Floor Statements

Mr. President, the first vote tomorrow will be a cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the Middle Class Tax Act at 2:15 p.m.

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

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

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

I thank the Chair.

(The remarks of Mr. Bennet pertaining to the introduction of S. 3400 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have come to the floor to talk about Colorado. This summer, most people have been thinking about the wildfires we have had up there. These fires were widespread throughout the State, and it is still just the beginning of fire season. We have already seen a lot of damage, including the destruction of hundreds of homes, and, most sadly, the loss of life.

I wish to say in this Chamber, to all my colleagues, how much I appreciate their kindness. The knowledge that all of you have been thinking about people at home has been very comforting to the people I represent. Thanks to the heroic work of the firefighters, and with a lot of help also from Mother Nature, the fires are under control. So I wish to remind people, as I have been doing now for months, that Colorado is the best place to visit during the summer. It is the best place to bring your family.

In fact, last week--or during the recess--Susan and I loaded up the minivan and drove across the State with our kids. It takes all the fun out of playing the license plate game when you are driving in Colorado because in about 2 hours the kids saw half the license plates representing half the States in the United States--just 2 hours from Denver, CO. So I would say, as I have said time and time again, over the coming months, if you have plans to come to our State, please do.

Today, I wish to focus on one area that illustrates how special our State of Colorado is.

The Hermosa Creek watershed is a beautiful parcel of land just up the road from Durango in the southwest corner of our State.

Over 4 years ago, an incredibly diverse group of local citizens, mountain bikers, fishermen, outfitters, local elected officials, and others got together to talk about the future of this striking land. Everybody involved likes to visit the area for recreation or to do business there. Their discussion was about how to put together a plan from the local level up to manage the area so everyone could enjoy it and benefit, and so that we could protect it for the next generations of Coloradans and the next generations of Americans.

A little over a year ago, the group invited my family and me to take a hike through the watershed and join the discussion. During a tour over the last Memorial Day weekend, we unloaded at the Hermosa Creek trailhead, we tied up our boots, and my youngest daughter Anne made a hiking stick out of a nearby fallen branch. We started up the trail with 40 or so others from the local community.

As we climbed higher and higher, we were all overcome by the beauty. People stopped talking. I stopped talking largely because I was out of breath. But the people I was with were as awestruck as I was by the beauty of this place. It was a particularly settling walk after being cooped up with my children.

There are forested valleys, crystal-clear streams, and unspoiled views. After about an hour, the group pulled off the Forest Service trail into a meadow. And as Anne, Helena, and Caroline Bennet made themselves and their father and mother dandelion necklaces, we started a discussion about what this area means to the people who live there and the people who visit. The sportsmen come to fish for native Colorado cutthroat trout and for back-country elk hunting. The mountain bikers come to enjoy single-track riding on trails known throughout the United States of America, and actually in other countries as well. The local water districts love Hermosa because it provides drinking water for the great city of Durango. Workers in the timber and mining industries stress that some of the watershed could contribute to extractive development in the future. Some might not know that mining has long been an economic driver in that region of our State.

This is a photograph of the group that hiked that day. The upshot of the discussion we had in that meadow was an agreement to work together on a bill, a balanced bill that managed the watershed so it would contribute to the local economy long into the future. After nearly 14 months of discussions and negotiations since that hike, I introduced that bill earlier today.

The Hermosa Creek Watershed Protection Act governs the entire 108,000-acre watershed. It includes provisions to allow for multiple uses, such as timber harvesting for forest health; access and trails for off-road vehicle enthusiasts, and for mountain bikers.

It keeps getting better. The bill also adds nearly 40,000 acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System, lands that provide unique and important opportunities for solitude and reflection, lands that will remain undeveloped forever, so they will always have clear streams of fish and lush forests for a local outfitter to take clients into the wilderness on horseback.

I am proud to report the bill has the unanimous bipartisan backing of the two county commissions involved, the San Juan County Commission and the La Plata County Commission. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of letters of support from both counties.

It has the support of the Hermosa Creek Workgroup, ranging from hard-rock miners to wilderness advocates. I am pleased to carry this bill on behalf of the people of Colorado. I am especially proud because this was a community-driven process at its very finest, through and through, from beginning to end. Colorado wrote this bill. This bill wasn't written in Washington, DC. The bill has grown from the grassroots up, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents working together to cement a long-term plan for the community's future.

I also want to thank my senior Senator, Senator Udall of Colorado, for joining me as a cosponsor of the bill, and to thank Senators Bingaman and Murkowski for their past help moving Colorado land bills through their committee. I am confident that as we work on this bill together we will find similar consensus.

To bring this back to the beginning, I don't have to convince most people that Colorado is a special place. Many have visited our State over their lifetimes to ski our mountains, run our rivers, or climb a ``14er.'' The Hermosa Creek watershed represents some of the best Colorado has to offer. It deserves to be protected for our outdoor recreation economy, and for future generations.

I want to thank all of the people who have spent countless hours working together to make sure they could overcome their differences and reach a consensus on this bill. As I have told all of them, it makes my work so much easier when people work in such a constructive way together, and for that, they have my deep appreciation.

Mr. President, I have come to the floor to talk about Colorado. This summer, most people have been thinking about the wildfires we have had up there. These fires were widespread throughout the State, and it is still just the beginning of fire season. We have already seen a lot of damage, including the destruction of hundreds of homes, and, most sadly, the loss of life.

I wish to say in this Chamber, to all my colleagues, how much I appreciate their kindness. The knowledge that all of you have been thinking about people at home has been very comforting to the people I represent. Thanks to the heroic work of the firefighters, and with a lot of help also from Mother Nature, the fires are under control. So I wish to remind people, as I have been doing now for months, that Colorado is the best place to visit during the summer. It is the best place to bring your family.

In fact, last week--or during the recess--Susan and I loaded up the minivan and drove across the State with our kids. It takes all the fun out of playing the license plate game when you are driving in Colorado because in about 2 hours the kids saw half the license plates representing half the States in the United States--just 2 hours from Denver, CO. So I would say, as I have said time and time again, over the coming months, if you have plans to come to our State, please do.

Today, I wish to focus on one area that illustrates how special our State of Colorado is.

The Hermosa Creek watershed is a beautiful parcel of land just up the road from Durango in the southwest corner of our State.

Over 4 years ago, an incredibly diverse group of local citizens, mountain bikers, fishermen, outfitters, local elected officials, and others got together to talk about the future of this striking land. Everybody involved likes to visit the area for recreation or to do business there. Their discussion was about how to put together a plan from the local level up to manage the area so everyone could enjoy it and benefit, and so that we could protect it for the next generations of Coloradans and the next generations of Americans.

A little over a year ago, the group invited my family and me to take a hike through the watershed and join the discussion. During a tour over the last Memorial Day weekend, we unloaded at the Hermosa Creek trailhead, we tied up our boots, and my youngest daughter Anne made a hiking stick out of a nearby fallen branch. We started up the trail with 40 or so others from the local community.

As we climbed higher and higher, we were all overcome by the beauty. People stopped talking. I stopped talking largely because I was out of breath. But the people I was with were as awestruck as I was by the beauty of this place. It was a particularly settling walk after being cooped up with my children.

There are forested valleys, crystal-clear streams, and unspoiled views. After about an hour, the group pulled off the Forest Service trail into a meadow. And as Anne, Helena, and Caroline Bennet made themselves and their father and mother dandelion necklaces, we started a discussion about what this area means to the people who live there and the people who visit. The sportsmen come to fish for native Colorado cutthroat trout and for back-country elk hunting. The mountain bikers come to enjoy single-track riding on trails known throughout the United States of America, and actually in other countries as well. The local water districts love Hermosa because it provides drinking water for the great city of Durango. Workers in the timber and mining industries stress that some of the watershed could contribute to extractive development in the future. Some might not know that mining has long been an economic driver in that region of our State.

This is a photograph of the group that hiked that day. The upshot of the discussion we had in that meadow was an agreement to work together on a bill, a balanced bill that managed the watershed so it would contribute to the local economy long into the future. After nearly 14 months of discussions and negotiations since that hike, I introduced that bill earlier today.

The Hermosa Creek Watershed Protection Act governs the entire 108,000-acre watershed. It includes provisions to allow for multiple uses, such as timber harvesting for forest health; access and trails for off-road vehicle enthusiasts, and for mountain bikers.

It keeps getting better. The bill also adds nearly 40,000 acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System, lands that provide unique and important opportunities for solitude and reflection, lands that will remain undeveloped forever, so they will always have clear streams of fish and lush forests for a local outfitter to take clients into the wilderness on horseback.

I am proud to report the bill has the unanimous bipartisan backing of the two county commissions involved, the San Juan County Commission and the La Plata County Commission. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of letters of support from both counties.

It has the support of the Hermosa Creek Workgroup, ranging from hard-rock miners to wilderness advocates. I am pleased to carry this bill on behalf of the people of Colorado. I am especially proud because this was a community-driven process at its very finest, through and through, from beginning to end. Colorado wrote this bill. This bill wasn't written in Washington, DC. The bill has grown from the grassroots up, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents working together to cement a long-term plan for the community's future.

I also want to thank my senior Senator, Senator Udall of Colorado, for joining me as a cosponsor of the bill, and to thank Senators Bingaman and Murkowski for their past help moving Colorado land bills through their committee. I am confident that as we work on this bill together we will find similar consensus.

To bring this back to the beginning, I don't have to convince most people that Colorado is a special place. Many have visited our State over their lifetimes to ski our mountains, run our rivers, or climb a ``14er.'' The Hermosa Creek watershed represents some of the best Colorado has to offer. It deserves to be protected for our outdoor recreation economy, and for future generations.

I want to thank all of the people who have spent countless hours working together to make sure they could overcome their differences and reach a consensus on this bill. As I have told all of them, it makes my work so much easier when people work in such a constructive way together, and for that, they have my deep appreciation.

Mr. President, I thank my neighbor, the Senator from New Mexico, for his kind words and his leadership on this issue. I have been privileged to have the chance to cosponsor a constitutional amendment that I think responds very nicely to what he hears from his constituents, as I hear from mine, whether they are Republicans, Democrats, or Independent voters. I also want to thank the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Whitehouse, for organizing this time tonight and for his leadership over these many months.

It is 8:45 p.m. tonight in Washington, DC, as we debate this bill. We are not actually debating the bill because we weren't even allowed to move to a debate on the bill. I can't tell you the number of times we haven't been able to do that.

I am often struck by the fact that I think the Founding Fathers would have wanted us to debate all these bills and to vote up or down on each one and then to go home and explain to our constituents why we voted one way or why we voted another way. But here we are, not technically debating a bill, once again, because we haven't even been able to move onto a piece of legislation that historically has been and I hope will again become bipartisan.

As I mentioned, it is 8:45 here. At home in Colorado, it is 6:45. It is dinnertime. Families are sitting around having dinner with their loved ones, much as I did when I was a boy. I can remember my parents, who followed public affairs closely, turned on the evening news every night about this time, and Walter Cronkite would be on the television. I remember that the ads, as probably does the Senator from New Mexico, were things like Geritol, things that cleaned your dentures. I remember one ad in particular--I never could believe they could get the cherry stains out of those pearls, but every single night they were able to do it. And if there was a political ad on television, the candidate had to get on at the end and say: My name is Michael Bennet, my name is Jeff Merkley, my name is Tom Udall or Dick Durbin or Harry Reid or Sheldon Whitehouse, and I approve this message. That is what we saw when I was a child.

Tonight, families all over my State, which is a swing State, are going to have to endure advertisement after advertisement that is not advertising those consumer products I described but are advocating for candidates and political ideas. And many of them will have phony names. The Committee for a Strong America or Tall Children or Strong Teeth is what they are going to see. Now, because of what the Supreme Court ruling did, they can't even find out, if they wanted to, who is donating to those in many cases fake committees.

I wish to start out tonight by making clear what is not at issue with this bill. This is not a constitutional question we are debating here tonight. There is not a question that disclosure and disclaimer--which this bill doesn't even do--is constitutional. Eight of nine Supreme Court Justices have not only said it is constitutional but some have said that is a desired result.

Justice Scalia said:

Requiring people to stand up in public for their political

acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is

doomed.

For my part, I do not look forward to a society that, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the home of the brave. It takes courage to put your name on something, to stand for something that is unpopular. It doesn't take a lot of courage to let somebody use your money in a way that keeps you completely anonymous and imposes something on families in our States who are trying to make a fundamental American decision to vote in a democracy. That doesn't take courage. That is the point Justice Scalia was making because Justice Scalia, I believe, thought Congress would do its job and enact what is constitutional, require disclosure, require disclaimer.

This issue is one that has been well understood in this country since its founding. Here is Patrick Henry in 1788:

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be,

secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed

from them.

Accountability and transparency--that is what this legislation is about, and it is emphatically constitutional. So if somebody comes and tells you this is about the Constitution, tell them that eight of nine Supreme Court Justices have already ruled on this question. They have already ruled that what is in the content of this act is constitutional.

What is happening out there as a consequence of a decision that was made by the Supreme Court on the one hand and the failure of the Congress to act in a timely manner on the other? Well, these super PACs have come into being, these anonymous folks who have been able to give money.

There is an owner of a casino in Las Vegas, and he has actually given more

money to super PACs in 2012 than anybody else in the country--at least that is my understanding--but to him this is chump change. So far he has given $35 million, and he says he is going to give more than that. That is a lot of money to most people, but it is not a lot of money to this guy because he has a net worth of $23.9 billion.

We did some math at home, and what we figured out is that in Colorado and in America, the average family's net worth is roughly $77,000. So if they were to spend the same percentage of their net worth that this one casino owner in Las Vegas has spent of his net worth, that would be about $108, which is about what people spend a week on groceries who are making this kind of money. To them, that would be a little bit of a sacrifice, $108, but if they knew they could control the outcome of elections in State after State, if they could influence the election of the very President of the United States by spending .0001 of their net worth, $108, they might do it.

This is pocket change for him. These numbers get so big it is hard sometimes to think about what it means. This one person's net worth is 332,000 times the net worth of our average family.

Think about it this way: The median household income in Colorado is roughly $56,000. A family earning $56,000 in Colorado every year, year in and year out, who never paid any taxes--and is probably paying a higher rate, by the way, than this guy in Las Vegas--but who never paid any taxes, who never spent one penny of their salary--$56,000 a year, year in and year out and didn't spend a nickel of it--would have to do that for 441,000 years before it added up to what this guy has. Just to give you a sense of perspective, human beings made their appearance on this planet 200,000 years ago--less than half of what it would take for this diligent and prudent family to raise what this fellow is worth. It gives you a sense of the order of magnitude.

As some of my colleagues have said, one aspect that is really interesting about this super PAC phenomenon is it is a very small group of very wealthy people who are contributing to it. It is not most corporations. It is not some people who have some means. This is a tiny, tiny group of people who are committed to a set of political outcomes in their economic interests that I am not sure are in the same interests of most of the folks who live in my State.

Again, we are not saying they can't do it. This bill doesn't say they can't do it. This bill just says: If you are going to do it, you need to tell us who you are. We want to know who you are. Step up and say why it is you are doing what you are doing.

It is not surprising, by the way, that this problem has become enormous since this decision was made. In 2006, 1 percent of donors were undisclosed; that was it. Ninety-nine percent were disclosed, and 1 percent was not disclosed. It is even worse today.

This is 2010, the year I was running and a year when Colorado saw more outside money on television than anybody should deserve to see, more outside money than any State in the United States of America, and 44 percent of the money that was spent was not disclosed. The identity of the people who gave the money was not disclosed. That is virtually half of what was spent, and it is going to be worse this year.

I have three daughters who are 12, 11, and 7, and everybody who has been a parent would know this intuitively. Not surprisingly, as the spending has become more anonymous, the advertising has become more negative. If one of my kids thinks they can get away with doing something negative to one of their sisters--which is not often, but it happens--if they think they can get away with it without anybody catching them, they are a lot more likely to do it than if they know somebody is watching.

I ask for an additional 2 minutes.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

So you can see that the portion of positive advertising here is much, much higher than the negative.

Today it is almost entirely negative. And between the hours of 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. tonight in the State of Colorado and across the United States of America, those graphs are going to be borne out by negative ad after negative ad.

We face enormous structural issues in the economy in this country. We faced them for a while, and we are facing them again because, as you can see from this chart, GDP growth, our economic output, has decoupled from wage growth and job growth. That is what has happened in the United States. And the job of this Congress and the job of this administration and our generation's job is to recouple this so that we have a rising middle class. And that is what we should be spending our time on as we think about reforming our Tax Code and our regulatory code and our statute books. But there are some folks around who aren't necessarily all that interested in that because the current system works pretty well for them.

I can't tell you the number of times I have heard people say in this Chamber that the government shouldn't pick winners and losers. That is really easy to say when you are on the winning side. We ought to have a set of rules that are responsive to the needs of the vast majority of American people--whether Republicans, Democrats, or Independents--who together, no matter where they are in the economic spectrum, all want essentially the same thing, which is to make sure we are not the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to the people who are coming afterwards. I believe that anybody who wants to come to that debate, anybody who wants to play in that game is welcome, but they ought to tell us who they are.

Mr. President, I yield the floor. I see the Senator from Illinois is here, and I look forward to his remarks.

I wish to thank the Senator from Rhode Island for his leadership and my other colleagues who are out here tonight.

I wish to be clear again about what this bill is. First of all, it is very clear it is constitutional. In the Supreme Court, eight of nine Justices have said that. As I listen to the debate tonight, I also think people at home should know this is about a few actors in the country who have been allowed to spend wild amounts of money without saying who they are. This doesn't prevent them from spending the money. It simply says they need to say who they are.

My sense, having spent time with people who are often asked to contribute to these campaigns, is that people who have the means to spend $10,000 on political activity, by and large, would actually like this disclosure requirement. The reason they would like this disclosure requirement is so they can say to people who are trying to list them and distorting our politics and having them pay for negative attack ads they don't agree with and they don't think are true, could say no because they know they could say to the people: I am not going to sign up for that because I don't want to put my name on that.

There is an enforcement mechanism I think virtually everybody in America would support and certainly at home would support. I would argue the only place in America that anybody would think that spending vast amounts of money by a small group of people without having to tell us who they are makes sense, and that is right here in Washington, DC. Maybe some people will benefit from making the ads or those who are paid to place the ads on television. But otherwise, it is hard to find anybody who would think this wasn't in their interest and certainly not in their children's interest.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record Senator Coburn's column in the op-ed page of the New York Times where he lays out in a very succinct and compelling view some of the things that are wrong with this place.

It also calls for the kind of principled leadership we are going to apply in order to solve the challenges we face with respect to our debt and deficit to get this economy moving again. It includes recoupling rising wages and job growth to our economic growth, energy policy, educating our kids in the 21st century. It is all the things people at home want us to be working on.

In a State such as mine that is one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, and one-third Independent, there is not that much difference in opinion about what the solutions ought to be.

The reason I support the DISCLOSE Act is that I think it is one important step. It is certainly not the only step, but it is one important step toward recoupling the conversation we are having in Washington and to recoupling the priorities that are in Washington. Maybe it is better to say it this way: to recouple the priorities the people have at home to the work being done or not done in Washington,

I thank the Senator for his question. I think it is going to be made much more difficult. There are plenty of people I know at home who watch the stuff going on, on TV, and they don't recognize themselves and the cartoon that is playing. Sometimes they don't recognize their priorities playing out on the Senate floor. They don't recognize the convictions they have or the aspirations they have for the communities or the debate they are having. It is a natural reaction for people to say: I don't want any part of that.

As Dick Durbin was saying, somehow this is a knife fight that has nothing to do with me, and I am not going to pay attention to it. The problem is, as with any fight such as that, what we end up doing is ducking and covering because that is what we have to do in order to stay out of the way. That isn't going to put us in the position of being able to deliver on the promise of generation after generation of Americans to make sure the folks coming after us actually have more opportunity, not less, than we had.

Remember, this is a tiny proposal. This is simply requiring disclosure. It is not even requiring a disclaimer. Frankly, if it were up to me, I would want people who funded these committees to have to stand up at the end of the ads to say: I am John Smith or I am Mary Jones, and I paid for this ad. But this bill doesn't even do that. All it says is they have to say who they are. I think poll after poll shows that 90 percent of Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, agree with that.

This is one issue where the sort of optical issues that happened somehow on the beltway ought to not lead us to a place where we obscure the vision of the American people, which on this issue is as clear as can be. We have to get this done and get on to the rest of the business at hand.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank you for the recognition. I come to the floor to briefly talk about the Supreme Court decision on health care.

I was in Colorado last week. We had a wonderful time traveling across the Western Slope of our State. We spent time in Gunnison County and other places. We fished in Hartselle. One thing people were not talking about there was the Supreme Court decision on health care. What they were talking about was how we get our economy moving again; how we recouple our economic growth in this country to job growth and wage growth again; how we create a comprehensive and thoughtful approach to reducing our deficit and our debt; how we educate our kids for the 21st century; how we build this economy to make sure we leave our kids with something better than what we found. In short, they were talking about exactly what people inside the beltway are not talking about.

Today the House of Representatives--I don't know whether voting has started yet--in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, is voting to repeal the health care reform bill for the 31st time. They have been successful 30 times. They have voted to repeal the bill 30 times, but they feel the need now to do it a 31st time.

I saw on the TV in my office today the Twitter traffic that was rolling at the bottom of the screen. One person after another announced that they were voting to repeal the health care bill for the 31st time.

I thought about a Facebook post I saw last week from somebody I know in Denver named Mary Seawall. She is on the school board there, but she is not a politician. This is what she wrote

the day after the Supreme Court reached its decision on health care:

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable

Care Act came on a hard day for our family. Yesterday

afternoon, we learned that our 6-year-old Annie has type 1

diabetes. She and I sat in a doctor's office crying through

her first finger prick, her first insulin shot. Our life is

now different.

She will have this disease for her entire life or until

there is a cure. A few years ago, our entire family might

have lost our insurance. She now has a preexisting condition

that likely would have made her uninsurable as an adult.

Mary wrote:

What I am saying is not political; it's a mother's sigh of

relief.

``A mother's sigh of relief.''

When I heard the Supreme Court ruling, I was waiting for

the call--

``I was waiting for the call''--

to tell me why my baby looked too thin, why she had to take

breaks walking up a flight of stairs, why she had started

wetting her bed. The ruling means she lives in a country that

won't leave her behind.

We are very lucky that we caught this early before she lost

consciousness or went into a coma, something that would have

likely happened in the next few days.

I know our luck came from health insurance that allowed her

worried parents to take her to the doctor because we had a

``bad feeling.'' Many families, even insured ones, can't do

what we did. I was raised on the idea of ``better to be safe

than sorry.'' Our health care system has been ``better sorry

than safe'' for too long.

Mary goes on to say that this Supreme Court decision ``couldn't have come at a better time, our family's worst day.''

I hope the folks who are twittering about their repeal for the 31st time of this bill rather than working to try to improve it, rather than working to try to fix it, incapable of actually telling us what they would replace this with, would take a moment to read what a mother in Denver posted on Facebook last week.

I do not think this health care bill was perfect, and I said that from the day we passed it. There are issues around cost, in particular, that I continue to be very concerned with because despite the rhetoric around this place, the reality is that we cannot solve our deficit and debt problem without dealing with a restructuring of how we deliver health care in the United States. Maybe the bill is not perfect, and maybe there are suggestions that could be made to improve it. I have my own. I tried, when we passed the bill, to put a fail-safe in place that would actually hold this Congress to the numbers that it said it would save, the dollars that we said we would save, and that if we did not, we had to figure out how to cut or make other changes to get there. So there is more work to be done. But the thing I find amazing--and this is why I wanted to come to the floor--is how far away this conversation is from the people I represent and what a masquerade so much of this conversation is.

I know there were a lot of people who were disappointed that the health care bill was declared constitutional by the Supreme Court, and there were people who said they were going to declare it unconstitutional, and they did not.

So the next day--and really for the next week--what we heard was, well, the bill imposes a tax on the middle class of this country, that the President broke a promise because he said he would not raise taxes on the middle class.

I want everybody to know what is being talked about when people talk about this. They are talking about a piece of the legislation called the health care mandate. Some people call it a penalty, and some people call it a tax. That is something that has been debated around here for the last week. It has not been debated before this.

I do not care what label you put on it, frankly, because people at home are not talking to me about this. Do you know why they are not talking to me about this? Because it applies to 1 percent--1.2 percent, to be precise--of the American people. That is what the Congressional Budget Office told us when we were passing this legislation. And if you do not believe me, it is on page 33--I will not enter the whole opinion into the Record--of the Supreme Court's finding of fact, where Justice Roberts finds as a matter of fact that the CBO said this mandate would cost $4 billion and that roughly 4 million people would be affected. Those are the 4 million people after Medicare and Medicaid and private employers' insurance and personal insurance that people buy. That is a group of people, a sliver, 1 percent of the American people who can afford to buy insurance but do not and choose to pay the penalty or the tax or the mandate instead of buying their insurance--$4 billion; 4 million people.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the portion of the Supreme Court Opinion of the Court that I referred to on page 33 of the opinion be printed in the Record.

What the health care bill was intended to do--and again, it may not have done it perfectly, and there may be other ideas we ought to be legislating around--what it was intended to do is solve a problem that confronted not 1 percent of the American people, not 4 million people, but a problem that conservatively--extremely conservatively--affects 50 percent of the American people and is a $58.5 billion problem, not a $4 billion problem, because it is 50 percent of the people who are covered today by their employers who have to pay $1,100 a year in additional premiums to subsidize the uninsured in the United States of America. That was one of the big objectives of dealing with this health care issue. And I say it is conservative because this number does not even include the people who are buying insurance on their own. So maybe if you add those numbers together, you get to about 70 percent of the American people.

So we spent a week on cable television, on the floor of the Senate, occupied completely with this 1 percent number over here, with no theory at all about what we are doing for 50 percent of Americans. That is how comical this conversation has become. I should not say comical. That is how detached this conversation has become from what is actually going on in the real lives of the people whom I represent and others in this Chamber represent.

What is so amazing to me, having watched this as somebody who has not been around here for very long and may not understand all the ways of Washington, is that when you look at the history of this so-called mandate or so-called tax, it is really puzzling to understand the politics around this.

This is a chart, I show you in the Chamber, that is part of an article that ran in the New Yorker a couple weeks ago called the ``Unpopular Mandate'' by Ezra Klein. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.

I urge people to read this because what Mr. Klein does in this article is chart the political course of this mandate from about 1989 to the present. The red shown on the chart is the years in which this was a Republican idea, advanced by Republican Members of Congress and by think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that actually came up with the idea to begin with to deal with the fact that there were people in this country who were not buying health insurance and whom we were all subsidizing, and then when it became a Democratic idea in more recent times.

It strikes me as one person watching all of this that this might have more to do with the party that is in the White House or not in the White House than it does with respect to the merits of the idea. But it is, of course, the merits of these ideas that we should be debating and talking about. But we should not be telling the American people that something that affects 1 percent of the American people is a broad- based assault on the middle class, and we should be bringing to this floor the ideas we have for improving what 50 percent of the American people or 70 percent of the American people are already facing. That is what people in our States believe.

Here is part of an editorial from the Greeley Tribune, which I think was published yesterday, where they wrote:

In 2010, the North Colorado Medical Center provided more

than $71 million in services to indigent patients who didn't

have health insurance. It wrote off another $29 million in

bad debt.

The Greeley Tribune writes:

Eventually, insured patients [must] pay for that, in higher

premiums and co-pays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that editorial be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I believe that folks in Colorado have moved on here, that they want us to improve this legislation, that they want us to get focused on the real matters at hand, which are getting this economy going again, getting us into an environment where we have more jobs and rising wages again, and they are a lot less interested in these talking points.

I do not understand why people who are in politics can simultaneously make such a big deal about this that affects 1 percent of the people in this country and at the same time support legislation, for example, that forces women, that mandates women to have procedures before they can make a choice about their own reproductive health. It does not make any sense because it is completely inconsistent.

I have a daughter Anne who is 7, not 6 like Mary's daughter. But it is her health care and the certainty in her life and in her sisters' lives and the thousands of children across my State whose health care we should be interested in.

I can see that other colleagues of mine have come to the floor, so I am going to move along here. But before I do that and before I yield to the Senator from Maryland, I want to say that if this repeal happened in the House and then this repeal happened in the Senate and it were signed into law, 932,000 Coloradans who have preexisting conditions would lose their insurance, 50,000 young adults in Colorado who can now stay on their parents' insurance until they are 26 would no longer be able to, and women could once again be discriminated against simply because they are women. It is welcome to 696,000 women in Colorado who need maternity care or other women's health services who are not going to be charged higher premiums since this law is in effect. And when these exchanges are set up, 521,000 Colorado children will, for the first time, have better vision and dental coverage.

I want to work in a bipartisan way going forward to try to make sure we are doing everything we can to follow the examples of places such as St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction or the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver or Denver Health in Denver to drive higher quality and to drive lower costs. It is essential. It is essential for our economy, and it is essential for our competitive position in the world. And it is essential that we put these talking points down and start actually dealing with the facts as they are.

With that, Mr. President, I thank you for your patience, and I yield the floor.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of H.R. 3001, which was received from the House and is at the desk.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read three times and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, without any intervening action or debate, and any related statements be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of H.R. 4155, which was received from the House and is at the desk.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read three times and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any related statements be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 12; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; that the majority leader be recognized and the first hour be equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees, with the majority controlling the first half and the Republicans controlling the final half.

Mr. President, this evening the majority leader filed cloture on the Landrieu substitute and the underlying Small Business Jobs and Tax Relief Act. As a result, the filing deadline for amendments to the Landrieu substitute amendment and to S. 2237 is 1 p.m. tomorrow.

Unless an agreement is reached, the cloture votes will be on Friday. We hope we can come to an agreement to have them tomorrow.

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

Mr. President, I want the record to reflect that I would have voted in favor of H.R. 4348, but I went home to Colorado to be with my constituents, many of whom have lost their homes and are facing severe challenges as several fires continue to rage across the State.

By finally reauthorizing our transportation programs for over 2 years, we will provide some measure of certainty for States, municipalities, and businesses across the country urgently in need of more than just a 2-month extension. The bill includes resources, modeled on legislation that I introduced with Senator Mark Warner, for transit-oriented development competitive grants to help local communities work with private investors to promote long-term transit planning, and the legislation also contains a common-sense modification to the rural transit formula for which I advocated. These provisions will benefit transit agencies across my State as they provide quality service to Coloradans. The bill also maintains continued funding for the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) Program and Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination (SRS) Act. These programs are lifelines for financially strapped rural counties and local businesses.

Of course this is not a perfect bill. I am disappointed that the conference committee eliminated the Senate provision funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a program that has been vital to preserving Colorado's western heritage. And I would have liked to see a longer reauthorization, with structural reforms to the highway trust fund to ensure we can continue to finance improvements to our public infrastructure and leave more--not less--for the next generation. That said, I commend my colleagues for all their hard work getting this bill across the line.

I am also pleased that this legislation will prevent loan rates from doubling and averts an increase that would have put the dream of a college degree further out of reach for thousands of Colorado students, and increased an already crushing debt burden on the middle class.