Floor Statements

Mr. President, I will be brief because I think Senator Udall has covered it very well. But I also want to rise today on this floor to thank all 100 of our colleges who were necessary for getting this done and for getting it passed. We have to move it along to the President's desk.

There are a lot of times when people at home wonder whether anybody in this place is listening to them and whether we are doing something other than playing politics with each other. This is a clear case where people here have listened to the people in Colorado, who have generously from time to time helped people in other States that were confronting disasters. Now it is our turn to ask for help, and that help has been granted.

I wish to thank Senator Udall for his leadership in particular, but also all the Members in the Senate who made this possible.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all quorum calls during the period of morning business be charged equally to both sides.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I wish to first say thanks to the great Senator from California at this time for her words. We need to pull together for other places, Sandy and other things. Now it is time for the country to embrace Colorado, as my senior Senator so eloquently said. I know he may have to leave the floor, but I wish to say how much I have appreciated his leadership in all of this. It has made a huge difference.

The work that is really being done is the work on the ground, as Senator Udall was saying. That is the most important work--the first responders, neighbors helping neighbors. But it also has been a time when our political leadership has come together in a way at least for once not to get in the way and actually try to support the people who are just trying to serve their friends and neighbors. I wish to say thank you to Senator Udall, my senior Senator and my friend, for his leadership.

As he mentioned, our State is a long way from recovering from the floods that have inflicted so much damage over this month. The damage has been historic. Based on the latest estimates, over 16,000 homes have been seriously damaged. Thousands have been destroyed. The floodwaters consumed more than 2,000 square miles across Colorado's Front Range--an area about twice the size of Rhode Island. To give some sense of scale, it would be as if Rhode Island were completely underwater twice or, as Senator Mark Udall said, as if it covered a State the size of Connecticut. The floods have tragically killed at least nine Coloradans. We hope that number won't go up, but we don't know if it will.

Over the weekend I went to Jamestown, which is a small community about 14 miles northwest of Boulder, CO. Tara Schoedinger, the mayor of the town, showed me around. The damage to this one town was simply unbelievable. It was as if a bomb had gone off in the middle of this community. The flooding destroyed over a fifth of Jamestown's homes, half of its roads, both of its bridges, a central fire hall, and much more.

The storm killed Joe Howlett, age 72, a beloved pillar of the Jamestown community. The mayor's house is right next to Joe's house. The mayor's house is fine. Joe Howlett's house was destroyed by a mudslide that came down from the very top of the hillside, the very top of the mountain behind his house, killing somebody who had been the glue of that community.

I have a couple of photos from the visit that I wish to share to give a sense of scale of this damage.

This used to be Main Street in Jamestown. We can see it passing between these two utility poles on either side of what is now a raging river. Main Street is gone. It is not the asphalt that is gone; the whole street, the roadbed is gone. All that remains is a torrential river that ran in a completely different place than it does today.

This photo shows the end of Main Street in Jamestown. My deputy chief of staff took that picture. This is what Main Street used to look like. This is what Main Street in Jamestown, CO, looks like as we stand on the floor of the Senate today.

I will say, as the senior Senator is still here, it was amazing, the resilience of the people of this community, the sense of humor people had, and the sense of community they had. There were probably 30 people or so left out of a town of 300. They had come back to see their belongings and to secure what was left of their homes. What they were talking about was how they were going to rebuild this community together. There were tears from time to time, as you naturally would expect there to be, but what really came through, as it always does at the back end of these disasters, was the human spirit we see in each one of our States. We are particularly proud of the Coloradans who are struggling together to get through this incredibly difficult time.

In my mind, these are the most heartbreaking pictures, people who have dedicated their lives to being able to secure homes for their families.

They, by the way, had no expectation there and in other parts of the State that they would ever be affected by a flood and see everything lost.

One woman came up to me while I was there and said, ``this was our house.''

It was in reasonably decent shape compared to some of the others I had seen. She also had a rental property down the road in which she had invested her life savings. She had no flood insurance.

She said: I just don't know how we are not going to go broke as a result of this piece of bad luck.

I also saw in Evans, CO--a rural community near Greeley in the northeastern part of the State--two trailer parks that had been entirely destroyed by floodwaters from 1 mile or 1\1/4\ miles away. In the middle of these trailer parks, there was a cement pipe that was about this tall sitting underneath a carport. The thing must have weighed tons. It was a huge culvert pipe that had come from 1\1/2\ miles away through these raging waters to position itself in this trailer park.

The people who live there work in agriculture in our State, clean hotels in our community, and work in our oilfields in northeastern Colorado. When I went to the trailer park, the people were assessing the damage. They have lost everything. Because they couldn't qualify for financing for those trailer homes, they bought them with cash.

One person there said: Senator, it is awfully lucky this happened during the day and not at night because our kids were at school during the day. If they had been there at night, we don't know how many of them would have been killed by these floodwaters.

In addition to the human dimension of all of this, which is the most important dimension, the flooding also inflicted enormously costly damage to

Colorado's infrastructure. Over 200 miles of roads in Colorado have been affected by this flooding. The mountainous terrain in the State is going to make repair work exponentially more expensive and exponentially more difficult. I salute our Governor and everybody who is working to make sure that at least temporary roads are built to these communities in the next 90 days, which would otherwise be completely cut off.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from the Colorado Department of Transportation that estimates the total damage just to Colorado's federally maintained roads and highways. These are not our State and local roads; federally maintained roads and highways will exceed $400 million.

Earlier this year Congress passed funding for Federal Highway Administration emergency relief. States such as Colorado that have been hit with significant natural disasters are eligible for funding. Our State will be in desperate need of these funds, as New Jersey and New York were in desperate need. The scale of the damage far exceeds what our States and local governments can cover.

As my senior Senator said, there is a catch. There is a cap of $100 million per incident, per State, on this Federal highway assistance.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from Gov. Hickenlooper urging Congress to raise the current cap on emergency funding and explaining why this is something Colorado desperately needs to have done.

State of Colorado,

Office of the Governor,

Denver, CO, September 23, 2013.

Hon. John Boehner,

Speaker, House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Hon. Nancy Pelosi,

House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Hon. Harry Reid,

Majority Leader, U.S. Senate,

Washington, DC.

Hon. Mitch McConnell,

U.S. Senate,

Washington, DC.

Dear Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Reid, Minority Leader

Pelosi, and Minority Leader McConnell: As you may know, this

month massive rains and heavy flooding left over a dozen

Colorado counties in devastation. With the rains, highways,

bridges, and culverts were washed away. As a result, even now

many communities still are cut off and isolated from the rest

of the state. Colorado is in dire need of help.

Communities across Colorado's Front Range and Eastern

Plains are starting to deal with aftermath of the flooding

and destruction. The affected counties include Boulder,

Adams, Larimer, Weld, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Clear Creek,

Denver, El Paso, Fremont, Jefferson, Logan, Morgan, Pueblo,

and Washington--an area so expansive, that it surpasses that

of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Rhode Island combined.

Early analyses show that the flooding was so severe that it

may not occur again for 500 to 1,000 years.

Thousands of Colorado families are without homes, potable

water, or power. Before the state can fully restore essential

services to impacted towns and cities, and allow residents to

permanently return home, we must repair our devastated

highway system. Early estimates are that at least 50 bridges

will need significant repair--30 of which must be fully

replaced. Approximately 200 highway lane miles must be

reconstructed. Temporary crossing structures are needed in

the interim. And, today, numerous state highways and local

roads remain closed, cutting off primary, and in some cases

the only, access to Colorado cities and towns. Assessing the

damage to Colorado's highway system is underway. But early

assessments are that the damage will be several hundred

million dollars.

Under the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013,

Public Law 113-2, the U.S. Federal Highways Administration

(FHWA) Emergency Relief Program (ERP), received over $2.02

billion to help states rebuild and repair damages to their

highways and bridges. In this bill, states impacted by

Hurricane Sandy could receive up to $500 million per disaster

in ERP funds; however, all remaining states--including

Colorado--were capped at $100 million per disaster.

Given the widespread devastation to our state highway

system, we are respectfully asking that Congress raise this

$100 million cap for Colorado as well. As the Colorado

congressional delegation stated in a letter to the House and

Senate Appropriations Committees, there are precedents for

waiving or raising this cap. For example, the $100 million

was waived in response to damage caused by Hurricanes Gustav

and Ike, and Hurricane Irene and the Missouri River basin

flooding. Recently, the cap was raised to $500 million for

those states devastated by Hurricane Sandy.

Based on Colorado's anticipated highway needs and the

precedents mentioned above, we ask that you raise this cap

for Colorado. Time and again, Congress has answered the call

to help communities during times of disaster and loss. The

September 2013 floods may prove to be the worst natural

disaster in the history of our state, and is likely the worst

we shall ever see in our lifetimes. Before we rebuild our

homes and businesses, we must rebuild our roads to reopen our

communities. On behalf of all Coloradans, please raise this

cap to $500 million, so that we may begin this process.

Sincerely,

John Hickenlooper,

Governor.

Senator Udall and I have a simple bill that would raise the $100 million cap for Colorado for emergency funding for our highways, matching what Congress has done, as Senator Udall has said, many times previously--in fact, as far as I know,

every time an issue like this has arisen.

We have already talked to the Congressional Budget Office about this. They have looked at the bill. They have told us that it will not cost the Federal Government one dime because the money is already there. It has already been appropriated. It just needs to be used for the purpose Congress laid out--to help States with major disasters that inflicted cost damage on that State's highway system.

Colorado needs this Congress to act, and act now, to get this done so that Colorado can access the highway aid we will clearly need to recover in the coming months.

This $100 million cap on emergency funding from the Federal Highway Administration, as I mentioned earlier, has been lifted many times before. It has been done routinely and swiftly by this Congress following other major disasters when it was obvious--as it is in our case--that federally maintained highway costs would exceed $100 million. We lifted it for the Sandy States, as I have pointed out, earlier this year when we passed the Sandy supplemental on January 29, 2013. We lifted it on November 18 for Hurricane Irene and the Missouri River basin flooding. We lifted it on September 30, 2008, for Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. We lifted it on May 25, 2007, for storms in the State of California. We lifted it on December 20, 2005, for Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. All told, Congress has waived this $100 million cap 14 times in the past 25 years. It is routine, and it is normal when there is a major disaster that causes major highway damage in excess of $100 million.

Senator Udall and I have been working with our colleagues in the Senate. Nearly all of them have indicated a readiness to work with us to pass this bill. I am very grateful for that.

I also wish to thank my colleagues for working with us to get this done quickly for Colorado in recognition of how badly we need this cap lifted and this Federal funding made available.

I urge my colleagues to pull together to work with us to quickly clear this bill in the coming days so we can get Coloradans the help they need.

If you will indulge me a few more minutes--and if the Senator from California would as well--I wish to take a quick moment to tell you why this is so important.

A picture tells a thousand words--especially when I am the one who is speaking. I want to show the damage to Colorado highways as a result of this historic flooding.

This photograph was taken during a helicopter tour by Vice President Biden, Governor Hickenlooper, and FEMA officials of flood damage in Greeley, CO, earlier this week. We can see that a huge portion of the road has washed away and water has breached a dam.

I would like to say that FEMA has been doing a tremendous job with our local and State officials.

This is a section of Highway 72 that collapsed and washed away after a flash flood tore through Coal Creek near Golden, CO, which is outside of Denver--maybe in Golden they would say Denver is outside of Golden. This is what the road looks like there.

A bridge on the south side of Lyons is gone. Huge portions have broken off. This is a photo of the bridge that is missing. Here is another shot of large portions of U.S. 34 washed away.

This is a very clear example of the way these mountain roads work. In this case, when the prospectors first came to Colorado, what they would do is pan for gold in the bottom of the rivers, near the plains. They would see whether there was gold leaf there. That would lead them to walk up these valleys--very steep valleys--to see where the gold was coming from. They founded towns in these places. That is the way the river came, then the road followed the river, and that allowed them to get to their town. You can see in this case this road has been completely washed out by the river.

This is just another instance of mountain roads where we can see the dropoff below is what used to be road but no longer is.

Here is a roadway that, when this photo was taken, is completely submerged and with extensive damage. And then this, what used to be a ribbon of pavement, is now in fragments in the remaining water.

In times of disaster in this country, we have stood together time and time again. Working on behalf of the people of Colorado, along with Senator Udall, that is what we are asking for again. We have pulled together with all of our colleagues and we are going to need all of you to pull together with us.

The Founding Fathers had a lot of work to do and they are often quoted around this place, but they were engaged in founding a country, not dismantling one. This is a reminder of why this vision was so important and why people, frankly, are counting on us to carry this on for this generation of Americans and for the generations that will follow us.

With that, I thank the Chair for his indulgence, and I yield the floor.

Madam President, I will be brief. I want to thank the Senator from Louisiana while she is here, not just for her words and for reminding us this isn't about who can scream the loudest on cable television, it is about the work that actually needs to get done in the Senate on behalf of the American people, but I also want to thank her for all the work she has done over the years with FEMA. It has made a big difference in my State already. They are working well with our local and State officials. We have a long way to go, and the last thing we need to worry about is whether the government is going to shut down.

Fortunately, because of the work the Senator and others did around here, the emergency part of this is going to continue to carry through, even if there is a shutdown. But there is a lot of uncertainty that is related to that. So while Senator Landrieu was here, I wanted to thank her for that.

I am sorry the Senator from Delaware has left the floor for a moment, because he has been holding it down and I wanted to ask him a question about his previous work. He was a county executive in Delaware before he was here. I was a superintendent of schools. I worked for the mayor. Senator Klobuchar, who is here from Minnesota, was a district attorney. I think every one of us is completely perplexed by the hostage taking that is going on around this place.

I ask the Senator from Delaware, he was the county executive of a county in Delaware?

I say through the Chair, does the Senator think that any county executive or mayor or local official in the Senator's State wouldn't be run out of town if they threatened the credit rating of their community for politics?

That is my point. I think we are dealing with something that is so far outside of the mainstream of what political actors, at least in my State who are elected who are Republicans or Democrats, would support. I think it is important for us to call attention to that because that is what we are dealing with.

I see the Senator from Minnesota is here, so my last observation. If one of us represented a State government that opened and closed its doors or threatened to open and close its doors every single year, I can assure you that businesses would look to do business in some other State, not in the State in which we work.

That is what we are doing to the United States of America right now. We have so much going for us. The innovators are out in the economy innovating. Natural gas is cheaper than it has ever been. We could build this economy if only a few actors in Washington would get out of the way.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I would like to thank my colleague Mark Udall for summarizing so well what we are facing out in Colorado. I thought I would share a few of my thoughts too.

As Senator Udall said, our State is in the midst of unprecedented flooding that has wiped out entire communities in over a dozen counties across Colorado. Last week rain began to fall across our State, across the Colorado Front Range, and it didn't let up. A lot of reports have termed this historic, but to get your head around the scale and scope of the damage it is important to express what that means in hard numbers.

In the course of 1 week, 21 inches of rain fell in parts of Boulder, including over 9 inches on September 12 alone. The previous alltime high for a single day in Boulder was 4.8 inches in 1919, and they have kept records since 1893. The average annual precipitation in Denver is 14.9 inches--for an entire year. On September 12, 11.5 inches poured down in Aurora. Just to give a sense of the order of magnitude, that is almost as much rain as it typically gets in 1 year--in 1 day. It was the same story all across the Colorado Front Range. The result was flooding, destruction, and tragedy on an unprecedented and unmanageable scale.

Based on the latest estimates, over 17,000 homes were seriously damaged, over 1,500 homes were completely destroyed, and over 2,300 agricultural properties were flooded. In just Larimer County alone, they estimate that 200 businesses were destroyed and 500 more were damaged. At least 30 highway bridges were destroyed, and at least 20 more were seriously damaged. Hundreds of miles--hundreds of miles--of major roads have been washed away, as Senator Udall said. The floodwaters consumed more than 2,000 square miles across 15 counties along the Front Range--an area about twice the size of Rhode Island. Because the rain is just finally letting up and emergency officials are only beginning to measure the magnitude of this rain, these numbers could easily go up, and they could go up a lot.

As recently as yesterday morning, 4 days after the flooding reached a crisis, over 1,000 Coloradans are still stranded and awaiting evacuation, with hundreds still not accounted for. Tens of thousands were forced to evacuate, and many had to abandon their homes within minutes, grabbing whatever they could carry and wading through rising waters to seek shelter and safety. Most tragic of all, eight Coloradans are either confirmed or presumed dead as a result of this storm. Those are just some of the numbers and a taste of the pain this disaster has brought to cities and counties across our State.

As Senator Udall mentioned, over the weekend I joined him and Governor Hickenlooper and others on a helicopter tour of the damage, and from the air the scope and scale of the destruction boggles the mind. Here is some of what we saw. These photos were taken from the Denver Post and other media.

Here is an image showing dozens of vehicles flooded in Greeley, CO.

Here is a home and a car stranded after a flash flood destroyed a bridge near Golden. Dozens of other bridges also collapsed.

This is a picture of the Big Thompson River washing out the Loveland Water Storage Reservoir.

In this picture, young Casey Roy, 9 years old, is looking through a window into her family's basement under 3 feet of water. And there are thousands of families in Colorado just like Casey's.

Finally, this image shows the Big Thompson River overflowing and tearing apart Colorado U.S. 34 in the Big Thompson Canyon--another example of the damage to the infrastructure across our State.

Madam President, how much time is remaining?

I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes.

I won't go on too much longer, but in addition to showing these images, I do want to pass along a few of the stories we are hearing from Colorado families from the past week.

In Jamestown, a small mountain community of just a few hundred people in the mountains northwest of Boulder, a mudslide destroyed the home of 72-year-old Joey Howlett, a pillar of that community. It killed him. In the hours that followed, Jamestown residents pooled their resources so that no one was without food or shelter. The town, isolated from outside assistance, was literally split in two by the flood, so they rigged a pulley system to carry food, medicine, and supplies across the rising waters to fellow townspeople.

Just outside of Lyons, CO, four adults, three children, and two dogs had to scramble up hills and across ledges with no trails to escape the floodwater. At one point they literally had to make a human chain across waist-deep water so nobody would be carried away. These are a few of the thousands of stories from across our State.

We know these floods are devastating. We know the loss some Colorado families feel today is beyond words. We know some have lost loved ones, and many others have lost homes and businesses that took them decades to build. But stories such as this remind me Coloradans are resilient, that the worst disasters often bring out the best in our neighbors. All across the State we have seen Coloradans of different ages, backgrounds, and beliefs pull together and help each other get through this massive storm. We saw real heroism a thousand times a day as first responders and National Guardsmen risked life and limb to carry the young, the old, the vulnerable, and the injured to safety.

I close by saying thank you to the FEMA Administrator for his prompt response to our request to declare a disaster. He would not let me leave the floor without saying that if you are in Boulder, Weld, Adams, or Larimer Counties, and impacted, you can go to

disasterassistance.gov or call 1-800-621-FEMA to register for disaster assistance.

As we move from rescue to recovery, frustration and enormous challenges lie ahead. We know in the coming weeks, months, and even years Colorado is going to face a lot of rebuilding, and we will rise to this occasion. We will build it back better than it was before it was destroyed. We are going to fight every day for Colorado families, many of whom have lost everything, to make sure they are getting the support they need.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1847.

I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the calling up of the amendment be vitiated out of respect for my colleague from Louisiana.

Mr. President, through the Chair, I would say to the Senator from Louisiana that my understanding was he would object. He was on the floor when I offered it and I thought he was going to object. So knowing of his objection, I withdraw the amendment.

Having said all of that, I think it is a shame that we can't get going with this bipartisan bill. I wish to thank the chairman and the ranking member for their incredibly great bipartisan work on this energy bill. I wish to thank Senator Jeanne Shaheen from New Hampshire and Senator Portman from Ohio for the bipartisan work that has been going on for months, if not years, on this bill.

I am pleased to come to the floor--I wish to introduce my amendment but not today because of the objection, but to at least talk about a bipartisan amendment we would like to get on this bill. I wish to thank my colleague Senator Ayotte for joining me in this important effort.

Our amendment is based on stand-alone legislation we have written called the Better Buildings Act, which encourages energy efficiency in commercial buildings. Over the last several years we worked with building owners across Colorado and the country to craft the legislation. The economic and environmental benefits of improving energy efficiency in buildings are clear.

A well-publicized retrofit of the Empire State Building in New York reduced energy usage by 38 percent--almost 40 percent--and it saved an estimated $4.4 million annually for the building owner. The retrofit also created over 250 construction jobs right here in the United States that can't be sent overseas.

It is this example, and these ideas, that helped form the basis for the Better Buildings Act and this amendment.

In crafting the measure, we started to think about efficiency in buildings not only from the top down where a building owner makes the improvements, but also from the bottom up where a tenant would see advantages from designing and configuring their rented office space in an energy-efficient manner. With all of that in mind, the amendment we have introduced accomplishes two principal goals. First, it allows for a first-of-its-kind study by the Department of Energy to chronicle private sector best practices as tenants build out their lease spaces in commercial buildings. This study would then inform a voluntary Department of Energy program to recognize tenants, to acknowledge tenants that design and construct high-performance lease spaces in the future.

The second provision, called Tenant Star, would expand on the popular ENERGY STAR Program and make it available to tenants, not just landlords. Under our amendment, tenants will be recognized for the efficient performance of their leased office space. This will provide value to their customers, their investors, and ultimately to the building owner.

The ENERGY STAR label has proven a very powerful tool to achieve whole building efficiency. Our language takes the next logical step and confers this recognition on tenants as well.

This bipartisan amendment is broadly supported--from the Alliance to Save Energy to the Real Estate Roundtable, to the Sierra Club. It also received a favorable hearing in the Senate Energy Committee in June, and I thank the chairman for that. The Congressional Budget Office has confirmed it has no score.

I urge my colleagues to support this bipartisan and commonsense amendment. I hope we can get to the business of legislating around this incredibly important bipartisan bill.

With that, I thank the Presiding Officer for his patience, I yield the floor, and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, today I wish to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the dedication of the Cadet Chapel at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In the half century since its founding, the Cadet Chapel has become a National Historic Landmark and the most popular manmade attraction in Colorado. Each year more than 750,000 visitors explore this iconic and unique building.

Today, the Cadet Chapel is a multifaith house of worship specifically designed to provide multiple distinct worship areas under a single roof, meeting the spiritual needs of the Academy's cadets. The chapel's aluminum, glass and steel structure features 17 spires that soar 150 feet toward the Colorado sky.

Annually, over 4,000 cadets are provided 850 religious worship and educational opportunities to practice their personal faith. The chapel also provides religious rites and observances such as baptisms and dedications, weddings, funerals and memorial services. Most worship services are open to the general public and thousands of visitors each year attend worship.

The Cadet Chapel fosters outstanding civic involvement by partnering with the local community to host four annual free concerts with over 2000 attendees. The U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel is truly unique. Its iconic architectural structure serves as a symbol of the Academy and is recognized worldwide. Most important, the Cadet Chapel enables the free exercise of religion for cadets in this unique campus setting and aids the Chaplain Corps at the Air Force Academy to inspire men and women to become leaders of character through spiritual formation.

In the 50 years since the Cadet Chapel was dedicated our Nation has sent Air Force Academy graduates to serve in the skies and jungles of Vietnam and the deserts of Iraq. Those that once bowed their head beneath the spires of the Chapel served our country in the former Yugoslavia and in the mountains of Afghanistan, and they continue to serve the cause of freedom around the globe today. We thank them for their service, and we congratulate the Air Force on the 50th anniversary of the dedication of the Air Force Academy's Cadet Chapel.

Madam President, I ask to speak as in morning business.

Madam President, on Saturday, July 20, Colorado will commemorate a solemn anniversary because a year ago, almost exactly to the day, in Aurora, CO, a theater full of people, who at that moment wanted nothing more than to escape the heat and enjoy a movie with their family and with friends, found themselves in the middle of a senseless and violent tragedy. A gunman opened fire and took 12 lives a year ago, innocent people, loved by family and by friends. He physically wounded scores of others.

Days later, as this photo shows, thousands of Coloradoans attended a vigil hosted by the city of Aurora. We shared tears and prayers. We also resolved to support each other, to heal, and to always remember those who lost their lives--which is what brings me here today.

Since that time, we have continued to see an outpouring of support all across Colorado and, for that matter, all across the United States of America for those we lost, their loved ones, and for the city of Aurora. The grace and courage of the families and survivors affected by this terrible tragedy serve as a powerful reminder to all of us of the resilience of the human spirit.

Today we remember the victims, victims such as Jessica, an aspiring young journalist; Rebecca, a mother of two who joined the Air Force after high school; and Veronica Moser Sullivan, age 6, who had just learned to swim and loved to play dressup.

We also remember the acts of heroism and the resolution demonstrated by so many Coloradoans in the aftermath of this tragedy, people such as Matt McQuinn, who threw himself in front of his girlfriend on the night of the shooting, saving her life; and the brave first responders and volunteers who helped save lives and comforted those in shock and heartbreak.

We remember the city of Aurora and the State of Colorado, which has once again come together to help one another through unspeakable loss and heartache.

At a recent service of over 3,000 people at the Potter's House, an Aurora-based church, Rev. Chris Hill told those in attendance that ``We believe morning is coming to Aurora. Aurora means the dawn.'' I think that captures the spirit of resilience and toughness that characterized Aurora, my beautiful State of Colorado, and these United States of America.

Before I leave the floor, I want to read once again the names of the victims in Aurora: Jon Blunk, AJ Boik, Jesse Childress, Gordon Cowden, Jessica Ghawi, John Larimer, Matt McQuinn, Cayla Medek, Veronica Moser, Alex Sullivan, Alex Teves, and Rebecca Wingo.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I wish to start by thanking the able Senator from Arizona for his statement, for his leadership, and for his incredible work on this bill. I wish to thank all of my colleagues who have been in this so-called Gang of 8, both Democrats and Republicans, including Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin and Bob Menendez on the Democratic side. But today I especially want to thank the Republican Members of this group, led by John McCain, and including Lindsey Graham, Jeff Flake, and Marco Rubio, for their extraordinary leadership. For reasons everybody in this Chamber understands, their willingness to be at the table and to stay at the table was an act of leadership unlike any other I have seen in this Chamber in the 4 years I have served here. We would never be here today voting to fix our broken immigration system were it not for them. So on behalf of the people I represent in Colorado I thank them.

For me this all started in Colorado, because everywhere I went I heard people talk about how the broken immigration system was affecting them. I would hear the peach growers in Palisades say one thing and the cattle ranchers on the eastern plains say something else. The immigrant rights community, many of whom represented children in my old school district, our high-tech community, our ski resorts--everybody was feeling the pain of a broken immigration system that Washington was refusing to fix and they had actually given up hope that Washington would fix it.

They didn't know each other cared about this issue, so we pulled them together over about a 2-year period. We had hundreds of meetings and traveled thousands of miles in the State to create something called the Colorado Compact, a statement of six principles about what Colorado expected immigration reform to look like.

Now that we have come to the end of this process--we have come to the end of the Gang of 8, finishing the Judiciary Committee proceedings, the work on the floor--I can say this bill is entirely consistent--it is not identical, but it is entirely consistent with those principles.

The first of those principles of the Colorado Compact is immigration is a Federal responsibility. This is not something that should be done State by State by State in this country. The Founders themselves recognized this because they put the regulation of immigration in the Constitution and charged the U.S. Congress as our obligation to deal with it. That was the first principle.

The second principle was ensuring our national security. This bill meets that test as well. It is the strongest border security bill ever passed in the Senate. It doubles the number of Border Patrol agents on the southern border. We build 700 miles of fencing. It adds new technologies. We spend nearly $50 billion on border security.

I believe we should have a secure border. In Washington this becomes a trade. For me, it is not a trade. We should have a secure border, and we should have a pathway to citizenship, and this bill accomplishes both.

The people in Colorado who wrote this Colorado Compact called for more effective enforcement of our immigration law, and this bill will give them that. It includes a fully operational, biographic, and biometric entry-exit system, more effective measures to detect fraud and abuse of our visa system, and an employment verification system to be used by all employers. This is all in this bill. That has not been in prior efforts that either passed or failed in the Congress, but it is in this bill, and it is a critical part to making sure we don't end up here again.

The Colorado Compact said we should have a bill that strengthens our economy. This bill meets that test with a visa system much better aligned for our 21st century economy--a merit-based system. We have high-tech and INVEST visas, visas for agriculture that will give our farmers and ranchers a fighting chance to hold on to their

farms and to their ranches, and give the people who are working in that industry much-needed relief. There are great benefits for our tourism and ski industry as well. And, on top of everything else, the Congressional Budget Office tells us this bill doesn't increase our deficit but reduces it over the first 10 years by $197 billion and over the next 10 years by $700 billion.

Colorado said we want a bill that is focused on families and keeping families together. This bill does that by clearing the green card backlog and ensuring family members are able to reunite more quickly. There is better protection for children in detention and the immigration court system.

Finally, we call for a commonsense approach to the 11 million, and this bill does that with a tough but fair path to citizenship for the 11 million.

As so many people in this Chamber, my life story is a story of immigration because I am the son of an immigrant. My mom was born in Poland in 1938 while Nazi tanks massed at the border. She and her parents miraculously survived one of the worst human events in our history: The Holocaust. After going to Sweden and Mexico City, they were able to come to New York City in 1950. My mom was almost 12 years old. She is the only one in the family who can speak any English at all.

On my first birthday--this is 1965, so 15 years after they came to the country--my grandparents sent me a birthday card. This is the card they wrote. Here is what they said, in English, by the way. They said this in English:

The ancient Greeks gave the world the high ideals of

democracy, in search of which your dear mother and we came to

the hospitable shores of beautiful America in 1950. We have

been happy here ever since, beyond our greatest dreams and

expectations, with democracy, freedom, and love, and

humanity's greatest treasure. We hope that when you grow up,

you will help to develop in other parts of the world a

greater understanding of these American values.

They had only been in this country for 15 years. They didn't speak English when they got here. They had survived the most horrific event of the 20th century, and this was the place that gave them hope and, more than that, it allowed them to rebuild their lives in the only country in the world where they thought they could.

This bill reaffirms we are a Nation that respects the rule of law and reaffirms our history that we are a Nation of immigrants, and it will keep that hope alive for millions of people, both here and abroad, for years to come.

I urge a ``yes'' vote on this bill.

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.

Mr. President, I first wish to say how wonderful it has been to serve with you in the Senate. As you take your leave to go back to the real world in Massachusetts, we all wish you well and we thank you for everything you have done while you have been here, especially the good cheer you brought to our caucus. Thank you very much.

In the vein of thank-yous, I wanted to come down after this historic day, passing this historic bill, to say some thank-yous. I have already thanked my colleagues in the Gang of 8 and the other Senators who worked so hard on this bill, and there will be a time to do that on another occasion.

Sometimes people have asked me during the course of my checkered career: How did you get to do this? Why did they let you do this? How did somebody with no apparent skill or aptitude for public education, for example, get to run the Denver Public Schools, one of the most cherished things I have ever done.

My answer has always been the same, which is the key is to find a bunch of people who are better at doing their job than you would ever be at doing their job. Assemble them, organize them around a project, a challenge or an obstacle and let them do their thing.

The Presiding Officer spoke eloquently about this yesterday when he thanked his personal staff and the Senate staff on his way back to Massachusetts.

I ask unanimous consent to submit the list of staff for the Record.

Of all the staff in the Senators' offices who worked on this bill, I will take further time tonight to mention a few names. First, I thank people on my staff, Rachel Velasquez and Stefanie Aarthun, who did amazing work, both of them, over many months on this bill and not only here. Also, we worked on the Colorado Compact in the State of Colorado. This was what enabled us to be part of this conversation.

I have thought throughout this process how important the work was that we did in Colorado in preparation for this moment, to get to this moment. It simply would have been impossible to succeed at producing what we call the Colorado Compact, composed of six principles. They were so bipartisan that when we had the press conference, the person who came to read the first of these principles was actually my Republican opponent in the 2010 Senate race, Ken Buck. I want to thank him for that and the others who were part of the compact.

I especially thank my deputy chief of staff, Sarah Hughes, who did an amazing job of pulling everybody together. She has been with me longer than anybody on my staff. Nothing I could have accomplished in the jobs I have had before and certainly not in this instance could I have done without Sarah Hughes.

The same goes for Jon Davidson, who is my chief of staff and who is a model for what a chief of staff in the Senate should be--or anywhere else, for that matter, but particularly here, where the pressures can be so extraordinary. His ability to attract an incredibly talented team of people who work on all kinds of issues, from immigration, to health care, to education, is incredibly important in the constituent service we do both here and in Colorado. Simply none of it would have happened if somehow I hadn't been lucky enough to hire Jonathan Davidson, who has been around this place, actually, as a young person, for a very long time, having been, among other things, Paul Sarbanes' chief of staff when he was the chair of the Banking Committee.

By my side both before I came to the Senate and in the Senate on this issue has been Sergio Gonzales, who has worked tirelessly. ``Tirelessly'' doesn't even capture it--24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it has felt like. He certainly looks that way. He won't appreciate my saying that, but it is true, and people who know Sergio will know what I am talking about. He has done an amazing job with a sense of humor and has served not just me during this but the entire Gang of 8, and we will be forever grateful.

There were many times during this process that I have thought about Sergio's grandfather and his grandmother. His grandfather, Corky Gonzales--Rodolfo ``Corky'' Gonzales--played such an important role in Colorado's history and the history of the West, and a library was just named for him last week. I have wondered what he would think about knowing we live in a country where his grandson has helped to shepherd across the line the most important immigration reform in this country's history. So I thank Sergio Gonzales for his leadership as well.

None of this would have been possible without Chuck Schumer, whom I talked about earlier. None of it would have been possible without his incredible staff: Leon Fresco, Stephanie Martz, Mike Lynch, his chief of staff--all of whom did an extraordinary job of keeping us on track and keeping Chuck on track, and I deeply appreciate that.

The others I wanted to mention while on the floor today are the staffs of the people with whom we negotiated the agriculture provisions of this bill. Dianne Feinstein did a great job leading that effort, with Chris Thompson, Neil Quinter, and Kim Alton, who all work for her. I deeply appreciate their work.

From Orrin Hatch's office, Matt Sandgren did an excellent job all the way through.

I particularly want to say thank you to Marco Rubio's staff and their efforts to bring Democrats and Republicans together on this issue. This is the first time we have had an immigration bill where the agriculture provisions in the bill are endorsed by both the growers and the farm workers union. That has

never happened before. I thank all of them for doing that. We would not have accomplished that without some very late night meetings, and Enrique Gonzalez was always there along with John Baselice. He will never forgive me for that, and Enrique will never let me forget it, but they did extraordinary work on that part of the bill and other parts of the bill as well.

I thank the leader's staff--Serena Hoy--the Judiciary Committee staff, and the floor staff.

As I say, I have submitted names for the Record, but there are names here that are too often not mentioned on the floor of the Senate, so I want to read these names. These are the schedulers for the eight Senators who worked on this bill so hard for so many months.

The day I knew we were actually going to get this done was the day John McCain said in his office some months ago that unless we begin to meet three times a week, we are never going to get this done. As the Presiding Officer knows, that is an enormous commitment of time, to meet three times a week, and we did it week in and week out. Sometimes we weren't even in Washington but back home on the telephone, but we carved out the time to do it, and that could not have happened without the schedulers in our offices--from my perspective, certainly not without Kristin Mollet, who is my extraordinary scheduler. I told her at our first meeting--I don't know if I was interviewing her or she was interviewing me; it was probably a little bit of both--that the scheduler is the heart of the operation. If the schedule doesn't work, the wheels come off and nothing else works. Kristin Mollet has done an extraordinary job getting us through this process.

In no particular order, let me please say thank you to Alice James, with Senator Graham; Megan Runyan, with Senator Flake; Rob Kelly, with Senator Menendez; Claire Reuschel, with Senator Durbin; Jessica Bonfiglio, in Senator Rubio's office; and a very special thanks to Alex Victor, with Senator Schumer, and Ellen Cahill in Senator McCain's office. We could not have done this without them.

In the story I told before about when I was a superintendent and working in business, not in politics--I had never run for office before when I took this job--I mentioned that the key is finding people a lot better at doing their job than you would ever be at doing their job. Well, that has never been more true than it has been in the Senate, where the quality of the work we do depends entirely on the quality of the staff we have. So I want to say thank you to all the Senate staff for their efforts.

Mr. President, I was here to talk about immigration, and that is what I will talk about. But I have been caught in a crossfire on this subject, and I want to say my view is this is exactly what people hate about Washington, DC. It is exactly why we have a 10- percent approval rating.

For 4 years I went to townhall meetings and was asked over and over and over: Why don't the Democrats in the Senate pass a budget? Which I think is a very legitimate question. We got a new Chair of the Budget Committee and we passed a budget after 4 years, and now we are told we can't go to conference to have a discussion with House Republicans about what our budget ought to look like.

I actually disagree with the Senator from Texas, I have to say respectfully, on the merits of this issue; that is to say, on the debt ceiling itself. This is the reason I think folks in Colorado can't stand this place. There is not a mayor in my State, whether they are a Republican or a Democrat or a tea party mayor, not one--not one who would threaten the credit rating of their community for politics. Not one. We would run them out on a rail, because that is not the way you do business. The credit rating of a community is the most important thing it has. The

full faith and credit of the United States of America--which until the last debt ceiling discussion had never been questioned--was questioned for the first time in our history; not because of the size of our debt--which, by the way, I have spent 4 years trying to work on because I believe it is a very severe problem we face, and I look forward to working with the Senator from Texas on this issue--but because of the political dysfunction in DC. That is why we got this downgrade.

The Senator from Alabama, who has left the floor, was talking about the restatement of our GDP numbers in the first quarter. I worry a lot about that. The people I represent are not concerned with the procedural stuff that goes on here. What they are worried about is an economy they are living in day after day after day where, even in periods of economic growth, median family income is falling, middle- class families are falling behind. They are worried about an economy where they are earning less at the end of the decade than they were at the beginning, but their cost of higher education continues to escalate, their cost of health care continues to escalate. As individuals, as families, and as members of a generation, they are worried we are going to be the first generation of Coloradans and Americans to leave less opportunity and not more to the people who are coming after us.

I wish to finish my statement, and then I will gladly yield for a question.

I was glad to hear the Senator from Alabama. He and I disagree on the immigration bill, but we certainly agree on the issue of the concern all of us have about this economy--or most of us have about this economy. It is one of the reasons we should pass this immigration bill. The Congressional Budget Office tells us we would see 3 additional points of GDP increase in the first 10 years, 5 over the two 10-year windows, if we pass the bill.

To the point about American jobs, I was very glad to hear him say he was not talking about the 11 million people who are here because most of the 11 million people who are here are working. But they are working in a shadow economy, a cash economy, under circumstances where they can be exploited. We have allowed that to happen because of the broken immigration system we have. If all you cared about--and I deeply care about it--was raising wages for the American worker, you would want to bring those 11 million people out of that shadow economy. You would want them paid in something other than cash, and you would want them, for heaven's sake, paying taxes at a time when we have the kinds of deficit problems the Senator from Texas is describing.

The Senator also talked about the future flow of immigrants. I should say I was part of the bipartisan group. This is not a partisan bill, this immigration bill. There were eight of us. Four Republicans and four Democrats worked together on this bill, and one of the things we thought hard about was the future flow of immigrants to this country because generation after generation of Americans, since the founding of our country, has relied on new immigrants to bring their ideas, to bring their talents, to bring their energies to our shores to build their businesses here.

Today what we are saying to people--even people who get college degrees in the United States, degrees that we subsidize, that we pay for--even to those people, we are saying: Don't stay here. Even if you want to stay here, please go home to China and start your business there. Go home to India and compete with us there. Hire people there instead of creating jobs here in the United States.

We are a nation of immigrants. We subscribe to the rule of law. This bill is a ratification of those two American ideals--ideals that you can almost not find in any other country in the world.

That is why I am so glad that for once this body is actually acting in a bipartisan way to deal with not an easy problem but a tough problem. I will tell you the kids who are visiting today from 4-H all across the country and from my State of Colorado actually are expecting us to do these hard things, as our parents and grandparents did before them, so we don't leave them in the lurch.

That is what is at stake. That is why I wish we could find a way past this budget impasse as well so we actually could start to have a responsible conversation about what we are going to do on the entitlement side and on the revenue side, so we do not continue to hack away at domestic discretionary spending in ways that could lead us, with some of the House proposals, to invest only 4 percent of the revenue we collect in the future--4 percent in transportation and agriculture and education. There is not a business in this country that would last a year if it invested 4 percent of its cash flow in the future of that business.

At some point we have to move beyond where we have been here and actually get into a serious discussion about how we are going to manage this debt down over the next decade or two in ways that do not prevent us from growing our economy and in ways that do not subject our children to unpaid bills. It would be as if I went to the mortgage lender on my house and I said: I would like to buy a house, and I am going to take out a mortgage, and then I am going to give it to my kids to carry for me instead of paying for it myself. That is the position we are in today. The only way we are going to solve that is if Democrats and Republicans can sit down together and actually move past the talking points.

With that, I will yield for a question.

Here is how I answer that. I appreciate the question. Through the Chair to the Senator from Texas, it is clear that this is not going to get us anywhere, this procedural fight the two of you are having every couple of weeks. I think that is clear. I think it is clear that the debt ceiling is something that has been raised time and time again by Republicans and by Democratic Presidents over the years. I think it is also clear that we have to deal with our debt and our deficit. I believe that. But for myself, I don't feel like I would come to the floor and say that I am only going to allow this bill to go to conference with the Republicans in the House if all the money comes to Colorado--or some other stipulation I would want that 99 other Senators would not agree with.

The second thing is that I think it is important for people to understand that this issue--again, I am not in any way trivializing the issues around our deficit and our debt. I want the Senator from Texas-- I hope he understands that. I hope he knows that about me. But I worry about the debt ceiling as a tool for accomplishing this, first for the reasons that have to do with our credit rating but also because there is a view among some that the debt ceiling is about bills we are going to incur as opposed to the ones we already have incurred.

In other words, it would be one thing if somebody said: I am spending too much money and I am going to cut up my credit card, and that is what they would do, but that is not what the debt ceiling is about. What the debt ceiling is about is somebody saying: You know what, I want the best cable package I can find, I want the best satellite package I can find, and when the bill comes to pay for it, I am just going to chop it up into little pieces and not pay it. That is what I don't like about this approach.

But everybody is entitled to their own approach on this question. I just wish we could move forward here instead of continuing to earn the 10-percent approval rating Congress has. That is all I am asking for.

Sure.

May I.

I say through the Chair to my friend from Texas, I have not read the bill, but I will read the bill. I commit to him that I will do that.

I appreciate the implication of this, which is that the Senator is not objecting to my metaphor about the cable bill being cut up, because I do think that is a real problem.

We are not saying to people--we should not be saying to people that we are going to behave in an irresponsible way. As somebody who used to spend his time restructuring companies that were really well run, really well operated but had horrible balance sheets, I would have to think hard about the treatment that creditors would provide to, in this case, the U.S. Government when I look at that. I will look at that.

I say to the Senator from Texas that there are other things we might even be able to agree on too around here. For a long time I have thought it would be important for us to put health care on a budget in this country. We are not on a budget. During the health care debate I had an amendment called the fail-safe amendment that would say to the American people and to the Congress: This is what we have to spend on health care. That is all there is. There is not any more. We have to manage toward that. If we failed, if we tripped over it, we would actually have to make cuts, make changes to our system of health care.

We spend twice as much as any other industrialized country in the world, and it is crowding out a lot of other things that the 4-H kids and others whom I worry about care about.

So I think there is much we can work on, but I just don't think we are going to get to it through this kind of discussion. We might get to it through this kind of discussion.

In any event, I will commit to the Senator from Texas that I am going to sit down and stop talking about what he said.

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

Mr. President, there is no one else on the floor. I thought I would take the opportunity to talk again a little bit about our immigration bill. This has been such a gratifying process to me because it has been bipartisan from the start. In fact, I have been telling people that it is not even that it has been bipartisan, it has been nonpartisan. The work on the Gang of 8, which led to work in the Judiciary Committee, which led to work on the floor is the way this place ought to operate on a whole host of issues, from energy--the Presiding Officer cares a lot about that--to infrastructure, to the budget issues I was just talking about with the Senator from Texas.

It is important for people to know that this is a bipartisan bill because I think people are fed up with the partisanship in this town, and they do not believe it reflects the way they live their lives. There is a reason for that. It does not. This place is decoupled from the lives of ordinary American people, and this is an effort--among others, hopefully--to recouple those priorities.

I have been interested in the objections to the immigration bill since the beginning. First there was the objection that it was actually going to drive up our deficit. Not surprisingly, we learned from the Congressional Budget Office that this bill actually would create the most significant deficit reduction of any piece of legislation we considered here, certainly that we passed here--$197 billion in the first 10 years, $700 billion in the second 10 years. Even in Washington, $1 trillion is still a lot of money. That is what we heard, both because people now not paying taxes would be paying taxes and also because of the economic growth that would be generated if we could restore the rule of law to our immigration system and to this economy. That was an objection. That objection was answered--not by me but by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The second objection was that the legislation was not going to get a fair airing, that it was going to be rushed through in the dead of night. I don't like doing work that way.

There were eight ``no'' votes on the fiscal cliff deal at the end of the year, and I was one of those ``no'' votes, one of three Democrats who voted no not largely but partly because it had not had any process and it was in the middle of the night. This bill, by contrast, had 7 months of negotiations among four Democrats and four Republicans. It had 3 weeks to go through the Judiciary Committee, a markup that had 160-some amendments, many of which were accepted. Forty-one Republican amendments were accepted to this bill. It came to the floor for the debate we have had over the last few weeks.

I realize the amendment process is jammed up, and I am sorry about that because I think people ought to be able--including the Presiding Officer--to offer the wise amendments they have and the not-so-wise amendments they have, at least in my opinion. But there certainly has been an open process for this bill. Sometimes I have heard people say, well, it is just like health care all over again. I was here during the health care bill, and I can say this process looks nothing like that process.

There is a third objection from some who say there is no border security in this bill. First of all, that wasn't even true of the Gang of 8 bill. We had substantial border security, and as my lead, I was taking what John McCain and Jeff Flake--both Senators from Arizona-- said was important. They are two Senators who have a border State, and they have been working hard to resolve these issues in our group. We made a substantial investment in that bill for border security and technology. Even fencing was included in that bill.

I think it is a reasonable expectation--not of Republicans but of the American people--that our border should be secure. Certainly the people in Colorado believe our border should be secure. So when Senators came and said: We would like to vote for this bill, but we would like to do more on border security, not only was I open to that, I supported that. The bill before us has incredibly substantial border security. There are 700 more miles of fencing. We doubled the number of Border Patrol agents on the border.

One of the Senators said to me that we are at a point now where there is a Border Patrol agent every 1,000 feet on the southern border. One might ask whether that is a wise use of resources, but it was important for some people to have that before they would sign on to this bill. So I don't think any reasonable person looking at this could say border security has not been addressed.

So what are the objections to moving forward? We have heard people say: Well, it is the path to citizenship or we don't like that part of the bill. That was a core principle for the four Democrats and four Republicans who started this negotiation, and it has been a core principle for a lot of people who voted for this bill. A very important reason to pass this legislation is to resolve the situation for the 11 million people who are here illegally. The pathway to citizenship is the right way to do it.

This is not amnesty. This has to be earned. People have to pay a fine. People have to learn English for the first time in our history. People have to pay their taxes. It takes 10 years to get a green card, then 3 years after that. They have to pass background checks all along the way so we know who the people are we want to stay in this country and who the people are we want to leave this country.

I see the Senator from Louisiana is here, so I will wrap up. To my friends

who think some lawful status that doesn't include a pathway to citizenship is useful to this country, I ask them to look at countries all around the world that have created a subclass of people--not even citizens, just a subclass of people--who have no attachment to their culture, no feeling they are ever going to participate in their civic or political institutions or meaningfully in their economy, no chance to believe their children or the children after them are actually going to make those contributions as well, and ask: Does that look like the United States of America to you?

That is not what the Founders had in mind. We hear a lot of cheap talk about the Founders around here these days. That is not what the Founders had in mind when they wrote into the Constitution that it was our responsibility as a body to deal with immigration.

So I hope people will consider that objection, take a look at the Senate bill, and will, hopefully, support it.

With that, I know the Senator from Louisiana was scheduled to speak, so I will yield the floor.

I object.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I am here today on the immigration bill, but I wish to thank the Senator from Vermont for bringing our attention to this very serious issue. It is a little bit of a variation on a theme today about trying to reconnect the priorities of the American people--frankly, whether they are Republicans or Democrats or anybody else--and this place, which has become totally disconnected. I wish to say through the Chair to the Senator from Vermont how on point he is.

The people I represent care about the fact that they are living in an economy that even when it grows--I was talking about this a little bit earlier--it is not producing sufficient jobs and it is not driving up income. That is what they are concerned about. The student debt crisis the Senator speaks about, where it tripled over the last 10 years, is a huge part of this story. It is a significant part, because if a family's income is going down but the cost of higher education is skyrocketing--by the way, at the same time the cost of health care is skyrocketing--it makes it very hard to get ahead. People are desperately worried, as I said earlier, that we are going to be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to our kids and grandkids.

But there is another issue as well, which is today, in the 21st century in this country, if a person is born and living in poverty, their chances of getting a college degree or the equivalent of a college degree are 9 in 100--9 in 100. For the folks in the Chamber, for the pages who are here today, we have 100 chairs, 100 desks in the Senate. If these desks represented poor children living in this country instead of Senators, those four desks in the front row and four at that end right there, and another one, those are the only folks who would be getting a college degree. Ninety-one other people in this Chamber would be constrained to the margin

of this economy and a margin of our democracy from the outset.

Matters are getting worse, not better. We led the world in the production of college graduates when George Bush--this is not a partisan observation, it is a temporal one--when George Bush, the son, became President. We led the world. Let me tell the young people who are here today, 13 years later, we are 16th in the world in the production of college graduates. Because of our inability to come together and figure out how to deal comprehensively over time in a thoughtful way with the fact that we don't want to stick our kids with this debt we have acquired--which we need to do; we are just hacking away at domestic discretionary spending for higher education, for K-12 education, for agriculture, for infrastructure.

Some of these budgets we have considered--we have not passed them here; they passed them over in the House--would invest only 4 percent of our revenue, 4 percent of the revenue we collect, in the future of this country. Ninety-six percent on something else is not going to get the job done.

On an issue such as this, where our students are saying: How do you at least not make matters worse, we ought to be able to come together in a bipartisan way and solve this problem.

I thank the Senator from Vermont for coming to the floor to focus our attention on something the American people actually care about.

With that, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I know the Senator from Massachusetts is here, and I look forward to hearing his farewell. Before he does, I wanted to say thank you to the Senator from Nevada for his work on this bill, for getting us to a bipartisan result, for helping us grow the vote, and for the statement he made about surely not one of us would have written the bill exactly the way it is written. But there is much more that is good about this bill than not. I am grateful for his support. I thank the Senator.

Mr. President, I wish to thank the Senator from Minnesota for her remarks and say how much I appreciate her work on this legislation, on the Judiciary Committee and beyond.

The chairman is here today. I wish to thank him for his leadership both on the committee and on the floor.

One way or another, something important is going to happen here this

week--which should happen more regularly than it does, but it does not, in the 4 years I have been here; that is, a bill that actually is the result of thoughtful bipartisan--in some cases I even describe it as nonpartisan--work that has been done first by the so-called Gang of 8 that I was pleased to be part of, then in the Judiciary Committee itself, and now on the floor of the Senate.

Before I talk about immigration, I want to mention we are still struggling out in Colorado this summer with these terrible wildfires. We have appreciated the Federal cooperation we have received. It is a reminder to me, when I stand on this floor, how important it is for us to get past this partisan gridlock we have and into a position where we are actually making shared decisions that will allow us, among other things, to do the investments we need to do to make sure our forests have the fire mitigation that will prevent them from catching and burning the way they are this summer in Colorado.

Today we have the opportunity to try to work together on immigration. Opponents have come out and said this bill is going to cost us money, this bill is going to make the deficit worse. It is exactly the opposite. The Congressional Budget Office has said if we pass this bill, we will see nearly $1 trillion of deficit reduction over 20 years. This Congressional Budget Office tells us it will increase our gross domestic product by 5.4 percent over that same period of time. So this bill is a deficit reduction bill. People around here who talk about deficit reduction--and I am one of them--finally have a chance to do it in a thoughtful and measured way, in a useful and constructive way, rather than through a series of mindless across-the-board cuts which we have seen as a consequence of the sequester. Even in Washington, DC, $1 trillion is real money. That is one reason we ought to pass this bill.

Another reason we ought to pass this bill is it creates a visa system that is actually aligned to the economic needs of the United States of America. Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies have been founded by immigrants. Nearly 1 in 10 business owners in Colorado are immigrants and generate $1.2 billion for our State's economy. Agriculture is a $40 billion industry in Colorado, and tourism is Colorado's second largest industry.

We have a growing high-tech sector in Colorado, and 23.6 percent of STEM graduates from our State research universities are immigrants. We want them to earn those degrees if they are doing it in the United States and then stay here in the United States, build businesses in this country, invest in our future with us in this country. Today, because we have a broken immigration system, we are saying to those graduates, Go back to China and compete with us; go back to India and compete with us; we have no use for your talents here in this country.

This bill fixes that. This bill has very important border security measures and measures to prevent future illegal immigration. I thank the Senator from Tennessee, who is on the floor, for his remarkable work with Senator Hoeven to get us to this point. The agreement on border security, which maintains a real and attainable pathway to citizenship which was a bottom line for the Gang of 8 Senators who were working on this bill, was the result of several Senators who were willing and determined to find a way to get this done. So I thank Senator Corker, I thank Senator Hoeven, and I thank Senator McCain and the other Republican Members of the Gang of 8 for getting us here. This is how the Senate should work--a process that leads to principled compromise.

On the border security amendment, some opponents of fixing our broken immigration system continue to say our bill doesn't do enough to secure the border. No reasonable person could look at this legislation and arrive at that conclusion: nearly $50 billion in additional spending at the border, 700 miles of fencing at the border; we double the number of border agents on the southern border of the United States; we go from roughly 22,000 to 44,000 border agents. Those numbers are directionally right. We double them. More money and Federal resources are devoted to securing our border than on all other law enforcement that the Federal Government undertakes, and now we are doubling it.

You might be critical and say, Well, you shouldn't spend that money, although, as I mentioned earlier, this bill results in deficit reduction of almost $1 trillion over 20 years. I could see how somebody might stand up and be critical about that. I can't see how somebody could seriously maintain this bill does not secure our border.

We call for an array of new technologies and resources at our border sectors to ensure 100-percent surveillance and rapid interdiction of threats and potential illegal crossings.

E-Verify is required to be used by every employer in the United States, so we don't end up the way we did the last time--with a broken system, where small businesses either became the INS or were given fake documents and people came here where there were jobs--illegally, not legally. This internal enforcement mechanism will allow us to make sure small businesses know who they are hiring, and we are turning away people who are here unlawfully and shouldn't work here in the United States of America.

This is the greatest country in the world. But 40 percent of the people who are here who are undocumented came lawfully to the United States, overstayed their visas, and it is the consequence of our having a system to check people on the way in but never checks them on the way out or whether they left at all. This bill fixes that problem with a complete entry-exit system, with improved biographic and biometric tracking of those who come into and leave our borders. It is about time for us to begin to apply 21st century technology to this broken immigration system we have.

There are many economic reasons why we should support this bipartisan legislation. We know it will help businesses, we know it will boost our economy, we know we are securing our borders. If people don't believe me on this, I hope they will listen to Senator John McCain and Senator Jeff Flake, who are the two Republican border Senators--Senators from a border State--who took me and others down there to see what the border actually looked like, who support this legislation, who have to go home to Arizona and be able to defend this legislation by saying it secures the borders of the United States of America. They know what they are talking about.

We also can't lose sight of what this bill means for families who are suffering under the current system. Here is one story from a bright young woman in Boulder, CO, who I had the fortunate pleasure to meet, Ana Karina Casas Ibarra. I first met Ana at a bagel shop in Boulder where my staff and I stopped in for a bite to eat. She waited on us and recognized me. When my staff overheard her explaining the dynamics of the 112th Congress, they suggested she apply for an internship in my office. She was an awesome intern. We had the opportunity to learn more about her story.

Fourteen years ago, her mother brought her and her two younger brothers to the United States to escape an abusive marriage. Her mom had consistently juggled two or three jobs to support them. Although Ana was a good student, an old Colorado law denied her in-State tuition. She had to work to pay for community college a few semesters at a time. Her brothers, who saw her opportunity denied, lost their motivation. One brother who speaks better English than Spanish was deported, and the other brother who has an American citizen wife and a baby is facing possible deportation right now. She just published her story in the Denver Post. She wrote:

Too many families share similar horror stories of

separation. There are 11 million people who have entered this

country illegally, and the time is now to provide them with a

path to citizenship.

It is time for immigration reform.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of the Denver Post op-ed.

I just wish to say, again, how proud I am of the work Senator Corker and Senator Hoeven have done to get us to this point. I hope we will come to an agreement on some amendments between now and the end or that we will just take up this bill.

It is time for us to pass it. It is time for us to fix this problem for our economy and for the families all across this country. I believe we can do it, and I think it is an opportunity for this Senate to show it can work in a bipartisan way that produces a meaningful piece of legislation that is very important to the American people.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I wanted to come to the floor tonight to talk briefly about where we are in immigration reform. We are moving along this week. We have come out of several weeks of committee work, where there were a number of Republican amendments that were adopted as part of the process and a number of Democratic amendments adopted as part of the process.

As somebody who was involved in the negotiating group that led to the bill reaching the Judiciary Committee, I actually think it was improved by both Republicans and Democrats. It has been an unusual bipartisan effort, and it is the kind of effort the American people, certainly the people of Colorado, think is long overdue. They do not understand why we seem to be engaged in these fights that don't have anything to do with them instead of working to get together constructively to meet the challenges this country faces.

I think when it comes to this very difficult issue of immigration-- and it is difficult, and there are strong feelings about it--it has been remarkable for that reason; that we have been able to see what I would describe not even as a bipartisan process but a nonpartisan process, with people actually coming together to resolve this issue. As a result, the objections to it, the substantive objections to it are falling away.

There was an objection that somehow the bill was being rushed through. Well, no, it went through the regular order, which is very rare for this place. It shouldn't be rare, but it is rare. It got a full hearing in the Judiciary Committee, and there has been a full hearing on the Senate floor.

There was an argument somehow it was going to create horrible deficits, and it turns out the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said, actually, in the first 10 years it is going to improve our deficit situation by $190 billion and over the next 10 years by another $700 billion--almost $1 trillion over the course of the next 20 years.

So, then, there was another argument, which was there is no border security as part of this legislation. In the Group of 8 we listened hard to what the border Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, two Republicans from Arizona, had to say about what they believed they needed at the border. We went and visited the border with John McCain and Jeff Flake to see what they believed they needed on the Arizona border. But there were other Senators who weren't satisfied by what we put in that bill, and so there was an effort that was then led by Senator Corker from Tennessee and Senator Hoeven to amend the bill, and we supported it. I supported that amendment.

In fact, that amendment got 68 votes the other night--or something like that. We were missing a couple of Senators. We would have had 68 or 69 if everybody had been here.

That is progress because that has built support for the bill-- Republicans and Democrats coming together around the border security issue. I think it is very hard for anybody to make a real

argument this is not a significant attempt to strengthen the border in this country.

We were already spending more money on border enforcement than we do on any other Federal law enforcement combined as it was. We had gone to about 22,000 Border Patrol agents already as it was. Now we are doubling that number--doubling--as an attempt to respond to a very reasonable concern the American people have that the border should be as secure as possible. So that is now part of this legislation.

So those are three things people have argued: The process was too fast, the bill was going to negatively affect the deficit, and our border is still insecure. Those were the arguments that were made.

Now we don't hear those arguments so much anymore. Now we hear scare stories about health care. We are hearing scare stories about how this will affect our economy even though the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said we are going to see five additional points of gross domestic product growth--GDP growth--in the second 10 years of this bill passing, as a result of bringing people out of the shadows.

It is not as if the 11 million people who are here and who are undocumented are not working. They are working. Many of them are working in this country. Many of them are working in the agriculture sector in my State and in this country. Many are working in other industries as well all across the United States. But they are working in an unlawful way. They are working in a cash economy. They are working in a situation where they are easily exploited. Because of that, they drag down the wages of everybody in America.

Workers in my State who are here and who are legal--l-e-g-a-l--are having to compete in a marketplace where there are people who can pay less because they know there are people who have to take less because they do not have lawful recourse.

All the protections we put in this bill, all the protections to make sure, and rightfully so, an American is offered a job first; to ensure, and rightfully so, we are not bringing in a whole bunch of new people when there are Americans looking for work--all of those protections pale in comparison to the protection of bringing 11 million people out of the shadows and out of a cash economy and into a place where they are paid a lawful wage and they are paying their taxes to the U.S. Government.

If all someone cared about, if the only thing someone cared about when they got up in the morning and went to bed at night was rising wages for Americans, solving this issue finally for the 11 million would be the most important thing you could do. And we do that in this bill.

The opponents of this bill are not seriously suggesting they are going to go to the expense of sending 11 million people back to where they came from. They are not seriously suggesting, in answer to this issue, that nothing in the CBO report is true, that none of it makes sense, that this is about ObamaCare when what we are really trying to do for once in this place is solve a set of challenging issues in a bipartisan way.

Mr. President, even more than that, for a decade or more, because of our broken immigration system, the policy of this country has been to turn back talented people--even people educated at our universities, even people educated to be engineers and mathematicians. When they have graduated from college here, at our expense, in many cases, we have not said to them: Stay here and build your business. Compete here and help us grow this economy. Start a business--as half of the Fortune 100 or 500 companies have been started by immigrants. No. We have said: Go home. Go home to India and compete with us from there. Go home to China and hire other people over there.

If we pass this bill, we will say once again that this nation of immigrants is open for business, that we are open to the most creative and talented people in the world, that we want them to drive our economy in the United States just as they have generation after generation going back to our Founders.

It is a great testament to who we are and to the nature of our country that people want to come here, and under the right circumstances we should have them here. The CBO report--and I don't even care about the CBO report--makes it very clear--makes it very clear--what businesspeople in my State already know: It makes it clear to the agricultural industry in my State, the high-tech industry in my State, the ski resorts in my State that the objections of people of goodwill on this bill have been met through compromise and through principled agreement.

This is a good piece of legislation. We shouldn't, in this ninth or eleventh hour or whatever it is--the ninth inning--allow ourselves to get distracted by the politics seeking to divide us in this Chamber or in this country. And I don't believe we will. So I urge my colleagues to support the passage of this bill.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I appreciate the recognition, and I ensure my colleagues I will be brief. I appreciate very much the work of the Senator from Ohio on this bill.

I wanted to come to the floor this afternoon to talk about the agreement that we have reached with Senators Corker and Hoeven that will significantly increase security measures taken at our borders.

We have spent a lot of time talking about this issue over the last months with some proposals that would have simply gone too far by sacrificing the path to citizenship, perhaps completely, in some of these proposals.

I thank Senator Corker, Senator Hoeven, and the other Senators who have been involved in this discussion for striking the balance in a different place and giving us a path to another bipartisan agreement that has required compromise--principled compromise--on all sides throughout this process.

A number of us have said that this bill is not the bill each of us would have written left to our own devices. But the nature of this place, when it is working, is that it is a place where people make principled compromises and come together.

I want to thank Chairman Leahy, who is on the floor today, for the process that he led in the Judiciary Committee to get us here. There were over 300 amendments considered. I think there were 141 amendments adopted by both Democrats and Republicans.

This is the way Colorado expects the Senate to work--a State that is one-third Democratic, one-third Republican, and one-third Independent, and doesn't care very much about what labels people put on each other or themselves but would like the institutions in Washington to actually reflect their priorities and reflect the way they do business, which is by coming together and figuring out how to deal with principled disagreements.

So while we have said this bill isn't the bill that I would have written alone, it is a good bill. It is a bill that has gotten stronger in the committee and stronger on the Senate floor. That is the way it is supposed to work.

People at home know that doing big things means we are going to have to be willing to come together from time to time on compromised solutions, and that is what we are doing here. We are protecting the principles the eight of us laid out when we started this process, which includes ensuring a pathway to citizenship that is real and attainable, in addition to preventing future illegal immigration through, among other measures, securing our borders.

Our agreement had additional support for securing the border even after the improvements we have seen over the last 10 years. But now what we have before us is what some have called a border surge plan that will significantly expand resources at the border beyond what is already in the bill.

It will double the number of border agents--an agent, it has been estimated, every 1,000 feet on the border. It will significantly expand fencing. It will implement new technology and resources such as fixed towers, surveillance cameras, and aerial surveillance units. It will provide for full monitoring of our southern border.

We have already dramatically increased security at the border. This bill will double the number of border agents on our southern border. And while these items will add more cost to the bill, we know such costs are offset by fees and fines on visas throughout our bill.

Yesterday's news from the Congressional Budget Office that the bill as written would achieve nearly $900 billion in deficit savings over the next 20 years--coupled with the gigantic steps we are already taking at the border, along with the growing coalition of support for fixing our broken immigration system--is leaving opponents with less and less to undercut the bill. The case is simply slipping away for maintaining the status quo that is holding back our economy, keeping us less secure, and tearing apart families.

At home, people actually think securing the border is a virtue. They support securing the border at home. People at home think a pathway to citizenship that resolves the question for the 11 million people working in this shadow economy, in this cash economy, is a virtue. People at home believe both of those things would be positive. In Washington, somehow it becomes a trade: border security for citizenship, depending on which side you are on.

I want to say how grateful I am to the other Members of the Gang of 8, particularly to Senator McCain, Senator Graham, Senator Rubio, and Senator Flake, my Republican colleagues, and to Senator Hoeven and Senator Corker for creating the opportunity for us to have a big bipartisan vote on this Senate floor next week; to be able to show the American people there is hope, that we can finally resolve not just the issue for the 11 million, but we can also begin as a country to have the talents of people from all over the world who want to contribute to our economy, who want to build their businesses here.

I thank them for legislating in such a constructive way, so as we move forward, to have the chance for each of us to vote to reaffirm two essential principles that make our country so special: One, that we are committed to the rule of law and the other that we are a nation of immigrants.

I yield the floor. I thank the Senator from Utah for his patience.

I object.

Madam President, I did not know that was the purpose of the Senator rising, so I will keep going on another topic.

Through the Chair, does the Senator from Utah want to speak?

Through the Chair, two sentences, which are: Our farmers and ranchers in Colorado have been suffering through the worst drought that we have had in a generation. This is the third year in a row of that drought. We have passed a bipartisan farm bill twice on the floor of the Senate, I think with over 70 votes. It is not perfect. There are things in it I would change. It is the only bipartisan deficit reduction, other than the immigration bill, that has been achieved by a committee in this Congress, either on the Senate side or House side-- the only one.

We make important reforms to our conservation title. We end direct payments to producers. The Senate bill is not a perfect bill, but it is a good bill. Today the House of Representatives voted their own bill down. Farmers and ranchers in Colorado who are working hard to try to support their families, to create a condition where they can leave their farms and ranches to the next generation of Coloradans, are left to scratch their heads once again why Washington cannot get its work done.

I urge the House of Representatives to pass the bipartisan Senate farm bill so our farmers and ranchers can get the relief they need.

I yield the floor.

I yield.

Through the Chair, I am aware of that. I appreciate the Senator from Vermont, the former chair of the committee and now the chair of the Judiciary Committee, reminding the

Chamber that the Senator from Vermont has been here longer than I have been, just being honest about it. But I wonder sometimes what it would have been like to serve in this body when it did not have a 10-percent approval rating. The chairman was here when the Congress did not have a 10-percent approval rating. I don't know why anybody in the world would want to work in a place that had that level of approval.

I came down to the floor once with a slide that tried to find other enterprises that had the kind of approval rating we have in this Congress. It is very hard to do. The IRS had a 40-percent approval rating. There is an actress who had a 15-percent approval rating. Eleven percent of the American people say they want the country to be a Communist country--I don't, by the way. I think Fidel Castro had a 5- or 6-percent approval rating.

We have to start working together. That is what the American people want. That is what the people in my State want. They know we are not always going to agree on everything, but they expect us to actually get things done. One of the matters we have in front of us, this immigration bill, is an excellent example of Republicans and Democrats coming together to do their work.

The chairman is exactly right. The Senator from Vermont is exactly right. We have differences on the Agriculture Committee sometimes, but they are not partisan differences. They are not differences between Republicans and Democrats. They are regional differences, and we find a way to hash those out. We were able to pass this bill on the floor with broad bipartisan support. That is what we should do with this immigration bill and that is what the House of Representatives should do with our Senate farm bill.

I yield the floor.