Floor Statements

Mr. President, I am struck by this conversation as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. My colleague and distinguished Senator from Texas is on the Finance Committee. He knows I know something about writing bipartisan healthcare reform bills. I have written them. They have become law. I could tell my colleague, I have not once--not once--been asked to be part of any bipartisan effort with respect to this legislation.

I think, colleagues, it is real clear what is going on here. Senate Republicans are going to keep telling Americans they are fixing their healthcare right up until the second it gets taken away.

Now, as the ranking member of the Finance Committee, I find it bizarre that a health bill of this importance was hidden for so long behind closed doors, denying the American people the opportunity to see it in an open debate.

There have been no hearings on this dangerous, destructive proposal, not one hearing on whether Medicaid should be slashed to pay for tax cuts for the fortunate few, not one hearing on whether the bedrock protections for those with preexisting conditions ought to be shattered, not one hearing on whether Americans should face higher costs, along with annual and lifetime limits, on insurance coverage.

This secretive process of concealing and rushing this bill, which until today had been seen by nobody--nobody outside of the Republican leadership and their lobbyist allies who dwell on K Street--the secretive process stands in sharp contrast to the process that led to the Affordable Care Act.

I now put forward a parliamentary inquiry. Is the Chair able to confirm that the Committee on Finance considered S. 1796, the America's Healthy Future Act, which was ultimately incorporated into H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, in executive session on 8 separate calendar days prior to reporting the bill favorably?

I have information that indicates that 135 amendments were considered in the committee and that of those, 14 amendments offered by Republican members of the committee or offered in a bipartisan manner were adopted during the consideration of S. 1796. Is the Chair able to confirm that?

Therefore, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that no motion to proceed to Calendar No. 120, H.R. 1628, be in order until the bill has been the subject of executive session meetings in the Committee on Finance and the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, during which amendments from the majority and the minority received votes and the bill has been favorably reported from those committees.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Kimberly Koops-Wrabek, Alexander Floyd, Jeremy Jones, and Justin Abbasi be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the Congress.

Mr. President, it has been a rough day at the office for the Senate Republican healthcare plan, and my take is that it is going to be even tougher over the next few days. There will be a lot of Senate Democrats home, meeting with folks in open meetings. We will see if any Senate Republicans have the courage to do that as well.

Earlier this morning, the whole Senate had its first opportunity to look at this bill in the light of day. The debate that unfolded on the floor made it clear that our colleagues are committed to a partisan scheme to jam this bill through at any cost. There isn't going to be a full debate. There isn't going to be any bipartisan input.

If you read through the fine print in this destructive proposal, as the American people have had the chance to do over the last several hours, it becomes clear why my colleagues on the other side have kept this bill hidden and want to jam it through as quickly as possible.

This proposal is stunning in its sameness to the cruel House bill that the American people have rejected outright--in fact, rejected, according to polls, by really eye-popping numbers. So I want to begin by warning against anybody's buying into the sales job that is inevitably going to unfold in the days ahead. This bill may change, but Senate Republicans will only be putting lipstick on a devastating blow to the healthcare of the American people.

This is a plan to raise costs, slash Medicaid, and cut millions of people off of their healthcare to pay for tax breaks for the fortunate few.

My colleagues on the other side have spent the last month telling every reporter and constituent who would listen that they were throwing out the House bill and they would be starting anew with a fresher and kinder bill. That has turned out to be fiction. Republicans are going to keep telling Americans that they are fixing their healthcare right up until the second it gets taken away.

This bill doubles down on the meanness that even the President described in the bill from the other body. The Senate Republican plan doesn't fix the problems with people's healthcare. It creates a bunch of new ones.

After a day of pouring over this bill--and the Finance Committee Democratic staff has been looking at this in detail--I would like to lay out, as we close up this afternoon, some of the most devastating effects this bill will have.

First, Senate Republicans are so committed to slashing Medicaid that their bill cuts it even deeper than the House. Today, Medicaid comes with a guarantee to the most vulnerable Americans and their families who walk an economic tightrope every day. Today, if you get sick or suffer an injury, you will get the care you need. The Senate Republican plan ends that guarantee for good. It ends the Medicaid program as our country knows it for good.

People shouldn't be distracted by date changes or sweeteners for people already enrolled. This is a radical plan plucked from the wish list of the far right, and it is cloaked in the complicated language of inflation rates and dollar figures. When you talk about slashing Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars, you are not simply talking about the lingo of healthcare policymakers, like bending the cost curve. You are talking about people's lives.

Medicaid helps to pick up the bill for two out of three seniors in America's nursing homes. These are the people who have done everything right. They are our older parents, our grandmothers, our grandfathers. They scrimped, they saved, and they worked hard. But it is pretty clear: It is really expensive to grow old in America. So Medicaid is there to support them and cover the cost of nursing home care when savings run out.

The Senate Republican plan slashes Medicaid so deeply that States are going to be forced to cut benefits, and the guarantee of nursing home care will be in danger. This is one of the greatest threats seniors have ever faced, and it is being imposed on them by an act of Congress.

I don't make that statement lightly. My background is working with the older people of Oregon and our country. I was director of the Oregon Gray Panthers for 7 years and ran the legal aid office for the elderly before I was elected to Congress. I will say point-blank, having worked in this field now for more than three decades, that this is an extraordinary threat to the well-being of the Nation's older people, who shouldn't have to worry about winding up living in squalor or on the street.

Families shouldn't have to worry about where they will find the money

to cover the cost of a nursing home. That is $90,000 a year--$90,000 a year, on average, for nursing home care. Independence, safety, and a reasonably comfortable old age should not become a privilege reserved just for the wealthy in our country.

Second, the age tax in the Senate Republican bill is going to hit older Americans between 55 and 64 like a wrecking ball. They are going to be forced to pay several times as much as a younger person for health insurance. You are going to see older people desperately hoping and praying that they can hold on to their health until they make it to 65 and enroll in Medicare. I would like to hear somebody try to explain what healthcare problem that is fixing or why it is a good approach to healthcare policy.

Third, Senate Republicans have now cooked up a scheme to decimate the value of middle-class tax cuts for healthcare and send deductibles into the stratosphere. Here is how that is going to work. A whole lot of families in the middle class are going to lose their tax benefits outright.

As the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee that has jurisdiction over tax policy, I have seen that. Then, as if that is not enough harm, this plan cheapens the value of the tax benefits that were created under the Affordable Care Act. It is a scheme to force people into bargain basement insurance plans with sky-high deductibles. It also risks kicking off a death spiral in States where the private insurance markets are stable and competitive today.

Fourth, Republicans have twisted a part of the Affordable Care Act I wrote to promote State innovation, and they are using it to give insurance companies the power to run roughshod over individual Americans. What we are talking about here is what are called section 1332 waivers. What was done in 2009, in the Senate Finance Committee-- it came out of my original bipartisan bill, the Healthy Americans Act-- we told States that the Affordable Care Act was going to set a new bar for insurance in terms of coverage and affordability. We said to the States--the laboratories of democracy--if you believe you can do even better, you can get a waiver so you can go test an innovative, new approach. We did build in protections, basic protections, so people would get decent coverage, and their lives would be protected.

The Republican plan wipes those protections out, wipes out the consumer protections. It tells States: OK. If you want to do worse, go right ahead. In fact, the Senate Republican plan offers States a bribe to end basic health protections and lower the bar for insurance. You will see insurance companies given a green light to cut essential benefits out of the plans they sell on the open market.

For example, take maternity care. The Affordable Care Act banned the practice of price-gouging women just because of their gender, but the Republican plan takes the side of the big insurance companies in this debate.

On a fundamental level, this plan says that health insurance in America ought to be based on what men need and what women need ought to cost extra. Services like maternity care would be an add-on item, and that means women are going to face higher costs just because they are women.

Fifth, this proposal attacks Planned Parenthood and deprives hundreds of thousands of women of the right to see the doctor of their choosing.

I want to come back to what that really means. Women in America ought to be able to see the doctor of their choice, the doctor they trust, the doctor, in their own judgment, is the best doctor for them. This provision keeps them from doing that. Never mind that there is already an air-tight ban on taxpayer dollars funding abortions. Never mind that Planned Parenthood doesn't get a single dime of Federal funding above what is available to other Medicaid providers. Never mind that Planned Parenthood is where millions of women get routine medical care from doctors they know and trust--services such as basic checkups, cancer screenings, preventive care, HIV tests. The Senate Republican bill continues this ideological crusade against Planned Parenthood, and it is going to cost women across this country the right that I see as so fundamental--the right of women to be able to choose to go to the doctor they trust.

Sixth, at a time when the opioid epidemic is ripping apart communities from one corner of this Nation to another, this bill would be a devastating setback in the fight against opioid abuse. No community has been spared from this crisis, and I would wager that virtually every Senator has come to the floor at some point and spoken about the impact it has had on their State.

By the way, it would be hard to forget the parade of Presidential candidates in 2015 and 2016 that went through State after State claiming they had the very best plan to end the opioid crisis, but now the Senate Republican healthcare bill makes the crisis worse.

Medicaid is the only lifeline that thousands and thousands of people across America have in their struggle to try to put their lives back together after falling victim to opioids. For thousands and thousands of people, over the last few years, the treatment they have gotten through Medicaid has been their escape, their path out of a downward spiral that too often leads to heroin abuse and overdose deaths. The Republican plan takes this lifeline away.

Some on the other side have proposed creating a separate pool of money, a separate slush fund to replace the loss of treatment through Medicaid. In my view, this is a very serious mistake because it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the opioid crisis, and it is not going to work.

The opioid epidemic is a public health crisis, and fighting it means making sure people can get the healthcare they need. That means treating substance abuse disorders the same way you treat other diseases. Our country doesn't pay for heart surgery through grant programs. We don't pay for chemotherapy through congressional appropriations. If you are sick and you have healthcare coverage, you get the care you need. Anything less when it comes to opioid addiction treatment is going to fail.

Finally, when you listen to that parade of horribles--all the harm this bill is going to do to generations of Americans across the country--you have to wonder why my colleagues on the other side would push this bill forward.

People have been asking me this all day. There is a simple answer for it. This bill takes healthcare away from millions of Americans and raises costs for millions more for one reason--to give tax breaks to the fortunate few in America. This isn't a debate about two competing visions of healthcare--one liberal and one conservative. One side in this debate wants to protect Americans' healthcare coverage, make sure they can go to the doctors they trust and afford the medical care they need. The other side in this debate has a plan to take away healthcare coverage and raise the cost of care for the vulnerable, the middle class, families struggling to get by--all to pay for tax breaks for the wealthiest few. This is an out-and-out attack on millions of Americans' health and well-being.

In the debate that played out on the Senate floor this morning, it was suggested several times that Democrats turned down a chance to participate in the process. This is completely, entirely 100 percent false.

I am the ranking member of the committee that is responsible for healthcare. I have not once been asked by a single Republican to work on this bill or discuss fixes to the Affordable Care Act. I was stunned this morning when I heard the Democrats had been given an offer to work on these fixes; that Democrats aren't interested in being bipartisan.

I have made the center of my time in public service working in a bipartisan way on healthcare. I have written healthcare legislation that has been signed into law that has been bipartisan. It was based on principles that both sides of the aisle could agree on. Certainly, if there had been any interest in a process that would actually give both sides the opportunity to do the kind of give-and-take that you do with a bill--not through this partisan ``my way or the highway'' reconciliation--I would have been very interested in it, and I know Senate Finance Democrats would have been very interested in it. That wasn't on offer. The claim the Democrats have refused to

work in a bipartisan way is fiction, a gross fiction.

It is clear now that the only way to bring this partisan process to a halt is for Americans to stand up and speak out. I am going to close with two points. Ever since those Gray Panther days, I have always thought healthcare was the most important issue because if Americans and their loved ones don't have their health, then pretty much everything goes by the board. You can't go to the game. You can't spend time with family. It is hard to do much of anything.

It is very clear that healthcare, as a result of this proposal for millions of Americans and for our country, is going to be at risk. What is at risk is the prospect that the Senate will turn back the clock to the days when healthcare was basically for the healthy and wealthy. We shouldn't go there.

In the past, Democrats and Republicans have agreed we shouldn't go there. With the bill I wrote--seven Democratic Senators, seven Republican Senators--that was the centerpiece of it. By the way, several Senate Republicans who are here in this body were cosponsors of that legislation. We shouldn't go back to those days when healthcare was basically for the healthy and wealthy.

For all those who are paying attention to these proceedings, my view is, the only way you are going to end a partisan process and make policy the way it ought to be made is not through something Washington lingo calls reconciliation--it is just partisan--but through the give- and-take of Democrats and Republicans finding good ideas that the other side can agree on. The only way we are going to do that is for Americans to stand up and speak out.

Political change does not start in government buildings and then trickle down to the people. It is not trickle-down. It is almost always bottom-up, starting from communities where we are going to hear people speaking out over the next few days.

I am going to close by way of saying that over the next few days, this is one of the most important times for Americans to make their voices heard. As we wrap up the first day of actually seeing what the draft Republican proposal is all about, I hope Americans will weigh in, that we will see that grassroots juggernaut develop, and we will defeat a partisan plan and set about the task of doing healthcare policy again in a bipartisan way--where you find common ground that is sustainable rather than just a partisan approach, which continues the gridlock and the polarization on an issue that is the most important issue of our time.

I yield the floor. I believe there are no other speakers.

Mr. President, I am very pleased to follow my colleague from New Hampshire, Senator Hassan. She said it very well. This is an extraordinarily important part of the debate.

A Senate vote on TrumpCare is now days away, and that is the case even though the bill remains hidden in the Senate shadows. I am here tonight with my colleagues to try to shine some light on the extraordinary harm TrumpCare is going to do to women's health across the country and also to call on the American people to stand up and say, and say loudly, that this is wrong--wrong because it would be a partisan process that takes away important healthcare rights from women across this country.

First, TrumpCare says that health insurance in America ought to be based on what men need and what women need ought to cost extra. You look back a few years to when the Affordable Care Act set in stone guaranteed insurance benefits to protect everybody who shops on the open market, the private open market, regardless of their gender, no price gouging women just because they are women. Now, however, the Republican plan lets States hack away at those essential

health benefits, and it always seems that maternity care is the first benefit that then gets cut.

If TrumpCare goes through, what will happen in America is insurance companies will carve maternity care out of the plans they offer on the open market. It would, in effect, become an add-on--an add-on that would come with a higher price, as if a pregnant women's healthcare is a luxury item like a sunroof on a new car.

Let's set aside the fact that every man in the country was born to a woman. My colleagues on the other side have spent 7 years telling Americans that they were laser-focused on bringing costs down for everybody. Apparently, that notion of ``everybody'' that we are hearing from Republican Senators doesn't include mothers because their costs are going to be going up in a number of instances.

Second, the public has heard time and time again that nobody would be hurt under TrumpCare and that repeal and replace is all about putting the patient at the center of care. Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of women who will lose their right to see the doctor of their choosing as a result of TrumpCare defunding Planned Parenthood. Just unpack that for a moment. I think one basic, almost sacred principle for women is that they ought to be able to make the choice of the physician they trust for their healthcare. Yet what we are talking about here--apparently tomorrow--is a real prospect that women will lose the right to see the doctor they trust.

This ideological campaign against Planned Parenthood ignores the fact that there are already laws on the books that prevent tax dollars from funding abortions. It ignores the fact that Planned Parenthood doesn't get a dime of taxpayer funding above what is available to other comparable healthcare providers. It ignores the fact that women rely on Planned Parenthood to get routine medical care from the doctors they know and trust--basic checkups, cancer screenings, preventive care, HIV tests.

It is long past time to end this crusade against Planned Parenthood, which is taking away from women in this country the ability to make their own judgments about whom they want to see and the doctors they trust.

Finally, the TrumpCare plan would significantly slash Medicaid, and this is a special threat to women. Medicaid is at the heart of women's healthcare in the country. Women live longer than men on average, and Medicaid helps pay for two out of three seniors living in nursing homes. Women are more likely than men to have a disability, and Medicaid is the key to helping millions of Americans with disabilities live successful, independent lives in their communities. The Republican healthcare plan would slash Medicaid so deeply year after year that States would be forced to cut benefits and access to care. Women would be hit the hardest by those cuts.

The public needs to know that right now, it is go time in America on healthcare. This vote is right around the corner. And because my colleagues on the other side have in effect locked into this ``our way or the highway'' approach--the Washington word for it is ``reconciliation,'' and my guess is that in a lot of coffee shops in North Carolina and Oregon and points in between, people aren't that up on Washington lingo like reconciliation, but they really want Democrats and Republicans to work together. That has been the cornerstone of my work with respect to healthcare. That is what Chairman Hatch and I have done with respect to the transformation of Medicare, to update the Medicare guarantee. I have worked with my colleagues in a bipartisan way in terms of independence at home, more care for older people at home, and on a host of issues, particularly with respect to holding down pharmaceutical costs in a bipartisan way. The reality is, that is the only way you come up with approaches that are sustainable--build on principles that both sides feel strongly about and lock it into a bipartisan agreement.

What we are looking at, again, not in 6 weeks but tomorrow, is the Senate Republicans saying: We are going to use this reconciliation--not the bipartisan approaches that I think yield the real dividends but a partisan approach. It is called reconciliation. It means ``It is our way or the highway.'' And then what you are going to do is you are going to have one of the most consequential debates about domestic policy in decades. It is going to fly through the Senate with hardly any public input and debate.

A big part of what I wanted to do tonight is come to the floor of the Senate to say to Americans that this is the time to get loud, to get very loud and to tell your friends and your neighbors and your relatives to get out there and be loud with you. This isn't some mundane debate where the two sides couldn't square their differences, the kind most people choose to ignore; this is an out-and-out attack on the healthcare of millions of Americans and especially women.

I think that when the facts get out to women in this country, they are going to say this is wrong, and they are going to say this is personal. The people in Washington, DC, talk about lots of things and throw around lots of Washington lingo like ``reconciliation,'' but I think they are going to see through exactly what these proposals mean for them. It is a significant rollback of their rights on matters like being able to choose the doctor they trust.

I will close with this, and I have felt this way since the days when I was co-director of the senior citizens at home in Oregon. Political change hardly ever is top-down--top being it comes from government buildings and then trickles down to people--it is almost always bottoms-up, where the voices of Americans are heard and they tell their elected officials when they are off base, when they are doing something that will hurt them rather than help them.

I close by way of saying that I hope this has provided at least some useful information so Americans--particularly women--can get engaged, get loud, and do it now.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I note my colleague is prepared to speak.

Madam President, the American people have spent the last several weeks hearing that the Senate will vote on its new version of TrumpCare by the end of the month. It is now June 19, and the American people are still in the dark about this bill. There is no text. There is no legislative analysis of this bill and no scoring of what the financial ramifications are. The American people--and much of this Senate--are in the dark. We are in the dark about how much costs are going to rise, in the dark about how many people are going to lose insurance, and in the dark about whether a preexisting condition will once again be used as a weapon against them by insurance companies.

If news reports are to be believed--and that is all we have right now--a vote on this massive proposal affecting the lives of virtually all our people is days away. No one outside of a group of 13 men--all Republicans--knows what is being considered. In my view, this is as stark an example of legislative malpractice as I can remember.

It is time for Americans to get loud, to do their part, and to make sure their voices are heard on an issue that is so personal and so vital to our people and their families.

If and when this bill hits the floor, the debate is going to go by very quickly. By the standards of the Senate, it will be over in a flash. So this afternoon, I want to be direct with a few key points for those across this country to remember over the next two weeks.

First, the Republican healthcare plan is going to raise costs for the typical American. If you are an older person nearing retirement--55, 58, 61--you are going to get hammered with an age tax. You are going to be forced to pay several times as much as a younger person for health insurance.

Under the House TrumpCare bill, 64-year-old seniors of modest means are going to see their premiums shoot up by 800 percent. I would like to hear somebody try to explain to a lifelong trucker or to someone who has spent decades cleaning offices to put food on their family's table why that is an improvement in American healthcare.

These are older people who already struggle to make ends meet, and they have been told for the last 7 years that repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act is going to lower their healthcare costs. Now they face the reality of TrumpCare, which says that they will somehow have to spend the bulk of their income on health insurance and, in some cases, it will take up nearly all of it.

It is not just older people who face this age tax that will see their costs rise. TrumpCare cuts middle-class tax benefits for healthcare that were put in place under the Affordable Care Act, particularly in rural areas. That means premiums are going to be a much bigger burden on typical middle-class families.

The Republican healthcare plan ends the air-tight, loophole-free guarantee that protects Americans from being discriminated against for a preexisting condition. Working adults--30, 40, 50 years old--who thought they were home free with employer-sponsored insurance, under this bill could, once again, face some of the worst insurance company abuses, including annual and lifetime limits on benefits.

One new report says 27 million Americans could get hit by annual limits and 20 million could face lifetime limits.

Here is what this means: A 35-year-old, for example, who develops cancer could bust that cap in a hurry. If you have to go through expensive surgeries and chemotherapy, busting those caps could mean facing decades--decades--digging out from medical debt.

Second, TrumpCare is built around the $800 billion attack on Medicaid. Today, Medicaid comes with a guarantee: If you walk an economic tightrope, are sick or injured, you will get the care you need. You can't be denied benefits, but slashing the program by hundreds of billions of dollars ends that guarantee because States are going to have to cut benefits. The best way to understand the consequences of that plan is to look at seniors who need nursing home care.

The Medicaid nursing home benefit helps pick up the tab for two out of three nursing home beds in America because, the fact is, growing old in America gets expensive. You can do everything right through a lifetime of hard work, scrimping and saving, putting off vacations or big purchases to be financially prudent, but still, a lot of people go through their savings. That is when Medicaid steps in for seniors to help cover the cost of nursing homes and other long-term care. One year in a nursing home now costs more

than $90,000, on average. That is two or three times as much as a year of college education. If TrumpCare slashes Medicaid so deeply that seniors are in danger of losing the nursing home benefit, how are families, fighting hard to pay their own bills, going to be in a position to take care of older loved ones?

Of course, Medicaid does a lot more than cover nursing home care. Thirty-seven million kids are enrolled in Medicaid, a vital source of support for kids and adults with disabilities.

Medicaid is the only lifeline that thousands and thousands of Americans fighting opioid addiction have to be able to put their lives back together. No community anywhere in this country has escaped the opioid epidemic. Since Medicaid was expanded under the Affordable Care Act, it has been leading the fight against the opioid epidemic by improving access for millions of people for treatment of mental health and substance abuse orders, but with the Republican plan's enormous cuts, thousands of people could lose their best shot to recover from addiction and lead healthy lives.

Finally, what is especially unfortunate about this legislation is the process for writing this bill. It is being written behind closed doors, no input from across the aisle and particularly from the American people.

I serve as the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee. Our committee has authority over hundreds of billions of dollars in payments for Medicare, Medicaid, and tax credits. We haven't had any hearings. We haven't seen a bill. There is not the traditional process of a committee markup to consider legislation. We are also the committee that on a staff level, always has tried to work back and forth between Democrats and Republicans to try to find common ground, but with the majority leader keeping the process locked behind closed doors, Chairman Hatch and I, along with all of the Democrats and most of the Republicans on our committee, have simply been cut out.

Back in the runup to the Affordable Care Act--the one that President Obama was involved in, in 2009--the Finance Committee held more than 50 hearings and roundtables, and we walked through carefully the healthcare reform bill. When the legislation was introduced, it sat online for 6 days before it was voted on in the committee, 564 amendments were posted online, more than 130 amendments were considered during the markup, more than two dozen Republican amendments were adopted, and the bill passed on a bipartisan basis.

Again, let me highlight: More than two dozen Republican amendments were adopted in the Finance Committee. As of now, there will not be a single Democratic amendment adopted in the Finance Committee. When the legislation went to the floor, the Senate spent 25 consecutive legislative days on healthcare reform--the second longest consecutive session in history.

That is how the legislative process ought to look: The committees do the hard work in the open, gather input from the American people, have a chance--Democrats and Republicans--to work together. That is not what is happening on TrumpCare. This is a bill shrouded in secrecy and the public is kept in the dark. There aren't going to be any hearings on the impact it is going to have on the millions of people who rely on Medicaid for health insurance, no hearings on what it means if you have all these loopholes in the guarantee of protection Americans now have against discrimination for a preexisting condition, no hearings asking how a 64-year-old of limited means is supposed to deal with an age tax that swallows up most of their income. When the Senate Republican healthcare bill hits the floor, there will be a very short debate before time expires and the final votes are cast.

I am going to close by saying now is the time for Americans to be heard on healthcare. It is the time for Americans to speak out. For those who have a story about how TrumpCare will affect their family, you can share it on my website at wyden.senate.gov or you can use the hashtag ``America Speaks Out.''

I intend to be back on the floor with my colleagues, and many of us will be here often in the hours and days ahead, but I want to close by way of saying political change doesn't start at the top and then trickle down. Political change is bottoms up, as Americans across the country speak out and speak loudly. Now is the time to do that because this debate is coming fast.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I want to start my remarks on healthcare and what is ahead over the next couple of weeks in this way.

For almost 7 years before I got elected to the Congress, I was the director of the Oregon Gray Panthers, which is a senior citizens group, and I ran a legal aid office for the elderly. I made the judgment then that healthcare was and always would be the most important issue. I made that judgment because I have always felt that if you and your loved ones do not have their health, then pretty much everything else does not matter.

The Presiding Officer of the Senate, of course, is a skilled healthcare provider and knows a lot about these issues, and I am really going to use that as my reference point today in making the judgment that having quality, affordable healthcare for your families and yourselves is paramount to everything else.

My view is that the proposal being considered here in the Senate of cutting hundreds of billions of dollars in funds from the social safety net--the Medicaid Program, which is the lifeline for seniors and kids with special needs and for the disabled--is going to put at risk the health and well-being of millions of Americans if it is passed.

It is why I want to take some time to explain what it actually does so that people all across this country will be in a position to make their voices heard--to speak up, to do their part--so that when this debate comes to the floor of the U.S. Senate, as I believe it will in the next couple of weeks--and it moves very quickly--every Member of this body will have heard, loud and clear, what Americans think of this proposal, and I do not think that that assessment is going to be too kind.

Now, the House passed their version of TrumpCare by a razor's edge, and to put it in a pleasant way, over here, Senators looked at it and said: No way. No thanks. My colleagues in the Senate majority said: We are throwing this bill out, starting fresh, and we are going to do it right. So I am going to start with where that process got lost.

The majority convened a special working group made up of 13 Republican Senators, all of them men, and it turns out, based on comments that have been reported, the Senate bill isn't going to be all that different from what the House was talking about. So Republicans in the Senate are pretty much picking up where the House left off on TrumpCare, and the legislation that is being crafted stays hidden-- stays behind closed doors and in a position where, for example, if you are a Democrat on the Finance Committee, you don't even know what is in it. It is not going before committees. It will not be put forward for amendment in a markup. With barely any public notice, the bill will hit this floor for 28 hours of debate--that is that.

I will just briefly describe a session we had in the Finance Committee this week where there was discussion from the other side of the aisle that maybe there was a big partisan divide with respect to healthcare. I listened a bit. Finally, I said: I don't know how you can have a partisan divide about a bill that you can't read.

I am the senior Democrat on the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee is the committee that has jurisdiction over hundreds of billions of dollars in payments for Medicare and Medicaid and the various tax credits that are part of the Affordable Care Act. This is the committee with the authority to address the management of hundreds of billions of dollars for those programs--Medicare, Medicaid, tax credits--and we see nothing. Not only have there been no hearings, we haven't seen anything. Something has been sent to the Congressional Budget Office. Who knows the answer to that. We haven't seen that either.

So that is the process that would dictate a radical transformation of one-sixth of the American economy--the American healthcare system-- affecting millions and millions of Americans.

That is what we are looking at right now for the next couple of weeks, and it is pretty different than what happened during the Affordable Care Act.

I want to focus on a few points just with respect to that. The first is especially important, as I have said, to the Finance Committee that deals with Medicare and Medicaid and these crucial aspects of healthcare in America. The Senate Finance Committee has been cut out of this process. The chairman, Senator Hatch, I, and 24 other committee members--there has been nothing for us to examine as a group to do what the Finance Committee tries to do best, which is to work in a bipartisan way. That is what we have done so often in the past, which is to sit down and try to take the good ideas that come from both sides, from the staff who knows healthcare inside and out, with years of experience working on healthcare matters.

I have a little bit of a special interest in this because I wrote something called the Healthy Americans Act before the Presiding Officer was here in this body. Eight Democratic Senators and eight Republican Senators joined together in comprehensive healthcare reform for the first time--for the first time ever before.

We have done a lot of good work on issues that represent the big challenges ahead. We know, for example, Medicare today isn't the Medicare of 1965, when it was about broken ankles, Part A or Part B, a bad case of the flu. Today Medicare is about chronic illness--diabetes and heart disease and strokes and cancer. We have worked on that in a bipartisan way. Bipartisanship is what the Finance Committee is all about.

So in the runup to the Affordable Care Act, we held more than 50 hearings, roundtables, walk-through sessions. It wasn't exactly exciting. We always used to say: If you are having trouble sleeping, come by for a while and you will be knocked out in a matter of minutes. But that is where you do the hard work of legislating.

When the Finance Committee finished the drafting process, the legislation sat online for 6 days before we went through the formal committee consideration--what we know up here as a markup. A total of 564 amendments were posted online before the markup began for all to read. The markup lasted 8 days. There were 130 amendments in the longest markup in 22 years. Two dozen Republican amendments were adopted, and the bill passed with a bipartisan vote.

We all got pretty sick of the hearing room by the time it was over. I will just read a quote from Senator Grassley with respect to the Finance Committee markup of the Affordable Care Act. Senator Grassley is the chairman, of course, of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the former committee chairman of the Finance Committee, and a very careful, thoughtful legislator. He said: ``This was the most open and inclusive process the committee has undertaken in its history. . . . ''

He went on to say: `` . . . I believe, since I have been on the committee.''

So that is not a Democrat. That is Senator Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I am sure Senator Murray has similar accounts of the process under the late Senator Kennedy. That legislation was online for days as well.

That is what the legislative process is supposed to look like. It is a process that starts from the bottom up, and it is out in the open. Sunlight has always been the best disinfectant. You get hearings. You get study. You get debate. You marry the best ideas of both sides.

I have always felt that bipartisanship is not about taking each other's lousy ideas; bipartisanship is about taking each other's good ideas, but because of the process the Republican leader is insisting on, that is not what the majority has on offer. What is in the works is hidden away so the public and Americans across this country who might be sitting in a coffee shop and would like to pull up a proposal on their laptop, they can't do it, and there aren't any hearings on what might be going in the bill as well. That, in my view, is the wrong way to build a sweeping, massive proposal like this, which, for so many of those who are walking on an economic tightrope, balancing their food against their fuel and their fuel against their medical care, this isn't some abstract issue for them. It is a matter of life and death.

This proposal is built around an attack on Medicaid. The last version of the bill that anybody has been allowed to see cut the program by more than $800 billion, but there haven't been any hearings on what that would mean for the 74 million Americans who get their healthcare coverage through Medicaid. Nobody has been brought before the Finance Committee to talk about how you would not endanger the Medicaid nursing home benefit with this proposal, and that benefit pays for two out of three nursing home beds in America. There hasn't been a hearing examining the effect of the staggering implications of Medicaid cuts on 37 million kids enrolled in the program, particularly what it means for kids with disabilities and kids in special education classes.

At home in Oregon, when we had town meetings and roundtables on it, I just brought up--just raised the issue very gently--about the prospect of those special needs kids being hurt with this proposal, and the room just broke out in sobs.

There haven't been any hearings on how much worse the opioid epidemic will get in States across the country when people enrolled in Medicaid lose access to treatment for mental health and substance abuse disorders. Just this morning, I talked about a

brandnew idea that seems to be picking up some interest in the majority about basically coming up with kind of a separate way to fund the coverage for opioids. Instead of it being a guarantee of being able to get access to services, it would sort of be a separate program, which also is not in line with sensible healthcare policy. As the Presiding Officer knows, so often those addicted to opioids have multiple conditions. In other words, if you are a young person who is addicted to opioids, you might well need mental health services. If you are an older person who is addicted to opioids, you might need services relating to chronic illness.

So I want everybody in those States across the country--particularly in the Midwest and in the industrial Northeast--although opioid addiction has hit this country like a wrecking ball from Portland, OR, to Portland, ME. There are a lot of people paying attention to what is going to happen with respect to coverage for those addicted to opioids, and based on this proposal I have been reading about that is being floated, this is a prescription for trouble for those trying to come back from opioid addiction.

Then, I want to mention the bill's provisions on preexisting conditions. When the Affordable Care Act was written in committee, the bedrock guarantee of protection against discrimination for those who have preexisting conditions and protecting those who have preexisting conditions with airtight, loophole-free protection--that was at the heart of the Affordable Care Act. My view is TrumpCare takes a jackhammer to that bedrock protection, cracking open loopholes that benefit insurance companies. Americans are aghast that their elected representatives would support the idea. I know that because I have had 46 townhall meetings in my State this year, and I hear about it at nearly every one.

So one would think this would generate a lot of interest in the Senate Finance Committee--the committee with jurisdiction over Medicaid, for example--because there are a lot of those folks who have preexisting conditions. No discussion. Zero discussion--zero--of any proposal that the Senate could be considering over the next couple of weeks that rolls back protections on preexisting conditions.

I gather the House bill just basically takes the waiver process, which in the Affordable Care Act was designed to let States do better; in the House, they let States do worse--considerably worse--and one of the most objectionable features is the States can get a waiver and unravel some of those strong protections for people with preexisting conditions.

Now, if the healthcare changes I have mentioned aren't bad enough, TrumpCare also takes hundreds of billions of dollars of healthcare from needy and vulnerable people and, in effect, hands it in tax breaks to the most fortunate. Nobody has come before the Senate Finance Committee with authority over taxes to explain why the Congress ought to raid healthcare programs for the vulnerable to fund tax cuts for the fortunate few.

Our committee--the chairman and I, along with all the Democrats and several of the Republicans--has been prevented from legislating out in the open on this proposal because the Senate TrumpCare plan has essentially been pushed out of view. It is clear that this isn't just sidestepping the Finance Committee. The public--the American people-- have been cut out of the process when healthcare policy that will affect millions for years to come is being written here.

The majority leader has said he pretty much is not interested in input from Democrats. The Republican healthcare plan is going to move by reconciliation. That is a Washington word, folks--when you are at a coffee shop, nobody is talking about reconciliation, but it is basically our way or the highway. We are going to do it our way, and that is that. It is the most partisan road you can go down in the Senate. It relies on moving as quickly as possible with the least possible sunlight.

As far as I can tell, the Senate bill is going to be hidden until virtually the last minute, at which point it will come straight to the floor for a very short, abbreviated debate.

That is not what happened when the Affordable Care Act came up. The Senate spent 25 consecutive days in session on healthcare reform, the second longest consecutive session in history--week after week, spirited debate, mid-November into late December, vote after vote after vote. In total, the Senate debated the Affordable Care Act for nearly 220 hours. That kind of extended give-and-take from both political parties you just can't have under this partisan ``our way or the highway'' approach known as reconciliation.

When the Senate plan hits the floor, there will be 20 hours of debate before time expires and the final votes are cast. That is it. That is it. We won't have seen a bill until the last minute, and then one-sixth of our economy is going to be handled and framed for decades to come in a short and regrettably partisan debate.

I have said from day one that the Affordable Care Act is not perfect. No major piece of legislation ever is. For major legislation to work and for it to last, it has to be bipartisan. That is why I mentioned that I put in a bipartisan bill--eight Democrats and eight Republicans. But you don't get it exactly your way. So I was very glad when the Affordable Care Act took that portion of our bill--the portion of the bill that had airtight, guaranteed protection for Americans from discrimination when they had preexisting conditions.

The reason we felt it was so important--the 16 of us, eight Democrats and eight Republicans--is that if we open up the opportunity for discriminating against people with preexisting conditions again, we take America back to the days when healthcare was for the healthy and the wealthy. That is what happens if you allow that discrimination. If you are healthy, there is no problem. If you are wealthy, there is no problem, either. You can just write out the checks if you have preexisting conditions.

The process the Senate is headed down now is as partisan as it gets. Unfortunately, what Senate Republicans are doing now makes what the House was up to almost transparent.

I am going to close here with just one last comment. Now is the time for the American people to get loud about healthcare--really loud-- because the well-being and health of millions of Americans is at stake here in the Senate over the next 2 weeks. For older people who could need nursing home care, for seniors who aren't yet eligible for Medicare who are between 55 and 65 and who could face huge premium hikes, for the millions who work for employers who thought they were safe, the House bill removes the caps on the out-of-pocket expenses they have. If somebody gets cancer in America, they bust those caps in a hurry. Yet that is what the House is willing to do, and I don't see any evidence the Senate is willing to change.

This debate didn't end when the theatrical production on the South Lawn of the White House took place a few weeks after the vote in the House of Representatives. My hope is--and I sure heard about it from Oregonians last week when we had townhall meetings across the State; there is concern, there is fear, and there is frustration about why they can't be told what is in this bill--that there is still time for Americans to make a difference because political change doesn't start from the top and go down. It is bottom up. It is not top down. It is bottom up. There is still time for the American people to be heard and to make sure their Senator understands how they feel about this, what is at stake, and, in particular, to get an explanation about why they can't be told now what is in this bill.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I have some remarks to make with respect to healthcare that I will offer in a moment.

First, I want to address the events of this morning. The shooting that took place in Alexandria today was a horrendous, despicable act of violence. The victims--including Congressman Scalise, two Capitol police officers, and two others--are still undergoing treatment. There is much that is still not known about what happened.

There are a few things that are known. First, it is thanks to the extraordinary heroics of the Capitol Police and first responders on the scene that this shooting did not become a massacre. Each and every one of us who comes to work in these buildings every day is profoundly grateful for our Capitol Police, our first responders, and the incredible service and protection they provide.

Second, I think all of us know that this violence has visited too many of our communities. It has cost and ruined too many lives.

Finally, we know that the game our colleagues were practicing for--a charity game between rival parties that is held to benefit disadvantaged kids--is going to go on as planned. The game is

a show of friendship. It is a show of bipartisanship. It is an indication that, as there are strong differences of opinion on the policies that we debate on the floor of the Senate, we still come together at urgent times like this. The game, which shows our commitment to friendship and bipartisanship, has never been needed more than it will be tomorrow.

Our thoughts are now with those who are injured. It seems that everyone you run into at the Capitol has said they are praying and they are rooting for a full and speedy recovery. It is one of those moments when people understand that there is legislation here--their bills, their amendments. Sometimes there is a lot of process--an amendment to the amendment to the amendment, as my wife calls it. Then there are other times like this morning, which are life and death.

As we reflect on those who did so much to keep it from being even worse--a massacre--we have our prayers for those who are injured. Once again, it puts into perspective what is so very important.

Healthcare Legislation

Mr. President, to the topic at hand, there have, obviously, been dramatic headlines in the news pertaining to ties of the President with Russia. I want to be sure that what is happening here in the Senate with respect to healthcare doesn't get drowned out.

The fact is that here in the Senate, behind closed doors, 13 Senators--all from the same party, all of them men--are updating the Republican healthcare plan. The House passed its TrumpCare bill by the slimmest of margins just a few weeks ago.

The public has seen it, and, based on everything I can tell, it has gone over about as well as a prolonged root canal surgery. I have heard about every imaginable concern about that House bill from Oregonians. I have had 46 townhall meetings thus far this year, including 4 over this past weekend.

When the bill came to the Senate, my colleagues on the other side got out in the press, tamped down expectations, and claimed that everything would be starting over. They are starting from scratch. Now the public knows, because it is what Members of the majority party have said, that the Senate version isn't going to be all that different from what barely made it from the House this spring.

When the bill is finalized, we know it is going to be rushed to the floor, and it will not be long before debate is cut off and final votes are cast. It is a plan that relies on speed, forcing a devastating blow to American healthcare through the Senate before our citizens can actually catch on to what is happening.

This political process on this bill makes what the House has been up to look positively transparent. The basic framework of the Republican healthcare plan isn't going to change. Millions and millions of Americans will lose their health coverage. It is not my view. It is the view of the independent Congressional Budget Office. Costs are going to go up, especially for those who are elderly and sicker, and those who are the fortunate few are going to get an enormous tax break.

The basic framework isn't changing, and what that means is that the social safety net--led by Medicaid, which is a lifeline for kids and seniors and the disabled--is going to be under attack. The public health system in America has stood on two twin pillars since 1965. Those pillars are Medicare and Medicaid. The Republican majority has a plan to knock one of them out beginning this year.

Today, Medicaid comes with a guarantee that if you are sick, if you are injured or if you spend every day walking an economic tightrope, you are going to be able to get care when you need it. You will not be denied benefits. But TrumpCare ends that guarantee.

The plan Republicans have on offer would dismantle Medicaid as it is known today, putting hard dollar limits on the program. That puts caps on care. That is what it means--that there will be caps on care. It is a scheme that puts Medicaid in a vise, squeezing its funding year after year fix. The plan makes budget targets a bigger priority than real- world healthcare needs for some of the most vulnerable people in our country.

Seventy-four million Americans have health coverage through Medicaid. That includes 37 million children. It provides comprehensive care to millions of pregnant women. It is a leader in the fight against the opioid epidemic, and there is treatment for those who are dealing with mental health and substance abuse disorders.

Medicaid is a lifeline when it comes to helping kids and adults with disabilities. Then there is the nursing home benefit, something I know from my years as codirector of the Oregon Gray Panthers. This is a benefit that is a bedrock protection, built into Medicaid to help pick up the tab for two out of three nursing home beds in America. If you roll that benefit back, I don't see how seniors across this country are going to avoid living in squalor. Maybe their kids can take them in, but the kids of the parents I am talking about have told me they are working on an economic tightrope, trying to balance food against the fuel cost, the fuel cost against the rent cost.

So my guess is, if you squeeze the Medicaid Program tighter and tighter and States are forced to cut benefits and access to care, as will be inevitable under TrumpCare, I just don't see where you can ensure that seniors in nursing homes are going to be protected.

My own view--and this goes back to the days when I worked with seniors--the challenges with older people have evolved over the years. Back then, you had Part A. That was hospitals. Part B was doctors. That is not Medicare any more. Today, more than 90 percent of the spending deals with chronic illness--cancer, diabetes, heart disease, strokes. It is a very different program, but we are still going to need nursing home care for so many of our older people who have done everything right in life. They are our mothers, our fathers, our grandparents, our friends. They fought our wars. They started families. They built careers. They raised kids. They scrimped. They saved. They never went on that special vacation. They never bought the boat they would have loved to have, and they did it because they always wanted to pay for essentials and see if maybe they could set aside what they could for schooling for their kids and retirement for themselves.

But, as I have said, what I have seen over the years since those Gray Panther days is that growing old in America just keeps getting more expensive for so many older people. The bills don't stop coming when you retire. And most older people still live on a limited, fixed income. I saw that with my full-time work at the legal aid office for older people and the Gray Panthers, and I saw those seniors having to stretch every last penny, and even then, it was a struggle to cover the basics. So what happens--and I am afraid we are going to see a lot more of it--is seniors eventually spend down their savings. When they face challenges, they spend down their funds.

Today, when it comes time to pay for long-term care like nursing homes and home-based care, Medicaid steps up. It is the backstop, a guaranteed backstop to protect our senior citizens. I don't want to undersell how much that means to people in my State and across the land. Medicaid is the barrier that keeps millions of seniors from falling into isolation and utter destitution.

There was a time in our country when seniors were cast aside. They were sent to poor farms, what were called almshouses. The wealthiest Nation on Earth said goodbye to those poor farms with the creation of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Under the Republican healthcare plan, unfortunately, Medicaid would be slashed so deeply, States are going to be forced into cutting benefits. Seniors could be nickel-and-dimed for basic everyday services. Nursing homes could be shuttered. Home-based care that allows seniors to live independently could be no more. I think you are going to have lots of seniors living in squalor, and some could be out on the street.

So in my view, the people of our country are owed answers to key questions about this Republican plan.

First, how are families supposed to support their loved ones if they lose the guarantee of Medicaid?

One year in a nursing home costs more than $90,000 on average. That is two or three times the cost of a year of college tuition. Are families going to be forced into choosing between educating their kids and supporting their

elderly parents? Is it going to be a fact of life for working Americans that they have to cram two or three or four generations of one family into the same house simply because they can't afford nursing home care?

Second, what is the backup plan for vulnerable, isolated seniors, particularly those who live in rural areas?

I recently held a series of eight healthcare roundtables in rural communities across Oregon just over the last few days, in Pendleton and Condon. The message I heard from healthcare providers again this past weekend throughout rural Oregon was that TrumpCare cuts could hit seniors in rural America especially hard.

Seniors in rural communities have higher rates of chronic illness, like heart disease and diabetes. The healthcare they need requires more attention and more services. They count on getting top-notch care in nursing homes and from home-based providers. Losing these benefits could mean being alone in a home that is unsafe, cut off from the care and the connections they need.

Colleagues, in the last few weeks of this debate, I heard Members flatly deny that gutting Medicaid by more than $800 billion will mean anybody loses access to healthcare services. That is just untrue. Anybody who says that they can slash our healthcare programs by close to $1 trillion without having a negative impact on access to healthcare services is just plain wrong.

Furthermore, I think it is time to recognize what the end goal of this debate appears to be. My Republican colleagues haven't put forward a proposal to protect seniors who can't get the Medicaid nursing home care they need or kids with disabilities who lose the services they depend on. What Republicans have on offer is not a plan that swaps one vision of healthcare for another.

These massive cuts to Medicaid and other health programs are going to pay for equally massive tax breaks for the fortunate few. Members of this body are going to have to decide whether it is worth gutting Medicaid and endangering essential care, like nursing home care and important home-based services, to pay for these big tax breaks for the fortunate. In my view, it should be an easy choice.

My colleagues on the other side ought to drop this partisan approach--what is called reconciliation--that it seems the Senate is headed toward. At a minimum, the majority party ought to bring this process out from behind closed doors and give it a little bit of sunlight. There ought to be hearings convened in the Finance Committee and the other committees of jurisdiction, as there were again and again in 2008 and 2009.

When you are talking about one-sixth of the American economy and what is the premier issue and always will be, which is people and their loved ones having their health, I don't see how you make an argument for not having a debate out in the open. There has to be a public debate. The legislation ought to be written in the light of day, and then our people ought to have ample time to review it before it goes up for a single vote, either in committee or here on the floor.

I am going to close with something that I think about especially today--the big challenges of our time. You have to deal with them in a bipartisan fashion in order to, one, get them right, and two, make them sustainable. The Presiding Officer of the Senate knows this. He and I spent many months working on key economic issues and recently put together a bipartisan bill on infrastructure. Healthcare is particularly important because when you are talking about providing care for over 300 million Americans, you have to really think through what the consequences are. Often, when you take a step over here, it ripples over there. That is why it seems to me that it is so important that the Republican majority set aside this partisan ``our way or the highway'' approach and get back to working together to find common ground.

I had a piece of legislation when we were debating healthcare in 2008 and 2009--eight Democratic Senators and eight Republican Senators. That was the first time in the history of this body that we had that. There are Republicans and Democrats who continue to serve in this body who are cosponsors of that legislation. It is called the Healthy Americans Act.

We got some of what we thought was important into the Affordable Care Act--in particular, a provision that I think the American people really want to think about in the days ahead, and that is, in our bill with the 16 Senators, we had airtight, loophole-free protection for those with preexisting conditions. There wasn't any way to hit them with extra costs or discriminate against them because they had a preexisting condition. We said that we wouldn't stand for that because if you allow discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, you take America back to the days when healthcare was for the healthy and wealthy. If you are healthy, you don't have a preexisting condition, and if you are wealthy, you can pay for care. We can't go back there. But the House bill basically allows States to get waivers so they can start unraveling that and punch big holes into that guarantee of airtight protection for those with preexisting conditions.

If the majority will set aside this partisan-only, ``we are doing it our way'' kind of approach, what you heard from colleagues on my side is that there is very significant interest in working together to deal with the key challenges. One of them, obviously, is more competition in the insurance markets, particularly as it relates to individual insurance. You do that, and you will take the insurers off this roller coaster so they have some certainty and predictability. You can stabilize the private insurance market.

We ought to work together on bringing down prescription drug prices. Our people tell us every time we are home that these prescription drug price increases are hitting them like a wrecking ball. I have introduced approaches that I think can get bipartisan support, and there are others who have as well. But that is how to do it right. That is how you find common ground: You take time to take each other's good ideas.

Bipartisanship isn't about taking each other's lousy ideas. Bipartisanship is about taking each other's good ideas, and there are good ideas on both sides of the aisle to stabilize the private insurance market, to hold down prescription drug prices. But this idea of reconciliation, where we are all just going to do it our way--that is the Republican approach, the partisan approach, and featured in that approach are devastating cuts to Medicaid. That is a nonstarter.

So I come to the floor this afternoon, particularly given years of interest in trying to find bipartisan common ground on healthcare, to urge my colleagues to abandon this approach that is being pursued behind closed doors, that nobody knows anything about, and that really seems unprecedented in terms of dealing with one-sixth of the economy. I urge my colleagues to abandon the partisan approach of reconciliation and work with colleagues on this side on a bipartisan basis.

I will close simply by way of saying that I wanted to come to the floor today, and I will try to be back tomorrow to outline other challenges ahead in healthcare. I urge the American people across this country, in every corner of our Nation, to make their voices heard.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to bring two baskets of hemp products onto the floor of this body.

Mr. President, this is National Hemp History Week, a chance to recognize a product that has deep roots going way back in America but faces some of the most anti-farmer, anti-job, unjustifiable policies that are on the American legal books today. Because of its relation to marijuana, hemp can't legally be grown in American fields.

Now, hemp is harmless. Hemp grown for industrial use simply does not have marijuana psychoactive properties. You are going to get as high off hemp as you will off a bag of vegetables. But, still, farmers in Oregon and across the country can't legally grow it. So if America is serious about banning harmless products like hemp, just because they are related to drugs, then I have bad news for fans of poppy seed muffins.

This is the third year I have come to the floor during this time-- National Hemp History Week--to talk about the importance of industrial hemp, its huge economic potential for hard-working farmers, and the indefensible ban that keeps so many American farmers from growing it. As was the case before, I am joined by Malcolm McGeary from Southern Oregon, where a lot of farmers have an interest in this, to showcase a variety of hemp products in these baskets on the floor because, despite the ban on growing hemp, you can legally import it for use in products sold in stores across the country.

What really changed my mind on this was when my wife was pregnant--we are older parents--with our third child, and we went into a Costco store. We went into a Costco store on a weekend at home in Oregon, and there were these big bags of hemp hearts, and it said: healthy, good for the blood pressure, fiber--everything that one would expect in Pennsylvania or Oregon. I know the Presiding Officer is one of the most physically fit members of the body. I see him in the gym all the time so he obviously cares a lot about nutrition. So Nancy and I were walking through Costco, and it said this giant bag of hemp hearts could be purchased there. You say to yourself: Let me see if I get this straight. The hemp comes from Canada, so the farmers must just be laughing all the way to the bank because they are making money. I get what we do is we put it in bags, and it is sold in Costco. That led me to the really intellectual concept of saying that if you can sell it at a Costco in Oregon, why can't our farmers grow it? It is not much more complicated than that.

When you are shopping for hemp products, it is not just potato sacks and rough fabric by the yard. There is clothing, lotions and food, hemp milk, nutritional supplements--all these products Mr. McGeary has--used to make soaps, cleaners, and even deck stain. I understand Mr. McGeary may even be wearing a hemp tie. None of these products can be called 100 percent American because every bit of the hemp in these baskets had to be grown someplace else, which is essentially what I described as the Wydens toured Costco at home.

When it was imported, it wasn't an American farmer earning money off that sale. Despite the consumer demand for hemp products and the ingenuity of so many producers who find uses for it, American farmers are cut out of the hemp equation.

The ban on hemp is not anti-drug policy. I think that is what has been confusing with respect to this issue. The ban on hemp is not going to advance the cause of being against drugs. It is not anti-drug policy. It is anti-farmer policy, and it is anti-American jobs policy.

As I indicated, if you can buy it in a local supermarket, the American farmer ought to be able to grow it. Yet year after year, despite a lot of work from Members on both sides of the aisle in this body and in the House, hemp remains on the controlled substance list.

Hemp is not a drug. It is a big opportunity for our farmers. So it is long past time to end these statutory relics of history that cut American farmers out of a valuable market.

Despite the fact that hemp continues to be stigmatized by Federal laws, there is some good news and progress. The 2014 farm bill began to chip away at the Federal ban. It OK'd hemp research projects led by universities and agriculture departments in States like Oregon and Kentucky that take a smarter approach to hemp. These projects are showing significant success. Farmers are ready to grow hemp, and States' agriculture departments are ready to regulate.

The first steps, in my view, don't go far enough, and even some of these early projects remain tied up in redtape due to the Federal ban.

In my view, the only real solution is a legislative solution. So here we have a bipartisan coalition, the kind of coalition you see in the U.S. Senate when people really look into the facts and Members decide to make common cause. We have the good fortune of having the majority leader, Senator McConnell of Kentucky, as one of our principal sponsors; Senator Paul, his colleague; Senator Merkley; and I reintroducing the Hemp Farming Act. We pursued this for a number of years. I introduced it every Congress since 2011.

Last year, our bipartisan bill had more than a dozen Senate cosponsors. This year, the goal is to again find common ground to remove hemp from the schedule I controlled substance list, give the go- ahead to farmers across the country who are ready to grow industrial hemp, and, once again, make it a true American crop.

I hope my colleagues will join in the effort to celebrate National Hemp History Week. I hope they will use it to learn more about a very versatile crop, a safe crop, and one with really extraordinary potential to boost jobs in the economy, in our agricultural sector, and our domestic employment base.

This is commonsense legislation. Again, we have the good fortune to be led by the majority leader, the distinguished Senator from Kentucky, Mr. McConnell. We will be introducing this commonsense legislation very shortly.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, Senator Merkley and I have come today together to discuss our resolution honoring the heroes of the Portland attack. On May 26 in Portland, our hometown, our community lost two very brave people: Ricky Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche. They stood up courageously against terrorism and for core American and Oregon values of tolerance and freedom.

Along with Micah David-Cole Fletcher, who was seriously injured, these three extraordinary Samaritans stepped in to protect two girls who were being terrorized on public transit by a man menacing them because he thought they were Muslim. These three Oregon heroes did not run when they saw danger. Instead, these three advanced toward the danger.

I paid my respects last week at the beautiful memorial that my fellow Portlanders created at the transit station where this attack occurred. I can assure my colleagues that the message of the memorial could not be more clear: The heroes of Portland stood up to terror, and we ought to be willing to call out the hate and the evil they confronted.

So today, I join with our friend and colleague Senator Merkley to express

our deepest condolences to the families, the friends of the victims, so that we can all make clear how much we appreciate them and how grateful we are--and we all are--to be able to stand with the two girls who were being terrorized and to support all community efforts to overcome hatred and bigotry and violence.

As a son of parents who fled the Nazis, I know full well what hate speech is all about. There must be zero tolerance for hate speech and violence because otherwise you give it room to fester and grow. Hate speech and violence must have no place in Oregon or anywhere else in our great Nation.

With these three Oregon heroes forever in our memories, we must and we will recommit to fighting hate, violence, and terrorism every chance that we have. We urge adoption of this important resolution.

I yield to my friend and colleague Senator Merkley.

Mr. President, we yield back the remainder of our time.

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

Mr. President, today the Senate will vote on the nomination of Courtney Elwood to be CIA general counsel. This is an important job that got even more important in the past week. As I will explain, this position may play a crucial role in determining whether history is erased or preserved for generations of Americans to come.

As Senators know, last week the current chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded that several key government agencies get rid of their copies of the torture report prepared by Senator Feinstein and her colleagues. I am going to take a few minutes to describe what this has to do with Courtney Elwood.

In short, it starts with the CIA's history of torture, which was carefully documented and sourced by the Intelligence Committee under Senator Feinstein's leadership. This is the issue that is being debated--the CIA's history of torture. That is why it is critically important that the CIA get back its copy of the report. If Courtney Elwood is confirmed, the decision on whether to do so may be up to her. Here is why: The CIA Director, Mr. Pompeo, who said at his confirmation hearing that he would read the report, has gotten rid of the CIA's copy. He did so despite the fact that the current chair of the Intelligence Committee had no authority to demand that of him. Mr. Pompeo got rid of the report despite a personal promise to read it, and he did this even though it may have violated the law. It certainly violated a fundamental principle important to the American people that in this country, we don't erase history.

Now, this can be fixed. The CIA can get the report back. It can do what Senator Feinstein told the government to do back in 2014, which is to distribute this report, read it, and learn from it. Will Director Pompeo get the report back on his own? There is no reason to think so. But if there is one thing Director Pompeo said again and again in his remarks during the confirmation process, it is that he told the Senate Intelligence Committee repeatedly that he is going to rely on the advice of his lawyers.

That is exactly where Courtney Elwood comes in. What will her advice be to Director Pompeo? What will she advise him about whether to allow this attempt to erase history to stand or whether it is going to get fixed and the report is going to be brought back? The Senate doesn't have any idea this morning. We do know that Ms. Elwood's responses to questions on the torture issue were troubling and that we need to look at those responses in a whole new light based on what happened last week.

Ms. Elwood said that she read the unclassified executive summary of the torture report, but based on her responses to questions, the 500- page executive summary was not adequate for her. It was not sufficient for her to conclude whether the CIA's interrogation techniques violated the law. Clearly, she needed to read the classified report. Ms. Elwood, in both her written answers and at her hearing, said that she would read the classified report. But now, because of what the current chair of the Intelligence Committee and the Director of the CIA have done, it is not going to be available. It is not going to be available for her to read.

Many Members of this body have spoken out about the torture report and the need for its lessons to be learned so this country never again engages in the kind of illegal, damaging program that Senator Feinstein has documented. But now there is an issue that goes beyond what the Senate has thought this was all about. Now there is an individual nominee for whom these lessons are critical. This nominee told our committee that she had not yet studied whether the CIA's torture techniques were legal. She told us she would read the report, and now the report is gone. What could be more troubling than that?

What is at issue here is one of the most disturbing and undemocratic events ever to take place in the U.S. Senate. The current chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee has told the executive branch to get rid of its copies of the report, and at least some of the agencies have sent their only copies to the committee. I am going to be clear: The current chair does not have the authority to do this.

First, in December of 2014, the full, final, classified report was filed as a Senate report. It is therefore not a committee document. Second, no one can retroactively change the status of a historical Senate report. The report was finalized, filed, and transmitted to the executive branch during the 113th Congress. Only in the 114th Congress did the current chair assume the chairmanship and begin to assert control over the report.

Think about the implications here. How can this body allow Members of Congress who don't like what a previous Congress has done to unilaterally try to erase history? How many other congressional reports would be at risk? There are other reports that have not yet been fully declassified. Should the Senate worry about whether or not they will be protected? Should Americans be concerned that the country's historical records are going to be erased before the public ever sees them?

My view is that this effort by the current chair of the committee is an

assault on one of the fundamental values of our democracy. In this country, we don't eradicate the historical record just because we find it uncomfortable. There is a reason insecure dictators do it, and there is a reason this kind of thing has never happened here. It is because we are a confident democracy that has always looked to our own history and all our flaws as we seek to build a better Nation.

We are better than this. I urge my colleagues to defend these principles. I urge them to vote against this nomination.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I want to acknowledge an exciting moment in Oregon's history: the grand opening of the new Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in Portland. The 15,000-square-foot museum now has a permanent place in our State where anyone can come to learn and experience Jewish culture and history.

Jews have lived in Oregon for more than 165 years. Many immigrated here to escape the horrors of the Holocaust; others came with the hope of finding a new life in a new land. I am the son of immigrants who fled Nazi Germany, so this history is especially personal. As a proud American Jew, I know that for each dark chapter in our history, there is a story of perseverance, of hope, of triumph. The rich traditions and culture within the Jewish community must be preserved and taught for generations to come. That is why I am so proud of the work done by the community in Oregon and by the Portland museum staff and board to bring this museum to an even grander scale.

The museum has come a long way from its initial beginnings when it was known as the museum without walls. From the first exhibition, ``Jews of Greece,'' at the Multnomah County Central Library in 1990, interest grew-and so has the museum's footprint. Now, with this new state-of-the-art facility, the museum will continue to educate and open the minds of many about the experiences of Oregon's vibrant Jewish community. In fact, it continues to be the only community repository for displaying that experience in my home State.

It is my distinct honor to recognize the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. It brings incredible exhibitions to our State, provides a full-time Holocaust educator to help those who want to learn more about this tragic piece of history, and remains the steward of the Oregon Holocaust Memorial in Portland's Washington Park. I am greatly appreciative for all this museum does and will do for Oregon.

Mr. President, I would like to take a few minutes today and share with my colleagues an extraordinary piece of our country's World War II and civil rights history: the story of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion--or the Triple Nickles, as they would come to be called.

The 555th was officially activated in December 1943 at Fort Benning, GA, and began as a company of Black officers and enlisted men. Seventeen soldiers graduated Army jump school the following February, earning a coveted Parachutist Badge--their ``wings.'' The Army transferred the unit after several months to Camp Mackall, NC, and, in November 1944, redesignated it Company A of the newly activated 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion.

Although the 555th did not serve overseas during World War II, it performed an important role in defending the American homeland. In 1944 and 1945, the Japanese launched roughly 9,000 ``balloon bombs,'' explosives attached to paper balloons that rode the jetstream current across the Pacific Ocean and over the contiguous United States.

One of these balloon bombs exploded in Oregon, killing a pregnant woman and five children in what historians regard as the only American World War II combat causalities to occur in the contiguous United States.

The members of the 555th boarded a train westward to Oregon on a secret mission to help defend Americans living in the Pacific Northwest and the natural timber resources deemed vital to the war effort.

The incident in Oregon was one of more than 275 documented balloon bomb related incidents as far east as Detroit, MI, south into Texas, and north into Canada and Alaska.

Japanese balloon bombs, of course, had the potential not only to wound or kill but also to set forests ablaze in the western United States. Putting those fires out and dealing with their aftermath could divert the Nation's focus on the war effort and dampen American morale.

The Triple Nickles arrived in Oregon in 1945 and were sent out to Pendleton Air Field, then still an active military base. They were assigned to work with

the U.S. Forest Service and received specialized training as smokejumpers and on the handling of unexploded balloon bombs.

As part of Operation Firefly, the 555th made some 1,200 jumps and fought more than 35 fires in Oregon, Washington, and other western States between July and October 1945.

Smokejumping is no easy feat; it is dirty, sweaty, and dangerous work, but because of the 555th's dedication and professionalism, the unit only ever sustained one fatality: Malvin Brown tragically fell to his death in the Umpqua National Forest about 45 miles northwest of Crater Lake. His death is regarded as the first smokejumper death in U.S. history.

Make no mistake about it, Malvin Brown and the other soldiers of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion are heroes. They were the first Black paratroopers ever to serve in the U.S. Military, which they did with honor and distinction. They are also the only military unit in history to work as smokejumpers.

The soldiers of the 555th faced painful discrimination and blatant racism on a daily basis. They were barred from the store on base while at Fort Benning, GA, even though German and Italian prisoners were allow to enter. Even after the Triple Nickles arrived in Oregon, they found most restaurants and bars would not serve them.

The Army sent the 555th to Fort Bragg, NC, following the Japanese surrender and, in December 1947, integrated the unit into the famed 82nd Airborne Division--making the 82nd the Army's first racially integrated division.

On June 3, 2017, the State of Oregon will commemorate the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion's remarkable history and important contributions to the country with the installation of an Oregon State historic marker at the Smokejumper Museum in Cave Junction.

It is my true honor to share their story today with my colleagues and to express my profound gratitude to all the Triple Nickles for their service.

Mr. President, today I wish to pay tribute to Judge Michael H. Bennett. Judge Bennett will be retiring in May 2017 after serving 28 years as an immigration judge.

Former Oregon Governor Tom McCall once said, ``Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say, `This is my community, and it is my responsibility to make it better.''' Judge Bennett truly is a hero, for he has devoted much of his life to making the United States and his community better.

Judge Michael Bennett began his career as a general attorney for the

legacy Immigration and Naturalization Service in El Centro, CA. He also worked as an Assistant Attorney General and Assistant Public Defender for the Government of American Samoa. Judge Bennett was appointed as an immigration judge in El Centro, CA, in 1989.

In Oregon, we were fortunate to have Judge Bennett assigned to our immigration court in 1998. During his tenure, Judge Bennett has served as an impartial adjudicator who is known for his fair and compassionate decisions. He has gained the respect of his colleagues, fellow attorneys, and the public for his intricate knowledge of immigration law. Further, Judge Bennett has created a positive work environment in the Portland immigration court that is commendable and should be recognized.

Judge Bennett comes from a long line of public servants, including his grandparents and parents. His grandfather served in the U.S. Navy and fought in WWII. Judge Bennett's father also served in the U.S. Navy and eventually earned his Ph.D. and became a teacher. Judge Bennett and his wife, Sivai, have continued to dedicate themselves to making Oregon a better place through their public service.

It is an honor to recognize Judge Michael H. Bennett for his service to the United States, to Oregon, and to his community.

Madam President, the Senate will shortly consider the nomination of Courtney Elwood to be the CIA's General Counsel. I wanted to take a few minutes this morning to discuss the nomination and put it in the context of the extraordinary national security challenges our country faces.

It is hard to imagine a more despicable act than the terrorist attack in Manchester Monday night, killing innocent teenagers and children who were out to enjoy a concert. The suffering that Americans and all in the Senate have been reading about and watching on television is heartbreaking by any standards. I think it is fair to say that, as Americans, we stand in strong solidarity with our British friends, our allies, as they confront this horror. Our country will, as we have for so many years, stand shoulder to shoulder with them as there is an effort to collect more information about this attack, about what actually happened, and work to prevent future attacks.

Not everything is known about the attack, but one thing Americans do know is that it can happen here. That is why, as I begin this discussion on this important nomination and the challenges in front of our country, I would like to start, as I invariably do when we talk about intelligence matters, by recognizing the extraordinary men and women who work in the intelligence community, who work tirelessly across the government to keep our people safe from terrorist attacks. So much of what they do is in secret, and that is appropriate. It is so important to keep secret what is called the sources and methods that our intelligence community personnel are using. It is important to the American people and it is important to our country to make sure that the people protecting them every day can do their jobs.

The reason I took this time this morning to talk about this nomination is to talk about the broader context of what we owe the American people, and I feel very strongly that we owe the American people security and liberty. The two are not mutually exclusive, and it is possible to protect the people of our country with smart policies that protect both their security and their liberty.

Smart policies ensure that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. For example, I would cite as a smart policy something I was proud to have been involved in. Section 102 of the USA FREEDOM Act sought to make sure that we weren't just indiscriminately collecting millions of phone records on law-abiding people. A provision, section 102, says that when our government believes there is an emergency where the safety and security and well-being of the American people is at stake, our government can move immediately to deal with the problem and then come back later and settle up with respect to getting a warrant. That was something that, I thought, really solidified what was a smart policy.

Our Founding Fathers had a Fourth Amendment for a reason--to protect the liberties of our people. What we said is that we are going to be sensitive to those liberties, but at the same time, we are going to be sensitive to

the security and well-being of the American people at a dangerous time. We are going to say that, if the government believes there is an emergency, the government can go get that information immediately and come back later and settle up with the warrant process.

Issues ensuring that we have security and liberty are especially important today. We obviously face terrorism. We are challenged by Russia and North Korea, and the list can go on and on. The fact is, there are a host of these challenges, and it seems to me that if we look at the history of how to deal with a climate like this, too often there is almost a kind of easy, practically knee-jerk approach that is billed as dealing with a great security challenge that very often gives our people less security and less liberty. At a time when people want both, they end up getting less. That is what happens so often in crises, and far too often it happens in large part because senior lawyers operating in secret give the intelligence community the green light to conduct operations that are not in the country's interest.

I am going to walk through how misguided and dangerous decisions can be made and how much depends on how the lawyers interpret current law. In past debates people have said: You know, that happened years ago, many years ago, and various steps were taken to correct it. Today, I am going to talk about how misguided and dangerous decisions can be made today.

At the center of this question is the nominee to be the CIA general counsel and what I consider to be very troubling statements that have been made on a number of the key issues that involve decisions that will be made now. In outlining those, I want to explain why it is my intention to vote against the confirmation of Courtney Elwood to be the CIA's general counsel.

The key principle to begin with is that there is a clear distinction between keeping secrets of sources and methods used by the intelligence community, which is essential, and the creation of secret law, which is not. We in the Senate have a responsibility to make sure the public is not kept in the dark about the laws and rules that govern what the intelligence community can and cannot do.

I believe the American people understand that their government cannot always disclose who it is spying on, but they are fed up with having to read in the papers about the government secretly making up the rules. They were fed up when they learned about the illegal, warrantless wiretapping program. They were fed up when they learned about the bulk collection of phone records of millions of law-abiding Americans.

What our people want to know is that the rules are going to be, No. 1, clear to everybody and, No. 2, that the government is operating within those rules. That is why the nominations for the intelligence community are so important. The American people need to know how these men and women understand the laws that authorize what they can and cannot do in secret.

Shortly, the Senate will consider the nominee to be the CIA's general counsel. I believe there are few more important positions in government than this one, when it comes to interpreting key laws. The advice the general counsel provides to the Central Intelligence Agency will be shielded from the American people and possibly from Congress as well. There is almost never accountability before the public, the press, watchdog groups, or other public institutions that help preserve our democracy. There are almost never debates on the floor of the Senate about the legality of the CIA's operations. It is all in secret.

The advice of this general counsel will carry especially important heft, given what CIA Director Mike Pompeo said during his confirmation. Again and again during those confirmation hearings, when asked what boundaries Director Pompeo would draw around the government's surveillance authorities, the Director responded that he was bound by the law. In effect, the Director said to the Senate and this body that he would defer to the lawyers. So if Congress and the American people were to have any clue as to what the Central Intelligence Agency might do under Director Pompeo, we were going to have to ask the nominee to be general counsel. That is why it is critical that she answer questions about her views of the law and that she answer them now before a confirmation vote.

I asked those questions, and what I heard in return was either a troubling response or some combination of ``I don't know,'' and ``I will figure it out after I am confirmed.''

Now, without answers, we are left largely to judge Ms. Elwood by her record. So I am going to start by looking back at her previous service and what she says about it now.

With respect to the National Security Agency's illegal warrantless wiretapping, that became public at the end of 2005 when Ms. Elwood was at the Department of Justice. She reviewed public statements about the program and held discussions about those public statements with individuals inside and outside the administration. That includes discussions with the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel about the Department's legal analysis justifying the warrantless wiretapping program. She was especially involved when the Attorney General made public statements about the program. So the committee asked her about some of that Justice Department public analysis, and, in particular, the Department of Justice January 2006 white paper that was thought to justify the warrantless wiretapping program. Ms. Elwood responded that she thought at the time that the Department of Justice's analysis was ``thorough and carefully reasoned and that certain points were compelling.''

This was an illegal program. It violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. No interpretation of the law that defended that warrantless wiretapping program is carefully reasoned or compelling. It was an illegal program.

Ms. Elwood also said that some of the analysis ``presented a difficult question'' and that ``reasonable minds could reach different conclusions.'' Of course, the point is not what ``reasonable minds'' might conclude. The point for us in the Senate is what her mind would conclude. Remember, this is the Department of Justice's conclusion that the laws governing wiretapping of Americans inside the United States could be disregarded because the President says so or because the Department of Justice secretly reinterprets the law in a way that no American could recognize. Remember, too, that we are talking about a program that may have begun shortly after 9/11, but it was still going on secretly and without congressional oversight more than 4 years later when it was revealed in the press. That was the context in which the Department of Justice--at the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006, when Ms. Elwood was at the Department--determined that the warrantless wiretapping program was perfectly legal and constitutional.

This is--to say, in my view--at the least, dangerous, and it could happen again.

I wanted to give Ms. Elwood every opportunity to reconsider and distance herself from these assertions I described. So I asked very specific questions. First, did the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement apply? No, she responded. She endorsed the view that the warrantless wiretapping of Americans on American soil did not require warrants under the Fourth Amendment. That was not very encouraging.

What about the other arguments made to try to justify this illegal program?

The first was the notion that the 2001 authorization for use of military force somehow gave the government the green light to conduct warrantless wiretapping of Americans inside the United States. This argument was ludicrous. The authorization for use of military force said nothing about surveillance. The applicable law governing national security wiretapping was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act-- period. If the Bush Administration had wanted the law to conduct warrantless wiretapping after 9/11, it could have asked the Congress to pass it as part of the PATRIOT Act. It didn't. So when they got caught and had to explain to the public what they had been doing all these years, they said that the authorization for use of military force, which the Congress understood as authorizing war in Afghanistan, somehow magically allowed for

wiretapping in the United States. The second argument was that the President had something called ``inherent power'' to disregard the law.

I asked Ms. Elwood if she agreed with either of these arguments. She wouldn't answer the question of whether the authorization for use of military force authorized warrantless wiretapping, and she wouldn't answer the question of whether the President's so-called inherent power authorized the warrantless wiretapping. That was not very encouraging, either.

I did get one answer. Ms. Elwood said that the arguments that the Bush Administration's secret interpretation of the authorization for use of military force, combined with the President's so-called inherent powers, allowed for the warrantless wiretapping, in her view, that ``seemed reasonable.'' That definitely was not encouraging.

Then it occurred to me that having asked her about the past in some of these concerns that I have just raised, I thought maybe that is all part of yesteryear. Maybe that is all in the past. Let bygones be bygones. So I looked for assurances that Ms. Elwood's defense of warrantless wiretapping wasn't relevant now. After all, Ms. Elwood's response to questions about the program referred to the law at the time. Maybe current law makes clear to everyone, including the nominee, that there will never again be warrantless wiretapping of Americans in the United States.

So what does the law actually say now? Back in 2008, Congress took a big part of the warrantless wiretapping program and turned it into the law now known as section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Congress wanted to make it absolutely clear that our country had really turned the page and that Americans wouldn't have to worry about any more violations of the law. So the Congress included in the law a statement that said: We really mean it. This law is ``the exclusive means'' by which electronic surveillance could be conducted.

I asked Ms. Elwood about whether the President's supposed powers under the Constitution could trump the current statutory framework in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Specifically, I asked her whether that provision in law--the one passed in 2008 that explicitly states that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive means for conducting wiretapping--would keep the President from asserting some other constitutional authority in this area.

She said she had not studied the question. This was the most troubling answer of all because this is about how the law stands today. This is not talking about yesteryear. This is about how the law stands today, and this was the nominee to be general counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency's not ruling out another assertion of so-called inherent Presidential power to override the law.

My fear is that if the public cannot get reassuring answers now to these fundamental questions of law, then Americans could end up learning about the nominee's views when it is too late--when our people open up the newspapers someday and learn about an intelligence program that is based on a dangerous and secret interpretation of the law. It happened repeatedly in the past, and my message today is that the Senate cannot let it happen again.

One of the reasons Ms. Elwood's views on whether the government was obligated to respect the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is so important is that, for the most part, the Central Intelligence Agency operates under authorities that are actually more vague than is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In fact, those authorities are not even established in a statute that people in Iowa and Oregon could just go and read. The CIA's authorities to collect and use information on Americans and even to secretly participate in organizations in the United States are conducted under an Executive order, Executive Order No. 12333.

In January, during the last 2 weeks of the Obama administration, the intelligence community released two documents that offered a little bit of insight into how intelligence is collected and used under this Executive order. It was good that the Obama administration released the documents. More transparency is why I can come to the floor and be part of this conversation.

These and other publicly available documents demonstrate the extent to which the CIA deals with information on Americans all of the time. Right now, the CIA is authorized to conduct signals intelligence as well as the human intelligence that is generally associated with the Agency, and the intelligence the CIA obtains from various sources, which can be collected in bulk, inevitably includes information on law- abiding Americans.

What do the rules say that apply to all of this information on Americans? What these rules say is, under this Executive order, the CIA can mostly do what it wants. If Ms. Elwood could find wiggle room in the airtight restrictions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, I think the Senate ought to be asking: What might she do with the flexibility in the rules that govern what the CIA can do under this Executive order?

In fact, even when this Executive order includes limitations, there are usually exceptions. Guess who decides what the exceptions are. The CIA Director and the CIA General Counsel.

In short, the rules look like an invitation for the CIA Director and the general counsel to conduct secret programs and operations that rely on case-by-case decisions that have no clear or consistent legal framework. That is why it is so important that these nominees give us some sense of where they stand before they are confirmed.

I started with Mike Pompeo, who is now the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He wrote an article--an op-ed piece as it is called in the press--that called for the government to collect the bulk records of law-abiding Americans' communications and to combine all of those records--``publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database.''

That, in my view, is breathtaking. It makes what everybody was talking about with regard to the old phone records collection effort look like small potatoes.

At his hearing, I asked then-Congressman Pompeo whether this database would have any boundaries. In other words, he is setting up a brandnew database--bigger than anything people have seen. He is going to collect people's lifestyle information and who knows what else.

He said ``of course there are boundaries. Any collection and retention must be conducted in accordance with the Constitution's statutes and applicable Presidential directives.''

The real question is, What does that mean?

It means the person who is deciding what, if anything, Director Pompeo's CIA cannot do is the lawyer, and that is where the nominee-- Ms. Elwood to be general counsel--comes in.

We might ask: How would these questions come up at the CIA?

As a hypothetical, one question I asked Director Pompeo was: What happens when a foreign partner provides the CIA with information that is known to include the communications of law-abiding Americans?

For example, what if the Russians collected information on Americans and, instead of providing it to WikiLeaks, gave it to the CIA? It could be sensitive information about political leaders and our country and journalists and religious leaders and just regular, law-abiding Americans. What would Director Pompeo do in that situation? When, if ever, would it be inappropriate for the CIA to receive, use, or distribute this information?

His answer was that it is highly fact-specific. He said he would consult with lawyers.

So, when she came for her nomination hearing, I said this is our chance. Let's ask the lawyer, Ms. Elwood, who is the nominee to be general counsel.

She said, like Director Pompeo, it would be based on all of the facts and circumstances. She said she had no personal experience with such a decision and was unable to offer an opinion.

This, in my view, is a prescription for trouble. We have a CIA Director and a nominee to be general counsel of the Agency, and neither of these two individuals will tell the Congress and the American people what the CIA will do under these circumstances which relate directly to the privacy of law-abiding and innocent Americans.

In her responses to committee questions, Ms. Elwood referred to one of the

documents that was released in January--the revised Attorney General guidelines--which she said imposed ``stringent and detailed restrictions'' on what the CIA can do with the intelligence it collects that is known to include information about Americans.

We are not talking about an insignificant amount of information on Americans. We are talking about bulk collection. We are talking about information on Americans that the rules, themselves, describe as ``significant in volume, proportion, or sensitivity.'' Obviously, the mere fact that the CIA collects and keeps this kind of information raises a lot of concerns about infringements of Americans' privacy.

I wanted to know what these stringent restrictions were that Ms. Elwood was talking about that she said would, again, just sort of magically protect the rights of Americans.

One of the issues our people are especially concerned about is whether the government, after it has collected lots of information on Americans, can conduct warrantless, backdoor searches for information about specific Americans. Those who dismiss the concerns about these backdoor searches argue that if the intelligence has already been collected, it is just no big deal to search it, even if the search is intended to obtain information on innocent, law-abiding Americans. The problem is, the more collection that is going on, the bigger the pool of Americans' information that is being searched.

This has come up with regard to section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which we are going to debate in the coming months. As my colleagues know, a bipartisan coalition--a bipartisan group of Senators and House Members--has been trying for years to get the intelligence community to tell us how many innocent, law-abiding Americans are being swept up in the section 702 collection. That number, if we can ever get it, is directly related to whether the intelligence community should be allowed to conduct warrantless searches on particular Americans, and it is directly related to the point I offered at the outset, which is that we must have policies that promote security and liberty. If we do it smartly, we can have both.

These questions I have described also apply to information that is collected under the Executive order. In the case of the Executive order, there is not even a discussion about how much information about Americans gets swept up.

So what do the rules say about backdoor searches that have been conducted by the CIA under this Executive order?

It turns out, the CIA can conduct searches through all of this information on law-abiding Americans if the search is ``reasonably designed to retrieve information related to a duly authorized activity of the CIA.''

Ms. Elwood has told the Intelligence Committee that there are really stringent requirements on this, but as I just read--``reasonably designed to retrieve information related to a duly authorized activity of the CIA''--that sure does not sound like it has much teeth in it to me. It does not sound very stringent to me.

I asked Ms. Elwood at the hearing what other restrictions might apply.

In a written response, she referred to training requirements, to recordkeeping, and to the rule that the information must be destroyed after 5 years. None of that changes the fact that there is no meaningful standard for the searches. There is no check. There is no balance. Even the CIA's rule that the information can only be kept for 5 years has a huge loophole in that it can be extended by the CIA Director after consultation with--guess who again--the general counsel.

Again, we have rules that are vague to begin with, whose implementation is up to the discretion of the CIA Director and the general counsel. At this point, the Senate has virtually nothing to go on in terms of how this nominee for this critical general counsel position would exercise all of this power.

Another aspect of CIA activities that are authorized by the Executive order is that of the secret participation by someone who is working on behalf of the CIA and organizations in our country.

These activities would obviously be concerning to a lot of Americans. Most Americans probably believe the CIA is not even allowed to do this anymore, but it is. The question is, whether there are going to be rules that prevent abuses.

Since that is yet another modern-day, present-time topic, I said I am going to ask Ms. Elwood some questions on this. For example, for what purposes could the CIA secretly join a private organization in the United States?

The rules say the CIA Director can make case-by-case decisions with the concurrence of the general counsel, so I thought it would be appropriate to ask what the view is of the nominee to be the general counsel. Ms. Elwood's response was that she had no experience with this matter and looked forward to learning about it. And that, of course, is typical of so many of her answers. Repeatedly, she declined to provide any clarity on how she would interpret the CIA's authorities under this sweeping Executive order, but these are the calls she could make every single day if confirmed. At this point, the Senate has no clue how she would make them. It is my view that we cannot vote to confirm a nominee--particularly one who will operate entirely in secret--and just hope for the best.

I have other concerns about the Elwood nomination, particularly some of her views with respect to torture.

I asked Ms. Elwood whether the torture techniques the CIA had used violated the Detainee Treatment Act, often referred to as the McCain amendment. She had no opinion. I asked her whether those techniques violated the statutory prohibition on torture. She had no opinion. I asked her whether the torture techniques violated the War Crimes Act. She had no opinion. I asked her whether the torture techniques violated U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture, the Geneva Convention and other U.S. treaty obligations. She had no opinion.

How could she have no opinion? She has said that she read the 500- page executive summary of the Intelligence Committee's Torture Report. The horrific details of waterboarding, extended sleep deprivation, stress positions, and other torture techniques are known to everyone, but the nominee to be the CIA's General Counsel has no opinion on these matters.

Ms. Elwood did, however, commit to complying with the 2015 law prohibiting interrogation techniques not authorized by the Army Field Manual. That gets us again to the question of what decisions she would make now, based on current law. Everyone agrees that waterboarding is prohibited by the Army Field Manual, but the Army Field Manual can be changed. Fortunately, the 2015 law also prohibits any changes to the Army Field Manual that involve the use or threat of force. I asked her whether the CIA's torture techniques fell safely outside of anything the Army Field Manual could legally authorize. Her response, again, was that she had not studied the techniques.

So that was her position. She said she will comply with the law and agreed that the law prohibits interrogation techniques that involve the use or threat of force, but she refused to say whether waterboarding or any of the other CIA torture techniques falls outside that prohibition.

Finally, I asked the nominee how the constitutional rights of Americans would apply when the government seeks to kill them overseas. She responded that she had not considered the matter. Do these rights apply to legal permanent residents of the United States who are overseas? She did not have an opinion on that either.

To fully understand why this kind of avoidance is such a problem, we need to consider again what the CIA general counsel does and how she does it. I have been on the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2001. I have seen far too many intelligence programs go on for years before we find out about them. In so many of these cases, the problem lies in how senior lawyers interpreted their authorities. These interpretations are made in secret. They are made by a handful of people, and they are revealed to almost no one. We place almost immeasurable trust in the people who make these decisions. We cannot take this lightly.

The Senate and the American people have one shot--and one shot only-- to get some insight into how those lawyers will make their decisions and how

they view the laws that apply to them. That one shot is the confirmation process. So when a nominee refused to take positions, it short-circuits the process. This is not acceptable. We cannot just confirm someone to be the CIA's general counsel without knowing what she will do in that position. That would be an abdication of our duty.

I want to close by saying that, at this extraordinary time in American history, a time when our country--and if you sit on the Intelligence Committee, as I have for a number of years, you go into the Intelligence Committee room, and it is all behind closed doors, and you often walk out of there very concerned about the well-being of our people, given some of the grave national security threats we hear about once or twice a week.

The point is that our choice is not between security and liberty; it is between smart policies and ones that are not so smart. For example, on this floor, when the leadership of the committee was interested in weakening strong encryption, which is what keeps our people safe--we have our whole lives wrapped up in a smartphone, and smart encryption ensures that terrorists and hackers can't get at that information. It ensures that pedophiles can't get access to the location tracker and pick up where your child might be. We all know how much our parents care about the well-being of kids.

People are saying: Let's just build backdoors into our products, and I said I am going to fight that. I will fight it with everything I have whenever it is proposed because it is bad for security, bad for liberty, bad for our companies that are trying to continue to offer high-skill, high-wage jobs because our competitors won't do it, and so far we have been able to hold it off.

As we seek in the days ahead to come up with smart policies that protect security and liberty, we have to get answers from those in the government who are going to have these key positions. Given the fact that the CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, made it clear in his hearing that he was going to rely on the person chosen by the Senate as his general counsel, I felt it was very important that we get some answers from the person we will be voting on shortly.

I regret to say to the Senate that this morning we are largely in the dark with respect to Ms. Elwood's views on the key questions I have outlined today.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.