Floor Statements

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

Mr. President, a number of Senators have been inquiring as to what will happen next with respect to the handling of the tax legislation. My sense is that, in a relatively short period of time, the Senate will be voting on the motion to proceed to this legislation. I just want to take a couple of minutes to talk about why I am going to oppose the motion to proceed.

The fact is, right now, on a topic that will involve $10 trillion worth of tax policy changes--the biggest change in the Tax Code in 31 years when the U.S. Senate votes on the motion to proceed--we, essentially, will not know yet what the Senate will be debating. There are rumors; there are whispers, but the fact is, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which has authority over taxes, I haven't seen the text of the bill that we will actually be debating.

The bill seems to have changed practically every half hour. It has certainly been a moveable feast for the super lobbyists, but there are a couple things we already do know. We know, for example, it is not going to give a fair shake to working families. What we have talked about again and again in the Senate is that the Senate leadership is committed to a double standard with respect to the American economy: temporary breaks for the middle class--they vanish in a few years--and permanent breaks for those at the top.

We can do better than this. The middle class is responsible for 70 percent of the economic activity in our economy. They are the ones who buy the cars, who buy the houses. They send kids to childcare. Instead, many of them certainly fairly soon are going to be further in the hole than they already are.

So this is a piece of legislation, both on the substance, from the standpoint of what my colleagues have been talking about in terms of the double standard--I mean, we already have in our economy essentially two tax systems, one for the cops, the nurses, autoworkers, and timber workers. Their tax system is compulsory. Their taxes come right out of their paycheck. There are no Cayman Island deals for them. The people at the top pay what they want when they want to. The reality is, what it looks like we are going to get--as I say, I don't have the details-- is going to make this work.

So a number of Senators have asked, for example, about the passthrough provisions, important to small business. We don't have the details on that. We have Members who care about how we are actually going to not rack up hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of debt in the years ahead. Some Senators have suggested that there be triggers. I happen to think they are gimmicks in all of the approaches I have heard. They just don't seem to add up. We don't have the details on that.

What we do know--and I know there are several other Senators who would like to speak--is, we have never had negotiations in the Senate Finance Committee over the specifics of this legislation or any other. We have never had a legislative hearing. When Ronald Reagan and Democrats got together in 1986, they had more than 20 of these hearings.

I will just tell my colleagues in the Senate, Bill Bradley, the former Knick and basketball great who was on the Finance Committee--and I like to kid colleagues that he was another tall Democrat on the committee with a much better jump shot than I--he always would tell stories about how he would fly across the country to meet with Republicans to talk about the specifics of tax reform. Back then, Senators went to great lengths to talk to each other about the specifics of tax reform. In this instance, the majority hasn't been willing to even walk down the corridor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to talk about the specifics of tax reform.

The Senate is better than this. I was part of the bipartisan group yesterday, and Senator Donnelly, our colleague from Indiana, really set out what became an outpouring of good faith among something like 17 Senators who said we can find common ground here. I happen to know we can find common ground here because with two Senators, who happen to be very close to the distinguished majority leader, Mitch McConnell, I wrote two full bipartisan Federal income tax reform bills--my former colleagues, Senator Gregg and Senator Coats.

We can do this. This is what the Senators said yesterday. We can find common ground. There is not a Senator here who doesn't agree that the Tax Code is a rotting economic carcass. It is a dysfunctional mess. Every single Senator understands it is broken. Since it has been 30 years since the last reform, there have been scores of changes to the Tax Code that really cause as much confusion as they do benefits. So I know we can do this. That is what Democratic Senators said yesterday. They said we want to work together in a group led by our colleagues Senator Manchin and Senator Kaine, who brought us together.

So we are going to vote, and I think it is going to be soon, on a motion to proceed. I would just tell Senators, as of right now, we don't yet know what the Senate is going to be debating, and on those crucial issues I just mentioned, we still don't have any information. Yesterday, the Joint Committee on Taxation told me they hoped to have what the Republicans said was the essence of why their bill works: a dynamic score of the tax legislation. We haven't seen that either.

I hope our colleagues will vote no on the motion to proceed because I don't think it is too much to say that as Senators, when we are talking about going to a bill that involves $10 trillion worth of tax policy changes in the Senate, we ought to know what the Senate will actually be debating.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up the motion that I have at the desk.

Mr. President, I listened to the remarks of my colleague, the distinguished Senator from Wyoming, and he said there were 70 hearings on taxes. I think it is important that the American people know that there was not one single hearing--not one--on this bill. There were no discussions of the specific provisions in this legislation. There was no hearing on the personal responsibility requirement in the Affordable Care Act, which is so essential to that law and to what we ought to be looking at strengthening in the years ahead with respect to cost containment. So I just want to set the record straight right at the outset of the debate. Since I have heard once again that there were 70 hearings, I think it is important that the American people know that there was not one on this bill.

Contrast this to 1986, when Democrats and Republicans got together and there were more than 20 hearings--more than 20 discussions on specifics about how to work together and find common ground on this enormously important issue.

The Senate is 20 hours of debate away from a broken promise of truly historic proportions. This was supposed to be the year that the working people of America regained a powerful voice in Washington. Instead of a strong voice, what they got was a big con job. If this Republican tax bill passes, Washington is going to reach into the pockets of working Americans and cut a big check to multinational corporations, to tax cheats, and to the politically powerful and well connected.

The bill before the Senate would enshrine an economic double standard that makes permanent second-class treatment of Americans who work hard and do their best day in and day out to provide for their families. For the cops, for the nurses, for the mechanics, and for those who work retail, this Republican tax plan is a big gamble. They don't get any special tax dodges--no Cayman Islands deals for them. Those folks are stuck clinging to the hope that they will not be among the millions hit with an immediate tax hike. Even for those lucky Americans who do see some benefit, there is bad news coming down the pike. All they get out of this Republican plan is the fleeting sugar high of temporary tax cuts.

That is not the case, though, for multinational corporations or powerful high fliers who wield big political power in this town. Under this tax plan, the basic message to them is this: You can pay what you want, when you want, and, if you are lucky--really lucky--you may pay hardly anything at all. That certainly is not what working people were promised in the fall 2016 campaign. That is not what Republicans have spent month after month telling Americans their tax plan would do. The Republican rhetoric doesn't match the reality of this tax plan, and every day we get frightening news reports about the harm it is going to do to working people and the middle class.

Just yesterday, I received a letter from the independent congressional tax experts known as the Joint Committee on Taxation, and they gave us really important information about the bill. Buried in one of those answers was information that ought to put a scare into millions of Americans who work hard every day to get ahead. This bill showers trillions of dollars on multinational corporations, but the fact is, these multinational corporations are already awash in cash. What it means, according to these independent congressional tax experts, is that interest rates are going up. The Federal Reserve will have to tighten the screws of the economy.

But here is the bottom line for what it means for a middle-class American in North Carolina, or Oregon, or anywhere else in the United States: If you want to buy a house, this bill is going to make it more expensive. If you want to buy a car, this bill is going to make it more expensive. If you want to get a credit card, this bill is going to make it more expensive. If you want to take out a student loan, this bill is going to make it more expensive.

It is not just harm for typical families. The cost of doing business is going to rise for the brewery owner or the tool-and-die maker who wants to build a new facility or purchase new equipment. They would like to hire new workers, but they will find that the money they need to do it is getting drained by higher interest rates.

In short, higher interest rates will wipe out the benefits of this bill for a lot of small businesses and add pain to the tax hikes that are going to hit millions of families. The only businesses and individuals who will not feel the effects I just described are those sitting on mountains of cash--those who will never need to borrow to get ahead. That is just one of the latest of truly frightening details about what this destructive bill would do.

If there was any doubt remaining, it is clear based on those tax experts that individual working Americans and families are going to be on the hook for handouts to multinational corporations.

Republicans have spent months shouting from the hilltops that they were bringing jobs back. The President made it a centerpiece of his campaign. Jobs are coming home, he said. Corporations that ship jobs overseas are going to be punished. The plight of so many mill and factory towns is over. It is too bad that those talking points from stump speeches and interviews never made it into the proposals on paper, because the tax plan that is actually before the Senate does the opposite.

Under the new notion of taxes for American companies overseas called the territorial system, corporations will get a bigger tax cut if they lay off their American workers here in the United States, pack up, and move abroad. It creates colossal new loopholes, a true bonanza of new tax gifts for the tax cheats, for the people who have sophisticated help to cut corners.

When it comes to international tax rules, my view is that the United States shouldn't get suckered into a race to the bottom with a bunch of no-tax, resort-lined islands to please the tax avoidance industry and their lobbyists. That is a truly expensive competition in terms of taxpayer dollars and jobs, but this Republican plan forces working Americans to pay up.

The tax experts we rely on here in the Congress make it clear that the Republican corporate tax scheme loses

revenue, but the individual tax changes raise revenue. That is a whole lot of tax lingo for saying that working people are going to get fleeced so that multinational corporations can pay a lot less.

Here is how it is going to work. More and more Americans will face a tax hike with every passing year. Stealthy tax tricks will force people into higher tax brackets over time, heaping a heavier burden on their shoulders. Millions of working Americans are going to lose their healthcare and the tax credits that make insurance affordable for them and their family. Put all together, it is an immense amount of money being taken from people who are already walking an economic tightrope-- an economic tightrope in North Carolina and Oregon and everywhere else--where they balance food costs against the fuel bill and the fuel bill against the cost of housing. An immense amount of money is being taken from them and being handed to multinational corporations that ship jobs overseas.

This is not a plan to create red, white, and blue jobs. This is not a plan to turn the lights back on in factories that went dark many years ago. This is a plan to sell out millions of Americans--American workers and their families--and the damage will get even worse when the deficit climbs into the stratosphere.

As I begin to touch on the deficit, I want to note that it didn't have to be this way. I wrote two fully bipartisan Federal income tax reform bills with our colleagues. I believe they were here before the Senator from North Carolina joined us: Dan Coats, now the head of national intelligence, and Judd Gregg, the former Republican chair of the Budget Committee. The three of us--Senator Gregg first, then Senator Coats--made changes to ensure that American companies could be competitive for red, white, and blue jobs. We understood that you had to have a competitive rate to grow those companies. But we certainly didn't create new breaks for shipping jobs overseas, and--because I am going to touch on the deficit now--our proposal was revenue neutral.

So it didn't have to be this way. That is what Senator Manchin and Senator Kaine said yesterday, along with 17 Democrats. We wanted a bipartisan alternative that didn't create new incentives for shipping jobs overseas and that didn't jack up the deficit, but I certainly was surprised when I saw early on that Senate Republicans, who had given so many speeches on their concern about the deficit, said: It is kind of OK with us if we have a net deficit of $1.5 trillion. And as the Joint Committee on Taxation has essentially indicated to me, it would be higher than that.

All of the deficit hawks in the Republican Party just flew away. That was surprising because it seems like just yesterday when the Congress couldn't buy lunch without a whole cast of Republican deficit hawks doing some pretty serious hollering about the deficit. But based on history, what is coming next is pretty predictable. We have seen the movie before. The deficit hawks come flying back after ideas like the one we are looking at in the Senate become law. We have already heard the Speaker say, what is next? Entitlement reform, which means Medicare, Medicaid, and anti-hunger programs.

The Speaker said that is what is next. That is next on the docket. Everybody listening ought to know that is code for attack, and it is multiple fronts on these kinds of programs for the most vulnerable people in our country--the lifeline programs, the safety net programs I have just described. What we are going to hear, because this is the script from earlier movies, is we have these big deficits. Oh, my goodness. There is a lot of red ink. America can't afford the safety net. They will say we have to do something. Instead of being willing to go after the people at the top, history says the people who really face the burden of those deficit reductions are the most vulnerable.

The first big legislative push after the Bush tax cuts, for example, was an all-out assault on Social Security. The fact that it was stopped doesn't mean Medicare or Medicaid or other safety net programs like Social Security are going to be safe this time around.

The policy on offer, in my view, is simply a disaster. It makes a mockery of the approach Ronald Reagan took with a big group of Democrats. I know so many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle admire President Reagan greatly. This bill is the opposite of what President Reagan did.

What President Reagan did is he said to those big multinational corporations: I have to ask you to give up some money in order to make sure the middle class, the individual ratepayer, will get a fair shake.

This is just the opposite--180 degrees away from what Ronald Reagan did. We are going to have an amendment on the middle class pretty soon, but what could be more stark than the fact that the tax cuts for the multinationals are permanent, and the relief for the middle class is temporary. This bill is the opposite, the total opposite, of what Ronald Reagan worked on in 1986.

Our colleague Senator Enzi--and I have worked with him often, and I am sad to see us have such differing views on this--said we have had 70 hearings. I can tell you, the once storied Senate Finance Committee never even attempted once to craft a bipartisan bill. We said for months that was our preference. That was what was stated in the letter the vast majority of Senate Democrats signed. That is what we said when we were invited to the White House to meet with the President. We said it repeatedly.

I mentioned the two bills I wrote. They are the only two bipartisan Federal income tax reform bills--the only two we have had since 1986. By the way, they didn't go as far as Ronald Reagan went. Ronald Reagan, in 1986, said, for purposes of taxes, a dollar is a dollar is a dollar.

We are going to have the same rate for those who make money on investments that we do for those cops and nurses who get that wage, that ordinary income. I have indicated on the floor that Senator Bradley, former New York Knick--and as I like to say, another tall Democrat who served on the Senate Finance Committee with a much better jump shot than mine--is incredulous at this process. He is just slack- jawed when he asks about what is being done to bring both sides together. Senator Bradley, and others on the Republican side, in 1986, flew all over the United States to get together with senior Republicans and Jim Baker, Richard Dorman, and others to talk about the specifics of getting bipartisan tax reform together. You hear the stories, and you see that is the way you tackle an issue like this. Bill Bradley flew all over the country to work with Republicans to get a bipartisan tax reform bill. Right now, the majority on the Senate Finance Committee wouldn't walk down the corridor of the Dirksen building once to talk about anything resembling how we would put together a bipartisan proposal. So the process we have seen here makes a mockery out of Reagan-style reform.

Some have asked, was this foreordained, did it have to be. I have already made it clear that I don't think it had to be. It is hard work putting together a bipartisan bill. Senator Gregg, for example, when he was in the Senate, I think was one of Leader McConnell's top economic advisers--chairman of the Budget Committee. We used to say in our house, Judd Gregg is scary smart. We sat next to each other in chairs in our office for almost 2 years to put together a bill. It is heavy lifting, but it can be done. A lot of that work was brought into other efforts since then--the question of the Bush proposal, bipartisan commissions, or a variety of other ones. It is pretty hard to do when the majority leader says, on the first day, the very first day out, we are going to use the most partisan process--budget reconciliation and, in effect, say: What we are telling the other party is we don't want your ideas because we don't need your votes. Sometimes it got almost a little ridiculous because I know there were times when statements were made by the Republican leadership that no Democrats were interested in bipartisan tax reform, despite the fact that in the few instances where a White House official would call and ask our opinion, Senate Democrats would meet. That was the point of the press conference that was held yesterday with 17 Democrats from various parts of the country, as well as legislation I have described that was written.

By the way, in the work product Republicans finally produced, they took

some of the ideas from the bipartisan bills; for example, increasing the standard deduction, but we tripled the standard deduction without any takeaways, like the State and local deduction or the permanent exemptions, and what that meant is, in the bipartisan bills, if you passed something like that, people adjust their wages, and immediately working-class folks get hundreds and hundreds of dollars more in every paycheck. Not only were there no discussions--and I have seen Republican Senators stand out on the floor sometimes and hold up a sign: What we are doing is the Wyden-Coats bill. Nothing could be further from the truth, whether it is on the international provisions I mentioned or the personal provisions. I was so proud to stand with Senate Democrats in a meeting yesterday put together by Senators Manchin and Kaine, once again, stating that it doesn't have to be this way.

What is the rush to take taxes for multinational corporations from 35 to 20 percent? Back when I was working with Senator Gregg and Senator Coats, the Republicans, we didn't have multinational corporations saying we should go to 20 percent. The difference between 25 and 20 percent is $500 billion.

My colleagues yesterday were saying--moderate Democrats--we are serious about tax reform, both on the individual and the corporate side, but it ought to be based on bipartisan give-and-take, not something like we have seen.

Republicans in Congress and the administration's top salesmen have spent months and months telling the American people that in the long run, their bill is going to pay for itself with explosive growth. They had cheerleaders, those who cooked up these phony growth forecasts based on revenue-neutral reform proposals that don't exist. Respected economists will tell you tax cuts don't pay for themselves. In fact, when we had a chance to have some discussion not about a specific bill but some ideas about taxes, the Republican economists who were before the Finance Committee said the tax cuts wouldn't pay for themselves.

The honest predictions say that any growth caused by this bill is going to be modest. After they have spent years insisting--I can't tell you how many times I heard this--that we would have dynamic scores, Republican Senators are rushing the independent scorekeepers to try to get a thorough analysis, but we don't have it as we are on this floor debating the bill.

Finally, we ought to forget that this bill has been getting a rewrite behind closed doors for weeks now. A number of my colleagues on the other said what was important to them is we have what is called regular order. Regular order is probably not a concept people talk about in too many coffee shops unless they traditionally get eggs or toast or something, but what it means is, you have a process where both sides work together, and you have a chance to discuss ideas and differing approaches or offers. We haven't had anything like that. We haven't had an open process with open debate and real amendments. What we have seen is a mad dash to pass a bill that can't stand scrutiny in broad daylight. If this bill really got scrutinized and had a chance to be examined, we would see a lot of Americans coming to their Senators and saying: Senator, no way--no way--should you support that bill.

What is on offer is a plan to force working people and working-class families to pay for handouts to multinational corporations and tax cheats. This bill does not deserve to pass. My view is, it really doesn't deserve the ink that was used to print it on paper. The process that has culminated in this scramble to drive this through, drive it through with the most arbitrary process imaginable, I consider shameful.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that motions to commit be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 3 minutes to wrap up on the first vote we are going to have on my motion.

Mr. President, this first motion, the first motion the Senate is going to vote on, is a straightforward proposition. The motion says: Let us send this bill back to the Senate Finance Committee on a bipartisan basis and come up with a plan that actually works for the middle class.

I am going to wrap up just by recapping the Republican rhetoric on this tax plan. First, it was said to be a guaranteed middle-class tax cut. Then, it was merely focused on the middle class. Next, it was an average tax cut across a variety of income cohorts. Now the numbers are actually in. Republicans want to run up enough red ink to threaten Medicare and Social Security and still raise taxes on more than half of the middle class. The Senate, on a bipartisan basis, can do better than this.

I urge my colleagues to support this proposal to send the bill back to the Finance Committee and, on a bipartisan basis, come up with tax reform that actually works for the middle class.

I yield back.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following individuals in my personal and Finance Committee offices be granted floor privileges for the remainder of this Congress: Claudette Yazbek, Karlen Yallup, Lawrence Doppelt, Jonathan Harris, Rachael Kauss, and Michael Cecil.

Mr. President, one of the great privileges of this job and the honor of representing Oregon in the U.S. Senate is seeing the way Oregonians of all backgrounds and beliefs come together to support those who wear or have worn the uniform of the U.S. military. When it comes to honoring our veterans, Oregonians and so many across the country think in terms of patriotism, not politics and certainly not partisanship. There is not a Democratic or a Republican way to support our veterans; there is an American way.

Recently, I was very pleased to join Senator Moran and Senator Tester to introduce bipartisan legislation that would expand the presumption to veterans exposed to Agent Orange in the Korean Demilitarized Zone. The VA currently presumes that veterans who served in the Korean DMZ from 1968 to 1971 were exposed to Agent Orange, but there is evidence that veterans were exposed to toxins all the way back to 1967. Our bipartisan bill would extend the presumption date back, making it easier for veterans to apply for and receive care and benefits.

It is a good bill. It is a bipartisan bill. As we head to Veterans Day, I want to make it clear that I am going to do everything I can to make this bill law soon.

Given the fact that we will all be home this weekend, I also want to take a few minutes to discuss another bipartisan piece of legislation that is important to the welfare of our veterans and a proposal that recently became law.

A few years ago, I learned that wounded members of the National Guard and Reserve were losing out on benefits under the GI Bill for time they spent in rehabilitation and recovery. These are men and women who put their lives on hold to serve our country abroad, and when they suffered injuries in the line of duty, their time spent recovering didn't count toward GI Bill benefits, even though it did for Active-Duty servicemembers in the same situation.

I think it is an understatement to say that is certainly a real head- scratcher, to not stand up for our Guard and Reserve to make sure they are not losing out on benefits under the GI Bill for the time they spend in recovery and rehab. In effect, the Federal law was adding insult to injury by robbing wounded guardsmen and reservists of benefits they earned and should have been receiving all along. Estimates show that more than 20,000 servicemembers across our country were affected.

I approached our friend and colleague from Arkansas, Senator Boozman, and he graciously agreed to team up with me. Senator Boozman made it clear that a fellow from Arkansas and a fellow from Oregon were going to team up, leave the politics behind, and fix an injustice. We brought together a bipartisan group. We worked with the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, and we were able to get the bill across the finish line. As of now, wounded guardsmen and reservists will get the education benefits they have rightly earned.

Especially today, when people are asking about the divisiveness and polarization that now consumes so much of the political debate, I wanted Senators to know that I really appreciate Senator Boozman always trying to be constructive and a problem-solver. And this is one problem that is getting solved.

The law will apply retroactively, meaning that eligible veterans who already lost out will be made whole. Because it is so counterintuitive for servicemembers to lose benefits for being wounded--just think about that, servicemembers losing benefits for being wounded--many of our veterans haven't learned they were missing out. They never knew they were missing out. That is why I am very pleased, as I know Senator Boozman is, that our law applies retroactively to all service after the 9/11 attacks.

I think it is true that success has a thousand parents, and if I thanked everybody on both sides of the aisle for all the work that went into this important bill, we would be here until suppertime tonight. But I do especially want to thank our colleagues, Senators Markey and McCain. They lent important support along the way, as did Chairman Johnny Isakson and Ranking Member Jon Tester. Representative Mark Takano of California has also been an exceptional advocate in the other body.

I also wish to give a special thank-you to MAJ Steve Warren, a Department of Defense fellow in my office at the dawn of the process. He is considered a real rock star in terms of working for veterans. He did so much to bring this injustice to light and then worked diligently toward a solution. I think it is the judgment of everybody involved that without Steve's inspiration and perspiration, it would have been hard to see this injustice fixed and our even being here today, as we head to Veterans Day, to talk about it.

I close by way of saying that in this time of partisan rancor and the back-and-forth that consumes so much of the political debate in Washington, I think what we have shown with this piece of legislation and its importance is that our veterans continue to be a unifying force. This good will comes from a deep respect for the All-Volunteer Force and for the sacrifices made by military families. It also stems from an appreciation for the role our veterans play in so many communities. In Oregon, our vets are small business owners, coders, mill workers, and educators. They help students at the Youth Challenge Program in Bend, and they help us fight fires. And suffice it to say, this year those fires were big, they were long, they were brutal, and we saw fires nobody could have even believed could happen, such as the one that jumped the Columbia River.

It doesn't mean that Congress, even with this legislation, always gets it right with respect to veterans. There is a whole lot more to be done, particularly ensuring timely access to top-quality healthcare through the VA or outside of it and ensuring that guardsmen and reservists get treated fairly and equitably.

I want to say this again on the eve of our taking time out specifically to honor veterans--although in our State, we believe that every day is really Veterans Day--I want to renew my pledge to the people of Oregon that I and my staff will keep working until our vets receive the care and treatment they have earned. We hope the success of our GI Bill Fairness Act demonstrates what can be done when the Congress sets aside all this business of trying to point score on partisanship and puts veterans first.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I don't often come to the floor of the Senate to give a speech like the one I am going to give now, but today I plan to start sounding the alarm, both from the standpoint of the process and the substance of what is known about the Republican tax plan as of this afternoon.

This morning, the House passed the budget so now it is on to tax. The debate, if the Republicans have their way, will happen at the speed of light. If they have their way, this all could be wrapped up before most Americans have even been able to put a dent in their holiday shopping.

That is exactly what the majority of Republicans is counting on. The Republicans are rushing to drive the tax giveaway to the superwealthy and the powerful corporations and to do it so quickly that most of America will really have no idea what will be going on. Their hope is simple--to do it in a way so that nobody catches on. So this afternoon, as the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, I am going to look at this from a few different angles--first, as to the process and, then, as to the policy that is on offer from the Republicans as of right now.

Right off the top, I am sure that Senators have heard that, here in the Senate and Congress, there is going to be a real debate that is going to play out in a careful and deliberate way and that there is going to be plenty of give and take. As of right now, my message to the American people is this: You have been fooled. Don't buy that. Here is what is going to happen. Anybody who expects a repeat of the kind of bipartisan, deliberate process that took place in 1986, when the Democrats and Ronald Reagan got together, is in line for some very disappointing times.

Our former colleague Senator Bradley, who served on the Finance Committee with such distinction and was a key author of the 1986 reform bill, called a couple of days ago, and I explained to him what was going on. He was just incredulous. He could not believe that this was going to be the process--that it would all be over in a matter of weeks and that it would not even be like healthcare, with the debate moving in fits and starts and stretching out over months.

If Republicans have their way, as my family used to say, this is going to be over lickety-split, and it is coming up quickly. The House plans to offer up a bill in about a week, and the Ways and Means Committee is going to jump into action. The Senate bill could come out in a matter of days later, and then it would be the Finance Committee's turn.

As most people in the Senate know, there is a normal process for these debates in committee. You usually put out draft legislation. You refine your ideas. You update your work. You share with both sides of the aisle the ideas that would make sense--those that get both sides to say: Hey, bipartisanship is about taking each other's good ideas, and politics is about taking each other's bad ideas. In this case, it is not about trying to make any bipartisan efforts at all. The normal process involves exercising a little patience, giving the officials at the Joint Committee on Taxation and in the Congressional Budget Office time to really make sense of what the numbers mean.

This is not Washington lingo. What do the numbers mean for middle- class people--the folks who are really hurting now, who are walking on an economic tightrope in trying to pay bills? We ought to make sure that people who are knowledgeable about this have the time to really look at the numbers and give us some general sense of what this means, particularly for America's hard-working middle class. Yet for this partisan tax cut and a process that will be hyperpartisan--it is designed to be an off-ramp to partisanship only--the Republicans are just blowing right by those steps that constitute the normal process that I have described.

The Congress is headed for a debate on legislation that has the potential to reshape our entire economy at a crucial time when we understand the challenge from global competition and change, but the Republicans, as of now, are not going to wait to see the facts and figures, never mind that the bill is going to affect every taxpayer in the country in one way or another. The Republicans have said that we are going to do some leaping without looking. They may not even have legislative hearings to examine the Republican tax cut bill and what the impact of it could be, which was what Senator Bradley was just stunned about because he and others worked for months with the Reagan administration in trying to do what was normal and, as of now, is not going the happen.

What is even more ominous is that, if the bill clears the Finance Committee, the debate on the Senate floor will happen in a flash. That is because, since day one of this administration, the Republicans have said--and Leader McConnell has said this repeatedly--that they want to use the most partisan process around to move the tax cut. It is another round of what is called budget reconciliation.

What this comes down to is a rejection of the kind of bipartisanship that has been proven to work on tax reform. Ronald Reagan worked hand in hand with Democrats on tax reform in 1986. The two sides brought forward their best ideas. They worked for months and months and, as Senator Bradley told me, for several years. There were dozens of hearings that dug into the specifics and carefully examined the issues. After the bill came out, the committee met over 18 days to debate and vote on the amendments. There was committee consideration-- what is called a markup--that lasted a total of more than 45 hours. Then the bill came to the floor of the Senate, and, as is fitting for a piece of legislation that can reshape the whole American economy, the debate took almost a month. That is the textbook of how you successfully write bipartisan tax reform legislation. By the way, that is the model by which our former colleague Dan Coats--now a member of the Trump administration--worked with me to produce a bipartisan Federal income tax reform bill.

Yet we are not going to see any of that kind of work this time around. The road that the majority is taking us down in 2017 makes a mockery out of the bipartisan process that brought Ronald Reagan and the Democrats together. As of now, there will be 20 hours of debate--20 hours. That is it--on a bill that will transform the bottom line for every American family and will affect the hopes and aspirations of our middle class, which will drive 70 percent of the economic activity in our country for years and years. Then the debate will be over, and it will be time to vote.

What I am going to try to do here--and we will be talking often in the days ahead--is to lay out what this really means for hard-working middle-class people, because, so far, what we have seen is kind of one hand giveth and the other hand taketh away. The details for the top of the top, the megawealthy, are spelled out, but we do not see exactly how the middle class is not going to go into the hole. As of now, the numbers suggest, particularly if you have a couple of children and are in a place with high State and local taxes, that you really could fall behind. If we do not spell out what is actually at stake here and give the American people the opportunity to tune in and be heard, this process is just going to race by before anybody notices, and that is what the Republicans are counting on.

The bottom line is that, when the middle class and the American people find out what is in the Republican tax plan as it is known today, the less they are going to like it. There have been sort of two versions of it. The first came out, I believe it was, late in the spring. It was a page long--shorter than the typical drug store receipt. We got a bit more information a few weeks ago, but in both instances, as I have described, it looks like the middle class is going to get hurt, and folks who are successful and those who are at the top of the top are, basically, going to get even more.

We want all Americans to be successful. We want to give everybody the chance to get ahead, but we do not want tax breaks skewed to the very top. As of right now, the Republican tax plan is a feast for the very wealthy, and the middle class is on the menu. Even the President's top campaign adviser on taxes said that the Republicans have made $4 trillion worth of promises in this tax proposal, perhaps even more, but because of budget rules, that pricetag has to come down to $1.5 trillion for the bill to get through the Senate. That means that somebody has to pay for a whole lot of that $4 trillion of corporate goodies and handouts to the wealthy.

The Republicans seem almost allergic to raising revenue by asking those at the top to pay their fair share. Every proposal that the Republicans have put forward to pay for this tax giveaway to the top has reached right into the pockets of the middle class. Take the elimination of the State and

local deduction. It will cause pain for millions of Americans across the country, not just in the West--in places like California and Oregon--and the Northeast but for those in scarlet red areas who voted for the President on election day--places like North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Texas. Then there is the plan to double the standard deduction while simultaneously getting rid of personal and dependent exemptions.

When you cut out all of the tax lingo--as I have said, one hand giveth and the other hand taketh away--what it means, based on the information that is out now, is that a family of six in Medford, OR, could see its taxes increase by thousands of dollars per year. That is a holiday surprise. My guess is that people are going to say that it is the nightmare before Christmas if this plan becomes law.

Even more middle-class Americans who checked on the news over the last few days probably had the wind knocked out of them when they read that their 401(k)s may be on the ropes under the Republican plan. A few days ago, the President said: No, do not touch the 401(k). But it seems to me like Republicans just cannot help themselves. When the President was asked about it again, the new Trump position was that middle-class retirements are a bargaining chip to get this lopsided tax handout through the Congress.

Let me repeat that last part. The President of the United States said that middle-class retirements are a bargaining chip in this crusade to cut taxes for the most fortunate. Nothing illustrates more clearly how this process has gone horribly wrong, and I want to make clear to the American people to watch the details. Watch the details because every time a new detail leaks out, the middle class loses.

So my bottom line, colleagues, is real tax reform ought to be about putting more dollars back in middle-class pockets, but right now the majority is taking a different tack. It amounts to a hunt for ways to force the middle class to pay for the tax breaks for those at the top.

This scheme will explode the deficit. It is a con job on the middle class. It is failed economic policy, but it could rocket in the Congress in the weeks ahead before the American people catch on.

So my counsel is, everybody ought to strap in and get ready for what is coming. Every step of the way in the Finance Committee and here on the floor, I will continue working with my Democratic colleagues to fight for middle-class priorities and tax reform, and I hope we will have some from the other side of the aisle join us. We intend to keep sounding the alarm on a Republican plan that as of now gives trillions of dollars of handouts to those at the top while hiking taxes on millions of middle-class families.

Now that the House has passed its budget, this is kicking off the debate, and the idea that we would have a bunch of fake promises to the middle class, very specific gifts to folks at the top, and somehow unicorn theories of growth that will justify this, while really creating deficits that hurt Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and our safety net--those are the issues the American people deserve to know more about. We are going to tell them a lot more about the details in the days ahead because we believe in tax reform that puts the middle-class first, doesn't give gifts to the people in the very top 1 percent, doesn't clobber Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, and, as Bill Bradley said earlier this week in a conversation with me, is based on the kind of bipartisanship that a hugely important issue like tax reform warrants.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, before Senator Durbin leaves the floor, I just want to commend our colleague from Illinois. He and I have worked together for many years, and throughout that time, the Senator from Illinois has constantly been a voice for those who have no voice on these human rights concerns, laying out why the effort to step up is what we are all about as Americans.

I thank him. I enjoyed listening to him again. You don't really enjoy it because you hear about the suffering, but I am so glad that Senator Durbin has made this case, and I thank him for it.

Mr. President, across the West, 2017 will be long remembered as the year when fire was seared into our collective consciousness and ash rained down on homes and cars. There were mass evacuations, and scores just lost their hopes and dreams.

Devastating fires have hit my home State of Oregon, but Idaho, California, Washington, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and more all were hit by fires that always seemed bigger and hotter and more powerful than what we have seen in the past.

These are not our grandfathers' fires. There are a whole host of reasons behind this, and today I just want to talk a bit about what happened, what it has meant, and at least a commonsense approach that Senator Crapo and I have advocated for moving forward on a bipartisan basis.

The fact is, in the West, dozens of lives have been lost. Entire communities have been wiped out. An iconic national treasure in my home State, a place that Oregonians have always regarded--a special love for our Columbia River Gorge is practically in our chromosomes--it was burned over this year.

This month, a huge part of Northern California was burned. We talked to our colleagues Senator Feinstein and Senator Harris about that. It is not just rolling hills and unoccupied land; the fires swept through entire cities. Some of the stories about those whose lives were lost in California just break your heart. School has been disrupted for more than a quarter million children. In some cases, it could be weeks before classes are back up and running.

In my home State, more than 600,000 acres were burned, nearly a third of that in the Chetco Bar fire that burned through southwestern Oregon. I was there to visit with folks in the community and the volunteers. There were volunteers from all over the country who were stepping up to help us deal with these fires. It sure was needed because, nationwide, almost 9 million acres burned. It is an area bigger than the size of eight States in our country--all of it up in flames. Compare that to the 1980s and the 1990s, when an average of around 3 million acres burned per year.

A brandnew report is out from the Department of the Interior forecasting how much the cost of fighting these fires is going to climb in the near future. The agency predicts a jump of 20 percent from fiscal year 2018 to 2019, and they believe that is a conservative estimate. If conditions are dry and temperatures are high, it could be even worse.

I am of the view--and it is something Senator Crapo and I have worked on

together for years now. Sometimes we believe it is the longest running battle since the Trojan War. It is based on the proposition that Congress should no longer sit back and accept that these fires can only get larger, cost more, and that somehow the Forest Service is not all that big a problem. We just call it the fire service, which is the way a lot of people describe it in our part of the world.

Now, the way the Federal budget works for these fires is a broken, commonsense-defying policy, and it literally adds fuel to the fires and in effect disrupts not just the West but the rest of the country because the consequences of this broken budgeting process for fighting fires takes a toll on communities across the country.

A few years ago, I came back from Oregon for a visit, and I learned that our colleague and friend, the distinguished senior Senator from New York, Mr. Schumer, had signed on to legislation that I am going to describe shortly that Senator Crapo and I have been working on. When I heard Senator Schumer had signed on to it, I, of course, was very pleased to have someone of his influence. I said to my colleagues: What am I missing here? I don't remember there being a lot of Federal forests in Brooklyn.

Well, it turns out that at that time, Senator Schumer, because he goes all over his State, was I believe in Upstate New York. There was a company that made baseball bats. As a result of this broken system of fighting fire, when Senator Schumer's constituent had a problem with the baseball bats because there was an invasive species that was eating its way through these baseball bats, the local Forest Service folks didn't have the money to help him deal with this economic issue.

It might seem like a small thing to some people, but when you are talking about these smaller communities, if they don't have the resources because they are victims of this broken system of fighting fire, this is a problem. It is a problem that Senator Crapo and I have taken on now to ensure that, once and for all, we substitute common sense for a system that is everything but common sense.

What I am going to describe now is something called fire-borrowing. It starts like this: Over the years, prevention, which everybody talks about--Smokey is the symbol of prevention. Prevention gets short shrift. It gets hot and dry in our part of the world in the West, and if you don't go in there and do the preventive work, if you don't thin out the forests and it gets hot and dry, and then all of a sudden you have a lightning strike on your hands, you will have what amounts to an inferno. It just whips through the area. It knows no boundaries. Federal land is affected. Private land is affected. State land is affected. There are bigger and more expensive fires, and I can tell you that what we have seen are unprecedented fires.

In our Columbia River Gorge that I mentioned, we saw a fire leap the river. It used to be that rivers were a break. They were a break to ensure that the communities were safe. Now, in my home State, we have seen a fire actually leap the river.

So what is happening is, as prevention gets short shrift, these big fires break out, the Federal Government borrows from the prevention fund to put the fires out, and the problem just gets worse. Common sense is defied. There is absolutely irrational budgeting that ripples not just through the West but through communities all across the country, producing what I think most colleagues would say they would never expect, which is forestry personnel--when Senator Schumer visits in New York--having challenges paying for local forestry matters.

Fire prevention programs help thin out dead and dying material from forests and clear dried grasses from open landscapes--the kindling that goes up in flames when lightning strikes or when a small ground fire grows out of control. Those are the very real problems we have in the West. The programs we need to deal with this are being robbed because of the cycle I just described. Fire-borrowing. Prevention. Short shrift. The government borrows from the prevention fund to put the fire out, and the problem gets worse. That is fire-borrowing in our part of the world.

You can look at the recent fires in California to see how dangerous this is. If fire prevention had gotten a fair shake, lives could have been saved, and businesses and property might have been spared. Western communities would not be trying to recover from the ravages of summer and fall 2017.

Many of our colleagues of both parties and now 205 groups--timber companies, scientists, environmentalists, academics, and people from all across the political spectrum--are joining Senator Crapo and me in saying that what is needed is a clean fix for the wildfire budgeting system and a complete end to fire-borrowing. We have been working on this, as I said, for years.

We know some of our colleagues want to see a variety of other policies attached, particularly policies dealing with forest management. One of the reasons I wanted to come to the floor tonight was to say that I take a back seat to no one when it comes to finding the right approach to forest management. I have written bipartisan forest management laws. But let's make sure that as we go forward on this issue, we understand that we cannot let other matters get in the way of stopping the cycle of fire-borrowing once and for all.

What Senator Crapo and I have proposed is essentially to say that the really big fires, once and for all in America, will be treated like what they really are--natural disasters. And you can look at that relatively small number of fires and say: We are going to deal with them through the disaster fund. Then you don't raid the prevention fund. And what the government scorekeepers have said in the past is that not raiding the prevention fund through fire-borrowing will, in their judgment, means fewer fires in the first place; hence, there will be fewer natural disasters if you end fire-borrowing once and for all.

My view is that we are going to go forward this year on the disaster relief issue, and I want it understood that I am going to work with Senators of both political parties to finally see this matter wrapped up and an end to fire-borrowing.

I think anyone who has kept an eye on the news or has read stories or seen reports about natural disasters understands that unfortunately disasters have visited too many of our communities--hurricanes flooding Houston, violent winds and rain in Florida. Weeks after Maria made landfall, millions of American citizens in Puerto Rico are still in desperate need of help. Our neighbors to the south suffer with the aftermath of a massive earthquake. Tornados are a threat across much of the country. In our part of the world, these wildfires are our natural disasters.

The Congress can't get up one day, come to the floor of the Senate, and just say: We are going to stop all the hurricanes and the earthquakes. There is something that Congress can do about preventing so many wildfires. We, with our legislation, want to build a new ethic of fire prevention. That is what ending fire-borrowing is really all about. It is saying that we are in effect going to take--it is almost like an old stage with a dilapidated set on it, and you just pull it out because it is outdated. That is what we are talking about with fire-borrowing. It is like an old stage that is dilapidated. It doesn't make sense for the times. We are talking about replacing fire-borrowing with a modern policy so that we can deal with the big fires as the natural disasters they are and get back in the business of putting fire prevention first and replacing a commonsense-defying Federal budget plan that has caused so much harm to folks in the West.

I hope my colleagues will support the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act. Senator Crapo and I want to work with every single Senator in this Chamber to get across the finish line. We are not saying that ending fire-borrowing is going to mean there will never be another fire in this country. What we are saying is that it is past time to replace such an illogical, commonsense-defying budget system as that presented by fire-borrowing. With that, we can reduce the risk of major wildfires to communities across the West.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1302 as provided for under the previous order.

Mr. President and colleagues, later this morning, the Senate will be voting on the amendment I am offering to strike what are known as reconciliation instructions from the budget proposal.

The reason I will be focused this morning on that is that it is absolutely key that we pass this amendment in order to get bipartisan tax reform. The fact is that reconciliation is an on-ramp to the most partisan process around, and the history of successful tax reform is in our working in a bipartisan way. For example, that is what the late President Reagan worked to do in 1986 with a whole host of Democrats, and they came up with a lot of very important, bold, progressive ideas. They chose to actually treat income from a wage in the same way as one would treat income from investments so as to send, in one fell swoop, a message that working-class people would get a fair shake, that the tax law was not about the 1 percent back then but that it was about working-class people. The middle class drives 70 percent of the American economy. They were not talking about massive tax handouts to big corporations and the wealthy; they were talking about the fact that, in our country, economic success is built around a thriving middle class--a middle class that can buy homes and cars and educate kids and pay for essentials.

What troubles me so much about these reconciliation instructions that would allow for a $1.5 trillion net tax cut is that it is just the opposite of the kind of approach that Ronald Reagan and the Democrats used in 1986. It is going to polarize us rather than bring us together.

I think that is particularly important right now, given the meeting that was held at the White House yesterday that I attended along with a number of Democratic colleagues on the Finance Committee, because at that meeting Democrats made it very clear to the President of the United States that we think that the Tax Code is broken, that it is a broken, dysfunctional mess. We described the letter we sent that lays out our principles that tax reform should focus not on the 1 percent but on the middle class and not savage Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, which are our essential retirement programs.

What was striking about the discussion was that the President said: I agree with you on all of those things. He said: Tax cuts should not go for people like me. I want help for the middle class, and I don't want to cut Medicare and Social Security. I made the point--I hope respectfully, Mr. President. I said: Unfortunately, there is a big gap between the administration's rhetoric on this and the reality of what is really on paper. That is why it is so important that we strike these reconciliation instructions and make it clear from the get-go that we are going to get tax reform right, that we are not just going to kind of utter these sort of sound bites and rhetorical plights and speeches, as the discussions go out from various administration officials, and we actually focus on what it is going to take to do bipartisan tax reform.

The President agreed with the principles that Democrats talked about yesterday. It is very different when you see it on paper, and I want to talk a little bit about what is actually on paper.

First, the Trump tax plan creates a massive new loophole, the Grand Canyon of all loopholes, by twisting and abusing what is known as tax passthroughs. It used to be that the tax passthrough was for a store or a restaurant or a garage. You see them all over Oregon. You see them all over America. Those are the people for whom we ought to be working together to give a boost to. That is not what is on paper. What is on paper is very different, and it is very different than what the President said yesterday he wanted.

For example, on paper is a new loophole that would allow tax cheats to self-declare as passthroughs, rake in income, and pay a much lower rate. It is a tax change that is deeply slanted toward what I call the top of the top--not just the 1 percent but the top of the top. Eighty- eight percent of the benefits of this kind of passthrough rate cut would go to those at the very top, according to recent analyses, the top 1 percent and those even more affluent. It opens the door for tax cheats to dodge paying into Social Security and Medicare like every hard-working wage earner in America. This would leave a lot of those programs that are lifelines for working families a lot worse off than they are today and that, too, is something the President said he didn't want.

Next, apropos again of the most affluent the President said he didn't want to help, is the estate tax. Here, there is a proposal in the administration's plan to abolish the estate tax. Let's make sure everybody understands who is affected by that. The tax today touches estates worth more than $11 million, $5.5 million for a single individual--a tiny fraction of all the estates in the country. Eliminating the estate tax isn't a policy change that has anything to do with helping the middle class. It is entirely about helping the megawealthy--exactly the people the President told us yesterday he didn't want to help.

The Finance Committee Democratic staff put out a report last week that looked at some of the worst schemes and dodges that are used by the megawealthy to avoid paying estate tax. There is a cottage industry of crafty lawyers and accountants who have made careers out of gutting the estate tax by engineering billion-dollar tax shelters for the 1 percent. So the estate tax is already full of loopholes, but this administration isn't interested in closing them even after the Treasury Secretary, Mr. Mnuchin, admitted just the other day that it goes mostly to the people at the very top.

So there is a common thread in these proposals. There is a common thread in this debate that is driven by partisanship and reconciliation, which is why I want to strike those instructions. What is actually on paper--not what is said in the speeches or in sound bites and the like--is that the Republican plan doesn't close the most egregious loopholes. It enshrines them as permanent features in our tax law. That is contrary to what the President said he wanted to do, and it certainly isn't a tax recipe focused on the middle class.

One of the individuals who has been most out in front of the cameras selling the Trump tax plan to the public is the Treasury Secretary. A few weeks ago, the Secretary doubled down on the failed experiment that tax cuts pay for themselves. Forget the history that shows that isn't true. Secretary Mnuchin said the Trump tax cuts will not just pay for themselves, they will raise an additional trillion dollars in revenue on top of their own costs. The fact is, there is no magical growth fairy, no unicorns, no kind of growth fairies that are going to somehow spring to life if this tax cut plan becomes law, but Secretary Mnuchin, our Treasury Secretary, keeps going back to the unicorns, keeps going back to rainbow economics.

What is striking is, I asked the Republican economist--the economist chosen by our friend and distinguished chairman Orrin Hatch--who came before the Finance Committee the other day about whether tax cuts pay for themselves, and the Republican economist chosen by the Republicans on the Finance Committee, those Republicans' economist acknowledged that tax cuts don't pay for themselves.

There have been some other whoppers about the Republican plan, at least what is again written down on paper. Secretary Mnuchin said it is very hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy with tax cuts to the middle class. That is one stunner of a statement: It is very hard not to give tax

cuts to the wealthy. In the same interview, he delivered what sounded like a real ultimatum; that if the Congress doesn't pass this plan so tilted to the megawealthy, oh, boy, it is going to be tough times on Wall Street. You have to appreciate the eye-popping honesty, but the ideas behind what the Treasury Secretary is talking about on tax reform pretty much leave your jaw on the floor. If that is where the administration has trained its focus, as far as tax reform is concerned, the middle class is in tough straits.

In my judgment, this is yet another reason the Senate should reject using reconciliation for taxes and support my amendment. The fact is, the Congress has never used reconciliation to write a comprehensive tax reform bill. There is a template for comprehensive tax reform that has been proven to work, and I have mentioned it already. It is the one initiated by President Reagan, a big group of Democrats, a culmination of years of bipartisan work. What we saw was real bipartisanship, which I define as not taking each other's bad ideas but taking each other's good ideas. The bill was considered under regular order, it was debated in the Finance Committee and on the Senate floor for months, and it was open to unlimited amendments and passed the Senate by a vote of 97 to 3. That is the kind of bipartisan process we would like to see.

Democrats have made it clear, and we made it clear again yesterday, that we think the Tax Code is broken, that we have heard the President's comments about how he wants to help the middle class and not the wealthy, that he understands how strongly we feel about protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but the fact is-- and this is the heart of the challenge--there is a big gap right now between what the President says his priorities are and what is actually written down on paper. That is the challenge, and we are not going to be able to address that challenge, in my view, by signing up for more partisanship, for taking the most partisan route on tax reform.

What we ought to be doing is saying that we all agree the Tax Code is broken; we all understand the key is helping the middle class, not more handouts for the top of the top, the 1 percent; that we are sensitive to long-term costs because we don't want to pass those off to our children. Doing that is best going to be accomplished by saying that as we move now to the actual consideration of tax reform, we reject partisan approaches like reconciliation, and we come together. I know we can do it.

The fact is, what the President says when he speaks about this subject is in line with the principles in the Democrats' letter. What we have talked about doesn't even go as far as what President Reagan did in 1986. What is in the Democrats' letter tracks a bipartisan piece of legislation that several colleagues here have been part of, including one in the President's Cabinet now.

We can do bipartisan tax reform that is good for our country. We shouldn't make it a lot harder to accomplish that goal by including these partisan reconciliation instructions in the budget proposal. That is why I urge my colleagues to support my amendment to strip these reconciliation instructions when we vote on my amendment later in the morning.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, how much time remains on our side?

Mr. President, yesterday I was at a meeting with the President at the White House, along with several members from both sides of the Senate Finance Committee. I said to the President flatout that Democrats agree that the Tax Code is a broken, dysfunctional mess. Finance Democrats yesterday laid out to the President our principles for reform, focusing on the middle class--not 1 percent--and being fiscally responsible so that Congress doesn't turn around and look at gutting safety-net programs such as Medicare and Medicaid or Social Security.

I think it would be fair to say that a whole lot of ears in that room perked up when the President said: Hey, I am for those kinds of things. The President talked to us about wanting help for the middle class. He said that this is not supposed to be about people like him, and he said that he doesn't want to shred the safety net.

Unfortunately, as I have indicated, there are gaps as wide as Crater Lake among all of the administration's statements, the rhetoric about taxes, and the reality of what is actually written down on paper about its tax cut plan. The Republican plan--this administration's plan, which actually is written down on paper, doesn't resemble what the late President Reagan accomplished in partnership with Democrats in 1986. Back then, the two sides brought their best ideas forward and passed major tax reform built around the idea that America is strongest when the middle class is prospering. What is on paper today is just an enormous gift to the top of the top--the most fortunate special interests.

I hope the Senate, in a few minutes, will vote for my amendment to strike the reconciliation instructions from the budget because budget reconciliation is exactly the kind of partisan process, at least for taxes--especially for taxes, given the importance of taxes in this particular budget--budget reconciliation is exactly the kind of approach that President Reagan rejected in 1986.

I hope my colleagues will support my amendment, striking the reconciliation instructions from the budget. Senate Democrats have outlined our principles for reform.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. President, very quickly, the principles that the Senate Democrats have laid out in our letter are very much in line with what the President says he wants. Now what we have to do is to have a bipartisan process to advance it. You do not get that with reconciliation. I hope the Senate supports my amendment.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I think I have made the case.

To my colleagues, what the American people have told us--and they certainly said this during this last work period--is that they understand that the big challenges in this country require bipartisan approaches. That is what President Reagan understood when he brought together Democrats and Republicans for comprehensive tax reform.

We need to pass this amendment to strike the reconciliation instructions from the budget because they send all of the wrong signals with respect to tax reform.

The American people understand what it takes to tackle big issues. They understand that tax reform should be about the middle class. It should not be about the 1 percent, and it should not be about causing a huge, new sea of red ink.

I urge my colleagues to support my amendment to strike the reconciliation instructions from the budget.

Madam President, I rise in strong opposition to the Capito amendment. More than half the taxpayers claiming the State and local deduction make less than $100,000. These hard-working, middle-class folks are not going to appreciate Congress double-taxing them.

The fact is, the Capito amendment is Washington lingo that would produce a Republican tax plan that hits the middle class, yet again, with more taxes. Under Capito, you could again have one hand giveth and the other hand taketh away. You might have the Republicans say let's double the standard deduction, but then when those middle-class folks lose their deduction for State and local taxes and their personal exemptions, they are in a big hole.

Reject this amendment, reject sleight-of-hand tax policy and those approaches like this that hurt hard-working, middle-class families.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this amendment provides reconciliation instructions to three Senate committees for the purpose of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act; in effect, rerunning the same bad movie the Senate has now seen three times. By now, Americans understand what these partisan Republican healthcare bills have in store for the middle class: higher premiums, worse healthcare, and a safety net in tatters.

I will close by saying that there is now a desire on both sides of the aisle to set aside this my-way-or-the-highway approach to governing. Bipartisanship is about taking each other's good ideas, and I believe the Senate can work together to lower people's premiums.

This amendment is a vote to look for more partisan ideological trophies when the Senate ought to be working together to find common ground.

I urge my colleagues to reject this amendment.

Mr. President, some of our Republican colleagues said in the past days, the budget debate is all about getting the tax reform. The fact is, this is a fast lane to a partisan process for dealing with taxes. When it comes to the Republican plan, you get a lot of rhetoric and a lot of happy talk. You hear it is the biggest tax cut ever. You hear it is about the middle class.

Just this morning, the President tweeted the Democrats will only vote for tax increases, but that rhetoric is just out of touch with reality. For example, our 2015 bill, of which I was the lead Democratic sponsor, cut taxes $650 billion. It went to the heart of the needs of young people in this country with the American opportunity tax credit, the earned-income tax credit, but it also helped farmers--farmers who are concerned about expensing the research and development credit for our innovators.

That is the kind of approach we ought to take that is bipartisan, that helps people in this country. Everybody has a chance to get ahead. The fact is, the Tax Code on the books is now a tale of two systems. There is a strict mandatory system for a cop or a nurse. Their taxes come right out of every paycheck. It is mandatory. There are no special Cayman Island deals for them.

Then there is another set of rules for the highfliers, the most fortunate. They can, with good lawyers and good accountants, decide what they want to pay and when they want to pay it. That is the rotting source of unfairness that is at the heart of the American Tax Code. That is why so many hard-working Americans think they are getting a rotten deal every April 15. That is the brand of unfairness Ronald Reagan was interested in going after, but somehow we can't get that same kind of spirit from Republicans at this point on this tax bill.

The Trump tax cut doubles down on the rotten unfairness in the Tax Code. It is a multitrillion-dollar handout to those who are the most powerful, and it is very generous to those at the top of the top, which is why this amendment with Senator Sanders is so important. The Trump tax plan, at this point, doesn't just fail to close the most egregious loopholes, but it enshrines them for good.

The amendment that Senator Sanders and I are putting forward is pretty simple. It says that in this tax bill we are going to put the focus on the middle class. We are not just going to focus on people at the top. That is why the amendment creates a point of order against the plan that gives a tax handout to the top of the top of the income spectrum in our country.

If you are a middle-class family, according to what is offered now, the Republican plan giveth with one hand and taketh away with another. The standard deduction might be doubled, but you are going to lose personal exemptions, and if you come from a State with a significant State and local tax structure, you are going to find it very hard to get ahead.

That is what we want to change. We will not want a scheme that hides the true multitrillion-dollar cost of the tax giveaways to those at the top. We want relief to go to those at the middle.

I close by saying that the Sanders-Wyden amendment is based on a simple principle, and that is that we want to expand the winners' circle for working Americans--those without lobbyists, those without clout--to have a chance to get ahead. They have been left out of the economic winners' circle for too long. We want to put a focus on those people who have felt the panic of seeing the costs of rent, college, and medicine go up and up and up. Tax reform should be about helping them. That is what the Sanders-Wyden amendment proposes.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, very briefly, I strongly support this amendment, colleagues.

The point of this is, this is an amendment that does what the President says he wants to do, which is not give relief to the people at the top, but the reality is, when you look at their proposal, it really does drive much of the wealth in America to those at the very top.

The Sanders amendment is to ensure that people at the top of the top don't get relief. We get it to working families and the vulnerable. I urge colleagues to strongly support this amendment.

Mr. President, today I wish to indulge in a bit of bragging. I know every one of us in this Chamber has that one or two staffers who are the Jacks or Janes of all trades of their operations.

My longtime loyal friend and staffer, who has served the great State of Oregon for over 20 years in my office as a fellow, a field representative, and now deputy State director, Mary Gautreaux celebrates her 70th birthday on October 17. I want to recognize her enormous and long-lasting contributions over the past two decades in my office to making Oregon a better place to live and enjoy.

Mary brings a lifetime of expertise to the natural resources issues that play such an essential part in Oregon's economy and quality of life. Not only

does she know these issues but she has lived these issues and passed on her love of them to her children, Ryder, Myria, Callie, and Lucas, as well as her five grandchildren.

Before joining my office in the 1990s, Mary served in the U.S. Forest Service. In those days, Mary planted trees and fought fires to support her young family. While the work was seasonal, to start, she quickly made an impression on the U.S. Forest Service and became a full-time employee.

Then I was lucky enough to get her as a fellow in 1994 in my DC office when I was still a member of the House of Representatives for the proud 3rd District of Oregon and still had rugged good looks and a full head of hair.

She worked in my DC office for a year and had just moved back to Oregon when I realized my office was better for her presence, so I hired Mary to work as field rep in Oregon. I may not know much about a lot of things, but I can recognize an excellent teammate, and Mary was a natural fit on ``Team Wyden.''

When I was elected to the U.S. Senate for the first time in 1996, I made a promise to do a townhall meeting in every county in Oregon every year I was privileged enough to represent the good people of Oregon in Washington, DC. In the last 21 years, she has been with me at almost every one of the 800-plus townhalls I have held each year in each of Oregon's 36 counties.

At almost every one of those townhalls, I have at some junction pointed to Mary and said, ``Folks, give Mary a call about this issue. She works nights and weekends--never hesitate to call.'' It does not matter the issue; Mary always answers the phone. She has been going the extra mile with and for Oregonians in every nook and cranny of our State, both literally and figuratively.

Literally, Mary has traveled with me and solo to countless meetings in grange halls, diners, and farmhouses all across Oregon, and there has never been an issue too big or too small for her to take on.

One way to explain the praise Mary has earned is to say that Oregonians know Mary as a public servant always willing to listen and find solutions that benefit all of Oregon and Oregonians, not just the ones that vote for me. She lives by my promise to be the ``Senator for all of Oregon,'' and Oregonians know it and appreciate her for it.

My appreciation and Oregon's appreciation for Mary goes deeper than that accurate and well-deserved summation.

The deeper truth is that anybody who knows Mary knows she is an original and unforgettable force of nature--fierce on behalf of Oregonians, bold in her problem-solving, always willing to help, and just as ready with a smile to lighten any situation.

She has a gigantic heart matched only by her passion for public service and protecting the natural treasures we Oregonians all hold dear.

The bottom line is I have been very fortunate to work with her, to call her friend, to have her as an integral member of Team Wyden, and I look forward to many more years of her public service to the people of Oregon and her friendship to me and my family.

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

Mr. President, I did not get a chance to hear the distinguished Democratic leader's remarks, for Chairman Hatch and I were in the Senate Finance Committee. We managed to pass, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote, the Children's Health Insurance Program-- a vital program for 9 million kids. So that is a bit of good news in that this important piece of legislation is advancing. I do know that the Democratic leader touched on a number of very important issues, particularly some of these comments that have been made by top advisers to the President with respect to taxes.

I am struck by the fact that Mr. Gary Cohn, the President's top economic adviser, said last week that middle-class folks were going to get $1,000 in tax relief--set aside the fact that that does not look to be true for a number of middle-class folks who have kids. I am also struck by the comment that followed. Mr. Cohn said that not only are middle-class families going to get $1,000 worth of tax relief but that they would be able to go buy cars or remodel their kitchens. You just think to yourself, with that kind of tax cut, that you would be buying a very small car or remodeling a very small kitchen. The fact is, that is not, in my view, a comment that reflects a real understanding of what middle-class folks in America are going through. I don't see very many of them buying cars for $1,000 or remodeling their kitchens for $1,000.

That comment was accompanied by the comments of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who not only said a couple of days ago that tax cuts would pay for themselves--a statement that was contradicted by Republican economists yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee--but that there would be something like $1 trillion left over. Mr. Mnuchin continues to make the case that there is somehow a magical growth fairy here in the American economy that nobody else knows about, including Republican economists.

I am one who believes that behavior does matter, and I am going to talk about a bipartisan approach to taxes in a minute--a responsible, bipartisan approach to taxes, not one that helps the 1 percent or creates a huge new deficit or that kind of thing. I think that you will generate some revenue, and Doug Elmendorf said that when he was the head of the Budget Office, but it is not going to generate hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, as in the case of what Mr. Mnuchin is talking about, which is something like $2 trillion. There is no economic support for that.

You have the President's economic team and his top advisers trying to defend the indefensible, and I will go into that more a little bit later today.

Right now, I think it is important that we have a response that I am going to deliver to the distinguished majority whip, who is a member of the Finance Committee, who made some comparisons between the Republican plan and the bipartisan legislation that I wrote--after months and months of hard work--with two of our former Republican colleagues, Senator Gregg and Senator Coats. Senator Coats is now a member of President Trump's Cabinet.

The comparison that somehow the Republican plan is like the bipartisan approach that I wrote--these extreme ideas in the Republican plan--is not just a bit of a stretch or a little off base; there is absolutely no comparison--none--between the bipartisan proposal and the extreme Republican plan. The distinguished majority whip, in my view, offered a complete and total misrepresentation of what the two proposals are all about, and I am going to illustrate this in two ways--first, with respect to the policy.

The Republican tax cut framework green-lights the entire wish list for major multinational corporations and the wealthy. There is a massive corporate tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits shareholders. When it comes to international taxes, there is a pure territorial system with barely a nod to

the kind of tough rules that are needed to protect workers and the middle-class folks in the center of our tax base.

There is, in the Republican plan, a brand-new passthrough loophole. It is as big as the Grand Canyon. It is the Grand Canyon of loopholes in the Republican tax proposal, which invites tax cheats to skip out from paying their fair share to Social Security and Medicare.

The Republican plan eliminates the estate tax, which today only touches estates worth more than $11 million or $5.5 million for a single individual. The top rate goes down, and the bottom income tax rate goes up. When doing the math on what the Republicans have on offer, we are looking at upwards of $4, $5, $6, or $7 trillion in tax giveaways to the most fortunate.

It is a different story under the Republican proposal if you are middle class. You probably have a lot of unanswered questions. All you know right now is that it virtually guarantees that, in order to pay for the giveaways to the wealthy and corporations, current middle-class tax breaks are going to be on the chopping block--the personal exemption, incentives for retirement savings, education, and home ownership, to name just a few. From everything we know, when you set up these kinds of extreme approaches, when you raise the parts of the Tax Code that are a giveaway to those at the top, what you see is the middle class getting hurt.

Instead of tripling the standard deduction, which is what we did in our bipartisan bill, the Trump people double it, but then they take away the personal exemptions for working-class folks. So unlike our proposal, where the middle class can count on hundreds and hundreds of dollars in their paycheck when you triple the standard deduction, under the Republican proposal, they give it with one hand by doubling the standard deduction and take it away with the other hand by eliminating the personal exemption. So you have a very stark difference between the bipartisan proposal that I offered with Senator Coats, a member of the President's Cabinet, and what the Republican extreme plan is all about.

The bottom line is that the Republican plan seeks to raise those parts of our Tax Code that are all about the middle class, and they are doing it to pay for the giveaways for those folks at the top. That is not what we did in the bipartisan plan at all. Any middle-class person can sit at their kitchen table and look at the bipartisan plan that I was involved with and see how the middle class wins. They get hundreds and hundreds of dollars more in every paycheck by tripling the standard deduction, and they can see how they as middle-class folks--say, who make $70,000 and have a couple of children--lose under the Trump proposal.

Now there are other differences between our bipartisan plan and what the Big 6 and the Trump administration want. The bipartisan plan was scored as revenue neutral by authoritative independent tax experts. It made the Tax Code more progressive. The fact is, what we offered-- Senator Coats, Senator Gregg, and I--was an actual bill. It was the product of weeks and months of work.

Senator Gregg and I--and I think it is fair to say that all Senators may not be aware of this, but Senator Gregg was a top economic thinker with whom the majority leader consulted--sat next to each other for months in order to put together what is still the first and only comprehensive Federal bipartisan tax reform plan since 1986. It was an actual bill. It wasn't four pages of rhetoric.

In the spring we got one page. It was shorter than your typical drugstore receipt. Now I guess we are up to four pages, when you take out all this kind of white space. Our bill was an actual bill and was designed to give everybody in America a chance to get ahead, not just those in the 1 percent, not just those who have real clout and power.

I have always said that this is the heart of the difference. We have two Tax Codes in America. We have one for the cops and the nurses. It is compulsory. Their taxes come right out of their paychecks--no Cayman Islands deal for them. Then we have another Tax Code for the high flyers--the fortunate and well-connected. They can pretty much pay what they want when they want to. The bipartisan proposal that I wrote with Senator Gregg and Senator Coats helps the first group, the cops and nurses, but it was also fair to everybody. It gave everybody a chance to get ahead. The Republican plan is another big gift to that second group, the group that can decide what they are going to pay in taxes and when they are going to pay it. So we really couldn't have two proposals that are more different.

The fact is, the Republican framework looks less like a real effort at tax reform than a shameless attempt, in effect, to accommodate the President's boast about the biggest tax cut ever. The bottom line is that it is a giveaway to those at the top, and it robs from the middle class.

The differences don't just end with these specifics that I have described here. We took a fundamentally different approach. With Senator Gregg and Senator Coats, we were digging into the cobwebs of every dark corner of the Tax Code. We brought together principles on which both sides had to find common ground with a lot of sweat equity.

If you are going to write a partisan bill, you can go off on your own and do your thing. The fact is, if Senators Gregg, Coats, and I had written separate bills on our own, they would have looked very different, but the bill we wrote together, starting with Senator Gregg and I, was the first comprehensive bipartisan tax proposal in a quarter century. Senator Coats, to his credit, did yeoman's work in updating it. There is no comparison from a process standpoint between that bipartisan work that was done to update the system of more than a quarter century ago and the Republican tax cut framework.

The majority leader said from day one, at the beginning of the year, that he didn't want Democratic input on tax reform. He said: We are just going to do it on the ``our way or the highway'' approach with reconciliation. Reconciliation is a rejection of bipartisanship through and through.

I note that the Presiding Officer is the tallest Member of the Senate, along with Senator Strange, and I talked fairly frequently with our former colleague Senator Bradley, who was another tall Democrat on the Finance Committee with a much better jump shot than me. He has described the bipartisan efforts of 1986, with key officials in President Reagan's administration, Jim Baker and Don Regan, who spent months talking to Democrats--months and months--before anything happened. That is not what happened here. The specifics are very different, and the process is very different.

Recently, my Democratic colleagues and I came forward with our principles for reform, and it was just a matter of a few hours before Leader McConnell rejected them in the media. One administration official actually said that tax reform would be worse if it included Democratic ideas, and the ``go it alone'' mentality is pretty obvious when you look at the framework that came out last week.

The tough questions haven't been answered. For those at the top, it is all sweet and no sour. There was not a single shred of Democratic input in the framework--not one Democratic fingerprint anywhere to be found. The administration officials in charge of selling it to the public are, in my view, executing a con job on the middle class.

So I wanted to come here today to highlight some of the recent comments that the Senate Democratic leader has made with respect to some of these out-of-touch comments we have heard recently from key administration officials, like Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin, and I wanted to make sure that Senators heard--after the comments of the Senate Republican whip--that they now know that there is no comparison, none, between the bipartisan proposal that I had the honor to write with Senators Coats and Gregg, which brought the two parties together, and the framework that came out last week that forced even more polarization between the parties. The reality is that this Republican proposal, this tax cut framework, is so radically skewed toward the wealthy and the big corporations, that it makes Ronald Reagan's landmark reform look like the work of rabid socialists.

So I appreciate the chance to set the record straight by outlining the differences between a recent bipartisan bill with two influential Republican Senators with whom I had the honor to work and the extreme Republican framework that came out last week. These plans are not just trillions of dollars apart based on the numbers. It is clear they are written with entirely different goals in mind.

Our view is that tax reform ought to be about giving everybody in America the opportunity to get ahead. What we have said is that, instead of it being an ``our way or the highway'' partisan approach, we ought to be doing--particularly in the area of tax reform--what has a storied history. The key to a successful tax reform, based on that history, is working in a bipartisan way.

I will close with the comments about the Democratic principles, which is that we are not going to give relief to the people at the 1 percent, we are not going to break the bank, and we are going to focus on the middle class. Those principles don't even go as far as ideas advanced by President Reagan, where he said that we are going to treat income from a wage and income from investment in the same way.

I close by way of saying this. No. 1, the distinguished Republican whip is wrong when he compares the bipartisan bill I have been a part of to what the administration's tax framework is all about. No. 2, the right way to do this is to focus in a bipartisan way, not through partisanship only. The principles that we have outlined on our side, when you compare them, do not even go as far as some of the ideas embraced by the late President Reagan.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, I followed the Senator's comments with respect to taxes and the debate over tax reform

with considerable interest. I will just tell you, my goodness, how I wish we could have what the Senator called an uninhibited process with respect to the debate over tax reform. I have written an actual bipartisan tax reform bill with our colleague who is now part of the Trump administration, Senator Coats.

Unfortunately, what our colleague laudably called for is not on offer. The Senate majority leader has said that he intends to use reconciliation--the most partisan process for considering tax reform. When we were talking about healthcare, which is one-sixth of the economy, we had the same process--reconciliation, all partisan. Now we are talking about taxes that involve the whole economy, and we are seeing the Senate majority leader say once again that it is his intent, his preference, and his plan to use that same process. I sure wish the world was like my colleague has called for because I have written a bipartisan plan.

What is so striking is that the Senate majority leader has called for 20 hours of discussion, which is essentially what you get with reconciliation, as opposed to what happened when Ronald Reagan and a big group of Democrats got together in 1986 and spent a whole month on tax reform.

So before the Senator leaves--and it is a pleasure to serve with him on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as well--I sure wish the world was along the lines of what my colleague has called for. Perhaps he can use his intellect and energy to persuade the Senate majority leader to use that process on taxes because that is what some Democrats have called for.

I can just tell my friend, given my interest in the subject, which goes back well over a decade--we have a bipartisan proposal written, coauthored by a member of the President's Cabinet, so we would very much like to have what the Senator is talking about.

Madam President, I rise now to oppose the nomination of Eric Hargan to be Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. This is the No. 2 position at HHS, the chief operating officer. Of course, with Secretary Price's departure, Mr. Hargan would fill the top spot if he is confirmed.

My concern is that I don't have any confidence that Mr. Hargan is going to lead the Department in a different direction than it took under Dr. Price. Last week, the country watched as more and more details emerged about Secretary Price's travel. In my view, the flights were an abuse of office.

In my view, from the very outset, there was reason to be concerned about Secretary Price and how he would handle the public trust. Ever since our committee received the Price nomination, it was clear that he had a little trouble following the rules when it served his own personal interests rather than taxpayers. He used insider information from a fellow Congressman to get a sweetheart stock deal that made him hundreds of thousands of dollars. He frequently bought stocks in industries that he was overseeing as a Member of Congress. He pushed healthcare legislation that benefited industry insiders rather than patients.

He was confirmed on a party-line vote, and it wasn't very shortly after that that he proceeded to go forward with what I and others consider a sabotage campaign that, in effect, has been executed since day one. He was a top salesman for TrumpCare. He came before our committee and made countless other public appearances in which he willfully misrepresented the massive scale of the harm TrumpCare would have done to American healthcare. He also appeared on national television and argued, in effect, that healthcare funding cuts aren't actually cuts. He denied that individuals would lose health coverage or see increases as a result of TrumpCare, even after there were independent analysis showing that was wrong. Then, of course, he flew about the country scaring folks who just wanted affordable healthcare.

As far as the President's promise to bring down the high prices of prescription medicine--that was a promise the American people heard stop after stop on the campaign trail in 2016. That promise is nowhere to be seen or heard from at this point. It is my hope that the President's next pick to lead Health and Human Services will follow through on what the American people were told in the campaign they were going to get--lower the cost of healthcare and get our citizens covered--but that nominee hasn't been put forward.

In the meantime, Mr. Hargan's nomination has him in line to serve as Acting Secretary. I will tell you, having examined the record as closely as I could, I don't think there is any reason to believe Mr. Hargan would deviate from Secretary Price's ideological agenda that included a constant effort to undermine and in my view sabotage the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. This campaign is driving up premiums and confusing Americans who just want to be able to see a doctor and get affordable healthcare services.

I am going to tick through some of the actions the administration has taken that would undermine the upcoming open enrollment period and the effect that is going to have on our people's healthcare costs.

First, just a few weeks into his tenure, Secretary Price cut the enrollment period. This is the period during which Americans sign up for health insurance. We are talking about a private marketplace. I am really struck by this debate about the role of government. We are talking about a private marketplace where private healthcare plans offer coverage. Secretary Price cut the enrollment period for private healthcare in the private marketplace in half. People across the country used to be able to sign up for healthcare from the beginning of November until the end of January, and now they have literally half that time. That is going to cause a whole lot of disruption for people who are working hard and living their lives rather than trying to follow every little press account from Washington, DC.

Let's imagine for a moment a 29-year-old who just got locked out of the healthcare system because he has had a 3-year routine of signing up for health insurance around the new year. That is exactly the kind of individual the private insurance market needs to attract in order to hold costs down--a young person who is probably signing up right toward the deadline.

Then think of the single mom with two kids who marked January 30, probably with a big, bright pen on her calendar because she cut it close to the end of enrollment last year. Her life is busy enough. She doesn't read trade publications from health industry sources to see what is happening with open enrollment. Because of the early enrollment cutoff, this mom and her family, who just want affordable, private healthcare from the private marketplace, are going to be locked out.

The Department of Health and Human Services is taking the healthcare.gov website offline for maintenance on all but one Sunday during the open enrollment period. The fact is, Sunday has been one of the most popular times for well-meaning assistance groups to help folks get signed up at community centers. It is like the State Department of Transportation blocking the highways and digging up the blacktop with construction crews every Monday morning during the peak commute time. It is just the opposite of common sense.

The Department is kneecapping the programs that are designed to get highly trained people. These are folks called navigators, and what they do is get out into the communities and go to various places where they know a lot of folks aren't signed up, and they help them get signed up.

The Department of Health and Human Services has slashed the budget for getting the word out, including zeroing out the budget for TV ads. That has been a big factor in getting enrollment up in the past.

Let's be clear about what the Department has done under Secretary Price's leadership. They have been working overtime to make it harder for people to get healthcare, plain and simple.

The sabotage doesn't really end with just making enrollment a headache. The administration continues to dangle the threat of cutting off cost-sharing payments as if it were a political gain without consequences in the real world. In State after State after State, insurers have made it clear that this gamesmanship is causing premiums to go up. If the payments are cut off, families will face premium increases of

hundreds of dollars or more, and it is all because they are searching for a political trophy.

I want to talk about what this means for private sector healthcare. When you have the President and the previous Secretary of Health and Human Services pouring gasoline on the fires of uncertainty in the private health insurance marketplace, it makes it very hard for insurers to make the calculations that are involved in spreading risk and getting people signed up and pricing products.

The reality is, an administration that says they really care about the private sector--the President continually says that he is from the business community and he wants to be sensitive to private sector economic forces. The last thing you would do is pour all this uncertainty into the private healthcare landscape, which is what they have been doing with the gamesmanship in terms of whether they are going to pay these cost-sharing payments so that folks who face big deductibles and extra prices for medicine and the like would know there is going to be help in their health plan for those costs.

The Secretary was out jetting all about, spreading falsehoods about the private healthcare landscape. Sometimes he would say that it would be collapsing, and I would say: We know a lot of people who are trying to stabilize it, but you are making it harder by pouring all this gas on the fires of uncertainty.

While this was going on, they were also neglecting to work with States. For example, Oklahoma designed a reinsurance system intended to stabilize the private insurance market and control costs, and they sought a waiver application to the Department of Health and Human Services. But the Department of Health and Human Services didn't get around to approving it in time to help Oklahomans in 2018, so the State just pulled their application.

I have been a strong supporter of these waivers. I authored a provision in the Affordable Care Act, the innovation waiver, 1332. For the Secretary to not work with Oklahoma in a timely way and in a way that would stabilize the private insurance market is not what those of us on this side are in favor of.

There is no reason to believe Mr. Hargan would come in and clean up the mess. In my view, many States want to see stable or reduced premiums this coming year, but so far the Department is just marching in lockstep with the status quo. The President apparently is committed to continuing this kind of mismanagement and willful wrongdoing. Mr. Hargan has made clear what his stance is on the Affordable Care Act in plenty of public statements.

Beyond this question of undermining the Affordable Care Act, we were also particularly troubled that Secretary Tom Price shared the Trump administration's abysmal record of responding to oversight letters from Congress, especially the Democrats. As far as I can tell, some of this is shared on both sides.

I think this is profoundly undemocratic, and our obligation to perform oversight as Members of Congress is derived from the powers laid out in the Constitution, in article I. The issues we raise in oversight inquiries to the Department of Health and Human Services relate directly to the well-being of people in North Carolina, in Oregon, and everywhere in between. I don't think Senators on either side, Democrats or Republicans, do it for sport. But the administration's behavior is not that of a government that sees itself as answerable to the public--either that or it just doesn't have good answers as to why it constantly, constantly is out there undermining private health insurance markets to make it harder for people to get affordable healthcare. Either way, they aren't doing their jobs, and they aren't putting the interests of the American people first.

Members on both sides of the aisle have expressed concern about the Department of Health and Human Services stonewalling important oversight issues presented by Members on both sides. Chairman Hatch and Senator Grassley are two very senior Republicans. Chairman Grassley and Chairman Hatch deserve a lot of credit for calling out the Trump administration on this lack of responsiveness to basic oversight.

The fact is, what our committee has heard is basically a lot of sweet talk from nominees about how, of course, they are going to be responsive, and then they go out, and it is business as usual. We see them for that confirmation hearing, and there is not much of any kind of response when we ask the questions.

I will not support Mr. Hargan's nomination today. In my view, under Tom Price and this administration, the Department of Health and Human Services has done a miserable job of working to improve the health and well-being of the American people. The irony is, it seems that one of the objectives from day one was to set out and try to accomplish that, to make it appear that there were problems when the Affordable Care Act was being implemented. Instead of rolling up their sleeves and tackling it, the idea was to try and get an ideological trophy: Let's tell the American people that everything about the Affordable Care Act is horrible so we can get it repealed.

The Affordable Care Act is far from perfect. In fact, when we were debating it, I had an alternative plan. We had seven Senators on both sides of the aisle. It was a bipartisan plan, but that is history.

The Affordable Care Act has made an enormous difference for millions of Americans. What we ought to be doing is working together to improve it. There are plenty of ways in which this Senate and an administration that really want to accomplish that can work together in a bipartisan way.

What I have been more interested in than any other aspect of public service is to work in a bipartisan way on healthcare. That has been my No. 1 interest. So nothing would please me more than to be able to say: OK. We have an official who is going to break with the past and, instead of trying to make the implementation of the Act as bad as possible, is prepared to roll up his or her sleeves and make it as good as possible. Unfortunately, that person is not Mr. Hargan. I urge a no vote.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, a week from today, on October 10, the Taiwanese people will celebrate their 106th Taiwanese National Day. I would like to take a few minutes to congratulate my Taiwanese friends on this important occasion.

Taiwan has long been a trusted friend of the United States and a valuable partner in the increasingly important Asia-Pacific region.

Taiwan is hugely important to Oregon. It is also one of Oregon's largest trading partners and a big export market for Oregon products like grain. Portland's annual Grand Floral Parade and Rose Festival host delegations from Taiwan. Portland, OR, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan, are sister cities.

These ties are both broad and deep, as I saw myself when I visited Taipei several years ago.

That was more than a year before Taiwan's historic 2016 election, but the Taiwanese people's commitment to democracy was already very much on display.

Because our people share values like freedom, respect for human dignity, and entrepreneurship, I am honored today to reaffirm the U.S.- Taiwan relationship.

I wish my friends, the Taiwanese people, a wonderful 106th National Day and a fortuitous year ahead.