Floor Statements

Mr. President, first, let me join my colleague from North Carolina in his request for humanitarian care and the release of Pastor Brunson. It is something we share on a bipartisan basis. I thank him for calling that to the attention of the Senate and to those who are following our proceedings.

Mr. President, we know that President Trump during the course of his campaign made immigration a major issue. Almost from the beginning, he made it clear that he would take a different approach to immigration than previous Presidents of either

political party. We can remember when he referred to those coming to the United States from Mexico as murderers and rapists. We can remember when he called for the construction of a 2,000-mile wall between the United States and Mexico, and quickly added: And Mexico will pay for it.

We can remember all of the statements that were made during the course of the campaign about immigration and terrorism. We knew we were in for a change in policy with this administration. Some of the things that have occurred have been stunning, and some of them have been horrible. One of those things was the subject of a hearing this week in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which I serve on. It was about the zero tolerance policy. Some may remember that last year President Trump decided to eliminate and abolish the DACA Program. That was a program for those young people brought to the United States as children-- infants, toddlers, and children--who grew up in the United States and believed they were part of this country and future. They learned, probably about the time they became teenagers, that this wasn't true. They didn't have legal status. They weren't documented in the United States.

They have lived their whole lives here. They have gone through our schools, and some of them have been amazing students. They had planned to go on with their education and their lives, and they learned they had an obstacle in their path.

President Obama created an opportunity for them to continue to live in the United States without fear of deportation and to be able to work here. So 790,000 of them stepped up and paid a $500 filing fee, went through a criminal background check, and were given, on a temporary renewable basis, this protection under President Obama's Executive action.

President Trump eliminated that order. In doing so, he eliminated the protection they had to stay here. Their fate and their future were in doubt because of the President's unilateral action. He challenged Congress to pass a law to save them.

We tried. At the last minute, a bipartisan bill, agreed to here in the Senate by a majority of the Members, was rejected by President Trump. It also included massive construction of his wall, but he rejected it nevertheless.

Today, the only thing protecting those young people--the 790,000--are court orders, which can change any day or any week. The President's effort on immigration and children didn't end with his elimination of the DACA Program. Just a few months ago, they announced something called zero tolerance. Here is how it would work. At our border, any person who presented themselves between ports of entry and wasn't a legal resident of the United States could be arrested and charged with a misdemeanor--a criminal misdemeanor--of trying to come into this country without legal documentation.

People can come in without legal documentation between ports of entry and claim asylum and refugee status, but no distinctions were made. If a person presented themselves and didn't have legal status, they face this misdemeanor criminal charge.

What flowed from that has created a humanitarian disaster. Because of that charge, the Trump administration then ordered the agencies to forcibly remove all the children who were with their parents who came to the border. That meant that almost 3,000 children were forcibly removed from their parents at the border under the zero tolerance policy.

That was the law of the land for some period of time, or at least that was the President's order for some period of time, until public reaction from both Republicans and Democrats was so strong that on June 20, President Trump did something very rare in his administration. He almost admitted he made a mistake. He decided to eliminate the family separation policy.

The elimination of that policy did not solve the problem for 2,700 children who were in the custody of the U.S. Government. These are children under the age of 18 who were basically spread across the United States, and are being held by government agencies and government contractor facilities.

The case went before a judge in the Southern District of California, Judge Sabraw, as to what to do with these children. A number of organizations, like the ACLU, came forward and said: These children should be reunited with their parents. Our government separated them. They should be reunited.

He set a time table and schedule for that to occur. A lot was done, but not nearly enough. We had a hearing this week in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which went on for several hours with representatives from five different agencies of the Trump administration trying to explain how we created this policy and what we have done ever since to reunify these parents with their children.

All of us know it is not healthy to take kids away from their parents. The pediatric physicians in America--the American Academy of Pediatrics--came forward and called it institutional child abuse. If that sounds like an exaggeration, imagine if it were your child who was being taken away by our government, or your grandchild, for that matter. I know how I would feel as a parent and a grandparent, and I am sure most people realize it would be a traumatic experience for any parent--or for grandparent, for that matter--to go through. Then, from the side of the children, we know that kind of separation can cause real psychological problems for these kids.

I met some of these kids--they were 5 and 6 years old--in Chicago. They had been transported 2,000 miles from the border to Chicago and were being held by our government in a contractual facility--5 and 6 years old. These little kids couldn't figure out what had happened to them in their lives.

I will never forget the scene of being in a room with 10 of them and watching 2 little girls walk into the room who were hanging on to one another for dear life. I thought they were twins. They weren't. They weren't even sisters. One of them said: ``No, amigas.'' They had really latched on to one another because they were so uncertain about where they were and what their future would be. Doctors tell us that isn't healthy for children. Yet it continues for too many of these kids.

At the hearing we held, we talked about how many kids are still out there who haven't been reunited, who have been separated from their parents by our government agencies under this Trump zero tolerance policy. The numbers change almost by the day, but they estimate that over 700 children are currently separated, and in over 400 of those cases, their parents have been deported. So the parents come to the border, the kids are taken away, the parents are invited to leave the country, and the kids remain. Where are the parents? No record was kept as to where they were going. How will we reunite these kids with their parents? No one really knows. It was clear at this hearing that nobody had even thought in advance about what that meant.

When you listened to the testimony of the sworn government witnesses there, it was clear that no one from day one even envisioned what this policy was going to do. One of the people who testified before us--a man whose degree and expertise are in public health--said that he warned this administration. He told them that this was not a healthy thing to do to children, to separate them and put them in some institutional setting. Yet they went forward with this plan, and not a single one of them could point to any effort made to keep track of the kids and the parents so that someday they could be reunited.

In fact, what we found was that the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, on June 17, sent out the following tweet. It said: ``We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.'' The sworn testimony this week tells us that is not true, and it wasn't true from the beginning of the zero tolerance policy. There was a policy of separating children from parents. What this member of the Trump Cabinet said was just wrong, just plain wrong.

Listen to what the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security said on June 23. In a fact sheet that they sent out across the country, they said: ``The United States Government knows the location of all children in its custody and is working to reunite them with their families.'' Here we are, 6 weeks later, and they have fallen 700 children short of what they claim they already knew back in June.

These were two falsehoods that were promulgated on the American people to try to get them to believe this wasn't a serious problem. Well, we know better, because this Federal judge got serious about it, and he said: I am going to set a deadline for you to put these kids back with their families. Our government failed to meet the deadline.

Now read what this Federal judge had to say about it. This judge, incidentally, was appointed by a Republican President, lest you think this is some Democrat who is trying to make political hay. Here is what Judge Sabraw said: ``The practice of separating these families was implemented without any effective system or procedure for tracking the children after they were separated from their parents, enabling communication between the parents and their children after separation, and reuniting the parents and children.'' That is what the Federal judge said about the zero tolerance policy.

I can't remember a more heartbreaking and embarrassing chapter in American Government history in recent years--to think that our government set out with a policy to separate these kids from their parents, forcibly removing them and separating them without any plans to reunite them.

They argued afterward: We can't send these kids back to parents who might be dangerous.

No one argues with that.

We can't send them back to smugglers who are pretending to be parents.

Well, we can't argue with that either. But the United States accepted responsibility when we took custody of those children. We became what they call in law in loco parentis. In other words, we accepted a parental responsibility for these children. We have not met that responsibility.

I asked at some point, who is going to accept responsibility for this humanitarian disaster in this Trump administration? Absolutely no one has. I believe Secretary Nielsen should. I believe she should step down because this policy--this disastrous policy--has given a black eye to the United States.

What we have seen happen here is not consistent with our values as a nation. It is not consistent with the kind of treatment we have given to those who have come to our border over the years. Think about the refugees who presented themselves to become part of the United States and our history.

Think about the thousands of Cubans who came to this country saying: We want to escape communism. We want to come to the United States. Think about what a valuable contribution they have made. Did we punish them when they came into the United States? We accepted them. Have Cuban Americans been an important part of our country? Ask three U.S. Senators who are Cuban Americans. The answer is in the affirmative.

Think about the Soviet Jews, those of the Jewish religion who were living in the Soviet Union and facing all sorts of prejudice and discrimination. They asked for an opportunity to come to the United States, and we opened our arms.

Think about the Vietnamese who worked with us during the war trying to protect our soldiers, trying to be a part of the solution to their problems, risking their own lives in the process. We welcomed them to the United States too.

Time and again, this country has opened its arms to refugees who needed a helping hand and a place of safety. We did not put them in internment camps. We didn't take their children away to punish them. We said: We will hear you out, and if you have a legitimate claim, a fear of where you live, we will stand by you.

We know what is happening in Central America--in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. At this point, there are higher rates of murder, domestic violence, and rape than almost anywhere in our hemisphere, and these people are bringing their kids here for their safety.

I met in Chicago with one of the immigration lawyers who represent some of these immigrants, and she said to me: ``Senator, they believe their children will die if they leave them in these countries. They are willing to put their entire life savings on the line to get them to our border in the hope that they can be treated as refugees or people seeking asylum, and they are going to keep coming because the alternative is to accept rape and murder on their children.''

Think about if that were your choice in life, what you would do. Would you do everything in your power to protect these children? Well, they have done it, and they have come to the border, and we answered them by separating them from their children and deporting many of them back to these dangerous countries. This isn't consistent with what America is all about.

We should stand together, both political parties, and not only condemn zero tolerance but make a solemn commitment to return these children to their parents. These lost children sadly reflect on our Nation, and we need these children to be with their parents as quickly as possible. That needs to be our highest priority.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, from the earliest moments in the Presidential campaign, Donald Trump made it clear that immigration was an important issue to his election. You will recall statements that he made about the construction of the wall on the southern border of the United States. He called it the big, glorious, gorgeous 2,000-mile wall, and he promised us that the Mexicans would pay for it. Over and over he promised us they would pay for it. That wasn't the only reference made to immigration during the course of the campaign, so it came as no surprise, when President Trump was elected, that immigration became a major issue in his administration.

It is ironic, in a way, that this Nation of immigrants called America would have such struggles these days with the issue of immigration. Many of us can trace our origins to recent immigrants. In my own case, my mother was an immigrant to this country, and here her son turned out to have a full-time government job as a U.S. Senator.

My story is my family's story, but it is also America's story of how the sons and daughters of immigrants came here and tried to--and in many ways did--make a difference in the country we live in. Despite that fact, despite the Statue of Liberty and all of our heritage from immigrants coming to America, there has always been a political voice and a political force that has resisted more immigration.

There were people who have said: We have enough. They are going to take our jobs. They don't practice our religions. They don't speak our language. Their food smells funny. We don't like the way they dress.

Over the course of decades, if not centuries, that was always part of the American political life, but it was a minority position. With the Trump administration, immigration issues have been front and center. We have seen that many times.

Years ago, I introduced the Dream Act. The Dream Act said that if you were brought to this country, undocumented as a baby, as a child, you should have a chance to earn your way to legal status to become part of America's future. I have tried to pass that bill, and I have been successful in the Senate a few times. We have been successful in the House, but it has never made it through both Chambers to become the law of the land.

President Obama created a program called DACA, based on the Dream Act, which allowed those who qualified to have 2-year temporary, renewable status, protected from deportation, with the legal right to work.

Last year, President Trump abolished the program, and 790,000 young people who were protected--who had registered with the government, who had paid a filing fee, who had gone through a criminal background check and were going to school and working--were told their protection would go away.

Were it not for a court decision to protect them, many of them would be deported today. But that court decision can change any day, any week, any month.

We tried in February on the floor of the Senate to come up with a bipartisan approach to solving this problem, but we fell short. When a bipartisan group of Senators came up with a proposal, which I supported and which received over 50 votes, at the end of the day, the Trump administration opposed it, so it went down, and we did not answer the need for the passage of legislation.

There is a new issue before us, one most Americans are well aware of; that is, the President's announcement of what is known as the zero tolerance policy. It started at the beginning of April, and it was a policy by our government to literally arrest and charge every person who came to this border without legal status.

You could come to the United States without legal status and apply to become a person protected with asylum or a refugee. Just coming to the border itself is not a crime if you come for that purpose.

But this new zero tolerance policy said that they would charge every person who came to the border as a criminal. Well, one thing led to another because once a person has been charged as a criminal--even as a misdemeanant criminal--in most circumstances, their children, minors in their custody, are removed from them. That is exactly what happened. In 2,700 cases, our government, under the President's zero tolerance policy, forcibly removed children from their parents.

We had a hearing on it today, and it is the reason I have come to the floor. We asked the heads of the agencies who created this policy some basic questions. We asked them if they had created a means of determining what would happen to the children, where the parents would be, and how they would be reunited. The sad answer, the real answer, is no.

So when a Federal judge in Southern California stepped in and said that the zero tolerance policy must end, and now there must be a reunification of these families--parents with their children--it turned out that this Government of the United States of America did not have the records to reunite parents and children.

They literally turned thousands of people loose, trying to match up these kids with their parents--kids who had been separated by our government at the border. You think to yourself, as one of my colleagues said: When you take your child into Chuck E. Cheese, they sometimes give them little plastic bracelets so that they don't get lost and we know who that little child belongs to.

Our Federal Government didn't do that, and, as a consequence, thousands--thousands--of children were turned loose into a system, and when the court order was applied we couldn't comply; we couldn't reunify them.

Where are we today? Today, out of the 2,700 or more children who were separated from their parents, we have reunified about 2,000 of them, roughly, but for 711, we are still short of bringing the reunification together; the parents are not reunited with their children. For 94 of these children, we do not have information. We don't know where their parents are. Think about that.

In the United States of America, with our vast wealth and talent and resources and computers, we removed children from their families and tossed them into the bureaucratic sea. I am not sure how this story is going to end, but it is a pretty sad situation.

One of my colleagues, Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut, asked the assembled representatives of the Trump administration the following question: Do you believe that the zero tolerance policy was a success? Not one of them did. Do you believe that the United States should engage in further family separation? Not one of them did.

So we know it was a mistake, and we know there are still victims out there--kids who have not been reunited. The obvious question is: What can we do about it? Well, we can use every resource at our disposal to make sure that we bring these children back in contact with their parents.

I went to one of the shelters in Chicago about 5 weeks ago to meet with 10 of these kids. Their ages ranged from about 5 years of age to 14, and the youngest ones were from Central America and Mexico. They came into the room. I remember two little girls holding hands, walking into the room, cutest little things, and they looked like twins because their hair was fixed the same way. It turns out that they were not twins; they were not even sisters. One of the little girls said: ``No, amigas''--friends.

I watched them. They held on to one another through the entire meeting, and as they left the room, they held hands together. They were clinging to the only connectivity--the only anchors--in their lives: other children who were going through the same experience. They had been forcibly separated from their parents.

I brought some cards with me, made by kids of my staff in Chicago-- just cards with stickers on them, construction paper with little messages, some in Spanish, some in English. I let the kids choose from these cards if they wanted them. Every single one of them took one and hung on to it like it was a Christmas gift.

What is it like for these children to be separated at that early age? I am not an expert. I have been a dad and a grandfather, if that gives me any claim to expertise. But when you turn to the experts, the pediatric physicians, they say that it is institutional child abuse to forcibly remove children from their parents and set them off in a strange setting, this institutional setting, for weeks and for months, and that is exactly what we did.

The President finally realized that he was wrong and reversed the policy, but the kids are still there. The kids have not been united, and we have not solved the problems that face this country.

There are a lot of things that divide Democrats and Republicans in this town. I hope there are several things we can all agree on.

No. 1, the United States needs border security. We can't have open borders for everyone who wants to come to this country. It wouldn't work, it wouldn't be safe, and I am not advocating that. I doubt that many people are.

Secondly, we need to make sure that dangerous people who want to come into this country are stopped, and anyone who is here, undocumented and dangerous, should be removed. I think we all agree on that.

The third thing we need--clearly need--is comprehensive immigration reform. Our immigration system is desperately broken. It doesn't serve our needs in so many different ways.

I was part of an effort 5 years ago when eight Senators--four Democrats and four Republicans joined together. John McCain, Chuck Schumer, Lindsey Graham, Michael Bennet, Bob Menendez, Jeff Flake, Marco Rubio, and I spent about 6 months writing a comprehensive immigration reform bill. We all had to give a little. That is what happens when you are in a political situation.

We brought the bill to the floor of the Senate, and it passed with 64 votes. That is a pretty healthy margin in a Chamber that is often bitterly divided.

We had comprehensive immigration reform. So what happened to it? It crossed the Rotunda into the House of Representatives and disappeared. They never held a hearing, and they never called a bill. They ignored it completely. They left the mess that we now have in place.

Well, we need to return to this issue, and we need to do it quickly. We need to make sure that we have another comprehensive immigration reform bill that starts addressing the basic issues we addressed in our last effort. That, to me, is the only way to put us on the right track to do the right thing.

In the meantime, there are too many victims, and too darn many of them are children. We can do better as a nation. The United States is a caring and compassionate nation. We have proved it over and over again throughout our history. We need to do it again.

National Defense Authorization Bill

Mr. President, I want to discuss the conference report that is coming over for the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.

I want to thank Senator John McCain, who has been absent from the Chamber for months, but we think of him every day and remember fondly his amazing ability to shepherd this bill through the Senate and through conference committee; Jack Reed, the Democrat serving on that same defense authorization committee; Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has stepped in to fill in for John McCain in his absence; Congressman Thornberry, Congressman Smith, and all of those who worked on this conference agreement.

Since I am the ranking Democrat or vice chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, I know how hard it is to take a bill of this complexity and size and work out a political compromise. But that was achieved with the National Defense Authorization Act, and it was done with many extraordinary efforts when it came to defense and foreign policy.

No compromise is perfect, but I am troubled and disappointed by several particular provisions in the bill, and I wanted to speak to them on the floor before the bill comes up for consideration later this week.

This last January, Secretary of Defense Mattis, whom I respect greatly and voted for, argued in his national defense strategy that we were seeing ``the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition,'' especially against Russia and China. I don't think anyone disputes that, and yet two high-profile provisions in this Defense authorization bill weaken the pressure that we should be exerting against these two nations.

Russia has illegally seized territory in Ukraine and Georgia. It has protected the murderous Syrian regime. It has murdered its critics with chemical attacks on foreign soil. It has attempted to undermine democratic elections across the Western world, from

France to our own United States. For that reason, Congress put in place tough sanctions against Russia last year. They passed with overwhelming votes in the House and the Senate. I voted for them as did most of the Members from both sides of the aisle.

Many of those sanctions required the President to impose the sanctions. It was mandatory that he do this. It gave Congress the right to review those sanctions if the President decided to waive and not apply them. Why? It is sad to say that this congressional review was included because no one trusted President Trump to stand up to Vladimir Putin. He believes the word of Vladimir Putin over that of our intelligence community professionals. Unfortunately, our President has shown on almost a daily basis, that he simply doesn't have it in him to stand up for American interests if Vladimir Putin disagrees.

Yet the conference report before us provides the administration with an even bigger national security waiver on these sanctions, a larger escape clause so that the President could avoid applying sanctions to Russia, and it removes Congress's ability to review that decision. I am sure the Secretary of Defense will use his powers in this bill wisely to allow the United States to help key allies wean themselves off of Russian military equipment. The problem is that this is not the only way the administration can use this broad waiver. It makes congressional review more, not less, important, and yet the conference report, I think, goes in thing wrong direction.

We need to be firm with Russia. They need to understand there is a price to pay for what they are doing to their neighbors, as well as to the rest of the world and especially to the electoral process of the United States. It was only last week that we received the latest notification that one of my fellow colleagues in this Chamber has had her office hacked by the Russians during the course of her reelection campaign. This is not the end of Russian intrigue, and we have to address this Russian threat with our eyes wide open. I wish the Defense authorization bill were more explicit in that regard.

This conference agreement also waters down sanctions against China. Last year, a large Chinese telecommunications company was caught redhanded evading U.S. sanctions on North Korea and Iran.

Earlier this year, the Department of Defense also stopped selling its phones to the military because it ``may pose an unacceptable risk to personnel, information, and mission.'' These phones from China ``may pose an unacceptable risk to personnel, information, and mission.'' Our Department of Defense has warned us that this Chinese equipment can be dangerous if used by our military establishment in the United States.

We responded forcefully to these repeated violations of the law and national security risk, passing a provision to prohibit this company from doing any business in the United States, but, again, just as with the Russia provision, this was watered down from prohibiting it from doing business with the U.S. Government. What it means is that the Chinese telecommunications company, which we fear is going to make us weaker in terms of national security, is prohibited for business with our government but is able to sell its products in the general commerce of America. That cannot make our country any safer.

The agreement also contains a comprehensive overhaul of the way we protect our economy from national security threats. So perhaps next time, if the Chinese violate it or any other country does, we can catch them before damage is done. We could have made this provision much stronger.

Another reason why I am disappointed by this conference committee report is the irresponsible removal of provisions related to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. The House bill contained five provisions restricting security engagement with Burma, imposing sanctions on Burmese officials responsible for human rights abuses, and requiring the State Department to make a determination on whether the atrocities committed against the Rohingya people, a minority, constituted ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or genocide.

These provisions were included in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act with overwhelming bipartisan support. Similar language passed out of our Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a stand-alone bill with bipartisan support. It looked like these provisions were destined to be in the final work product.

We are all aware of the horrific persecution of the Rohingya people by the Burmese military, stemming from decades of deep-seated misconceptions and hatred that have led to violence, most recently last August, when a small group of militants attacked a security outpost.

The Burmese military brutally responded in a scorched-earth campaign against the Rohingya people, killing thousands, including children, violating their women, forcibly starving their people, and burning down their villages. More than 700,000 Rohingya people fled Burma to nearby Bangladesh, as they had been overwhelmed by the Burmese military and their forces.

In neighboring Bangladesh, they were forced into squalid refugee camps, which I visited. I know the Bangladeshis and others are doing their best to help them, but these are horrible living conditions for anyone.

In Burma the government authorities continue to deny that any of this took place. They burned and overtook former Rohingya villages. They ignored calls for safe and voluntary repatriation and accountability.

I am particularly disappointed in Aung San Suu Kyi. Her silence on these problems is hard to explain. Many of us admired her for a long period of time and the courage she showed against the Burmese military, but when it comes to this moral humanitarian choice, her silence is distressing. Just this month, an extensive and devastating report released by the group Fortify Rights found that the Burmese authorities had actually made the preparations for attacks against the Rohingya people before the August 25 militant attack, which they blamed for their actions. Groups such as Fortify Rights, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and countless others have even documented the Burmese military officials and units responsible for the crimes against the Rohingya, led by General Min Aung Hlaing.

Despite this, our President has been slow to sanction military officials. The Trump administration has been sitting on a potential list for months and so far has sanctioned one person only. Here in the Senate, one of our Senate leaders, dismayed, continues to block movement of any bipartisan sanction effort aimed for those responsible for this atrocity.

I am sorry to say that what looked like an easy bipartisan provision to condemn this behavior by the Burmese military is a casualty of this conference committee, and it is another reason that I am troubled by the work product. Finally, I want to note that this conference agreement provides zero paid increases for defense civilian personnel. That is just unacceptable. The President did not request an increase in his budget proposal even though Secretary Mattis has called their contributions essential to our military operations for everything from acquisition to policy expertise.

Congress should exercise its independent judgment to provide this civilian pay increase. After all, we cannot expect to continue to recruit and retain the best civilian workers in our military without appropriate pay.

I am glad that the Appropriations Committee was providing modest increases for all Federal and civilian employees, but every committee in every branch of government must take responsibility for this in the future. I understand that one cannot demand perfection in the legislative process, and there are many provisions in this conference report that I appreciate and the work that was put into it.

The conferees rejected unrelated poison pill environmental provisions from the House and retained a very strong Senate statement in support of NATO. These are two of the hundreds of good provisions contained in this bill and conference report. But as I stated at the outset, I believe the agreement also makes improper changes in the key areas that I have outlined, and for those reasons I will be voting against cloture on the conference agreement.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, today I want to say a few words about a special anniversary. Earlier this month, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the very first Special Olympic Games, which took place at Soldier Field in Chicago, IL.

The Special Olympics didn't just give people a chance to compete; it gave them a chance to come out of the shadows. It is hard to imagine, but before the Special Olympics, people with intellectual disabilities were offered little education and oftentimes were left in isolation and despair. Thankfully, Eunice Shriver shared the compassion and vision to create these games, but I want to talk about someone whose role in the games creation is often overlooked: Illinois Supreme Court justice and my friend, Anne Burke.

Before becoming a justice on Illinois' Supreme Court, Anne was a physical education teacher. She had an idea to create a summer jamboree where kids with special needs could compete in an athletic competition at Soldier Field, just like other children who attended day camps across the State of Illinois. So Anne took that idea to Washington, DC, and Eunice Shriver. What did Eunice Shriver say to Anne's proposal? Unacceptable. It was simply too small. Eunice decided it needed to be bigger. With Eunice's help, Anne returned home to Chicago, rewrote the proposal, and made it a national Olympic program. Eunice joined Anne in Chicago on July 20, 1968, and they celebrated the first Special Olympic Games.

During those first games in 1968, Mayor Richard Daley told Eunice: ``The world will never be the same after this.'' Eunice Shriver and Anne Burke knew it. Eunice boldly predicted that 1 million of the world's intellectually challenged would someday compete in these games. Well, she was wrong. Today, more than 5 million athletes train year- round in all 50 States and 172 countries.

Here are just a couple examples of how the world changed after that summer day in Chicago. In 2003, after the games were held in Dublin, Ireland rewrote its antidiscrimination laws. Across the Middle East, people who were once forced into the shadows now play soccer in the light of day. That is the legacy of the Special Olympics: inclusion.

I will close with one more story from those first games at Soldier Field. After one athlete, Frank Olivo, finished competing, he said: ``People always put me down. And said, I wouldn't amount to anything. And now they say, he does amount to something. He's special.'' That is what makes the Special Olympics so special.

Congratulations to the Special Olympics for 50 years of making athletes like Frank understand that hearts beat the same.

I announce that the Senator from Florida (Mr. Nelson) and the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner) are necessarily absent.

Madam President, first let me thank my colleague and friend from Maine. If you ask the American people from one corner of this country to the other, what are they worried about, what are they concerned about, what you have just talked about is the top 1, 2, 3 issue: the accessibility and affordability of health insurance, time and again.

Some of us have been in a predicament in life when someone we love was very sick and had no health insurance. People never forget it as long as they live--people who live every single day with that prospect of not having health insurance or it is so darned expensive they can't pay for it.

I thank the Senator from Maine for the comments he made regarding the efforts by this administration to undermine and sabotage health insurance. It is one thing to say you are against ObamaCare, you are against the Affordable Care Act; the obvious question is, What would you replace it with? When given a chance, the other side of the aisle had nothing. That is why, thankfully, we stopped their efforts to repeal it.

You and I, and everyone on this side of the aisle, is open to talking about making it better, make it work more efficiently, and reach more people in a more efficient way. But just saying we are going to get rid of it and then we will talk about it later is not an answer. I thank the Senator for the comments that he made.

Madam President, I am going to address the second issue that comes up when you talk to people across America who are concerned with it, and I will start with a question: Have you ever, ever, in your whole life, seen an ad on television for prescription drugs--ever? If the answer is no, I know one thing for sure: You don't own a television because the average American sees nine--nine--television prescription drug ads every single day. They see nine every day.

You know what I am talking about; they mumble as fast as they can: If you take this you may die; don't take it if you are allergic to it. All of those ads, all of those names of all those drugs--it took about 20 times for me to watch the XARELTO ad to get to the point where I could spell XARELTO. I am not sure I have it right still.

But here is what it is all about. Why does pharma--pharmaceutical companies--spend so much money on television advertising? What is this all about? You can't buy most of these drugs over the counter; you need a doctor. Here is why they do it: They believe, if they keep suggesting to you that this is a drug that might help you, when you go to the doctor you will ask him or her: Doctor, should I be taking XARELTO?

Well, the doctor may say to you that you don't need it--or may say to you that you can take a generic that is a lot cheaper and does the same thing. But in many, many cases, the doctor says ``Let me write a prescription for XARELTO for you,'' and what we have happening across the United States is the increasing cost of healthcare for everyone, which is being driven by the increasing costs of prescription drug prices.

You see, in the United States of America, there is no control over the increases in prescription drug pricing. So these companies that spend billions of dollars advertising on television end up getting more of their drugs prescribed, making more money, raising their prices, and it goes on and on, and we see the cost of healthcare increasing.

How many countries in the world today allow drug companies to advertise on television the way they do in the United States? There are two--the United States and New Zealand. That is it. What does the American Medical Association--the doctors of America--have to say about this television advertising of prescription drugs? They say it is a bad idea because what it does is incentivize first the patients and then the doctors to prescribe more expensive drugs than are necessary, and that drives up the cost of healthcare. So I decided to try to address this.

There are lots of ways you could address it. I decided one of the things we might do is simply do something that is fair and open and honest: Ask the drug companies in their ads to disclose the price of the drug. Simply that: How much does it cost? Put it in the ad. Well, you might be surprised.

Here is one for you. Have you seen the ads for the drug HUMIRA? HUMIRA. I bet you have. I have--plenty. It was a drug originally designed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, but then they found that it also could impact psoriasis. Most of us know, psoriasis is a skin problem. For many of us, it is just a tiny little patch on the elbow; for some people, it is more serious. But they now advertise that HUMIRA could be used for psoriasis. That is good to know.

Here is what they don't tell you. Do you know what HUMIRA costs? Do you know how much it costs each month for HUMIRA? $5,500. They don't advertise that because, for $5,000 a month, I think I can live with that patch on my elbow.

What I think, and many agree, is that we ought to move to the point where the pharmaceutical companies tell us the cost of the drug in their advertisement. That is not unreasonable, is it? In fact, it is so reasonable that--hang onto your hats--President Donald Trump and this Senator happen to agree on it.

The President, at a press conference a couple months ago, said: Let's have pharma advertise in their advertising the cost of the drug.

I thought to myself, Well, that is an issue that I have been working on for a while. I agree with the administration. Maybe we can do it together.

So I went to my colleague and friend, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and I asked him: Will you cosponsor an amendment to the bill on the floor today that gives appropriations to the Food and Drug Administration to support asking pharma to disclose their prices on their advertising?

We introduced this amendment, and, frankly, with 76 percent of the American people supporting the idea, we have an interesting coalition: Durbin, Democrat of Illinois; Grassley, Republican of Iowa; President Donald Trump; and--I came to learn last night--the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Azar. He called me. I don't know him. I have never met him. But he said: I want to tell you that we support your amendment, the Durbin-Grassley amendment for the disclosure of the cost of drugs. We think it is a good thing. We think it will start to bring down the cost of prescription drugs. That is a great thing. It turns out the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration also supports it.

So now we have kind of an amazing coalition: Democrats and Republicans--here in the Senate, as well as in the White House, the administration--coming together. How often does that happen around here? Not that often. Sadly, it doesn't. So let's seize this opportunity.

I am asking those who are managing this bill to include this language--this appropriations language in this amendment in the bill as a step toward giving us some control over the increasing cost of prescription drugs.

Pharma hates this amendment like the devil hates holy water. They don't want to tell people that HUMIRA costs $5,500 a month. It kind of spoils your ad when you are talking about psoriasis, and it comes out to be over $5,000 a month for their drug. So they don't want to tell you. They hope it gets lost in the system. I think it is better for Americans to know what they are getting into.

Why is pharma afraid to tell the consumers how much their drugs cost? We shouldn't wait to be surprised when we go to the pharmacy, when we stand by the register to pay for what we are buying. People have a right to know. You know the price of a car before you buy it. Don't you? How about the price of that washer and dryer? I looked at those over the weekend with my wife. We know those prices right now. Why shouldn't we know the price of those drugs?

So I am calling on my colleagues--we have amendments Nos. 3611 and 3612. Let's put them on this bill. Let's do something. Let's do the first thing we have done this year--the very first thing we have done this year to address the serious concern which Americans have on the cost of prescription drugs.

I see my colleague and friend, Senator Grassley, is here. I thank him for joining me on this amendment.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, it is time for the Senate and the U.S. Department of Education to get serious about the student loan crisis in America.

This is a crisis in Illinois. It is a crisis in Iowa, in Nevada. You pick the State. Student loan debt is now a larger debt in the United States than credit card debt. Add up all of the debt that Americans owe on credit cards, and it will not reach the amount of student loan debt that is carried by students and their families.

More than 44 million Americans have student loan debt. The total amount is $1.5 trillion. As I mentioned, it is larger than America's cumulative credit card debt--second only to the mortgages that we owe on our homes across the United States.

An American who graduated from college in 2015, with a 4-year degree, owed an average of $30,100. That debt is often much higher for many Americans if they decide to go on to graduate school or if they are unfortunate attendees at the for-profit colleges and universities. Across the United States, there are many of these for-profit institutions. You should remember them. It is 9 percent of young people who come out of high school who end up at for-profit colleges and universities, while 33 percent of all of the college students who default on student loans come out of the same schools--for-profit colleges. This is 9 percent and 33 percent. Why?

It is that they are so darned expensive--dramatically more expensive than are community colleges or other universities. No. 2, they don't care if you finish. They would just as soon you didn't. No. 3, if you finish, you get a worthless diploma and can't find a job. So there you are, stuck with your debt.

Yet this is about student loans in general, not just about for-profit victims.

I hear from students, young and old, who have had to forgo homeownership and hold off starting families because of their massive student loan debts. Increasingly, I have been hearing from parents and grandparents who, in gestures of goodwill and kindness, cosign on the loans on behalf of those children or grandchildren who are students. Guess what. Grandma and Mom are now trying to pay off that student loan debt because the student can't.

Earlier this year, Chairman Jerome Powell of the Federal Reserve said the student debt crisis absolutely could hold back economic growth in America--the student loan crisis. We need to take action on it. We rarely even try, but today I am going to try.

Earlier this year, in March, I tried to offer an amendment on the Senate floor to help student borrowers. At that time, the Senate had a bill up to provide regulatory relief--breaks--to banks. I thought it was only fair that the Senate also consider taking a look at the student debt crisis. I was blocked from getting a vote on my amendment. I am not giving up.

I am filing an amendment today to the Financial Services and General Government bill that is part of this appropriations package pending on the floor of the Senate. My amendment deals with an important part of the student loan problem--the treatment of student loans in bankruptcy.

If you borrow money for a vacation house, lose your job, and have no money, you file bankruptcy, and your mortgage is discharged. If you borrow money for a car, and you can't pay off the car--you lose your job--you file for bankruptcy, and your auto loan is discharged. How about a boat? If you take out a loan to buy a boat and file for bankruptcy, it is discharged.

I will tell you that there are only a handful of things you can borrow money for that you cannot discharge in bankruptcy no matter how bad things get, and one of them is student loans. Currently, most types of debts can be discharged in bankruptcy but not student loans.

Up until 1976, all student loans were fully discharged in bankruptcy, but since then, the law has been changed. Now if you have student debt, you are going to carry it to the grave. You cannot discharge it in bankruptcy.

In 1998, Congress determined that Federal student loans would be nondischargeable in bankruptcy unless the borrower could demonstrate that he or she faced an ``undue hardship''--that is a quote, ``undue hardship.'' But we didn't define it; we left it up to the courts. That is a problem.

Most students don't even try to pursue the undue hardship exception because of the difficulty and expense of meeting the standard of proving undue hardship in bankruptcy court.

Listen to what the Wall Street Journal said last month. It found that in 2017, only 473 student loan borrowers in the United States out of 44 million asked for relief from their student debt in bankruptcy--473 out of 44 million. The Journal found only 16 bankruptcy cases that year where a judge actually ruled on student loan debt--16 cases out of 44 million borrowers--and in only 3 of those cases did the judge cancel the debt. What do you think your odds are in taking your student loan debt to bankruptcy court when 3 out of 473--out of 44 million--actually had their debt discharged?

A big reason the undue hardship path is difficult for student borrowers is because the Department of Education contracts out the collection of the debt to companies like Educational Credit Management Corporation. This is a student loan guaranty agency that collects on defaulted Federal student loans. This company is notorious for aggressively challenging and appealing borrower claims of undue hardship in bankruptcy court because it doesn't want to see the loans discharged. So many students don't even try to fight them because they know they are going to lose.

Here is what my amendment does. My amendment would bar the use of Federal funds to pay contractors, such as the one I named, to contest undue hardship claims in bankruptcy court when the claims are brought by specific categories of borrowers who face severe undue hardship.

Let me tell you the categories I am trying to protect. These are people who are deeply in debt with student loans and are coming to court asking for relief from their student loans. You tell me whether you think these Americans deserve a break when they go to bankruptcy court on their student loans. The first category is veterans who have

been deemed unemployable because of a service-connected disability; No. 2, family caregivers of a veteran or an elderly or disabled family member; No. 3, people who are receiving Social Security disability or whose only income is Social Security; and No. 4, borrowers who have finished school but have spent at least 5 years with an income of less than $24,000 a year. Those are the four categories.

Wouldn't you agree that you would start with groups just like these and say: Give them a break. This disabled veteran has reached a point where he can't pay back this loan. Don't have these agencies hounding this poor fellow for the rest of his life.

By stopping these Federal loan guaranty agencies from contesting and litigating these undue hardship claims in bankruptcy court, we can at least give these hard-hit student borrowers a chance to seek an undue hardship discharge in bankruptcy.

My amendment also includes a provision preventing Federal funds from being provided to a for-profit college if the college receives more than 85 percent of its revenue from Federal sources, including the Department of Veterans Affairs GI bill and Department of Defense tuition assistance funds.

Currently, for-profit colleges are able to receive 90 percent of their revenue from Federal sources--the most heavily subsidized, private, for-profit companies in America. They can add the GI bill in on top of it, to add insult to injury. It makes no sense. It incentivizes for-profit colleges to aggressively recruit veterans and servicemembers in order to get extra money from the Federal Government and provide very little in return.

Not only would this provision help protect students, it would result in long-term cost savings to the Federal Government.

I say to my colleagues, I bet you have all given a speech on student loans. Haven't we all? When young people come in, burdened with debt, and say ``I don't know what to do with myself. I can't pay off this debt. I can't even buy a car. I am living in my parents' basement. I thought I was supposed to be a college graduate with a big life ahead of me. What are you going to do about it, Senator?'' if you say ``Well, I wish there were something we could do,'' you will get your chance today. There is something you can do. It is the amendment I am offering.

This issue of student loan debt is challenging. Let's not run away from it. Let's face it honestly. Let's give at least these four groups, including disabled veterans and the caregivers who watch them, an opportunity to get their student loans discharged so they can get on with their lives.

I am going to keep at this and keep raising this issue until we get the positive change the students and their families deserve.

I yield.

Madam President, I would like to ask the Senator from Hawaii a question through the Chair.

When the Senator is referring to the number of children who are currently forcibly separated from their parents by our government, is the Senator referring to the 2,551 children between the ages of 5 and 17 who were reported

by this administration as of this past Monday?

Is the Senator referring to the fact that 1,634 families are possibly eligible for reunification, according to this administration?

And that leaves 917 families with children forcibly separated by our government from their parents, who, according to this administration, may not be eligible for reunification?

We are also told there are some 463 parents who are ``not in the United States''--children taken away from them, and they have been sent out of the United States?

Incidentally, the administration reported 37 children in its custody who have not been matched with a parent?

And we are being asked to reduce the standards of care for these children by this unanimous consent request?

I thank the Senator from Hawaii.

I object.

Madam President, I have a unanimous consent request.

Madam President, I am making clear to my friend from North Carolina, as well as to the other Members on the floor, that I would like to have this colloquy. I would like to make a formal unanimous consent request, and then we can enter into debate or colloquy, as the Chair would allow, if I may proceed.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 3263 introduced earlier today; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

This is a bill which embodies the Keep Families Together legislation by Senator Feinstein, A Fair Day in Court for Kids Act by Senator Hirono, and additional measures which I will then describe later when we go to colloquy and debate.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I would like there to be some exchange, something even perilously close to a debate on the issue. I would be happy if the Senator would reframe his unanimous consent request for that purpose, and I would be happy to agree to it under those circumstances.

I object to the original unanimous consent request.

Madam President, let me try to give this some perspective. Let me start with something I hope we all agree on. There are three things about immigration that Democrats and Republicans can agree on. Let's see if we can say those three things and all agree.

We need border security in the United States. We cannot have open borders; we need border security.

No. 2, if someone coming into America is dangerous, we don't want them here, and if there is someone undocumented in America who is dangerous, we want them to leave. Those two things I think both parties can agree on.

The third thing really gets to the heart of it. We need comprehensive immigration reform. It is not a matter of solving the issue of the day; it is a matter of looking at all of our immigration laws and making them work.

The Senator from North Carolina has probably heard what I have heard from our friends in agriculture. Whether it is ranching or dairy or picking fruit, they need migrant labor. Americans are many not stepping up to take that backbreaking work, and they need help. That is one example.

We need comprehensive immigration reform. Let's take a look at the whole package.

I spent 6 months with Senators John McCain, Chuck Schumer--four Democrats, four Republicans. We wrote a comprehensive immigration reform bill. From start to finish, it was a bipartisan bill. It passed on the floor of the Senate with 68 votes 5 years ago, and the Republicans refused to consider it in the House of Representatives.

We still need comprehensive immigration reform. We ought to be working on that together. We ought to take that bill, reintroduce that bill, and make that our starting point.

The last point I want to make is about the current issue we face. Let's put this issue into perspective. First, I am sorry, but I disagree with my friend from North Carolina and the Senator from Texas, who say that this is our job to fix or, as the Senator from Texas said, we created this problem in Congress. That is not true.

The zero-tolerance policy that has led us to this moment of debate was created by President Trump, Attorney General Sessions, Stephen Miller, and others. It went into effect in April. We decided then, as official policy stated by the United States, that we would physically, forcibly separate children from their parents.

We argued that they are all criminals if they show up at the border. That is not the case. Some people legitimately come to our borders seeking asylum status. They are not criminals, per se, and to treat them as such and take their kids away is unwarranted. But that was our policy.

So 3,000 children were forcibly removed from their parents starting in April, and what happened next? These children were sent off into the system. The parents were sometimes held, sometimes tried, sometimes deported, and there was a furor that rose across the United States. People said: What are we doing? Why did we take that nursing child away from the mother? Why did we take that little toddler away from his father? What are we doing here? What is our goal?

The opposition from both political parties--Republicans and Democrats--got so intense that this President did something he almost never does. He reversed his position. He said: We are not doing the family separation policy anymore. That is the end of it.

But it wasn't soon enough. There were 3,000 kids at that point separated from their parents and spread across the United States. There was one I knew of in Chicago. A woman from the Congo was being held in California. Her 6-year-old daughter had been sent to Chicago. That is how I learned about the case. There are cases like that all over the United States.

Then a Federal judge stepped in. We are here today because that Federal judge said: Enough--we want these parents reunited with their kids now.

He set some deadlines. Four weeks ago, he said: All kids under the age of 5 need to be reunited with the parents they were taken away from. He set that goal with a deadline of 2 weeks ago. Our government identified only 103 out of the 3,000 who were under the age of 5, and they reunited fewer than 60 of them. As for the rest of them, it is uncertain what is going to happen to those kids under the age of 5 who were separated from their parents.

Now there is a vast number beyond that; 2,500-plus kids are out there, and this judge from San Diego stated that as of tomorrow, July 26, all of those kids are to be reunited with their parents too.

Guess what. We are in a position where that is not going to happen. It physically can't happen. Our government can't do it. Here is the heartbreaking secret that we now know: Our government separated these children from their parents without any means of reuniting them, without keeping information about where the parents were going to be, where the children are going to be when the day would come that the mother would get her baby back in her arms. We have no process for that. That, to me, is inexcusable and disgraceful.

If you order a package on Amazon this afternoon, they give you a tracking number. Tomorrow, if you want to know where it is, you go to Amazon, put in the tracking number, and you will know where your package is.

We sent infants, toddlers, and young kids all across the United States without a tracking number, and now we are trying desperately to reunite them. As I mentioned earlier to Senator Hirono, there are 37 kids out there about whom this government has admitted: We don't know where the parents are. We can't put this back together again. What are we going to do with these kids?

That is why we are on the floor to talk about this current crisis. It wasn't a crisis created by Congress. It was created by the Trump administration with

a zero tolerance policy. Attorney General Sessions and others were so proud of it, as they took the kids away from the parents, and they didn't keep records. They tossed these infants, toddlers, and children out into the bureaucratic sea and said: Start swimming or sink.

I met some of these kids in Chicago. There were 10 of them. Kids will be kids. They looked like regular kids sitting around the table. Two little girls came in, and I thought at first they were twins because their hair was identical and they were about the same size. When I looked more closely, I saw that they weren't.

We asked in Spanish: Are you sisters? The little girl said: No, amigas. No, we are friends. These two little girls had attached themselves to one another. One was from Honduras and one was from Chiapas, Mexico. They were holding on for dear life to one another's hand as they walked around this place because that was their connection; that was all they had to hang on to. They were taken away from their parents. I don't know what happened to those two little girls.

As a grandfather of 6-year-old twins, I looked at those little girls and thought, I know kids just like them, and I love them to pieces. I can't imagine being physically, forcibly separated away from those kids by any government. That is what we have done.

So I say to the Senator from North Carolina, let's find some things we can agree on. Let me suggest some things. Let's increase the number of immigration judges. Let's do it on a merit basis so that we can get professional people who know what they are doing--not political appointments.

Secondly, let's say that every child who appears in an administrative hearing is going to have an attorney next to them. It is embarrassing to me as an American to think of a 6-year-old, 10-year-old, or 12-year- old standing before an administrative judge with an interpreter, trying to figure out what is about to happen to them. We are better than that in America. We ought to make sure we are going to do much better than that in America.

Beyond that, we have to talk about what we do that is humane--that follows the Flores decision. Just wiping it away--there are no standards for humane treatment for those kids. We have to have standards. We have to make sure that they will be placed in areas we can be proud of, that they will be treated fairly, humanely, in the right way, which I am sure you want and I want too.

Those are things we can work on. Several weeks ago, we met and sent a list of questions to the administration to start our bipartisan conversation. They never got back to us. I think it has been a month now. I think it is time.

If you want to rekindle this bipartisan conversation, count me in, but let's do it with the information, and let's try to do it with a common purpose.

The last point I will make is this. If you want to make sure that somebody shows up at a hearing, 95 percent of those who are supposed to show up for these hearings do show up if you do one of three things. If you provide them with an attorney who gives them advice, they will come back for the hearing. If you provide them with counseling services--for example, programs that have been run by the Lutheran family services or the Catholic family services--they will show up for the hearing. Or if you provide, in some cases, an ankle monitor, they will come back for a hearing. So it isn't a question of whether they are going to be lost in the system. We know this works. Let's make use of it. It is a heck of a lot more humane than separating families by thousands of miles.

I yield the floor.

I announce that the Senator from Illinois (Ms. Duckworth) is necessarily absent.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the joint resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the joint resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, Senator Wicker of Mississippi and I have a bipartisan amendment that means a lot to thousands of people who use Amtrak. It has been 10 years since we asked the inspector general of Amtrak to do a study of on-time performance. On-time performance has a direct impact on the number of people who ride on Amtrak trains, how frequently they use them, and how much they rely upon them. There is a problem. Amtrak owns very few railway tracks in America. They share the tracks with freight trains, and the freight trains have been pushing ahead of them and making the Amtrak trains wait.

How long did they wait? Between 2016 and 2017, in 1 year, there was 17,000 hours of delay on Amtrak trains directly attributable to freight trains that didn't yield the way to the Amtrak trains. That is just one factor.

Senator Wicker and I have asked the inspector general to do a report on on-time performance that we can consider in making Amtrak more efficient, more profitable, and more popular with Americans.

I hope our colleagues will support our bipartisan amendment.

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

Mr. President, you couldn't follow this President's tweets with a roadmap, a GPS, a flashlight, and a program. It is impossible to understand the policy of this administration for this country, and when you try to follow his actions instead of his words, it is even more confusing.

Over the past few weeks, President Trump's conduct when it comes to foreign policy has been head-spinning, even for him. To recap, he insulted our best allies of 70 years and then turned around and lobbied for Russia at a recent G7 meeting and again bullied our key allies at a summit on NATO. He then met privately with Russian President Putin and then held a press conference with him in which President Trump blamed America and defended Putin's words over the expertise of his own government intelligence agencies. Keep in mind that he also inexplicably met privately with President Putin at the G20 summit in Hamburg last year--an event which he initially denied.

Why all these private meetings between President Trump and President Putin? Why wouldn't he let his Secretary of State sit in the room? Why wouldn't he let his National Security Advisor witness the conversation? I don't know the answer to these questions, and neither does America.

Then the President tried to backpedal from some of his most outrageous statements. At the end of the day, after trying that and deciding it wasn't worth the effort, he backed around again and decided to side with President Putin. It is impossible to keep track of where this President has been or is going.

President Trump then questioned the bedrock NATO alliance, asking why the United States should come to the defense of one of its members. Incidentally, that is the heart and soul of the NATO alliance--article 5: We stand together. When the United States was attacked on 9/11, it was the NATO alliance that stood with us when we struck back at Afghanistan and al-Qaida. They stood by us because of article 5, the very basis of the NATO alliance, which this President has questioned.

He said that no U.S. President has been harder on Russia than President Trump. He argued: ``I think President Putin knows that better than anybody.'' Then he said he wanted to invite President Putin to the United States as his special personal guest. Go figure.

As President Trump weakens a great military alliance like NATO, bullies our allies of seven decades, cozies up to a foreign dictator, and talks in circles about his bizarre tweets and actions, what has been the priority of the Republican Party on the floor of the Senate since the summit--the disastrous summit--at Helsinki? Well, the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, has not spoken on the Senate floor on this issue since the Helsinki summit, not even one time.

Why aren't we urgently moving legislation to protect America's membership in NATO, ensure the integrity of our upcoming election, and fully implement last year's Russian sanctions bill? I can't answer that. I don't think the Republican leader can answer it either. Those are national security priorities.

Maybe it isn't surprising because when Senator McConnell was told about the Russian intervention in our last 2016 election by the top intelligence officials of the U.S. Government and asked to make a bipartisan statement condemning it, he declined.

Why would a congressional leader not want to join in a bipartisan effort to warn a foreign power to stop its attack on democracy? Why the silence on this floor, on that side of the aisle, since the Helsinki summit conference?

There is not absolute silence. I will commend my ailing but respected and often-quoted colleague John McCain in Arizona, who sends messages from his home to this Chamber, to the U.S. Senate. What did he call the Helsinki summit? ``[O]ne of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.'' John McCain has never been one to mince words. I have to say that quote hit the nail on the head.

I want to put another word in here. Every time I hear politicians and all the smartest people on Earth on television referring to what happened in the 2016 election as the Russians meddling in our election--you heard that term, ``meddling'' in our election? If a seasoned criminal broke into your home to case it for a later burglary, would you say that burglar was just meddling? No. ``Breaking and entering'' might be the proper term. That is what happened with the Russians in the 2016 U.S. election. They broke and entered our election system across the United States.

The reason I know that, one of the targets happened to be my home State of Illinois. They found a way to sneak into the computers of the Illinois State Board of Elections and, according to the Special Counsel's recent indictment, stole information related to approximately one-half million voters in my State of Illinois. The State discovered it and sent out warnings to voters whose registration data may have been accessed.

Was that meddling? Not in Illinois. Those were fighting words. That was a cyber attack by the Russians on the State of Illinois Board of Elections, and they followed up by trying to hit 20 other States as well.

Meddling? Give me a break. This is a cyber act of war by the Russians, and our intelligence officials of the Trump administration-- like Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence--have warned us, the red lights are blinking again. They are coming back.

What are we doing about it? Nothing. There will be a chance for my Republican colleagues to join the Democrats in a bipartisan effort to take this seriously before it is too late. What do we have left, 105 days until the election? It

is not much time. The question is whether we will do something to try to protect our election system. Every Member of this Chamber will have an opportunity to vote to ensure that State and local election officials have the resources to stop any other effort by the Russians to interfere in our election.

Earlier this year, we came together and passed a bill--a bipartisan bill--that provided $380 million in fiscal year 2018 omnibus spending for States to modernize and secure their election systems. Funding gave the States flexibility to tackle the most critical priorities: replacing outdated voting machines, for example, that have no paper trail, updating election computer systems to address cyber vulnerabilities. The Election Assistance Commission reports that 55 different entities, including all the States and territories, have requested funding from this grant program. That was an important first step. It was bipartisan. It should be done. It was done, but it is not enough.

After the 2000 election, and months of news coverage about hanging chads and butterfly ballots, Congress passed a Help America Vote Act to address the outdated election infrastructure in America. We authorized $3.8 billion to respond to this issue. A few months ago, we authorized one-tenth of that to respond to the Russian threat. We need to respond to that threat in a much more robust manner.

I received a memo from our election authorities in Illinois specifying how they plan to spend their grant funds and what they need to do to be more certain that their election operations and machinery are intact, and virtually every State can provide me with a similar memo.

We need to respond to this threat in a meaningful, robust manner. We know full well in Illinois what the Russians could have done to us. If they had taken 500,000 voter registration records and simply changed one number in the street address of each voter, let me tell you what would have happened. When I turned up to vote in Springfield, IL, and listed my home address, they would have said: No, that address doesn't match our records. You can vote a provisional ballot if you wish. We will look into it later.

That could have happened thousands of times. Thank goodness it didn't, but that is the extent of our vulnerability. It is a suggestion of what we might face again from the Russians, according to our own Intelligence agencies.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security notified election officials in 20 other States that Russians attempted to hack into their systems, including Texas, Iowa, and Florida--Mr. President, your home State of Arizona--Oklahoma, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Alaska, Colorado, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

We have to make sure we are prepared for future attacks on our democracy. That is why I have joined Senator Leahy--who is on the floor with me today--and Senator Klobuchar, preparing an amendment to the appropriations legislation we are going to consider, offering an additional $250 million in election security grants to our States.

When a similar amendment was offered at a committee markup last month, we heard it was too early to talk about additional funding; we need to wait and see how the $380 million earlier appropriated would be spent.

We know the answer. At a recent Senate Rules Committee hearing, Cook County Director of Elections Noah Praetz explained that though the $380 million was greatly appreciated, more resources are desperately needed. He said: ``Given the costs of regular technology refreshes and support for human resources with cyber capacity, the needed investment is very large.''

Last week, when asked if the $380 million was enough to address the problem, the President of the National Association of Secretaries of State said: ``[N]o, to put it bluntly . . . Congress needs to come up with some kind of a funding mechanism that is sustainable and year-in, year-out, not once every 10 years.''

Just yesterday, a bipartisan group of State attorneys general asked Congress for increased funding because many States lack the resources and tools they need to protect their polling places.

I urge the adoption of the Leahy-Klobuchar amendment.

It is also time for the majority to heed former Senator Bill Frist's sage advice when he wrote recently in the Washington Post: ``[P]atriotism should always take priority over party.''

I say to the Presiding Officer, I know you know that, personally, and you have proven it.

Senator Frist went on to say that ``staying silent is no longer an option.''

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, it is interesting--I listened to my colleague from Wisconsin, which is my neighboring State, talk about her personal and family experience with healthcare. I think every one of us has a story--it is our own personal story--or knows somebody in our family who has a medical history, tells a story of whether they had the proper care at the proper time, whether the family could afford it. And then there is the big question: Can you buy health insurance if you have a child with diabetes, if you have a wife who is suffering from cancer and survived? Can you buy health insurance?

The interesting thing--I bet the Senator found this because I know she is traveling all over her State of Wisconsin--this issue doesn't go away because people's worry over it doesn't go away. They are worried about whether they can afford to buy good health insurance. They are worried about whether they can afford to buy prescription drugs. It is that insecurity, that economic insecurity about healthcare that really continues to make this the biggest issue year in, year out in America.

I thank my colleague from Wisconsin for telling her story and for really giving my speech. So I am going to condense it and just say a few things she might not have touched on. And I thank her for her contribution earlier today.

It happened in my life at a very early age. My wife and I got married. I was in law school. God sent us a beautiful little girl, and she had a very serious medical problem. We were living here in Washington, DC, and didn't have health insurance. I want to tell you that you have never felt more helpless in your life than to be a new father with that brand-new baby who desperately needs medical care and not have health insurance. I will never forget it as long as I live. I lived in such fear from that point forward of not having health insurance coverage that I did crazy things--getting health insurance at two different places of employment just to make sure I never lost it. It scared me that much, and I still remember that fear. I wonder if the people who are debating this issue about the Affordable Care Act ever lived through it themselves, because if they did, they wouldn't be standing here saying that we can do away with the Affordable Care Act.

We know what happens if you eliminate the Affordable Care Act. Millions of Americans lose their health insurance. Millions of Americans find health insurance not affordable. Millions of Americans are desperate for protection, no longer have it, and can't access the most basic, quality healthcare that every American should expect.

We had this debate. A new President came in and said: The first thing I am going to do is to get rid of ObamaCare, to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Well, the obvious question was this: Could he do it?

It looked like he might be able to. The Republicans controlled the House and the Senate, and when they were in the majority with a Democratic President, at least on 50 or 60 different occasions, the House Republicans voted to abolish ObamaCare.

It was pointless because the Senate wasn't going to take it up, and the President would never sign that bill into law, but you knew what the sentiment was. We are getting rid of it. We are getting rid of it. We heard about that year after year. We passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and for year after year all the Republicans could say was this: Get rid of it. Get rid of it.

Then came that moment when, figuratively, the dog caught the bus, and they had an opportunity to present on the floor of the Senate an alternative. What is it that you want to replace the Affordable Care Act with? We said to our Republican friends: You are elected to this body as legislators. Let's see your legislation.

It turns out that they didn't have any. They just wanted to make sure ObamaCare was gone, but they couldn't find a replacement, and they couldn't answer the basic question as to how they would provide health insurance--or affordable health insurance--for the millions of people who would lose coverage.

I remember the night--it was early in the morning it was--when we had the vote--the vote--on whether to eliminate ObamaCare. Two Republican Senators had already voted with us, but

the critical third vote walked in that door, and his name was John McCain. He stood in that well and give a ``no'' sign with his thumb, and that was it. The Affordable Care Act lived for another day.

Thank goodness he did it. Thank goodness he and two of his colleagues had the courage to do it, to stand up and say: If you can't replace ObamaCare with something better, for goodness' sake, stick with it, fix it. That didn't happen.

After that vote, there was a determined effort at every level of the Trump administration to do away with ObamaCare. If they couldn't kill it on the floor of the Senate, they were going to kill it in many different ways.

They limited the period of time when you signed up to renew your health insurance. They wanted to have fewer and fewer days available, hoping fewer and fewer people would take advantage of it.

They eliminated the navigators, the advisers who help people pick the right health insurance plan. They didn't want to give advice. They closed down the telephones to the agencies, where people would call saying: Well, what is my right under the Affordable Care Act?

They did everything they could think of to eliminate ObamaCare and make it more difficult for people to sign up for it, but still people signed up. Many people realized it was their only chance--their only chance--to get health insurance.

The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are determined to this day to get rid of it, and they have a new approach. If they can't kill it outright in the Senate and they can't kill it by President Trump's tweets, they are going to kill it in court.

Here is what they decided to do. Twenty attorneys general, starting with Texas--and I see my friend from Texas on the floor; the leading attorney general is from Texas--filed a lawsuit. Here is what they said. It is unconstitutional to say that you cannot discriminate against people because they have preexisting conditions.

Now, those are three negative words. So let me try to translate this Helsinki style into something you might understand.

What they basically said is this: We don't believe the Constitution can stop an insurance company from discriminating against people with a medical history, and we are going to court to prove it. And they have, with the support of the Trump administration.

They are trying to find a way to eliminate the protection of people with preexisting conditions so that they can buy affordable quality health insurance.

What an amazing mission that is--that these attorneys general and this administration want to find a way to deny health insurance coverage to millions of Americans or make it so expensive that they could never afford it.

What are they thinking? Don't they represent the same flesh-and-blood Americans as everyone else? Don't they represent families, as I do, and all of us do, who have someone in their family with a medical history? I guess a third of American families qualify for that. Yet they want to say that those people should be discriminated against. Why? Because of the misfortune they had of being born with a congenital birth defect or the problem they had because they conquered cancer but always worry about its coming back.

These are the things that my Republican friends say: Well, that is the way it goes. Good luck in the insurance market. We are not going to protect you.

They say what it is all about is choice. It is pretty easy to have good choices in life when you are healthy or wealthy. But if you don't fit in those two categories, your choices are extremely limited. People find themselves with only bad choices if they are not healthy or wealthy and they don't have the protection of the law. They find health insurance premiums they cannot afford. When they find a premium they can afford and start to look at the health insurance policy, it turns out that it doesn't cover much.

They also find themselves in positions where, as I mentioned earlier, someone in the family has a medical history. The wife has a medical history and you can't buy a family plan that you can afford for the rest of the family. That is the reality of the world the Republicans envision us moving to. Oh, it may be some great economic market model, but it doesn't work in reality--not in the reality of people who are born with illnesses they have no control over and who spend their lives fighting them and need a helping hand.

The Affordable Care Act gave them that helping hand. The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have been determined from the beginning to put an end to this protection, to eliminate health insurance for more and more Americans, and to make it unaffordable for so many families. Is that why they ran for Congress? Is that why they ran for the Senate--to go home and say: Well, sorry folks, but because of my principles, you don't get health insurance. You can't afford the health insurance being offered to you, or you can buy a junk policy that just will not be there when you need it.

Is that what America is all about?

This is interesting to me, and I will close with this. The Chicago Medical Society represents the doctors in the greater Chicagoland area. I have come to know it. It is one of the best medical associations in our State. It is more progressive than most and more thoughtful than most. I really salute them time and again.

They did a poll of their members, and they asked them: Where do you think this is going?

Well, first they said: We believe that people have a right to quality, affordable healthcare--these are doctors--a right to quality, affordable healthcare. Second, they said there are programs that work, like Medicare, programs that people trust.

The premise behind Medicare is very basic. If you are of an eligible age, you get health insurance. We make sure of it. We guarantee to you that you are going to get quality care through a government-run insurance program. There are a lot of Republicans who would like to see Medicare and Medicaid go away, too, but America wouldn't. America believes in it. I believe in the principle behind both of those plans-- that, as Americans, we should care for one another, give each and every family a chance, and make certain that, at the end of the day, healthcare is not just a privilege for those who happen to be wealthy.

I yield the floor.

I announce that the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Brown), is necessarily absent.

Mr. President, last July, heavy rain in Illinois caused severe flooding that led the Governor to declare disaster areas in Lake, McHenry, Kane, and Cook Counties. Thousands of buildings, including homes, businesses, and schools, were damaged by floodwaters. Thankfully, there were no fatalities as a result of this historic flooding.

Lake County was one of the areas most impacted by the flooding. When I visited two towns in this area--Libertyville and Gurnee--I saw street after street of flood damage to homes and businesses. It was heartbreaking.

I spoke with residents who were concerned about being able to recover from the flood and resulting damages and who voiced the need to find long-term solutions that will mitigate the impact of future flood events.

One year later, I am still awed by the dedication of the local first responders and county officials. State and local employees and volunteers came out to help at every level, from county emergency management agencies to the American Red Cross. Representatives from the Illinois Emergency Management Agency worked closely with local officials to make sure communities had the resources needed to protect critical infrastructure and clean up when the water began to recede.

People from all around the region pitched in to help their neighbors and even strangers protect property and get back on their feet.

It has been challenging for Illinois to receive Federal aid after a disaster occurs. I led the Illinois delegation in supporting the Governor's request for a Federal disaster declaration for the four impacted counties, but unfortunately, the State did not receive aid after the flooding last July.

Currently, FEMA considers State population when reviewing States' requests for Federal assistance following a disaster. This puts highly populous States like Illinois at a disadvantage, relying on the premise that they can absorb more recovery costs after a disaster. Despite that, my colleagues in Congress and I will always stand ready to do whatever we can to provide Federal assistance to assist Illinois communities.

I introduced a bill to fix FEMA's disaster declaration formula--the Fairness in Federal Disaster Declarations Acts--and I will continue to push this bill to try and help States, both small and large, in times of need. Families in Illinois deserve a fair and transparent disaster declaration process that allows them to access Federal resources when they are needed most.

I want to thank everyone who was engaged in the response and mitigation efforts, and all those who were part of the recovery efforts since last July. Illinoisans always come together and rebuild, as we have done, and we are stronger for it.