Floor Statements

Mr. President, February marks the anniversary of the massive, peaceful protests against Bahrain's repressive regime in 2011. Bahraini citizens, men and women of all ages and backgrounds, demanded more accountability from their leaders and more agency in their lives.

Instead of sitting down with the protestors as leaders in Oregon or Washington, DC, often do, Bahrain's rulers unleashed the country's security forces on them. I am afraid that it has now become a rather sad tradition of mine to remind the Senate of these events, and so before February gives way to March, I just wanted to offer a few words on why this issue continues to resonate.

Bahrain held elections in November 2018, but they were hardly on the level. ``The Economist'' termed them ``unfair.'' The head of Human Rights First called them ``fake elections.'' The Project on Middle East Democracy and Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain said they were a ``sham.'' The list goes on.

This should come as no surprise to anybody paying attention to development in Bahrain because the regime banned opposition parties from participating altogether. That is not exactly a recipe for a free, fair, or legitimate outcome.

Indeed, the regime has spent the past couple years detaining, intimidating, and silencing the political opposition.

But don't take my word for it, that's how Amnesty International characterized the situation before the November elections.

The repression extends far beyond the ballot box. Human rights advocates say the regime has arbitrarily stripped hundreds of individuals of their citizenship in the past few years.

Human Right Watch indicates that the regime closed the last remaining independent newspaper in 2017. Freedom House says the regime continues to bully journalists and to persecute those who are critical of the regime.

Bahrain is a longtime U.S. ally in a tumultuous region. My intent with these annual statements is neither to insult the Kingdom nor to demand the administration cut ties.

No, the point of these statements is to make it clear that I believe the United States should always promote basic rights and values and further, that I believe the United States must--must--hold its friends and partners to a higher moral standard.

I was concerned that the previous administration did not do more to push Bahrain's rulers on this point, but I am deeply disappointed that the Trump administration seems hell-bent on setting a new low.

The President himself has made clear that he views the world through a transactional lens and is willing to overlook rights violations in the name of arms sales or greater defense cooperation.

So it is hardly surprising to read that Trump administration officials fail to raise human rights concerns with their Bahraini counterparts.

This must change. I hope it will change. And I hope that the influx of new members of Congress following the 2018 midterm elections will cause it to change.

Today I renew my call on Bahrain's monarchy to stop brutally repressing peaceful protest, to release political prisoners like Abdulhadi al-Khawaja and Nabeel Rajab, and to offer Bahrainis a greater voice in their country's future.

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

Madam President, this week the Senate is debating the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to serve as Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

I am going to make this short because this is bad news for anybody who wants the Environmental Protection Agency to live up to its fundamental mission; that is, to protect the public health so our citizens, from sea to shining sea, can breathe clean air and drink clean water.

In my view, Andrew Wheeler is Scott Pruitt without an appetite for luxury travel on the taxpayers' dime--yet another Trump appointee doing the bidding of the dirtiest, most powerful industry in America, no matter what physical harm it might do to the people of our country.

To me, the fundamental obligation of an EPA Administrator should be to make sure we don't compromise our health and the environment. Regrettably, Mr. Wheeler has spent his career doing essentially the opposite.

Given what he has done during his time as acting head of the Agency, he has already proven what sort of backward-thinking Administrator he will be. In fact, I think it would be fair to say Andrew Wheeler is sure to be ``Administrator Rollback.''

During his time as Acting-Administrator, he's rolled back fuel economy standards that reduce pollution and help drivers save money at the pump. Not even the car companies support him on that. He is rolling back the rules designed to stop dirty powerplants from belching toxic gases into the air. He is rolling back rules designed to protect workers from exposure on the job to dangerous chemicals that can cause heart attacks, for example. He is rolling back EPA enforcement--basic enforcement--of a host of safeguards that are already on the books.

Civil penalties against polluters are now at their lowest since 1994. Inspections of potentially toxic industrial sites amount to half of what they were just in 2010. Civil fines have plummeted on his watch. Judicial enforcement cases that have begun and are concluded have been cut in half. The Wheeler EPA is already letting environmental criminals off the hook. It is my view that these criminals are not creating victimless crimes--what they are doing is poisoning our communities, our workplaces, our air, and our water.

Perhaps what is most alarming about his appointment is that he essentially waves a hand of dismissal to the existential threat of climate change.

I have a lot of open-to-everybody townhall meetings in my State. We have now had more than 920. Just last week, I held five in different parts of our State. In counties where Donald Trump won and in counties where Hillary Clinton won, the issue of climate change comes up everywhere.

At the root of the questions I get in communities that span the philosophical spectrum is that people are terrified--terrified--of what climate change is going to bring. They see the news coming out of Washington. They see that the Trump administration isn't just waving the white flag of surrender on climate change. In effect, it almost feels as if the Trump people want to bring on those climate changes even faster. Anybody who is walking around in our communities and sees temperature shifts of more than 30 or 40 degrees on a dime is completely aware of what I am talking about, even if the Trump administration is not.

In my home State, when you talk about climate change, the first thing Oregonians think about are wildfires. These fires are not your grandfather's fires. They are bigger. They are hotter. They are more powerful.

Not too long ago, we actually had a fire leap the Columbia River--our magnificent Columbia River. This is noteworthy for a variety reasons but especially because our rivers historically have acted as fire bricks. Now we have these bigger and more powerful fires almost all year round, not just a few months in the summer, the way it used to be. These new megafires are extraordinary.

It is almost as if we are trying to get acclimated to the idea of clean air refugees--people who live near areas where fires break out, with ash built up on their cars like snow in the wintertime.

California has seen its own huge infernos causing horrible fatalities in the last few years. Nevada has seen it, Colorado and Washington as well. People are literally homeless, out and about in their communities, trying to just find a safe place for shelter.

Climate change is also not just about fires. Across the West, there is the threat of crippling drought. The hurricanes that battled the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico are intensifying and drowning our cities with rain. It seems like every day there is another report about how sea levels are rising faster than previously estimated.

Climate change is affecting wildlife in catastrophic ways. Entire ecosystems could be lost. This week, there were reports that an ice sheet larger than the island of Manhattan broke off from Antarctica. So the effects of climate change aren't some threat way off in the future. It is already a massive problem today. Americans feel it, and they see it in their communities again and again.

My wife and I are older parents. We have 11-year-old twins and a 6- year-old daughter. I--and I am sure there are plenty of other Senators--think about what their generation is going to be dealing with down the road. This is why there is so much grassroots energy out there about the Green New Deal, which I am proud to cosponsor.

I can tell you from the conversations I had in Oregon, people know what a grave threat climate change poses. They want action. My hope is that there are a variety of ways, like we saw with the original New Deal, in which we can find some common ground.

I am the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which writes the tax laws. We have more than 40 separate tax breaks for energy that are on the books today, and most of them are dirty energy tax relics of yesteryear.

What I have proposed is that we basically throw those 40 energy tax breaks--relics of dirty energy--in the trash can and substitute three; one for clean energy, one for clean transportation fuel, and one for energy efficiency.

The Presiding Officer is new here. She is getting out and talking to Senators about a variety issues. I can tell her that what I will be saying to colleagues on the other side of the aisle is something like, my idea responds to what Republicans have been talking about, the need for fewer subsidies. We ought to have fewer subsidies for energy.

Why don't we try to work together, find common ground, and do it particularly on an issue that helps us to promote clean energy at a time of dramatic climate change?

That is why I believe Andrew Wheeler is the wrong person to lead the EPA. Just when we need Democrats and Republicans to come together to find fresh ideas to combat climate change, he basically says that it really isn't a threat at all.

It really isn't a threat to Mr. Wheeler, and he is making the climate change challenge worse by basically suppressing the authority and the ability of the Agency to take this existential challenge head-on.

The mission of the EPA is all about protecting human health, fighting for clean air, fighting for clean water, and fighting on behalf of Americans from sea to shining sea.

Andrew Wheeler fights for those who endanger our health and pollute our air and water. This isn't a tough call. I am a no on a nomination that represents danger and going backward. I urge my colleagues to stay with me.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, as a former chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, I have a pretty good sense of how complicated it is to pull together a legislative package of public lands like the one this Senate is about to pass.

So I would like to begin my comments with a special shout-out to our chair and committee leadership, Chair Murkowski, Senator Cantwell, Senator Manchin, then-chairman and my friend Congressman Rob Bishop, and now-Chairman Grijalva for helping me negotiate the Oregon provisions in this bill.

This morning, I have brought to the floor of this Senate a copy of a wonderful story. It is called ``Fire at Eden's Gate.'' It is an inspiring account of our late Republican Governor, Tom McCall. Nobody understood better than Tom McCall the very basic idea that protecting our public treasures should not be a partisan proposition. In this day and age, too often, it can feel like the sense of common purpose around protecting our public treasures is slipping away, but I hope this bill is a bit of a signal that it is coming back.

That is why this morning, I am dedicating the Oregon provisions of this bill to the memory of our late, great Tom McCall. If Governor McCall were here with us this morning, he would say the Oregon provisions in this legislation are all about protecting and enhancing Oregon's unique and extraordinary livability. At the heart of that livability are our natural treasures and the recreation economy that pumps billions of dollars into Oregon, especially in our rural communities.

I am heading home this weekend. I have townhall meetings in every one of Oregon's 36 counties. In those rural areas, I am constantly seeing people whose livelihood revolves around that theory Tom McCall talked about--our unique livability. We will see small businesses, we will see guides who are taking folks out into the back country, and people who sell gear. The recreation economy is a big economic multiplier, and it is all tied to what Tom McCall talked about, which is protecting Oregon's livability.

Tom McCall would be very pleased with a number of aspects of this bill, and I want to tick them off briefly this morning. I believe Governor McCall would be especially pleased that this legislation does more to protect Oregonians from the growing threats of wildfires that, in our part of the world, are not your grandfather's fires. They are becoming infernos. We are seeing fires leap our majestic Columbia River, something that used to be unheard of but is a reality today. This legislation, in my view, makes a real difference in reducing the threats of wildfires.

I want to talk about one provision specifically, and that is what the bill does for Crooked River Ranch in Central Oregon. The Crooked River Ranch provision I worked on with the committee leadership and that we got in this bill is just common sense because it reduces the risk of fire and also prevents the increasing backlog that prevents our land managers from clearing out dead and dying hazardous fuels near the homes of families.

Folks from this really small community, the Crooked River Ranch, came to my townhall meetings and told me about their very understandable fear of being engulfed in one of these infernos, which is how I describe some of these fires that just leap through Federal, State, local, and private boundaries. I want everybody at Crooked River Ranch this morning to know the provisions of this bill reduce the risk of those huge fires, promote forest health, and reduce the backlog that is so critical to preventing fires in the future. I think the provisions in this bill show all those folks from Crooked River Ranch who came to our townhall meetings that the Senate has listened to them and responded to this very real threat.

In addition, I can picture Tom McCall this morning--this towering figure--striding through the forests that this bill designates as the first new wilderness in Oregon in nearly a decade. I am talking about the Devil's Staircase Wilderness area, which is 30,000 acres of rugged rainforest in our beautiful Oregon Coast Range. This is an untouched, pristine area, and it was named after a series of cascading waterfalls. It is an area that is so remote and so steep that hikers--who come from all over the country and literally from around the globe--when they come to Devil's Staircase, they can only gain access after a daylong trek through miles of devil's club, which is a tall, spiky bush that has irritated many a hiker. Few people have actually seen the waterfalls and the primeval stands of old-growth trees that surround it. In true Tom McCall fashion, this bill ensures that these majestic Douglas firs and tall trees on the hike are there for future generations to come, and that, in particular, is something Tom McCall personally talked to me about.

I am going to mention volunteers in the forests and a conversation I had with Tom McCall not long before he passed. He was always coming back, trying to make sure those of us in positions to make policy were thinking about future generations.

Nancy and I are older parents. We have twins who are 11 and a little redhead who is 6. Pictures are available on my iPhone after my presentation.

Whenever I look at them, I think about what Tom McCall said: You are making policy for future generations. Now, because of the provisions here to protect Devil's Staircase and create this unique, new wilderness area, it is going to be there for those future generations, for Oregonians, Americans, and literally visitors from around the world.

While we are on the topic of remote areas in my State, the lands bill we are about to vote on protects yet another very special place, the Chetco River in Southwestern Oregon. The Chetco lives within steep, mountainous terrain in the heart of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness area. This river--one of the wildest in Oregon--drops almost 4,000 feet in elevation from its headwaters in the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest before it empties into the Pacific Ocean near Brookings. This area would be particularly beloved by Tom McCall because it is a haven for treasured Oregon fish species like salmon and steelhead. There are so many pictures of Tom McCall throwing a rod because he loved to fish. Although it is a hike to get there, it is an irresistible challenge to even the most proficient anglers and whitewater kayakers, but they will find it the trip of a lifetime.

In addition to its recreation benefits and wildlife-sustaining habitat, the river also provides a clean and pristine source of drinking water for the city of Brookings and the town of Harbor on the Oregon Coast.

For years, this extraordinarily pure river, with crystal clear water, was being threatened by those who simply didn't appreciate what it meant for fishing and protecting the future, and simply just looked at as an opportunity for mining. This legislation ends the future potential for mineral exploitation along the banks to the Chetco once and for all.

I and other Members of the delegation have been working for years to try to make sure this was done permanently. We wouldn't have to lurch from one kind of administrative fix to another. Now we are embedding in black letter law that we are ending the future potential for mineral exploitation along the banks of the Chetco River.

I have been working on this for my entire time in public service representing Oregon in the U.S. Senate, and it is something that I-- again, apropos of that shout-out to Senator Murkowski, Senator Cantwell, Chair Bishop, Chair Grijalva--am so appreciative of.

The Chetco, by the way, is just one of the many rivers the public lands bill will protect and conserve in my home State. The bill protects more than 250 miles of rivers and streams in Oregon by adding them to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.

As an Oregonian, I know it doesn't take an act of Congress to remind us that rivers and streams are the backbone of Oregon's recreation economy. I spoke about it earlier, but this is something that, in my view, is missed in much of the debate about public lands. Recreation is an enormous economic multiplier for our communities.

I see our new colleague in the Chair, the Presiding Officer, and I know Florida cares deeply about treasures. So, again, this is not a partisan concern. This is all about looking down the road. When I have a chance, as I will this weekend, to be home for townhall meetings, I am always stunned at how far the reach is with respect to the recreation economy.

I was home recently, and a young man said he wanted to talk to me about his kayak business, and so we visited. He talked about how he had tourists come, and he would take them out in his kayak. Then he talked to me about how there is a global market for his kayaks.

I am the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee with jurisdiction over trade. He asked me about my view on economics. One out of five jobs in Oregon revolves around international trade. We like to make things and grow things and add value to them and ship them all over the world.

Well, the recreation economy creates opportunities here at home, as that young man took folks out in his kayaks, but creates even more opportunities as the rest of the world benefits from his kayaks as well.

In Oregon, we outdoor enthusiasts understand that from every corner of the United States we have an opportunity to show Oregon's true natural beauty as well as give people the experience of a lifetime seeing unparalleled treasures. It is a big boost to a lot of families for increasing their incomes.

Rivers and streams, such as those we are going to protect with the new additions to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, are a place for families to picnic, for anglers to cast a fly rod into some of the best fishing holes in the country, and for whitewater rafters to get an adrenaline rush while enjoying Oregon's treasures.

I can tell you about Tom McCall because Tom McCall loved fishing almost more than life itself. I am telling you, he would look at these provisions, and he would say that what this bill does to protect those hundreds of miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers is something that he would call part of laying the future for future generations but making sure there is a lot that benefits the people of my State and our country right now.

From Brookings to the Willamette Valley, from the Chetco to the Molalla River, this bill and the provisions we were able to negotiate on rivers protects treasured fishing streams and salmon habitats in every single corner of Oregon. As I indicated, it is going to be a real shot in the arm to rural communities that are going to be able to create world-class recreation destinations and look at that recreation economy as an increasing opportunity to build a more secure economic future.

Especially important are some of the protections this bill gives to the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. Fifty-one years after President Johnson named the Rogue to the original Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, this bill adds just over 120 miles of important Rogue River tributaries to the list. In doing so, this bill further protects and safeguards the mighty Rogue that the iconic western author Zane Grey put on the map when he wrote about the wilderness and remoteness of the river from his cabin at Winkle Bar nearly one century ago.

With these designations, Oregon will now have more miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers than any other State in the contiguous 48. Stay tuned, folks. Alaska is the only State that has more miles designated, but given that State is about six times the size of my Oregon, I still think we are in a position to catch up.

As the Governor who gave the public access to all of Oregon's beaches and passed the Nation's first bottle recycling bill, Tom McCall valued those who volunteered to keep Oregon so special. He was a great champion of promoting volunteers--again, something that historically has been bipartisan.

I ran the legal aid program for older people for a number of years-- the Gray Panthers, for about 7 years--and shortly before he passed, Tom McCall came to see me. I had never been elected to anything. I was stunned that such an important person would come to see an obscure fellow like myself. He was talking about the elderly, and it really led to a broader discussion of volunteerism and people participating, getting involved in their communities, and because he was always working to get people involved in cleaning up our beaches, and then he passed the Nation's first bottle recycling bill, he always came back-- as he did that day when he came to see me--to talking about how volunteerism is a big part of what keeps Oregon so special.

In that spirit, this bill honors the conservation legacy of two Oregonians who spent their lives working to keep Oregon special--Frank and Jeanne Moore.

Frank Moore just embodies the Oregon way. He served in World War II, and he returned to Oregon and settled with Jeanne in North Umpqua, guiding generations of anglers on the river. Frank and Jeanne dedicated their lives to preservation and conservation of the Umpqua River.

For somebody who knows a thing or two about casting a fly rod, Frank Moore understood just how important protecting the river is. I and my colleagues have felt it is long past time to honor Frank and Jeanne's legacy along the river and in their community. That is what this bill does.

I went and visited them not long after we made a judgment that we wanted to protect these Oregon icons and their conservation legacy, and now Frank and Jeanne Moore will be recognized in this bill for protecting nearly 100,000 acres of Forest Service land near the North Umpqua River through

the inclusion of the Frank and Jeanne Moore Salmon Sanctuary.

As anybody who works on public lands legislation knows, sometimes it is hard to find a balance in order to get public lands legislation passed. Nobody gets everything they want. Nobody gets everything they believe they ought to have. The question is, can you bring people together.

I am going to close by way of saying I have highlighted a number of provisions that I am glad we got in here. It was 10 years earlier when then-President Obama signed seven pieces of public lands legislation that I was the lead author of. So these opportunities don't come along all the time.

There are additional protections that I wish were in this bill we will vote on in a few hours. I particularly wanted further protections for the Rogue and the Molalla Rivers. I want to say to the people I am so honored to represent at home that as soon as we get this done, we are going to go back and start building support to get those protections through Congress in the future, and I am optimistic that if we can have the same kind of cooperation I have been talking about this morning, we can get them across the finish line.

This public lands bill may not be perfect, but it is a major accomplishment. If you had told me, in a polarized political climate like the one we have today, that we could get a permanent authorization for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, I would have said, ``No way. Can't happen,'' but now we have real protection for, as it is called,

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

Mr. President, the first tax filing season under President Trump's mess of a tax law is upon us, and it looks like a whole lot of chickens are coming home to roost.

Republicans jammed their tax bill through Congress at record speed-- pile driver legislating. The Trump tax bill was signed into law with a whopping 9 days to go before the 2018 tax year was set to begin, and after all of that land speed record timing, there were bound to be serious problems. There is a big one now that lots of Americans are reportedly waking up to, and they are

waking up now that the tax filing season has arrived. The big tax refunds that Americans have gotten used to could be goners now that Trump's tax changes are the law of the land and many Americans might owe the government money.

As the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, I am very troubled about the prospect of what is ahead, and I want to lay out my concerns. Here is what this is all about.

Most Americans have their taxes withheld from each paycheck, and the Treasury redoes the math on withholding every year. Obviously, the math gets more complicated when Congress passes legislation like President Trump's tax law, which, in effect, triggers a tax policy earthquake. The outcome of these decisions about how much to take out of everybody's paycheck is clearly going to have a big impact.

Here is where it looks like things went wrong, where it looks like the Trump team decided to score short-term political wins instead of to protect Americans from financial harm.

In election year 2018, the Trump Treasury Department had a shiny, new tax law on its hands, and there is no question it wanted it to impress. It sure looks like, back in December 2017, the Trump administration decided to put politics first--to lowball the estimates of how much tax should be withheld from everybody's paycheck and lure Americans into a false sense of security that they had gotten big tax cuts that were courtesy of Donald Trump.

The prospect of the Trump administration's buying American taxpayers off with their own money is what you are talking about here. It is as if the Trump administration figured, when the other shoe dropped and people were to be hit with penalties for underpayment, well, it would be springtime 2019, and the 2018 election would be behind us. It could cause a lot of hurt this spring when people who typically get big refunds suddenly learn that they owe the government a check. Americans, understandably, want their taxes to be simple and straightforward and routine. Whether it is a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, you can understand why people would count on getting refunds when they have gotten the same amount back for years and years.

I have talked to folks all over my State about this. I have townhall meetings in every county--90 minutes, open to everybody. I don't give any speeches. I am just there to let people tell me what their takes are with respect to what is going on back here and what they think we ought to be doing. Oregonians are asking about the issue of whether or not they are going to owe money. The first thing they say is that it is their money, that these are refunds on taxes that have been taken out of their paychecks. We are talking about middle-class folks, working families, who use their refunds to pay the bills, to help cover tuition for a child, or to put a downpayment on a new car one has been needing for ages.

Here is the truth. The Trump administration did not need to put anybody in this situation. It had the option of delaying these withholding changes by a year to make sure nobody took a hit.

While it was making this decision in January of 2018--just days after the law was enacted--the Democrats in this body and in the other body were sounding the alarm on what sort of danger was possible this spring. I and Chairman Neal, of the House Ways and Means Committee, wrote to the Government Accountability Office. In representing the Democrats in this body and in the House, the two of us asked what kind of impact this rush job was going to have on working Americans who have their income taxes withheld from every paycheck. The Government Accountability Office responded to Chairman Neal and me 7 months later.

According to the Government Accountability Office's analysis, after the Trump tax law enactment, nearly 30 million Americans will find that they will have underpaid their taxes in 2018. That is millions more Americans than before the new tax law, which is way out of line with numbers that you would typically see. Those are the Americans who are in line for a shock when they file their tax returns this year.

Here is what the Treasury Department is going to say. It will claim it chose the withholding figures that would do the least amount of harm. Yet that just doesn't pass the smell test, not when it chose numbers that underwithheld taxes at far higher rates than usual. You are potentially talking about millions and millions of Americans--way more than is normal--finding out that the government has been goosing their paychecks with tax trickery, and now they are going to get hit with big tax bills. The Treasury Department, I am sure, is going to say it updated the official IRS--Internal Revenue Service--withholding calculator and sent out new withholding forms for employers, but none of that was released until February 28--2 months into the new tax year.

Furthermore, let's be realistic about the prospect of Americans flocking to the Internal Revenue Service's withholding calculator. The taxpayers who will be potentially affected by this underwithholding issue will be parents with jobs to do and kids to look after. How can you expect those people to have spent a whole lot of time doing tax math at the beginning of 2018 in order to head off a problem they didn't know anything about and that might show up in a filing season more than a year later? Our working families have lives to lead. They are not spending the first weeks of a new year crunching the numbers on tax withholding.

That is why I wrote to the Internal Revenue Service's Commissioner, Mr. Rettig, before anybody up here had really begun to see the challenge. I encouraged the Commissioner to waive penalties for 2018, to waive tax penalties for this year. I made the case that it was the first year of a new tax law--he was not involved in writing it--that was jammed through the Congress and enacted in way too precipitous a manner. Hard-working families should not suffer the harmful consequences of political gamesmanship on taxes. Instead of replying and working with me to find a solution, Commissioner Retting went ahead and said that the best the Internal Revenue Service could do is adjust the threshold where penalties kick in. Instead of penalizing those who paid less than 90 percent of what they owed in 2018, he decided that they would penalize those who paid less than 85 percent. There is no question that is a modest step in the right direction, but it is my judgment that the Internal Revenue Service ought to do more and keep it simple.

As we look at the events of the upcoming weeks, here is my bottom line: I believe it is time for the Trump administration to say that nobody will be penalized for the Trump administration's mistakes on tax withholding, change the penalty thresholds, extend the safe harbor--do whatever it takes to make sure that our people are held harmless with respect to what could otherwise be penalties for the Trump administration's mistakes on tax withholding.

Down at the Treasury Department, there are a lot of people with expensive degrees hanging on their office walls. I would like to see them put some of that brain power to work now helping to protect middle-class families.

My bottom line is that nobody ought to be penalized for the Trump administration's mistakes on tax withholding.

After Republicans and this administration teamed up on a $2 trillion tax giveaway that overwhelmingly benefits multinational corporations and those at the very top, those who are particularly powerful in America, protecting our working families from tax policies is the least the government can do. Otherwise, it sure looks like a lot of middle- class families are going to be justifiably outraged. I know, because they are coming up to me. They are coming up to me here in this city, and I know that when I have town meetings next week at home in Oregon, I am going to hear a lot about this. I believe that a lot of middle- class families are going to be justifiably outraged. I wouldn't blame them.

I want it understood that I believe the next step is for the Trump administration to move to make sure that nobody is penalized for the Trump administration's mistakes on tax withholding.

With that, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, today I am placing a hold on the nomination of Elizabeth Darling to be Commissioner on Children, Youth and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Since Ms. Darling has been renominated by the administration in the 116th Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services gave the State of South Carolina a green light for religious-based discrimination in its State-contracted foster care agencies. Adults who can provide safe, loving, and nurturing homes for foster kids will be denied that opportunity on religious grounds.

I am also concerned about the slow implementation of the Family First Act, which the Finance Committee passed on a bipartisan basis in the last Congress. A big part of that law has been delayed, and the latest information I have heard regarding my concerns is that there are ``robust conversations'' happening behind the scenes. I expect that to improve going forward.

For these reasons, I will object to any unanimous consent request concerning the nomination of Ms. Darling at this time.

Mr. President, today I recognize the distinguished career of Kathleen Gardner Cravedi, who is retiring after 41 years of dedicated Federal service and for whose public service we should all be grateful.

As somebody who started his career in public service as the co- director of the Oregon Grey Panthers, I appreciate the work of individuals who are committed to improving conditions for older Americans. Kathy began her career in public service on Capitol Hill working on exactly those issues. As a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, I had the benefit of working with Kathy when she was staff director for the Subcommittee on Health and Long-term Care of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Aging. Working under her chairman, the late-great Congressman Claude Pepper, Kathy helped pass legislation ending mandatory retirement and providing hospice care under Medicare. She worked on fighting elder abuse, health fraud, and she worked on the first congressional hearing ever on Alzheimer's disease.

She helped to establish the National Center for Biotechnology Information and National Institute on Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Following her service in Congress, Kathy continued her healthcare advocacy by directing a nationwide campaign to bring citizens from all 50 States to Washington, DC, to testify before Congress and talk with the First Lady on the need for healthcare reform.

In 1996, Kathy moved over to the National Library of Medicine, or NLM, which is the world's largest biomedical library and a key resource for some of the most exciting medical science out there. Serving as NLM's first public liaison, she worked hard connecting NLM's work with the public, spearheading campaigns that drew huge attention in the United States and abroad. She brought in lawmakers and celebrities and athletes and scientists to promote the organization's mission.

Over 23 years at NLM, Kathy steadily moved up the ranks, and she is now retiring as the director of the Office of Communications and Public Liaison. Her career at NLM has been key to connecting the American public with the astounding work this organization does.

Forty-one successful years in public service is a tremendous accomplishment. So I want to thank Kathy for all her many years of hard work, and I want to congratulate her on her well-earned retirement.

Mr. President, today I am introducing the Preserving American Justice Act to ensure that foreign governments face serious consequences if they assist their citizens to escape legal accountability in the United States.

Recently, Oregon's largest newspaper, The Oregonian, uncovered that five Saudi nationals with criminal charges departed the Nation before facing justice. These men were arrested for serious crimes including vehicular murder of an innocent teenager, sexual assault, rape, and child pornography. According to news reports, U.S. government officials believe the Saudi government helped these five men with actions ranging from posting bail to facilitating their escape from the United States. These reports claiming the Saudi government is whisking away criminals facing justice in Oregon show a shocking disdain for our Nation's criminal justice system. Given the disturbing similarities in these five cases, a thorough investigation is essential to better understand the involvement of the Saudi government.

When anyone commits a crime in the United States, they must be held accountable. The Trump administration has failed to explain what, if anything, it is doing to ensure these men face American justice. That failure is completely unacceptable. Foreign governments cannot disregard our laws and abuse diplomatic privileges by helping criminals escape. No one is above the law, and I am committed to making sure the Saudi government understands that it cannot behave this way here in Oregon or anywhere in the United States.

The legislation I introduced today would direct the Department of Justice to investigate these five cases and bring to light the involvement of the Saudi government. If the Department of Justice concludes that the Saudi government was involved, then my bill would bar Saudi Arabia's leaders from the United States until their government returns the suspects who have fled. The legislation would also create a major tax penalty on governments and sovereign wealth funds for any country that help its citizens escape American justice. More broadly, my legislation would help Americans understand how widespread this practice is, direct the Department of Justice to maintain a list of any foreign governments that help their citizens evade American justice, and create tough consequences for those governments and their leaders.

I believe that my colleagues who talk about ``putting America First'' would agree that foreign governments cannot undermine American laws. I'm all for doing more to protecting Americans from real threats and ensuring that the victims of these crimes get the justice they deserve in an American court of law. So I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting measures that would hold foreign governments accountable.

Mr. President, today I am introducing the Preserving American Justice Act to ensure that foreign governments face serious consequences if they assist their citizens to escape legal accountability in the United States.

Recently, Oregon's largest newspaper, The Oregonian, uncovered that five Saudi nationals with criminal charges departed the Nation before facing justice. These men were arrested for serious crimes including vehicular murder of an innocent teenager, sexual assault, rape, and child pornography. According to news reports, U.S. government officials believe the Saudi government helped these five men with actions ranging from posting bail to facilitating their escape from the United States. These reports claiming the Saudi government is whisking away criminals facing justice in Oregon show a shocking disdain for our Nation's criminal justice system. Given the disturbing similarities in these five cases, a thorough investigation is essential to better understand the involvement of the Saudi government.

When anyone commits a crime in the United States, they must be held accountable. The Trump administration has failed to explain what, if anything, it is doing to ensure these men face American justice. That failure is completely unacceptable. Foreign governments cannot disregard our laws and abuse diplomatic privileges by helping criminals escape. No one is above the law, and I am committed to making sure the Saudi government understands that it cannot behave this way here in Oregon or anywhere in the United States.

The legislation I introduced today would direct the Department of Justice to investigate these five cases and bring to light the involvement of the Saudi government. If the Department of Justice concludes that the Saudi government was involved, then my bill would bar Saudi Arabia's leaders from the United States until their government returns the suspects who have fled. The legislation would also create a major tax penalty on governments and sovereign wealth funds for any country that help its citizens escape American justice. More broadly, my legislation would help Americans understand how widespread this practice is, direct the Department of Justice to maintain a list of any foreign governments that help their citizens evade American justice, and create tough consequences for those governments and their leaders.

I believe that my colleagues who talk about ``putting America First'' would agree that foreign governments cannot undermine American laws. I'm all for doing more to protecting Americans from real threats and ensuring that the victims of these crimes get the justice they deserve in an American court of law. So I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting measures that would hold foreign governments accountable.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to discuss the nomination of William Barr to be Attorney General.

Today, I want to make clear that I will be opposed to this nomination for several reasons. I am just going to outline some of my key concerns that really haven't been addressed much over the last few weeks.

I am specifically concerned about his view that the President of the United States is effectively royalty, in his book, and he seems to believe that the President is unaccountable to the laws of our Nation or to the normal constraints imposed by the Congress. Today, I am going to focus on what I consider to be Mr. Barr's dangerous views on surveillance and his contempt for surveillance laws and the Fourth Amendment.

It is my view this is not a partisan issue. There has been, for some years, a bipartisan coalition in the Senate that has battled to protect the privacy and constitutional rights of Americans, but Mr. Barr's views, after I have laid them out today, ought to frighten every Member of this Senate. What Mr. Barr has said is that whether the Congress supports broader or narrower surveillance authorities and regardless of whether Congress votes for more checks and balances and oversight, it really doesn't matter. He has made the judgment, based on the proposition which he has stated very clearly, that the President can essentially do what he wants.

This nominee, in my view, poses a unique threat to the rule of law and the Fourth Amendment. His long-held views, which presumably he would put in practice if confirmed, threaten the very notion that Congress or the courts have any say in who in America gets spied on. If he is confirmed as Attorney General, he could take us back--and not just 12 years to an era of warrantless wiretapping. As Mr. Barr himself has made clear, he would be taking us back 40 years, to an era before the Church Committee, when neither Congress nor the courts had any role at all in checking or overseeing an abusive, out-of-control government.

Before the reforms of the 1970s, as has now been well documented, the government committed one horrific abuse after another. It spied on hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans. It spied on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It spied on activists. It spied on Congress. When these abuses finally came to light, Congress acted by passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established a secret court to issue warrants against spies and terrorists.

Unfortunately, as we now know, the government violated the law when it implemented its warrantless wiretapping program in 2001. The program included warrantless collection of the content of private communications, including through warrantless targeting of phone numbers and email addresses of people in our country. The program also included the bulk collection of phone and email records of enormous numbers of innocent, law-abiding Americans. All of this occurred in secret, without warrants or any judicial oversight at all, and almost no one--no one in the Congress, nor even most members of the Intelligence Committee--knew anything about it.

The secrecy didn't even end when the bulk phone and email record programs were moved under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Obama administration, just like the Bush administration, kept this abusive program and the secret legal interpretations behind it from the American people, even lying about it in public testimony.

How did these abusive and illegal programs get their start? With secret determinations made at the Department of Justice that the law didn't matter and that the President can do what he wants.

That brings us to Mr. Barr. His dangerous views on Executive power have long been consistent--consistent--throughout his career, from his writings at the Department of Justice in the late 1980s to the present, but in October of 2003, he laid out in public testimony his position that, in Mr. Barr's view, the President is not accountable to surveillance laws and that the President enjoys huge loopholes in the Fourth Amendment.

October of 2003 was shortly after Congress had passed the PATRIOT Act, legislation that many in Congress have come to view as granting too much authority with too little oversight, but from Mr. Barr's perspective, the PATRIOT Act was too limiting and too constraining, and that wasn't even the most troubling part of his testimony. Right up front, he asked himself the question of whether the law was adequate to fight terrorism. Here is what he said. He said he wasn't worried about the law, and this is a direct quote: ``The critical legal powers are granted directly by the Constitution itself, not by Congressional enactments.'' In other words, Mr. Barr's view of surveillance is that the laws passed by Congress do not matter. If the President wants to violate them, it is Mr. Barr's position that he can just go out and say he has constitutional authority and do it.

Here is a direct quote from Mr. Barr's testimony. Talking about laws going back to the 1970s, he said: ``Numerous statutes were passed, such as [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], that purported to supplant Presidential discretion with Congressionally crafted schemes whereby judges become the arbiter of national security decisions.''

I am going to unpack that sentence for a minute. From Mr. Barr's perspective, decades of laws passed by the U.S. Congress are nothing but schemes--schemes. He is talking about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a fundamental framework of checks and balances that Congress has relied on

for four decades to ensure congressional and judicial oversight of surveillance. He is talking about every modification of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, from the PATRIOT Act to what is called section 702, reauthorized last year, to the USA Freedom Act, which was intended to stop the collection of millions of innocent Americans' phone records. Whatever you think of these statutes, they are how Congress determines the extent of the government's surveillance powers and exercises its responsibility to protect the rights of Americans. Mr. Barr notwithstanding, these duly enacted laws of Congress are not mere schemes.

Worse still, it is Mr. Barr's contention that all of these laws only purport to have any effect. The President, says Mr. Barr, has the discretion to ignore them. By definition, if you are saying that the President can just ignore the laws, in effect, that is a position that is in favor of tyranny. This is as dangerous a position as I have heard in congressional testimony. It is very similar to the language that was concocted in the Department of Justice to justify warrantless wiretapping--and these are the views coming from the man who might be Attorney General of the United States.

Mr. Barr is correct that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gives judges some say in when the government can spy on Americans. It is a secret system, one that greatly advantages the government and almost always precludes challenges from those who are spied on. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been abused through secret interpretations of law, but the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does involve judges considering the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans, and that is what Mr. Barr objects to.

Based on his own testimony, it is clear to me that Mr. Barr has fundamental problems with the Fourth Amendment or at least its application to anything the President might unilaterally decide involves national security. He believes that if the government determines there is a threat, there is no need to ask a judge for a warrant.

The Fourth Amendment protects the rights of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures unless there is a probable cause warrant. That is what the Constitution says. Mr. Barr, however, has found two very big loopholes in the Fourth Amendment.

First, he insists that if the government decides a foreigner in the United States is ``apparently acting as a terrorist,'' then he or she is not one of the ``people,'' and the government can just throw out the Fourth Amendment.

Second, Mr. Barr argues that so long as the government says there is a threat, a warrantless search is not unreasonable, and the warrant requirement under the Fourth Amendment simply doesn't apply.

At the core of Mr. Barr's philosophy is that no one--not Congress and certainly not judges--has any business assessing the government's assertion about threats.

Here is another quote from Mr. Barr: These are ``assessments judges are not competent to make or responsible for making under the Constitution.''

For 40 years, judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court have been making these determinations, but, from Mr. Barr's perspective, the courts are not competent to decide who gets spied on; only the President gets that power.

Some might ask whether Mr. Barr has had a change of heart, particularly since Congress has passed additional surveillance authority in the year since his testimony. I hope we see in the days ahead where he stands, whether he now believes that spying on Americans and people in the United States has to be consistent with the laws passed by Congress, but his 2003 testimony suggests that even new, sweeping, bipartisan laws that have passed wouldn't satisfy him.

A little over a decade ago, Congress created section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That allows for warrantless spying on foreigners overseas. I have said our country faces real threats from foreigners overseas, so I stipulate that is something that is important to the safety of the law-abiding people whom we all represent. I have had serious concerns about the number of innocent Americans whose communications are being swept up under section 702 collection, but at least the targets of the surveillance are overseas.

Mr. Barr would go further in his testimony, calling for the warrantless targeting of people inside the United States. According to Mr. Barr, there are individuals right here in the United States who have no Fourth Amendment rights. This is an important issue today, and it will become more important in the days ahead.

I have already stipulated that I think there are serious threats to our country overseas. What troubles me is, as telecommunication systems around the world become more globally interconnected, more and more innocent Americans are going to get swept up in these searches. To me, when you are talking--as Mr. Barr seems to be doing--that there are individuals in our country who have no Fourth Amendment rights, that is why I think all Senators should be troubled about these positions he has long espoused.

There is also the matter of collecting business records, sensitive information about Americans that are in possession of a third party. Here, we are talking about your purchases, who you are communicating with, where you are located at any time of the day.

Mr. Barr believes that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to any records held by a company or other third party, no matter how sensitive that information is. This view has actually been rejected recently by the U.S. Supreme Court. What Mr. Barr has been saying is actually out of sync even with the current thinking of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court most recently held that the Fourth Amendment does apply to the government's collection of location data from wireless carriers.

Apparently, yesterday Mr. Barr said he had not read that Supreme Court decision. Colleagues. I think that ought to be really troubling to the Members of this body. We are talking about location data. Location data can be a personal safety and national security nightmare.

We saw what happened just last week. In 2018, the wireless companies all made promises to me that they wouldn't make available precise location data to hedge funds, bail bondsmen--all kinds of bottom feeders just looking to make a buck. What happened was, in 2018, those wireless companies said they wouldn't make that data available any longer to these location trackers and bail bondsmen and the like, and then last week, a bounty hunter got 300 bucks and found out those 2018 promises to me meant nothing. So last week, the wireless companies promised again that they wouldn't make location data available to all of these financially interested parties. I appreciate their saying it, but I will tell you, I will believe it when I see it, because we got a promise in 2018 that they would be serious about protecting location data, and we saw last week that they weren't.

We have the Supreme Court now making it clear that the Fourth Amendment applies to the government's collection of location data from wireless carriers, but the person who is up for nomination, Mr. Barr, has not been willing to or doesn't find it important enough to even read the Supreme Court decision on this case.

The government's collection of business records is authorized by section 215 of FISA, which was part of the PATRIOT Act. There are serious concerns about 215. It was abused for years to carry out a secret program that swept up the phone records of millions of innocent, law-abiding Americans. Even after the USA FREEDOM Act, which was intended to end bulk collection, it has been used to collect hundreds of millions of phone records. All the government needs to collect these records is to show the FISA Court that the records are relevant to an investigation. There is no requirement for a probable cause warrant.

This important law sunsets this year, so the Congress will have a debate about whether these authorities are too broad, whether there is a need for more checks and balances. I see my colleague from Texas, who also serves on the Intelligence Committee. We are going to have a debate on it. That is the way it ought to be.

Today, we are talking about what I consider to be dangerous views espoused by Mr. Barr. What Mr. Barr believes is that the government shouldn't have any court oversight at all when it comes to collecting the records on Americans. He thinks the government should just unilaterally issue a subpoena and collect those records and that there would be no oversight whatever. The foundation of Mr. Barr's beliefs when it comes to surveillance is that the President can do whatever he wants if he believes national security is at stake.

I am going to close by simply talking for an additional minute or two about what it will mean if Mr. Barr is confirmed as Donald Trump's Attorney General.

Right now, the President is openly considering a declaration that he, Donald Trump, has emergency powers to override the will of the Congress, and he is doing this while relying on a baseless assertion that there is a national security crisis.

Until he was fact-checked, he was making very far-fetched claims about terrorists coming over the border. He also regularly calls journalists ``enemies of the people'' and calls for investigations of his political enemies.

I would oppose the nomination of anyone with William Barr's views on Executive power regardless of who was President, but the kinds of threats I am talking about are too serious to ignore.

Donald Trump has openly said and said specifically how much he would enjoy unchecked surveillance power. During the 2016 campaign, when the Russians were hacking his opponents, the President of the United States, our current President, said: ``honestly, I wish I had that power. I'd love to have that power.''

If Donald Trump decides that national security is at stake and William Barr is the Attorney General, it would be Mr. Barr who might give him that power--power he could use with no oversight from the courts and without regard to what Mr. Barr has dismissed as ``the schemes''--our laws--of Congress.

In case anyone thinks Mr. Barr would himself serve as a check on the President, he has also written that that is not the Attorney General's job. Just last year, he wrote that all Executive power rests in one and only one person--the President--and that the President doesn't have to convince his Attorney General that his orders are legal.

Let me be clear. The issues I have raised with respect to Mr. Barr's views on surveillance are not kind of conjecture or possible theories. What I have been talking about this afternoon are the views outlined in Mr. Barr's own testimony. I hope every Member of this body will take the time to read Mr. Barr's testimony and consider what is at stake.

There are Members in both political parties in this Chamber who have long been concerned about the expansive surveillance authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the possible abuse of that law. Those concerns are, in my view, small potatoes compared to what Mr. Barr has proposed, which is that the law need not constrain the President whatsoever. For example, some Members of this body have expressed concern about Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants in connection with the Russia investigation and whether all relevant information has been provided to the FISA Court. Consider a world in which the government doesn't need a warrant and doesn't have to justify its surveillance to any court. Consider the possibility of abuse in that world. That is the world Mr. Barr has testified he wants.

I also would appeal to my colleagues with whom I have had some pretty vigorous debates over the years about surveillance and who may have no concerns about the current framework of our laws. We can have our disagreements about how to write the law. Here in the Senate, we do agree that the laws passed by the Congress mean something. They are binding, and they are not, as Mr. Barr has stated, ``schemes'' that the President can just ignore whenever he feels like it.

This nominee has been more than clear about where he stands. He believes that the President alone decides when there is a threat and that when he does, he doesn't have to worry about Congress, judges, or the laws, or the Constitution. In my view, that is a prescription for trouble, a prescription for more abuses--abuses that Congress may or may not even be told about. But we have been warned. We have been warned by Mr. Barr's testimony.

I also would like to note that I have concerns about Mr. Barr that relate to classified matters, and I am currently seeking declassification of those matters and hope that this will be resolved prior to any votes on the nominee.

I see colleagues are waiting.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, a few minutes ago, I got off the phone with Jasmine Tool, who is an Oregonian living with an inoperable brain tumor. As the shutdown lingers on, I want to share her story because she has been bearing the unthinkable consequences of her illness.

I am going to start today by asking: How can a country as rich and good and strong as the United States of America let Jasmine Tool suffer this way?

She is a 34-year-old mother of two young children. She lives in Lake County, a rural community in south central Oregon. She is a public servant, an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She has been living with an inoperable brain tumor. The cancer has caused related debilitating conditions. She is in and out of hospital emergency rooms. Her digestive system is impaired. With the invaluable care provided by a home health worker, she takes in liquids and nutritional infusions through tubing that is plugged into her abdomen.

Because she lives in a rural area, her treatment can require long- distance travel. That is hard to deal with when you are suffering from the flu. Just imagine how hard it is with a brain tumor, a broken digestive tract, and feeding tubes attached to your body that prevent you from eating or drinking normally.

She is confronting this health challenge with remarkable bravery, and I don't believe there is a single Member of the U.S. Senate who would wish Jasmine's struggle on their very worst enemy.

Then comes the government shutdown.

Jasmine was due to travel to Nevada this month for treatment related to her tumor, but last week, as she was prepared to go, she was informed that her health insurance had lapsed. Initially, she thought it might be--we all know with insurance--kind of a recent hiccup or recent problem, something that could be corrected quickly.

This week, she learned that it lapsed in October--October, months ago--and her insurance company told her that only her employer could fix it.

Jasmine's employer is shut down. Nobody is answering the phones. Right now, Jasmine Tool is suffering--this mother of two--and is unable to determine what caused the lapse in her coverage or what can be done to get it fixed.

The most immediate threat is this: Jasmine was told that her home health assistant cannot continue to help her if she doesn't have insurance. That means that within days this 30-year-old mom will not be able to get the infusions she needs to stay alive.

Now, if that isn't enough, Jasmine has been failed by the government on multiple occasions. Shortly after she went on medical leave in early 2017, she began the process of applying for disability--disability retirement. She worked with the appropriate human resources official to prepare the paperwork to send to the Office of Personnel Management. She thought, as anybody would, that the process was underway and she would hear back soon about the results of her application.

She just learned recently that the official who prepared the documents retired without sending them in. For a year and a half, while Jasmine fought cancer and was just hoping to get some positive news, her disability paperwork sat in an unused office--just sat there collecting dust.

She had to travel to that office against her doctor's orders to finalize the paperwork once more and prevent a loss of benefits. But the Office of Personnel Management--that is shut down too. Jasmine hasn't been able to learn where her benefits stand.

It is too cruel already that thousands and thousands of American workers are going without paychecks. This shutdown is making victims of those who do public service. But consider what it is doing to this young mother of two, a woman who is currently fighting for her life right now.

Because of this shutdown, she can't figure out how to restore her health insurance. She can't get the status of her disability application. She could be cut off--I just talked to her--from her nutritional supplements in a matter of days. That means Jasmine could starve. That is what she just told me.

So I have been talking to people who have suffered from health challenges

for a long time--director of the Grey Panthers about 7 years at home. I listened to Jasmine and I just said: How can it be that there is no outbreak of conscience here--no outbreak of conscience here in this Senate? How can a country as rich and powerful as ours fail Jasmine in such a shameful way?

Our country is going to spend $3.5 trillion on healthcare--$3.5 trillion on healthcare--this year. It is not a lack of money that is causing this nightmare for Jasmine Tool in rural Oregon.

With the government reopened, things would be different. Things would be very different for Jasmine. There would be somebody on the other end of the phone line to tell Jasmine what happened to her insurance, and because of the professionalism of those in these positions, I think they could tell her how to renew that insurance. There would be somebody to tell her what is happening with her disability application. Jasmine could bring back her home health aide and get the infusions she needs to survive.

So I am asking the Senate, how can this be allowed to continue? How can this be allowed to continue? The Senate passed a bipartisan government funding bill by voice vote just 2 weeks ago in the previous Congress.

I see Senator Collins. She has a longstanding interest in these healthcare issues. Senator Sasse also, I know from our conversations, has a heart and cares about people.

The House passed this legislation. The pathway out of this shutdown is right in front of us if the majority leader would decide when to bring up the legislation again, and we could do it tonight. Jasmine Tool could get the lifesaving healthcare that she needs, based on our conversation, by week's end, so she will not starve.

Otherwise, unless the majority leader calls it up, it seems to me the White House has no plan to end this shutdown. So I just think it has to end right here--right here in the U.S. Senate, where all of us say: This cannot go on any longer.

I just spoke to a young mom in rural Oregon who is in a fight for her life, a fight for her survival.

Colleagues who are here, I am sure Jasmine is not the only such case in America. Jasmine Tool--my guess is, there are plenty of others in communities across the country. Jasmine Tool does not have the luxury of time.

I am going to go back to my office. My staff here, my staff folks in Oregon--we are just going to be pulling out all the stops now because it really is a matter of hours to get Jasmine the help she needs. We do it recognizing that there is only one immediate solution: The shutdown must end, and it must end now.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about Larry Weinberg, who was beloved by many Oregonians, one of the original owners of our wonderful basketball team, the Portland Trail Blazers-- the owner who won eternal gratitude from the people of my State as he guided our Trail Blazers to their first title. He passed away last week at the age of 92. He was a soft-spoken man who was never one to drone on, so in that spirit, I am going to keep these remarks brief.

The first thing we want everybody to know about Larry is that he was a wonderful family man. I met him for the first time in the early 1980s. I was a young Member of the other body, the House of Representatives, and Larry could have made our first conversation about politics. We were very interested, for example, in ways to promote a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. There were plenty of things we could have talked about with respect to politics, but he made the conversation about basketball, which was one of the great loves of his life, and I think people know around here that my great hope was to play in the NBA. Larry knew that.

Because Larry was a family man, that first conversation we had was about family, and he had an enormous family. If you look at the family photo on the holiday cards that Larry and his wife Barbi sent each year, you would think about half of the 320 million people in our country were actually Weinbergs. The cards were wonderful, and they just seemed to go on and on and on.

During that first conversation, Larry asked me about my family. I told him about my great-uncle Max, who was one of last Jews to be murdered in Auschwitz. I told him about my parents, who fled Nazi Germany as refugees and settled in America before they pitched in to the war effort during World War II.

That was one of the first bonds I had with Larry Weinberg, and I think that was true of many of his friends. We had family who were veterans themselves, loved ones who had wanted to make sure the United States prevailed in World War II, and that was Larry. He served in Europe during the war and sustained serious injuries in France. Throughout his life, he carried that dedication to service that was so characteristic of so many of his generation.

Larry Weinberg applied the lessons of the war to his leadership of the American Jewish community. He worked to promote understanding between religious groups while demonstrating a firm commitment to the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam--improving the world. That is something Jews feel very strongly about. Whether it is healthcare or foreign relations, whatever, we want to be part of making the world a better place, perfecting the world. That is what tikkun olam means.

Larry and Barbi Weinberg supported the development of concrete scholarship on issues that face not only Israel but the entire Middle East, understanding that the difficulties affecting one's neighbors are really part of a shared burden, demanding a shared solution.

Portlanders like myself know Larry for another reason. If you are a Portlander of my age and an ardent Blazer fan, you cheered on Bill Walton's Trail Blazers because they won a championship for Rip City in 1977. If you are a young basketball fan in Portland today, you probably root for Dame--that is Mr. Lillard--or C.J.--that is C.J. McCollum. All of us in Portland and in Oregon owe Larry Weinberg a debt of gratitude because he brought the NBA to our State, and had he not done that, all of us who root for the Trail Blazers today wouldn't be able to turn out and see Dame and C.J. and all of our wonderful players who are really community leaders.

I remember back then seeing Larry and his wife Barbi cheering at our home games, and they were always wearing our colors. I particularly saw that bright-red blazer. Whether it was back in the seventies at the Memorial Coliseum or even in their later years at Moda Center, when you looked at Barbi and Larry Weinberg, you got a sense of what it meant not just to be a fan, but the Weinbergs really looked at our town and those Trail Blazers as part of their extended family.

With respect to sports and the intersection of sports and how sports fit into the world, I want to relate something that happened in the late 1980s when Larry approached me with a particular request, something he wanted me to do.

I was traveling to the Soviet Union with a group of Jewish community leaders from Portland. At that time, the Trail Blazers were very interested in bringing a wonderfully talented center, Arvydas Sabonis, to Portland. There was a discussion. It was a period when the United States and the Soviet Union were still talking about the relationship being so ambiguous. Reagan and Gorbachev were trying to sort it out. Larry asked me to present a letter to the Soviet Sports Federation about Arvydas Sabonis. He had actually been drafted a few years before, and the idea was that the Trail Blazers hoped to bring Mr. Sabonis from the Soviet Union to the United States to play for the Trail Blazers in the NBA.

Now, as I mentioned, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were still somewhat ambiguous, but they were improving. A lot of people believed that a Soviet-born player coming to play professional basketball in my hometown in Portland would help that along. So on this trip to the Soviet Union, Larry asked me to meet with the Soviet Sports Federation. I was to, in effect, hand over a letter to the Soviet Sports Federation, making it clear--and this was a courtesy letter--that if Mr. Sabonis were permitted to come to Oregon to play basketball for the Trail Blazers--the letter indicated--Mr. Sabonis would be well treated. He would have comfortable accommodations, good training facilities, and there would be people to advise him on nutrition and get him acclimated to our country.

Well, when I walked into this meeting in Moscow, I really felt like I was starring in Rocky IV. There I was--a young Congressman from the United States, a former basketball player myself--trying to make the case on behalf of my hometown and the Portland Trail Blazers to these men, all of whom were at least 20 or 30 years older than me. I was trying to make the case that if the Soviet Sports Federation were willing to allow Mr. Sabonis to come, he would be well treated.

What I got from these stern looking Soviet Sports Federation officials were essentially monosyllabic answers, much like you heard in the Rocky movies--maybe somebody would say ``nyet.'' I didn't know everything about the language of my host, but I got the sense that wasn't a good thing when they said that. I could get the sense about their skepticism as if they believed that this young American Congressman in front of them was pulling some sly trick of geopolitical strategy as we tried to bring Arvydas Sabonis to Portland.

I tried to make the point to these Soviet leaders that we were not exactly talking about arms control. We were talking about playing basketball, and we were talking about building bridges.

That, if anything, is what Larry Weinberg's life was all about. He was about building bridges in sports. He did it in terms of housing, when he was trying to create housing opportunities for people of modest means, when he was creating opportunities for people to learn from each other. There he was with this young Congressman, just wanting to offer a guarantee that Mr. Sabonis, the best Soviet player of his time, would be well cared for. It took a few more years. Eventually he made it to Portland, where Larry and Trail Blazer fans got to watch him play and play well.

I cannot find the picture, but back then there was a picture that ensured that Oregonians across the State were

laughing at their breakfast tables. One day it came out that Mr. Sabonis and I were strolling along the waterfront in Portland. I am 6 feet 4 inches--not as tall as Senator Cotton, but 6 feet 4 inches--and I was standing next to Mr. Sabonis, who was as tall as a typical building. I mean, we thought he might have been 7 feet 5 inches, which was much taller than was listed.

It was a wonderful experience for me, and it was a chance to see what Larry Weinberg was all about. He always told me: It is a chance for you to learn a little bit more about the world, Ron, a chance for you to go to the Soviet Union--it was the Soviet Union at that time--and see the connection between reforms and what Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev were trying to do and the role of sports in terms of bringing people together.

I was so honored that Larry Weinberg would give me a window into that kind of opportunity and allow me, in a really small way, as a young Congressman to be part of what his life was always about, which is building bridges.

So I am going to close this way. I think some of my colleagues are going to speak about Larry as well. When the Jewish people really want to compliment somebody and say somebody is really special and has exceptional character, what we say is that person is a mensch. What I am here to tell the Senate today is my friend Larry Weinberg, whom we lost just a few days ago, was really a super mensch, a true mensch, a person of enormous integrity, decent at his core. I just want to say that Larry and his wife Barbi were the essence of Rip City pride. He was a soft spoken guy, but he was Portland's loudest fan.

Tonight, I want to say to his family and friends--all, seemingly, 100 million of them--that we are always going to remember Larry Weinberg with great fun and appreciation for his enormous contributions to our city and for all that he did during his lifetime to be in that bridge building business, for working to perfect the world--tikkun olam--a wonderful, wonderful man.

Our Larry Weinberg we Oregonians will always remember in our hearts.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, this week, with my support, the Senate passed the FIRST STEP Act of 2018. This is a groundbreaking step toward long overdue criminal justice reform in our country. Too many people have unnecessarily spent decades behind bars for nonviolent offenses or because of disproportionately harsh mandatory minimum sentences. When these individuals are finally released, if ever, they are met with loads of challenges stemming from the lack of rehabilitative help available before and after their release.

The FIRST STEP Act begins to address these issues. It allows for less prison time for nonviolent offenders, reduces harsh mandatory minimums, works to eliminate some racial disparities in sentencing, provides for meaningful education and job-training programs for inmates, and raises the chances that the incarcerated return to society for good. In short, this legislation is an important and overdue course correction from laws that, for years, created and amplified serious inequities in our criminal justice system.

However, the FIRST STEP Act is not perfect. I would like to offer a few thoughts on a particular component of the legislation. This legislation requires that the Attorney General develop what is called an evidence-based risk and needs assessment tool. If all goes right, it will be a data-driven software program designed to help incarcerated individuals reintegrate into society upon release. This tool is intended to take into account a person's ability to earn time off their sentence, how likely a person is to reoffend, their most effective treatment plan, access to resources like educational and work programs, and their housing assignment after release.

I am fully in support of fresh ideas. Ones that can help individuals reenter society are important and this bill contains a lot of them. But the fact is, some existing software programs, similar to the one proposed in this legislation, have been plagued by racial and class bias. Inherently biased software and algorithms can harm the vulnerable, especially if they are not deployed and monitored carefully. Oversight is necessary to ensure the FIRST STEP Act reforms, once implemented, do not inadvertently establish a new form of the same old discrimination.

Some safeguards have been put in place to ensure this software is developed without those biases. That includes establishing specific transparency requirements and an independent review committee made up of experts to advise the process. The rest is up to oversight. I am committed to closely monitoring how these reforms are implemented and put into practice. Given the broad support this legislation has on both sides of this body, I am hopeful that Democrats and Republicans alike will be able to work together to ensure it is implemented the right way.

Mr. President, today I have introduced the Retirement Parity for Student Loans Act. This legislation would permit employers to make matching contributions to workers under 401(k) and similar types of retirement plans as if worker student loan payments were salary reduction contributions to the retirement plan. This legislation will help those workers who cannot afford to both save for retirement and pay off their student loan debt by providing them with employer contributions to build their retirement savings. This legislation is a common sense fix to our Nation's rules for employer-sponsored retirement plans and I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. President, today I have introduced the Retirement Parity for Student Loans Act. This legislation would permit employers to make matching contributions to workers under 401(k) and similar types of retirement plans as if worker student loan payments were salary reduction contributions to the retirement plan. This legislation will help those workers who cannot afford to both save for retirement and pay off their student loan debt by providing them with employer contributions to build their retirement savings. This legislation is a common sense fix to our Nation's rules for employer-sponsored retirement plans and I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. President, I am placing a hold on S. 1010, the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017, out of deep concern for the implications of this bill for the Copyright Office and its administration of U.S. copyright laws. The Constitution delegates to Congress the power to ``promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.'' Currently, the Librarian of Congress appoints the Register, who acts under the Librarian's direction. The Librarian is uniquely positioned to bring to bear the interest of the public and concerns around freedom of speech, scholarship, access for the disabled and other societal values, as well as incentivizing creators to continue to innovate and produce new works.

At certain times, I have been deeply concerned that rights holders have seemed to capture the Copyright Office. Politicizing the appointment of the Register and reducing the influence of the Librarian would only cement that tendency. The voice of the public will always be more diffuse than those with vested interest in locking up works for as long as possible. Congress must ensure that all voices are heard, and the structure of the Copyright Office is integral to achieving that goal. Again, this is Congress's responsibility, and ceding ever more power to the Executive, as this bill does, over matters within our purview is an abdication of our responsibility which I believe we will regret.

For these reasons, I have placed a hold on S. 1010, and I encourage my colleagues to give serious consideration to the concerns I have expressed about this bill.

Mr. President, today I wish to honor a brave and passionate Oregonian who is an incredible example of a person finding bold solutions to challenging problems.

I am proud to boast about my friend, Brenda Tracy, being named a Woman of Impact by Politico at its sixth annual Women Rule Summit.

Brenda Tracy survived childhood sexual abuse. She is also a survivor of a brutal sexual assault that happened to her as a young single mother in Oregon. Brenda reported her sexual assault but she didn't speak of it publicly. She says that, at the time, she was saved by the compassion of a trauma nurse who treated her with dignity. Soon, Brenda went into nursing herself, graduating from the Oregon Health and Science University.

After 16 years of silence, Brenda courageously decided, in 2014, to share her sexual assault survival story publicly. Going public has exposed her to harsh judgments, disbelief, unwanted publicity, and harassment.

But since 2014, Brenda's story of survival also has positively reverberated across the entire country, sparking productive conversations and genuine reforms along the way.

In 2016, Brenda began traveling the country to speak to high school and college athletic departments. As the founder of ``Set the Expectation,'' she has spoken to nearly 100 college athletic programs and several high schools, setting the expectation with thousands of athletes that physical assault and sexual violence are never okay.

Set the Expectation is combating sexual and physical violence by directly engaging with men, who perpetrate 9 in 10 instances of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Brenda says her efforts are geared toward men because, if women could stop sexual violence, they would have already. This is an all-hands-on- deck nonpartisan national issue. Today, Brenda continues to share her story in order to educate, engage, and inspire athletes and coaches to become involved in the fight against sexual and physical violence.

Sexual assault on college campuses is pervasive. An estimated one in five women who attend college will be sexually assaulted during her time there. Sexual assaults on campus spike by 40 percent when a Division I football team has a home game.

When repeating those awful statistics, I hear folks grumble about their accuracy or about people falsely reporting assaults. The truth is; one assault is too many. Every year in college, too many students will have their lives permanently changed by assault. The reality is often worse for students in K-12 schools, where abused children, like Brenda once was, may be forced to suffer in silence, as even less attention is paid to their plight.

Even knowing this, we have seen the President mock survivors of sexual violence on the national stage. His unacceptable words and actions reaffirm the dangerous notion that powerful men can take-- advantage of their influential positions to abuse women.

We are now seeing Trump's Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, move to dismantle Federal enforcement of sexual violence protections. Secretary DeVos has doubled down even though survivor advocates, like Brenda, agree and have told her that these changes would make it much harder for sexual assault survivors to report their assaults.

The fight against physical and sexual violence is far from over. It couldn't be more clear: there is more to do to ensure that fewer students experience sexual assaults and that more students feel protected and advocated for on campus. Like I said before, even one assault is too many. Until our society steps up and accepts this as a fact, we have work to do.

Brenda said to me earlier this week that she can't wait to talk to her 10-month-old granddaughter about going to college. She said she can't wait for her granddaughter to say, ``Wow, Grandma. Things were really that bad? They are so much better now.''

This really struck me because Brenda's unfailing optimism and candor are what will change the norms around sexual violence. Her courage in sharing her story is inspiring, and I know I join folks from around the country in saying: Congratulations, Brenda, and thank you!