Floor Statements

Madam President, I would like to thank my colleague for his good comments regarding Neil Gorsuch.

I rise today to strongly support Neil Gorsuch for the U.S. Supreme Court.

First, there is no question that Judge Gorsuch is qualified for this job. He served as a law clerk for two Supreme Court Justices, Justice Byron White and Justice Anthony Kennedy. He has also had a distinguished career in the public sector and in the private sector. Finally, of course, he worked in the Office of the Attorney General. He worked in the Justice Department, and he had a great reputation there as well.

Of course, in 2006, not that long ago, he came to the floor of the Senate to be confirmed to the Tenth Circuit. And guess what. He was unanimously confirmed by this body. In fact, at the time, Senator Hillary Clinton voted to confirm him. Senator Joe Biden voted to confirm him. Senator Barack Obama voted to confirm him, and, by the way, so did a number of Democrats who are currently serving in the Senate. Not a single Senator objected. Why? Because the guy is so well qualified.

Since then, in his 10 years on the Tenth Circuit Court, his record has shown that he is fair, he is independent, and he is a consensus builder, which only ratified what the Senate had done. It showed that, in fact, he was the kind of person who represents us well in court.

By the way, he is also a guy who knows how to find common ground. Listen to these numbers: 97 percent of the cases he has decided were unanimous decisions with the other two judges on the panel. Typically, as you know, these are judges who have been appointed by Presidents who are Republican and Democrat. Finally, he has been in dissent less than 2 percent of the time. So this is a guy who 97 percent of the time is unanimous, and 2 percent of the time he is in dissent. Out of the more than 180 opinions he has written as a judge--180 opinions--only one had ever been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court from the circuit court, and, by the way, that one was affirmed.

So this is a guy who clearly knows how to build a consensus, bring people together, and that is needed right now. It is needed in this body. It is needed in our country as a whole, and it is certainly needed in the judiciary.

By the way, it doesn't surprise me that he is a consensus builder. If you think about it, he was a law clerk for Justice Byron White and Justice Anthony Kennedy. They are both known famously as being consensus builders and being able to bring together disparate decisions to try to find a decision at the Supreme Court level. So he has seen it up close and personal. He knows how to do it.

I would say, though, in terms of this debate we are having, it is not just about Neil Gorsuch and it is not just about another seat, as important as it is, on the U.S. Supreme Court. It is also an opportunity, by voting for Neil Gorsuch, to ensure that we have reestablished the proper role of this body, of the legislative branch and of the judicial branch in our system of government.

Judge Gorsuch understands that his job as a judge is not to impose his views on people but rather to apply the law, as written--to apply the law as written. That is kind of a basic part of our Constitution.

He put it well in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said: ``A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge.'' What does he mean by that? I think what he meant is that he doesn't believe in substituting his personal views for what he is supposed to do as a judge.

So you may not like the decision, but you are constrained by the Constitution, by the law, and that is what judges should do.

He went on to say that the job of a judge is ``not about politics. . . . If judges were just secret legislators, declaring not what the law is but what they would like it to be, the very idea of a government by the people and for the people would be at risk.''

I think he is right about that. It is not about what he wants. It is what the Constitution and the law say. Judges should not legislate from the bench. That is not their job.

Judge Gorsuch and I met recently, and he has met, I think, with about 80 of my 100 colleagues in the Senate, and he has talked to them about his views privately. I was very impressed with him. I was impressed with him as a person, his background, and his family. I was impressed with his approach.

I was talking about what he said that he is not going to substitute his own personal views. He basically said to me what he said in public. He is going to uphold the law, as written, even if his personal beliefs had led him to vote against the law if he had been in my position, as a legislator. I think that is what you want in a court.

But don't take my word for it. Judge Gorsuch also has earned the respect of lawyers and judges across the spectrum. Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, who was an adviser to former President Obama and to previous Democratic Presidents, has said that Judge Gorsuch is ``a brilliant, terrific guy who would do the Court's work with distinction.'' That is Laurence Tribe.

Neal Katyal, who was President Obama's Acting Solicitor General--so a guy who knows a thing or two about arguing before the Supreme Court, because that is what the Solicitor General does with a lot of his time--has said that 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.'' Again, this is the Acting Solicitor General for President Obama.

Yes, this debate is about something bigger than that, even. It is about Neil Gorsuch. It is about his character, his experience, and his judgments, but it is also about something I think even more important than this division of powers in our Constitution. It is about the rule of law itself. What does it mean?

Why does that matter? It matters because laws are an expression of the will of the people. The Constitution itself starts out with this idea, of course: ``We the people . . . establish this Constitution''-- not ``we the Congress'' or ``we the government.'' It is we the people who govern ourselves. The government is the servant of the people under our Constitution, not the other way around.

When judges try to change the law rather than apply the law, they make themselves into an unelected legislative body. That is not just arrogant, by the way. I think that is unfair. Not because it steals legitimate authority from us, the elected representatives in Congress, but because it steals that authority and silences the voices of the people who elected us. Ultimately, that is what this is all about.

In this Republic, Congress writes the laws, the President ensures that the laws are faithfully executed, and the courts apply the law and our Constitution to specific cases that come before them. That is how it should work. That is how our Founders intended it.

I think it is more important now than ever to have a Supreme Court that understands this role and resists the urge to act as a superlegislature.

In recent decades, the Court has been increasingly asked to decide a lot of important matters that affect us all. Think about it. Healthcare, or the Affordable Care Act is an example, and

immigration, energy and environmental policies, social policies, First Amendment rights to free speech, freedom of religion, Second Amendment rights, and a hundred other issues. The Court affects all of our lives in ways that are fundamental, and rulings by the Court, of course, cannot be appealed to a higher court. All you can do is change the law. On constitutional provisions, you can't even do that.

At the same time as the scope of judicial power has expanded and as the significance of the Supreme Court's rulings has increased, there are some judges who have essentially rewritten statutes that did not suit them. They have taken the law and said: We are going to rewrite this in a way that we think works better. That is not their job.

One example I would give you is that a couple of years ago, the Supreme Court ruled, for example, that the words ``established by a state''--this was in the Affordable Care Act--could also mean ``not established by a state.'' I mean, literally, the Court said that, and that ``legislature'' could also mean a popular referendum. So they took the very words of a statute and said: We don't like the way that is written. We are going to change these words, and we are going to adjudicate this matter based on our understanding of these words, which is based on our personal opinion.

I don't think these rulings made sense logically but, more importantly, they changed the law, as written by the people and the people's Representatives.

So the stakes are high here. We have to get this right. There are people who make the argument that the Constitution is such a living document, whose meaning evolves as popular opinion evolves, that we should make judges into basically pollsters or superlegislators. I don't think that makes sense. But, more importantly, I don't think it is fair, and it is one reason why so many people have felt like their voices aren't being heard, I believe, when the courts do that.

Again, Neil Gorsuch gets it. 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.''

This should be what we all want in a Supreme Court justice--someone who will fairly and impartially apply the law and protect the rights we have guaranteed by our Constitution.

To my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I would make a plea today: I would say that in this regard, I would think Judge Gorsuch is exactly the kind of Justice that you would like, someone who is actually going to apply the laws that you write--that we write--and not impose his personal views.

The American Bar Association--not known as a conservative body--has unanimously declared Judge Gorsuch ``well qualified'' for this job. That is their highest rating--``well qualified.'' That is what they have given him. The ABA has noted that ``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,'' meaning the independence of the judicial branch. That is pretty strong from the American Bar Association.

By the way, despite these accolades he has gotten and his respect for the lawmaking that so many of us do here in this body, some of my colleagues on the other side may decide to vote against Judge Gorsuch, and they certainly have a right to do that. Of course, they do. But let's at least give him a vote. Let's give him an up-or-down vote. He deserves that. If a nominee this qualified can't get an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor, it is not clear to me who could.

Some have argued recently that the standard for a Supreme Court Justice should be 60 votes in the Senate--not an up-or-down vote, not 51 votes or a simple majority. The Washington Post has looked at that recently, and the Washington Post gave the notion that it should be 60 votes three Pinocchios--that means the guy whose nose gets longer when he is not telling the truth. Here is what the Washington Post said: ``There is no `traditional' 60-vote `standard' or `rule' for Supreme Court nominations, no matter how much or how often Democrats claim otherwise.''

That is the Washington Post.

In fact, as you probably know, two sitting Justices on the Supreme Court right now were actually confirmed by this body with less than 60 votes. Justice Thomas, a very controversial nomination at the time, was confirmed 52 to 48--hardly a tradition of confirming with 60 votes. Justice Alito was confirmed 58 to 42 only 10 years ago. In fact, as we have heard on this floor, there has never been a successful filibuster of a Supreme Court Justice in the history of this body. That is hardly the standard. So I urge my colleagues to give him a vote, and I hope the result will be the confirmation of this smart, mainstream, decent man who is so well qualified for the Supreme Court and who has made it clear, again, that he is not going to impose his personal beliefs on the rest of us but will apply the law as written, and he is going to adhere to the U.S. Constitution. That is the kind of judge who deserves the support of all of us.

Thank you.

I yield back my time.

Mr. President, first I want to thank my colleague for coming to the floor today to speak about Montenegro and the importance of its accession into NATO, as well as for his focus on the Balkans and for his comment that right now the people of the Balkans and, for that matter, the people in Ukraine and other countries in eastern Southern Europe are feeling a lot of pressure. I applaud him for working on a bipartisan basis over the last couple of years to help us push back against some of the disinformation and propaganda that is primarily being promoted by Russia.

In each of these countries--and I know my colleague Senator Murphy has visited these countries--the first issue I hear about when I go on a trip to Latvia, where I went recently, and certainly Ukraine and even Poland is concern about this sort of unrelenting campaign of disinformation, as we call it; maybe the other term would be ``propaganda.'' We do need to stand up and be counted. The new department of global engagement at the State Department is beginning to do that. I know Senator Murphy has had some meetings recently--and I have, too--where they are starting to get their feet on the ground and being able to allow people to be able to see the objective truth; in other words, to sort of separate narratives from reality, to be able to ensure that we don't have an undermining of these great democracies-- these fledgling democracies, many of them.

So we are talking today, as my colleague from Nebraska did earlier, about the meddling in our own election here and the effect it is having on the level of trust in this country, and this is true not just here but in other democracies. I appreciate Senator Murphy standing up and being counted on that issue and then today specifically being able to help Montenegro to have the opportunity to develop its own institutions. As I said, it is not perfect, but they have made progress, they have made reforms, and they have followed the directions many of us have given them to enable them to be responsible members of NATO. So I thank Senator Murphy for being here today and talking about that.

Read Aloud Month

Mr. President, I am actually speaking out today about another issue, which is one that is a little closer to home, and that is about the importance of reading to our kids. It turns out that this month of March has been designated as Read Aloud Month, and this group called Read Aloud is doing fantastic work around the country. They actually started in my hometown of Cincinnati, OH, so I am a little biased about them, but what they are doing is incredibly important. It is about education, it is about the economy, and more importantly, it is about the lives of young people around the country and the ability to achieve their dreams. It is about child literacy.

Here is the information. Elementary schools and libraries are talking about this more and more back home. If you read to your kids when they are young, they will have a much better chance of succeeding in life. According to a study that dates back to 1995--kind of a famous study-- by the time a child born into poverty reaches age 3, he or she has heard 30 million fewer words than his or her peers. Let me repeat that. A kid who is born into poverty is going to hear 30 million fewer words by the time he or she is 3 years old. Why does that matter? Why does this word gap, as they call it, matter? Well, it matters because it turns out these verbal skills, like other skills, develop as they are used, and if they are not used, they don't develop. So a lot of kids who already have the challenge of growing up in poverty are also burdened with the disadvantage of not developing these verbal skills. That makes it harder for them to get good grades, harder for them to develop social skills, and harder for them to get a good job and ultimately to be able to live out their dreams.

I know Washington, DC, may be the only place on Earth where 30 million sounds like a small number, but it is a big number. It makes a huge difference. This word gap leads to an achievement gap later in life based on all the studies. Experts tell us that a child's vocabulary is reflective of his or her parents' vocabulary. It makes sense. Kids learn what they see and what they hear.

There is a 2003 study by Elizabeth Martin and Tom Risley studying word gaps which found that by age 3, before even reaching school age, children's ``trends in the amount of talk, vocabulary growth, and style of interaction were well established and clearly suggest widening gaps to come.'' So having poor reading skills makes it harder to make a living, it affects self-esteem, and it makes life more difficult in so many small ways. Think about this: unable to read a manual when you buy something, unable to read a list of ingredients, unable to read a newspaper to understand what is going on, to be online.

Millions of our friends and neighbors are struggling with these consequences every day. According to the Department of Education, about 32 million adults in this country can't read. Think about that. That is a group nearly 3 times the size of the State of Ohio and maybe 25 to 30 times the size of the Presiding Officer's State--32 million. Too many of these adults, of course, started off life with the disadvantage of this word gap, and they never caught up.

That is why this Read Aloud Month is so critical. Parents and other caretakers need to know they can steer their child in a better direction--develop vocabulary skills and end the word gap just by reading aloud to them.

Developing these skills, according to experts, affects the biology of the brain. Dr. Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus of Cincinnati Children's Hospital-- a great institution in my hometown and one of the top three children's hospitals in the country, based on U.S. News and World Report. Anyway, he is an expert on this topic, and this is what he said: ``The more you read to your child, the more you help the neurons in the brain to grow and connect.'' So it is physiological.

Dr. Kim Noble, a brain scientist at Columbia University, has found that this word gap actually translates into a brain-sized gap in the areas dealing with language.

Dr. Dana Suskind of the University of Chicago has found that more than 80 percent of a child's brain development occurs by age 3--80 percent--and the effects of the word gap are detected in brain development in babies as young as 9 months old. These aren't children; these are babies. Doctor Suskind says that by reading aloud, every parent has the ability to grow their child's brain.

So certainly before a child can read, before a child can even speak, it is important to be speaking to that child. Think about that. Think about the impact you can have. So get out a book and do some reading to a child, a grandchild, someone who is in the neighborhood, one of your kids. Do it tonight.

Sometimes when I talk about this, people say: Well, Rob, parenting is pretty tough. Everybody is busy. Some people are working two shifts. Both parents are working. Where do you make time for this? Here is my answer to that: Fifteen minutes a day. That is the goal here. Fifteen minutes a day makes a huge difference to be able to close that gap.

Others say: We can't afford it. How do you afford to buy these books if you are going to read all the time? To me, that is pretty simple. Buy a library card. They are free, usually. If not, they are cheap. You don't need a lot of new books, but you do need a library card, and that is very helpful. They helped Jane and me to be able to have books to read to our kids.

Again, I am very proud Ohio has led on this issue. In 2008, this group Read Aloud was started in Cincinnati, OH. It has now become a national movement. It has more than 10,000 grassroots partners-- including daycare facilities, schools and libraries, and rotary clubs-- in all 50 States.

So what can you do to help? I would say that this issue is not going to be found here in this body. It is not about Washington, DC, doing anything except encouraging people to do what makes sense, which is to spend time with your kid, to ensure that if you have a kid in school, that you know that kid gets the right start in life, to ensure that everybody has the ability to have a successful life.

Senator Harris and I introduced a resolution about this recently in the U.S. Senate. It is called the Read Aloud Month resolution. It encourages parents and caregivers to read to their kids for 15 minutes a day. We are asking our colleagues on both sides of the aisle, Republican and Democratic, to sign off on that resolution. That would help raise the visibility of this issue.

Again, I hope everybody listening today takes the opportunity to follow up, to read to a kid, to help ensure they can close that words gap in their lives and therefore have a better chance of getting better grades, getting a better job, and achieving whatever their dream is in life.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, this is the 32nd time I have come to the

floor in the last year to talk about an issue that unfortunately is getting worse--not better--and that is the epidemic of opioids; that would be heroin, prescription drugs, and now, more recently, synthetic heroin, also known as fentanyl or U-4 or carfentanil.

Every single day we are now losing 144 Americans to drug overdoses. Think about that, every single day, 144 people. By the way, that means, during the time it takes to give these remarks, which will be about 12 minutes, on average, we are losing another American to this opioid epidemic.

It is an issue that is now so serious that it has overtaken car accidents or even homicides from gun violence as the No. 1 accidental cause of death in our country.

It is easy to get discouraged because we see these statistics. We hear about the overdoses. We hear about the deaths. We hear about the difficulty for people to get out of the grips of this addiction. The relapse rate is high. It is an issue that is affecting every single community in this Chamber. By the way, it is affecting our inner cities, it is affecting our suburbs, it is affecting our rural areas and every group of Americans out there. No one is immune from this, and it knows no ZIP Code.

Yet today I want to talk a little about some of the reasons for hope and some of the models of success out there because this Congress, to its credit in the last year, has actually gotten much more serious about this issue. We passed two pieces of legislation to help; particularly, to provide better prevention and education to keep people from getting into the funnel of addiction and then, second, to help in terms of providing the resources: the treatment, the recovery. The longer term recovery, in particular, it is the first time Congress has stepped up on that.

We also need to do a better job ensuring that our law enforcement and our other first responders have what they need to save lives and to be able to reverse the effects of overdoses through this miracle drug called naloxone or Narcan. It is part of the legislation that has not just been passed but is beginning to be implemented.

Fortunately, in my own State of Ohio--although we have one of the worst addiction problems in the country--we also have a lot of really compassionate people who have stepped forward and are taking advantage of these resources, including not only resources from Washington now but also from State and local governments and from so many nonprofits out there. They are taking advantage of that to provide better treatment, better recovery, and better prevention. As a result, they are saving lives.

On Saturday, I visited a group called Clean Acres in Wilmington, OH. It is a farm that provides recovery housing for men. These are men who are struggling with addiction. They work on the farm. They provide each other support, and it has been very successful for a lot of them.

I met a guy named Dan, who told me how Clean Acres is helping him get his life back. For over a decade, he was a heroin addict. He shot up every morning until one day, he was actually at work, and he passed out. He was digging a ditch, and he passed out.

He was rushed to the hospital. The doctors discovered he had a very serious infection related to his intravenous drug use. He required emergency, lifesaving surgery right then.

The doctors told him he might not wake up. He did wake up after that surgery, and there before him were his three kids. He hadn't seen them in 5 years because--in so many cases you hear this and as Dan said this--the drugs became everything. He said, not his family, not his relationships, not his friends, not his work--the drugs became everything. These three kids had come to his bedside because they thought it might have been his deathbed, he said.

He saw these three kids, whom he hadn't seen in 5 years. He said that even after having experienced this near-death operation and having his three kids there, the first thought that came to his mind was: Where can I get another hit? Where can I get another hit? But then, in the situation he was in, he prayed, and he said his prayer was: ``Lord, help me get out of here.'' ``Help me get out of here,'' meaning, ``help me get out of this situation.''

He made a decision. He was going to try treatment again. He had tried treatment before. So many recovering addicts and addicts I talk to around my State have been in and out of treatment programs, detox treatment. It hasn't worked.

He decided this time he was not just going to get into treatment, but he was going to try something different, which was not to go back to the old neighborhood, not to go back to his old friends, but instead to try longer term recovery. That is how he ended up at Clean Acres. That is this farm where he and other men live together. They work, but they support each other to try to keep their lives on track after their treatment is over. It doesn't provide the treatment, but it does provide them with the meetings they need to be able to have that support around them in order to keep clean.

As one of the men at Clean Acres told me, it is hard to go through treatment. It is much harder to stay clean after treatment.

So Dan is healing himself. He is working at the farm. He plans to go into construction. He has big plans now. That is the hope. That is the opportunity for people to get their lives back on track whom I see every day when I talk to the people in my home State of Ohio.

Last week, I was also at Racing for Recovery, outside of Toledo, OH. I met with Todd Crandell. He has been in recovery from addiction for about 20 years. He is now giving back in a huge way.

I met with parents who had lost children to addiction. They come to Todd's organization, Racing for Recovery. They find support there, and they help other parents to work through this.

I met law enforcement officers there who are working with this recovery facility to try to ensure that the people whom they are locking up aren't going to just get right back into the revolving door again, back in and out of prison, back committing crimes. The No. 1 cause of crime in the State of Ohio is this addiction; people who, again, put the drug first ahead of everything, including their own sense and their own conscience, their own sense of what is moral and right, and instead they are committing burglaries and fraud and shoplifting--anything they can do to get the funds they need to continue their addiction.

I met Jessica at Racing for Recovery. She has been clean for 9 months. Before she sought help, she overdosed for 3 days in a row. She said her life was saved by the police; specifically, a program by the Lucas County Police Department called the Drug Abuse Response Team, DART. I am really impressed with DART and what they are doing. It is now being copied in other communities around Ohio and around the country. DART is being proactive. They got her engaged in treatment and recovery. She is now in sober housing. Todd, Jessica, and others there told me this: Look, you have to have this longer term recovery because that is what works.

A couple of weeks ago, during the State work period, I held a roundtable discussion in Fremont, OH, where I met Matt Bell. Matt is an amazing guy--a charismatic, young guy. He said that for him the gateway drug was marijuana and alcohol in high school. He ended up overdosing on heroin three times. He was convicted of 13 felonies, and he went to detox 28 times. Now he is clean and preventing new addictions from taking place by working nonstop to raise public awareness about the dangers of drug use. He goes around to the schools, and he doesn't just talk to kids who are juniors and seniors. He talks to middle schoolers because he knows he has to go younger and younger to get kids to think about their own futures, about the fact that addiction can happen in one use sometimes, and it is something that can ruin their lives. Thank God for Todd and thank God for Matt, because guys like that are out there every day giving back and they are saving lives.

So I want to thank all these compassionate people I have met--Clean Acres, Racing for Recovery, the Lucas County DART team, and Team Recovery. They are doing the hard work. They are in the trenches trying to actually turn the tide on this growing addiction problem we have. Again, I want to tell them that help is on the way.

Last year Congress did pass the 21st Century Cures Act and authorized

funding for States--$500 million this year and $500 million for next year--to fight this epidemic. Another step we took, which I think was probably the biggest step we have taken in a couple of decades in this area, was the passage of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, or the CARA Act. Those who know about CARA know that it is a new approach on treatment, recovery, and prevention. If you don't know about it, look it up and check it out. Be sure that the groups in your town, wherever you live, know about the fact that they can apply for grant money to be able to help on these recovery services that I am talking about, many of which do not have the funding to be able to be successful without the increases in rehab. Be sure they know about the fact that if you have a fire department in your community that is strapped for cash and cannot afford the Narcan to provide the Narcan treatments, there is an opportunity to apply for grants there, too, to be able to save lives from overdoses. Narcan is not the answer. The answer is to get into treatment. But Narcan is saving lives, and, therefore, it is necessary today. So let people know that is around and is available now.

Sadly, the situation is not getting better, even with these new efforts that are finally being implemented by the new administration. They started at the end of the Obama administration with a couple of programs, and now we have a couple more programs coming on line. Within the next few months, we expect the rest of the programs to be fully implemented. They are absolutely necessary, but they are pushing up against something new, which is, I hate to say, even more dangerous than heroin, and that is this synthetic heroin that is coming into our communities. It is like a poison coming into our communities by the U.S. mail system, if you can believe it.

The experts tell us that most of this fentanyl or carfentanil is being made in laboratories overseas, mostly in China, and it has been coming through the mail system. Why? Because the traffickers don't want to use other private carriers--UPS or FedEx or others--because they require that there be advanced digital information on where the package is from, what is in it, and where it is going. Guess what. We don't require that in the mail system. So the bad guys choose to send it through the mail system instead. That certainly is something the Federal Government should address.

So we have introduced legislation called the STOP Act. It is very simple. It says that if you want to send something to the United States of America, it has to say where it is from--what place in China--what is in the package, where it is going, and it can only go to the place they say it is going. That gives our law enforcement a new tool they are desperate to have because they are not able to look at millions of packages. But they can look at hundreds and this helps them to ferret out those packages that look most suspicious.

By the way, this new stuff, fentanyl and carfentanil, is incredibly powerful and incredibly dangerous. It is believed to be 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin. Think about that. I was in Dayton, OH, a week before last and was meeting with the law enforcement task force there. They told me the sad story about a little girl, 14 years old, who was told by her friends: You ought to snort this stuff; it is called heroin. She did. It was fentanyl, and she dropped dead. She overdosed and died immediately because it was so powerful. Even a few flakes of it, they say, can kill you.

According to the Cleveland medical examiner of Cleveland, OH, this past month of February, which is the shortest month in the year, was also the deadliest month in Northeast Ohio for fentanyl and heroin. In other words, what they are seeing is not just more overdoses but more deaths because of fentanyl being mixed with heroin or sometimes fentanyl in its pure form. In just 28 days this February, 60 Clevelanders died from overdoses in one month. This is one city in America. There are another seven cases that are undergoing tests, but they are suspected to be the result of heroin and fentanyl overdoses.

What is driving the growth of this epidemic is the increasing use of fentanyl. Drug traffickers are lacing other drugs with it. I was told by the DART task force in Toledo that they are actually putting fentanyl in marijuana now, and people are showing up in the emergency room and overdosing on marijuana because it is sprinkled with fentanyl. It is more addictive. So the traffickers like it. It is more deadly. So we need to fight back. The Drug Enforcement Administration says it takes 2 milligrams of fentanyl to kill you. That is about the same as a pinch of salt. Many heroin users don't realize that the heroin they buy on the street may contain these new incredibly powerful synthetic drugs. So part of the message has to be what one father told me, which is: You are playing Russian roulette every time you use these drugs because you don't know what is in it. If there is fentanyl in it, there is a good chance you won't just overdose, but you will end up as one of these statistics we talked about earlier.

In Lorain, OH, last Monday, a 29-year-old man drove off the road and nearly hit a tree. When police arrived they found him unconscious from an overdose, with a baby in the backseat--a baby in the backseat. It took several doses of this Narcan and naloxone to reverse the effects of the overdose. Ordinarily, it would take only one dose, but with fentanyl-laced heroin it takes more. When police went to his home, a child answered the door and said: Mommy is sleeping, and we can't wake her up. Again, this is the guy that overdosed in the car. They take the kid home and another kid says: Mommy won't wake up. They find out the mother is also unconscious from a heroin overdose that she had in front of her four children. According to police, the couple thought they were using heroin, but tests confirm that it was laced with fentanyl.

This is an opportunity for us in the Congress to pass legislation that will help to be able to stop some of this poison from coming into our communities. At a minimum, it will raise the price, because some of this fentanyl, I am told, is less expensive than even the things that are less powerful, like heroin.

Fentanyl took the life of Erin Jarvis of Troy, OH. Erin was a prom queen. Erin was very popular. She was active in student government. She was captain of her soccer team. She got good grades. She got into Ohio University, a great school.

She had multiple knee injuries from playing soccer, which required surgery. She was prescribed Percocet. She became addicted. At Ohio University, her friend introduced her to a drug that was stronger and cheaper and easier to get. Of course, that was heroin. This story I have heard so many times. There is the overprescribing, sometimes because of an accident and an injury, and, then, somebody becomes addicted and turns to heroin because it is cheaper and easier to get. Erin began disappearing for days at a time, stealing from her family. Her mom Kelly started missing jewelry, credit cards, and even a TV set. When her sister got her wisdom teeth taken out, she stole her sister's Percocet. By the way, she never should have gotten Percocet for her wisdom teeth, in my view.

Erin finally got help. She went to rehab. She decided she wanted to become a nurse and help others struggling with addiction. After receiving treatment, she moved back in with her mom. But she relapsed, and she died. She died at the age of 24 with this promising life ahead of her. Her last words to her mom were these: I love you. The next day Kelly watched her daughter get taken out of their home in a body bag.

Tests showed that Erin died of an overdose of heroin laced with fentanyl. According to the coroner, she hadn't used the full injection. There was a lot left in the needle. He said: I suspect that what was in that syringe was not what she thought it was--exactly.

Families who have loved ones struggling with addiction are worried about the poison pouring into the streets, and you can see why. As deadly as heroin is, this stuff is even worse.

To keep this poison off the streets, Senator Klobuchar, Senator Rubio, Senator Hassan, and I have introduced bipartisan legislation, the Synthetic Trafficking and Overdose Prevention Act, or the STOP Act, which would require the Postal Service to require this simple information that would give our law enforcement the ability to target these packages of fentanyl.

Based on expert testimony in hearings we have had hearings before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, it would make it easier for them to detect those packages. That is what law enforcement is asking for. We should provide it to them. There is a bill in the House that is identical to ours, introduced by Congressman Pat Tiberi of Ohio and Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts.

This is not the silver bullet, as I said. It is not the solution. No one has that silver bullet, but it would take away a key tool of drug traffickers and restrict the supply of these drugs, raising their price and making it harder to get. With the threat of this synthetic heroin and this poison coming into our communities every day, we need to act and act now.

So I would urge my colleagues to let their constituents know about the help that is on the way. Tell them about what is going on with the Cures Act and CARA legislation. Put it on your website so they know they can get help with treatment and recovery that was not previously out there. Our law enforcement, first responders, and firefighters can get the help they need to be able to get the training and have the funds for Narcan to save lives. We can do much better in terms of prevention and education. Some of this grant money is directed toward letting people know the connection between prescription drugs and heroin and between fentanyl and heroin.

Finally, to my colleagues, please join us in pushing back against these new poisons coming into our communities by cosponsoring the STOP Act and by requiring that this basic information be provided. With more cosponsors, I think our leadership will be much more likely to take this to the floor. Once it gets to the floor, it can be passed because people know that in their communities all over this country this epidemic must be stopped.

Thank you, Madam President.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Massachusetts for yielding his time.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Barbara Repeta, a congressional fellow with the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, be granted floor privileges through December 31.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m., Friday, February 10; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; further, that following leader remarks, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Mnuchin nomination postcloture; finally, that all time during morning business, recess, or adjournment of the Senate count postcloture on the Mnuchin nomination.

If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

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

Madam President, I come to the floor today to talk about Career and Technical Education Month. The month of February has been set aside as Career and Technical Education Month. It is an opportunity for us to talk about something that is working very well in some of our States and is giving our young people amazing opportunities, and it should be expanded.

Over the last 6 years, my home State of Ohio has come a long way. We have turned a record deficit into a billion-dollar rainy day fund. We have created lots of new jobs, but we also have a problem in Ohio and around the country, and that is a skills gap.

If you go on the www.ohiomeansjobs.com Web site right now, I think you will see about 122,000 jobs being offered. In other words, these are companies saying: We are looking for people.

At the same time, in Ohio today, we have about 280,000 people who are out of work. So how could that be, you ask? Well, if you look at the jobs and you look at what the descriptions are, many are jobs that require skills, and some of these skills are not available right now in the workforce. So you could get a lot of people put back to work just by developing these skills in Ohio.

At the same time, this is happening around the country, and this skills gap--this mismatch between the skills that are in demand in a local economy and the skills of a worker--is something that can be dealt with with more aggressive career and technical education.

Businesses want to invest more. They want to make better products, but they

can't do so if they can't find the right people.

By the way, when those skilled workers aren't available, often those jobs go somewhere else. So in the case of Ohio, some may go to other States--let's say Indiana--but some go to other countries--say India.

So if you don't have the skilled workforce, you are not going to be able to keep the jobs that we want here in America because workers are such a critical part of making a business successful.

The Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the typical unemployed worker today has been unemployed for about 6 months. So we have this long-term unemployment again. The skills gap would help deal with that. There are 5.8 million Americans who are now stuck in part-time work who would want full-time work. So we have some challenges in our economy, and this skills training would really help.

According to a survey from Deloitte, 98 of the 100 biggest privately held employers in my hometown of Cincinnati, OH--98 out of 100--say they are struggling to find qualified workers. There is a shortage of machinists--machine operators. We are a manufacturing State. There is also a shortage of other jobs, IT skills, health care skills. Companies want to hire, but they have a hard time finding workers with the right skills.

By the way, it is not just in Cincinnati or in Ohio; it is across the country. There was a study done by the National Association of Manufacturers that found that three out of every four manufacturers say the skills gap is hurting their ability to expand and create more jobs. So as soon as this new Congress and new administration get to work, I think there is an opportunity for us to address this.

One thing we have heard about from the administration and also from both sides of the aisle here is the need for more infrastructure. We have all heard about the funding for our crumbling roads and bridges, our water systems, our waste water systems. I think that is all true, but it is going to be tough to do it because we don't have the skilled workers to rebuild the infrastructure. I think there is an area of common ground that if we have skilled workers, we will be much more likely to rebuild that infrastructure.

We had a conference on this issue a couple of weeks ago in Congress, and we brought people in from Ohio from the building trades. The point they made was: We would love to see this infrastructure expansion everybody is talking about. But who is going to do the work? We need more skills training, and we need to make sure that is there.

Yesterday afternoon we confirmed the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. One reason I voted for Betsy DeVos is that she talked about skills training. Her quote was that CTE, career technical education, is an ``important priority,'' and she agrees that we must do more to give our young people the job skills they need.

Some people, when they hear about CTE, wonder what it is. For some in my generation, it is what was called vocational education, but I will tell you that it is not your father's Oldsmobile. It is really impressive to go to these CTE schools and see what they are doing and see the changes in the attitudes of the kids and their parents once they get into these programs.

One of the challenges we have is getting kids to enroll in some of these CTE programs. Sometimes the parents say to their kids: That is not something you should do. You should get on track to go to college because that is the track we were on, and that is the track we were told was better. I will tell you that is a big mistake. Changing that attitude is really important to helping expand CTE because young people going into these CTE programs have an incredible opportunity. By the way, many of them do go on to college, 2- or 4-year institutions. Many of them also get a job out of high school, and, again, that job is very important to our employers keeping jobs and economic activity here in this country, but it is also a huge opportunity for them.

I was at a CTE center a couple of years ago. We were sitting around the table talking to some of the employers who were there supporting the programs, some of the administrators, and, of course most importantly, some of the students who were from three local high schools who were all involved in this CTE program. Of the three young people who were there, two of them were going off to manufacturing jobs where they were going to be making 50 grand a year plus benefits, and the third was going into an IT position where, again, she was going to have a great opportunity.

My question to the students was: Have you gone back to your high school and talked to your friends about this? They all indicated they were planning to do that because they had a great experience. They had great opportunities. By the way, one of them was interested in being an engineer. He was going to CTE and then going to get a job. He had a job lined up with a company he had interned for, but that same company was willing to send him to school to get a degree in engineering over the subsequent years.

All three of them had college credits already because in Ohio students are allowed to get college credits from CTE courses, which makes it more likely that they will graduate but also more likely that they will be able to get to college and have college be more affordable by getting credits in advance. It is a terrific idea.

There is a story that I heard about recently of a young woman in Ohio. Her name is Mackenzie Slicker from Massilon, OH. She will tell you that she was not doing very well in school. She was not hitting her marks, and she was not very excited about school. Then one day she saw there was an opportunity to get into a CTE course in sports medicine. She applied for it. The teacher looked at her scores in other classes and non-CTE classes, and said: I will take a chance on you, but I am concerned about you because your grades are so low. But she applied. She said she was embarrassed by those scores. The teacher let her in with the understanding that she would do a better job in her other classes. The CTE course gave her a totally new-found motivation to work hard and get good grades.

I hear this again and again back home. These kids from CTE are excited. They not only stay in school--they are not dropouts--but they do better.

In her senior year in high school she had a 4.0 after getting into the CTE program for sports medicine. She is studying at Miami University where she is on track for living out her dream of becoming an orthopedic surgeon. That is an example of how CTE really works.

Senator Tim Kaine and I had this in mind when we started the Senate CTE Caucus. It is a caucus that started with just a couple of Members, and now it has a strong following. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin is among the leaders of that caucus, and she is on the floor today. This caucus not only has these conferences that bring people together to talk about issues, but we also put together legislation.

Senator Kaine and I introduced legislation called Jumpstart Our Businesses by Supporting Students Act, or the JOBS Act. We tried hard to get that acronym, JOBS. We introduced it a couple weeks ago. It would let low-income people get Pell grants for job training programs. Under current law, financial aid for programs can be used for courses lasting 15 weeks or more, but a lot of the licensing programs and the job training programs are less than 15 weeks. In Ohio a lot of them are 9 weeks. So we think this legislation will be helpful, giving young people options that they don't have now to be able to have this funding to be able to give them opportunities for a better start in their careers, getting them the licensing they need, the certificates they need, and putting them on the path to joining the middle class and the ability to get a job, but also to be able to buy that car, to be able to buy that home over time by having this opportunity to get skills training.

Our legislation has been endorsed by education groups like the Association of Career and Technical Education, the National Skills Coalition, the National Council for Workforce Education, and many other groups. We appreciate their help, and we are going to get that legislation done.

I hope colleagues from both sides of the aisle can join us to get that legislation enacted. It makes so much sense.

Senator Kaine and I are also planning to reintroduce another bill called Educating Tomorrow's Workforce Act, which improves the quality of our CTE programs by setting minimum standards for CTE programs that would ensure students are able to transfer their credits, be able to have their work graded today based on today's industry standards, and use equipment that is up to date. So basically it is legislation--and again I thank Senator Baldwin for her support--to help increase the quality of CTE education. In some of our States this is working incredibly well. Ohio is one of those cutting-edge States. We have to ensure that the standards are maintained and expanded everywhere and we continue to support reauthorization to strongly support our CTE programs.

Just like the JOBS Act, this bill has been endorsed by a number of education experts and groups, and we appreciate their help, including the National Career Academy Coalition, the National Career Development Association, National Association of Secondary School Principals, and many more.

In Ohio we have some great schools, whether it is Cleveland, OH--the Max Hayes High School does an awesome job. I was there for its opening, now about a year and a half ago, and they are doing a terrific job of working with the building trades, working with private industry, working with the high schools in the area, and developing skills that are badly needed in Northeast Ohio. Ohio also has some great health care CTE programs. I mentioned the young woman who found her motivation getting involved in CTE for sports medicine.

Recently I went to Butler Tech to their health care campus, which is north of Cincinnati, and what they are doing there is amazing. You walk in and all the kids have on their white medical coats, and whether they are dental hygienists who are being trained or technologists or students who plan to go to medical school someday or those who are interested in getting a degree in nursing, there are some incredible sites. They have brought in outside partners, all from the area, who are involved with working with them. It is good for our kids but also really good for our community.

Mr. President, if we pass this legislation that I am talking about today, if we continue to focus on career and technical education as we are supposed to do this month--CTE month, February--we are going to help many millions of our young people to be able to have better opportunities and, most importantly, we are going to be able to help our economy. We are going to help create more jobs and more opportunities in this country, to be able to close that skills gap, to put people back to work. It makes too much sense for us not to come together as Republicans and Democrats alike, and with the new administration, to promote career and technical education.

With that I yield my time.

Mr. President, I rise tonight to talk about a problem that is affecting every single one of the States represented in this Chamber and every one of our communities. It is one that folks back home are, unfortunately, experiencing and, frankly, we don't talk enough about this in Washington. It is this epidemic of heroin and prescription drug abuse.

How bad is it? We just learned very recently that for the first time in 23 years, life expectancy in the United States has gone down, and there is no question that the surge in heroin and prescription drug addiction is one of the reasons. In fact, the demographic that saw the biggest drop in life expectancy was among middle-aged White women--the very group that has been hardest hit by the heroin and prescription drug epidemic in overdoses and overdose deaths. Unbelievably, this epidemic is actually driving down life expectancy in our great country.

It has been pretty dramatic. The number of heroin users in the United States has tripled since 2007, and the number of heroin overdoses has tripled just since 2012. It has gotten to the point where we are now losing one American life about every 12 minutes to this epidemic. So during this talk today, which will be about 12 minutes, we expect another American to die of a heroin overdose.

Congress has begun to act, and I applaud the House and the Senate for that. We have acted over the last year to do a couple things. One is that, in the appropriations bill that passed at the end of last year, we put more money aside for treatment. So States are now receiving grants--$500 million this year, $500 million next year. These grants are needed. It is going to the hardest hit States. It is going to States based on their need, which I think is very important, because some States are hit harder than others. My colleague from Ohio is here on the floor, and he has been very involved in this issue as well. My State has been one of those States hardest hit. Some think that Ohio now has the highest number of overdoses when we add prescription drugs, heroin, and synthetic heroin, like fentanyl.

Second, last summer Congress took what I think is the biggest step we have taken in decades in terms of fighting this issue when we passed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. The President signed it into law. It is already helping with regard to providing more prevention efforts, treatment, and long-term recovery. It is also helping our law enforcement and other first responders to be able to handle this growing crisis.

We fully funded this Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act--also called CARA--this year, and now we need to ensure that the new administration that has just come in continues to effectively implement this program as quickly as possible.

Just in the last few weeks, three of CARA's grant programs got up and running. One is funding for drug courts. Those who are involved with drug courts back home already know this, but it is a very effective way to take those who are in the criminal justice system because of a drug issue--prescription drug and heroin issues in particular--and get them into a diversion program where they can get treatment, with the risk of going back to incarceration if they do not stay clean. This is really working well in some of our communities in Ohio. They are also using interesting new techniques, including a medication called VIVITROL, to keep people off of their addiction.

Second, we have just put in place for the first time ever programs for recovery support services. Again, in this legislation, CARA, we funded long-term recovery. So it is not just a detox center, not just a treatment center that might be short term, which they usually are, but longer term recovery, including getting people into sober housing, providing them with people who will support them and encourage them. That, we have found out, keeps people from relapsing and is incredibly powerful.

Third, there has been a grant to empower States and local governments to help fight this epidemic.

This is all-important. It is real progress. But our work is far from done. In fact, there are five more CARA grant programs yet to be implemented.

Again, I call on the new administration to do so urgently. I know they are focused on this issue. We just need to get these programs up and going to help our communities right now.

Near my hometown of Cincinnati, OH, the Winemiller family of Wayne Township had a pretty tough Christmas. They were missing a son and a daughter because of heroin. Over Easter weekend last year, Roger Winemiller found his daughter Heather dead of a heroin overdose in their bathroom. She left behind an 8-year-old son. Then, just 5 days before Christmas, Heather's brother Gene--a father of three children under 18--died of a heroin overdose. Gene started abusing painkillers when he was in his early twenties. He became addicted, and when the pills were too expensive, he switched to heroin, which is cheaper and, really, more accessible.

Unfortunately, this is a fairly common story in my home State and around the country. We are told this is how four out of five heroin addicts in the United States started on heroin--prescription drugs.

Heather and Gene both got clean several times. Heather was clean for 3 years before she relapsed and died. These were vibrant people; they loved life. Heather loved gardening, and she was a huge Ohio State Buckeyes fan. Gene loved rock music, hunting, and fishing. But they both made the tragic mistake of trying these drugs, and it changed their lives forever.

Gene Winemiller's funeral took place at Blanchester Church of Christ in Blanchester, OH. I know Blanchester, OH, pretty well. It is a small community of about 4,000 people. The very next day, there was another funeral in that same church in this small town of 4,000 people for a heroin overdose. As Gene's dad Roger puts it, ``I can't emphasize enough: No one--no one--is immune from this epidemic.''

Unfortunately, he is right. It knows no zip code. It is in the rural areas. It is in the suburban areas. It is certainly in our inner cities. It is everywhere.

Take Cleveland, in Northeast Ohio, for example. Cleveland medical examiner Thomas Gilson said that ``2016 was an unprecedented year.'' The number of overdoses in Cleveland doubled in 2016 compared to 2015-- doubled. Overdoses are happening all over the Cleveland area. More than 150 heroin overdose deaths happened in the city and another 150 happened in the suburbs, kind of evenly split. It is everybody, every group, every age group--African American, White, Hispanic.

Take Dayton, OH, in Southwest Ohio, as another example. In Dayton last year, there were more than 2,500 overdoses, about 7 a day. About half of the victims were men, and about half were women--some in the cities and some in the suburbs, with 60 percent in their thirties and forties and 40 percent who were either younger or older than that. So this is happening all over our State and all over our country--in cities, suburbs, inner cities, and rural areas and to rich and poor, old and young alike.

In 2015, Ohio statewide experienced a record 3,050 drug overdose deaths, which is a 20-percent increase from 2014, and more than quadruple the number of overdose deaths in 2000. In 2015, we lost an Ohioan every 3 hours to this epidemic. Sadly, the toll was even higher in 2016. We don't have the final numbers yet.

One of Ohio's economic assets, of course, is our location. We are centrally located. It is great for transportation. They say half of America's consumers are within 1 day's drive from Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus. Unfortunately, that central location also makes us very vulnerable to drug traffickers.

Last year, Ohio State troopers confiscated nearly 160 pounds of heroin. Depending on the potency, that could be equivalent to more than $50 million--or more than 180,000 injections--of heroin. That is nearly triple the amount of heroin seized the year before. The Ohio State Highway Patrol also confiscated a record-level number of illegal painkillers and methamphetamines last year.

We have to thank our law enforcement officers because they are saving lives every day by keeping this poison out of our communities, certainly, but also helping to reverse the overdoses with this miracle drug called naloxone or Narcan. In 2015, the last year we have numbers for, Narcan was administered 16,000 times. Think about that: 16,000 people were saved who could have died of an overdose, thanks to our first responders and their professionalism. We don't have numbers yet for 2016, but, again, it is going to be, unfortunately, far higher than that.

The Washington Post recently published a report on the heroin epidemic in Chillicothe, OH, where there were more than 300 overdoses last year, and where a single police officer, Officer Ben Rhodes, says that he used naloxone to reverse an overdose more than 50 times. One church in Chillicothe, Zion Baptist Church, recently had funerals for three overdose victims in 1 week. I know Chillicothe. It is a small town of about 21,000 people.

Heroin and prescription drug painkillers are flooding our communities to meet a rise in demand. CARA, this legislation I talked about, will reduce that demand by increasing access to treatment for those who need it and preventing new addictions from starting in the first place through better prevention and education efforts.

After CARA became law, I introduced bipartisan legislation to take another step. This is called the Synthetics Trafficking and Overdose Prevention Act, or the STOP Act. Again, it builds on CARA because it helps reduce the supply of drugs coming into our communities.

Some of the deadliest drugs coming into Ohio are synthetics--drugs such as fentanyl, carfentanil, or U4, essentially synthetic heroin that is made in a laboratory somewhere. Guess where these drugs are coming from: overseas. Boy, they are incredibly powerful. Fentanyl can be more than 50 or even 100 times as powerful as heroin. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, it takes about 2 milligrams to kill you. Carfentanil is even more powerful than that--up to 10,000 times as powerful as morphine. It is so powerful that it is used primarily as a tranquilizer for large animals like elephants.

Heroin bought on the street today in Ohio and elsewhere is often laced with these drugs to make it more potent. Roger Winemiller, the Dad I talked about a few moments ago who lost his two kids, compares buying heroin to playing Russian roulette because you never know the potency of the drug that you are buying. Many of these spates of overdoses in our urban areas in Ohio are because of the mix with fentanyl and carfentanil.

These fentanyl deaths in Ohio have increased nearly fivefold in the last 3 years. Three years ago we had about 1 in every 20 overdoses in Ohio because of fentanyl. Now it is one in five. We expect it soon to be one in three. You can see where this is going.

I talked a minute ago about the trafficking of drugs on our interstate highways. That is a serious problem, but so is the problem of traffickers shipping these drugs through our mail system to our communities to meet this growing demand.

Just yesterday the U.S.-China Commission released a report about the trafficking of Chinese fentanyl into this country. The report says:

The majority of fentanyl products found in the United

States originate in China. . . . Chinese law enforcement

officials have struggled to adequately regulate the thousands

of chemical and pharmaceutical facilities [laboratories]

operating legally and illegally in the country, leading to

increased production and export of illicit chemicals and

drugs. Chinese chemical exporters . . . covertly ship drugs

to the Western hemisphere.

That is from a report just yesterday. Right now these drugs are difficult to detect before it is too late. Part of the reason is that, unlike private carriers such as UPS or FedEx, the Postal Service does not require information about packages. If you are a private carrier, you have to have electric customs data for packages coming into the country, saying where it is from, what is in it, where it is going. This means the U.S. Postal Service is a more attractive way for traffickers to get these dangerous drugs like fentanyl or carfentanil into our country. It shouldn't be this way. It doesn't have to be this way.

The STOP Act would close that loophole and make the Postal Service require advanced electronic data. Where is it coming from? What is in it? Where is it going? That information on these packages before they cross our borders would be incredibly helpful. It is common sense. It would help stop these dangerous synthetic drugs from being trafficked into the United States, and it would save lives. That is what our law enforcement officials are telling us.

I know the scope of this epidemic is daunting. It is in your State of Indiana. It is in my State of Ohio. Its consequences are hard to even think about because it is about the overdose deaths, but it is far more than that. It is about people not being able to live out their dream. It is about higher costs for law enforcement. It is about crime. It is about our workforce and people not being able to go to work and not being able to find workers who are drug free. It is about so much that affects our communities.

Yet there is hope. We have to work here in Congress to continue to promote legislation and policies that will help us to achieve the dream of turning this tide around. The STOP Act that I talked about is going to help keep some of that poison out of our communities and increase the cost of heroin. That is good.

These synthetic heroin increases are really concerning. Treatment is incredibly important, and it can work. I have met so many people across Ohio who have beaten their addiction--people who are now back on their feet, back with their kids, back with their families. It is hard, but with treatment and a supportive environment, particularly this longer term recovery, it can be done.

Last year I met with Aaron Marks in Columbus, OH, at a conference held by the Ohio Association of County Behavioral Health Authorities. Aaron is from Cleveland, a suburb called Beachwood. He began using prescription painkillers as a freshman at Beachwood High School. He was just 13 years old.

Again, it is a story that is all too common. Often because of an accident or injury, people start using these pain pills.

He was smart, had good grades. He got into the University of Cincinnati, a great school. One day at UC he ran out

of pills. A fellow student who was living in the same dorm room offered him something else. He said: It is cheaper; it is called heroin.

He tried it. Soon, he had sold virtually everything he owned to buy more. Finally, with the help of Glenbeigh treatment center in Cleveland, OH, Aaron got clean and has stayed that way for more than a decade. Aaron is now a successful manager of business development at American Express.

We can have a lot more success stories like Aaron's if we all engage--all of us. Washington, DC, is not going to solve this problem. It will be solved in our communities. It is going to be solved in our families. It is going to be solved in our hearts.

Washington, DC, can play a more constructive role. In passing this legislation, it makes sense to give people the tools they need to be able to fight this scourge. The role is put the right policies in place, like the STOP Act, like fully funding treatment, like fully funding CARA in the coming months. We can then bring down the demand for these dangerous drugs, and we can keep these poisons from coming into our communities and build on the progress that Congress has made over the past year. Let's not let up until we finally turn the tide of this epidemic and begin to save lives.

I yield back.

Mr. President, today I wish to pay tribute to the life of a famous Ohioan, Dr. Henry Heimlich.

The son of Jewish immigrants who fled Central and Eastern Europe for a better life in America, Henry Judah Heimlich spent his life helping others.

As a 21-year-old medical student, he was riding a train from Connecticut to New York City when the train derailed. Henry rescued one of his fellow passengers that day. That was the first of the many lives he would save.

By 23, he had his medical degree. Two years later, he left his internship at Boston City Hospital to serve in the Navy during World War II. He was sent to treat American Marines and Chinese soldiers in the Gobi desert of Inner Mongolia, behind Japanese lines. In those rugged conditions, he came up with a new solution to help there hundreds of people there who had a certain bacterial infection that caused blindness.

In 1957, after sketching the idea on the back of a napkin, he became the first American doctor to repair a damaged esophagus using a tube made from the patient's stomach. A year later, it became a standard procedure in the United States.

In 1964, based on those experiences during World War II operating without electricity in the Gobi desert, he invented the Heimlich chest drain valve, which drained blood and air out of the chest to help those with gunshot wounds or collapsed lungs. It all started with a toy noisemaker he found at a dime store. He noticed that the toy had a flutter valve, which he realized could be used as a model for a valve to prevent fluids from flowing back into the lungs.

This invention was immediately used to save the lives of American soldiers serving in Vietnam, and more than 4 million of these valves have sold since then.

In 1968, Dr. Heimlich moved to my hometown of Cincinnati and became surgery director of Jewish Hospital and professor of surgery at the University of Cincinnati. He taught at UC until 1978, when he became a professor of advanced clinical science at Cincinnati's Xavier University. He taught at Xavier until 1989.

In 1974, he became famous around the world for finding a better way to save someone from choking.

At that time, some 4,000 Americans were dying every year from choking, and it was one of the leading causes of accidental death. Many of those victims were kids who choked on small toys.

With a great feeling of compassion for them, Dr. Heimlich set out to find a solution. Whatever it was, it would have to be a quick and efficient solution because, within just 4 minutes of being deprived of oxygen, the brain becomes irreversibly damaged.

Dr. Heimlich thought that the conventional techniques used at that time were not just ineffective but actually harmful because they risked pushing the blockage farther down the windpipe, making the problem worse.

At Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, Dr. Heimlich led 2 years of research that discovered a new, more effective technique of dislodging objects from the esophagus: putting pressure just below the diaphragm to create upward air pressure in the chest. Just days after it was made public, a restaurant owner in Washington State used it to save someone's life.

It was simple and easy--so simple that, within a few years, a 5-year- old boy in Massachusetts used it to save one of his friends. You can even use it on yourself if necessary.

As Dr. Heimlich put it, ``the best thing about it is that it allows anyone to use it to save a life.'' Everyone can and should learn this technique.

Letters began pouring in. Within a year, Dr. Heimlich received some 200 from people around the country who had successfully used the Heimlich maneuver to save a life and the American Medical Association had endorsed it. Within 2 years, the American Red Cross recommended it.

The Heimlich maneuver is estimated by some to have saved as many as 50,000 or even 100,000 lives just in America--not to mention countless others around the world.

To put a face to these numbers, consider that the Heimlich maneuver has saved the lives of future-President Ronald Reagan in 1976. It has saved the lives of New York City Mayor Ed Koch, basketball commentator Dick Vitale, news anchorman John Chancellor, television personality Simon Cowell, as well as actors Walter Matthau, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich, Carrie Fisher, Goldie Hawn, Nicole Kidman, and Halle Berry, and so many other people who have touched our lives. The maneuver has been used by Cincinnati Reds third basemen Todd Frazier, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David, and an 83-year-old Clint Eastwood.

We have all benefited from this innovative technique.

This discovery, I think, really sums up Dr. Heimlich's life, because he used to say that his focus was to find ``simple, creative solutions to seemingly insurmountable health and medical problems.'' Time and again, he did just that, authoring more than 100 scientific papers and presenting more than 250 medical lectures over his lifetime.

In 1980, he invented the MicroTrach, a more efficient portable oxygen system that, because of its smaller size, gave patients more mobility. In 1981, Dr. Heimlich received the ``Distinguished Service Award'' from his colleagues with the American Society of Abdominal Surgeons, and he received the 1984 ``Arthur Lasker Award for Public Service'' for his ``simple, practical, cost-free solution to a life-threatening emergency, requiring neither great strength, [nor] special equipment [n]or elaborate training.''

In 1985, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop declared that the Heimlich maneuver was the best method to be used when someone is choking. From 1986 to 2005, the American Red Cross and the American Heart Association issued the same recommendation.

Dr. Heimlich's medical career lasted some 70 years. In his final years, he remained active, swimming and exercising regularly. Living at a retirement home run by Episcopal Retirement Services in Cincinnati, he saved the life of an 87-year-old fellow resident named Patty Ris this past May using his famous maneuver.

Dr. Heimlich passed away on December 17 at age 96 at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati. He was married to his wonderful wife, Jane, for 61 years, and he is survived by his four children and three grandchildren.

His son Phil is a good friend of mine and a former Cincinnati city councilman and Hamilton County commissioner.

Jane and I send our condolences to our friends in the Heimlich family. We are grateful for Dr. Heimlich's work and for his life. We will miss him, but even in his absence, his ideas will live on and continue to save lives.

Thank you.

Mr. President, I rise today during Human Trafficking Awareness Week to talk about the scourge of human trafficking, and, specifically, about an investigation that the Senate has just concluded that matters to every single State represented in this Chamber and to every American.

We are told now that human trafficking, including sex trafficking, is a $150 billion a year industry. That makes it the second largest criminal enterprise in the world, behind the drug trade. Unfortunately, it is happening in all of our States, including my home State of Ohio. It is growing as a problem.

A couple of weeks ago, two people were arrested in my home town of Cincinnati in connection with sex trafficking. Police charged a women with luring an underage girl to commit a sex act with a 56-year-old man.

That was just 2 weeks after police in Blue Ash, OH, just up the road, broke up what they said was a sex trafficking ring at a hotel. Police said that two men and two women rented two rooms at a hotel, paying cash, and forced four different women to perform sex acts. The women were given crack cocaine and heroin, presumably to keep them dependent on their traffickers.

This is what I am hearing back home a lot when I talk to victims of sex trafficking. Typically, drugs are involved. In Ohio, it is usually heroin. These cases are alarming, and, unfortunately, we have reasons to believe that the problem is getting worse not better. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, really, the expert on this issue, particularly of kids who get involved in sex trafficking, reports an 846-percent increase in reports of suspected child sex trafficking from 2010 to 2015. That is an over 800-percent increase just in those 5 years.

The organization found this spike to be ``directly correlated to the increased use of the Internet to sell children for sex.'' So it is kind of the dark side of the Internet, isn't it. What I am told sometimes by survivors of trafficking is that they say: Rob, this has moved from the street corner to the cell phone. There is widespread evidence that sex trafficking is increasingly doing that all over our country.

In order to confront this problem, as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, along with my colleague and ranking member Senator Claire McCaskill, I opened a bipartisan investigation into sex traffickers and their use of the Internet. This investigation began about 2 years ago. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children says that nearly three-quarters--73 percent--of all suspected child sex trafficking reports it receives from the general public through its cyber tip line are linked to one Web site--a single Web site. That Web site is called Backpage.com.

According to a leading anti-trafficking organization called Shared Hope International, ``[s]ervice providers working with child sex trafficking victims have reported that between 80 and 100 percent of their clients have been bought and sold on Backpage.com.'' Eighty to 100 percent of their clients have been bought and sold on Backpage.com.

Again, that is consistent with everything I have heard when I have been back home and spoken to and met with sex trafficking survivors. Backpage now operates in 97 countries, 934 cities worldwide. It is valued at well over half a billion dollars. According to an industry analysis, in 2013, 8 out of every 10 dollars spent on online commercial sex trafficking in the United States went to this one Web site, Backpage.

Others, by the way, have chosen not to engage in this. There have been a number of cases around the country, including in Ohio, where Backpage.com was used by traffickers to sell underage girls for sex.

Last spring, in my own State of Ohio, a man, who by the way has nine children of his own, was sentenced to 12 years in Federal prison for trafficking four underage girls who had run away from home in Akron and Canton, OH. He kept them locked in a hotel, supplied them with drugs like marijuana, heroin, and ecstasy, and sold them for sex on Backpage.com. When he was arrested, by the way, he was found with more than 8,000 bags of heroin.

Just this week, or a week later after that, a man from Fort Wayne, IN, was charged with human trafficking and child prostitution after he was arrested on his way to Ohio. His intention, police say, was to traffic a 14-year-old girl whom he had met on Facebook, raped, and whom he planned to sell on Backpage.com.

Backpage says it leads the industry in its screening of advertisements for illegal activity. In fact, Backpage's top lawyer has described their screening process as the key tool for disrupting and eventually ending human trafficking via the World Wide Web.

But despite these boasts, this Web site and its owners consistently have refused to cooperate with our investigation, with other investigations relating to lawsuits around the country. With regard to our situation, we subpoenaed them for the documents, and they still refused to provide the documents or to testify. As a result, as my colleagues will remember, this body, the Senate, for the first time in over 20 years, voted unanimously to pass a civil contempt citation to require them to supply the documents, to come forward with this information.

In August a Federal court order rejected Backpage's objection to that subpoena and compelled the company to turn over the subpoenaed documents to the subcommittee. Backpage appealed that and asked for a delay in that order. They took it all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States. But their request was rejected. Since then, the subcommittee has been able to review the documents that have been submitted--over 1 million documents--including emails and other internal documents.

What we found was very troubling, to say the least. After reviewing the documents, the subcommittee published a staff report on Monday of this week that conclusively shows that Backpage has been more deeply complicit in online underage sex trafficking than anyone imagined. We reached three principle findings: first, that Backpage has knowingly covered up evidence of criminal activity by systematically editing its so-called adult ads; second, that Backpage knows that it facilitates prostitution and even child sex trafficking; and third, that despite the reported sale of Backpage to an undisclosed foreign company in 2014, taking them outside of the United States, the true owners of the company are the founders--James Larkin, Michael Lacey, and Carl Ferrer, their chief executive officer.

First, on the editing of ads, our report shows that Backpage has knowingly covered up evidence of crimes by systematically deleting words and images suggestive of illegal conduct, including of child sex trafficking. That editing process sanitized the content of millions of advertisements in order to hide important evidence from law enforcement.

In 2006, Backpage executives instructed staff to edit the text of adult ads, not to take them down but to edit them, which is exactly how they facilitated this type of trafficking, including child sex trafficking. By October 2010, Backpage executives had a formal process in place of both manual and automated deletion of incriminating words and phrases in ads.

Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer personally directed his employees to create an electronic filter to delete hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking or prostitution from ads before they were published.

Again, this filter did not reject the ads because of the obvious illegal activity. They only edited the ads to try to cover it up. The filter did not change what was advertised, only the way it was advertised. So Backpage did nothing to try to stop this criminal activity. They facilitated it knowingly.

Why did they do that? Backpage executives were afraid they would erode their profits. It is a very profitable business. In Ferrer's words, they were

afraid they would ``piss off a lot'' of customers. What terms did they delete? Beginning in 2010, Backpage automatically deleted words including ``lolita''--referencing a 12-year-old girl in a book who was sold for sex--``teenage,'' ``rape,'' ``young,'' ``little girl,'' ``teen,'' ``fresh,'' ``innocent,'' ``school girl,'' and even ``amber alert''--and then published the edited versions of the ads on their Web site. Backpage also systematically deleted dozens of words related to prostitution.

This filter made these deletions before anyone at Backpage even looked at the ad. When law enforcement officials asked for more information about the suspicious ads, as they have routinely done, Backpage had already destroyed the original ad posted by the trafficker, and the evidence was gone.

So this notion that they were trying to help law enforcement is in the face of the fact that they actually destroyed the ads that had the evidence. We will never know for sure how many girls and women were victimized as a result. By Backpage's own estimate, the company was editing 70 to 80 percent of the ads in the adult section by late 2010.

Based on our best estimate, that means Backpage was editing more than half a million ads every year. Internal emails indicate the company was using the filter to some extent as late as 2014. We simply don't know if they are still using a filter. Eventually, Backpage reprogrammed its filters to reject some ads that contained certain egregious words suggestive of sex trafficking.

But the company did this by coaching its customers on how to post clean ads to help facilitate the criminal conduct of these traffickers. So they did reject some ads, but then they went back to the customer to say: This is how you could do it better. For example, starting in 2012, a user advertising sex with a teen would get this error message: ``Sorry, `teen' is a banned term.''

With a one-word change to the ad, the user would be permitted to post the same ad, the same offer. In October 2011, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer directed his technology consultant to create an error message when a user entered an age under 18 years old. Just like the word filter, the customer could just enter a new age that the ad would then post.

With regard to ownership, our investigation revealed that acting through a serious of domestic and international shell companies, Backpage's founders lent their CEO, Carl Ferrer, more than $600 million to buy the Web site. While Ferrer is the owner of Backpage, Backpage's previous owners retain near total debt equity in the company and continue to reap Backpage's profits in the form of their loan repayments.

They can also exercise control over Backpage's operations and financial affairs pursuant to the loans and to other agreements. The elaborate corporate structure under which Ferrer purchased Backpage through a series of foreign entities appears to provide absolutely no tax benefit--based on their accountant's information to us--and serves only to obscure Ferrer's U.S.-based ownership.

Based on all of these findings, it is clear that Backpage actively and knowingly covered up criminal sexual activity--sex trafficking-- that was taking place on its Web site, all in order to increase its profits at the expense of the most vulnerable among us.

Backpage has not denied a word of these findings. Instead, several hours after our report was issued, the company closed what they call their adult section. They closed it down. Frankly, this just validates our findings.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said this about Backpage's closure of its adult site: ``As a result [of this closure], a child is now less likely to be sold for sex on Backpage.com.''

No one is interested in shutting down legitimate commercial activity and speech, but we do want to put a stop to criminal activity.

I want to thank Senator McCaskill and her staff for their shoulder- to-shoulder work with my team on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on this bipartisan investigation. I am also grateful to the members of the full committee and the Senate as a whole for unanimously supporting us as we pursued the enforcement of this subpoena against Backpage.com.

But we are not done. In the weeks and months ahead, I intend to explore whether potential legislative remedies are necessary and appropriate to end this type of facilitation of online sex trafficking.

At a hearing on the report on Tuesday, Backpage CEO and other company officials pled the Fifth Amendment, invoking the right against self- incrimination, rather than respond to questions about the report's findings.

The subcommittee also heard powerful testimony from parents whose children had been trafficked on Backpage.com. One mother talked about seeing her missing daughter's photograph on Backpage.com, frantically calling the company to tell them that was her daughter and to please take down the ad.

Their response: Did you post the ad?

Her response: Of course I didn't post the ad. That is my daughter. Please take it down.

Their response: We can only take it down if you paid for the ad.

I urge my colleagues to join me in this effort to ensure that does not happen again. What happens to these kids is not just tragic; it is evil.

I urge my colleagues to join me in reforming our laws so they work better to protect these children.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, our amendment was about ensuring that the second step in improving the health care system for our constituents was done in a thoughtful way. We now have assurances from leadership that certainly is their intent and that this date is not a date that is set in stone. In fact, it is the earliest we could do it, but it could take longer. We believe that it might.

With that, we would like to withdraw the amendment, with assurances that we will have this time to be able to put together something that will, in fact, ensure that our constituents can better deal with the broken health care system.

Mr. President, I enjoyed listening to the comments of my colleague from Utah about the Affordable Care Act, and I wanted to expand on that a little if I could. I know we are having a discussion right now about whether to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, and we are focused a lot on what the timeframe might be and what the replacement might be, which is appropriate, but we also have to remind ourselves as to how we got here.

We got here because the Affordable Care Act has not met its promises and has let down the people of Ohio and people around the country. Millions of these families have already had a tough time experiencing really a middle-class squeeze of flat wages, even declining wages, on average, over the last decade or so, and now higher costs. That squeeze is accelerated by the cost of health care which has gone up dramatically.

In my own State of Ohio, the Ohio Department of Insurance has reported a 91-percent increase in the individual market in Ohio in the last 6 years, an 80-percent increase for small businesses that are purchasing Affordable Care Act-compliant plans. This is since the Affordable Care Act went into effect. Think about that. There has been almost a doubling of health care premium costs. Who can afford that? People certainly can't afford that as their wages are flat or even declining.

According to the Kaiser Family Health Foundation, average family premiums since the Affordable Care Act was put into place have increased by more than $4,700. Recall that one of the promises of the Affordable Care Act was that costs would go down, on average, $2,500 per family. Exactly the opposite has happened. In fact, there has been an almost doubling, with a $4,700 increase. I don't think families got that kind of pay increase to be able to afford that. They certainly haven't in Ohio.

So this is a huge problem. To make matters worse, we think these cost increases are continuing to escalate in our State and around the country. In Ohio, premiums grew this year in 2017--on average, 13 percent higher than in 2016. So there have been double-digit increases in 1 year. With two plans in particular, premiums went up by 39 percent in Ohio. So for some families it was much worse than that. We have had good leadership in Ohio with Governor Kasich and Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, who is also the insurance commissioner in our State, and because of that we have done a better job of trying to control these costs, but in many parts of the country, the situation is getting even worse.

Nationally, premiums are increasing by 25 percent just this year. In Arizona, they are doubling. In Tennessee, they are rising 63 percent. In Pennsylvania, right next door to Ohio, they are rising 32 percent. I can go on and on. I am sure North Dakota has had similar problems, as the Presiding Officer can tell us about. Some people might be able to afford these higher premiums, but I think we just can't afford it.

I heard Senator Hatch talk about having to make a choice between paying your rent or being able to pay your premium. That is what I hear in Ohio as I talk to people who are struggling and are now being hit with these huge expenses. Unless we take action, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

The Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan group in Congress, and also the Joint Committee on Taxation projected that unless we do something to change the status quo, premiums will continue to skyrocket. They say they will grow by at least 5 percent per year over the next decade. By the way, that is far faster than they assume wages are going to grow so the squeeze will continue.

The law was advertised as something that would ``bend the cost curve,'' meaning we would begin to see a reduction in the costs of health care, but health care costs have gone up, not down, and on top of that, American people had to pay hundreds of billions of dollars every year in taxes for this new law. There are 19 tax increases in the Affordable Care Act. Some of these, like the Cadillac tax, are very unpopular, even among Democrats and Republicans. So we are hoping we can deal

with that with any kind of repeal effort immediately.

Another goal of this law, we were supposed to be increasing access to health care. Let's talk about that for a second. We heard different things on the floor about that. About 6 million people lost health insurance they liked as a direct result of this law going into effect. About 6 million Americans were told their coverage is no longer adequate because it didn't meet the mandates so they will lose their coverage. President Obama told the American people, I am told, 37 different times that if they liked their doctor, they could keep their doctor. Of course, that turned out not to be true. When you lose your health care plan and lose your doctor, you don't feel like those promises have been kept.

The outside fact checker called PolitiFact rated that as the Lie of the Year for 2013. That is the outside group that looks at what we elected officials say is going to happen and then compares it to what actually happens. By the way, it still is not true. One in five ObamaCare customers were forced to find a new insurance company for this year.

So the Congressional Budget Office that I mentioned and the Joint Committee on Taxation, these nonpartisan groups, now project that 27 million Americans are still uninsured today. Under the status quo, if we don't take action, they say that will be the case for the next decade. So this notion that everybody is going to get covered just hasn't happened. By the way, that is about 1 in 10 people in our workforce, even after hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars have been spent on the Affordable Care Act, including these 19 new tax increases.

A lot of people have told me: Rob, I have health insurance, but I really don't because my deductible is so high. So, forgetting the premiums for a second, to pay for health care, just the annual deductible has gone out of sight. There are some plans where a deductible for a family might be $8, $9, $10,000 a year. That is not really health care because you end up paying all that money out of pocket. The average deductible for a midlevel plan for ObamaCare, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, went up to $2,500 the year before last, 2015, to more than $3,000 last year, an increase of about 25 percent in just 1 year. You see that in increases in deductibles and copays, not just in the premiums.

National insurers have lost billions of dollars on the Affordable Care Act exchanges, and a lot of them pulled their plans from the States. This is a real problem because if you don't have competition or choice out there, you will not get the costs down. I see in my own State of Ohio we lost one-third of the companies on the exchanges just this year. We have gone from 17 companies offering insurance on the exchanges in 2016, last year, to this year having just 11--so 17 companies going down to 11 companies. We now have 20 of our counties-- there are 88 counties in Ohio--20 of our counties have only 1 insurer. This is also true nationally. About one-third of the counties around the United States only have one insurer. Again, this leads to higher costs, less choice, less competition. Quality also goes down because you don't have competition for the beneficiaries. It also affects the issue of premiums going up, deductibles going up, copays going up, and the middle-class squeezed.

So the President's health care law certainly failed at its own goals that were laid out in the promises that were made. It was supposed to create jobs, too, which is a different issue. What is the economic effect of this? Having more people covered is a good thing. We all want that. But what is the economic impact on the way the Affordable Care Act was put into place? We are looking at the weakest recovery in the history of our country from a recession still. Unfortunately, we haven't seen the strong economic growth we hoped for and had anticipated after a deep recession. Some of the reason for that, in my view, is health care. Health care costs went up dramatically. People are paying a lot more for health care, not being able to get ahead, small businesses having higher and higher costs.

If you look at the latest jobs report, it is interesting. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that 5.7 million Americans now are stuck in part-time work who want full-time work. These are people who are looking for a full-time job but only have a part-time job. Why is that? The economy is not working as it should. It is not generating enough growth to create job opportunities full-time, but it is also because of these mandates under the Affordable Care Act. I can tell you, economists may differ on the impact of this, but go talk to people about it.

I was in Chillicothe, OH, and someone came up to me and asked: Can you help me; because my employer is saying I can only work 28 hours a week. I figured out what it was about. She was a fast-food employee. I asked her: What did they say? And she said it was because of health care. What does that mean? It means that under ObamaCare, if you work under 30 hours a week, you are not covered by the mandates and the new costs, so some employers are going to say we are keeping you under 30 hours a week. That has led to more part-time work.

In this particular case, the woman said: I have to find another part- time job and I have kids at home and this is tough. And I said: Well, the answer to this, in part, is to change the health care law; that is, to take out some of the mandates and requirements and make it more pro- growth and pro-job rather than the current situation.

There are tens of thousands of new pages of regulations in this new law. It forces small businesses--and I am a small business person. I can tell you that I have burned a lot of time and effort to try to figure it out. You can go to consultants and pay them a bunch of money, and they will tell you they are not sure what it means either. This is one of the big issues that doesn't get talked about much with the Affordable Care Act; that it is really hard for businesses to figure out what they are supposed to do, particularly small businesses that don't have that kind of expertise inhouse. Those costs could go toward having more employees, they could go into reinvesting in business, plants and equipment, but they are going into trying to figure this thing out.

I don't doubt the good intentions of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who support this legislation. We all want to see more coverage and see health care costs go down, but that is not what is happening.

Before the Affordable Care Act went into effect, the CBO estimated that 26 million Americans would be enrolled in a plan in 2016. That is what they estimated. The Congressional Budget Office said 26 million would be enrolled in a plan in 2016. The actual number was 12.7 million, less than half. So, again, it hasn't met its own promises and projections.

The co-ops are another failure. There was a debate on the floor just before I got elected about should there be a public option so everybody would have an option to get into an exchange. We said let's put together these co-ops. They will be nonprofit. They will work great. We will set up co-ops around the country. There were 23 co-ops set up, including 1 in Ohio. We now see that 15 of the 23 co-ops have gone insolvent.

I will tell you that last spring, when 22,000 Ohioans lost their health care because the co-op went belly up, it was tough because they had to scramble and find a new health care plan quickly. More than 860,000 Americans--people who were encouraged by this law to sign up for these co-op plans--had to scramble to find new coverage because of a failed co-op. It is tough on these families.

It is also tough on the taxpayer. We did an investigation of this under the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and we looked at what was happening to these families and we also looked at what was happening to the taxpayer. At that time, when only about half of the co-ops had gone under, rather than two-thirds, $1.2 billion of taxpayer money had already been spent on these co-ops. That money isn't coming back to the Treasury, meaning this is money that will probably never be repaid. Again, part of the problem with our deficit is that ObamaCare and the Affordable Care Act is so expensive, and the co-ops in particular just wasted money. Among the surviving co-ops, 3 have not yet enrolled 25,000 members. In other words, they are not enrolling enough members even if they are surviving. So the nonpartisan Government Accountability

Office, GAO, issued a report in March which confirmed the results of our investigation, and it indicates that this money, the $1.2 billion, has now increased substantially because more of the co-ops have gone under.

Many of those 22,000 Ohio families who were in the co-op had already paid deductibles in the plans they thought they could count on. Think about it. They paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in health care costs to get up to their deductible, and then all of a sudden they found out that they had to go to a new plan and they had to start all over again. So it is adding insult to injury. They lost their plan and they had to scramble to find one and then they found out they have all these out-of-pocket expenses again because although they met their deductible under the old plan, they have to start again in the new plan. This is not the way it ought to be. It is just not fair. These families did nothing wrong. All they did was what they were told to do, to sign up for these co-ops.

I think these are just symptoms of the problem. The diagnosis is clear. The Affordable Care Act is a bad law, bad economics, and bad health care policy. It hasn't worked. I think it is difficult to make the other argument. The President's health care law hasn't worked, not because it didn't have good intentions but because it tried to achieve those good intentions by forcing millions of people to buy a product they didn't want after losing a product they did want, including a $2 billion taxpayer-funded Web site that didn't work. If you recall, they had problems with the Affordable Care Act Web site and unfortunately potentially exposed a lot of personal information of many of these individuals to hackers.

As I talked about, even those who have insurance often have limited access to providers because the deductible is so high that they can't afford their health care.

With higher costs and fewer choices, the American people, by and large, are dissatisfied with the plan, the Affordable Care Act, just as they were when it was enacted. A CBS poll last month has shown that more people disapprove of the law then approve of it. A Gallup poll in November found that 8 in 10 Americans want the law repealed or significantly changed--8 in 10 Americans. Why? Because they have seen it.

By the way, most Americans were not in the exchanges, but they still felt it. Think about this. When a company is involved in the exchanges and losing money, and many of these companies are losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year, what they are doing is they are cost- shifting onto private plans, onto employer-based plans, and raising the costs for other Americans. This is part of the reason health care costs have gone up generally, not just in the exchanges but overall.

I have certainly seen this firsthand in Ohio. Constituents have been contacting me for the last 6 years to tell me how this health care law has affected them. There is a father of five who wrote to me after the cost of the family's insurance doubled. Another man saw his $100 deductible soar to $4,000 while his premiums hit $1,000 a month.

I still remember the letter I received from Dean from Sandusky. He lost his job in 2009 as so many other Americans did during the recession. Because he lost his job, he had to go on the individual market to buy health insurance. He picked out a plan that worked for him and his family. He liked it and he bought it. Once the President's health care law went into effect, that plan was discontinued because it didn't meet the mandates and requirements of the new law. He found himself high and dry. He, too, had to buy another plan that was twice as expensive, and it cost him more than half of his pension--because that is his income. It is his pension. So not only did he lose his job, but then he was saddled with a plan he couldn't afford and a much more expensive cost of living. He didn't do anything wrong, but because of a failed, mistaken approach that Congress took to health care reform, he has now had to struggle to make ends meet.

Susan from Batavia also wrote to me. She is a single mom. She lost the plan she liked because of the President's health care plan. She wrote and said: I stay in shape. I watch my diet. I exercise regularly. I do all the right things. I had a high-deductible, low-cost plan, but under the President's new health care law, I had to change my plan.

Her coverage, by the way, was for double the price of the premium. A single mom; tough to afford it.

Another, Susan from Columbus, OH, wrote to me and told me that she works for a small business of 12 employees. When the health care law went into effect, their rates went up nearly 30 percent in 1 year. Small businesses and new businesses cannot afford that. I cannot tell you how many small businesses I have been to where I asked them: What have your premiums done over the last several years, and they tell me: Double digit, Rob. Double digit. If we get an increase in the low double digit, that is a good thing. Again, there is no place for that to come from except for wages and benefits and cutting back on employees--in some cases, again, not expanding a plan that they otherwise would have because of this health care law.

It doesn't have to be this way. We can enact real health care reform that uses the market forces that help to increase competition, that requires insurance companies to compete for our business, that allows people to get the plan they want, looking all around the country for what works best for them. This burdensome health care law is standing in the way of real reforms right now. It is hurting families in Ohio and across the country.

The health care market was far from perfect before this law so I am not arguing that the status quo is acceptable. I think we have to do things not just to repeal ObamaCare but to replace the Affordable Care Act with reforms that make better sense. We had issues before, but it has gone to worse, not better. It accelerated the problems.

I hope that over the next couple of months, as we talk about this, we will be able to come up with a replacement plan that makes sense. Republicans and Democrats alike need to come to the table on this because, again, I have listed today all the reasons the current law is not working. The status quo is not acceptable. I think it is very hard to argue that it is. That means all of us have a responsibility to say: OK. How do we fix this? How do we come together, Republicans and Democrats alike--not on a partisan basis as was done last time--to figure out a way to do it together? We need to come together to make sure the people we represent have the chance to get the health care they want for them and their families, that fits them, where they can have costs that are affordable, where they can have quality health care that is good for them and their families, where it can be patient- centered, and we can give people the affordable care they deserve.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.