Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleague from Rhode Island to talk a little bit about a very important piece of legislation we are introducing. It is called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2014. I think it is fair to say that Senator Whitehouse from Rhode Island and I do not agree on everything in this body that comes up--all the policy issues. But on this one we agree that it is necessary to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to deal with this heroin epidemic that is sweeping across our country.

He has been an unwavering ally in trying to find common ground on this legislation. I appreciate him. Again, I think this is an area where we can find common ground on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Capitol to move legislation forward that can help to deal with this growing issue in our States.

I do not think we can afford to wait. Every day, unfortunately, the number of people who die from heroin overdoses grows. Every day more mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters are lost to this horrible scourge. By the time this year is out, I am told that more than 19,000 Ohioans will have overdosed on heroin or other opiates. The deaths from heroin overdoses this year will be the No. 1 cause of death in the State of Ohio, exceeding traffic accidents.

Elected officials around the country, medical professionals, and grass roots volunteers are dealing with this issue. They are fighting back. They are doing everything in their power to try to save lives and to try to stem this epidemic. But they need help. The challenge we all face is serious. To address it we need a comprehensive effort, marshaling the resources of communities, grass roots organizations, local, State, and, yes, the Federal Government. That is where we come in here, in the Congress.

I think only together can we make progress here and prevent new victims from falling into the grips of addiction. Only together can we help those who are already struggling with heroin to rebuild their lives. I think this bipartisan legislation we have introduced today is the important first step in that. It lays out a broad spectrum response to the epidemic of heroin and opiate addiction.

It starts with prevention and education. Why? Because we know that approach can work. Obviously, it is the most effective way to deal with this, to keep you from getting into the addiction in the first place. Nearly 20 years ago I joined with leaders around southwest Ohio to form what is called the Coalition for a Drug Free Greater Cincinnati. I was here in the Congress on the House side. A constituent came to me and said her son had just died from an overdose of smoking marijuana and huffing gasoline. I was ready for her. I had all the statistics as to what we were doing at the Federal level in terms of eradicating crops in places like Colombia, interdicting drugs, prosecuting people, trying to stop the flow of drugs into this country.

She kind of looked at me and said: How is that going to help me and my community? How would that have helped my kid? How does that help me deal with our church, where people are in denial and will not even talk about it, or our school, where the principal said: It is not a problem here.

So we came up with this notion of these community coalitions. There were a few around the country, and they seemed to be working. Ours in greater Cincinnati has worked well. It is still working well. By working together with grass roots organizations across the spectrum-- teachers and parents, law enforcement, religious leaders, the media, business--we pulled together a group. That coalition led to this greater effort that we started in the House, and there is legislation that I authored called the Drug-Free Communities Act, which has now provided funding, by the way, and therefore helped to create thousands of other community coalitions. It has provided funding to over 2,000 community coalitions around the country. There are now about 5,000, I think, around the country. Those have worked. But they are not adequate to deal with this heroin epidemic.

But we start there. We start with this notion that there is a way, through a grass roots program, for more focus on prevention and education to be able to help stem this growing problem; that is, stopping addiction before it even starts. That, of course, again, is the most effective way. It saves money, saves lives. We also, though, have to do more to incentivize new innovative treatment programs for those who have become addicted to try to break the cycle and break the addiction.

We do that in this legislation by encouraging diversion programs like drug courts that provide treatment alternatives to incarceration. We do it by funding evidence-based heroin treatment pilot programs. There are some exciting new medications out there that we think are worth a try, including some new medications that actually block the urge, the craving. We are funding evidence-based treatment programs, but at the same time encouraging the use of emergency medications to stop overdoses.

This is something we have seen in all of our States. It expands the availability of Naloxone, which is an overdose inhibitor that the law enforcement agencies and other first responders have access to in order to be able to keep people not from overdosing--which is happening--but from dying from that overdose.

We know that there have been many lives saved, even over the last couple of years through the use of that medication. We offer more resources to promptly identify and treat incarcerated individuals suffering from addiction disorders by collaborating with criminal justice stakeholders and, again, providing evidence-based treatment. This revolving door in the criminal justice system of people who are drug users getting into prison, getting out again--and within 2 or 3 years over two-thirds of them are back in the system--we are all paying for that. The communities are paying for it with increased crime. The families are paying for it. The taxpayers are also paying for it-- $25,000, $30,000 a year for incarcerating individuals, who, if you can get them into a drug treatment program, in part through these drug courts, in part through other programs that are proven to work, they can then not just get over their addiction and not be committing crimes but become productive citizens and taxpayers themselves.

We have seen this lap around the country. We have to be encouraging that and supporting that at the Federal level. I saw a model of this kind of approach when I visited the CompDrug treatment center recently in Columbus, OH. I met with several nurses and

counselors who are there on the front lines in the battle against addiction. They used medication-assisted treatment, but they also use a lot of counseling to help men and women get on this path to recovery. So it is not just the medication, but it has to be a more comprehensive plan. They do this in both a public health capacity but also in connection with a prisoner reentry program.

So, again, it is people coming out of the criminal justice system who have a history of addiction and to get them into this program so they can get not just the treatment they need to get over their addiction but the job training they also need to be able to get back into the workforce to become productive citizens.

We do not stop here in this legislation. If there is one thing I have learned over the last couple of decades working in this area, it is that the best solutions on this are not going to come from Washington. They are going to be developed at the grass roots, on the ground.

What we can do is support those efforts on the ground and provide States with more flexibility to be able to use these resources that are already coming from Washington, so our legislation does that as well.

Our bill offers States that are proactive at enacting proven policies the ability to benefit from support under State incentive grants. These grants will reward States such as Ohio that are improving access to drug-abuse services for specific at-risk individuals and that are working to reach 100-percent compliance with programs such as the prescription drug monitoring program that tracks prescription drugs.

Some States such as Ohio--where we have a big prescription drug problem--there is also southern Ohio with adjoining States West Virginia and Kentucky that have this issue and without a sufficient monitoring program. Some people are getting prescription drugs filled in Ohio and then going across the river to Kentucky and getting them filled. There is no way to monitor that without an effective program. We want to encourage all States to adopt this kind of a program so we know who is getting prescription drugs, who needs them and who is abusing the process.

We also talk about this issue in the abstract. I have done that today talking about numbers--19,000 overdoses. But what does that mean? It is a shockingly high number. We sometimes forget that every one of those overdoses represents a person, a family member, someone who has hopes and dreams, someone who at some point made a mistake, and now that mistake threatens those dreams and often devastates their family, as I have seen and I am sure you have seen. Sometimes it can even result in that person's death. As we talk about overdoses this year, it will be the No. 1 cause of death in my State of Ohio.

I want to share a couple stories briefly before I close, people I have met in Ohio, people in communities in my State who are struggling with the weight of addiction.

I recently met a guy about my age. His name is Paul. Paul came to a roundtable discussion and has been engaged in this issue because his son died of a heroin overdose. He was 19 years old. He died of an overdose 2 days after getting out of rehab. Sadly, that is not an uncommon story. People go into rehab to turn their lives around and many are successful, but many aren't. For some of them when they get out, the temptation is too great and unfortunately their body no longer has the tolerance for the drug it once did and sometimes they overdose. His son was one of those.

This man has been in a lot of pain, I could tell. He is still in a lot of pain. But where he has channeled his grief and his pain is helping others to overcome addiction and to bring this discussion out of the dark, to talk about it.

It is not a comfortable topic for a lot of people to talk about, but he has been willing to do it, to talk about his family situation and talk about the fact that every family around the kitchen table ought to be talking about this subject. We ought to be talking about it in the classrooms. We ought to be sure that people understand the incredible risk and danger our young people face today.

Earlier this year I met a young woman named Sarah. Sarah has been struggling to overcome her own addiction. She has been successful, and I applaud her. She told me: Addiction starts in treatment, Rob, but it also happens in the community. You have to have a surrounding that supports you and encourages you.

She is fighting her own battle, but she is also doing something interesting at Ohio State University. She has started a student-led recovery program, kind of a support network among students.

Again, often this is in the shadows. She has been the one to step forward and say: Hey, I have an issue. I am a recovering addict, and I want other recovering addicts to come and join me and feel support so they don't do what Paul's son did.

Then there is Bill. Bill is in recovery from a heroin addiction that he told me used to cost him $2,000 a week at its height. It cost him his freedom too. He ended up in prison. When he got out of prison, he was able to take advantage of some of these programs we talked about today, some of these prisoner re-entry programs and treatment options. Bill turned his life around. Interestingly, he now works at the very corrections facility where he once served.

As he joked with me, he said: I used to be behind bars. Now I hold the keys to the cells and I am spreading a message.

I imagine he is a very credible spokesperson for that message. He is working with inmates to help build relationships and re-entry programs, not just in the prison behind the walls, but also in his community in Canton, OH.

He encourages employers to give people a second chance, to give them a shot. His quote to me was: Don't give them the keys to the safe on the first day, but give them a shot. It worked for me. It can work for others.

This battle against addiction will not be an easy one, we know that, but we also know it is well worth the fight. We have to take the fight.

When we see the number of overdoses drop, and we see statistics showing that fewer kids are using drugs and more people are breaking free of the addiction that once held them, we will know it paid off. It is not only about dollars and cents. Yes, we can save taxpayer money, we can be sure that more people are productively employed, and that our society is more efficient and communities are safer, but ultimately this is about our young people and what kind of future they are going to have.

It is about our children and our grandchildren. Will they have a better shot at their dream, a better shot at getting through school, getting an education, a better shot at getting a decent job and being able to hold it, and a better shot at being able to take care of their own families and having the dignity and self-respect that comes with that? That is ultimately what this legislation is about.

I thank Senator Whitehouse for joining with me to craft this legislation. I also thank Senator Leahy, who I understand has recently agreed to become an original cosponsor of this bill.

I encourage other Members to take a look at it. It is a good way for us to come together as Republicans and Democrats to focus on an issue that is affecting every single State represented in this body.

Sometimes people are in denial about this subject, but the reality is it affects all of us as Americans.

Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleague from Rhode Island to talk a little bit about a very important piece of legislation we are introducing. It is called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2014. I think it is fair to say that Senator Whitehouse from Rhode Island and I do not agree on everything in this body that comes up--all the policy issues. But on this one we agree that it is necessary to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to deal with this heroin epidemic that is sweeping across our country.

He has been an unwavering ally in trying to find common ground on this legislation. I appreciate him. Again, I think this is an area where we can find common ground on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Capitol to move legislation forward that can help to deal with this growing issue in our States.

I do not think we can afford to wait. Every day, unfortunately, the number of people who die from heroin overdoses grows. Every day more mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters are lost to this horrible scourge. By the time this year is out, I am told that more than 19,000 Ohioans will have overdosed on heroin or other opiates. The deaths from heroin overdoses this year will be the No. 1 cause of death in the State of Ohio, exceeding traffic accidents.

Elected officials around the country, medical professionals, and grass roots volunteers are dealing with this issue. They are fighting back. They are doing everything in their power to try to save lives and to try to stem this epidemic. But they need help. The challenge we all face is serious. To address it we need a comprehensive effort, marshaling the resources of communities, grass roots organizations, local, State, and, yes, the Federal Government. That is where we come in here, in the Congress.

I think only together can we make progress here and prevent new victims from falling into the grips of addiction. Only together can we help those who are already struggling with heroin to rebuild their lives. I think this bipartisan legislation we have introduced today is the important first step in that. It lays out a broad spectrum response to the epidemic of heroin and opiate addiction.

It starts with prevention and education. Why? Because we know that approach can work. Obviously, it is the most effective way to deal with this, to keep you from getting into the addiction in the first place. Nearly 20 years ago I joined with leaders around southwest Ohio to form what is called the Coalition for a Drug Free Greater Cincinnati. I was here in the Congress on the House side. A constituent came to me and said her son had just died from an overdose of smoking marijuana and huffing gasoline. I was ready for her. I had all the statistics as to what we were doing at the Federal level in terms of eradicating crops in places like Colombia, interdicting drugs, prosecuting people, trying to stop the flow of drugs into this country.

She kind of looked at me and said: How is that going to help me and my community? How would that have helped my kid? How does that help me deal with our church, where people are in denial and will not even talk about it, or our school, where the principal said: It is not a problem here.

So we came up with this notion of these community coalitions. There were a few around the country, and they seemed to be working. Ours in greater Cincinnati has worked well. It is still working well. By working together with grass roots organizations across the spectrum-- teachers and parents, law enforcement, religious leaders, the media, business--we pulled together a group. That coalition led to this greater effort that we started in the House, and there is legislation that I authored called the Drug-Free Communities Act, which has now provided funding, by the way, and therefore helped to create thousands of other community coalitions. It has provided funding to over 2,000 community coalitions around the country. There are now about 5,000, I think, around the country. Those have worked. But they are not adequate to deal with this heroin epidemic.

But we start there. We start with this notion that there is a way, through a grass roots program, for more focus on prevention and education to be able to help stem this growing problem; that is, stopping addiction before it even starts. That, of course, again, is the most effective way. It saves money, saves lives. We also, though, have to do more to incentivize new innovative treatment programs for those who have become addicted to try to break the cycle and break the addiction.

We do that in this legislation by encouraging diversion programs like drug courts that provide treatment alternatives to incarceration. We do it by funding evidence-based heroin treatment pilot programs. There are some exciting new medications out there that we think are worth a try, including some new medications that actually block the urge, the craving. We are funding evidence-based treatment programs, but at the same time encouraging the use of emergency medications to stop overdoses.

This is something we have seen in all of our States. It expands the availability of Naloxone, which is an overdose inhibitor that the law enforcement agencies and other first responders have access to in order to be able to keep people not from overdosing--which is happening--but from dying from that overdose.

We know that there have been many lives saved, even over the last couple of years through the use of that medication. We offer more resources to promptly identify and treat incarcerated individuals suffering from addiction disorders by collaborating with criminal justice stakeholders and, again, providing evidence-based treatment. This revolving door in the criminal justice system of people who are drug users getting into prison, getting out again--and within 2 or 3 years over two-thirds of them are back in the system--we are all paying for that. The communities are paying for it with increased crime. The families are paying for it. The taxpayers are also paying for it-- $25,000, $30,000 a year for incarcerating individuals, who, if you can get them into a drug treatment program, in part through these drug courts, in part through other programs that are proven to work, they can then not just get over their addiction and not be committing crimes but become productive citizens and taxpayers themselves.

We have seen this lap around the country. We have to be encouraging that and supporting that at the Federal level. I saw a model of this kind of approach when I visited the CompDrug treatment center recently in Columbus, OH. I met with several nurses and

counselors who are there on the front lines in the battle against addiction. They used medication-assisted treatment, but they also use a lot of counseling to help men and women get on this path to recovery. So it is not just the medication, but it has to be a more comprehensive plan. They do this in both a public health capacity but also in connection with a prisoner reentry program.

So, again, it is people coming out of the criminal justice system who have a history of addiction and to get them into this program so they can get not just the treatment they need to get over their addiction but the job training they also need to be able to get back into the workforce to become productive citizens.

We do not stop here in this legislation. If there is one thing I have learned over the last couple of decades working in this area, it is that the best solutions on this are not going to come from Washington. They are going to be developed at the grass roots, on the ground.

What we can do is support those efforts on the ground and provide States with more flexibility to be able to use these resources that are already coming from Washington, so our legislation does that as well.

Our bill offers States that are proactive at enacting proven policies the ability to benefit from support under State incentive grants. These grants will reward States such as Ohio that are improving access to drug-abuse services for specific at-risk individuals and that are working to reach 100-percent compliance with programs such as the prescription drug monitoring program that tracks prescription drugs.

Some States such as Ohio--where we have a big prescription drug problem--there is also southern Ohio with adjoining States West Virginia and Kentucky that have this issue and without a sufficient monitoring program. Some people are getting prescription drugs filled in Ohio and then going across the river to Kentucky and getting them filled. There is no way to monitor that without an effective program. We want to encourage all States to adopt this kind of a program so we know who is getting prescription drugs, who needs them and who is abusing the process.

We also talk about this issue in the abstract. I have done that today talking about numbers--19,000 overdoses. But what does that mean? It is a shockingly high number. We sometimes forget that every one of those overdoses represents a person, a family member, someone who has hopes and dreams, someone who at some point made a mistake, and now that mistake threatens those dreams and often devastates their family, as I have seen and I am sure you have seen. Sometimes it can even result in that person's death. As we talk about overdoses this year, it will be the No. 1 cause of death in my State of Ohio.

I want to share a couple stories briefly before I close, people I have met in Ohio, people in communities in my State who are struggling with the weight of addiction.

I recently met a guy about my age. His name is Paul. Paul came to a roundtable discussion and has been engaged in this issue because his son died of a heroin overdose. He was 19 years old. He died of an overdose 2 days after getting out of rehab. Sadly, that is not an uncommon story. People go into rehab to turn their lives around and many are successful, but many aren't. For some of them when they get out, the temptation is too great and unfortunately their body no longer has the tolerance for the drug it once did and sometimes they overdose. His son was one of those.

This man has been in a lot of pain, I could tell. He is still in a lot of pain. But where he has channeled his grief and his pain is helping others to overcome addiction and to bring this discussion out of the dark, to talk about it.

It is not a comfortable topic for a lot of people to talk about, but he has been willing to do it, to talk about his family situation and talk about the fact that every family around the kitchen table ought to be talking about this subject. We ought to be talking about it in the classrooms. We ought to be sure that people understand the incredible risk and danger our young people face today.

Earlier this year I met a young woman named Sarah. Sarah has been struggling to overcome her own addiction. She has been successful, and I applaud her. She told me: Addiction starts in treatment, Rob, but it also happens in the community. You have to have a surrounding that supports you and encourages you.

She is fighting her own battle, but she is also doing something interesting at Ohio State University. She has started a student-led recovery program, kind of a support network among students.

Again, often this is in the shadows. She has been the one to step forward and say: Hey, I have an issue. I am a recovering addict, and I want other recovering addicts to come and join me and feel support so they don't do what Paul's son did.

Then there is Bill. Bill is in recovery from a heroin addiction that he told me used to cost him $2,000 a week at its height. It cost him his freedom too. He ended up in prison. When he got out of prison, he was able to take advantage of some of these programs we talked about today, some of these prisoner re-entry programs and treatment options. Bill turned his life around. Interestingly, he now works at the very corrections facility where he once served.

As he joked with me, he said: I used to be behind bars. Now I hold the keys to the cells and I am spreading a message.

I imagine he is a very credible spokesperson for that message. He is working with inmates to help build relationships and re-entry programs, not just in the prison behind the walls, but also in his community in Canton, OH.

He encourages employers to give people a second chance, to give them a shot. His quote to me was: Don't give them the keys to the safe on the first day, but give them a shot. It worked for me. It can work for others.

This battle against addiction will not be an easy one, we know that, but we also know it is well worth the fight. We have to take the fight.

When we see the number of overdoses drop, and we see statistics showing that fewer kids are using drugs and more people are breaking free of the addiction that once held them, we will know it paid off. It is not only about dollars and cents. Yes, we can save taxpayer money, we can be sure that more people are productively employed, and that our society is more efficient and communities are safer, but ultimately this is about our young people and what kind of future they are going to have.

It is about our children and our grandchildren. Will they have a better shot at their dream, a better shot at getting through school, getting an education, a better shot at getting a decent job and being able to hold it, and a better shot at being able to take care of their own families and having the dignity and self-respect that comes with that? That is ultimately what this legislation is about.

I thank Senator Whitehouse for joining with me to craft this legislation. I also thank Senator Leahy, who I understand has recently agreed to become an original cosponsor of this bill.

I encourage other Members to take a look at it. It is a good way for us to come together as Republicans and Democrats to focus on an issue that is affecting every single State represented in this body.

Sometimes people are in denial about this subject, but the reality is it affects all of us as Americans.

Mr. President, today I wish to honor the professionals at the Wexner Center for the Arts--the Wexner Center--for 25 years of committed service to The Ohio State University and to the greater central Ohio community. The mission of the Wexner Center is to act ``as a forum where established and emerging artists can test ideas and where diverse audiences can participate in cultural experiences that enhance understanding of the art of our time.'' The exhibits, performances, and educational programs at the Wexner Center achieve this mission and effectively promote the importance of art throughout our Columbus region.

On July 5, 1985, the architectural design by Peter Eisenman and Richard Trott was selected from a competition of six designs and paid homage to the Ohio State Armory, which formerly occupied the space. The Wexner Center opened its doors to the public on November 5, 1989 and over the past quarter century has served as an exhibition space for all types of art.

Today, the Wexner Center features many exhibits and programs each year

and is home to The Ohio State University Fine Arts Library. The center welcomes visiting artists to Ohio State and Columbus from around the world. More than 200,000 people visit the center annually and more than 400,000 patrons utilize the online resources.

The Wexner Center provides the central Ohio community with educational and cultural opportunities for all visitors. I congratulate all who were involved in making its first 25 years a success.

Madam President, I wish to recognize the Bethel Murdoch Presbyterian Church as it celebrates its 200th anniversary. The Bethel Murdoch Presbyterian Church was founded in Warren County, OH, by a small group of faithful and passionate Christians.

In 1814, the Bethel Murdoch Presbyterian Church began when 12 pioneer settlers to Warren County first met in a maple grove to worship. The location of their first meeting spot is the site of the Murdoch Cemetery, where many of the early members are buried. The congregation's current home is a 140-year-

old church building that was built with the financial assistance of James Murdoch, a well-known Shakespearean actor at the time.

On September 14, 2014, the church will be holding a Service of Celebration, during which this small but strong congregation will celebrate the anniversary of the church and all the good that it has brought to the community.

I would like to personally extend my congratulations to the Bethel Murdoch Presbyterian Church on 200 years of faith, service and worship.

Madam President, earlier today the Senate voted to proceed to debate on legislation called the Bring Jobs Home Act. It is about tax reform. It is about the tax system in this country.

I am glad we are having the debate. I voted to proceed to the debate. I think it is important we talk about it.

I had a reporter come to me earlier today who said: I hear that Democrats are going to talk about inversions. That means when a company of the United States goes overseas and buys a company--usually smaller than they are--and then inverts, they become a foreign corporation.

They said: Are you concerned about that?

I said: No. I think that is great. I think we need to talk about it. I think it is a hidden problem that no one is talking about, and I think it is terrific that we are talking about it.

So I hope what will happen over the next week on the floor of the Senate is we will have an honest conversation about what is happening in our great country, where we have more and more American companies saying, because of the Tax Code they are saddled with, they cannot compete around the globe.

So what do they do? Having a responsibility to their shareholders, they go and find either a foreign company to become part of and become foreign--or they make themselves a foreign company by being acquired by a foreign company. Some of them are simply not growing because they can't compete with other companies from other countries that are buying some of their assets.

A company recently came to me from Ohio, my home State, and said: We do work in Korea. We were in South Korea. We wanted to buy this subsidiary there so we could expand what we are doing in Korea and push more of our product there, more of our exports there. We finished the negotiation with the Korean company, and a company from Germany stepped up and said: Do you know what. Whatever you guys have negotiated, we will take it, but we will pay 18 percent more.

The reason the German company could pay 18 percent more is their after-tax profits were higher, because the German tax code treats the German company better than the American Tax Code treats the American company. That is the reality, and it is happening.

Over the last 5 years, they say there have been 35 American companies that have gone overseas through these inversions, but there are also a lot of American companies that have become foreign entities.

I am a beer drinker, and it is hard to find an American company that can sell you a beer these days. Why? Because they are almost all foreign companies. The two largest American beer companies each have about a 1.4-percent market share--Sam Adams and Yuengling. Great beers, by the way. But this is sad to me.

It doesn't mean these companies have all left the United States. A lot of them still have production here, breweries here, and so on. But by headquartering somewhere else for tax purposes we lose something as Americans. We lose executive jobs over time, but we lose this intangible thing--which is, companies that are willing to invest in our communities--in hometowns, like in my hometown, probably everything we are involved with on the charitable side, some local company has been involved with and helped with. A lot of them tend to be international companies that do a lot to help make our cities a better place to live and to work. But they do it partly because it is where their headquarters is. This is where their towns are. If they are not here-- if they are in Dublin, Ireland, or if they are in London, England, or if they are in Beijing or in Rio, Brazil, or somewhere else, they are not going to be making those investments. So this is a big deal.

It is also a big deal because it is not just about the inversion. I see that as kind of the tip of the iceberg. It is also about all these companies that are losing right now in foreign competition because, again, they can't compete. They have to pay more in terms of taxes than their foreign competitors. So their foreign competitors can afford to broaden their market share, get more customers, can afford to buy a company when one comes up for acquisition.

I had a fellow come up recently from the Boston area. Boston does a lot of biopharmaceutical research, as the Presiding Officer knows. It is very exciting what is going on there, and throughout our country. We are still doing top-notch research. They showed me the list of companies that have been purchased in the last 4 or 5 years. Unfortunately, the majority of those companies were purchased by a foreign company. It wasn't by a U.S. company coming in and consolidating. It was by a company under different tax laws--a Swiss company, a French company, a German company, or a Japanese company-- that had bought an American company, the majority of them--by far the majority. This is happening all over the country, and it is happening under our noses.

We are sitting here in Washington, allowing this to happen because we are abdicating our responsibility to reform the Tax Code so that it is competitive.

By the way, we are the only country that is not waking up to this. Every single one of the other developed countries in the world--the countries that are members of what is called the

OECD, which is all the developed countries--every single one of them is reforming their tax code, except us.

In the 1980s, we established the rate we have now, which is 35 now-- then it was 34 percent. When we add the State tax rates for the companies, it is about 39 percent on average in America. We are the highest rate in the world.

So at the time we set our rate in the mid-thirties, that was just below the average. It was done deliberately, and it was done as part of the 1986 tax reform. We said: Let's set the business rate at something below the average so we can be competitive.

But since that time, we have become the highest rate, and every single one of our developed country competitors--all of them--have reformed their tax code and lowered their rate.

But they haven't just lowered their rate to make us No. 1 in the world--which is not a No. 1 you want to be if you want to compete and develop jobs--they have also reformed their tax code to make it more competitive internationally. We haven't done that. We have been bystanders in this effort to attract jobs and investment opportunities.

We still have what is called the worldwide system, where we don't tax income where it is earned. That has created a real problem.

So I am glad we are having this debate on the floor. I am glad there is an opportunity to talk about this. I must say that, unfortunately, the bill before us, the Bring Jobs Home Act, is not going to help because it doesn't get at this underlying problem we have been talking about today. It does nothing about lowering the rate. It does nothing about changing the international system of taxation. It tinkers around the edges with one issue, and that is to remove deductions and tax credits that, according to the authors of the bill, incentivizes companies to move overseas.

There is a group here in Washington called the Joint Committee on Taxation. They are nonpartisan, and they tell us in Congress what tax policy means, how much it costs, and what the effects are going to be. Here is what they say:

Under present law, there are no targeted tax credits or

disallowances of deductions related to relocating business

units inside or outside the United States.

So why are we having this debate? Why aren't we debating the core issue--the real problem? I guess because this is the better political debate and it is easier to do. But it is not going to help. It would be nice if there were these targeted tax credits that some of the authors claim, because then we could get rid of those and that might help some. But, as the Joint Committee on Taxation has said, that doesn't exist.

Let's take a look at the numbers.

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the very small tweaks this legislation will make to the Tax Code by disallowing some of these deductions will amount to around $143 million over 10 years. So they say $143 million over 10 years, because even though there is no targeted allowance or targeted tax credits, they think this legislation will have some effect on the way the IRS will interpret it. By the way, it is left up to the IRS to interpret it, and it is a subjective decision by the IRS since it is not targeted.

But let's say that $143 million over 10 years is the right number. That is what the Joint Committee says. So $143 million over 10 years. Let me give one example.

There is a company in Ohio that is about a Fortune 200 or Fortune 300 company. So it is a big company--not the biggest company, but it is a big company in Ohio. They decided a year or so ago to do an inversion. They bought a company that was one-quarter their size overseas and they became a foreign company. Based on the public filings, we know this year that company will save $160 million on its taxes because it chose to become a foreign company. That is wrong. Our tax system should be fair, it should be competitive. It shouldn't be driving these companies to do this on behalf of their shareholders and under their fiduciary responsibility.

That is $160 million a year versus this bill that, even if it works as the folks are talking about, is intended to be a $143 million impact over 10 years. See what I mean about this not being a serious proposal? Let's get at the core problem.

The other problem is, if we continue to make it harder to be a U.S. company--whether it is to take away a tax credit, whether it is to take away a deduction, whether it is to do something else, to try to block inversion, what will happen? What happens every time we try to put up a wall to stop something but don't deal with the underlying problem? These companies will continue to look overseas, and they will be targets for acquisition.

We talked about the fact that there are no American beer companies anymore, except ones that have less than 2 percent market share. These companies didn't invert. They were bought by foreign companies. That is happening right and left in America, and that is what would happen even more if we make it even more disadvantageous to be an American company because we are trying to block this.

We have to get at the core issue. We can't have the highest tax in the world, and we can't have an international system that is not competitive and hope to have these companies stay American companies. So let's deal with the underlying problem.

Thirty-five companies over the past 5 years have chosen to invert, but so many others have done other things to try to be competitive, including to sell to foreign companies, or not to grow, not to be able to compete with acquisitions, because their after-tax profits are not as high as their foreign competitors.

It is not going to be easy to do tax reform. I understand that. It is never easy. That is not what we were hired to do, the easy things. We are on the floor right now debating this proposal called the Bring the Jobs Home Act, which I think is a misnomer, unfortunately. I guess that would be easy. It wouldn't help, but it would seem easy.

Tax reform is going to be hard, because we do have to lower the rate and broaden the base and get rid of some of these deductions and credits and exemptions and so on that are out there. The Tax Code is now riddled with them. Everybody likes their special provisions. But it is an effort well worth undertaking, because it is about our economy, it is about our future, it is about our kids having jobs here. It is about keeping American companies here. We simply have to do it.

By the way, Congress has done this before. We did it back in 1986. It was led by a Republican, Ronald Reagan, and a Democrat here in the Senate, Bill Bradley; and in the House, Dan Rostenkowski, Tip O'Neill. This was a bipartisan effort. It should be again. There is no reason it shouldn't be bipartisan.

The President has talked about it as a big problem right now in our economy, that our Tax Code is so inefficient, antiquated, needs to be updated. He has talked about lowering the rate, broadening the base. I agree with him, let's do it. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a proposal from the administration.

We had a hearing on this recently and I asked the administration: Where is the proposal?

They said: Well, we are interested in working with you.

Great. I am, too. All of us are.

Some Republicans, including Dave Camp, have put out very specific proposals in the House Ways and Means Committee.

We have to move forward on this. And we have done this before. We can do hard things. It is our job to do hard things. We did welfare reform a year before an election--actually, months before election day, with President Clinton, working with Republicans, including Newt Gingrich.

This seems to be the kind of thing that is harder and harder to do around here, and yet there is more and more urgency to do it.

People call it corporate tax reform or business tax reform and think: It must be about the boardroom and about the executives. It is not. They will be fine either way. We don't need to worry about them. We need to worry about the workers. CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, which is the group that analyzes legislation, has looked at this and said: Do you know who is hurt more by these high corporate taxes we have? It is the workers, of course. More than 70 percent of the burden, they said, is borne by the workers in the

form of lower pay, lower benefits, and fewer job opportunities.

So we need to do this not because we are looking to help the boardroom but because we are looking to help the American worker at a time when it is already tough.

Over the last 5 years, they say, average take-home pay has gone down about $3,500 for a typical family. So pay is not going up, it has gone down. Health care costs have gone up. In fact, they are skyrocketing.

I talked to some folks in Ohio last weekend who asked: Why aren't you doing more to get health care costs down?

I said: Well, I didn't support the ObamaCare proposal. It was promised that the costs would go down, and they are now going up. That is why we need real health care reform.

This is a middle-class squeeze. Health care costs are up, and wages are down, now stagnant. This is an opportunity, not through a sideshow like we are going to see on the floor here talking about how to do these tweaks that aren't going to make any difference, but to really get at the problem is the way to get payback. That is what the Congressional Budget Office tells us.

Our Tax Code should draw companies to our shores, should bring investment here and bring jobs here instead of pushing companies away. All we are looking for is a level playing field. If Americans have a level playing field here, we will be able to be competitive, and we will be able to bring back jobs. We have the greatest innovators in the world, we have the greatest resources, and we have incredible infrastructure in this country. We have a lot of advantages. Our energy advantage now, thanks to what we are doing now on private lands--we should do more on public lands, but what we are doing on private lands is really giving us an advantage in terms of a stable supply of relatively low-cost natural gas, particularly for manufacturing. We see this in Ohio. It is a great opportunity, but to take advantage of that opportunity, we have to reform and improve these basic institutions of our economy, including the Tax Code.

By the way, it is not just the Tax Code, it is about regulatory relief to ensure that American companies are not being saddled, as they are now, with higher and higher costs and more and more regulations that make it harder for them to compete, make it harder for them to create jobs.

It is also about being assured that we have a trade policy that actually works to expand exports. That is a huge issue in my home State of Ohio. We do a lot of exporting. We could do a whole lot more. Twenty-five percent of our factory jobs are now export trade jobs. One in every three acres planted in Ohio is now exported. We want to do more. That gets the prices up for farmers. That is adding more jobs and creating more opportunity for good-paying jobs. These great jobs tend to pay more and have better benefits. We are sitting on the sidelines there too.

Congress could move quickly to provide this President with the negotiating authority every President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has had. Since FDR, every President has also asked for it. This President has now asked for it. You heard him in his State of the Union earlier this year. He hadn't asked for it earlier in his term, but now he has asked for it. Let's provide it to him. Let's give him the ability to knock down the barriers of trade for our workers, our service providers, and our farmers to get this economy moving, along with tax reform and regulatory reform. These are things that would actually make it better for the American people.

On the regulatory side, I am offering amendments in the context of this legislation, and they are bipartisan amendments. One has to do with ensuring that we do allow companies to permit something more quickly. Right now it can take years to permit a project in the United States of America. We have a bipartisan bill. Senator McCaskill and I are the two lead sponsors, but we have other Democrats and Republicans onboard saying this is just common sense. Let's make one agency accountable. Let's be sure there is a way for everybody to transparently look at a windshield and see what the status of the project is and move it forward. Let's reduce some of the legal liability in some of these projects.

What people tell me--whether it is the solar companies I talked to yesterday or whether it is some of the oil and gas producers or whether it is some of the wind companies or whether it is the hydro people who brought this to my attention initially a few years ago--they cannot get foreign investors because it takes so long to permit something in America.

We used to be at the top of the heap, by the way, and now in the annual ease-of-doing-business surveys that are done, America has fallen behind. America is now something like 34th in the world in terms of the ease of doing business on permitting because more and more regulations have been added. For an energy project, there are sometimes up to 34 Federal regulations. Usually it is one after the other because there is no coordination and accountability.

That is what this bill does. It is very simple. It is common sense. It already passed the House. It is the kind of bill that, if passed, would create jobs and good construction jobs, which is why the building trades support it.

By the way, the labor unions, building trades, and others who support this kind of legislation do so because they figured out that America cannot be competitive unless we have these basic institutions of our economy--whether it is regulatory reform or whether it is a smarter energy policy or whether it is the ability to have a tax code that works, they want to be sure we are expanding opportunities for their members. So I appreciate the building trades stepping forward.

The other one is simply to make sure regulations are accountable, make sure there is a cost-benefit analysis, make sure we use the least burdensome alternative in Washington, DC, to get to a policy that is passed by the Congress--commonsense stuff. Again, that has passed the House, too, with bipartisan support.

I am offering these because I do think it is important for us to have this debate on tax reform, and I look forward to further debate on Monday and Tuesday of next week. I think this is a great opportunity for us to talk about the real problems.

I am not going to support this solution because I don't think it will help, but I welcome the debate, and I am glad we have proceeded to this debate. I am glad my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are raising this issue.

To the reporter who asked the question I got today--Are you concerned that Democrats are talking about inversions?--no, I am really happy they are talking about it. We should all be talking about it-- Republicans, Democrats, Independents alike. As Americans, we should be focused on this issue and the broader issue that by our companies not being competitive, we are hurting American workers. If we don't turn this around--not by show votes, not by something that looks good politically but doesn't make any difference, but by actually getting at the root of the problem--the highest rate in the developed world, an international system that doesn't let us be competitive globally because people cannot move around their assets to find the best, most efficient use for them--those two issues, if addressed, will unlock all kinds of opportunities. That is the potential we have. There is a better day ahead, right around the corner, if we do some of these basic things.

I was also asked today at a press conference we do every week with Ohio reporters: How would you grade this Congress? Are they doing the things they ought to be doing?

I have to tell you there are small things that have been done, but, no, Congress is not doing the work of the people. And the work of the people at its core means that the laws, the Federal laws that this place alone--the House and the Senate and the President--have control over, those laws need to help the American people to be successful. It needs to be an environment for success, an environment for people to be able to say: Hey, my kids and grandkids could have it better than I have it because we see America on the upswing.

That is not what we see today--the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. I talked about wages going down, not up. I talked about the higher cost of health care. I talked about the fact that we have now in this

country a lot of people who are discouraged about the future.

CNN did a poll recently, and normally when people are asked in a poll whether they think their kids or grandkids are better off, they say: Yes. That is the American dream. The next generation will be better off.

That is what my grandparents believed, and that is what my parents believed. That is not what today's generation believes. Sixty-three percent of the people said: No, I don't believe that is going to happen.

What is even more troubling is that 63 percent of young people do not believe that. They don't believe their lives are better off than their parents'. We can change that.

I hope we get a vote on these amendments I talked about. I hope we will have a good discussion and debate on these issues. We owe it to the people we represent to solve these big problems.

I thank you for the time, Madam President, and I yield the floor.

Moment of Silence

Madam President, I was listening to my colleague from Illinois talking about the need for us to have economic patriotism and to keep people from moving jobs offshore.

I couldn't agree more, but the way to do it is to fix a broken Tax Code. It is frustrating to me that we have the President of the United States, we have Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who have talked and talked and talked about the fact that we need to lower our tax rate and come up with a more competitive international tax system, and yet we do nothing about it. Instead, we are for these one-off political debates that we are going to have on the floor this week, apparently, that unfortunately aren't going to make any difference to the workers in America who are seeing this erosion of their wages, of their benefits, and often of their jobs because Washington is abdicating its responsibility. Washington is not doing what it has to do in order to meet its fiduciary responsibilities.

There is a lot of talk about that with these corporations. Our responsibility is to the people--to have the right tax system in place so that people can succeed so that if they work hard and play by the rules, the Tax Code is actually going to reward them and American companies can be competitive. That is simply not what is happening now. We need to do a lot of things too, such as to be sure we have a regulatory system that works, to have an international trading system that works for the workers of America, and to be sure we deal with our debt, deficit, and other issues.

But because the discussion of taxes is on the floor this week, I thought it would be helpful to talk just generally about where we are. We had a hearing today in the Finance Committee on this topic. We had experts in from across the spectrum. Although they disagreed on some of the specifics about what we ought to do today, they all agreed with one thing, which is that our Tax Code is broken. It is not working.

By the way, the Congressional Budget Office, which is the nonpartisan group that advises us on the economic impact of things, has looked at the Tax Code and said if you did deal with our high tax rates in this country and improved the corporate code, who benefits? It is the workers, and it is in terms of higher wages, better benefits, a job. This Congress has let the American people down, and it is time for us to deal with this issue and to deal with it in a way that can be nonpartisan.

We have, again, both sides of the aisle agreeing this is broken, and yet we can't seem to find that common ground to fix it. I would suggest there is common ground out there if we just get off the politics and start working on how we actually help people to be able to get ahead.

The issue that has come to the attention of all of us in Congress in the past few months the most is companies that are--what they call-- inverting. These inversions are when a company in the United States buys a company overseas, merges with it, and then it becomes an overseas company. Often these companies they are buying are smaller than the U.S. company, and they become a foreign company because they are trying to get as far away from our Tax Code as they can. They want to become domiciled--they want to have their headquarters--in a foreign country because that country has a better Tax Code for a corporation to be able to succeed.

Again, there have been discussions on the floor recently about fiduciary responsibility. People do, if you are in corporate America, have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. So they are making these decisions, and Washington sits by the sidelines and lets it happen.

I think the answer is to reform the Tax Code. I think we know what we have to do. I think we have to get busy on it.

Last week we saw another example of this. It was a Chicago drug company called AbbVie. Their bid to acquire a company called Shire looks like it is going to go through, and their combined company is going to move its tax headquarters to the UK, to England. This is hardly the first company to do this, and it won't be the last unless we change the code.

In fact, according to the Congressional Research Service, 35 companies have inverted in the past 5 years alone. I think the United States is still the best place to do business.

Despite our bad Tax Code, we have the most productive workforce; we have the best infrastructure; we have the rule of law; we have some great research institutions; we have a lot going for us; and we can compete and attract business from around the world.

So why are these companies going to England? Why are they going to the UK? Well, it turns out they have a tax code that was designed for this century, this decade--unlike here in America, where our international Tax Code was actually developed back in the 1960s. Things were a lot different then.

Our Tax Code itself and the rates of taxation were established in 1986. That is 25 years ago. The international system back to the 1960s, the rate we paid back to 1986--in 1986, ``Top Gun'' was the top at the box office. People still communicated by telegraph. The Mets were World Series champions. Pete Rose was playing for my hometown team, the Cincinnati Reds. That is how long ago it was.

A lot has changed since then. The world has changed. The global economy is far more competitive. It is very difficult for us in the United States of America to have a policy that is not affected by that global economy. And yet while every other one of our global competitors has reformed their tax code, we have not. They all have.

By the way, after the reform, the United Kingdom has a 21-percent corporate tax rate and they have a so-called territorial tax system. That basically means it taxes income in the UK if it is made in the UK, but otherwise it is taxed in the country where it is done. That means they have a competitive global tax system. By the way, about 93 percent of the companies that American companies compete with have that kind of more competitive international system. We have the old-style system.

We also have a higher rate. So we have a deadly combination--a higher rate, 39-percent tax rate, which is now the highest among all the developed countries in the world--not a No. 1 you want to be--but we have also got this international system that is not competitive.

So it is not a mystery why companies are leaving. When we look at the side-by-side, they are making decisions based on what is best for their shareholders. When we look at the changes in the tax rate since the 1990s and 2000s, we can see the United States is falling further behind.

Here is an interesting chart. This shows, just in 2004, what the tax rates were and now what they are in 2014. That is just 10 years ago. The United States is the same, 39 percent. And that 39 percent includes the Federal rate plus the State rate.

People say, well, the effective rate is less than that. Yes, it is less than that because people do take advantage of some of the so- called tax preferences. But even so, our rate is higher than these other countries.

We go from 39 percent to 39 percent; the UK, 30 to 21; Canada, 34.4 to 26, and they are going even lower at the Federal level; Netherlands, 34.5 to 25 percent; Ireland, 12.5; Switzerland, 24 to 21. And they have gone to these territorial tax systems that we talked about.

What has happened? Well, these are the companies that have left the United States of America to go to these countries. We mentioned Abbvi. That is the latest one last week. Medtronic, that was a couple weeks ago. On and on. There are companies in here from the State of Ohio. There is a company listed there from my home State of Ohio that chose to incorporate somewhere else because of the Tax Code. Guess what. They are going to save about $160 million on their tax bill this year. That is a pretty darned good savings, and that is wrong. We have to reform this Tax Code.

In 1960, 17 of the world's largest 20 companies were U.S.- headquartered. By 2010, only six were headquartered in the United States. In 2012 alone, our global 500 companies, the bigger companies' share fell from 36 percent to 26 percent.

I am not saying it is all due to taxes, but a lot of it is. If we talk to these companies, we find that out.

Again, I don't think anyone in the Senate--or in the White House, for that matter--disputes that tax reform is needed. I don't think so. Yet we aren't seeing it. Instead, again, we are hearing about these one- offsies, these small things that seem politically popular but aren't going to make a difference in terms of truly bringing the jobs back and attracting more jobs--attracting companies that want to headquarter here in the United States of America.

It is an admission that the United States is no longer the best place in the world to invest if we say we are going to require companies to do certain things so they can't follow the Tax Code. I think it is a futile effort to try to keep companies here with these new requirements, because ultimately if we do that and make it more disadvantageous to be an American company--so you have companies competing not just with one hand tied behind their back but with two hands tied behind their in a global economy--what will they do? Well, they will probably sell, because foreign companies can come in and buy them. And that has happened and is happening.

If you are a beer drinker, like I am, try to find an American beer these days. The largest share is probably Sam Adams, with about 1.4 percent market share. The rest are all foreign-owned. Yuengling is up there too at about 1.4 percent. But all of them. And foreign companies have come in here and bought these companies because they can pay a premium for them, because their aftertax profits are greater because their tax code in their country is more advantageous. Who does that hurt? It hurts American workers.

I am not saying they don't have facilities here. They do. But when they move their corporate headquarters out of the United States, the tax headquarters out of the United States, the history is, when you look at this, that jobs follow--including the higher paid executive jobs.

Also, an intangible but really important thing to American communities is, when you have a U.S. company headquartered here, they tend to invest in the communities. So think of the nonprofits involved with charities we help out with. There are probably some companies that help out there too and probably it is an American company.

So of course we have to keep up with the times, and we aren't doing that. If we don't, we are going to see more and more companies leave our shores. I don't think these companies want to leave our shores. I think they are doing it because Washington is letting them down.

Let's imagine for a second that a company did decide not to do one of these inversions because we did some one-off things, including to say: You ought to stay here. You ought to not take advantage of a company with a $160 million a year benefit.

I think what is going to happen is we will see more and more companies become foreign companies. American workers and American jobs are going to be lost because we are going to see foreign companies come in and buy these U.S. companies.

If we are truly patriots, economic patriots, we need to look at tax reform, and we need it as soon as possible. This can't, by the way, be just a Republican or Democrat priority. It needs to be an American priority. And it should be, because as far as I can tell in talking to people, the consensus is that it is broken. We have a pretty good sense of what we ought to do to try to fix it.

One, I think we have a pretty good sense that we ought to reduce the rate. So the corporate rate ought to be reduced. I think it has to get down to at least 25 percent for us to be competitive. Back when we last did this in 1986, we purposefully lowered the rate under Ronald Reagan to get it down to 34 percent so it would be below the average of the other developed countries of the world. That is what we have to do again. So, at least 25 percent.

And we need to do this, by the way, at the same time we eliminate some of these preferences, the deductions, the credits, the exclusions. I know that is tough, and some people are going to say: Well, gosh, I am going to lose my special preference or this is going to hurt my company. If they get a lower rate, one, they get a benefit. But, second, it helps the whole economy to have a lower rate.

Economists who look at this all agree, this will generate economic growth and will result, by the way, in more revenues coming in through growth as well. So we broaden the base by getting rid of a lot of the preferences, take those savings to lower the rate.

Then, finally, we need to do something about this international side. If we don't, we are not going to be able to be competitive. Even if we have a low tax rate, if we don't figure out a way to ensure we go to a system that is more like these other countries have all gone to--about 93 percent of the companies that we compete with have this what is called territorial system where you tax income where it is earned. If we don't do that, then I think we are going to end up making this problem worse, not better, by some of these proposals that say let's just kick the can down the road and immediately do something to create a requirement on companies to do this or that.

With regard to the anti-inversion rules, we are going to talk about that now. Let's not reform the Tax Code; let's just do something on inversions to make it harder to invert. We did that back in 2004. We enacted anti-inversion rules that were supposed to stop companies from moving overseas. As we saw in the first chart, that didn't work. Companies did anyway. And I don't think it is going to work today. In fact, I think it could make the problem worse, again, because those companies could then be targeted for foreign acquisition.

So if businesses are more valuable overseas than the United States and businesses can't move under the U.S. themselves, I think the foreign corporations will step in and buy them.

The Bring Jobs Home Act is a great title, and that is legislation we are going to consider here on the floor tomorrow. I think we ought to have a debate on it, so I am going to vote to proceed to have that debate. It is a great title, but I don't think there is anything in the legislation that is going to help to actually bring jobs back. I don't think anything in this legislation is going to address the fact that we have this high tax rate. I don't think there is anything in this legislation that is going to address the fact that we have a worldwide system that is way out of step with all our competitors.

It claims to remove deductions and tax credits and incentivize companies to move overseas. Unfortunately, that is not as easy as it sounds because, according to the Joint Committee on Taxes, which is the group here that advises us, under present law there are no targeted tax credits or disallowance of deductions related to relocating business units inside or outside the United States. There aren't any. So it is sort of tough to say we are going to do something with regard to credits or disallowances of deductions when there are none that relate directly to that.

There have been claims to the contrary that the media, looking at it routinely, says that is just false or misleading.

Finally, when it comes to proposed deductions for bringing jobs back to our shores, the proposal would likely pose some really serious administrative difficulties for an Internal Revenue Service that already has plenty of problems. The legislation, as I read it, gives the IRS authority to subjectively judge whether the IRS thinks that business deductions were made specifically for the purpose of bringing jobs to the United States or moving jobs overseas. Because there are no specific targeted tax deductions for this, the IRS would have to somehow subjectively determine whether that was true. That is going to be tough, because multinational businesses create and close businesses around the globe every day, most times because it is the most economically efficient thing to do from a business perspective. They start a company, close a company, move them around. Asking the IRS to determine whether those decisions were made specifically to move jobs to the United States or to move jobs overseas I think is going to be impossible. That is why this legislation, if passed, is not going anywhere.

I do appreciate my colleagues' hard work in trying to come up with real legislation to address the problem. Senator Wyden, who is the Democratic Chair of the Finance Committee, has been working on that, as have others. But this particular one is just not going to help. It is just not going to help. That fact should serve as a stark reminder that the only way we are going to stop these so-called inversions, the only way we are going to stop people from saying I would rather be a foreign company than a U.S. company is to make it more attractive to be here-- to do what we should have done over the last couple decades--and the rest of the world has; all of our competitors have--which is to reform our Tax Code so that it is good for American workers and good for American investors. If we do that, I think America's best days are ahead of us. I really do.

There are a lot of things we need to do, as we talked about earlier, to make this country more competitive and to be sure we are creating the best jobs and the greatest opportunities here for everybody. But one thing we can do that will give the economy a shot in the arm right away is this comprehensive tax reform. When people have analyzed this from a macroeconomic basis, they say: If we did this--lower the rate by broadening the base, go to this competitive international system--we would generate a lot more investment and business in America. That would in turn generate a lot more investments, a lot more business here in America. That would in turn generate more revenue.

So it is growth revenues, which is exactly what we want to see. We want to see more jobs, and we want to see us being able to have the kind of growth and prosperity so we can help to get out of this debt and deficit, which is a real problem. And, going forward, it is

a problem we are going to have to deal with, both because it affects the economy and because it affects what we are doing to future generations.

As legislators, it is our job to fix this problem. That is what we were hired to do. I know it is not easy. I know corporate tax reform is tough to do, because we would take away benefits from one company or another by lowering that rate. But, by the way, when we do this--when we do lower that rate and get rid of some of these preferences to do so, guess what. Everybody has to pay taxes.

People talk about it is unfair that some American companies in some years, because they get a tax break, don't pay taxes. Well, if they can't be as creative because there aren't all these deductions and credits and exemptions to be able to use, they are going to have to pay taxes. Everyone will pay. There will be a lower rate and they will be more competitive, and they won't be having this incentive to move offshore. But everybody will be paying taxes. And I think that is part of what we ought to be doing.

To be able to compete and to succeed and to help American workers, it is time for us to make tax reform a reality. Let's not do things that might feel good politically and do some of these one-offs and half steps that in the end could inadvertently actually make it worse, not better--because, again, if we make it even more difficult to be an American company, we are just not going to have as many American companies because they will be bought by foreign companies that can pay more for them and pay a premium. Let's instead get busy doing what we were elected to do, which is to work across the aisle to come up with sensible tax reform, lowering that rate, a competitive international system, and ensuring that we do create more opportunities for American workers to be able to compete--not just survive but thrive in the global economy.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I want to talk about an issue today that transcends party lines: the humanitarian crisis we are seeing in Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In September of last year the Congo informed the United States that they would no longer issue exit visas for Congolese children who were in the process of being adopted by American parents. These are kids that have gone through the adoption process and yet the Government of the Congo says they cannot leave the country. This terrible and unjustifiable action has left hundreds of children and their families here in the United States in limbo.

Last Friday the Congolese Government announced an end to exit permit exceptions until the country passes what they deem are new adoption laws. I stand here today to express our deep concern and commitment to resolve this crisis from so many in the Senate. We have over 50 cosponsors for a resolution calling on the Congo to do the right thing. Those of us who have cosponsored this are looking for a way to help these children who have already been adopted to be reunited with their families permanently.

More than 350 families have finalized adoptions of Congolese children. They have obtained the necessary U.S. approvals, including U.S. visas authorizing their children to immigrate to the United States. There were 400 additional families in the process of completing adoptions at the time Congo imposed this moratorium. In every way that matters, including in what they feel in their hearts, these are their children.

All told, more than 800 children are caught in this diplomatic nightmare. By the way, that is about 10 percent of total adoptions worldwide by American families last year. These are international adoptions, so it is a significant number. Many of these kids have special needs, and those needs are not being met. Until they are able to come home and be with their families, those needs will not be met. In fact, some lives have been put at risk. In fact, six of these children have already died.

I had the opportunity to meet with some of the parents of some of these children and have seen some of the photos and heard some of the stories. If the Congolese Government would simply do the right thing and allow these exit permits, lives would be saved. We can't remain silent in the face of this tragedy.

Together with Senator Landrieu of Louisiana, I am offering a resolution calling on the administration to take action and demand that the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo resume processing these adoption cases and issuing exit permits so these kids can leave. They need to prioritize the processing of intercountry adoptions which were initiated before the suspension began.

I thank Senator Landrieu for her hard work on this matter, as well as 50 of our colleagues from both sides of the aisle who have joined us.

Last week I met with a number of families from Ohio, and we had the opportunity to talk about some of these kids and some of their specific circumstances. We also talked about what these families are ready to do, and they are ready to give these kids the support and love they need.

I met with the Millimans from Columbus, OH. They are adopting a little girl who has very serious medical conditions. They are in the final stages of the adoption process, and they fear they will not be able to provide her the treatment and care she needs.

I also met with the Webb family. The Webbs are in the process of adopting a child from the Congo to bring to their home in Wooster, OH. The Webbs' biological daughter Heather is also in the process of adopting from the Congo. They were both in the Capitol to talk about their kids and what they have been through.

These families represent the very best of our country and our values, a respect for these young people's lives and a commitment to live with humility, prioritizing the needs of the most vulnerable children. This diplomatic impasse is keeping these families apart. It is time the administration joined with Congress to support the families and the children involved in this crisis in every way possible.

In the coming days, I hope we will speak with one voice and demand that Congo reverse their decision and process these adoptions as quickly as possible. It is my sense this is an issue that will come up in committee this week. I hope before this session is out we will be able to take this up on the floor of the Senate, pass it, and begin to put some pressure on the Congolese Government to do the right thing. It is time to allow these children to be with their loving families.

With that, I yield back all time and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise in support of the nomination of Cheryl LaFleur to serve as a commissioner on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and in opposition to the nomination of Norman Bay to serve as a commissioner on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

On May 20, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, of which I am a member, held a hearing on these two nominations. I had questions regarding Mr. Bay's qualifications prior to that hearing, and they were not allayed. If anything, they were reinforced. Mr. Bay's experience in the energy field consists of his service over the past 5 years as Director of the Office of Enforcement at the FERC, a tenure which has been marked by that office's controversial theories of market manipulation and concerns by long-time industry experts about due process. Mr. Bay has 5 years of enforcement experience, but he has no regulatory experience. By contrast, Commissioner LaFleur, currently serving as the Acting Chairman of the FERC, has 5 years of experience on the FERC and decades of experience in the energy sector, including as a State utility commissioner.

Yet we are being asked to demote Commissioner LaFleur to commissioner and replace her with an unproven and arguably less qualified candidate.

But most important from my perspective is whether a nominee will address the key responsibilities assigned to the agency to which he or she is being nominated. At FERC, job one with respect to the electric sector is assuring just and reasonable electric service in interstate commerce, which Congress has found for the past 80 years to be in the public interest. Assuring the reliability of such service is an important task that Congress explicitly made part of FERC's responsibilities nearly a decade ago.

At our May 20 hearing, I asked Mr. Bay whether he agreed with the developing consensus that baseload power plants, the ``always on'' energy resources vital to reliable operation of the grid, deserve additional consideration for the irreplaceable reliability benefits they provide. Mr. Bay answered that he looked forward to reviewing comments on the issue. I then asked whether as a commissioner he would look at the cumulative effect of EPA rules that, by various estimates, have resulted in the announced closure of 40,000 to 70,000 megawatts of coal-fired power plants across the country, many of them in Ohio, the closure of which has raised strong concerns about maintaining electric reliability in many parts of the country. He answered that if confirmed, he would be willing to discuss the issue with his colleagues to see if consensus could be reached.

Mr. President, these are simple questions that go to the heart of FERC's mission. On both, Mr. Bay gave non-answer answers that are the basis for substantial concern. Either you agree that something needs to be done to keep power plants running that are vital to maintaining a reliable electric system, or you don't. Either you are concerned that EPA's rules, which even the environmental groups attribute to shuttering more than 68,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation, need to be evaluated for their electric reliability impacts, or you don't.

A presidential nominee deserves the benefit of the doubt, but in the case of Mr. Bay, whose nomination has been rushed to the floor, the doubts remain too strong.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Virginia and appreciate his comments. He has a passion for this issue. It fits very well with what so many of us are trying to do in the Congress, which is to put in place policies that actually create more opportunities for our young people.

We are living through the weakest economic recovery we have had in this country since the Great Depression. I know we have seen some improvement recently in the job numbers, but in fact unemployment remains way too high. If we take into account folks who have dropped out of the workforce altogether as compared to 4 or 5 years ago, we have unemployment rates at over 10 percent.

Among young people coming out of school it is far higher. It is double digits, about 12 or 13 percent for 18 to 25 year olds, we are told. Again, the real numbers are worse than that when we take out the folks who have dropped out of the workforce altogether.

Our GDP growth, the growth of our economy, is too low. So there are a number of things we ought to do, in my view. One is, we have to deal with ensuring that we have a workforce that is trained for these 21st century jobs that are out there. We also need to reform our Tax Code. We need to put regulatory relief in place that is sensible. We need to do much more to take advantage of the energy resources we have in this country. We need to get back in the business of exporting and trade.

There are some things relatively quickly we could do to get the country back on track, but none is more important than having that workforce. Because we can have a great environment--which unfortunately we do not have now for many businesses because we have not created the climate for economic growth with good policy in Washington.

But if we had that--if we do not have the workers in this increasingly competitive global economy we are in, jobs will be created somewhere else. That is happening right now. It is happening partly because we do not have the skilled workers to be able to attract those jobs here, those businesses here, and to fill the jobs here in America.

Four and one-half million jobs are open right now, they say. That might surprise some people listening because they are thinking: Wow. I cannot get a job or my son or daughter cannot get a job or my neighbor cannot get a job. As I said, unemployment is high. Yet there are 4\1/2\ million jobs open. When we look at those jobs and what is available out there--and Senator Kaine talked some about this, a lot of them require skills that young people and workers who are shifting careers, maybe they have lost a job, are in their forties or fifties, skills they do not have.

So it is IT, it is high-tech jobs, it is health care jobs, it is bioscience jobs. Yes, it is manufacturing jobs. My own State of Ohio is a big manufacturing State. We are particularly sensitive to this. There are lots of manufacturers in Ohio who are saying: If we had the workers, we could add new jobs, new opportunities, grow this economy. The spinoff from that, all of the other jobs that are created through a successful manufacturing company that makes something is the backbone of our higher economy, international economy.

This is exciting for me to work with Senator Kaine and others who say: Let's take a piece of this, which is career and technical education, to encourage young people to get these skills, to be able to access these great jobs. Some of them, by the way, will do it right out of high school.

I was in Ohio on Monday. We had a roundtable on this. We had a bunch of employers there. We had some educators there. We had some students there. One was a senior in high school who is currently in career and technical school. For those who do not follow this closely, you probably are more familiar with the word ``vocational'' school, because that is typically what it has been called over the years. That is the same thing as the career and technical schools.

Again, Senator Kaine and I have cofounded this Career and Technical Education Caucus in the Senate over the last couple of months. We have a number of our colleagues now joining and so on. We are trying to raise this, let people know about this great opportunity out there.

This young man is a senior. He is going back to his high school and saying: You Guys are crazy not to do this CTE stuff because I am getting great skills, where I can get a great job, and I am getting college credit because they have one of those dual credit programs in this particular CTE program.

Then there were two students there who graduated earlier this year. They both have been in the CTE program. They both have been taking advantage of it to get the skills but also working part time as apprentices or interns--19 years old, two young men. Both of them are now out in the workforce, working for these manufacturers. One of their bosses was there, one of the executives from one of the small manufacturing companies.

These young men at 19 years old are making $50,000 a year. They have benefits on top of that. They have the opportunity now to run very sophisticated machines. Both of them started off learning as apprentices. Now they are both running machines. These machines are worth over $1 million apiece. These are in CNC machines. In one case it is a plastic injecting molding machine. It is very exciting. By the way, they now have been encouraged to go back to their high school and say: Hey, 4-year college or university, that is great if you want to do that, but here is another opportunity.

By the way, they may go back to school. They both have some credit where they could go back and maybe get an associate's degree or a 4- year degree or maybe a graduate engineering degree someday, but in the meantime they are providing the opportunities for these companies in Ohio to have skilled workers so they can compete globally. For them and their families, they are providing a tremendous opportunity, rather than graduating with a bunch of debt. The average debt is $20,000, $30,000 a year now. Instead of having debt, they are making money.

For the next 4 years, even if they are not promoted 0--0 which I think they will be, having met these two young men--that is $200,000 they are going to be making and spending and investing in our economy.

I am very excited about this opportunity to hold this up to say there is a way for us to help get this economy moving by helping to fill this skills gap. In Ohio alone, if you go on ohiomeansjobs.com right now, go on their Web site, you will see about 140,000 jobs open. Yet we have about 400,000 people out of work. If you look at these jobs, again, you will see a lot of them require skills that simply are not out there in the workforce now.

Help provide these skills and we are going to see some of these jobs get filled. That helps our economy, keeps businesses here, and expands businesses here. We did, as Senator Kaine said, just pass the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, so-called WIOA. I was very pleased about that. The House just passed it this week. The Senate passed it 2 weeks ago.

In that there is something called the CAREER Act that Senator Bennet and I have been promoting the last few years. We were able to include a number of our provisions in there to add more accountability, to add more performance measures to improve that legislation. I am happy that was done. That helps on retraining. That is critically important. We spend about $15 billion a year on that at the Federal Government level.

What we are talking about is starting with the career and technical education even before we get into the WIOA programs and the retraining money that is necessary when somebody loses a job and needs to move to another job. We are talking about young people coming up and having this opportunity. According to the U.S.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ohio is gaining jobs in manufacturing. That is great news. But we also hear, in the latest skills gap report by the Manufacturing Institute, 74 percent of manufacturers are experiencing workforce shortages or skill deficiencies that keep them from expanding their plant and operations and improving productivity--74 percent.

We could be doing much more to close that skills gap. The legislation that Senator Kaine and I talked about that we are introducing today is a very important step toward that. It is going to help open opportunities for the next generation of workers by ensuring that they have these skills to participate in the 21st century economy.

We were talking a moment ago, some of us, about high school graduation rates. Unfortunately, we have unacceptably high numbers of people who do not graduate from high schools in this country. So there was a lot of discussion about postsecondary and so on. But we have a real problem: Our high school graduation rate is way too low. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 81 percent of high school dropouts say real-world learning opportunities would have kept them in school. That is interesting. The average high school graduation rate is now about 80 percent--way too low. In fact, it is closer to 50 percent in some of our great cities and in some of our poorer rural areas. But even 80 percent is the average--way too low for high school graduation.

But what they say is they would have been more likely to stay in school if they had real-world learning opportunities. That is why the graduation rates for kids involved in CTE--

I would ask unanimous consent for 2 additional minutes.

For kids in CTE concentrations, it is a 90-percent graduation rate. That is because they are getting that real-world experience. So I think a good place to start, again, is with this legislation we are introducing today. This is legislation that begins with reforms to the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. It needs to be reauthorized. The reauthorization ought to include these reforms that Senator Kaine and I have talked about.

This is the major source of Federal support for the development of CTE skills. It was last reauthorized in 2006. So it has to be modernized to meet the demands of this workforce today to ensure that students have access to these programs.

It does a few different things. Senator Kaine has talked about it. It requires a more rigorous CTE curriculum, requiring Perkins grant participants to incorporate key elements into the programs; that is, things such as academic and technical skill assessments to measure student achievement, making sure they are actually accomplishing what they are supposed to be based on industry standards, making sure the CTE curriculum is in alignment with whatever the local and regional needs are in the workforce, what the demands are. Employers are looking for kids who have specific skills. We have to be sure we are providing them.

It also increases flexibility for States and localities, allowing them to use these Perkins grant funds to establish academies such as the one Governor Kaine started when he was in Virginia.

It also improves the link between high school and postsecondary education to ease the attainment of industry-recognized credentials, licensing, apprenticeship, postsecondary certificates. We do a lot of that in Ohio, the dual credit programs I talked about earlier.

It promotes partnerships between local businesses, regional industries, and other community stakeholders to create pathways for students through more internships, service opportunities, and so on.

I believe this legislation is urgently needed, and we have to move forward with it. If we do, we are going to be able to provide more opportunity for our young people and more jobs in this country because we will be filling that skills gap and we will be able to have more young people who will able to have this experience, such as these two young men I met earlier this week, where they are able to go out on their own, get a good job, good benefits, help themselves and their family, and help create a stronger economy for all of us.

I thank my colleague from Virginia for his hard work on this legislation, and I look forward to working with him toward its passage.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Virginia and appreciate his comments. He has a passion for this issue. It fits very well with what so many of us are trying to do in the Congress, which is to put in place policies that actually create more opportunities for our young people.

We are living through the weakest economic recovery we have had in this country since the Great Depression. I know we have seen some improvement recently in the job numbers, but in fact unemployment remains way too high. If we take into account folks who have dropped out of the workforce altogether as compared to 4 or 5 years ago, we have unemployment rates at over 10 percent.

Among young people coming out of school it is far higher. It is double digits, about 12 or 13 percent for 18 to 25 year olds, we are told. Again, the real numbers are worse than that when we take out the folks who have dropped out of the workforce altogether.

Our GDP growth, the growth of our economy, is too low. So there are a number of things we ought to do, in my view. One is, we have to deal with ensuring that we have a workforce that is trained for these 21st century jobs that are out there. We also need to reform our Tax Code. We need to put regulatory relief in place that is sensible. We need to do much more to take advantage of the energy resources we have in this country. We need to get back in the business of exporting and trade.

There are some things relatively quickly we could do to get the country back on track, but none is more important than having that workforce. Because we can have a great environment--which unfortunately we do not have now for many businesses because we have not created the climate for economic growth with good policy in Washington.

But if we had that--if we do not have the workers in this increasingly competitive global economy we are in, jobs will be created somewhere else. That is happening right now. It is happening partly because we do not have the skilled workers to be able to attract those jobs here, those businesses here, and to fill the jobs here in America.

Four and one-half million jobs are open right now, they say. That might surprise some people listening because they are thinking: Wow. I cannot get a job or my son or daughter cannot get a job or my neighbor cannot get a job. As I said, unemployment is high. Yet there are 4\1/2\ million jobs open. When we look at those jobs and what is available out there--and Senator Kaine talked some about this, a lot of them require skills that young people and workers who are shifting careers, maybe they have lost a job, are in their forties or fifties, skills they do not have.

So it is IT, it is high-tech jobs, it is health care jobs, it is bioscience jobs. Yes, it is manufacturing jobs. My own State of Ohio is a big manufacturing State. We are particularly sensitive to this. There are lots of manufacturers in Ohio who are saying: If we had the workers, we could add new jobs, new opportunities, grow this economy. The spinoff from that, all of the other jobs that are created through a successful manufacturing company that makes something is the backbone of our higher economy, international economy.

This is exciting for me to work with Senator Kaine and others who say: Let's take a piece of this, which is career and technical education, to encourage young people to get these skills, to be able to access these great jobs. Some of them, by the way, will do it right out of high school.

I was in Ohio on Monday. We had a roundtable on this. We had a bunch of employers there. We had some educators there. We had some students there. One was a senior in high school who is currently in career and technical school. For those who do not follow this closely, you probably are more familiar with the word ``vocational'' school, because that is typically what it has been called over the years. That is the same thing as the career and technical schools.

Again, Senator Kaine and I have cofounded this Career and Technical Education Caucus in the Senate over the last couple of months. We have a number of our colleagues now joining and so on. We are trying to raise this, let people know about this great opportunity out there.

This young man is a senior. He is going back to his high school and saying: You Guys are crazy not to do this CTE stuff because I am getting great skills, where I can get a great job, and I am getting college credit because they have one of those dual credit programs in this particular CTE program.

Then there were two students there who graduated earlier this year. They both have been in the CTE program. They both have been taking advantage of it to get the skills but also working part time as apprentices or interns--19 years old, two young men. Both of them are now out in the workforce, working for these manufacturers. One of their bosses was there, one of the executives from one of the small manufacturing companies.

These young men at 19 years old are making $50,000 a year. They have benefits on top of that. They have the opportunity now to run very sophisticated machines. Both of them started off learning as apprentices. Now they are both running machines. These machines are worth over $1 million apiece. These are in CNC machines. In one case it is a plastic injecting molding machine. It is very exciting. By the way, they now have been encouraged to go back to their high school and say: Hey, 4-year college or university, that is great if you want to do that, but here is another opportunity.

By the way, they may go back to school. They both have some credit where they could go back and maybe get an associate's degree or a 4- year degree or maybe a graduate engineering degree someday, but in the meantime they are providing the opportunities for these companies in Ohio to have skilled workers so they can compete globally. For them and their families, they are providing a tremendous opportunity, rather than graduating with a bunch of debt. The average debt is $20,000, $30,000 a year now. Instead of having debt, they are making money.

For the next 4 years, even if they are not promoted 0--0 which I think they will be, having met these two young men--that is $200,000 they are going to be making and spending and investing in our economy.

I am very excited about this opportunity to hold this up to say there is a way for us to help get this economy moving by helping to fill this skills gap. In Ohio alone, if you go on ohiomeansjobs.com right now, go on their Web site, you will see about 140,000 jobs open. Yet we have about 400,000 people out of work. If you look at these jobs, again, you will see a lot of them require skills that simply are not out there in the workforce now.

Help provide these skills and we are going to see some of these jobs get filled. That helps our economy, keeps businesses here, and expands businesses here. We did, as Senator Kaine said, just pass the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, so-called WIOA. I was very pleased about that. The House just passed it this week. The Senate passed it 2 weeks ago.

In that there is something called the CAREER Act that Senator Bennet and I have been promoting the last few years. We were able to include a number of our provisions in there to add more accountability, to add more performance measures to improve that legislation. I am happy that was done. That helps on retraining. That is critically important. We spend about $15 billion a year on that at the Federal Government level.

What we are talking about is starting with the career and technical education even before we get into the WIOA programs and the retraining money that is necessary when somebody loses a job and needs to move to another job. We are talking about young people coming up and having this opportunity. According to the U.S.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ohio is gaining jobs in manufacturing. That is great news. But we also hear, in the latest skills gap report by the Manufacturing Institute, 74 percent of manufacturers are experiencing workforce shortages or skill deficiencies that keep them from expanding their plant and operations and improving productivity--74 percent.

We could be doing much more to close that skills gap. The legislation that Senator Kaine and I talked about that we are introducing today is a very important step toward that. It is going to help open opportunities for the next generation of workers by ensuring that they have these skills to participate in the 21st century economy.

We were talking a moment ago, some of us, about high school graduation rates. Unfortunately, we have unacceptably high numbers of people who do not graduate from high schools in this country. So there was a lot of discussion about postsecondary and so on. But we have a real problem: Our high school graduation rate is way too low. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 81 percent of high school dropouts say real-world learning opportunities would have kept them in school. That is interesting. The average high school graduation rate is now about 80 percent--way too low. In fact, it is closer to 50 percent in some of our great cities and in some of our poorer rural areas. But even 80 percent is the average--way too low for high school graduation.

But what they say is they would have been more likely to stay in school if they had real-world learning opportunities. That is why the graduation rates for kids involved in CTE--

I would ask unanimous consent for 2 additional minutes.

For kids in CTE concentrations, it is a 90-percent graduation rate. That is because they are getting that real-world experience. So I think a good place to start, again, is with this legislation we are introducing today. This is legislation that begins with reforms to the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. It needs to be reauthorized. The reauthorization ought to include these reforms that Senator Kaine and I have talked about.

This is the major source of Federal support for the development of CTE skills. It was last reauthorized in 2006. So it has to be modernized to meet the demands of this workforce today to ensure that students have access to these programs.

It does a few different things. Senator Kaine has talked about it. It requires a more rigorous CTE curriculum, requiring Perkins grant participants to incorporate key elements into the programs; that is, things such as academic and technical skill assessments to measure student achievement, making sure they are actually accomplishing what they are supposed to be based on industry standards, making sure the CTE curriculum is in alignment with whatever the local and regional needs are in the workforce, what the demands are. Employers are looking for kids who have specific skills. We have to be sure we are providing them.

It also increases flexibility for States and localities, allowing them to use these Perkins grant funds to establish academies such as the one Governor Kaine started when he was in Virginia.

It also improves the link between high school and postsecondary education to ease the attainment of industry-recognized credentials, licensing, apprenticeship, postsecondary certificates. We do a lot of that in Ohio, the dual credit programs I talked about earlier.

It promotes partnerships between local businesses, regional industries, and other community stakeholders to create pathways for students through more internships, service opportunities, and so on.

I believe this legislation is urgently needed, and we have to move forward with it. If we do, we are going to be able to provide more opportunity for our young people and more jobs in this country because we will be filling that skills gap and we will be able to have more young people who will able to have this experience, such as these two young men I met earlier this week, where they are able to go out on their own, get a good job, good benefits, help themselves and their family, and help create a stronger economy for all of us.

I thank my colleague from Virginia for his hard work on this legislation, and I look forward to working with him toward its passage.

Madam President, I thank my colleague from Georgia and appreciate his work on this legislation. I know that he and the Senator from Tennessee have been talking about the legislation earlier today. I understand that Senator Alexander talked about some of the work we have done together to try to make sure this legislation does not just reauthorize an existing program but improves that program to give more focus on how to take our Federal worker retraining program to make it work for America's workers at a critical time.

We just learned that the economy, in the first quarter, grew even less than we had thought. I think it now has been readjusted to almost minus 3 percent--minus 2.9 percent growth. We have big problems in terms of our economy getting moving. One of the problems we have is we do not have the trained workers for the 21st century jobs that are out there.

I rise today as the Senate is on the verge of passing this first comprehensive reform of our Nation's primary workforce development programs in about 16 years, to say that I appreciate, again, the fact that Members on both sides of the aisle have worked with me and others to put some reforms into this program to ensure it works better for our workers and for our competitiveness and for our ability to actually get this economy moving again.

We do have this weak economy. And sometimes we are sort of numb to it. We forget that this is not just a typical recovery; it is a very slow recovery. In fact, by measures of growth in economy or unemployment or other measures, it is the weakest economic recovery we have had since the Great Depression. We have become numb to some of the disappointing news.

Almost 20 million Americans are out of work, 317,000 of our friends and neighbors in Ohio are now unemployed, and millions more have given up looking for work. In fact, the number of people who have given up looking for work is growing, so it is a high percentage. As to those who have given up looking for work, you would have to go back 34 years ago, to the 1970s, to find similar numbers of people as a percentage of the workforce.

For men, they say it may go back to the 1940s when we started keeping track of this. So we have problems. We have problems that can be solved in part by closing what is called the skills gap. In other words, there are a whole bunch of jobs that are open, but they cannot be filled because people do not have the skills to take those jobs.

By the way, you do not have to take my word for it. Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas is someone I do not often have an opportunity to quote on the floor of the Senate, but he was at the White House recently. In addition to his work in the music industry, he is also known for his work with kids back in his hometown of Boyle Heights, CA. A lot of that is focused on job training, skills training. During an event at the White House a couple of weeks ago, I saw that he said the following: There are so many jobs in America we can't fill because people aren't brought up to speed with the skill sets that are needed.

Will.i.am is right. The numbers back him up, by the way. Today, 4.5 million jobs remain open and unfilled in America. Yet we have these high levels of unemployment and all of these people who have left the workforce altogether. What is going on? Part of it is that we do not have the skills to be able to fill those jobs.

In Ohio today, if you go to the OhioMeansJobs Web site, you will see 140,000 jobs advertised. Yet we have about 317,000 people out of work. If you look at these jobs, a lot of them require advanced manufacturing skills, information technology skills, and medical and bioscience skills for health care workers. We have to do better in terms of filling that gap so that American workers are able to meet the demands of the 21st century.

There is a skills gap report by the Manufacturing Institute that came out recently. Based on a poll they did, it said that 74 percent of manufacturers are experiencing workforce shortages or skill deficiencies that keep them from expanding their operations and improving productivity. Seventy-four percent say they are looking for better skills to be able to fill those jobs.

We could be doing so much better than we are to close that skills gap. For too many Americans, the only jobs available are those that they do not have the skills and qualifications to be able to fill.

The Federal Government spends a lot of money on this. This is not for lack of funds. The Federal Government spends between $15 and $18 billion a year on these Federal worker retraining programs. As some of you know, there are 47 different programs spread over 9 different departments and agencies. We need to do more to try to consolidate and improve these programs, but in the meanwhile let's do what we can. That is what this legislation does.

The Government Accountability Office or GAO--which looks at all Federal agencies and decides how they are doing, spent a lot of time looking at this. They have said that some of that money--the $18 billion I talked about of our taxpayer money that does provide the funding for these 47 different programs over 9 departments and agencies--they are not working very well. They say 45 of the 47 programs overlapped with at least 1 other program. Only five have conducted an impact study of their efforts since 2004, meaning that the assessments of outcomes or performance you would expect are not being done. Only five have conducted an impact study of their efforts since 2004.

GAO concluded that ``little is known about the effectiveness of most of these programs.'' But actually we do know something about the effectiveness because these millions of unfilled jobs are an indictment of the program. In other words, we should be doing a better job of getting the skills we need to fill these jobs if we are spending $15 to $18 billion of hard-earned taxpayer money on it.

I hear this story all across Ohio, and I know my colleagues hear it across their States. I hear from workers, from businesses, from educators. People are frustrated, and there is good reason for it. I think the way Washington has handled workforce development is simply inefficient. It is not working well. I think it is unfair to employers who have open positions because they cannot find qualified candidates to fill them. It is certainly unfair to taxpayers who send their money to Washington believing that their government will be good stewards of those funds and that we are going to use them effectively for worker retraining, getting the money into the hands of people to train them for jobs that are actually out there. I think it is unfair to, of course, millions of Americans who would like to build a better life for

their families and find that the Federal resources allocated to them are not getting the job done.

Because we believe we can do better, this Congress is going to act today. The Senate and the House are working together on this issue, which is good. It is bicameral. It is bipartisan.

I have joined with Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado on what is called the CAREER Act. The CAREER Act is included, in most part, in this legislation. The CAREER Act first calls for a reduction in the wasteful and inefficient overlap in the system.

I am pleased to see that the legislation before us today trims 15 programs from our Nation's workforce development program. I think that is a good start. I also think we can do even more. Understanding that there were a lot of constraints, different points of view, we need to consolidate further, in my view.

Second, we called for an increased focus on helping unemployed workers attain high-quality credentials that give them a leg up in the local job market. I am pleased this bill includes our provisions that require those local boards, the workforce investment boards, to give priority consideration to programs that lead to credentials that are in demand in their local area.

We worked hard to include a provision requiring the State and local boards to provide specific strategies for helping folks attain high- quality credentials. These are industry-recognized credentials that are in demand, that are portable--they can move from State to State--and that help them move up the career leader. That is important because we know that these credentials, based on all the research, are critical to getting people into these jobs.

Third, we call for a new and innovative accountability program in the system called Pay for Success. Currently, the workforce development programs provide funding regardless of performance so long as certain rules are followed and input requirements are met--not output but input. This has resulted in this unaccountability the GAO talked about and many complacent programs that have fallen short. Pay for Success turns this model on its head by linking payments to outcome, to actual performance measures. Job-training service providers who do well will be rewarded under this model. Those who fail to deliver results are going to be held accountable.

I am pleased that again this underlying legislation--the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act--before us today includes these Pay for Success provisions that allow local workforce boards to use their formula to engage in Pay for Success contracts. That is a step in the right direction. I would like to go even further, but I think it is historic and it is very important.

Finally, we call for access to better data to make it less difficult and expensive for State and local officials to assess the effectiveness of their training activities in real time. I am pleased this legislation includes the provisions for a study on how to access better data that can help the system deliver better results for taxpayers and the unemployed. That is part of the CAREER Act.

These four reforms can help change lives and turn around our economy. They are the kinds of reforms that can empower millions of Americans to get the kinds of jobs that do fund retirement, that do buy homes, that do pay for college educations. These reforms are long overdue.

We live in a dynamic and ever-changing economy, no question about it. We have to be sure our workforce is also dynamic and ever-changing to be able to meet the demands. We should not be held back by a workforce development system that has not been reauthorized since 1998. For reference, that is the year Google was first incorporated as a company. So I strongly support the underlying legislation.

Again, I commend my colleagues on both sides of the aisle--I see some of them here today on the floor--for their work. I thank them for working with Senator Michael Bennet and me to incorporate some of the bipartisan CAREER Act provisions.

At a time when the two parties in Washington have been at odds on how to finally get our economy moving again, this is a jobs bill that is win-win. It is a win for everyone, especially those Americans who are still looking for jobs and those businesses that are desperate to fill the skills gap they see.

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

I rise today to put the Senate on record on something very important, and that is speaking to the decision by the Obama administration to release five top Taliban leaders from Guantanamo Bay without consulting Congress, as required by law--a decision that I believe endangers the lives of American personnel, not to mention the countless Afghans and the success of our mission in Afghanistan.

It has been well reported in the press that this release was done without consulting Congress or congressional leaders on either side of the aisle--Republican or Democrat, by the way. This was in clear violation of a requirement to provide detailed notice to Congress before such action is taken--a requirement that is contained in both an authorization bill called the 2004 National Defense Authorization Act and a spending bill, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014, both of which passed Congress with big bipartisan majorities. Both were bipartisan bills, and there was a bipartisan consensus about having this notification.

Despite several closed-door briefings and public comments from the administration since we learned of the release, the administration has been unable to provide any legitimate justification for violating the requirement and for failing to consult with Congress.

I believe the President's conduct raises a lot of questions-- questions which should concern every Member of this body on both sides of the aisle.

This is not a partisan issue, nor is it about what kind of soldier SGT Bowe Bergdahl may have been. I trust the Army will handle that matter appropriately. This is about our role in the Congress, and it is about our national security. It is about protecting our men and women in Afghanistan. It is about ensuring that what they have fought for in the last decade and the gains they have made in our war against terrorism and for the people in Afghanistan will not be squandered, as we are seeing today in the country of Iraq.

Congress enacted the bipartisan notice requirement to secure those interests and to prevent the release of dangerous terrorists who are likely to rejoin the fight if they are freed. It requires the President to give a detailed justification for the release of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, why such a release is in the country's national security interests, and what actions the administration will take to ensure that

those released detainees do not return to the battlefield to threaten American lives--basically asking the administration to notify us, but to also provide a justification for the release and the conditions of that release.

Had the President followed the law, I believe many of the dangers posed by this decision could have been avoided altogether. I think he would have heard on a bipartisan basis the concerns of the Congress, which were only voiced after the decisions were made, again, on both sides of the aisle.

Make no mistake, these five men who were released are dangerous. Don't take my word for it. This is what the administration has said repeatedly. I was in a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2012. I was a member of the committee at that time. Senator Levin, my colleague and chairman of the committee, who is here on the floor with us today, was at that committee hearing. In fact, he asked some very good questions, including questions to the President's own Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

What did Mr. Clapper say? He reiterated a 2010 administration assessment that these five Taliban leaders--these same five who were just released--posed a high risk of returning to the fight.

On this very point, Director Clapper did not equivocate, saying:

I do not think anyone harbors any illusions about these

five Taliban members and what they might do if they were

transferred.

This was sworn testimony before our committee. Even if, as the President admits, there is ``absolutely a risk that these men will return to the battlefield,'' these men were senior members of the Taliban. They include the Taliban's deputy defense minister, deputy minister of intelligence, administrator of the interior, and some were closely associated with Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda. Two are wanted by the United Nations for war crimes.

Yet despite these red flags--which, according to reports from the press, were reiterated during internal White House debates of the transfer--President Obama released these men anyway without following the notice provided in the law.

We need to know why. We need to know what security risks these five individuals pose. We need to know what measures have been put in place to mitigate those risks. I don't know why any Member of this body would oppose going on record saying that the law was violated and seeking answers to these good questions.

In a moment I am going to ask for unanimous consent on a resolution which I have offered and many of my colleagues have cosponsored calling on Congress, through regular order and committee jurisdiction, to investigate the decision to authorize this release. This resolution has a very narrow purpose: It only seeks to ensure that, when Congress speaks, the President listens. I would remind us that this provision on Guantanamo transfer passed in an overwhelming bipartisan manner.

This is not an issue of politics. No matter what party the President is from, our entire constitutional balance depends on adherence to the rule of law. This is about more than the President ignoring Congress. The American people are the ones who deserve these answers. We are their representatives. That is why that provision was put in place, so that we, representing them, could give the President better advice.

The American people deserve these answers. So do, by the way, our men and women in uniform who continue to put their lives on the line for us every single day.

Already this month, since the release of these detainees, eight American servicemen have lost their lives in Afghanistan. We still have over 30,000 troops in the theater--30,000 Americans putting their lives on the line for us every day. I think a lot of them are wondering: What was the justification? Why? What effect will it have on them and their safety? One could hardly doubt that the administration's decision to release these Taliban leaders will put even more Americans at risk.

We should be under no illusions: If we take no action, I do not believe this will be the last unlawful transfer of detainees from Guantanamo Bay back to the battlefield.

In other words, if we don't speak and go on record to say: Wait a minute; we had a law here; this is wrong; we need a detailed justification--I believe the wrong message will be sent to the administration. The sense is Congress didn't seem to care that we violated the authorization bill, the appropriations bill, and went ahead without providing the appropriate notice.

President Obama has made it clear that closing Guantanamo is one of his top priorities in the waning days of his administration. I understand that. But he has provided no such clarity on what he intends to do with the dangerous men who are housed there--men such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks. He is there. Will he be released? Into whose custody? The terrorist known as Hambali, the mastermind of the Bali bombing that killed 200 people, including 7 Americans; Ramsey bin Al-Shabab, a high-ranking Al Qaeda operative who helped coordinate the 9/11 attacks.

We also need to remember why we went to Afghanistan in the first place. Before 9/11, under Taliban rule the country had become a haven for Al Qaeda, a power base for Osama bin Laden, and a place from which to plan and launch attacks against the United States and our allies. We went to Afghanistan to seek justice for those who died on September 11, but we also went to remove the Taliban from power, to free the Afghan people, and to ensure that Afghanistan never again becomes this base, this platform for terrorist activity which threatens us. We must not be blind to the fact that the Taliban aims to regain as much power as they can in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. That means a return to oppression, human rights abuses, the suppression of women's rights and, most importantly to us and our national security, the complicit harboring of their ally Al Qaeda. We have just returned to them the leadership team to help them achieve that goal.

President Obama tells us the war in Afghanistan is coming to an end. We need to ensure that end is one of sustainable victory, not defeat. The deteriorating situation we see unfolding before us on our TV sets in Iraq today demonstrates what can happen when we rush to the exits without preparing for an appropriate exit.

Today, the black flag of radical Islam flies over the second largest city in Iraq, and armed militants are advancing on Baghdad. Proclaiming victory in Iraq did not make it so.

Many made it clear that if we failed to maintain appropriate forces in Iraq to help the government transition and establish its authority, the long-term stability of Iraq would be open to threats and radical groups. We chose not to complete a status-of-forces agreement with the Maliki government. President Obama did not heed the warnings from those who saw these threats, and unfortunately we are seeing some of these predictions come true. Whatever we do in Afghanistan, I hope we learn from the lessons of Iraq.

The decisions to release high-ranking members of the Taliban while the fight against the Taliban continues to this day has shaken the trust of the American people, the trust of the Afghan people, and it opens the frightening possibility that what we are seeing today in Iraq may be a foreshadowing of Afghanistan's future.

In my view, Congress has the responsibility to get to the bottom of how this release happened and to ensure it doesn't happen again. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will support the resolution I have submitted so we can fulfill that responsibility.

I ask unanimous consent that the Armed Services Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. Res. 469; that the Senate proceed to its consideration; that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

It is unfortunate that we cannot at this point come to a bipartisan agreement on something even, it seems to me, as straightforward as this.

To my friend from Michigan I would say a couple of things. One, this resolution does not prejudge the investigation. The resolution--and I have it in front of me now--does not talk about the President's article II powers. It very clearly says that transfer of these detainees violated the National Defense Authorization Act--legislation that you brought to the floor--and the appropriations bill. That is what it says. So that is clear by the very language in those bills, that it does violate those bills. It doesn't talk about the constitutional authorities the President may have. It does say that it violates the terms of this legislation. It does not prejudge the investigation, which is in the why, the investigation as to why it happened, with, again, the intent of trying to keep this from happening again.

I do think the President could have used some reasoned judgment from some people who have been around a while, maybe even Senator Levin, who has some strong views on these national security matters and was involved earlier in the hearings that I was in where, under oath, the administration official talked about how dangerous these very men were.

Second, Senator Levin correctly says the President cannot change the law, and that is all we are saying. He cannot change the law with a signing statement. If he didn't believe this law was appropriate, he should have vetoed it, and he has done that in the past--as have other Presidents--vetoed legislation with which he didn't agree.

So I do believe that under article II, Chairman Levin is correct that the President does have certain authorities. That is why we were very careful when we drafted this legislation, this resolution, to say that this says the Congress shall go on record establishing that under the clear terms of these two laws that were passed by the Congress and signed into law by the President, the President did not follow the terms of those laws. That is clear. The investigation, then, is into why, and the Armed Services Committee would have the ability to do that.

By the way, today I know many are celebrating the capture of Ahmed Abu Khattala. Ahmed Abu Khattala was one of the terrorists who attacked the American compound in Benghazi, and I am glad to hear we have captured him and he may be deported back to the United States of America.

It is interesting because we got notice. I don't know if the chairman was notified, but I know the intelligence committee was notified. And that wasn't required by law, by the way. It is just common practice that happens when you have a relationship between the administration and Congress that is confidential.

We were notified, of course, with regard to the bin Laden capture. I cannot imagine the bin Laden capture was any less sensitive or any different in kind to make it something that we could do a notification on when we couldn't do it on the release of these five detainees from Guantanamo.

So this is something I think is very reasonable. We are asking for justification not after the decision is made--that is not what the legislation says. It says before the decision is made so that Congress can have the opportunity to discuss this with the President and to make sure that, in fact, we are proceeding appropriately with these very dangerous detainees at Guantanamo.

I would again make the point that some of these detainees who are at Guantanamo right now are people who--just as in the case of these five Taliban--have been considered to be extremely dangerous, and I would ask the question, If Congress isn't on record saying that we expect the law to be followed here and that the President ought to notify Congress before we release these people, what is going to happen with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed? What is going to happen with Hambali? What is going to happen with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an architect of the

9/11 attacks? These are all people who are at Guantanamo. The President says he wants to shut it down.

I think the legislation Senator Levin and others crafted--which, by the way, was legislation that changed over time. It evolved. The notification was a relatively slight requirement on the President compared to the previous legislation when I was on the Armed Services Committee with Chairman Levin. So this was something we thought about. We decided notification was appropriate, notifying Congress and providing a detailed justification. It is not too much to ask.

Again, we required the President to tell the Congress before releasing Guantanamo detainees. We spoke with one voice in the Congress. The President ignored that legal requirement. He ignored the voice of Congress. He ignored the law. If we are not going to hold him accountable, I don't know who will. Again, what does it say about the separation of powers enshrined in our Constitution, which simply says Congress has a role as one of the branches of government. No declaration, no investigation, no recourse? I don't think that is going to be helpful in terms of ensuring that balance of power continues and that we don't have this situation recur, as the President is talking about shutting down Guantanamo Bay and releasing other detainees.

I hope my friends on the other side of the aisle will reconsider their course of action today and take a careful look at this resolution, which was carefully drafted--including not to impinge on the President's constitutional powers under article II. I think the stakes are simply too high to do otherwise.

I yield back my time.

I hear the remarks from my colleagues from Alaska and appreciate her leadership on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where I have the privilege to serve, and she makes a lot of great points with regard to some of the student loan issues that affect our State of Ohio as well as Alaska. But today I am here to talk about something else, and that is the 90th birthday of a mentor of mine, a former boss of mine, and the 41st President of the United States, George H.W. Bush.

In addition to honoring him by wearing some colorful socks today, I also want to make a statement in the Congressional Record, so this statement can go down in the ages and some of the young folks who are in the Chamber today and their kids and grandkids will have this as part of the Congressional Record, talking about truly one of our great American patriots and public servants in the history of our country.

Like so many in his generation, President George H.W. Bush, when he heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor, answered the call to serve his country. He was 18 years old. So his service started long before he was sworn in as President of the United States.

At 18 years old he became the youngest naval aviator in the U.S. Navy. He served greatly in the Pacific, famously completing one bombing after his aircraft was fired upon. In fact, his aircraft was on fire. Yet he completed that mission.

For that and many other examples of heroism he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, one of the highest honors any aviator could receive. But he went home, went out to Texas, had a successful business career, raised a growing family, and started to engage in politics.

He became a successful politician and was an accomplished Congressman from Texas and then became a very respected international figure as Ambassador to the United Nations, and as envoy to China. He also headed up the Central Intelligence Agency at a very difficult time and helped to improve the morale and effectiveness of that agency. He then, of course, became Vice President of the United States. Then on January 20, 1989, he was sworn in as the 41st President.

President Reagan, 27 years ago today, in fact, made the famous statement that Mikhail Gorbachev should tear down the Berlin Wall. It was Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush who actually saw it done and brought an end to the Cold War. He removed a brutal dictator in Panama and gathered the whole world with the United States in the lead to remove Saddam Hussein and turn back the invasion of Kuwait.

At home in a time of divided government, when at the time one party was in control of the Congress and one party in control of the Executive Branch--as we have now to a certain extent--a divided government--he showed how we could work together, how to reach across the aisle and get things done and he did so.

But of all the things he has accomplished, there is probably nothing he is prouder of than his call to volunteerism. He championed and established the Points of Light Foundation, which has been enormously successful in getting Americans in all walks of life more engaged in helping their fellow citizens. He inspired the Nation when he spoke of a thousand points of light to promote volunteerism and community action by all of us. It turns out that a thousand points of light was not as ambitious as he could have been because he underestimated what he would accomplish. It hasn't been a thousand; it has been a million. The latest year I was able to find information was in 2012. In that year alone, the Points of Light Foundation engaged millions of volunteers. It has supported thousands of nonprofits and volunteer organizations across 250 cities in America, providing volunteer services that have been estimated to be valued at over $635 million.

That sort of generosity reflects the heart of the man I have come to know since I first had the honor of meeting him over 30 years ago. That generosity is what I experienced when President Bush took a chance on me--a young, inexperienced lawyer from Cincinnati, OH--when he made me Associate Counsel to the President. The experience I gained in that job was invaluable, and I continue to draw on it today. But even more valuable was what I learned from President Bush. I learned about being a father, being a husband, being a public servant, and serving--serving the folks we are honored to represent in the U.S. Senate.

Today we honor a true American hero, selfless public servant, and a person I consider to be the most honorable and decent person in politics in my lifetime. I wish him the best for a truly happy birthday and blessings on him and his entire family as they celebrate an amazing year.

He is apparently jumping out of an airplane again today on his 90th birthday, and he has received numerous awards this year. It has been a terrific 90th year.

I hope he understands the American response to him, which is one of great appreciation, gratitude, and respect. I hope he has a very happy birthday, and I hope God continues to bless him and his family for years to come.

I thank the Presiding Officer and note the absence of a quorum.

I ask for the yeas and nays.