and fear. Today, in the middle of what one might characterize as a political depression, let's consider some new freedoms for the 21st century: Freedom from foreign oil; freedom from false patriotism; freedom from the politics of division; freedom to create a constructive future; and, yes, freedom from unconstitutional government surveillance.

We have duties to perform far greater than merely funding the government. Just ask any poor child or her teacher in a typical American school. The good news is that fear has never and will not now dictate the fate of our Republic. History's dustbin is filled with failed demagogues. And we are not going back. But we need to hurry. The world is not waiting for us.

Americans want us to move forward into the 21st century with the imagination, creativity, adaptability, and values that have made this country so great from its founding. The stakes are simply too high in our time to allow our institutions to be crippled by politicians who color far outside the lines of conventional American political thought and who react with angry and mock surprise when their policy objectives are not achieved.

It is time to close this sorry chapter in the history of the Congress, reopen our government, preserve the full faith and credit of the United States, and work together as Senators from the various States on the people's business. I suspect that is why most of us wanted to serve to begin with.

Madam President, I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I would like to first say how much I appreciate the words of the Senator from Virginia and the words of the Senator from Montana. They are known to be commonsense people, to work in a bipartisan way day after day in this Congress, against all odds, to actually try to make something work around this place. So I thank them for their leadership and their comments this morning.

For 4 years I have come to this floor at about this time of the year and talked about how Washington has become the land of flickering lights where the standard of success is not how we are imagining the future and what we are doing for the next generation of Americans but that we are managing, after a little bit of aggravation and hostility, to keep the lights on for 1 more month or for 6 more months. Well, this time we are not the land of flickering lights. The lights are out in Washington. They have managed to shut down the government.

No mayor, no school superintendent, no city council in Colorado would

threaten the shutdown of their government over politics. Whether they are a Democratic mayor or a Republican mayor or a tea party mayor, we wouldn't stand for it in Colorado. They certainly would never threaten the credit rating of their community over politics. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. We just had these terrible floods in our State, and people are struggling to do everything they can to keep their governments open to provide people who have been displaced by the flood, who have lost everything they own, the services they need.

This shutdown is already hurting the U.S. economy and Colorado's economy, and it is not surprising why. There is a lot of rhetoric around this place about uncertainty and the damage it does to our economy. Nothing could create more uncertainty than shutting this government down and threatening the credit rating of the United States by saying: We are not going to pay our bills. We have an ideology that is so far outside the mainstream of American political thought that we can't find a way to actually win elections that align with our ideology, so we are going to use these kinds of tactics to bring this government to its knees.

The AP reported that the U.S. and European stock markets fell yesterday as investors and world leaders worried about the threat to the global economy. According to the Denver Post, the shutdown may cost the United States at least $300 million a day in lost output during a 1-week shutdown. What good is that doing anybody? How is that helping any American? Economists have estimated that a 3-week closing would cut economic production by 1 percent. It would cut our GDP by 1 percent. How does this self-inflicted wound help anybody?

In Colorado, to be clear, just as in the other States we have heard about today, it is not just the families who rely on Federal programs or Federal workers who are suffering because of this shutdown. The Denver Post reported that in a neighborhood near the Denver Federal Center, Rick Koerner, who owns Stack Subs sandwich shop in Lakewood, estimates he has lost about 5 percent of his normal business since the shutdown began on Thursday. He says he can't afford to lose any customers because, in his words, ``it's a thin-margin business to begin with.'' How are we helping him? In the same story, Deborah Giovingo, who owns a restaurant called Paradise Cove on West Alameda Avenue, just east of the Federal Center, said she is also witnessing a loss. ``We're not getting our regular lunchers. I think they're really trying to conserve their money.'' Right now, how are we helping these people?

One city perhaps hardest hit in our State is Colorado Springs in El Paso County. According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, the furloughs at our military bases include more than 1,000 workers at the Air Force Academy, 400 workers at Schriever Air Force Base, 2,200 at Peterson Air Force Base, and 700 at U.S. Northern Command. At Fort Carson another 1,000 workers are off the job. Is our job more important than their job? Is the job they do to protect this country, to defend this country, less important than the job of these elected representatives in Washington who are still taking a salary? I don't think so. Are these jobs less important than the people who are actually in theater right now in Afghanistan? I don't think so.

After 1 week of shutdown, the WIC Program--the Women, Infants, and Children Program--will have no funds for clinical services, food benefits, and administrative costs. Roughly 100,000 women and children in Colorado participated in the WIC Program last year and will lose their benefits.

The shutdown will delay SBA loans for Colorado's small businesses. Last year SBA processed 1,300 applications, for a total of $559 million in loans, and they are on the ground right now, thank goodness, working with people who have suffered through these floods.

Our national parks, wildlife refuges, and recreational lands--major drivers of Colorado's economy--are closed. They are shut down. Approximately 13,000 people visiting national parks in Colorado will be turned away each day this government is closed. It will result in nearly $800,000 of revenue a day for our local communities, which are already suffering because of the floods. Estes Park is one of the towns that have been terribly affected, and this is one of their peak times of the year for tourism because of the changing leaves. They are losing that opportunity, and we are making it worse because the government is shut down.

Thousands of Federal employees are out of work during this economic recovery. There is a delay in Social Security services. There will be a delay in veterans' benefits by the end of October. Colorado is home to almost 400,000 veterans. That is almost 10 percent of our State's population.

At risk is the funding for Head Start agencies and the Export-Import Bank's support for small companies.

But what is just so insulting at this moment is that we are trying to recover from this flood. The recent flooding damaged at least 17,000 homes and other structures, several thousand of which were outright destroyed. Millions of dollars' worth of public infrastructure has literally been swept away. More than 200 miles of Colorado roads and at least 50 bridges have been damaged or destroyed. Nine Coloradans lost their lives in the floods. The floods consumed an area of Colorado that is twice the size of Rhode Island. The devastation defies belief. Houses have been leveled and reduced to piles of debris, and some of these communities lie in ruins.

FEMA has pledged to go to great lengths, and they are working very hard to ensure that crucial disaster response and recovery services are not interrupted. To be clear, so far, emergency funds are still flowing and emergency workers are still in place. They are doing a phenomenal job, and I want to say on this floor, on behalf of everybody in Colorado, how grateful we are for their work. FEMA is going to make sure this work gets done, but nevertheless a number of FEMA employees-- both based in Washington and at the FEMA Region VIII office headquartered in Denver--are vulnerable to furloughs if this shutdown continues.

Our economy is recovering in Colorado, and we are being led by innovative businesses that have been growing jobs despite the dysfunction in Washington. This year I visited many of them--companies that, in the depths of the worst recession since the Great Depression, were actually creating jobs by inventing our future. That is what innovators do, and that is what Coloradans do. We are letting them down profoundly here by failing to exercise our most basic responsibilities as legislators, as people who receive a salary from the taxpayer. They do not send us here to shut it down, they send us here to improve it. They send us here to come to agreement and to compromise and to imagine a better future for our children and for our grandchildren. That is what we are here to do.

Instead, a very radical faction in the House and some of their colleagues here in the Senate have shut this government down in support of an ideology that, as I mentioned earlier, is far outside the mainstream of American political thought. They are entitled to their opinion. Everybody is entitled to their opinion. But they are not entitled to shut the government down if they don't get what they want, and that is where we find ourselves.

It has been a privilege for me to work in this place, and the moments I have enjoyed the most have been the ones where we have worked in a bipartisan way, with colleagues on the other side, to dramatically improve the way the Food and Drug Administration works so that new drugs could be approved more quickly and so that the 600 bioscience firms in Colorado that came to me and said they could no longer raise venture capital because it was all going to Europe and Asia because of uncertainty with the FDA and to please help them fix that--with Republican colleagues, we were able to get that done.

In working the immigration bill we passed, with the Gang of 8--four Democrats and four Republicans--we solved each other's political problems to bring a product to the floor that actually could pass with nearly 70 votes--a supermajority of the Senate--and we still need to pass that bill in the House.

That bill, in stark contrast to the government shutdown we are going through right now, actually will drive GDP growth. The Congressional Budget Office tells us that immigration bill adds 3 points of GDP growth in the first 10 years and 5 points in the second 10 years.

By the way, at a moment when these people are saying they are shutting the government down, mostly because of the health care bill but also because of their concern about a growing government and widening deficits, the immigration bill reduces the deficit by $900 billion over a 20-year period. That is real money even in Washington, DC. They could be passing that bill over there. Instead, the government is shut down, and it has been a catastrophic failure of leadership that has brought us to this place.

I have absolutely no doubt, from all the press reports I have read and what I hear from my Republican colleagues in the Senate, my friends in the Senate who are Republicans, that if Speaker Boehner put on the floor of the House the Senate version of the so-called continuing resolution, it would pass with a broad majority of Democrats and Republicans, and the American people would cheer because that is what they want. They want us working together. And the standard of success needs to be something greater than that we kept the lights on, which in this instance we haven't. We haven't even done that. What is the signal we are trying to send to this complicated world in which we live by shutting this government down? Why is it that people here get away with things that no local elected official would ever get away with?

So we have to continue to fight to get this government open. We are going to have another fight to make sure that, for the first time in the United States, we don't fail to pay our bills and blow up the full faith and credit of the United States--which is one of our most important assets, right up there with the rule of law, right up there with our capitalist economy. From our founding, the full faith and credit of the United States has been a bulwark for us.

But once we get past that, what we need to fight for is the next generation of Americans. That is why we have been sent here. Whether we are Democrats or Republicans, that is why we are here. And they are waiting to see whether we are willing to be the first generation of American leadership to provide less opportunity--not more--to the people that are coming after us.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.