Floor Statements

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

Mr. President, will the Senator from Oregon yield for a question without yielding the floor?

As I recall, there was a moment in 1988, in the last year of President Reagan's Presidency, when there was a vacancy on the Supreme Court. This Republican President was in his last year--his so- called lameduck year, as many Republicans have now characterized it. At that time, the Senate was in the control of the Democratic Party. Of course, the Senate Judiciary Committee, I believe, was chaired by Joe Biden at that time in 1988.

President Reagan sent the name ``Anthony Kennedy'' to the Senate to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Democratic Senate held a hearing and a vote and sent Anthony Kennedy to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he continues to serve. So those who argue on the other side that everybody is doing it, that ``you would do the same thing, if you could'' and that sort of thing, I believe that is belied by the history--the recent history--when the Democrats were in the majority in this Chamber.

So the Senator from Oregon is saying that this is not the only time in history this has occurred, and Senator McConnell ignored this and decided not to even have a hearing or vote on Merrick Garland-- something that has never been done in the history of the Senate, which brings us to this moment. Is that the point the Senator is making?

I would ask the Senator from Oregon, as well, through the Chair, in this situation where Senator McConnell, as the Republican Senate leader, has exercised his so-called nuclear option to stop Merrick Garland, President Obama's choice, from filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court, does the Senator from Oregon believe, as I do, that this is part of a concerted effort by the Republicans to take control of the Federal judiciary, the fact that we left the end of the last year with 30 Federal judicial nominees on the Senate calendar, nominees who had received a bipartisan vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee? They were left unresolved, unvoted on, when the Senate went out of session. Does the Senator from Oregon see as I do, a pattern of conduct on the Republican part when it comes to filling the courts?

Is the Senator from Oregon aware of the fact that President Trump, during his campaign, released the list of 21 names of potential nominees for the Supreme Court, and then thanked the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation for preparing that list? The Federalist Society--a Republican advocacy group here in Washington, DC--now brags that every member of the Supreme Court appointed by a Republican President has either been a member of or cleared by the Federalist Society before they took the bench.

I wonder if the Senator from Oregon will yield for another question through the Chair.

I ask, when it comes to the Federalist Society--of course, like so many of these dark money organizations, they refuse to fully disclose their donors. They say it is to protect their identity from harassment. It is also protecting the American people from the truth.

Three that we do know have been actively involved would be the Koch brothers--a well-known group supporting Republican candidates--the Richard Mellon Scaife family foundation, as well as the Mercer family, now merging with millions and millions of dollars supporting these Republican causes.

I ask the Senator: Is it a leap of faith for me to think that they would not be working so hard to put someone on the Court, unless they felt that person was going to rule along the lines that they believed?

I ask the Senator from Oregon through the Chair again: During the course of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse raised this question about dark money with Neil Gorsuch, the nominee for the Supreme Court, and asked if he was aware of the fact that millions were currently being spent on ad campaigns and mail campaigns across the United States to promote his nomination-- and whether Neil Gorsuch felt that the source of this money should be disclosed. As far as we could bring the judge on this subject, he said: Well, someone should ask about where the money is coming from. That, I guess, is a pretty bold statement because many Republicans don't believe that it is fair to even ask where the money is coming from.

There was a time when even the Senate majority leader used to say: I am not going to complain about the amount of money. I just want to make sure it is all disclosed. Well, he is completely vacating that position. He doesn't want disclosure. He doesn't want the American people to know where the money is coming from.

I don't know if the Senator from Oregon noticed the television advertising here in Washington, where there is a lot on an issue like this before us. But the television screens--at least for those morning talk shows--were inundated with advertising in favor of Neil Gorsuch from groups like the 45 Committee, Judicial Justice Committee. They make up these names right and left.

I ask the Senator: When it comes to decisions like Citizens United, does

that give us clear evidence of why the Republicans are fighting so hard to make sure they put the right person on the Supreme Court?

I ask the Senator from Oregon if he will further yield.

Neil Gorsuch, the judge from the Tenth Circuit who has been nominated for the Supreme Court, has had some noteworthy opinions. One was the Hobby Lobby case. It is an interesting parallel between Hobby Lobby and Citizens United. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court said: We believe that money is speech. And we believe that the protections of the First Amendment extend to corporations who should be treated like persons when it comes to their right of free speech.

In the Hobby Lobby case, Neil Gorsuch, who is headed for the Supreme Court, reached a parallel decision, giving good credibility to the argument that the Republicans know why they are pushing for this man to go to the Court because this was a case where the Hobby Lobby company, which has stores across the United States owned by the Green family-- the Green family had their own special personal religious beliefs when it came to family planning and birth control. So they refused to provide for their 13,000 employees across the United States any health insurance plan that provided for methods of birth control, which they found personally offensive. They said that this was a corporate position they were taking--a company position.

So it was Neil Gorsuch, with others on the Tenth Circuit Court, who decided to expand the definition of personhood--again to include closely held corporations like Hobby Lobby. The net result was that the owners--the Green family--were able to say: We are going to stand up for our religious beliefs when it comes to family planning. And to say to 13,000 employees that those employees' personal beliefs--the religious beliefs of each employee--really made no difference from the viewpoint of Judge Gorsuch. Once the owners of the company had decided what was good, principled religious conduct, they could impose that on their employees.

So there is a parallel here where Citizens United said a corporation is a person. Judge Gorsuch and Hobby Lobby said that a closely held corporation is a person. And in the Citizens United case, he said this person--corporation person--has the right of free speech. In the case of Hobby Lobby, Judge Gorsuch said this corporation has the right of freedom of religion to exert their sincerely held religious beliefs.

So I say to the Senator from Oregon: It is clear to me that they tested Judge Gorsuch in the Tenth Circuit, and he came out ahead when it came to the basic principle that corporations should somehow be treated as persons when it comes to rights under the Constitution. That to me is hard to imagine.

I just can't fathom how they could stretch the meaning of person to include corporations when it doesn't say so expressly in any of the statutes that were referenced here. I haven't seen a lot of corporations pleading guilty and being sent to prison. It doesn't happen much.

So my question to the Senator from Oregon is, when it comes to the clearance of Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court seat--this open seat on the Supreme Court--whether they found the Hobby Lobby decision something that said to them: This man would believe in Citizens United had he been on the Court at the same time.

If the Senator from Oregon will yield further, when I started trying to find out the source of the money for these television ads that support Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, I went to something--the 45 Committee, I mentioned to you. I had never heard of it before. I looked it up. There was a committee that sounds just like this. It is hard to keep track of them. The largest donor by far in terms of money was Sheldon Adelson, a man out of Las Vegas who has become rather celebrated, if not notorious, for putting millions of dollars into those political efforts on behalf of candidates from the right--some say from the extreme right.

I would also ask the Senator from Oregon if, during the course of his review of Judge Gorsuch's record, he came across the TransAm Trucking case, which was really explored at length in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Many of us felt this was such a clear definition of the values of Neil Gorsuch, who tends to rule on the side of big business and corporate elites over and over again.

The case involved a truck driver who was driving near Chicago on Interstate 88 in January a few years ago during a bitterly cold period of time. He had trouble with his trailer. He pulled it off to the side of the road and realized the brakes on the trailer were frozen. So he got on his cell phone and he called his dispatcher, and his dispatcher said: Whatever you do, stay with that truck and trailer. The repairman is on the way.

So he waited a while. No one showed up. He fell asleep. By the time he woke up to a phone call from a member of his family, his legs were numb and he was having trouble breathing. It turned out there was no heater in the cab of the truck. So there he was, facing hypothermia and freezing in his truck. Again, the dispatcher told him: Stay there. Don't leave the truck.

He decided that the idea of dragging this trailer down the interstate was dangerous and the idea of staying in this truck could threaten his own life, so he made what I consider to be a reasonable decision: He unhitched the trailer, took the truck to the gas station, filled it with gas, warmed up, and came back to the trailer. For that conduct, he was fired by TransAm Trucking. Because he was fired, he was blackballed from ever driving another truck.

This man, whom I happened to meet in my office a few weeks ago, Alphonse Maddin, then did not know which way to turn. He couldn't make a living. He was a hard-working fellow out of Detroit.

Somebody said: You can go to the Department of Labor, and you can file a complaint for unfair dismissal.

I see the Senator has a photograph of Mr. Maddin there.

He told me he went to the Department of Labor. They handed him the form. With a ballpoint pen, he filled it in as to what happened to him, protesting this dismissal and firing. He said he was shocked a few months later to get a letter in the mail that said: You win. You are right. They shouldn't have fired you.

Well, he thought that was a pretty good thing and that he would get some backpay out of it. But then the appeals started, and it went in the Federal court system. By the time it got to the Tenth Circuit, where Judge Neil Gorsuch sat, seven different court judges and administrative judges had considered the case of Alphonse Maddin as to whether it was fair to fire him under these circumstances. Only one judge out of the seven said it was the right thing to do--Neil Gorsuch, the man who aspires to be on the Supreme Court.

One of my colleagues--and I think it was Senator Franken--said to Judge Gorsuch: What would you have done if you were sitting in that truck? What would you have done if you faced freezing to death or dragging a disabled trailer out on a busy interstate, endangering the lives of others?

Judge Gorsuch replied: I never really thought about it.

He never really thought about it. To me, that really gets to the heart of what we are talking about here. He thought about it enough to rule against that truck driver who faced that terrible choice in his life, but he did not think for a moment what a reasonable, ordinary man would do under the circumstances. He reduced the situation to the absurd and decided to rule for the trucking company, for the corporation.

When you consider that this Roberts Supreme Court has ruled on the corporate side, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce side, 69 percent of the time, it is pretty clear why they have this fond feeling for Neil Gorsuch as the next Supreme Court Justice.

Does the Senator from Oregon see the linkage here between what the Republicans are looking for in a Supreme Court nominee and what they would find in this TransAm Trucking decision?

I thank the Senator from Oregon for yielding for questions.

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 for a clarification. Is the remaining 17 or 18 minutes equally divided?

Mr. President, I just wanted to get more specific. I am not questioning what the Senator asked for.

Do we have 9 minutes each or 8 minutes each?

So will I.

Mr. President, I defer to the chairman of the committee if he would like to speak first.

Mr. President, for 3 straight days, the Senate Republican leader has come to the floor and has given us a history of Presidential nominations to the Supreme Court, but clearly an investigation is necessary. There must have been a hacking into his computer because he can't print the name ``Merrick Garland'' to include in his speech. The Senator from Kentucky, the Republican leader, has failed to mention that name because that name is the reason we are in this spot today.

When Justice Antonin Scalia passed away, President Obama exercised his constitutional responsibility to send a nominee to the Senate to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court. For the first time in the history of the Senate--for the first time ever--this Republican-led Senate refused to give this nominee a hearing and a vote. It had never--underline the word ``never''--happened before.

Was the reason that he was unqualified? Of course not: he was unanimously ``well qualified,'' serving on the DC Circuit Court. The reason was stated clearly by Senator McConnell: We are going to place a bet that the next President will be a Republican, and we will let them fill this vacancy.

When the Republicans come to the floor, as they have this morning talking about the politicization of this process, the reason we are here, when we should be celebrating the 1-year anniversary of Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court, is because they kept that position vacant so it could be filled by a Republican President. That is exactly why we are here today.

This notion that it is somehow fanciful that the choice of Neil Gorsuch was made by outside groups is belied by the very words of the President himself, who thanked the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation--two special interest, Republican organizations--for giving him a list of nominees for the Supreme Court. It was very open and public, and there was gratitude--political gratitude--that they came up with the name Neil Gorsuch. That is a fact.

When we look at the history that has led us to this moment, the Senator from Kentucky, the Republican leader, has to accept what is clear. In the history of the United States of America, until Senator McConnell's days under President Obama, exactly 68 nominees had been filibustered. Under Senator McConnell and the Republicans, 79 nominees of President Obama's were filibustered. It was an abuse of the filibuster never seen before in the history of our Nation, and it was that abuse of the filibuster and statements made that they would leave vacancies on critical courts, like the DC Court of Appeals, there forever and ever amen, that led to the decision 4 years ago to say that we would employ a change in the rules so we could finally fill these court positions--finally break the filibuster death grip--which Senator McConnell brought to this Chamber in a way never before seen in history.

So the Senator from Kentucky has made history. He comes to the floor every day and tells us history. He made history in the number of filibusters he

used on this floor. He made history in denying a Presidential nominee the opportunity for a hearing and a vote, which had never--never-- happened before in the history of the United States. Talk about partisanship.

When it comes to Judge Gorsuch, I read his cases. I sat through the hearings. I was in the Senate Judiciary Committee. We took a measure of the man. He was careful to avoid any question that he could when it came to his position on cases and issues and values, and that is not unusual. Supreme Court nominees do that.

So we tried to look at his cases. What do the cases that he decided reveal about the man? Two or three cases came right to the front. The first involved the sad story of a frozen truckdriver on Interstate 88 outside of Chicago in January a few years back. It was 14 degrees below zero, and the brakes on his trailer froze. He pulled to the side of the road, called his dispatcher who said: Stay with the truck. We are sending somebody. Hours passed. He was going through hypothermia. He was freezing. He called the dispatcher and said: I have to do something. He said: You either drive this disabled truck out on the interstate and take your best chances or you stick with the truck. He decided to unhitch the trailer and drive to a gas station, gas up and warm up, and come back. For that he was fired.

Seven judges looked at that case to decide whether it was fair to fire Alphonse Maddin. Six of the judges said: No, he did the right thing. One judge said: I rule for the trucking company that fired him-- Neil Gorsuch, the nominee for the Supreme Court.

In the Hobby Lobby case, the decision was basic, who should decide the healthcare of thousands of workers. Well, the Green family who owns Hobby Lobby said: Our religious beliefs should dominate. We should decide family planning and birth control for our employees and their health insurance. Judge Gorsuch said: That is right because they own a corporation, and a corporation is a person, and as a corporation, they can have sincere religious beliefs. It was a choice between a corporate ownership of a family and 13,000 employees and their own personal religious rights, and Judge Gorsuch ruled for the corporation.

Kansas State University. A Kansas State University professor, Grace Hwang, after working there for many years, was diagnosed with cancer and had to go through a bone marrow transplant. She took 6 months off. Then, when she was called back to work, she called the university and said: I understand there is an influenza outbreak on campus, and I am afraid, after having just had a bone marrow transplant, to be exposed to influenza at this point. They said: You either come back and teach or you are fired. She didn't come back. They fired her. It was Judge Gorsuch who said their employer was right; Kansas State University was right.

Those are insights into the values of a man who wants a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest Court in the land. The questions we have raised about his judgment and his values go to the heart of who we are and what we want to be. Do we want the Supreme Court to continue to be a voice for the corporations, the corporate elite, and employers? Do we want to exclude the opportunities of common people like that truckdriver, Al Maddin, to have his day in court and be treated fairly? That is what it comes down to. It is a fundamental question of fairness and justice.

I am sorry, because I love the Senate and I have spent a good part of my life here, that we have reached this moment. But it is this effort to fill the courts of this Nation with Republican appointments, even at the expense of violating Senate traditions that are over 100 years old, that has brought us to this moment.

As someone said, the nuclear option was used by Senator McConnell when he stopped Merrick Garland. What we are facing today is the fallout.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I announce that the Senator from Washington (Ms. Cantwell) is necessarily absent.

Mr. President, most Americans agree--and I think last week's vote in the House indicated--that there is something special about healthcare. This just isn't the right of every American to own an SUV; it is the right of every American to have access to healthcare. That is really at the heart of our healthcare debate.

There are some who believe that health insurance ought to be another product on the shelf, and if you have enough money, you can buy it. But there are others, like me, who believe it is more fundamental.

Healthcare in America, as far as I am concerned, should be a right-- not a privilege, a right--so that it doesn't go just to wealthy people. Everyone should have that peace of mind.

I have told the story many times on the floor of the Senate--and many of us are products of our own life experience. My wife and I got married when I was a student in law school here at Georgetown, in Washington. God sent us a beautiful little girl right away, but she had some medical problems--serious ones--and I didn't have any health insurance. I was a law student, had no real income, a wife, and a baby with a medical problem.

I ended up sitting in the charity ward of the local children's hospital with a number in my hand, waiting to see who would come through the door to provide me with healthcare for my little girl. I had never felt worse in my life as a father, as a husband, to think that I had reached this point where I didn't have health insurance, and I wasn't sure that I was bringing the very best medical care to my little girl.

Well, I never forgot that experience in the many years since, and I never will. I don't believe anybody should be sitting in that chair, worried because they don't have health insurance--whether they have the kind of healthcare that their family needs.

I think that is at the heart of this debate on our healthcare system in America and its future. What we are talking about today is part of it, as well, because we had decided 40 years ago--maybe more--that we were going to make sure, if you were poor in America, as a woman, you would still have access to basic healthcare. Poverty would not exclude you from healthcare. So we created this title X program to provide healthcare primarily for low-income families but for women and children. The services that are provided are basic life-and-death services--everything from breast and cervical care screening, high blood pressure screening, anemia, diabetes testing, and so on.

There is not much debate as to whether we should provide those services, but you know what this is all about. It is not about what I just read. It is about family planning, and it is about abortion. That is what this is really all about.

The Republicans who are voting to deny women access to healthcare are saying: We are doing this to reduce the incidence of abortion.

There is something they should admit: You cannot spend one penny of Federal money for abortion services, except in cases of rape, incest, or where the life of the mother is in danger. Not here in the United States, not overseas.

What they say instead is: Well, we don't want to provide any money to any place that might use their own funds for abortion services, like Planned Parenthood. So we have this amendment before us.

For thousands of women and families in my State of Illinois, as Senator Murray has explained, it means the Republicans--who were all for choice in

healthcare--don't want women of limited means to have their ultimate choice of Planned Parenthood for their services. So the Republicans have brought in the Vice President of the United States to vote in the Senate Chamber.

For those who are following the Senate, that doesn't happen very often. It has to be a big deal. And it must be a big deal to the Vice President and to the Republican Party to bring back one of our colleagues, who has been on the mend from medical care, and to bring in the Vice President to make that difference.

Their argument is: Well, we are just trying to reduce the number of abortions.

Well, if you have taken anything beyond Birds and Bees 101, there are some things that you might know. We had a study in St. Louis that was reported in 2012 that tells many people who are at least aware of the basics of how children are born something that we knew already and knew intuitively. Here is what it found:

The abortion rate in the St. Louis area declined by more

than 20 percent from 2008 to 2010, coinciding with a research

study that gave free birth control to thousands of area

women.

Although the drop in abortions in St. Louis cannot be

attributed solely to the project, the abortion rate for the

rest of Missouri--

Not in the study--

remained constant.

Contraception is key to reducing unintended pregnancies and

abortions, said Dr. Jeff Peipert. ``We need to remove cost

barriers,'' Peipert said. ``I think all women should have

equal access.''

Teenage participants--

In this study--

experienced a birth rate of 6.3 babies per 1,000 girls,

compared with the national rate of 34.3, according to the

study published . . . in the journal Obstetrics and

Gynecology.

There were an average of six abortions a year for every

1,000 women in the project, compared with the national rate

of 20.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

When you make family planning accessible to potential mothers and to the families, people are educated and make informed choices. There are fewer unplanned pregnancies. There are fewer teenage pregnancies. There are fewer abortions.

So the Republicans, by reducing the access of women to clinics and agencies that are providing family planning, reduce the likelihood they will get the information they need and the likelihood that abortions will increase--exactly the opposite of what they say they are trying to do.

Common sense dictates that--whatever your position is on abortion and choice--if you believe that an uninformed and uneducated young mother is the right person to make this decision as to whether they are going to have a family, I think you understand what all of us do: Information, assistance, and quality healthcare is critically important for women to make the right choice for themselves and their families and to avoid unplanned pregnancies.

We are now experiencing the lowest rates of unplanned pregnancies in the United States in the last 30 years and the lowest incidence of teenage pregnancies in the last 30 years, and the abortion rate is going down. It works. It is connecting.

This vote that the Republicans are forcing us to take--which the President, I am afraid, would sign, if it were sent to his desk--really gets at the heart of the issue. If you want to reduce the number of abortions in America, if you want to make them safe, legal, and rare, as they say, for goodness' sake, provide basic family planning information and services to women who otherwise might not have it.

This is a war against Planned Parenthood and a few other facilities that is mindless. It really is stopping information from people who desperately need it. Without that information, there will be bad results--bad results that often lead to abortions.

So I would just say flat out that we don't talk a lot about the A- word, ``abortion,'' on the floor, but that is really what is driving this debate. That is what is really behind it.

I hope that one more Republican colleague will decide that if you are truly against abortion, you should be in favor of family planning and giving basic information and counseling to young women who need it. That was proven in St. Louis. It is proven by our human experience. I hope my colleagues will join me in opposing this effort.

I thank the Senator from Washington for leading this debate on the floor.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, for 7 years, Republicans in Congress have promised to ``repeal and replace ObamaCare,'' but not once during those 7 years did they actually put together a piece of legislation to make good on that promise.

Not once during those 7 years did Republican leaders actually convene serious hearings and meetings with patients, hospitals, insurers, and medical groups to discuss how best to reform our healthcare system, instead preferring to just rail against the law.

Not once during those 7 years did congressional Republicans actually try to sit down with Democrats and work on a bipartisan basis to improve upon the law.

But here is what they did do: They did everything possible to gum up the works, with many Republican Governors even refusing to expand Medicaid, denying millions of their constituents access to healthcare.

They went on TV, did interviews, and held campaign rallies about how all of

the challenges facing our healthcare system, challenges that we faced even before we passed the ACA, was the fault of ObamaCare and made empty promises about ``repeal and replace.''

Congressional Republicans voted over 60 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act when they knew President Obama was in office and he would veto repeal--60 times.

Now, with Republicans controlling the House, the Senate, the White House, you know what they are doing? Nothing--they cancelled their vote last Friday to repeal the law.

Why? As evidenced last week, they are incapable of developing a proposal that garners the support of their own Republican Caucus. They are incapable of bringing a piece of legislation to the House Floor for a vote, despite having a large Republican majority in the House.

Now, after 17 legislative days of trying to ram through a bill that would have thrown at least 24 million people off their health insurance, reduced protections for 178 million people who have employer-based coverage, increased costs for seniors and rural communities, and given a huge tax break to drug companies and the wealthiest Americans, Republicans are giving up.

Time to move on, they say; time to tackle tax reform, they say.

Well, I, along with the majority of Americans who have benefited from this law, am relieved.

The Affordable Care Act is not perfect--no law is.

It made sure 20 million more Americans could get health insurance, including 1 million Illinoisans. As a result, our uninsured rate is at its lowest level in our Nation's history.

Young people are staying on their parents' plans till age 26, and seniors are seeing big savings on their prescription drugs.

Women can no longer be charged more than men for the same coverage, and people with preexisting conditions can no longer be discriminated against.

Annual and lifetime caps on benefits are a thing of the past, and people now have access to maternity and newborn care, as well as mental health and substance abuse treatment.

Now that Republicans have acknowledged that the Affordable Care Act is, as Speaker Ryan stated, ``the law of the land . . . for the foreseeable future,'' it is time to start building off of it.

Like Medicare and Social Security before it, it is time to make some bipartisan modifications that can help improve the law.

We need to increase insurer competition because, in too many of our communities, there are not enough options.

We need to address individual market premium increases because, for too many of our constituents, an affordable health plan is still out of reach.

I, along with many of my Democratic colleagues, have put forth ideas to deal with some of these issues.

I support the creation of a ``public plan,'' which would both increase competition in areas that are lacking and drive down premiums since, as Medicare has demonstrated time and again, the Federal Government can be more efficient than private for-profit companies.

I support legislation to bring down the high cast of prescription drugs, which are driving up premiums for families nationwide.

BlueCross BlueShield of Illinois now pays more for prescription drugs than they do on inpatient hospital costs, and they readily admit that drug costs are contributing to premium hikes.

We need to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. We need to end ``pay for delay'' agreements and get cheaper drugs on the market quicker. We need to prohibit direct-to-consumer advertising. We need more transparency into how drug prices are set, and we need penalties on drug companies that gouge the American public.

I also support enforcing portions of the law that Republicans have sabotaged and undermined since its inception. We need to allow the ``risk corridor'' program to operate unimpeded. We need to expand Medicaid in all States, especially since we know that premiums are highest and competition lowest in nonexpansion States, and we need to enforce the law--which is why the very first order of business going forward must be for President Trump to rescind the Executive order he issued on January 20.

The President's order directed the heads of all Federal agencies responsible for implementing and enforcing the Affordable Care Act to stand down, to not implement the law, to not enforce the law.

Now that the page has hopefully been turned on the ugly ``repeal'' chapter of this saga, it is time for the President and his administration to faithfully implement, enforce, and help improve this law.

I am calling on the President and congressional Republicans: Now is the time to stop undermining the law that is enjoying record support from Americans.

Now is not time to throw sand in the law's eyes, put a spoke in its wheel, and then turn around, gloat, and blame Democrats when it does not function properly.

The Affordable Care Act while championed by Democrats and President Obama, included over 100 Republican amendments and, for better or worse, borrowed heavily from Republican ideas for the marketplace.

Let's end these partisan games.

This law--the good and the shortcomings--is on all of us to improve.

Democrats have ideas, but we cannot do it alone. Remember, the Republican Party controls the House, the Senate, and the White House.

They are in charge. If improvements are going to be made, Republicans are going to have to get serious.

Now that the half-baked repeal effort has collapsed, my hope is that Republicans will finally be willing to sit down and work with Democrats. I know I am ready to pull up a chair.

Mr. President, last week in testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, FBI Director Comey confirmed what many of us have been urging for months: the need for an independent commission to look into the Russian act of cyber war on our election and any possible collusion with members of the Trump campaign.

Comey confirmed that the FBI was ``investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russian efforts.''

He continued that FBI agents would pursue the investigation ``no matter how long that takes.''

This is incredible. I am not surprised, but it is incredible. Our Nation's top law enforcement agency is investigating possible links between those involved in President Trump's campaign and a foreign adversary known to have conducted an aggressive intelligence operation to help him get elected, and all the while, this President continues to deny any such attack, praise the dictator who launched the attack, and pursue policies that mirror those of the attacker, including the weakening of the Western security alliance.

Yet what has been the priority of the majority party amid this mounting and serious breach, one we already knew about 5 months ago?

Has it been to set up an independent commission to look into this unprecedented threat to our Nation and democracy? No.

Has it been to work with the White House to disclose all information in an open and transparent manner to clear up any concerns or suspicions? No, in fact the opposite--we still haven't even seen the President's tax returns to get answers on Russian money in his businesses.

Has it been to pass sanctions on Russia for its attack on our Nation? No.

Has it been to pass meaningful cyber security legislation, legislation blocked by the majority in the last Congress to make sure our next elections in less than 2 years are secure from attack? No.

So what has been the priority instead? Well, last week, the majority voted to make it easier to kill baby bears and their mothers in their dens. The majority also reversed internet privacy protections for consumers. A few weeks ago, the majority voted to reverse a law to help mitigate corruption in some of the world's most impoverished nations.

Of course, the majority failed to advance TrumpCare, which would have

stripped 24 million Americans of healthcare, a cruel bill that would have disproportionately hurt those who voted for President Trump.

This is a dereliction of our responsibility here in the Congress. Not one of these issues is more important than getting to the bottom of possible collusion with the Russians or of the possibility that some in the White House have been compromised by a foreign government.

I want to praise the few on the majority side who have spoken out on the need for an investigation, including Senator Graham and Senator McCain. They noted early on the need for an independent investigation.

Today a majority of Americans also want an independent commission. I am again calling for the same. We need an independent commission, one led by American statesmen or women of unquestioned reputation, say Sandra Day O'Connor or Colin Powell.

We did this after the attack of September 11, and this attack and its unanswered questions demand nothing less again today.

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

Mr. President, allow me to take a moment of the Senate's time to say thank you and farewell to an exceptional person.

Ed Greelegs was my chief of staff for 17 years, and he was a wise and trusted friend. I was not unique in that regard. Ed had thousands of friends. I used to marvel while walking through the Capitol with Ed Greelegs because he knew everybody, and everybody knew him--not just the Members of Congress and their staff but cafeteria workers, carpenters, Capitol Police officers, and certainly Senators, Congressmen, and their staffs. He was a beloved member of the Senate community, and what a smart fellow he was.

During my first 10 years in the Senate, when Ed was my chief of staff, he was an unfailing source of wise and thoughtful advice. Some people are drawn to Congress because of what they think are the perks and power that come with this job. That is not what attracted Ed Greelegs.

For Ed, being a good public servant was always a privilege. He avoided the spotlight. He was there to help people and to help move America closer to that more perfect Union our Founders dreamed of.

Fifteen years ago, Ed was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's. He and his wife Susan faced that formidable challenge the same way they faced everything: together, with love, determination, courage, and a good sense of humor.

Sadly, yesterday, Ed's battle with Parkinson's ended, and he passed away at the age of 66.

Parkinson's disease is a bitter adversary. Over the years, it took away Ed's sure-footedness. It nearly killed him twice. In the end, it robbed him of many memories. I can recall speaking to him a few months back, and Susan had warned me that he didn't have much of a memory, she said, unless you want to talk about politics. So I called him, and we talked about politics--even the politics of the day--and Ed was spot on. He always was. But regardless of the loss of memory, it never took away Ed's dignity, his kindness, or his respect for others.

Ed Greelegs worked for so many Members of Congress from Illinois that I think he became an honorary son of

our State. He grew up in Washington, DC, in the suburb of Wheaton, MD, and graduated from the University of Maryland.

He came to the Capitol as an intern in 1970. Before he joined my staff, he worked for Congressman Marty Russo of Illinois, Congressman Bob Eckhart of Texas on the House Commerce Committee, Congressman Sam Gejdenson of Connecticut, and finally back to Congressman Marty Russo.

He also worked briefly for the Consumer Federation of America and for Fannie Mae.

In 1990 I persuaded him to come to work for me as my chief of staff in the House. Six years later, when I went to run for the Senate, he was right by my side, and he was there for me 8 years later when I became whip.

His quiet, wry sense of humor helped to lighten the mood when things became tense, and his profound compassion and decency reminded all of us of why we were really there.

There were a couple of things that Ed loved more than public service, and one was books. Ed's desk and his bedside were always surrounded by mountains of books. More than reading, Ed loved his family, especially his dear wife Susan and his stepchildren, Andrew and Amanda.

I have a thousand Ed Greelegs stories, but I am going to close with my favorite. The year was 2002. I was on a codel with then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle to Afghanistan with a handful of Senators. We were the first group of Senators to land in Afghanistan after the war broke out in daylight. The security was incredible. This trip to Afghanistan was the first since the fall of the Taliban. No one knew who was friend or foe on the ground. So when we landed at Bagram Airfield in Kabul, it was really tense. As the back end of the plane ramp went down on to the runway and we were brought off, we were surrounded by armored personnel carriers and men holding rifles. These armored personnel carriers were as far as the eye could see, and the armed troops as well.

As I came down the ramp, a man in civilian clothes walked up to me and said: Are you Senator Durbin?

I said: Yes, I am.

He said: Well, I am a personal friend of Ed Greelegs.

I couldn't believe it. In the middle of a war zone, here was another friend of Ed Greelegs.

On behalf of friends of Ed everywhere, I want to say: Thank you, my friend. You made this Congress and this country better with your caring and dedication. We will all miss you.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I rise to speak on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is important to reflect for a moment on how we have reached this moment. It has been more than a year since the untimely passing of Justice Antonin Scalia in February of 2016. Under article II, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, President Barack Obama had a duty to make a nomination to fill that vacant seat. He met that obligation by nominating Chief Judge Merrick Garland in March of 2016.

Yet the leader of the Senate Republicans, Majority Leader McConnell, announced that, for the first time in the 230-year history of the Senate, he would refuse the President's nominee, Judge Garland, a hearing and a vote. Senator McConnell further said that he would refuse to even meet with Judge Garland. It was a transparent political decision made by the Republican leader in the hopes that a Republican would be elected President and fill the vacancy. It was part of a broader Republican political strategy to influence, if not capture, the judicial branch of government on every level of the court system.

Not only did the Senate Republicans keep a Supreme Court seat vacant for over a year, they turned the Senate's Executive Calendar into a nomination obituary column for 30 other judicial nominees who had been reported out of the Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support. They were hoping a Republican President would fill all of those seats, and they were prepared to leave them vacant for a year or more to achieve that end.

What kind of nominees were they hoping for? Nominees who had been blessed by special interests, by big business, and by Republican advocacy organizations.

It was last year that then-Candidate Donald Trump released a list of 21 potential Supreme Court candidates who were handpicked by two Republican advocacy groups--the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. I am not speculating on the fact that they were chosen by those two groups, as President Trump publicly thanked the groups for giving him a list of names with which to fill the vacancies on the Supreme Court. It was unprecedented for anyone, including a candidate for President, to outsource the judicial selection process to special interest

groups, but President Trump did it. True to his word to these special interest groups, he nominated one of the names on the list--Judge Neil Gorsuch.

The first telephone call Judge Gorsuch received about his nomination was not from the White House; it was from the Federalist Society, which was one of these Republican advocacy groups. Eventually, Judge Gorsuch made it to the interview stage with President Trump's inner circle. He met with Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and President Trump himself. Those men each took the measure of Judge Gorsuch and gave him their approval to serve for a lifetime appointment on the highest Court in the land. President Trump, who had announced numerous litmus tests for judicial nominations, appeared very satisfied with Neil Gorsuch as his nominee.

The President's Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, even said: ``Neil Gorsuch . . . represents the type of judge that has the vision of Donald Trump.''

There was certainly no political subtlety in that evaluation.

After Judge Gorsuch's nomination was announced, a dark money machine shifted into gear. A national campaign, which cost at least $10 million, was launched to support the Gorsuch nomination. Because it is dark money, there is no disclosure about who is bankrolling this effort, but it is a safe bet that the suppliers of dark money have at least a passing interest in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Despite this unprecedented and unsettling process that led to Judge Gorsuch's nomination, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee gave Judge Gorsuch a courtesy that Republicans denied to Judge Garland--a hearing and a vote. Why? Because Senate Democrats take the Constitution seriously. We do not turn our backs on the constitutional responsibility of advice and consent, even though that is exactly what our Republican colleagues did when it came to Merrick Garland.

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee met for 4 days to consider the Gorsuch nomination. In leading up to the hearing, I made it clear on the Senate floor that I thought that Judge Gorsuch had a burden to bear at that hearing.

On February 2, I said here on the floor that Judge Gorsuch needed to demonstrate that he would be a nominee who would uphold and defend the Constitution for the benefit of everyone, not just for the advantage of a privileged few who happened to engineer his nomination.

I also said that Judge Gorsuch needed to be forthright with the American people about his record and his views. I made it clear that avoiding answers to critical questions was unacceptable.

I said that he needed to demonstrate that he would be an independent check on President Trump and every President and that he was prepared to disappoint the President and the rightwing groups that handpicked him if the Constitution and the law required it.

Judge Gorsuch was given a full and fair hearing. He was given every opportunity to explain his judicial record and his views and to meet the expectations I laid out for him. I came away from this hearing firmly convinced that I must oppose the nomination of Neil Gorsuch.

Here are the reasons:

Judge Gorsuch favors corporations and elites over the rights and voices of Americans, often using selective textualism to advance his agenda. Judge Gorsuch's hearing reinforced my fear that he would lean toward corporations and special interest elites at the expense of American workers and families.

Big business and special interests have found a friend under the Roberts Supreme Court. I noted at the hearing a study by the Constitutional Accountability Center that found that under Chief Justice John Roberts the Supreme Court has ruled for positions that have been advocated by the Chamber of Commerce 69 percent of the time.

I am concerned, based on a review of his record, that Judge Gorsuch is likely to increase the pro-business leanings of the Roberts Court. In a series of decisions--and I have read many of them--involving workers' rights, discrimination claims, consumer rights, and access to the courts, Judge Gorsuch has, time and again, favored corporations. He has often substituted his own judgment for those of the agencies that are tasked with protecting the workers.

No case was more egregious than the TransAm Trucking case, which was brought up repeatedly at the hearing. The facts are pretty well known by now. In January, Alphonse Maddin, a truck driver from Detroit, was stuck on the side of Interstate 88 in my home State of Illinois, and it was 14 degrees below zero outside. The brakes on his trailer were frozen. After waiting for a repair truck for several hours without his having any heat in the cab of his truck, Alphonse Maddin's body was starting to go numb. He called the trucking company one more time. They said: You have two options--stay in that truck or drag that frozen trailer down the interstate highway.

Both of those options were a risk to health and safety and common sense. So, instead, Al Maddin unhitched the broken-down trailer and drove to a gas station to fuel up and get warm and then returned to the disabled trailer. For this, the company fired him, and that firing blackballed him from ever working as a truck driver again.

Al Maddin came by my office and explained what he did. He had heard that there was some Federal agency that might consider what he had considered to be an unfair firing, so he went down to the agency and took out a ballpoint pen and filled out the complaint in longhand without the advice of counsel or any help. He was shocked when he won.

The case went further on appeal. Seven different judges heard Al Maddin's case. Six of them agreed that what had happened to him was unfair and unlawful. The only judge who found for the trucking company was Neil Gorsuch.

Judge Gorsuch's dissent claimed that he was merely looking at the plain text of the law and the dictionary's definition and that was why Al Maddin had been fired. But the Tenth Circuit majority said that Neil Gorsuch was cherry-picking one dictionary's definition to come to his conclusion. Other dictionaries and the law's purpose of protecting health and safety had been ignored by Judge Gorsuch.

Republican nominees like Judge Gorsuch often claim they are using the supposedly neutral philosophies of originalism and textualism to guide their decision making, but Al Maddin's case shows how Judge Gorsuch used a selective choice of text to advance a pro-business agenda at the expense of this American worker.

There are many other cases in Judge Gorsuch's record that demonstrate this trend, leading the Associated Press to say that Gorsuch's workers' rights opinions are ``often sympathetic but coldly pragmatic, and they're usually in the employer's favor.''

Take a look at the Hobby Lobby case. In that case, Judge Gorsuch expanded the idea that a corporation--a business--is a person. Why? He wanted to permit a for-profit corporation to impose its owners' personal religious beliefs on more than 13,000 employees who worked at that corporation and to limit their access to healthcare under insurance policies.

In finding for the corporation, Judge Gorsuch barely acknowledged that this decision burdened these thousands of employees and their personally constitutionally protected religious beliefs and choices.

Judge Gorsuch also has a troubling record when it comes to protecting the rights of Americans with disabilities and those who are victims of discrimination. It was quite a scene when, last week, in the midst of our hearing on Judge Gorsuch, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling that rejected a standard that had been created by Judge Gorsuch. I am sure that has never happened in history. This standard, which Judge Gorsuch had promoted for a case in which he wrote the majority opinion, weakened protections for students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

In 2008, Judge Gorsuch wrote in the Luke P. case that, under the IDEA, schools need only to provide educational benefits to students with disabilities that are merely more than de minimis.

At issue was the legal responsibility of a school district to provide educational opportunities for a child with

disabilities. In this case, Luke was a boy from Colorado who had suffered from severe autism. With the assistance and support of his teachers, Luke had made significant progress in school--in kindergarten and first grade. Then, when his family moved to a new home, he had to change school districts. At his new school, Luke began to lose the skills he had gained. His behavior was worse.

After unsuccessful attempts to address these concerns, Luke's parents decided that they ``could not in good conscience continue to expose their son, Luke, to this environment that was so detrimental to his educational and behavioral development.'' They decided to enroll Luke in a residential school that was dedicated to the education of children with his type of autism spectrum disorder.

A due process hearing officer, a Colorado State administrative law judge, and a Federal district court all found that the school district had failed to provide the education that was guaranteed to Luke under the Federal law of IDEA and that it was, therefore, required to reimburse the cost of the private residential school placement that Luke needed.

His parents were desperate to give Luke a chance in life, but then Judge Gorsuch ruled against them. In so doing, he created a new, lower standard for school districts in the process.

I asked Judge Gorsuch about this. He claimed he was just following the law and precedent, but as I pointed out at the hearing, that was not accurate. A legal analysis showed that Judge Gorsuch was the first judge in that circuit to add the word ``merely'' to the standard.

Luke P.'s father, Jeff, testified at the hearing and said that Judge Gorsuch's ``subtle wordcraft'' had the effect of ``further restricting an already restricted precedent with, unfortunately, my son in the bull's-eye of that decision.''

What did Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court say of the Gorsuch standard? Here is what he said: ``When all is said and done, a student offered an educational program providing `merely more than de minimis' progress [Gorsuch's words] from year to year can hardly be said to have been offered an education at all.''

The Supreme Court sent a strong message when they released this opinion in the midst of Judge Gorsuch's hearing. The Court unanimously said that the Judge Gorsuch standard was inconsistent with the law. On this issue, Judge Gorsuch, the nominee, is somewhere to the right even of Justice Clarence Thomas. This case is not an outlier. In fact, an analysis of his disability decisions shows that Judge Gorsuch has ruled against disabled students in 8 out of 10 IDEA cases.

There was also a consistent pattern of Judge Gorsuch's record on discrimination and retaliation involving employers. Bloomberg BNA analyzed this record and found that he ruled for employers 8 out of 12 times.

For example, he ruled against a sex discrimination claim brought by a UPS saleswoman; a disability discrimination claim that was brought by a college professor; an age discrimination claim that was brought by two maintenance workers; a race discrimination claim that was brought by an African-American grocery store employee who was called a ``monkey'' by his supervisor; a gender and disability discrimination claim that was brought by a female county accountant with multiple sclerosis; and a discrimination claim that was brought by a transgender woman who sought to use the restroom of her gender identity.

The case of Grace Hwang was particularly troubling to me. Ms. Hwang had been a college professor for 15 years. Then she was diagnosed with cancer. She needed a bone marrow transplant, so they gave her 6 months of sick leave. As it was about to expire, they told her to return to the classroom. Just at this same time, a flu epidemic was sweeping across the campus. Ms. Hwang asked to extend her leave and work from home so she wouldn't get infected. She felt especially vulnerable, having just had a bone marrow transplant.

The university denied her request and terminated her employment because she asked to be protected from this flu epidemic. Judge Gorsuch authored an opinion upholding the dismissal of Ms. Hwang's disability discrimination complaint.

Judge Gorsuch would not let a jury consider the reasonableness of her request. Instead, he wrote that six months' leave was ``more than sufficient'' and wrote that the purpose of disability law is ``not to turn employers into safety net providers for those who cannot work.''

Grace Hwang's children said that Judge Gorsuch's opinion ``removed the human element from the equation. It did not bring justice.''

Also, during the hearing, Judge Gorsuch refused to distance himself from the extreme and bigoted views of one of his college professors and his dissertation supervisor, Professor John Finnis, a man whom he has publicly praised.

Overall, Judge Gorsuch's record raised serious concerns about what his confirmation would mean for the vulnerable and the victimized.

We also came to learn that Judge Gorsuch was an aggressive defender of Executive power when he worked at the Justice Department during the Bush administration. In June 2004, after the terrible Abu Ghraib torture scandal, I offered the first legislation to ban cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees. This legislation ultimately became the McCain torture amendment, which, despite a veto threat by President Bush, passed this Senate in 2005 by an overwhelming 90-to-9 vote.

But Judge Gorsuch advocated that the President should issue a statement claiming that the McCain amendment was ``essentially codifying'' torture techniques like waterboarding. This is despite overwhelming evidence from Senator McCain and others in Congress that this amendment was intended to do the exact opposite by outlawing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Judge Gorsuch testified that he was simply an attorney working for a client, but Gorsuch's email correspondence revealed that he was viewed as a ``true loyalist'' to the Republican administration. And this is a client that the judge actively lobbied to serve, even though their troubled record on torture was already a matter of public record.

These documents from Gorsuch's tenure at the Department of Justice, which were not available during his earlier confirmation hearing for the Tenth Circuit, provide a revealing look at his beliefs on Executive power. They raise deeply troubling questions about what Judge Gorsuch would do if he is called upon to stand up to this President or any President who claims the power to ignore laws that protect fundamental human rights.

For the majority of questions from Democratic Senators at his hearing, Judge Gorsuch failed to meaningfully respond. He had a standard set of evasions and nonanswers that he used whenever he was asked about fundamental legal principles and landmark cases. It didn't take long before this Senator, and many others, could finish his sentences before he started.

In ducking these critical questions, Judge Gorsuch ended up saying nothing to assuage my concerns about Reince Priebus's pronouncement that Judge Gorsuch ``has the vision of Donald Trump.''

The Supreme Court must serve as an independent check on President Trump, not a rubberstamp. But Judge Gorsuch wouldn't even comment on the original meaning of the Constitution's emoluments clause, apparently for fear of possibly implicating the President who nominated him.

Judge Gorsuch might not be the first nominee to avoid answering questions about his views, but he went further than others. As a result, members of the committee can look only to his judicial record and his work for the Justice Department to decide their vote for this lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.

His record on the bench and his record at the Justice Department make it clear that Judge Gorsuch is not the right person to serve in the highest Court in the land. We all want judges to follow the law and apply the facts fairly, but it is naive to believe that this is some kind of robotic exercise. Every judge brings some values to the court. In close cases, those values can tip the meaning of the law or even the facts before the court. One key purpose of these hearings is to provide reassurance that the nominee's values are in

the American mainstream. I did not find this assurance in Judge Gorsuch's testimony last week, and I certainly didn't find it in his record. He received a fair hearing, but he did not earn my vote.

Because Republicans control the Senate, we can expect Judge Gorsuch to be reported out of the Judiciary Committee next week and then to receive a vote on the Senate floor. But no one should be surprised that Judge Gorsuch will need to meet the threshold of 60 Senate votes in order to be confirmed.

Majority Leader McConnell has made clear time and again that 60 votes is the standard for matters of controversy in this Senate. I will cite a few of the leader's more memorable quotes.

On December 2, 2007, Senator McConnell said: ``I think we can stipulate once again for the umpteenth time that matters that have any level of controversy about it in the Senate will require 60 votes.''

On October 28, 2009, Senator McConnell said: ``Well, it's fairly routine around the Senate that controversial matters require 60 votes.''

Then again, on July 17, 2007, Senator McConnell said: ``Sixty votes in the Senate? As common as gambling in Casablanca.''

Sixty votes is a threshold that Supreme Court nominees have met for the past quarter century. If a Supreme Court nominee cannot garner 60 votes in the Senate, then the President should put forward a new nominee.

We are at a unique moment in history. The President has already fired an Attorney General and had his unconstitutional Executive actions blocked by many Federal courts. The President, in the first few weeks, has also launched unprecedented attacks on the integrity of the Federal judiciary. And now the Federal Bureau of Investigation has confirmed it is investigating Russian involvement in his election.

A new bombshell is revealed almost every day.

In this context, the Senate cannot simply rubberstamp a lifetime Supreme Court appointment for the President. Neil Gorsuch is the man Donald Trump urgently wants on the Supreme Court. That should give many Americans pause. It certainly gives pause to me.

I cannot support the nomination of Neil Gorsuch. I will vote no when his nomination comes before the Judiciary Committee next week, I will vote no on cloture, and I will oppose his nomination on the Senate floor.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate, notwithstanding the previous order, move to the rollcall vote now.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, last Thursday was a sunny, cold day in Chicago, but I looked forward to it because there was an event that I wouldn't miss. We have a hospital there known as the Rehab Institute of Chicago. It is one of my favorites, and we have some great hospitals. The Rehab Institute of Chicago literally focuses on people who have had serious accidents, strokes, injuries and who are trying to get rehabilitated so they can function and walk.

I really got to know this hospital years ago when I had a town meeting in Chicago and talked about our returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of them were coming home with serious injuries from roadside bombs and the types of injuries that can change your life.

A man came up to me, and his name was Ed Edmundson. He was from North Carolina. I was kind of surprised that he was at a Chicago town meeting. He explained to me that he heard about the town meeting because he had a son named Eric who was a disabled veteran and was at the Rehab Institute of Chicago. It turns out that Eric was seriously wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq, and during the course of the surgery afterward, there was an accident. The net result of it was that he had very limited mobility and he could no longer speak.

Eric, if I remember, was about 23 years old. He was married and the father of a little girl. Well, the VA did the best for him, and they finally came to his mom and dad and said: We can't do anything more. We need you to pick out a motorized wheelchair for Eric because he needs to be in a nursing home. His father said: He is 23 years old. He is not going to a nursing home. We are not quitting. His dad then set out to find the best hospital in the United States and came to the conclusion that the Rehab Institute of Chicago was the place.

So he came to invite me to come up and meet Eric at the hospital, which I did a couple of days later. Eric was there with his mom and dad, and he started the rehab. I went back to see him a week or so later to see how he was doing. His mom said, as I came into the room: Eric has a gift for you. I thought: A gift for me? The gift was that Eric, with a little help, was able to stand on his own feet. It was a breakthrough. Some people had said it would never happen again.

His dad said to me that Eric planned on Memorial Day to put on his full dress uniform from the Army and walk out of the front door of that hospital with a little help and show folks that they shouldn't have given up on him. They asked me if I could be there. I said: I will move Heaven and Earth; I will be there. I wasn't the only one. There were a lot of people there--the mayor, elected officials, and every TV camera in Chicago--as Eric Edmundson walked out of the front door of the Rehab Institute in Chicago.

You never forget those moments, do you? Here is a young man who risked his life for America, came back gravely injured, and through his father and mother's determination--and his own strength--he found the best place for treatment. This rehab institute does research to find ways that give people who have spinal injuries and other injuries another chance.

Well, last Thursday they opened up the new Rehab Institute of Chicago, and it is renamed. It is the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. It is not a hospital. They call it an AbilityLab, and the reason is that they try to integrate research with actual doctors, clinicians, and patients all in the same place--not separate universities and hospitals and so forth. It is a bold idea. It is a new concept, but if anybody can pull it off, it is Dr. Joanne Smith, who heads up now the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.

Do you know what I learned as I got out of the car to give the speech and to cut the ribbon at this new research facility? I learned that the President of the United States, Donald Trump, had just announced his new budget. Do you know what was included in his new budget? A new spending line for the National Institutes of Health. That agency is the premier medical research agency in the world, and we are lucky to have it right here in the United States. We are lucky that Congress has given more money to NIH for biomedical research last year. Senator Blunt, a Republican of Missouri, who heads up the subcommittee with Senator Murray of Washington, planned on giving more this year, and we are still trying.

Do you know what President Trump suggested for next year's budget for the National Institutes of Health? He suggested cutting their appropriation by $5.8 billion. It is a $32 billion appropriation. Cutting it by $5.8 billion will bring the level of biomedical research in the United States of America down to the lowest point it has been in 16 years. That is President Trump's idea of a priority--the most dramatic cut in biomedical research in the last 16 years.

I announced it when I did the ribbon-cutting speech. First, I thanked all the folks at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, Dr. Smith, and Shirley and Pat Ryan. I told them if there is ever a time both political parties ought to come together and tell this President that you are just flat-out wrong, this is it. This is it because the medical research that is taking place in the National Institutes of Health is not just for those who are sick today but for those who may be diagnosed later today or tomorrow.

You know what the most frequently asked questions will be when you get that heartbreaking diagnosis? Doctor, is there anything you can do for me? Is there a medicine? Is there a procedure? Basically, is there any hope? If the NIH, or the National Institutes of Health, isn't properly funded and isn't doing its job, that answer is not always going to be a good one.

Young medical researchers don't get rich, but they love what they do. To keep them on the job doing what they should do with all of their talent and

all of their skill and all of their education, we have to promise them that we are going to continue to fund medical research in a serious way, without the peaks and valleys.

President Donald Trump does not understand that. Mick Mulvaney, head of the Office of Management and Budget, who came up with this terrible budget, doesn't understand that. To them, they are just numbers on a page. We will just cut biomedical research to the lowest level in 16 years.

A few minutes ago I had a visit from some folks from Chicago, IL. They were with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. They come to see me each year. You will see them around the halls wearing their orange ties and orange scarves. They came to talk about multiple sclerosis, which for many of my close friends is a disabling disease they fight every day. It is a disease of the central nervous system. It interrupts the flow of information within the brain and between the brain and the body. Symptoms range from numbness to tingling, to blindness and paralysis. The progress, severity, and specific symptoms of MS of any one person can't be predicted.

The good news is that we are engaged in research that can make a difference, research that gives us hope. They talked to me about Donald Trump's cuts to the National Institutes of Health. I told them I was going to do everything in my power to restore that money so that the research continues.

Incidentally, there is another issue. It isn't just fighting the disease and doing the research. It is what is happening to the cost of the drugs that these people need to maintain their lives and that give them hope. In 2004 the average wholesale price of available MS disease- modifying therapies was $16,000. By 2013, the average price had gone up to $61,000. In 2017, the average price is up to $83,600. All of the top 10 specialty medication classes, which include MS, increased in spending, and all had increases in the price of medication. Some of these drugs have been on the market for years, and now the pharmaceutical industry is driving the costs up across the board.

When we talk about healthcare in America, it is interesting how little time we spend talking about the cost of pharmaceuticals. But how wrong we are. When the head of Blue Cross in Chicago came to see me, she said: Senator, I will bet you didn't know last year Blue Cross Blue Shield spent more money in their hospitalization plans for pharmaceuticals and medications than they spent for inpatient hospital care for those who were covered--more money on drugs than inpatient hospital care.

So what did the Affordable Care Act, which is being debated, do about the price of pharmaceuticals? Almost nothing. What does the new Republican replacement plan do about the cost of pharmaceuticals? Almost nothing. Why? Why is there this hands-off attitude when it comes to an integral part of the cost of healthcare and an integral factor in the dramatic increases in the cost of healthcare? Because pharma has friends in high places.

Watch your television sets. There are two things to watch for, if you still watch television. The first thing is to watch for all the drugs that are advertised on television. Do you know how many countries in the world allow drugs to be advertised on television? Two. And one of them is the United States.

You see all these drugs being advertised that are going to allow you to be liberated, freed, and cured, and this and that and the other thing. Then, they run through all the disclaimers. This is the one I like the best: Be sure and tell your doctor if you have had a liver transplant: Oh, Doc, did I fail to mention I had a liver transplant?

That is the kind of thing they put on television. Why does a pharmaceutical company spend all that money advertising on television? They make money off of it.

Here is how. Americans walk into their doctor's office and say: I just saw this ad for this drug, and I think it is exactly what I need. Too many doctors, instead of taking 10 minutes to explain why it isn't the drug you need, take 1 minute to write out the script. So expensive drugs make it on the market and justify the advertising on television. That is one of the grim realities of what we are facing.

When it comes to the drugs and their pricing, we know what is happening. They are running up the costs of drugs on individuals, and they can't afford it any more. I just met with some of these MS patients, and one of them told me she had gone now for weeks without medication because, she said: Senator, it is $6,000 I just don't have.

Well, we can do better than that. We should do better than that as a nation. We ought to make certain that we don't get swept away with the pharmaceutical companies and their advertising. Those are the other things you are going to see on television now. They are really beautifully done ads. They are talking about all of us wanting to survive and how the pharmaceutical industries are finding, through their research, good drugs to help us survive. I don't quarrel with that premise. That is right, but it turns out many of them are spending more money on advertising than they are on research. So this is big business. It is big profits. They are trying to protect them. It is driving up the cost of healthcare. People like my friends with multiple sclerosis are wondering how this will end and whether they will be able to pay for the treatment they desperately need.

If this means anything to those who are listening to this debate, if it means something to you or your family, you need to speak up-- Democrat, Republican, Independent, Trump voter or not--you need to let this administration and this Congress know that medical research is a priority to you. If it is not, hold on tight because Donald Trump's budget is about to rip the heart out of the National Institutes of Health.

Whatever his ambition, whatever his goals, whatever his tweets, I could care less. When it comes to medical research, he is in for a fight.

TrumpCare

Mr. President, the Republicans promised, if they took a majority, the first thing they would do is get rid of ObamaCare. He is gone. It has to be gone too. Fifty-seven times--maybe more--in the House of Representatives, they voted to abolish ObamaCare. It didn't mean anything. He was still President then. He was going to veto whatever they passed, but they did it over and over and over. It was an article of faith, and they beat their chests and went across America saying: Get rid of ObamaCare.

Then the dog caught the bus. They got the majority in the House and the Senate, and all of those threats and promises about ObamaCare became reality. Then something else happened. People started saying to the Republican majority: And then what? What are you going to replace it with?

Well, it turns out for 6 years they have been writing speeches about abolishing ObamaCare instead of for 6 years writing plans and bills to replace it. So they slapped together a replacement plan, sent it over-- I say that because it only took them a couple of weeks. They sent it over to the Congressional Budget Office, which is kind of like the umpire here, the referee, to take a look at it.

The Congressional Budget Office gave a report on the Republican replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act. This is what it said: Under TrumpCare--ObamaCare to TrumpCare--under TrumpCare, 24 million Americans will lose their health insurance; 14 million in the first year--24 million Americans out of a nation of what, 350 million, 360 million. That is a pretty large group.

We know what happens when people lose their health insurance. They still get sick. When they get sick, they go to the emergency room when it is too bad, and the emergency room takes care of them. Then the hospital, because the person does not have health insurance, chalks up the cost of that health to charity care and passes it along to everyone else with health insurance.

Under TrumpCare, seniors, rural communities, and lower and middle- income families will see their premiums and out-of-pocket costs soar, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Under TrumpCare, Medicare's solvency will shrink by 4 years. Medicare, you remember, is the program primarily for seniors started back in the 1960s to make sure that when you got to a point in life, age 65, you may not be working, no longer have insurance through your

employer, the government Medicare plan would cover you.

Has it worked? Ask 60 million Americans who count on it. Yes. What about the results? Since the 1960s, people are living longer. We know Medicare works, but the cost of healthcare has been going up, and we worried about its long-term solvency. It turns out the Affordable Care Act, which we passed, brought some savings to healthcare and added 10 years of solvency to Medicare.

Now, the Republicans want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and it will reduce the solvency of Medicare by 4 years--4 years sooner Medicare will go insolvent. The fiscally conservative Republican Party has come up with an answer, which leads to sooner insolvency for Medicare. Under TrumpCare, $880 billion in Federal Medicaid funding to States will be eliminated. What does it mean? Well, let me tell you the story of Judy.

Judy works at a motel in Southern Illinois. She is in her sixties. She is a hard-working lady. There is not a lazy bone in her body. She works in the hospitality room where you get the free breakfast at the motel. She is the one who smiles and cleans off the table and makes sure you are happy. I got to know her. Judy asked me about all of this stuff going on with affordable care. I asked her: Would you mind working with my office? Let's see what we can do for you.

It turns out that Judy, as hard as she works, makes a very low income. She qualified for Medicaid, which meant health insurance that did not cost her anything because her income was so low. She couldn't believe it. For the first time in her life--for the first time in her life she had health insurance--Medicaid--providing her health insurance. It was a good thing too because just shortly afterward she was diagnosed with diabetes. Now comes the proposal from the Republicans to remove so many people across America from Medicaid. Where does that leave Judy? Back where she started, working hard, with diabetes, a low income, and no health insurance. Terrible things can happen to you if you have diabetes and don't have some medical home or a doctor you can count on.

That is the reality of what TrumpCare will mean to Judy in Southern Illinois. One trillion dollars will be cut from programs that serve low- and middle-class families so the Republican approach can cut taxes for the wealthiest people in America. I am not making that up.

They are raising the premiums for working families to pay. They are cutting off seniors and others from Medicaid coverage so they can give tax breaks to the wealthiest superrich in America. It is going to cost us healthcare jobs across America. Downstate Illinois, those are good- paying jobs. The Illinois Hospital Association says we are going to lose them.

This Republican bill, TrumpCare, is bad for seniors, bad for middle- class families, bad for people with disabilities. It is not very good for kids. Half of the kids in America are born under and taken care of by Medicaid. It is bad for the States, bad for just about everyone who is not healthy or wealthy. Yet the House Republican leadership is intent on moving forward with TrumpCare this week.

The President came to the House Republicans yesterday and said: If you don't support me on this vote, I am coming after your districts to defeat you.

This approach is going to increase premiums for seniors in one of the most fundamental ways. We said in our bill that we voted for that you could not have a disparity in premiums more than 3 to 1. So the premiums charged to a 20-year-old and the premiums charged to a 60- year-old could be no different than a 3-to-1 margin. The Republicans changed that and made it 5 to 1.

That is why the American Association of Retired Persons opposes TrumpCare and why seniors across the country are waking up to the reality that they are in for a jolt when it comes to the premiums they have to pay.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, has said: ``This is not a bill I could support in its current form . . . it really misses the mark.'' As Senator Collins noted, this bill does not come close to achieving the goal of allowing low-income seniors to purchase health insurance.

Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, said:

The CBO score was, shall we say, an eye-popper. . . . Can't

sugarcoat it. . . . Doesn't look good.

Senator and Dr. Cassidy, Republican from Louisiana, said that. He went on to say:

That's not what President Trump promised. . . . That's not

what the Republicans ran on.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said:

I'm afraid that if [House Republicans] vote for this bill,

they're going to put the House majority at risk next year. .

. . Just from a practical standpoint, I don't think this bill

is going to reduce premiums for working Americans. . . . I

think it's going to cost coverage for many Americans.

Why do we want to rush this process? It took us more than 2 years to write a bill, and it is still a bill that needs more work. I voted for it. To think that they can replace it in a matter of weeks, with this slap-dash approach, is not fair to America. It is not fair to people who count on health insurance for peace of mind and coverage when they desperately need it.

I see my friend on the floor. I am going to close. I released a report today, and it is one I am going to share across the board in Illinois before our delegation votes this week. This bill in Illinois means that 311,000 people I represent would lose their private health insurance. By 2020, the average enrollee in Illinois would see their health insurance costs increase by over $3,000--by 2026, almost $5,000.

The impact is particularly severe for Illinoisans ages 55 to 64. They would see their costs of premiums increase by over 50 percent. Illinois hospitals, they are against it too. They know that a lot of downstate hospitals and inner-city hospitals can't survive this Republican replacement plan.

I will close with a letter from Christine McTaggart of Watseka, IL. Here is what she said to me: ``I wake up every day since the election fearing that a complete repeal will happen and for me that translates into a death sentence.''

Christine was originally diagnosed with stage IIIb inflammatory breast cancer in September of 2012. Given this type of aggressive cancer, her prognosis was poor. She went through 16 cycles--16--of chemotherapy, a bilateral mastectomy, 33 radiation treatments, failed reconstruction and chronic tissue issues, and thyroid cancer as well.

After all of that, in 2014, she learned her breast cancer was back. This time in her bones, stage IV. In her letter to me, Christine McTaggart of Watseka wrote:

When the Affordable Care Act became law, I had no idea my

life would come to depend on policies such as pre-existing

conditions not excluding you from coverage . . . and lifetime

maximums being eliminated. If ACA were repealed, I would no

longer have coverage as my chronic ongoing treatment has far

exceeded the old lifetime maximums. . . . I would have to

choose between bankruptcy for treatments I cannot afford and

rolling the dice, waiting for death.

She ends with this:

I thank you for your tireless advocacy on this issue. . . .

My life literally depends on it.

What we need to do is take repeal off the table, and this Senator will pull a chair up to the table. Let's make the Affordable Care Act work. Let's do it in a bipartisan way. Let's not look for a slam dunk for either political party. Let's try to do the right thing for America. We are not going to make the extremes in either political party happy, but if millions of Americans have health insurance and can find a way to pay for it, then we will do our job.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, last week congressional Republicans finally unveiled their proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act is a law passed by Congress a little over 6 years ago with the express goal of expanding the number of Americans with the protection of health insurance. It has been successful. We have the lowest percentage of uninsured Americans in history. What it means is that through offering Medicaid to those in low-income categories, offering help to pay premiums for those in middle-income categories, and offering choices in the insurance exchange, we have really changed health insurance in America in 6 years.

Now Americans realize that when they take a look at their actual health insurance policy, it is worth something. It may be hard to remember--but we should--that only 6 years ago, if you happened to have a child with a preexisting condition and you were not lucky enough to have your insurance through your employer and you went out on the open market, you were in for a rough ride. Many health insurance companies would not insure a family with a child who had a history of diabetes or surviving cancer. We changed that. We said that no health insurance company in America can discriminate against a person or family because of a preexisting medical condition. Is there one of us who lives in a family which doesn't have a relative, a close relative, with a preexisting condition? That was an important reform that was part of the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare.

We also came to realize they were selling health insurance to people with some fine print that made a difference--lifetime limits on coverage. Well, I have $1 million coverage. That sounds great, until the next diagnosis or the next accident. Now, $1 million doesn't seem like such a large amount of money, and God forbid you end up with a chronic illness.

One of my constituents came by to visit me 2 weeks ago. She was a guest of one of the Members of Congress during the President's speech to the joint session. She was diagnosed a few years ago with an unusual disease, one that is life-threatening at any given moment. She told me that in the past 3 years, she has spent more than $700,000 on medication--$700,000--and that will be a burden she faces for the rest of her life.

If her health insurance had a limit on how much it paid, there would reach a point where she couldn't buy the medicine she needs to save her life. We did away with that, and we said: You can't discriminate against people by putting these limits. We also said: When it comes to charging premiums, you can't discriminate against a person applying for health insurance solely because they happen to be a woman.

There has been a lot of controversy over that in the House in their debate over the last week or so, but what we said basically is that when it comes to insurance risk, put everyone in together, make this a bigger pool of people seeking health insurance so insurance can be profitable and affordable at the same time.

We also said: When it comes to the premiums charged on health insurance--and I call attention to all of us over the age of 50--we said you cannot discriminate in premiums you charge in health insurance. There can't be a disparity of more than 3 to 1 for the most expensive health insurance policy to the least expensive. We also said, in addition to that, if you have a child, son or daughter, graduating college and looking for a job but has no healthcare benefits, keep them on your family plan until they reach the age of 26. I have been through that. Most families have.

I had a recent college graduate, no longer with student health insurance, and I said: Jennifer, do you have health insurance?

Dad, I feel just great.

No father wants to hear that answer. So we changed the law.

When it came to Medicare, under the Affordable Care Act, we said: We are going to eliminate the gap in coverage for prescription drugs for seniors. They used to call it the doughnut hole. It made no sense. It was something only Congress could dream up. We closed it and said: We are going to give seamless coverage to Medicare prescription drugs. That was part of the Affordable Care Act.

We put in incentives for people providing medical care to find ways to give us good quality care and reduce the cost. What was the net result? The slowest growth in hospitalization premiums for employer- based healthcare that we have seen in modern times.

When they put this new model for healthcare against the Medicare Program--that is a program for seniors and disabled--guess what. It bought 10 years of solvency for Medicare. That

meant a program that is critically important for 60 million Americans had 10 more years of solvency.

Did this program have problems? Of course it did. When you take on the healthcare system of America, you are not going to get it completely right the first time. I believed--and many others did--that as important and valuable as that vote was, we had to be prepared to return to this program to make sure we addressed problems as they would arise.

For example, there is nothing in the Affordable Care Act of substance when it comes to controlling the price of pharmaceuticals--prescription drugs.

Well, I can tell you what has happened. Blue Cross Blue Shield in Chicago came to see me, and the CEO said: Blue Cross Blue Shield is now paying more for prescription drugs than we are paying for inpatient hospital care. The cost of drugs has gone through the roof. The net result of that, of course, is the cost of healthcare goes up too. The Affordable Care Act should have addressed that but did not.

We also had to find a way to make sure there was health insurance available all around the United States. Some companies jumped in; some jumped out. Many of us believe we should have a single-payer plan available in every part of America so you could choose for your family a Medicare-type plan if you wish. Otherwise, you would go to a private health insurance company, if you wish. It is your choice.

The Republicans opposed the Affordable Care Act. In the House, they voted against it 57, 58 times--I lose count. Then came the day when they had the majority in the Senate, in the House, and in the White House--the answer to their prayers. Now, once and for all, they can get rid of the Affordable Care Act. They have the votes, but then there was a problem.

People across America started asking: If you repeal it, what will happen next? Will I still be able to get health insurance? Will I be protected if I have a preexisting condition? Will there be limits on what the policy covers?

Well, they hadn't quite thought that far ahead to look for the substitute, to look for the replacement. So they went to work in a matter of 5 or 6 weeks and created what is now being considered by the House of Representatives--the Republican replacement plan.

The Congressional Budget Office is a nonpartisan office that takes a look at our bills and legislation and puts a score on them. How much is it going to cost? What is it going to do?

We waited for Congressional Budget Office scores over and over again when we wrote the Affordable Care Act. They would come in and say: Nope, you have to go back to the drawing board. You have to change this and change that.

Well, just this week, they came out with the score on the Republican replacement plan, the one to replace the Affordable Care Act. They took a look at it, and here is what they told us.

To start off with, the Republican replacement plan throws people off health insurance coverage. How many? Remember when President Trump said the GOP healthcare bill would have ``insurance for everybody''? Under TrumpCare, the new Republican plan, TrumpCare, 14 million people would lose their health coverage next year. By 2026, 24 million people will have lost their healthcare coverage.

Is this what we were looking for in the replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act, to say to 24 million Americans, you will no longer have health insurance coverage? Think about the outcome of that. Think about someone with a chronically ill child or someone who faces a chronic illness themself with no health insurance.

Think about a working person who has no health insurance where they work. At least they had coverage through Medicaid and perhaps through the insurance exchange with a subsidy. Now they are losing it.

Think about those same people without health insurance. They will still get sick and will still go to the hospital but will be unable to pay. Incidentally, their bills they can't pay, we pay. Those bills are passed on to everyone else.

So the first plank of the Republican TrumpCare, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is to eliminate health insurance for 24 million Americans. In addition, the Republican TrumpCare plan significantly raises premium costs on seniors.

According to the official Congressional Budget Office estimate, the bill will ``substantially raise premiums for older people.'' How does that happen? Well, in addition to cutting back on the financial assistance for seniors to buy health insurance, TrumpCare would allow insurance companies to charge older people significantly more than the Affordable Care Act. Remember the limit, the 3-to-1 limit on premiums that we built into the Affordable Care Act? TrumpCare says: No, make that 5 to 1. So it means, if you are over the age of 50, buying health insurance, your premiums can go up dramatically, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

There is another thing too. As we take more and more people off of health insurance coverage, it really, in a way, dampens the incentive for affordable healthcare so the costs are not contained as they are today, and the solvency of Medicare--which we said was 10 years more, remember that--they reduce it by 4 years.

What the Republican TrumpCare plan has done is it threatens the solvency of Medicare. Is that what we were looking for on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act? I don't think so.

TrumpCare also raises costs for lower and middle-income families. By repealing the cost-sharing subsidies and lowering the bar on health plans, the Congressional Budget Office says that lower and middle-class families shopping in the individual market should expect to see--and I quote from the report--``substantially increasing out-of-pocket costs.''

The bill also defunds Planned Parenthood, which was to be expected. We expected it in many bills. According to the Congressional Budget Office, defunding of Planned Parenthood would ``affect services that help women avert pregnancies . . . most likely residing in areas without other health care clinics or medical practitioners who serve low-income populations.'' The Congressional Budget Office projects that 15 percent of those people--again, these are lower income women in medically underserved areas of America--would lose access to care.

Also, TrumpCare, at the same time it does this--eliminates health insurance for 24 million, raises the premium costs, and defunds Planned Parenthood. For good measure, TrumpCare also provides tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America. Is that what we were looking for? Was that part of the bargain? Those making over $1 million a year in income will get a $50,000 tax cut from the TrumpCare bill. The wealthiest one- tenth of 1 percent get a tax cut of nearly $200,000.

Finally, while cutting taxes for the very rich, TrumpCare also slashes $880 billion in Medicaid spending over the next 10 years. Medicaid is a vital healthcare program. Most people think about Medicaid--oh, that is health insurance for the poor. It is. But who are the poor? Overwhelmingly in numbers, they are children and their moms who are in low-income groups. That is the biggest number, but the biggest expense for Medicaid isn't kids and their moms. It is grandma and grandpa. It is our families and parents who are in an assisted care home who have Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to get by.

These cuts by the Republicans and TrumpCare to Medicaid will be felt by families across the board. In addition, it means that those who represent States like mine and the Presiding Officer's, with rural populations that have small hospitals that depend on patients paying something when they come through the door--many of them are paying through Medicaid, and if Medicaid is reduced, the payments to the hospitals are reduced.

That is why the Illinois Hospital Association warns us against TrumpCare. The Illinois Hospital Association says it will threaten the hospitals of my State. They will not be receiving the Medicaid reimbursement. They believe that up to 90,000 jobs at these hospitals will be lost in Illinois. I will tell you, as a downstater, those are some of the best paying jobs in the community. Many of my small towns trying to keep businesses or attract businesses brag up their hospital, as they should, and now TrumpCare threatens the future of these hospitals.

Medicaid is a vital healthcare program for 65 million Americans-- seniors, persons with disabilities, children, and low-income families nationwide, 3 million of them in my State. TrumpCare would devastate the program. By 2026, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 14 million fewer people would have Medicaid.

The Affordable Care Act took a lot of good steps toward improving healthcare for seniors. Before the Affordable Care Act, the number of uninsured adults ages 50 to 64 rose substantially--growing from 3.7 million in 2000 to 8.9 million in 2010. Insurance companies were rejecting more than one in five applications from individuals between the ages of 50 and 64.

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the rate of uninsured adults ages 50 to 64 dropped 47.4 percent, from 11.6 percent to 6.1 percent. The largest reduction in the uninsured rate occurred in the States that chose to expand Medicaid.

The Affordable Care Act also prohibited insurers from denying coverage, as I said earlier, to people with preexisting conditions. It limited how much insurers can charge older enrollees, closed the doughnut hole, and made important preventive services available for free, such as colonoscopies and annual checkups.

Let's look at what the TrumpCare program--the Republican program-- does to seniors. It allows insurers to charge older people significantly more than younger people, it reduces tax credits to seniors who pay their premiums, and it would devastate the Medicaid Program, which helps to pay for two out of every three seniors in nursing home care.

There is another thing I want to make a note of. Many years ago in the Senate, back at that corner desk, sat a Senator from Minnesota named Paul Wellstone, a Democrat. Over here on the aisle sat Pete Domenici of New Mexico, a Republican. For years they argued that we should include in every health insurance plan in America coverage for mental health, and the insurance companies fought them. Because many mental health conditions are chronic and long-term and may, in some cases, be expensive, they didn't want them. But Wellstone and Domenici had family members who struggled with mental illness, and they said we need to include this in every health insurance plan. Thank goodness they finally prevailed. Every health insurance plan in this country has to treat physical health issues and mental health issues the same, thanks to Wellstone and thanks to Domenici.

In addition they added something that many of us overlooked: It said mental health and substance abuse treatment. What does that mean? It means that if some member of your family is addicted, your health insurance plan can help pay for the help they need to get rid of their addiction. For a lot of people it was the only place for them to turn, and it worked, and thank goodness it did, because we are at that moment in American history where because of opioids, heroin, and fentanyl, we have dramatic increases in addiction.

Now what is going to happen under the TrumpCare approach when it comes to mental illness and substance abuse treatment? Are we going to require--mandate--every health insurance plan to include mental health treatment as well as substance abuse? Over and over we hear from our Republican friends: We want competition. We want choice. We want to eliminate mandates.

They can take that approach, but we are going to lose coverage for 24 million Americans. If they take that approach, we are going to be offering health insurance plans that aren't there when families need them.

We had a roundtable discussion in Rockford, IL, last Friday. When I go to these communities, I bring in people who are administrators of the hospitals, the doctors, the nurses, the clinics, the substance abuse treatment centers. To a person, they oppose TrumpCare. Every single one of them said that it is the wrong thing to do at this moment in time. It will leave people more vulnerable. It will leave families with health insurance that is worthless when they need it. Those are the bad old days we finally escaped 6 years ago, and now Republicans want us to return to this competition-choice access to healthcare. I have access to a Rolls Royce dealership, too, but I am not going to be buying a Rolls Royce because I can't afford it. If you give a person access to health insurance that they can't afford, you are not giving them anything.

What we tried to do with the Affordable Care Act is to make sure we gave people not only access but protection with health insurance. From the beginning, the Republicans have said: Let's repeal the Affordable Care Act. Now they have found that replacing it is a lot harder than they ever expected.

I said from the beginning, as well, if the Republicans are willing to take repeal off the table, I am going to pull up a chair. If they want a bipartisan approach, an honest approach to making the Affordable Care Act better, let's sit down and talk. Sign me up. If the goal is to give more people good health insurance that they can afford to protect their families, if the goal is to find ways to give us better healthcare, quality results at a lower cost, I want to be a part of that conversation. But if the goal is to deny health insurance coverage to 24 million Americans, count me out. That to me is a step backward in time.

What comes next? If the Republicans do this to the Affordable Care Act, what is next--Medicare? Well, we happen to know the Secretary of Health and Human Services believes in privatizing Medicare. I don't. I think that is a step in the wrong direction, and it will reduce the protection of Medicare. But if they will do this to the Affordable Care Act, then can Medicare or Social Security be far behind?

It is important that we maintain our values when it comes to critical programs that America and its families count on.

I hope the House of Representatives defeats TrumpCare, puts it out of its misery, and then invites all of us to come together on a bipartisan basis to talk about what we really need for healthcare in this country.

I find it incredible that there is no major medical group in America today that supports TrumpCare--none, not one. All we have is some conservative think tanks that believe this is a wonderful model. But the people on the ground--the administrators in the hospitals, the doctors, the clinicians, the nurses, the people in the healthcare clinics--all tell us TrumpCare is a disaster. It is a step in the wrong direction. It is going to decrease coverage and increase costs. That is not something that America needs for its future.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about another rule the Republicans want to overturn instead of working with Democrats to create jobs. This rule outlines when State unemployment agencies can drug test applicants for unemployment benefits.

Today there are roughly 7.6 million Americans who are unemployed, and over 2 million of these unemployed Americans are collecting unemployment insurance. About 150,000 of these people live in Illinois.

Unemployment insurance benefits provide a lifeline to many workers and families who are struggling to make ends meet. If this resolution passes, my Republican colleagues will succeed in preventing hard- working Americans from receiving these benefits, and they will succeed in making it more difficult for unemployed Americans to find work.

This past August, the Department of Labor finalized a rule that explains when State unemployment agencies can subject unemployment benefit applicants to a drug test. The rule clarifies which occupations regularly conduct drug testing, as established by the Department of Labor, to help State programs that conduct drug testing.

This rule makes sure States have the guidance they need to implement drug testing requirements in a fair and legal

mariner, but if this partisan CRA is signed into law, it will undo a bipartisan compromise that was created to ensure equitable access to unemployment benefits.

Unemployed Americans have paid into the unemployment insurance program, and they are entitled to receive that insurance when they lose their job to circumstances beyond their control. By supporting blanket drug testing of unemployment insurance applicants, my Republican colleagues are targeting hard-working Americans who in many cases have fallen on hard times.

And let me be clear, this will make it more difficult for them to receive the benefits they have earned.

Millions of Americans around the country voted for leaders who would fight for the working class. Repealing this rule will be another broken promise to those families.

Drug testing is also expensive. In 2011, the Texas Legislative Budget Board estimated it would cost Texas $30 million over the course of just 1 year if they moved forward with a universal drug-testing policy for unemployment benefits.

When States have conducted drug testing of applicants for other government programs, like the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, very few claimants have tested positive for drug use.

My Republican colleagues say that this resolution will help save taxpayer money, but overturning the Department of Labor's rule will lead to millions of wasted taxpayer dollars on drug tests that come back negative.

This resolution isn't about saving money. It is about paving the way for lawmakers who want to drug test every American who has to file for unemployment insurance; yet these same lawmakers aren't calling for drug testing Americans that claim other Federal benefits, like tax credits or deductions on their tax returns.

I urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to remember: the Department of Labor's drug-testing rule is about real people who depend on unemployment insurance to live in America.

They need these benefits to put food on the table, to make a rent or mortgage payment, or to pay for gas to allow them to continue their job search.

When people become unemployed, it is often a result of company downsizing or outsourcing American jobs, not drug use. We should not and cannot unfairly stigmatize these workers and make it even more difficult for them to get back on their feet after becoming unemployed by undoing this regulation.

I urge my colleagues to join me in voting against this resolution.

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