Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I rise during Police Week to pay tribute to our police officers around the country--the men and women in blue who serve us every day in Ohio and in every State represented in this Chamber.

In Ohio, this is a particularly difficult week. Here we are during Police Week, and we are, once again, mourning the loss of a police officer. This happened just last Friday. Last Friday, a gunman took two people hostage in the woods behind a nursing home in Kirkersville, OH, which is a small town about 25 miles east of Columbus.

The first one to arrive on the scene was the police chief of this small town. His name was Steven DiSario. Chief Steven DiSario confronted the assailant, and he was ambushed by this assailant. He was shot. He was killed. This gunman then went inside the nursing facility, and he murdered two staff members--a registered nurse, Marlina Medrano, and a nurse's aide named Cindy Krantz. Then he took his own life.

By the way, Police Chief Steven DiSario was 36 years old and had just become the police chief in Kirkersville a month ago. The women who were slain were Marlina Medrano, who had a son, and Cindy Krantz, who had five kids, including a 10-year-old son. Those kids had to spend Mother's Day preparing for their moms' burials.

On Monday, I went to Kirkersville and saw the memorial there for the officer. I also had an opportunity to meet with some of the officers who were from neighboring communities. There was just one police officer in Kirkersville--just the chief. I was able to express to them the sympathy and the gratitude of the people throughout Ohio. I had brought a flag that had been flown over the U.S. Capitol in honor of Chief DiSario, and that flag will go to his family as a very small token of the appreciation and gratitude of all of us for their father's and husband's service.

Chief DiSario had six kids, and his widow, Aryn, is currently pregnant with their seventh child--a child who is never going to know his or her dad. What he or she will know is that he died a hero, that he died a hero in risking his life to protect innocent people.

That is what police officers do every single day. They keep us safe. They take dangerous criminals and weapons and drugs off our streets. They enforce the law. Even their very presence helps to deter crime and keep our communities safer, but they do it all at great risk--at great risk to themselves and at great sacrifice to their families.

A little more than a year ago, I did a ride-along in Columbus with Officer Greg Meyer. He is one of those brave Columbus police officers who goes out every day to help keep our communities safe, and we were focused on a couple of issues that night in Columbus.

One was the drug trade, particularly the opioid crisis we face in Ohio. He was able to show me where much of this activity occurs, and we were able to see with our eyes some of the people who were trafficking drugs, dispersing, and what goes on in our communities.

We were also talking about human trafficking and his work in that area. We were able to go to some particular places at which there had been trafficking in the past and where the police had broken up trafficking rings in which girls and women had been made to become dependent on heroin. Then the traffickers had them, often in a hotel for a week until they had moved on to another one and trafficked-- sold--human beings, usually online, usually through the iPhone. Again, this police officer was able to tell me about what he has done and what his force has done to help protect these girls and women and to help get them out of that situation.

This was just a few hours for me, and I always enjoy doing these ride-alongs, but this is his life and their lives every day. They are out there doing their best to try to protect us and to make our communities safer.

The day before this tragedy occurred in Kirkersville, we had had a lot of police officers here in town because, on Thursday and Friday and over the weekend, police officers had been coming in for Police Week and Police Memorial Day, which was on Monday, so I had a chance to meet with a bunch of these officers and thank them for their service.

We talked about the fact that the job is dangerous and increasingly dangerous. Unfortunately, the numbers show that. Little did we know that, the day after we had been talking, there would have again been this tragedy in Ohio. We talked about the fact that some of their families have had sleepless nights because they do not know whether their husbands or their wives or their sons or daughters are going to be coming home.

In our Nation's history, more than 21,000 police officers have died in the line of duty. Think about that--21,000. We have already had 42 this year, 2017. In 2016, we lost 143, which is about one officer every 3 days. Again, last year, five of those fallen officers were from Ohio: Aaron Christian, a patrolman with the Chesapeake Police Department; Thomas Cottrell, a patrolman

with the Danville Police Department; Sean Johnson, of the Hilliard, OH, Division of Police; Steven Smith, of the Columbus Division of Police; and Kenneth Velez, an Ohio State trooper.

I had the opportunity to meet with some of the families of these fallen officers to express our appreciation, to express our respect for them and the sacrifices that they bear. It takes courage to wear the badge, and those officers wear the badge day in and day out. They knew what they were getting into. Yet they wore that badge; they died wearing that badge.

Although these heroic men were taken from us, their examples can never be taken away and will not be. Ohioans are going to remember them as models of bravery and service, as examples of fellow citizens who, on behalf of all of us, were in the habit of walking into danger rather than running away from it.

We have an opportunity to do something that will make a difference for our police officers by supporting the Police Week resolution that the House and the Senate are working on. I urge all of my colleagues to support it, and I am sure they will. I think we need to show our men and women in blue, who are on the frontlines, that we do appreciate them.

There is also legislation that can be supported. Most recently, with the majority whip, I introduced legislation that is called the Back the Blue Act. It is very simple. It says, if you target law enforcement officers, you are going to have to pay a very high price. That is appropriate. We think the Back the Blue Act, which would increase penalties on those who would attempt to harm or kill a police officer, is going to make a difference because it will send a strong message and help deter some of these crimes. Ultimately, I think that it will make our heroes in blue safer and help save lives.

Again, I urge my colleagues to join me in the wake of this terrible tragedy we had in central Ohio. I know the people of Ohio are looking for Congress to stand tall and to stand with our police officers and to thank them for what they do to protect us every day.

Let's support this Police Week resolution. Let's support the Back the Blue Act. Let's do everything we can to ensure that our police officers know that we are with them--that we are at their side--as they do their job every day to protect us.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I rise today in strong support of Jeffrey Rosen to be the Deputy Secretary of Transportation. It is my understanding that later this evening we will have a vote on that nomination. It will be the first of a couple of votes.

I would just ask my colleagues on the Democratic side and on the Republican side to look carefully at his qualifications and to be in a position to support this good public servant to be the new deputy at Transportation.

I recall that this body overwhelmingly supported Elaine Chao to be the Secretary of Transportation. She is doing a terrific job, in my view. She needs help, and she needs a deputy in place. Jeff has gone through the proper process. We have had hearings, and he has been voted on in committee. It is time to get him there to help Secretary Chao to be able to have her team in place and accomplish the goals that so many of us share.

Jeffrey is a graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School. Here in DC, where there are lots of lawyers, he is one of the most respected ones. He has 30 years of experience handling very complicated, high-stakes cases. He has litigated in more than 20 States. He has been in just about every setting imaginable: jury trials, bench trials, arbitrations, appellate arguments--on every topic--contracts, antitrust, securities, business torts, enforcement actions, product liability, and class actions. You name it, and he has been involved.

He has a lot of experience. Maybe particularly relevant to this job at Transportation, in 2003 he was unanimously confirmed by this body to serve as the Chief Legal Officer at the Department of Transportation. There he supervised more than 400 lawyers at the Department of Transportation. As the top lawyer there, he wasn't afraid to roll up his sleeves and get involved in lots of issues, including policy issues. I think the kind of experience he gained there will make him very well qualified to serve now as Deputy Secretary of that same agency.

He did such a good job that in 2006 I reached out to him and asked him to join my team at the Office of Management and Budget. I wanted somebody who was a good lawyer but also someone who could manage well and give me good advice, and Jeffrey Rosen was that person. I recruited Jeff to serve as general counsel and senior policy advisor at OMB. In that role, he was always vigilant about the use of taxpayer dollars, a guy who understands those hard-earned dollars need to be stewarded properly. He was someone who focused on management in the Department. He understood the need for us to ensure that taxpayers are getting the best bang for the buck, and, finally, maybe most important, he gave me good advice. He was insightful but also honest. I think that kind of candid advice is exactly what every Department Secretary or leader would want, and that is what he will provide should he become Deputy Secretary.

Since that time, I have stayed up with Jeff. He has continued to give me good advice and counsel. He is a guy who is well regarded in the legal community here in town and someone who understands how the Department of Transportation works and what is needed to ensure that it will be successful.

One thing that Jeff and I have in common is we married way over our heads. Kathleen is an Ohioan. She has the Ohio commonsense that makes Jeff, in my view, an even better public servant. They have three amazing kids--Anne, Sally, and James--and for all of Jeff's personal and professional accomplishments, he would be the first to say that his greatest pride is in his family--and rightly so, by the way.

In my view, Jeff has the judgment, he certainly has the experience, he has the skills, and he has the right aptitude to be the Deputy Secretary of Transportation. He is needed now, and I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of the cloture motion today on his nomination and in favor of his nomination to ensure we can get him in place to help move the Department of Transportation forward.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise today to continue a discussion we have had on the floor over the last year or so on the issue of opioids--that would be addiction to heroin, prescription drugs, and now this new form of synthetic heroin coming into our communities called fentanyl or carfentanil.

Sadly, I must say that things are not getting better. In fact, in the States we represent, in our communities, we see more and more evidence of not just addiction but overdoses and deaths. Fentanyl, in particular, is more deadly than heroin--30 to 50 times more powerful-- and is resulting in not just more overdoses but more deaths per overdose. This has become a crisis to the point that it is the No. 1 cause of death in my home State of Ohio and across the country, surpassing car accidents.

This is the 35th time I have come to the floor to talk about this issue and what we ought to do. We have made progress. In the last year alone, we passed legislation, including the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, to help with prevention, treatment, and recovery, and to help our law enforcement and other first responders, with Narcan, be able to reduce the number of deaths--this miracle drug that reverses the overdoses--to be able to save lives.

We also passed the Cures legislation, which sent money straight back to the States that would help to provide the treatment that is so badly needed. Probably 8 out of 10 people who are addicted are not receiving treatment. Sadly, there is a revolving door where people are coming under the grip of this addiction, committing crimes, going to prison, getting out, getting into the addiction again, and going back into the criminal justice system once again.

This legislation we passed is now starting to be implemented. It takes a little while for things to get moving around here. I am happy to say that the States have now received some of this funding. Some of the programs--about half of those in the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act are now implemented. I urge the administration to implement the other half of the programs, and I have done that every time I have come to the floor over the last few months.

Unfortunately, I also have to come to the floor today to talk about something that is going to make it harder to address this issue should it become reality. As some of you may know, recently it was reported that there was a document from the White House Office of Management and Budget saying that the White House is considering cutting funding dramatically for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the ONDCP. This is the office that coordinates the drug issue for the White House, the administration. The proposal that was leaked to the media said that it would be a cut from $388 million a year to $24 million a year. That is a cut of 95 percent. What does that mean? It means the staff would be, obviously, reduced dramatically. They have 33 people who would lose their jobs, people who are out there every day on the frontlines, trying to use a relatively small number of people to expand this effort all over the country. It would eliminate a lot of grant programs, office administrators, including what is called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program, or HIDTA, and a program called the Drug-Free Communities Support Program.

I want to touch on those two programs quickly and make the point as to how important they are, hoping that the administration is hearing us and hoping my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will help us ensure that this proposal does not become reality, that we don't end up, at a time when we have an unprecedented drug crisis in this country--the worst drug epidemic we have had in our lifetime--pulling back on these important programs.

Why does this matter? Again, having a drug czar, which is what the Director of the Office of National Drug Policy is called, is very important to coordinate the efforts. In fact, it is cost-effective to have a drug czar rather than having different agencies and departments competing and sometimes in duplication with each other, to have one person in the White House in charge, talking about the importance of this.

President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan established the drug czar. The reason they did it was they wanted to be sure America and the White House were speaking with one voice on this issue. I have known every drug czar since then. I have known every one of them over the last--what would that be?--30 years. I think it is incredibly important to have this job filled with the right person to get out there and deliver this message that it is important that we work together on prevention and education to try to keep people out of drugs altogether, and should people become addicted, how do we maximize the chances of their success by getting them into treatment and recovery?

The program I mentioned a minute ago, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program, is one that pretty much every Senator knows about. Why? Because in pockets of every State, there are areas in which there is a particular problem with drugs. This program, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program, does something unique. It says: OK, we

are going to put Federal law enforcement together with State law enforcement and local law enforcement to intensely focus on this issue at the local level. As you know, that is necessary because so much of this is interstate, even international, and by having this intense focus, there has been enormous success in my State and States around the country.

Under the program, you have to have one full-time law enforcement officer at the Federal level, State level, and the local level. What I have found back home is that typically you have a sheriff or a police chief who runs this locally and has a lot of his officers involved but really is able to maximize what he or she can do because you have this involvement from the State highway patrol, you have this involvement from the FBI, you have this coordination.

The Ohio HIDTA alone has removed $90 million worth of illicit drugs from our streets. It has apprehended more than 4,000 fugitives involved in drug trafficking operations. Think about the difference that makes. It makes our communities safer; ultimately, of course, it is going to save a lot of lives.

So I think this is one that is really working. If you ask your law enforcement locally about it, they will tell you that if they don't have a HIDTA grant, they probably wish they did. It is very competitive; not everyone can get one. But if you can show that you can use the money effectively and if you have a really serious drug problem in your area, having that HIDTA program is important.

The second program I mentioned is called the Drug-Free Communities Support Program. What does this do? This supports community anti-drug coalitions all around the country. Often, people ask me: What is the solution to this problem? Why are we in the situation we are in? I turn to prevention and education because, if you think about it, once you get into that funnel of addiction, it is very costly and very difficult.

Wouldn't it be better if we had better programs out there? Frankly, we did back in the 1980s and even the 1990s--to tell young people and to tell others why it is such a mistake to get into this drug issue, why they must do everything they can to avoid, in the case of heroin and prescription drugs and other opioids, taking these painkillers, these prescription drugs that are addictive, to the point that you become addicted, which is so often where the heroin addiction and the overdoses start.

Four out of five heroin addicts in the country started with prescription drugs, they say. Getting that information out there, that awareness, is incredibly important. That is what this Drug-Free Communities Program is about.

I got involved in this program early on through a personal experience. I was a first-year Member of the House of Representatives 23 years ago. A woman whose son had died of an overdose came to see me. She came to see me because she wanted to talk about her experience and what were we going to do about it.

At the time, Bill Clinton was President. I went to an event where both President Clinton and I were given a gold ID bracelet by a young man. The young man's name was Jeffrey Gardner. I put Jeffrey Gardner's ID bracelet on, and then I prepared for my meeting with this mother, who was obviously very upset.

She was there with her younger son. She came to my office. I was prepared for her. My staff had done all the research, and we knew there was about $15 billion a year being spent on drug interdiction, interdicting drugs coming from other countries, incarcerations and prosecutions, and the eradication of drugs overseas in places like Colombia, where a lot of cocaine was being grown at that time. So I told her that. I said: Your tax dollars are being used well to fight this battle. This is what is happening with your dollars.

She looked at me and said: How does that help me? She said: I went to my church. I went to my school to get them to help, to mobilize people, to provide more prevention and education resources, to get the word out. They were in denial. They said: This does not happen here.

She said: I went to my neighbors and tried to get a community meeting together, and people did not show up.

She said: How does interdicting drugs help me? How does the work on eradication overseas help me?

I did more research and looked into it further and talked to people around the country who were experts on this and found out where there was this community-of-support network, bringing in all sectors of the community. It really made a difference to reduce drug abuse.

So we started this program. This program, the Drug-Free Communities Act, has to be made up of all sectors of the community. We are talking about the religious community, faith leaders--very important--but also teachers, police officers, parents, doctors, other community leaders who come together with this intense focus on education and prevention.

The program we put together has real accountability. You know, I am a Republican. I believe in accountability. I want to be sure tax dollars are being used wisely. To receive funding under this program, coalitions are required to be in existence for 6 months before they can even apply--get on their feet, be sure they are working. It is the only Federal drug abuse prevention program that requires that, by the way.

The coalition is required to go through a year-long training academy to ensure they have the skills necessary to effectively reduce drug rates, and they have to have data to show that their efforts are actually working. There have to be performance measures in place. In these coalitions, there are surveys done in schools to see what the results are.

These coalitions are made up of people who are on the front lines. They know their communities better than anybody else does. That is why they are more effective than anybody else. They know how to reach people in that setting, know how to respond quickly when problems begin.

In communities with these coalitions, use of alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, marijuana, and cocaine by our young people have declined: alcohol, 32-percent decline; tobacco, 38-percent decline; other drugs, including prescription drugs, 21-percent decline. So these things work.

I must say, I have seen it firsthand because, before drafting the legislation, I started my own coalition called the Coalition for a Drug-Free Greater Cincinnati. Twenty-three years ago, we started this coalition, and we did it with, again, all members of the community.

In my case, I reached out to the first lady, Hope Taft of our State; also to a religious leader in our community, Damon Lynch, Jr., one of the most respected community leaders and at that time head of the Baptist Ministers Conference; and the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, John Petter, so we brought in the business community as well.

We established this coalition not thinking that we were going to end up applying for Federal grant money because there was no Federal grant program then, but that we would focus on how to ensure we could actually make a difference. We set up a survey that went to two-thirds of the schools in our community and asked questions about drug use, so we would know if our efforts were working or not working, as the case might be, and how to target our efforts toward parents and teachers. We spent a lot of time in the faith community, but also with coaches and athletic directors.

This program is still going. It is called Prevention First. I chaired it for 9 years. I was on the board of the coalition again before I ran for the Senate. I know it works because I have seen it. We have gotten good results. The coalition tells me that since 2000, alcohol use among young people they worked with in Cincinnati has gone down 46 percent; tobacco use, 61 percent; marijuana use, 22 percent.

Since 2012, which is when we started focusing on the prescription drug issue, there has been a decline by 29 percent in the use of prescription drugs by our young people. So, I think, this program, which by the way, cost about 90 million bucks last year--as someone who was a distinguished military officer told me recently: That is about what we charge to keep the lights on in part of the Pentagon every day, not that I am not for more and smarter defense spending; I am, but $90 million is

what we are talking about for this program during the time of the worst drug crisis in the history of our country.

I just think this impact, which I have seen, really works. It means less crime, less strain on our healthcare system, more productivity in school, more productivity at work, more people who can pass a drug test and go to work. That benefits all of us, and it saves taxpayer dollars.

The success we had in this coalition, again, led me to the legislation. A Democratic Representative from Michigan, Sandy Levin, and I introduced the legislation, bipartisan in the House.

Here in the Senate, the leaders who were the leaders of this legislation are still here and continue to support it; that is, Senator Chuck Grassley and Senator Patrick Leahy--again a bipartisan group. The bill, the Drug-Free Communities Act, is, again, based on these lead documents from the administration, one of the programs they have proposed defunding altogether.

I am hopeful that this legislation, the Drug-Free Communities Act, which has really worked--it has provided funding that has spawned over 2,000 community coalitions around the country. Today, it currently mobilizes 9,000 community volunteers all around the country. I am hopeful that we will not be defunding this program but, instead, focusing more on the issues of prevention and education. That is going to be the long-term solution to this drug problem. Yes, we have to get treatment to those who need it, but if we are not working on prevention and awareness and education, the issues of drug addiction and drug abuse are going to continue to get worse, in my view.

I am a former Budget Director. I understand it is a tough job to look at all the different competing priorities when you are trying to save taxpayer dollars. I get that. But I also get that we don't want to take a program like this that is actually working, that has all of these accountability measures in place to be sure that taxpayer dollars are being spent right, and then get rid of it at a time that we have this growing crisis in our country.

When I first got involved in this issue 22 years ago, I became convinced pretty quickly that one reason the drug issue had raised its ugly head in the 1990s is that we took our eye off the ball. I think in the 1980s, under the leadership of President Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan and Bill Bennett, who did an awesome job as drug czar, we made real progress, particularly on the issue of cocaine.

I think there was sort of a sense that we had solved that problem, and it was time to focus on other things. So we took our eye off the ball. That is why you saw, in the 1990s when the Drug-Free Communities Act legislation was necessary, there was a big increase in drug use, particularly among our young people. So I was always worried that we might do that again, that when there was a reduction in drug use, we might say: Well, that problem is behind us; let's move onto the next one.

The problem was never behind us, sadly. It is like the tide. It just keeps coming in, so you have to keep your focus on it. But I will tell you, I never expected that at a time when we would have a substantial increase in drug use, in crime, in overdoses, in deaths--which is what we have experienced in this country over the past few years--that we would cut these programs. I just did not imagine it. So I am concerned about it. We can't take our eye off the ball, particularly at a time like this. We have to be sure that we are supporting these programs that work.

Let me show you a chart that tells you where we are today. This is the number of drug overdose deaths in our great country from 1999 to 2015, the most recent year for which we have data. Look at this line here. This is opioid painkillers, this is fentanyl, and this is heroin. You see this incredible increase. Sadly, I will tell you that in 2016 and 2017, it keeps going up.

This year, we have had more opioid overdose deaths over the first few months than we had in the same period last year. In fact, here is one example. In Cleveland, OH, in the last 10 months, we have had more overdose deaths from fentanyl than we had in the previous 10 years. So it is sad that it is not getting better; it is getting worse.

Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, surpassing car accidents. This is, again, a troubling chart, but we need to look at it. We hear a lot about homicides, and gun homicides, in particular. We hear about car crashes. Here is an example of HIV/AIDS in 1995, a time that was the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, when all of us reacted appropriately.

Here we are in drug overdoses in 2015--far worse than any of these. So between prescription painkillers, heroin, and synthetic forms of heroin, drug overdose is now the leading cause of accidental death in the United States of America.

According to CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more Americans died from drug overdoses in 2015, again, than died in the AIDS epidemic in 1995. A recent story in the New York Times said there are more than four times as many people dying every day from this epidemic than were dying at the peak of the crack epidemic.

Another way to look at it, sadly, is that more people died in the last 3 years than died in the Vietnam War. Those are tough things to compare, but the point is, this is not a time for us to be gutting these programs. Fortunately, we have these programs in place to help. Let's use them to try to encourage more prevention and more education.

Here is a chart that just shows where heroin and fentanyl are. Again, from 1999 to 2015, this is heroin, this is fentanyl. Look at the rise of this over the last few years. That is what we are dealing with. That is the reality. That is what is happening in the communities and in our streets.

You might ask yourself, why do we want to cut this back at this point? My understanding is that some have argued we don't need the program. They said this program is duplicative because we have other programs now, including great legislation passed last year that I mentioned earlier called the 21st Century Cures Act. In fact, the author of that legislation just joined us on the floor, Senator Alexander of Tennessee.

They have said the Drug-Free Communities Act may be a duplication of that CURES Program. That is an entirely different program--again, $90 million a year. CURES is $500 million a year needed right now.

I was a strong supporter of the CURES Act, and I again thank my colleague for working with some of us who have been focused on this issue, as he has, to get that legislation passed on a bipartisan basis.

The 21st Century CURES Act provides $500 million, but it provides that funding over this year and next, over 2 years. It is a temporary increase in funding to deal with the real crisis. This will help fill the gaps, but it does not ensure that $1 of that money goes toward this evidence-based prevention we talked about today.

Second, these programs have distinct goals. The CURES grants can be used however a State wants, and that is appropriate. In Ohio, I know Governor Kasich and the State legislature are focused on using it in a smart way, focused mostly on treatment which is badly needed. As I noted, 8 out of 10 people who are addicted and need treatment are not getting the treatment they need. We need more treatment facilities in some communities where the treatment is not available.

The Drug-Free Communities Act is specifically focused on this prevention through education at the community level. Funding goes directly to these coalitions I talked about and their focus is on prevention. It is not duplication. One is a prevention program focused on the community level, and one is an open-ended grant to the States. There is no other Federal program that funds evidenced-based prevention at the community level and has these measures except this one.

The accountability measures we talked about are important, and that distinguishes it from CURES or anything else. We require that communities provide matching funds, a one-to-one match. So if a dollar of Federal tax dollars goes out, it has to be matched by a dollar of non-Federal tax dollars just to get the funding.

We put a cap on administrative expenses of 8 percent to ensure that we maximize the amount of funding going into these programs. If you want funding in your coalition, you have to keep

your funding below 8 percent. That ensures that a maximum amount of funding goes into these programs. We specifically included strict accountability measures to ensure the highest level of support in solving the substance abuse crisis every community faces. These programs are effective. They use taxpayer dollars well, and cutting them doesn't make sense.

One of the reasons I believe President Trump was elected was that he had the courage and foresight to talk about this issue on the campaign trail. He talked about addiction, whether he was in New Hampshire, Ohio, or other States where we have a high level of heroin, prescription drug, and fentanyl abuse and addiction. He spoke with a passion about this and the toll it has on our citizens and devastation to our communities. I think that was one reason he was elected. He focused on how we would stop this epidemic. This proposal apparently put forward by Members of his administration runs counter to what he talked about during the campaign.

Earlier today, my original House cosponsor of the Drug-Free Community Act, Congressman Sandy Levin, and I sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget Director, Mick Mulvaney, encouraging him not to pursue this course of action.

More importantly, more than 219 nonpartisan public health groups-- experts like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the Northern Ohio Recovery Association, the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America, and other groups sent a letter to the White House expressing their support for the work of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have this letter printed in the Record.

Mr. President, these groups know that the proposed cuts would undermine our anti-drug efforts at a time when we need them more than ever. So I ask my colleagues to join me in urging the OMB Director and the folks in the White House who are making these decisions not to take this course of action but rather to support our proven community anti-drug coalition, to support ONDCP in doing the important work at a time of a growing epidemic. We have never needed these programs more than we do right now.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield back my time.

The Republicans yield back 4 hours of the majority's time.

We have 1 hour remaining. We will keep our hour.

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

Mr. President, I rise to talk about an issue that affects every single Senator in this body and all of us as Americans, and that is this epidemic of drug use--opioids--which would be heroin, prescription drugs, the new synthetic heroins, like fentanyl, carfentanil, and U-4. It is devastating our communities. This is the worst drug crisis we have ever had in this country. That is my view, but it is also the view of a lot of experts. I have been involved in this issue for over 20 years, and I have never seen anything like it. That is why I have come to the floor to talk again today. This is the 34th time that I have spoken on this issue on the Senate floor in the last year or so.

I come with sadness in my heart because it is not getting better. Based on the statistics I have seen from my home State of Ohio and around the country for the first quarter of this year, it looks like the number of deaths and overdoses from drug abuse are increasing, not decreasing. Part of it is because of these new drugs coming in, particularly synthetic drugs, including fentanyl, carfentanil, and U- 4--things that are produced in a laboratory by some evil scientist somewhere and shipped into our country.

So the need to act has grown only more urgent. Every day we are now losing 144 Americans to drug overdoses. Think about that. Every single day, 144 Americans are dying of drug overdoses. It has now far exceeded the number of people who are dying in car accidents in my home State of Ohio and it is exceeding that number around the country.

Millions more are not dying of overdoses but are seeing their lives and their futures ruined, and millions of us--those of us who are not drug addicted but who have friends, family, and neighbors who are--are watching loved ones as they fight this addiction. Maybe they have lost a job. Maybe they have broken relationships with families and friends. Maybe they have committed a crime like theft, shoplifting, or fraud to pay for their habit. Maybe they have just given up hope.

Just last week, I met with some community leaders from Dayton, OH. As it happens, no matter where I am in Ohio, this issue comes up and this is what they want to talk to me about. They wanted to talk about the story of Nathan Wylie.

Nathan Wylie was a happy 13-year-old boy. He was a Cincinnati Bengals fan. His goal in life was to be a professional football player. He wanted to play for the Bengals one day. He had his whole life ahead of him.

Nathan's dad, according to police reports, is a heroin user. One day a few weeks ago, Nathan got into his dad's heroin, and he overdosed. His dad took him to the fire station and first responders did what they could. They took him to Dayton Children's Hospital, but it was too late. Nathan died of an overdose at age 13.

Two weeks ago, a 14-year-old girl in Dayton was mowing the lawn at the apartment complex owned by her grandparents, and she came upon a body on the ground. It turns out that it was a 25-year-old young man who had died of an overdose.

This is what is happening in our communities.

Just a few hours after this young man who died of an overdose was discovered by this girl, Dayton Police responded to a car accident on Route 35 where a man had driven through a barrier and knocked over a street light. Police arrived and found the driver passed out with a used needle on the floor of the car. In this case they saved his life. They used this miracle drug called naloxone, or Narcan, which reduces the loss of life because it reverses the effects of overdoses. It doesn't always work, but it works the vast majority of the time if you get there in time. He was revived, and he said that he not only just used heroin, but that he was on his way to get more when he overdosed and almost died.

So I could go on. We see these headlines every day, not just in Dayton, OH, where I talked about these three cases, but all throughout our State and our country. That is why people are starting to take action to turn the tide, and I commend them for it.

Last week, more than 500 religious leaders across northeast Ohio banded together and said: We are going to do something about this. They took to their pulpits all at once to speak about this issue. A lot of them talked about National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, which was this past Saturday that it occurred. Father Bob Stec of St. Ambrose Parish in Brunswick, OH, gave his parishioners a three-part action plan. No. 1, get educated. Learn about these opioids. Learn about the connection between prescription drugs and heroin. With many heroin addicts, their use started with prescription drugs.

No. 2, throw out unnecessary medications from your medicine cabinets. It is unbelievable the number of people I have run into who have said they started because they took prescription drugs, and they got their prescription drugs--in one case, a young man told me--from his grandmother's medicine cabinet.

No. 3, he said, was to pray for our first responders. God bless them, because they do save lives every day--in Ohio, 16,000 lives last year. Without them, the death toll would be far higher and the damage to our community would be far greater. They are as frustrated as anybody, by the way, by this epidemic. They want to get to the bottom of it, to be able to focus more on prevention and treatment and recovery. They don't want to keep applying Narcan to the same person again and again.

So I want to thank Father Stec and all of the other religious leaders for being willing to roll up their sleeves and to get involved. If they prevented even one addiction from starting, then they have made a permanent impact on the community. I am convinced that those 500 pastors, ministers, and rabbis have saved lives.

People in Ohio are taking action in other ways too. People are forming groups, particularly parent groups. Those who have lost a child are banding together and talking about how they cannot just console one another and support one another but put in place plans to help others.

I was at a treatment center recently when there were a couple of families there, and they spoke up. They are involved in the center. They come every day. They are there because they lost a son or a daughter to overdose. God bless them for stepping forward.

The Federal Government needs to do more too. We need to take action because we can be a better partner with States, local communities, and families. It is not going to be solved in Washington. Washington is not the solution, but it is part of the solution by being a better partner. We can take best practices from around the country as an example, as we did in the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which passed this Chamber last year, and spread those around the country so that every community has the opportunity to make a bigger difference.

Last week I met with Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey. He has a passion for this issue. He is leading the President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. I thought it was a very good meeting. Governor Christie is serious about this. I think he is going to be a constructive partner with the Congress and with our President to help turn this tide. I am glad he was selected, and I am glad he has the Commission going.

I will tell you, though, that my message to him was twofold. One, I am glad you are doing this, but, second, let's take action. We don't need another commission to study this problem to know that this is an area where Congress and the administration can work together to take action.

In fact, this agreement that we will vote on in the Senate this afternoon and again tomorrow to fund the government between now and the year's end actually includes a lot of good legislation to help with this crisis. It fully funds the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act I talked about earlier, or CARA. This legislation is the first comprehensive reform to Federal addiction policy in 20 years. It treats addiction like a disease, which it is. It focuses on prevention, education, treatment, and recovery and helping our first responders with Narcan. It is very comprehensive because that is the only way to get at this issue--to do it in a comprehensive way.

The legislation we will vote on today and tomorrow also fully funds the 21st Century Cures Act, which includes more funding that goes directly to the States to deal with opioid addiction.

In the funding bill, we have funded the CARA programs now at over $200 million for this fiscal year. That is more than the bill authorizes, and that is good news because we need it.

It includes $103 million in grants from the Department of Justice for drug courts, veterans courts, and prescription drug monitoring programs. It also includes $114 million for Health and Human Services grants for Medicaid assistance treatment, treatment for pregnant and postpartum women, and for supplying naloxone--again, this miracle drug can actually reverse an overdose--also known as Narcan, and this will help our first responders. It also provides training for them to be able to use it effectively.

It also includes $50 million authorized by CARA for the Department of Veterans Affairs to treat and prevent opioid addiction at the VA, as well as funding CARA's recovery services--the first time any Federal law has ever focused on recovery, not just for treatment but for longer term recovery.

By the way, when there is a good recovery program, the rate of success is dramatically increased--much improved. So it is important that Congress is being a better partner with regard to recovery.

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services also announced that $26 million will also go out as part of the Cures Act I spoke about to the State of Ohio. Every State in the Union applied for that money, and States are getting money, and it will be very helpful. I know our Governor and our legislature will put it to good use.

These are important steps. But I will tell my colleagues--and I said this to Governor Christie--that by my count, there are at least six provisions of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act that have not been implemented yet by either the previous administration or this administration. By the way, this is 9 months after CARA was signed into law. Let's get these programs all up and going.

We haven't set up the Pain Management Best Practices Interagency Task Force yet. What does that mean? We need a strategy for figuring out what the best practices are for pain management, for opioid prescribing and alternatives to potentially addictive opioids.

This is really important. Think about it. Four to five heroin addicts started with prescription drugs. Still, when you go to the doctor and you have an injury or an accident, it is not unlikely they will give you some pills--prescription drugs--and they will be addictive.

We have to be sure we do everything we can to come up with nonaddictive forms of medication, right? If we don't do that, we will continue to have the problem. We need to stop overprescribing. We have made some progress, but not enough. When a young man or a young woman goes to get their wisdom teeth taken out, they should not be given opioids. This has happened too many times. I have met two families from Ohio, one whose loved one died from an overdose because as a teenager he went in to get his wisdom teeth taken out and was given a bunch of these pills--60 Percocets in 1 case--and then, because he got physically addicted, he ended up going to heroin as a cheaper and more accessible alternative and ended up overdosing. That shouldn't happen.

So this is an important part. It can be done right now. Let's get this up and going and let's push back on overprescribing. Let's find ways for the pharmaceutical companies to produce medication that actually is not addictive that can help with regard to pain management.

Second, we haven't started the public awareness campaign about the dangers of opioid abuse and the link between these prescription drugs and heroin and other synthetic drugs like fentanyl. Let's do it.

In the legislation we have authorized an amount of money for the Federal Government to do a national awareness campaign that lets people know about this, because most of my constituents don't know about it. When the doctor prescribes those pills, they think that because the doctor prescribed them, it must be the right thing to do. Instead of taking maybe one or two, they are fine with having their kid or their brother or sister or mother or father take the whole dose when they aren't needed, perhaps, because they don't know about the link. They don't know these pills are addictive. Just getting that information out there is going to save lives, and it is an important part of turning the tide. Let's do it. This public awareness campaign can be implemented now.

The Department of Health and Human Services has not yet released information on alternative treatment options for youth sports injuries and about how parents and kids can seek treatment if they become addicted as a result of a prescription. Why wouldn't that make sense? Let's do that. Let's do it now.

I have had, unfortunately, many instances of talking to parents about a

kid who was injured in high school through a sports injury and who was prescribed opioids and, again, the parents and the kids didn't have the information to know how dangerous this can be.

There is a guy I worked with a lot on prevention who goes to colleges and high schools and talks about this. He talks about his son Tyler. He was a football player. He must have been a great kid; I wish I had met him. He had an injury, and, of course, the coach said to play through it, and the doctor said: If you take these pills, you can play through it. He became physically addicted. Again, he later turned to heroin as a less expensive alternative because the pills were too expensive. He overdosed and died. His dad, by the way, is channeling his grief into something really constructive. God bless him.

The FDA has not yet announced its action plan on approving new opioids. The legislation we wrote, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, says the FDA has to seek recommendations from an advisory committee before approving any new opioid, and they have to label any opioid that is going to be used by kids--label it. The FDA is also supposed to issue guidance to educate prescribers on this issue. They have not yet done that. Let's do it. That action plan of approving new opioids is something we can do. We don't need another study or a commission to do it. Let's do it.

The National Institutes of Health hasn't begun CARA's clinical research into alternatives to opioids for treating chronic pain. NIH should do that. Now, they may say after hearing this speech that they are starting to do it. That is great. Let's do it. Let's get that information out there. Let's use the NIH and all the great researchers we have there and the great tools we have there to come up with alternatives that are not addictive.

The Department of Justice has not yet expanded the prescription drug take-back program. As I mentioned, National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day was last Saturday. This is where you can dispose of your prescription drugs in a safe way. You know it is going to go into a safe receptacle where some trafficker is not going to take the drugs and spread them around our community, which, by the way, has happened. This is a really important program to get these painkillers off of the bathroom shelf. I mentioned the young man who got his grandmother's pain pills, and that is how he started his addiction.

So get them off your shelves. If you are listening today and you haven't taken this action, I urge you to do it. Somebody is going to be at your home, maybe fixing your plumbing, or somebody is helping to clean your home or something else; or kids might be in your home, or maybe some friends of your kids, and those pills are just too darn tempting. The cost of one pill is about $80 on the street. So think about that. Get rid of those pills. Take them to a drugstore where they have a receptacle now or take them to the police department where they have a receptacle. Be involved in these drug take-back programs.

Almost every community in America participated on Saturday. There were tons of drugs--and I mean tons--that were disposed of. That is a good thing and that is going to save lives, but, again, the Department of Justice can expand that program. Under our legislation, they are authorized to do it. Let's do it. This is something that can be done right now. These are steps that HHS, DOJ, and others can take right now under the authorities already given them. It will make a difference. Again, this crisis is getting worse, not better. To turn the tide, we have to do all these things and more.

I also wish to mention that in addition to these important parts of CARA and other actions the administration can take is that the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Dr. Ben Carson, can increase access to sober housing for people coming out of treatment. I know Dr. Carson well enough to know he has a passion for this issue and he wants to address it. This is one way to address it.

Under the previous Obama administration, sober living facilities lost priority if they had a zero tolerance drug policy. To me, that makes no sense. Dr. Carson has the authority to change that and to make it easier for folks who are in recovery to stay clean over the long term. Again, I hope the administration will take that step and these other important steps. Whether it is FDA, whether it is NIH, whether it is DOJ, whether it is HHS, whether it is Housing and Urban Development, we have opportunities without new legislation. This is either already authorized or actions they can take. Let's go ahead and do it. Let's do everything we can.

None of these individually is a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. This issue is ultimately going to be decided in our communities, in our families, and in our hearts. We all have to get involved. All these will help. All these will help to ensure that we are responding to a true crisis in our community. If we do all these things, I believe next year can be better. This year is going to be worse. All the data shows that the number of overdoses and deaths--in my State of Ohio, in your State--are increasing this year compared to the last year.

It doesn't have to be this way. All these actions taken together on prevention and education, better treatment, longer term recovery, sober housing, ensuring that we are moving away from overprescribing and providing alternatives to addictive pain medication, ensuring that we do provide our first responders with the training they need on Narcan and naloxone, to get people who are overdosing and save their lives and then get them into treatment--not just save their lives but get them into treatment. All of that together will make a difference.

I believe we can turn the tide. I believe we can save lives. I believe we cannot just save lives of those who otherwise may overdose and die as a result of their overdose, but we can help all those who are addicted--the hundreds of thousands of people in Ohio, the millions of people across our country--to be able to achieve their dreams by getting them into treatment programs.

There is good news here because there are so many examples of people who have gone into treatment and longer term recovery and turned their lives around, many of whom are now helping others to do the same, many of whom are back at work, back with their families, back being the kind of citizens who contribute to our society in so many ways. That is the hope, and that is what can happen if we work together to implement this legislation, to do everything possible to have this broad, comprehensive approach to turn the tide.

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

Mr. President, I rise today to talk about legislation to give our economy a shot in the arm and to help raise wages for Americans all across our country.

When I am back home, whether it is at a small auto body shop or whether it is at a big steel plant or whether it is at a soybean farm, I hear the same thing, which is people coming up to me and saying: Hey, Rob, with all of these regulations coming from Washington, I would love to hire more people, but I am spending too much time and money trying to keep up with these regulations.

I think that is true with every Member here, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, when you are back home talking to people. They get frustrated. Sometimes it is local and State regulations as well, but a lot of them are coming from the Federal Government.

One example would be the Whitacre Greer Company, which makes bricks. It is a small family-owned business in Alliance, OH, just outside of Youngstown. They told me recently that complying with just one regulation is now costing this small company almost a million bucks a year that they don't have. They have had to go out and borrow the money, and that has been difficult for them. The cost of just complying with this one new regulation is about 10 percent of their annual revenue. Otherwise, that roughly million bucks would have been invested, they say, in plant, equipment and people. In other words, they would be able to create more jobs and modernize their facility if not for that compliance cost.

They are not alone. It is happening all over Ohio and across the country. Costly regulations are causing companies to pull back on expanding jobs and creating more opportunity for the people we represent.

Look, regulation has its place. There is no question about it. We need regulations. I think everybody acknowledges that. It has a proper role. We need reasonable laws that protect our health and the environment and prevent dishonest business practices. But let's make sure that, as we regulate more and more and more, we have smart regulations--regulations that make sense and that don't affect these small businesses, as I talked about with this brick company in Alliance, OH.

The reality today is that a lot of Federal regulations are more extensive in scope, more expensive to these companies--and, therefore, these workers--more unpredictable than they have to be to meet whatever the policy objectives are.

So Congress writes a law, and we have certain policy objectives, but then the regulators take that and they change the spirit of the congressional law instead of meeting that objective in the most cost- effective way possible. So I get that from my constituents, and the question is this: What do we do about it?

The other thing I hear about is the fact that regulators aren't accessible. People don't feel like they have any influence over it.

By keeping new businesses from starting and small businesses from growing, regulations are just making it harder for people to be able to make a living.

So how did we get here? Why are regulations so expensive and so burdensome on workers and jobs? I think a big reason is the way the Federal Government goes about writing regulations. Too often the process is unaccountable to the people. Too often it is based on sloppy or even bad information.

The current law that gives us the basic framework for all this process is called the Administrative Procedure Act. This has been around for a long time. But guess what. It has not been reformed in any significant way in 70 years.

The APA, or the Administrative Procedure Act, is something I have studied

in law school, as did other people here in this Chamber. It is something that you would expect to sort of change with the times, but it simply hasn't. That doesn't make sense.

Imagine if we didn't update our healthcare laws for 70 years. We are talking right now about updating the healthcare laws that were passed 7 years ago. Imagine if we didn't update our immigration laws for 70 years. Imagine if we didn't update our criminal laws for 70 years. You know, the world changes. It just doesn't make any sense not to update our regulation policy because we live in a growing and dynamic economy. Things are changing, and we have changed a lot in the last 70 years.

We didn't have things like microwave ovens or color TVs, and our economy was 10 percent the size of what it is today. Yet we are still using the same regulatory process that was put in place for a totally different kind of economy.

By the way, in 70 years, we have also learned a lot about how to regulate in a way that it is more cost effective and more efficient, and we need to put that into practice. So a reform of our regulatory process, in my view, is long overdue.

So far this year, we have taken some steps here in the Congress to give small businesses very specific regulatory relief by rescinding some of the recent regulations that the Obama administration had promulgated. We have done this about 10 times now with what is called the congressional review process. It is estimated that this has saved the economy a total of $65 billion in regulatory costs and about 45 million hours of paperwork.

I have supported most of these Congressional Review Act bills because I think they make sense. But this is just a handful of recent regulations. We have only addressed a few of the symptoms, not the underlying cause. We still have to deal with the underlying problem of the way regulations get made. If we don't do that, the regulatory burden will just continue to increase.

By the way, this should be true whether it is a Republican administration or a Democratic administration. The same rules ought to apply.

All of this is why yesterday Senator Heidi Heitkamp from North Dakota and I introduced bipartisan legislation called the Regulatory Accountability Act, or the RAA, which would put in place some really important and very reasonable safeguards on the regulatory process to get better outcomes.

Every President since Ronald Reagan--Republican and Democrat alike-- has agreed with the idea that regulatory agencies should estimate the costs and the benefits of something that we all accept. So they put this into what are called Executive orders saying that they have to go through the cost-benefit analysis the same way that your family does and that families in Ohio do when they make a decision as to whether to buy that car or whether they can afford to send their kids to college. They figure out what it will cost and what the benefit will be. That has to go into regulations. Although every President from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama has agreed on the need for that, it has never been put into law.

The first thing this legislation does is very simple. The Regulatory Accountability Act--the RAA--says that there should be a law, we should codify the practice so that businesses have the predictability of knowing that regulations are going to continue to use that commonsense cost-benefit practice.

The Regulatory Accountability Act would then take the next step of requiring regulatory agencies, once they have figured out the costs and benefits of these proposals, to choose the most cost-effective way to achieve their policy objectives. That is common sense, right? It is not done now. This is a big change and an important part of the legislation. Again, it is the same thing people do every day with their families. When they are deciding where they are going to go to school or what brand of milk they are going to choose, they go through that kind of analysis. Let's find the most cost-effective way to accomplish the goal, one that costs less and has the least impact on the ability to create jobs.

As I said before, a lot of regulations are expensive. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, from 2009 to 2014, in those 5 years, the Federal Government published more than 80 major rules a year, every year. A major rule costs the economy more than $100 million a year, and there have been 80 a year.

For these major rules, the RAA would let stakeholders ask a court to review the cost-benefit analysis used by the regulators, so that we ensure that agencies are using the best information available, not relying on faulty information or making mistakes. That seems fair to me, that we should have some process to make sure they are doing the right thing. This is going to have a huge impact on regulations.

The RAA makes regulators more accountable by bringing the public into the process. When folks talk about regulations, a lot of the time, their concern is that they feel they are cut off from the process. Although they can come to me or their other elected officials and state their concerns about this or that law, they have no access to the regulators. They are not elected; they don't feel as if they are accountable. They can't complain to them, and there is no influence if they do.

So under the RAA, agencies would have to listen to public comments and proposals before making a decision. Again, this is an important change. Instead of waiting until after the decision has been made and potentially triggering years of litigation, the RAA would move up that process. An ounce of prevention, my colleagues, is worth at least a pound of cure. It is a lot better for our companies and for job creation to put some time into the effort upfront to get it right than to have to fix it later. I think it is better for the regulatory process and better for a smart regulatory process in terms of taking our laws and putting them into practice.

So the RAA requires agencies to choose the most cost-effective regulations, creates more accountability by involving the public, ensures we are using better information, and takes existing practice and puts it into law. Ultimately, this is going to make smarter rules with better outcomes and will give us a better environment for creating more jobs with better wages. The RAA will free up more resources for small businesses to hire more people, raise wages, and purchase more equipment. That will boost economic growth and benefit all of us.

There are some critics who have suggested that this bill will kill the regulatory process and prevent new regulations from being issued, but clearly they have not read the bill. The reason this bill is bipartisan is because it gives the American people a voice in the regulatory process and it makes it more effective for both our economy and for our health and safety. That is the kind of commonsense regulatory process that hard-working taxpayers expect and deserve from their government.

We have a lot of support for this bill from workers all over the country and from a wide variety of industries, including organizations representing truckers, farmers, electricians, and manufacturers. It is a bipartisan bill because it is a common-ground bill. It is a middle- ground bill.

I first introduced the RAA 6 years ago, and it has passed the House of Representatives five times. By the way, on one of those stand-alone votes, 19 Democrats in the House supported it. Some Democrats who serve in the Senate today have supported it in the past; they were House Members then. By the way, that was when the regulatory burden was less of a problem than it is today. I have always had Democratic cosponsors of the RAA when I have introduced it here in the Senate.

I am happy to have Senator Heitkamp, Senator Manchin, and Senator Hatch as the original cosponsors to this legislation because this idea is needed now more than ever. It is a great opportunity to break through the partisan gridlock and get something that creates more jobs, raises wages, and makes a difference in people's lives. I think that is what the American people are looking for. That is what my neighbors in Ohio tell me. They want us to get stuff done to help families. I urge my colleagues to join Senator Heitkamp, Senator Hatch, Senator Manchin, and me in supporting this legislation that will create

a more stable and reliable regulatory process and give the people we represent more opportunity.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield back my time.

Mr. President, I wish to honor 374 high school seniors in eight northeast Ohio counties for their decision to enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces. Of these 374 seniors from 118 high schools in 98 towns and cities, 86 will enter the Army, 98 will enter the Marine Corps, 55 will enter the Navy, 26 will enter the Air Force, 3 will enter the Coast Guard, 95 will enter our Ohio Army National Guard, and 11 will enter the Ohio Air National Guard. In the presence of their parents/guardians, high school counselors, military leaders, and city and business leaders, all 374 will be recognized on May 10, 2017, at the Northeast Ohio Foundation for Patriotism ``Our Community Salutes'' event.

In a few short weeks, these young men and women will join with many of their classmates in celebration of their high school graduation. At a time when many of their peers are looking forward to pursuing vocational training or college degrees or are uncertain about their future, these young men

and women instead have chosen to dedicate themselves to military service in defense of our rights, our freedoms, and our country. They should know that they have the full support of this Senate Chamber and the American people, who are with them in whatever challenges may lie ahead.

It is thanks to their dedication and the dedication of an untold number of patriots just like them that we are able to meet here today in the U.S. Senate and openly debate the best solutions to the problems that confront our country. It is thanks to their sacrifices that the United States of America remains a beacon of hope and freedom in a dangerous world. We are grateful to them, and we are grateful to their parents and their communities for instilling in them not only the mental and physical abilities our Armed Forces require, but also the character, the values, and the discipline that leads someone to put service to our Nation over self.

I would like to personally thank these 374 graduating seniors for volunteering to risk their lives in defense of our Nation. We owe them, along with all those who serve our country, a deep debt of gratitude.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the names of the 374 high school seniors.

Mr. President, today I wish to join my colleagues from Ohio in congratulating our good friend and colleague, Congressman Steve Stivers, on his new promotion to the rank of brigadier general in the Ohio Army National Guard.

This is a big deal. Steve is one of the highest ranking National Guard officers ever to serve simultaneously in Congress. I think that is really important because it gives him a unique perspective as a legislator and puts him in an unique position to advocate on behalf of our troops.

The title is a great honor, but what is more important, in my view, is the fact that he earned it. Steve has been serving Ohio as a soldier for 30 years. He deployed to the Middle East during Operation Iraqi Freedom, while simultaneously serving as a State senator in Columbus, and he even earned a Bronze Star for his accomplishments.

Since he came home, he has been serving his neighbors in central and southern Ohio as a legislator for more

than a decade. We are really grateful for that because he has been a faithful Representative in speaking up for his constituents.

I want to congratulate Steve, Karen, and the kids on this exciting time for them. On behalf of the people of Ohio, I want to thank Steve and all of our troops for their service.

Thank you.

Mr. President, today I wish to recognize the contributions of Dr. Candace Kendle, recipient of the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Corporate Growth, Cincinnati.

As the visionary cofounder of one of the largest international providers of drug development services to the biopharmaceutical industry, Dr. Candace Kendle is being honored for her achievements in founding and growing Kendle International, Inc., from a small, private startup in 1981, to a global clinical research organization traded on NASDAQ, KNDL, and acquired by INC Research in 2011.

Under Dr. Kendle's leadership, Kendle International delivered a wide range of clinical development and clinical trial services to biopharmaceutical companies around the world, including the development of Celebrex.

Prior to founding Kendle International, Inc., Kendle held senior faculty positions at several leading academic institutions, including the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine; the University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine; Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science; and the University of Cincinnati College of Pharmacy.

A first-generation college student, Dr. Candace Kendle earned a bachelor of science and doctorate in pharmacy from the University of Cincinnati, College of Pharmacy, and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. in science from the University of Cincinnati in 2010.

Dr. Candace Kendle is recognized worldwide as a leader in the CRO industry and is a founding member and past chairperson of the Association of Clinical Research Organizations. She has served as a mentor for the Fortune--U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership and as a member of the Committee of 200, where she served on the board of directors for its foundation. She has also served on biotechnology task forces for the U.S. Department of Commerce, as well as for two Ohio Governors.

Dr. Kendle serves on the boards of directors for USP, Emerson, and the H.J. Heinz Company. She is cofounder of Next Chapter Press and ReadAloud.org, an organization to encourage children and adults to read aloud to encourage lifelong learning. She is also a former trustee for the University of Cincinnati, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and numerous other nonprofit organizations.

Mr. President, I spoke on the Neil Gorsuch nomination

last week, and I intend to speak on it again tomorrow. Let me just say that I support Neil Gorsuch as the nominee to the Supreme Court. He is a good man. He is a mainstream jurist, incredibly qualified. I am happy to strongly support him for the Court.

Opioid Epidemic

Tonight, Mr. President, I want to talk about another issue, one that I hope can continue to bring us together here in this body and also bring our country together. I rise today to talk about what a lot of experts say is the worst drug crisis in the history of our great country--the worst. It is the opioid epidemic. This is the addiction to heroin, prescription drugs, synthetic heroins like fentanyl. The newest threat, this synthetic fentanyl, is coming into our communities from other countries, particularly China.

There are laboratories in China where evil scientists are putting together these concoctions and sending them through the U.S. mail system into our communities.

China is doing it on a scale that is devastating to our communities. As a result, I have urged President Trump to prioritize this issue in his meeting with President Xi in Florida later this week. China has banned one synthetic form of heroin, carfentanil, recently, but there is a lot more to do. I am urging President Trump to make it clear to President Xi that we will do everything we need to do to keep this poison out of our communities.

This epidemic is affecting every single one of the States represented here in this body. I know the Presiding Officer knows that because I know he has been involved in his own State. It is affecting your home town, whoever you are and wherever you are in the United States. Unfortunately, it is affecting people you probably know.

Every day we are now losing 144 Americans to drug overdoses, most of which are from overdoses of opioids. That is one American life lost every 12 minutes. That will be about the length of this speech. Look at your watch. In the next hour, five Americans will die of a drug overdose.

I have been working on this issue for a long time. I first got involved over 20 years ago when I was in the House of Representatives and a constituent came to me because her son had died of a combination of smoking dope and huffing gasoline. She came to me and said: What are you doing about it?

I was ready. I talked to her about the fact that we had $15 billion devoted to interdicting drugs and incarcerating people and so on.

She said: What are you doing to help me and my community? I have gone to my church. They are in denial. I have gone to the school, and they say it is not a problem here. I have gone to my neighbors, and they won't come together and talk about it.

So we got involved in this issue, and I set up our own community coalition back in my home town of Cincinnati and chaired that for 9 years. I am still very involved with that group, but I also got involved with legislation to try to do things to actually reduce the demand for drugs, because that is so important.

Here we are again. The crisis we had then was mostly crack cocaine, marijuana. Then it was methamphetamines, bath salts. But I have never seen anything like this. This is the worst. If you don't think it is the worst drug crisis we have ever faced, then think about this. Look at this chart of drug overdose deaths in America.

Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death--the leading cause--in my home State of Ohio, and probably in your State and in our country. This is from 2015, the most recent year for which we have complete data. Nearly two-thirds of the deaths were because of the prescription painkiller heroin-fentanyl issue, or synthetic forms of heroin.

Drug overdoses are not now just the leading cause of death. Overdoses kill more Americans than guns do. This next chart will show that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more Americans died from drug overdoses in 2015 than died from HIV/AIDS at the height of that epidemic. The peak of the AIDS epidemic was 1995. This is 2015 with regard to drug overdoses.

According to an article in the New York Times, more than four times as many people are dying every day from this epidemic than were dying at the peak of the crack epidemic. In the last 3 years, more Americans have died of drug overdoses than died in the Vietnam war.

Unfortunately, we have reasons to believe that this crisis is getting worse, not better. According to recent figures, fatal overdoses due to prescription painkillers, heroin, or synthetic heroin in 2016 alone went up 26 percent in Connecticut, 35 percent in Delaware, and 39 percent in Maine. During the first three quarters of 2016, deaths from overdoses in Maryland increased 62 percent. In Ohio they increased 20 percent the last 2 years in a row.

So we have seen this huge spike here in deaths from overdoses, starting in about 2010 and going up. This is with regard to heroin. This is with regard to non-methadone synthetic opioids--in other words, fentanyl, carfentanil, U4, and other synthetic heroins.

This is a crisis. It is one that, unfortunately, is affecting every single community--whether you are in an urban, suburban, or rural community, whether you are young or old, regardless of your walk in life.

The issue, of course, is much bigger than just the tragedy of overdose deaths. It is also about people whose lives have gotten off track because of these drugs and because of the addiction. There are 200,000 people in Ohio alone who are living with an addiction to these drugs. By the way, if you are addicted, you are much more likely to be committing crimes, fraud, and theft to pay for that habit.

In my State of Ohio--and I will bet in your State--the No. 1 cause of crime is opioids. A lot of these people have lost a job or can't get a job. I talked to some business folks over the weekend in Ohio who talked about regulations and taxes. They said: You know, this drug issue is affecting every single one of us. We can't get people to pass a drug test. We have employees who are now addicted to prescription drugs or heroin and their absenteeism and inability to come to work is affecting our economy.

So this is something that is affecting all of us. Of course, many have broken relationships with their families and their loved ones. I cannot tell you the number of people who have told me, and I have probably met with 1,000 addicts or recovering addicts over the last few years. I can't tell you how many people have told me: Drugs became everything, and I pushed my family out, and pushed my friends out, and pushed my job away, and it left me in a situation where I was broken.

But living without hope is something that we can deal with, because there are ways for us to get people into treatment and to get people into recovery to help them. We are in a crisis. Some have asked me: Well, how did we get here? That is usually a good start to this: How do we get out of it? How did we get here is complicated. But according to the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions, those who are addicted to prescription painkillers are 40 times more likely to be addicted to heroin.

Let me look at this a different way. Four out of five heroin addicts started with prescription drugs. So this issue of prescription drugs, overprescribing, is a huge part of how this happened in the first place. Increasingly, what we have seen in all of our States is addiction starting with these drugs and then switching to cheaper and more accessible heroin, and then switching again to sometimes more powerful forms of heroin like carfentanil, maybe 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin. That is what is taking so many lives at such an alarming pace. The epidemic started with overprescribing. The United States uses more prescription pain killers than any other country in the world. It is not even close. Look at these numbers here. This is the daily opioid dose for over a million people. Look at the United States as compared to every other country in the world.

This is using 2014 data, and the numbers may have gotten better because of the work being done to cut back on painkillers. But according to the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians, we consume nearly 70 percent in this country--5 percent of the world's population and nearly 70 percent of the world's painkillers.

In 2012, that number was 75 percent. It is still not even close on a per-person basis. For every American, there are 50

pain pills in this country, and second place is Canada with 30 pain pills.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, painkiller prescription sales nearly quadrupled from just 1999 to 2014. That number finally peaked in 2012, by the way, and since then has come down slightly. In 2012, there were more prescriptions for painkillers in Ohio than there were people in Ohio. There were more prescriptions for painkillers--not pills, prescriptions--than there were people in Ohio. By the way, that was also true in 11 other States.

Fortunately in Ohio, we have made some progress under the leadership of Governor Kasich, Lieutenant Governor Taylor, Attorney General DeWine, and the State legislature. They have taken some important steps to cut back on painkiller prescriptions. We have cut them back by about one-fifth, about 20 percent since they peaked in 2012, but that number is still way too high. According to the Ohio Board of Pharmacy, 631 million pain pills were prescribed to Ohioans last year. We are also still dealing with the consequences of a lot of the addictions that got started in 2011, 2010, or before.

The number of prescriptions has risen, just as the addiction to opioids has risen. Drug cartels have followed this prescription drug epidemic, bringing in heroin. Those drug cartels flooded my State and probably a lot flooded a lot of your States with this cheaper, more accessible heroin, now synthetic heroin.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Mexican heroin production alone increased sixfold in just 4 years--from eight metric tons in 2005 to 50 metric tons in 2009. That number is now 70 metric tons, and it just keeps rising.

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, here in this country, Mexican opium poppy planting increased by 64 percent just from 2014 to 2015. So it is getting worse, not better.

According to the Congressional Research Service, virtually all of the heroin produced in Mexico is consumed here in the United States of America.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heroin use among young people has doubled in the last decade, among young people 18 to 25 years old.

This affects all of us. It knows no ZIP Code. It certainly knows no walk of life.

Since 2010, heroin overdose deaths have doubled among Hispanic Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Whites.

A lot of the people who are addicted to prescription drugs have switched to heroin instead. Now we are seeing that heroin addicts are switching also, even if they don't know they are doing it. They are switching to fentanyl and carfentanil. Again, it could be up to 50 times more powerful than heroin. Sometimes they don't know it because the traffickers are sprinkling the fentanyl in other drugs--heroin, of course, but also, we know now, cocaine. They are mixing it with marijuana, mixing it with other drugs, and not letting people know.

We had a 14-year-old girl recently die in Dayton, OH. She was with her friends, snorting what she was told was heroin. She had done it before. But this was fentanyl, and it killed her instantly.

More than 1,000 Ohioans were killed by fentanyl in 2015--more than double the previous year and more than 10 times the number in 2013. In Cleveland, for example, there have been more overdoses from fentanyl in the past 10 months than there had been in the past 10 years. In Columbus, there have already been half as many fentanyl overdoses in the first 3 months of this year as there were all of last year. This is why I say fentanyl is the new risk, the new danger.

As one father who lost his son to an overdose told me: Every time you engage in taking drugs, you are playing Russian roulette because you don't know what is in it.

In my hometown of Cincinnati, fentanyl deaths now surpass heroin deaths. Drug overdose deaths in Cincinnati increased by 40 percent from 2014 to 2015. Over that same timeframe, in just 1 year, heroin overdoses increased 12 percent, while fentanyl overdose deaths increased 153 percent. These numbers are very disturbing. They are discouraging, too, because it seems like we just can't turn the tide. It is easy to feel as though we just can't do anything, that we are paralyzed, but there is actually a lot we can do to help, and we can and should.

Here in the Senate, we have already taken some very important steps in the last year. About 9 months ago, we passed legislation called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, CARA. Last year, we passed the 21st Century Cures Act. Those two together provide much more funding for this issue. The Cures Act alone is $500 million more this year going back to the States to provide funding primarily for treatment for this increase in overdose deaths. There will be $500 million authorized again next year. We have to be sure that gets into the appropriations bill.

We also have seen, I think much more importantly in a way, through the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act--separate legislation-- that we are beginning to fund directly programs that work. We spent 3 years looking around the country and had five conferences here in Washington, DC. We brought experts in from all over the country who told us what the best practices were. What is the best prevention technique that is working? How do we get kids not to make these decisions? What is the best thing that is happening in terms of treatment, and then longer term recovery, what works and what doesn't work. Is medication-assisted treatment better? Is it better? Does it rely more on longer term recovery? Have they had more success there?

All of this has led us to put together this legislation, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, that actually funds programs like drug courts that are working around the country. They take people, diverting them from prison, and say: As long as you stay clean, you can stay out of jail, because you are a user, you are not a pusher. But you have to stay clean.

Then they provide them alternatives, including using drugs that reduce the cravings. If you reduce the craving for opioids, that is proving to be very, very successful in some cases. Dimitrol is the drug they use mostly in Ohio to do that. There are some great examples of people who have gone through the drug court process who have now been clean for a few years. They are back to work. They are back with their families. They are back as contributing members of society. So there is hope. We have seen how it can work.

CARA is the first legislation Congress ever passed to promote long- term recovery. Why? Because we have looked around the country and had experts here. We figured out that the treatment programs are important, and before that, the detox program is important. But what is leading to more success is longer term recovery programs.

As an example, think about being in detox for a week and then maybe a couple weeks in a treatment program and then going into a sober housing arrangement where you have regular meetings, where you are getting support from fellow recovering addicts. That seems to work longer. You are there. It seems to work better for most Americans.

Unfortunately, we do not have all of CARA's legislation fully implemented yet. Only three of its eight programs have been implemented. It has been a while. It has been about 9 months. It is time to push all of those programs.

I pushed the Obama administration on this. I am now pushing the Trump administration. Last week, I was delighted that the Trump administration announced the creation of a commission on the opioid epidemic, led by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has a real passion for this issue. I commend the President and Governor Christie for their commitment to making progress on the issue. Their leadership and their partnership with Congress will make a difference.

Today I talked to General Kelly, the new Secretary of Homeland Security. He is going to be on the commission. He said they are going to report about the problem within 90 days. We know a lot about the problem. We also have to be sure we are seeing some action.

What I would suggest today is that the administration work hard to implement the remaining five CARA grant programs that are not yet up and running. For example, it has been 8 months, almost 9 months, since

Mr. President, I rise today to express my strong support again for Judge Neil Gorsuch. I spoke on the floor the other day about Judge Gorsuch. I just heard my colleague from Georgia talk about him, and he did a terrific job.

This guy, Neil Gorsuch, is the right person for the job. He is qualified. He is smart and he is fair, and a bipartisan majority of the Senate will vote for this worthy candidate tomorrow. Let me underscore that. A bipartisan majority of the Senate will vote for this worthy candidate tomorrow. He will end up getting on the Court.

I must tell you that I regret that some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle refused to provide him that up-or-down vote without going through the process we had to go through today. As someone who has gone through two Senate confirmations myself, I know they are not always easy. But I will tell you, it is a whole lot better for this institution and our country when we figure out ways to work together-- in this case, to continue a Senate tradition of allowing up-or-down votes.

I like to work across the aisle. I have done that through my career. I can point to 50 bills I authored or co-authored that have become law in the last 6 years. They were bipartisan, by definition, because they got through this body and were signed into law by President Obama. I have voted for President Obama's nominees before President Trump. When President Obama had a well-qualified judge here on the floor, I voted for that judge. I voted for Loretta Lynch. That was not an easy vote. I took heat for it back home because I thought she was well-qualified. I think that is what we ought to do in this body.

I am disappointed in the situation we are in. I think we could have followed more than 200 years of Senate tradition and not allowed for a partisan filibuster to try to block this nomination. We chose not to do that in this body. Never in the history of this body has there been a successful partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court judge--never. Some of my colleagues said: How about Abe Fortas? That was several decades ago, and that was bipartisan. Abe Fortas was a Supreme Court Justice who had some ethics issues, and he actually dropped out of trying to get the nomination because of it. But never have we stood up as Republicans--or stood up as Democrats--and blocked a nominee by using the filibuster. It has just not been the tradition.

Instead, it has been to allow an up-or-down vote--a majority vote. There are two Justices on the Supreme Court right now who got confirmed with less than 60 votes. One is Clarence Thomas--probably the most controversial nominee in the last couple of decades, I would say. I wasn't in the Senate then, but I was watching it, as many of you were. It was certainly controversial, yet he got to the Court with 52 votes. Justice Alito was confirmed by 58 votes only 10 years ago. So these nominees were not filibustered.

By the way, President Obama's nominees, Elena Kagan and Justice Sotomayor, were not filibustered by Republicans. They were given an up- or-down vote. In the history of the Senate, 12 nominations have been defeated on the floor, but, again, never a successful partisan filibuster. Even Judge Robert Bork--some of you remember that nomination. It was very controversial. His nomination was defeated in 1987. He was a Reagan appointee. But he wasn't filibustered. They had an up-or-down vote, and he was voted down.

So what are these objections to Judge Gorsuch that would rise to that level where we want to say that over 200 years of Senate tradition ought to

be shunted aside and we ought to stop this man? What are those objections? I must say that I have listened to the floor debate and talked to some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I made my case. They made their case. I just don't see why this man is not qualified. He was a law clerk for two Supreme Court Justices. He served in the Justice Department and had a distinguished career there. He was also a successful lawyer in the private sector. And of course, he has been a Federal judge for a decade. So we can look at his record.

My colleague from Georgia just talked about that record. It is why the American Bar Association--a group not known to be a conservative body--decided that he was ``well qualified.'' They unanimously declared him to get their highest rating of ``well qualified.'' This is what they said about him. They said:

Based on the writings, interviews, and analyses we

scrutinized to reach our rating, we discerned that Judge

Gorsuch believes strongly in the independence of the judicial

branch of government, and we predict that he will be a strong

but respectful voice in protecting it.

That is why the American Bar Association gave him their highest rating. Not qualified? By the way, nobody objected--nobody--for any reason, to his nomination to serve as a Federal judge, to be a circuit court judge, a level right below the Supreme Court, back in 2006. Not a single Senator objected. By the way, those Senators included Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Barack Obama, Senator Joe Biden, and a number of Senators, of course, who are still here today with us, who chose to filibuster this nomination. So I don't know.

I heard some of my colleagues talk about some of his decisions. They have picked one or two of his decisions as judge over the past 10 years and said they didn't like the outcome, and that is why he is not qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. I have a couple of concerns with that argument. One, Judge Gorsuch has decided over 2,700 cases. I am sure we can all find one or two of these we didn't like. That is true for any judge. As I said, I voted for a number of President Obama's nominees, and I voted against others based on the merits and based on their qualifications. It didn't mean I agreed with them--trust me--or disagreed with them on everything. The odds are very good that you agree with Judge Gorsuch's decisions a lot more than you disagree with them. You know why I say that? Because the odds are really good that you agreed with them. Let's try 97 percent, because 97 percent is the number of his decisions that were unanimous with the other judges on a three-judge panel. So 97 percent of the time, his decisions were unanimous.

Who is on these three-judge panels? Well, it is usually bipartisan in the sense that it is nominees who have been nominated by different Presidents of different parties. In the case of his circuit court, there is Judge Paul Kelly, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush. There have also been several of his colleagues who were appointed by President Bill Clinton. Judge Gorsuch even mentioned in his testimony that he was on judge panels. He presided with Judge William Holloway, who was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. So these three-judge panels tend to have judges that were appointed by Republicans and Democrats alike--97 percent of the time unanimous. And 98 percent of the time, his decisions were in the majority.

So again, I think the odds are pretty good that we are going to agree with Judge Gorsuch a lot more than we disagree when we look at his cases. He is a consensus builder. He is a guy who figures out how to come to a decision people agree with on different sides of the aisle, and from different points of view. That is what his record his. Actually, that doesn't surprise me at all, because he clerked in the Supreme Court for two Justices. One was Byron White and the other was Justice Anthony Kennedy. Those are two Justices who get a lot of heat. Byron White did, and Anthony Kennedy does--from both sides. Why? Because they tend to be in the middle. They write a lot of decisions that are consensus decisions. They tend to be that fifth vote on a 5- to-4 decision. That is whom he clerked for.

To note that somehow this guy shouldn't be confirmed for the Supreme Court because of one or two decisions just doesn't seem to be legitimate to me. This is a guy who had thousands of decisions, and the vast majority were 98 percent or 97 percent unanimous. He had one decision that was appealed to the Supreme Court because the litigants must have thought he was wrong. They took it to the Supreme Court to correct him. What happened? The Supreme Court affirmed it. They agreed with Judge Gorsuch.

I don't know whom you could find out there among judges who has a stronger record. In every case, somebody wins and somebody loses. I get that. Think about this: Out of Judge Gorsuch's 180 written opinions, only one has ever been appealed to the Supreme Court--wow. And they agreed with his ruling.

He made it clear he makes decisions not based on the outcome he likes, but based on what the law says. He thinks his job on the court for the last decade--and going forward--is to actually look at the law and decide what the law says and what the Constitution provides, not what he wants.

I think that is the kind of judge we would want--particularly those of us who are lawmakers, right? We are the ones writing the laws. We would hope that would be respected and that judges wouldn't try to legislate. This is what he said in his testimony:

A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a

bad judge . . . I have watched my colleagues spend long days

worrying over cases. Sometimes the answers we reach aren't

ones we would personally prefer. Sometimes the answers follow

us home and keep us up at night. But the answers we reach are

always the ones we believe the law requires.

Interesting perspective. He is saying: Hey, if you like all your decisions, you are probably not a very good judge because your personal beliefs aren't always going to be consistent with what the law says or the Constitution says.

He goes on to say:

I've ruled for disabled students, for prisoners, for the

accused, for workers alleging civil rights violations, and

for undocumented immigrants. Sometimes, too, I've ruled

against such persons. My decisions have never reflected a

judgment about the people before me, only a judgment of the

law and the facts at issue in each particular case.

Again, it seems to me that is the kind of person you want on the court. Making a decision as a judge is not about ruling in favor or against somebody because you like them or don't like them. It is about applying what the law says. As he said in his testimony recently, his philosophy is ``to strive to understand what the words on the page mean . . . [to] apply what the people's representatives, the lawmakers, have done.'' That is us. That is the House. That is people who are elected back home by the people who expect us to be the elected representatives and to listen to their concerns and then vote. Those laws should not be rewritten by the judiciary. That is the approach he takes. I would think any legislator would want to ensure the laws we pass are applied as written. Much more importantly, that is what people want too. That is what people should insist on. We want our votes to count. We want our voices to be heard.

President Lincoln warned in his first inaugural address that if judges legislate from the bench, ``the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.''

``The people will have ceased to be their own rulers'' if judges legislate from the bench.

I think President Lincoln was right. When judges become legislators, the people do have less of a voice. Judge Gorsuch himself summed it up. He said: ``If judges were just secret legislators, declaring not what the law is but what they would like it to be, the very idea of government by the people and for the people would be at risk.'' I think that is the deeper issue here.

Again, I think he is the kind of judge we should want. Judge Gorsuch and I had the chance to sit down and talk about this philosophy. We talked about his background and his qualifications. I asked him some very tough questions, as he got asked during the Judiciary Committee nomination process. His hearings were something that all Americans had the opportunity to watch. He did a great job, in my view, because he did focus on how he believes that his job is not to allow his personal beliefs to guide him but, rather, upholding the law as written and the Constitution.

I think that approach is a big reason he has earned the respect of lawyers and judges from across the spectrum, by the way. If you look at the people who say this guy is a great judge, it goes all the way across the political spectrum.

Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, an advisor to former President Obama, said Judge Gorsuch is ``a brilliant, terrific guy who would do the Court's work with distinction.'' Those of you who know Laurence Tribe, he is well-regarded, considered to be a liberal thinker on many issues. But he has looked at the guy, and he has looked at his record. He knows him. He says he is brilliant, terrific, and will do the Court's work with distinction.

Neal Katyal--you have heard about him. He was the Acting Solicitor General for President Obama, a guy who knows a thing or two about arguing before the Supreme Court. He said Judge Gorsuch's record ``should give the American people confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the President who appointed him. . . . He's a fair and decent man.''

This goes to what the ABA said about him: Independent. He will protect the independence of the judiciary.

Look, he is smart, no question about it. You saw him answer those questions. You have seen his record. He is qualified, as we talked about. He is certainly a mainstream judge, when you look at his opinions--98 percent of the time in the majority, 97 percent of the time unanimous. Three-judge panels. He has the support--the bipartisan support--of a majority of the Senate.

By the way, the American people, as they have plugged into this, also think he ought to be confirmed. There is a recent poll by the Huffington Post, which is not considered a conservative newspaper or entity. They said the people want us to confirm Neil Gorsuch by a 17- point margin. Why? Because they watched this. They looked at the guy. They saw the hearings. They looked at his record. People believe he is the right person to represent them on the Supreme Court.

So, again, while I am disappointed this process has become so polarized and divisive here in this body, I am glad to see this good man take a seat in our Nation's highest Court. I believe he deserves our support.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague from Colorado. He does chair a subcommittee that I am a part of. We had a great hearing last week, talking about China and the South China Sea issues, as he mentioned. We did talk about North Korea and the need for this summit between President Xi and President Trump to

include a discussion of how China could be more constructive, including the possibility of additional sanctions on North Korea to try to get some sort of pressure on the North Koreans to do the right thing and back off their nuclear program.

We also talked about trade. To level the playing field, we need trade, particularly allowing U.S. companies to have the ability to do what Chinese companies can do here in this country. And my colleague talked a little about that this evening.

I will say--because he mentioned the issue of opioids--there is another topic that I hope President Trump will raise with President Xi, and that is this issue of synthetic heroin being produced in China, which actually comes into our communities. In Denver, CO, or in Columbus, OH, we have through the mail system these poisons coming in, synthetic heroin coming through the mail from China.

We are told by law enforcement officials that most of these laboratories are in China. These are evil scientists in China who are making this incredibly potent, dangerous drug. It is 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin. Three flakes of it can kill you. They are putting it into packages and sending it into our communities through the mail.

It is a topic that I hope comes up--in addition to the very important ones that my colleague has raised and we talked about in the hearing last week--which is: How do you get China to actually crack down on these laboratories? And how do you get them to schedule these drugs so that they are illegal in China, to ensure the inputs into the laboratories and the final drug itself?

By the way, the Chinese should have a strong interest in this because, I will guarantee you, there are people in China who are also becoming addicted to opioids because of this inexpensive, incredibly dangerous synthetic heroin that is being promoted by these Chinese scientists.

My hope is that this will be a successful summit and among the very important issues raised is this opioid issue, which is so important to our communities.

Mr. President, I also wanted to talk briefly, if I could, about the legislation we just passed, S. 89. It has to do with the Delta Queen. The Delta Queen is a wooden ship that is very important to my community of Cincinnati. It is part of our Queen City heritage.

The boat was actually in Cincinnati during my childhood. From 1946 until 1985, it called Cincinnati home. It is a beautiful paddle wheeler, and people love to get on it and go down the Mississippi River.

It is no longer docked in Cincinnati, which is why the folks in Missouri were interested in this legislation tonight too. We just had a big vote, over 80 votes in favor of simply saying, for the first time since 2008: Let's allow people to spend the night on this boat and go overnight on this boat, despite the fact that there is legislation called the 1966 Safety at Sea law, which prohibits wooden boats of a certain size from carrying overnight passengers. Let's make an exception here because the Delta Queen is willing to undergo the kind of renovations that are necessary to make it safe. It also requires new safety requirements for the Delta Queen going forward.

So I really appreciate the fact this vote was taken tonight. It is about a treasured part of our history. It is also about the economy because it will produce tourism and economic advancements all along the river everywhere the river stops, including in my hometown of Cincinnati. We are going to welcome the Delta Queen back if this legislation can be enacted into law.

It is now going over to the House. It is in committee there. We hope that the House will do as the Senate did tonight and pass this legislation.

This is my button. It says ``Save the Delta Queen,'' which I am not going to wear on the floor of the Senate because of the rules. It doesn't mean I don't care.

I thank my colleagues tonight for helping us to be able to get this legislation through.

Mr. President, I want to talk briefly about a nomination that is coming before us this week. This is for Elaine Duke to be the Deputy Homeland Security Secretary.

This is an incredibly important job. Some of you remember the Homeland Security Department was made up of about 23 different departments and agencies coming together. It is a huge management challenge. The key job of the Deputy Secretary is to try to manage all of that.

We are very fortunate that Elaine Duke is willing to step forward and take on this responsibility. My hope is that we will have a bipartisan vote here on the floor of the Senate for her confirmation and that we do it quickly this week because they need her there.

She came before our Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs last month. We had a very productive hearing. I had the honor of introducing her to the committee because she has Ohio roots. We are very proud of those Ohio roots.

She has had a long, distinguished career all across the country in the Federal Government, but she still calls Ohio home, and much of her family continues to reside in Ohio. Her dad, Frank Costanzo, is a first-generation American who still lives in Cleveland, OH. I have also known her uncle, Dominick Costanzo, for over 25 years. He is a friend and a neighbor. Boy, he is very proud of his niece, as is her whole family.

This family has instilled in her a midwestern work ethic that you see in the great work she has done for the Federal Government over the past 28 years. She has worked as a senior member of various administrations. We are really fortunate that she is willing to now continue to serve.

She started her career as a GS-7 contract specialist for the U.S. Air Force. Over the next 28 years, she assumed bigger and bigger responsibilities in the Air Force, the Navy, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Smithsonian, and finally, the Department of Homeland Security.

In 2008, she was confirmed unanimously by this Senate to serve as the Under Secretary for Management at DHS. In this latest role, she, of course, was a key member of the DHS leadership team for both Secretary Chertoff and Secretary Napolitano, and they strongly support her.

She has earned a reputation for being an expert on issues of contracting, on acquisitions, on procurement, on property management, on organizational change, and on human resources. All of these, as I said earlier, are key issues right now at the Department of Homeland Security, so she will help it to be managed better, which will protect all of us.

Serving in these administrations--both Republican and Democrat--she did earn the respect of folks from both sides of the aisle. I find it interesting that all five previously confirmed DHS Deputy Secretaries have unanimously and strongly recommended her confirmation--all five of the previously confirmed ones. They said in their letter:

Elaine is extraordinarily well-qualified to serve in the

position for which she has now been nominated. . . . Elaine

knows DHS. She has been a senior leader at DHS under two

presidents. She sets an unwavering standard of excellence for

all who consider themselves committed to public service.

I look forward to having this vote. I hope we will have resounding support on a bipartisan basis for the nomination.

Secretary Kelly is doing a good job. General Kelly has an incredibly distinguished career. We are fortunate that he has stepped up as Secretary also. He needs her. He needs his deputy in place to help him run the Department, and the men and women serving in DHS today need her on the job.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.