Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, when you serve as the Secretary of Treasury, you are charged with a variety of responsibilities, and right at the center of your duties is to address taxes. This is an area that the nominee to head the Treasury Department, Mr. Steven Mnuchin, waded into very early on after his nomination became public.

News leaked on November 29 of last year that Mr. Mnuchin was the President-elect's choice for Secretary of the Treasury. The very next day, Mr. Mnuchin appeared on a CNBC program and confirmed his selection. During an extended interview with CNBC, he introduced what I have come to call the Mnuchin rule. I will quote Mr. Mnuchin directly with respect to what he said: ``Any reductions we have in upper income taxes would be offset by less deductions, so there would be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.''

I will repeat that last part of the Mnuchin rule: ``no absolute tax cut for the upper class.''

Mr. Mnuchin is the President's nominee for Treasury Secretary. This is a position that has been held by American economic giants like Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, Salmon Chase, Henry Morgenthau and Lloyd Bentsen. When a nominee for Treasury Secretary makes a pledge like Mr. Mnuchin's, it really ought to mean something. It ought to stand for something.

Unfortunately, it already looks as though the Mnuchin rule is on the ropes. The very first act of the 115th Congress and a unified Republican government, repealing the Affordable Care Act, shatters the Mnuchin rule.

The Affordable Care Act repeal scheme that Republicans kicked off months ago, in my view, is a Trojan horse of tax breaks for the most fortunate. Nobody outside the top 4 or 5 percent of earners would get any of that break. Most of it would go to households in the top 1 percent of earners--even then, the top one-tenth of 1 percent--and it is paid for by taking insurance coverage and tax cuts for health care literally out of the hands of millions of working people.

Then it is back for another whack at the Mnuchin rule later this year. Last week, the New York Times published a story talking about Mr. Mnuchin, which said that ``his guarantee appears impossible to fulfill either under the tax overhaul that the House Republicans are pushing or similar, sketchier proposals that Mr. Trump has offered.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article titled ``Treasury Nominee Vows No Tax Cut for Rich. Math Says the Opposite.''

After breaking the Mnuchin rule once, the majority is now planning to fast-track a second tax break for the wealthy. This one will be even larger; in fact, it could be 10 times bigger or more. My guess is that a lot of Americans are wondering what has happened to all the campaign talk about fixing the Tax Code and really going out there and standing up for the working people. As the Republican nominee, the President said he was the guy to repair the country's broken tax system. The particulars of the Trump plan were buried deep in the business pages and on his Web site, but the broad strokes of the message were pitched in rallies across the Nation: Donald Trump alone knew how to do the job because he had taken advantage of the rules himself, and he was ready to crack down on those who weren't paying their fair share.

One of the few specifics Donald Trump offered on the stump was that he would close the carried interest loophole. That, of course, has been a favorite of investment fund managers. It would be great if it were actually true. In reality, the promise turned out to be pretty much just a head fake. Rather than closing the loophole and asking investment fund managers to pay their fair share, the Trump plan actually gives them a 25-percent tax cut. In fact, the Trump plan slashes tax rates for corporations and the wealthy across the board at a cost of trillions of dollars.

The President and Mr. Mnuchin might defend this plan by claiming it is a tax cut for the middle class, so I want to spend just a few minutes checking in with that part of the plan. If we read the fine print, we will notice that one of the Trump tax plan's big casualties is something called head of household status. That is a particularly important benefit for a lot of middle-income taxpayers because it reduces their bills. What would it mean for head of household status to go away? Millions of working Americans, mostly single parents, would get hit with tax increases.

Furthermore, the Trump plan eliminates key personal exemptions for millions of other middle-income families. It pushes a lot of families into higher tax brackets than they are in today. The administration touts its proposals for a larger standard deduction and a new child care tax credit as the cure-all for its tax increases on the middle class and on working people, but the math just doesn't add up. Families who are struggling to get ahead today are going to pay higher taxes tomorrow.

So let's recap the Trump tax plan: a multitrillion-dollar tax break for the wealthy and corporations and a gut punch of higher taxes for working families.

At this point, it would be generous to say that the Mnuchin rule is now on life support. If we wanted to design a tax plan to push more Americans out of the economic winners circle, the Trump plan is what you would come up with. When I look at the Trump tax plan that Mr. Mnuchin would be in charge of spearheading, it looks to me as though the administration has zero interest in cleaning out the rot that is right at the heart of America's tax system.

Here is what it is all about, in my view. The Tax Code today is a tale of two systems. If you are a wage earner--a welder in Portland or a nurse in Louisiana--your taxes come straight out of your paycheck. They are compulsory--no special deals. You can even see the numbers right on your pay stub. Once or twice a month, out it comes. There are no special tax-dodging strategies or loopholes to winnow down the tax bill for the welder in Portland or the nurse in Louisiana. You can't set up a John Doe, Inc., in a Cayman Islands P.O. box to shield your income from taxes.

But the rules are different for the powerful and the well connected. At their disposal are huge armies of lawyers and accountants who specialize in tax games. They specialize in tax tricks. With the right advice, the most fortunate individuals and corporations in the country can decide how much tax to pay and when to pay it. If anybody wonders why people in America feel the tax system is rigged and the rules are stacked against them, this is a big part of the answer. I intend to talk more about that, but I want to come back to highlight the difference between the welder in Portland and the nurse in Louisiana.

When those hard-working Americans are out there working for a wage and once or twice a month have their taxes taken right out of their paycheck, they know they aren't getting anything special. It is compulsory. It is mandatory. They see it on their paychecks. Yet they get lots of news coverage and articles and the like, and they will see that for those who are fortunate, instead of paying taxes in a mandatory and compulsory way, they pretty much get to decide what they are going to pay, when they are going to pay it, and maybe nothing at all. It seems to me that as we look at the nominee for Treasury Secretary, we get a pretty good example of how it does play out in terms of taxes for those fortunate few and how his taxes stand in sharp contrast to that welder in Portland or that nurse in Louisiana.

Not long after ending a 17-year run at Goldman Sachs, Mr. Mnuchin opened a hedge fund called Dune Capital in 2004. He set up an outpost in Anguilla and the Cayman Islands. That is not a move you make for the infrastructure or the ease of the commute. It is about a zero-percent tax rate.

During Mr. Mnuchin's hearing, he claimed that having those overseas funds benefited American nonprofits. When he testified in front of the Finance Committee, he said: You know, the main thing we are doing with these overseas funds is we are helping churches and pension funds. But documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission show something quite different. In some cases, 100 percent of his investors were from outside of the United States, and setting up overseas allowed Mr. Mnuchin to help them avoid paying taxes. What was the end effect? Dune Capital was heavily invested in movies. So millions of dollars in profits from Hollywood exports, like the movie ``Avatar,'' were funneled to an offshore web of entities and investors, giving him the chance to skirt a U.S. tax bill.

At a more recent point in his career, Mr. Mnuchin's bank was up for a merger. The deal had the potential to be a personal windfall for him and a small circle of others. A foundation Mr. Mnuchin chaired reportedly used tax-exempt dollars to fund a write-in campaign pushing for the deal's approval. During the public comment period on a potential merger, this is pretty much the equivalent of stuffing the ballot box.

Now, as a nominee for a Cabinet position, Mr. Mnuchin could be in line for a special elective Federal tax deferral on money made by selling stocks and bonds. That is the very definition of getting to pay what you want, when you want. We hear a frequent and common defense when these kinds of tax tricks are brought into public view. It is true that the people who use them are following the laws on the books, but the outrage in our tax system, as I have said on this Senate floor, is what is legal. That is the real outrage with the American tax system, and it is outrageous that the Senate has allowed obvious gamesmanship to stay legal. It is outrageous that the administration and its chosen nominee for Treasury have shown no interest in changing it.

When you are the Treasury Secretary, one of your paramount obligations is overseeing taxes. The last time the United States overhauled its Tax Code--this was in 1986--the Reagan Treasury Department played a huge role in that effort, and one of the core principles of that reform was treating wages and wealth the same way. Democrats and Republicans came together to pass a tax reform bill based on fairness. It said that the wage earner--that nurse in Louisiana or welder in Portland--their income and the income of those who made their money in finance and on Wall Street and the like would be treated the same. I see no indication that this administration is prepared to repeat that formula.

The campaign promise to fix the broken, dysfunctional Tax Code-- Donald Trump's campaign promise--lured in a lot of voters. When I heard that Mnuchin rule the first time, I said that sounds pretty good--no net tax break for those who are the most fortunate. That sounds pretty appealing. The tax plans that the administration and Republicans in Congress have on offer now will not undo the disgusting unfairness that is right at the heart of the American Tax Code. In fact, it is only going to get worse.

This issue has to be at the center of the debate on Mr. Mnuchin's nomination. I am particularly troubled by the fact that the evidence shows that the Mnuchin rule is already on the ropes.

I intend to oppose this nominee. I urge my colleagues to do the same.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, there are communities across this country that are still waiting for the recovery from the great recession to show up. In many of those towns and cities, the storefronts are boarded up, the factories are shuttered, and, in what could be the most lasting scar of the crisis, homes--many homes--have been foreclosed. A lot of people in those communities cast their votes in November based on a Trump message that real change was coming.

Heads are going to be spinning tonight with the news from the Senate. In just a few minutes, this body will vote to confirm as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, known by many as the ``foreclosure king.'' That is whom the President chose as his Treasury Secretary. Mr. Mnuchin turned the bank he bought into a cash cow, and they set a land speed record for foreclosures.

I have supported nominees for this position from both parties. I voted for Paul O'Neill. I voted for John Snow, and Hank Paulson, who served under President George W. Bush. I don't expect to see eye to eye on each issue with every Treasury Secretary. I do expect to have confidence that the Treasury Secretary is going to work on behalf of all Americans--all Americans--and not just the well healed, not just the fortunate, not just the powerful.

After considering Mr. Mnuchin's qualifications and background, I just don't believe he would be that kind of Treasury Secretary. In Mr. Mnuchin's response to questions from members of the Finance Committee, he denied that his bank, OneWest, engaged in a practice known as robo- signing. The public record says that is just dead wrong. In fact, a OneWest vice president who worked under Mr. Mnuchin, Erica Johnson- Seck, admitted under oath that she ran an office that churned out roughly 6,000 sets of foreclosure documents a week.

She said she personally signed more than 750 disclosure documents a week without even reading them, and there was no notary present during the process. That is a violation of the law. When asked how much time she spent executing each foreclosure document, Ms. Johnson-Seck replied:

I changed my signature considerably. It's just an E now. So

not more than 30 seconds.

Now, on the eve of the Finance Committee mark-up for Mr. Mnuchin, the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio reported documented examples of robo-signing in Ohio. Now, on the eve of Mr. Mnuchin's confirmation vote in the Senate, another such story has broken. This time it is in the State of Washington, more evidence of robo-signing that directly contradicts what Mr. Mnuchin told the Finance Committee and the public.

Mr. Mnuchin also withheld foreclosure data requested by two Democratic members of the Finance Committee, Senators Brown and Casey. He did, apparently, give similar information to Senator Heller, one of the committee's Republican members. That is on top of $100 million worth of property and more than a dozen positions with various business entities missing from his disclosures to the Finance Committee.

My own view is, if not for the committee's minority investigations team, I don't believe any of that information, none of it--$100 million, the other disclosures--would have ever come to light.

I am going to turn from missing disclosures and misleading testimony to a broken promise. The day after news of Mr. Mnuchin's nomination was leaked, he appeared on television and, in effect, debuted a new tax policy. I have come to call it the Mnuchin rule, and I will quote Mr. Mnuchin directly with respect to what he said.

Mr. Mnuchin said: ``Any reductions we have in upper income taxes would be offset by less deductions, so there would be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.''

I will repeat the last part of the Mnuchin rule: ``no absolute tax cut for the upper class.''

When I first called this the Mnuchin rule during the Finance Committee's hearing on his nomination, Mr. Mnuchin said he took it as a great compliment, comparing it to the Volcker rule and the Buffett rule. Well, you would think a fellow who proudly embraced having a rule named after himself would actually stick to it.

The Mnuchin rule didn't last for very long before it was abandoned. The very first act of the 115th Congress in a unified Republican government, repealing the Affordable Care Act, would shatter the Mnuchin rule. Then it is set to take another hit later this year. That is with the majority working on plans to fast-track a second, even bigger tax break for those who are the most fortunate. The Trump plan, in fact, would hit millions of middle-income families with tax increases by wiping out key personal exemptions and eliminating head of household filing status.

So I want to be really clear what this means to people in Oklahoma and Oregon and all across the country, working families: Working families would get hurt by the Trump plan. They would lose key personal exemptions. They would eliminate the head of household filing status while those who were more fortunate would be in a position to get tax breaks, additional tax breaks beyond what they already have in the Tax Code.

The fact is, the Tax Code today is a tale of two systems. For the firefighter in Coos Bay, OR, or the retail worker in Roseburg, your taxes come straight out of each and every paycheck. That is the way it works in Oklahoma, the way it works all across the country. The Tax Code for working people is compulsory. Once or twice a month, your taxes come directly out of your paycheck--no special dodges, no special loopholes. Nobody is able to hide their pay in a Cayman Islands account if they are a firefighter or a retail worker.

But there is a very different Tax Code in America for the well- connected and the powerful. They have a whole array of lawyers and accountants who specialize in helping them shrink their tax bills. And with the right advice, the fact is, those people can, to a great extent, decide what they are going to pay, when they are going to pay it, and sometimes be in a position to not pay much, if anything at all.

The fact is, the tax system today punishes working Americans because it treats them very differently than it treats the most fortunate. And the administration and the majority in Congress don't seem to be doing much in terms of fixing this disparity.

The Mnuchin rule just hasn't held up. It is beyond being on the ropes. It is not going anywhere at all. In fact, the early proposals only make this extraordinary unfairness, the unfairness at the heart of America's Tax Code, even worse.

So what we have is another Trump nominee who, in my view, doesn't meet the test of standing up for working families in those communities all across the country who are waiting for economic recovery to show up in their neighborhood. They are the ones who have seen the factory close and seen the foreclosures and seen their neighbors laid off. And they would like to see people in these positions advocate for them, advocate for them because they need somebody who is going to stand up for them, and they were told in the campaign that is what they were going to get.

The fact is, Mr. Mnuchin is yet another Trump nominee who, instead of standing up for those working families, has a different set of priorities and, in addition to that, has the ethics alarm bells sounding.

He appears to be withholding information requested by Members of this body. My view is, he misled the Finance Committee and the public about his bank's foreclosure tactics. The Mnuchin rule--the first promise he made, the very first promise he made on policy, which he was proud to have described as a rule named after him, already has been broken.

So I am not going to be supporting Mr. Mnuchin to lead the Treasury Department. I urge my colleagues as well to reject this appointment.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, the Senate is now debating the nomination of Steven Mnuchin to be the Secretary of the Treasury, and this is yet another nomination on which the majority has walked away, unfortunately, from a 20-year bipartisan approach when it comes to the vetting process.

In 2009, when Tim Geithner was President Obama's first Treasury nominee, a vetting issue came up and both sides of the Finance Committee carried the investigation out to its conclusion, but the situation has turned out quite differently this time.

There were several properties in the United States and abroad worth $100 million missing from Mr. Mnuchin's disclosure. He failed to disclose several positions in various firms. He misled the public. He misled the committee about his bank foreclosure tactics, and he appears to have hidden key data requested by Members of this body. Frankly, I don't believe these investigations would have been uncovered at all if not for the work of the minority's investigation team. The majority, however, looked the other way, and the vetting process was ended prematurely. So the vote on this nomination is imminent. That is the first concern held by Members on this side, and I am going to speak more about that today and as this debate continues.

This morning, though, I want to focus on the substance of our concerns.

The single biggest challenge is what to do to reconnect working Americans with this country's economic engine. There are communities across the land, including many in my home State of Oregon where folks are just waiting for economic recovery to show up. They see their homes foreclosed, storefronts boarded up, factories shuttered. They

just feel stuck. Aside from the President himself, nobody in America has greater influence over this Nation's economic future than the U.S. Treasury Secretary. That is the case whether it is through tax reform that fights unfairness, rules that rein in Wall Street abuses, or smart infrastructure and trade policies that create good-paying jobs here at home. We call them red, white, and blue jobs.

The person who becomes Treasury Secretary has to be somebody who is ready to work on behalf of all Americans, including those Americans from the corners of our Nation where optimism has dimmed. If Steven Mnuchin's record is any indication, he simply doesn't fit that mold, not even close.

There is a lot to debate as the Senate considers Mr. Mnuchin's nomination. Particularly significant, in my judgment as the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, is the issue of how our Tax Code punishes wage-earning Americans. I am going to cover that this morning. In my view, though, the debate begins with the story of OneWest, Mr. Mnuchin's bank. It begins with a lot of gory details of how OneWest industrialized the process of kicking people out of their homes and onto the streets, and it begins with the details of how Mr. Mnuchin enriched himself at the same time his foreclosure machine was running.

As I described, the financial crisis was a personal setback from which a lot of Americans still have not recovered, but for Mr. Mnuchin, it wasn't exactly a setback at all. In fact, it was the deal of a lifetime. In March, 2009, Mr. Mnuchin led a group of investors who bought IndyMac Bank, one of several banks that had been engulfed in crisis the year before.

Mr. Mnuchin and his group got an unusually sweet deal from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, buying $23.5 billion worth of assets for less than $1.6 billion. IndyMac was renamed OneWest Bank and it opened up shop the very next day.

As part of this sweetheart deal, Mr. Mnuchin got what is known as a Shared-Loss Agreement from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Under the deal with OneWest, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation made nearly $900 billion in payments to OneWest for IndyMac loans. Total payments from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to OneWest, including payments for loans made to OneWest subsidiaries First Federal, La Jolla, and Financial Freedom, were $1.22 billion.

It didn't take long after Mr. Mnuchin rolled out the newly branded OneWest for the bank to be investigated by State attorneys general around the country. Already they had big concerns about OneWest's foreclosure practices, and this, in my view, is where you see the guts of the foreclosure machine beginning to show itself.

As part of this investigation, a OneWest vice president who worked under Mr. Mnuchin, Erica Johnson-Seck, admitted under oath to the practice known as robo-signing. This witness said she signed more than 750 foreclosure documents a week without reading them and with no notary present during the process. That is a violation of the law. When asked how much time she spent executing each foreclosure document, Ms. Johnson-Seck replied: ``I changed my signature considerably. It's just an E now. So not more than 30 seconds.''

It was not just Ms. Johnson-Seck. She was part of an entire team operating at this pace. In her deposition, Ms. Johnson-Seck stated there were about 1,100 documents signed by her office each day, or roughly 6,000 a week.

So amid an economic meltdown--our Nation shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs, families facing an uncertain future--Mr. Mnuchin found a way to profit. He bought a bank from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation at an extreme discount. He struck a deal with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation so he could be reimbursed for 80 percent or more of the bank's losses. He had at least one team in place that could sign 6,000 foreclosure documents a week--6,000 individuals and families a week thrown into this nightmare of potentially losing their homes. Mr. Mnuchin and OneWest were churning out foreclosures with ruthless efficiency. That doesn't sound to me like somebody who is going to be the kind of person who is going to look out for the interests of working families.

I want to talk a little bit about some who were victimized by OneWest's industrialized foreclosure. One of those was Dee Roberson, who in 2010 shared her story with the Orlando Sentinel. Ms. Roberson told them her parents were struggling to pay off the balance of their mortgage with OneWest. The mortgage had a balance of just $3,000, and Ms. Roberson was trying to help her parents get to the finish line, but instead of the usual mortgage payment of $600, OneWest demanded over $1,000 a month. OneWest said the home was in foreclosure and wanted $4,000 in attorneys' fees, but the Robersons had never received a foreclosure notice. When Ms. Roberson called OneWest to sort things out, it was just one big runaround.

Gerald Lembach is an Army retiree who needed cash to finish an addition on his modest ranch-style home in Pasadena, MD. He and his wife had owned their home for 23 years. According to a story in the Baltimore Sun, Mr. Lembach discovered the monthly cost for the new loan was much higher than what he expected. Instead of the $3,200 monthly bill he anticipated, it was almost $4,300. OneWest, which took over the servicing of Mr. Lembach's loan in 2009, denied his request for a modification in October 2010, a month after it had started foreclosure proceedings. He struggled with the process, and he hired an attorney who noticed something that struck him as very odd. Signatures on the foreclosure documents were fakes. In fact, various foreclosure processors around the State of Maryland had been signing under the same lawyer's name, but even with this discovery of false signatures, it didn't bring about the speedy modification that Mr. Lembach was hoping for.

Rose Gudiel and her family bought a small house in 2005, making payments on the mortgage until her brother was murdered in 2009 and the family lost his income. The next mortgage payment was 2 weeks late. OneWest said it wouldn't accept it, and Ms. Gudiel had to apply for a loan modification instead, but OneWest didn't actually own the mortgage, they were only servicing it. They didn't even have the authority to grant a modification. So this citizen was caught in limbo for 2 years, unable to modify the loan and at the same time had to fight eviction.

Out of options, Ms. Gudiel and a group of protestors went to Mr. Mnuchin's home, protesting outside and demanding answers. Shortly thereafter, despite OneWest's claim that there was nothing they could do to help Ms. Gudiel, they relented. She was allowed to keep her home, but it took essentially a four-alarm public relations calamity to make that happen.

Mark and Jenny Gin are another case Mr. Mnuchin may have heard about. The Gins sued OneWest in San Mateo Superior Court, and they won.

I will just describe a little bit from the San Francisco Chronicle how their case played out. While the Gins were making dozens of calls and submitting reams of paperwork to get a loan modification from OneWest, another department of the bank proceeded to foreclose on their home. This is especially important because this is a phenomenon known as dual tracking.

OneWest strung the Gins along for months before telling them just to send in their loan modification application. They said the Gins would have an answer in 30 to 60 days. But instead of a modification, they got an eviction notice. They were forced out of their home while Ms. Gin was 8 months pregnant and grappling with a breast cancer diagnosis.

They were left with no choice but to take OneWest to court. Their legal battle stretched more than 2 years. The costs were so substantial that even a victory in court could not save their home.

Those are all examples of typical mortgages--everyday homeowners caught up in OneWest's exceptional and ruthless foreclosure practices.

But it wasn't just your typical mortgage that OneWest foreclosed upon; the bank had a big reverse mortgage operation called Financial Freedom, and the foreclosure machine was running and running and running over there too.

The goal of a reverse mortgage is to give older people--62 or older-- the opportunity to use the equity in their homes to help cover the bills. Unfortunately, it doesn't always go smoothly.

In OneWest's reverse mortgage division, it often went terribly wrong.

A lot of older couples of modest incomes who got reverse mortgages put them under only one name, often the husband's. But here is the catch: If the person whose name appeared on the documents passed away, the terms of the reverse mortgage required the loan to be paid back in full. If it wasn't, then the foreclosure process once again kicks in.

So you have a family where first they lose their loved one, then they lose their home, and they are caught up in this nightmare scenario of a reverse mortgage. A common name for this practice--it almost hurts to say it--is ``widow foreclosure.'' Widow foreclosure.

According to documents reviewed by the California Reinvestment Coalition, during the first 6 years Mr. Mnuchin ran OneWest, the bank accounted for nearly 40 percent of all federally insured reverse mortgage foreclosures. They led the Nation in widow foreclosures.

You know, if you think about what you can lead the Nation in and you are thinking about trying to help hard-hit families, the kinds of families I just described, I would like to lead the Nation in terms of reaching out and finding imaginative ways to help them, to really go to bat for them, take them through the process, create something that is fair and commonsense.

What does this bank do? They lead the Nation in widow foreclosures.

In one case, OneWest and its predecessor tried to foreclose on an elderly Florida woman. That was twice. The first time, Mr. Mnuchin's bank tried to foreclose on her home and filed paperwork saying she didn't live there. When they finally discovered she, in fact, did live in the home, they backed off. Two years later, OneWest's new parent company, CIT, where Mr. Mnuchin was a board member, tried to foreclose again. This time it was over an unpaid bill of 27 cents.

This involved a woman who was 90. A woman who was 90 was involved in a foreclosure with an unpaid bill of 27 cents. She had to fight to keep her home twice because she was bombarded with petty and inaccurate allegations from Mr. Mnuchin's bank.

The President recently tweeted out an allegation that this story was ``fake news'' because the elderly woman never actually lost her home. The ordeal that OneWest's foreclosure machine put her through certainly was not fake news to her and others who were up against this activity.

While OneWest was putting thousands of homeowners through the nightmare of foreclosure, Mr. Mnuchin used the bank's money to make some pretty flashy investments in Hollywood. In September 2012, OneWest led a group of financial institutions that established a revolving credit facility for Relativity Media of hundreds of millions of dollars. Relativity was a movie studio led by a flamboyant executive named Ryan Kavanaugh.

Press accounts also claim that Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Kavanaugh became good friends. In fact, even though Mr. Kavanaugh was a client who owed his bank hundreds of millions of dollars, he and Mr. Mnuchin bought a private jet together and then traveled to various kinds of film festivals around the world. They were even investing in real estate together. They put millions into a shell company, HMBAC LLC, which owned property in Southern California.

In October of 2014, Mr. Mnuchin decided to buy into Mr. Kavanaugh's movie studio himself. He purchased a stake. He was appointed cochairman of Relativity.

So while he was pulling double duty on the boards of OneWest and Relativity, OneWest had to report the size of the insider loans the bank was making to Relativity. As a share of bank capital, OneWest's insider loans exceeded 94 of the country's 100 biggest financial institutions.

Unfortunately, Mr. Mnuchin's time with Relativity didn't go so hot. Each year from 2012 to 2014, the studio suffered eight- or nine-figure losses. Finally, in 2015, Relativity's problems came to a head, but it owed OneWest and Mr. Mnuchin a huge sum of money.

On May 29, 2015, Mr. Mnuchin quit the board. A few days later, funds totaling $50 million in cash were swept back to OneWest from several Relativity operating accounts. One of those accounts was earmarked to pay guild expenses--salaries for everyday contractors and production tradespeople. That put the nail in Relativity's coffin, and the studio declared bankruptcy.

Mr. Mnuchin's adventure of putting OneWest money into Relativity might have been a big mess, but it sure didn't do much damage to the bank's bottom line.

Around the time Relativity crumbled, OneWest was purchased by an even bigger group, the CIT Group, at a massive profit. Mr. Mnuchin and his investors originally bought the bank in 2009 for less than $1.6 billion. In 2015, CIT Group bought it from Mr. Mnuchin and his partners for $3.4 billion.

In between, while tens of thousands of Americans were going through this daily nightmare of losing their homes, the bank had paid out more than $1 billion in dividends to Mr. Mnuchin and its other owners.

Buying OneWest was literally the deal of a lifetime for Mr. Mnuchin, but the bank's conduct caught the attention of Federal watchdogs more than once. In 2011, the Office of Thrift Supervision conducted an examination of OneWest's foreclosure process, and I am just going to outline a few of the findings. These are the findings of the Office of Thrift Supervision, which is in the business of monitoring and examining these institutions.

They found, for example, that OneWest employees filed affidavits in State and Federal courts, falsely stating that they had conducted a review and had personal knowledge regarding the details of a disputed mortgage, including principal and interest due or other fees and expenses when no such reviews had taken place.

OneWest employees filed documents in State and Federal courts that had not been signed or affirmed in the presence of a notary.

OneWest litigated foreclosure and bankruptcy proceedings without ensuring that the promissory notes were properly endorsed or assigned and in possession of the appropriate party at the appropriate time.

OneWest failed to devote sufficient resources to the administration of its foreclosure and loan modifications procedures.

OneWest management failed to enact adequate internal oversight and controls to its foreclosure processes.

Finally, OneWest failed to adequately oversee the outside lawyers handling foreclosure-related services.

The Office of Thrift Supervision also demanded that OneWest take corrective action, and it issued what is known as a consent order. Basically in English, this OneWest consent order was an agreement to clean up its act. The order was signed personally by Mr. Mnuchin and the OneWest board of directors. They had been running OneWest for 2 years at this point, and the company was rife with problems.

In 2014, another watchdog stepped in. This time, it was the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Their audit found that more than 10,000 OneWest borrowers were due $8.5 million for improper foreclosure practices. According to the same report, OneWest paid nearly $3 million to 54 borrowers for violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which protects members of our armed services from losing their homes while they are serving our country.

So just think about that one. Here is the bank having to pay borrowers $3 million for violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. This is what protects the courageous people who serve our country. It is a law that protects these people from losing their homes while they put themselves at great risk, may make the ultimate sacrifice, and every day, their families at home are worrying about them and often worrying about their finances.

According to this report, OneWest paid nearly $3 million to 54 borrowers who violated this law that protects the courageous men and women who wear the uniform of the United States.

At the heart of these investigations was the issue of robo-signing, the practice I have spoken about earlier in the context of the OneWest team churning out 6,000 foreclosure documents a week. Senator Casey and Senator Brown on our committee really zeroed in on this issue. And it was particularly concerning in this context to Senator Casey, who represents a lot of people

who lost their homes to foreclosures by Mr. Mnuchin's bank.

So Senator Casey put the question to Mr. Mnuchin in writing after Mr. Mnuchin had his Finance Committee hearing. Senator Casey asked pretty simply: Did OneWest robo-sign documents?

This was a straightforward question, and based on the public record, the answer should have been a straightforward ``yes.'' Instead, Mr. Mnuchin replied, ``OneWest Bank did not robo-sign documents.''

Years of documented proof say that is false. So the committee gave Mr. Mnuchin an opportunity to amend his response. Once again, Mr. Mnuchin denied--denied--the truth. First he said, ``The concept of `robo-signing' generally referred to two distinct but related issues: (a) a signer of a foreclosure affidavit attested to facts that were not verified to be accurate; or (b) a signer of a foreclosure affidavit represented himself or herself to be someone else.''

So that is a fancy way to explain. When we gave him an opportunity to amend his answer, Mr. Mnuchin again denied the truth on this question of OneWest robo-signing documents.

And he went on to say, ``OneWest did not do these things.''

There is just no way of getting around it--none. That statement is flat wrong.

The language Mr. Mnuchin used to redefine robo-signing is nearly identical to the language used by the Office of Thrift Supervision in the findings of its investigation. Given the watchdogs report, testimony from OneWest employees, and the public record, Mr. Mnuchin cannot possibly, in good faith, claim that OneWest did not robo-sign. In fact, Mr. Mnuchin's signature is on one of the documents that proves otherwise, the Office of Thrift Supervision consent order. He ran the bank. Surely, he had to read the document before signing it. So Mr. Mnuchin misled the Finance Committee and the American people on robo- signing, directly contradicting a mountain of evidence.

Senators Casey and Brown represent States where a lot of families were hammered through foreclosures pursued by Mr. Mnuchin's bank. Senator Casey and Senator Brown decided to do some more digging into the information. Senator Casey sought OneWest national foreclosure figures. Senator Brown asked for a State-by-State breakdown. This information was never provided.

At first Mr. Mnuchin said he just couldn't get the data. Then Senator Heller made a similar request. It seems Mr. Mnuchin answered sufficiently to satisfy Senator Heller, whose State had a large number of OneWest foreclosures. So in my mind, that raises a question about why a Republican Senator could get his inquiry answered but a pair of Democrats could not.

Getting other basic facts from Mr. Mnuchin was pretty much like a painful time at the dentist, pulling teeth. Here is an example. The Finance Committee requested nominees ``list all positions held as an officer, director, trustee, partner, proprietor, agent, representative, or consultant of any corporation, company, firm, partnership, other business enterprise, or educational or other institution.''

When Mr. Mnuchin filed his paperwork with the committee, he signed them, attesting that the document was true, accurate, and complete. However, it became apparent to committee staff that key information was missing. In particular, SEC filings indicated that Mr. Mnuchin was director of Dune Capital International, an entity located in the Cayman Islands. It was nowhere to be found in Mr. Mnuchin's paperwork. He also failed to disclose his role as chairman and CEO of the OneWest Foundation, an entity that is alleged to have made generous donations to groups that publicly endorsed OneWest's controversial purchase by CIT Group. He even failed to report that he had been chairman of IMB HoldCo, the holding company that he used to purchase IndyMac, the bank that he turned into OneWest. All told, after questions were raised by the Finance Committee's staff, Mr. Mnuchin disclosed that he held positions in an additional 14 entities that were not listed on his initial paperwork.

Here is an example of Mr. Mnuchin's failure to fully disclose his various investments. The Finance Committee requests that all nominees list ``the identity and value of all assets held, directly or indirectly, with a value in excess of $1,000.'' That is pretty straightforward. ``The identity and value of all assets held, directly or indirectly, with a value in excess of $1,000'' was to be disclosed. Mr. Mnuchin failed to do this as well. On his initial paperwork, committee staff noted that Mr. Mnuchin listed membership in a vacation resort in Mexico, but he didn't disclose any related property. That was only the first case of missing Mnuchin real estate. After questioning by committee staff, Mr. Mnuchin disclosed still more missing Mnuchin real estate--an additional $95 million in real estate holdings that had not been listed on his initial paperwork. The fact is, the committee had to take the time and ask the questions to track down these multimillion dollar properties, Mr. Mnuchin's unreported businesses, and his undisclosed business relationships.

Again, I am convinced that none of what I have described, these undisclosed assets--these substantial and undisclosed assets--would ever have been brought to light if it wasn't for the work of the committee's minority staff investigators. Yet despite these efforts, Mr. Mnuchin still has never produced the information requested by two members of the Finance Committee, Senators Casey and Brown, concerning the OneWest foreclosures.

My view is that this is another nominee who has the ethics alarm bell sounding. He has already misled the public. He appears to be concealing information requested by Members of this body, and his claim to fame is the cold and staggering efficiency with which his bank booted predatory lending victims out of their home. I just don't think this is the type of person who should lead the Treasury Department.

Because we will have further discussion on this, I simply close speaking about the kind of person I want to see head the Treasury Department. I note that I have supported a number of Republicans for this particular position in my time on the Finance Committee. I want the kind of person who is going to give everybody in America the opportunity to get ahead. We are going to have more discussion about taxes and particularly important in this role will be the Treasury Secretary's view of taxes.

We have a Tax Code that is really a tale of two systems. If you are a cop or a nurse in West Virginia or in Oregon, your taxes are compulsory. Once or twice a month your taxes are just lifted out of your paycheck because you are a working person. That is the way it works in West Virginia. That is the way it works in Oregon.

But if you have a battery of financial experts, it doesn't work that way. You can use that battery of financial experts to pay what you want, when you want to, and, maybe, not much at all. For this position I want somebody who feels passionately about giving everybody in America the opportunity to get ahead, who really understands what a priority it is to work to bring economic recovery to those communities dimmed by hardship and suffering folks. I know there are a number of people like that in the State of the Acting President pro tempore of the Senate, and there sure are a lot of them in my home State of Oregon. A lot of those rural communities just feel like they have been hit by a wrecking ball. That is the kind of Treasury Secretary I want-- a Treasury Secretary who gives everybody in America the opportunity to get ahead.

Thus far, I just don't see Mr. Mnuchin fitting that mold. We will go on to talk about other issues next week, particularly, his view with respect to taxes. We will have further discussion on it next week.

I urge my colleagues to oppose this nomination.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, before Senator King leaves the floor, let me just say, as one who ran the legal services for the elderly program in Oregon, that the Senator makes all of us in legal services proud tonight. Senator King has really put a face on what is at stake here in the way he has focused on the opioid scourge that is hammering areas from coast to coast. Rural health care--without rural health care, we can't have rural life. It is just that simple. Certainly when we get to the closing here in perhaps an hour and a half or so, we are going to get to the bottom line, as the Senator did. I think these changes take America back to the day where health care was for the healthy and wealthy.

So I thank the Senator for his passion and his commitment to his citizens, but also to the people of this country. Anybody in legal services tonight will be very proud, as I am, because what it is all about is standing up for people, and the Senator has said it very well.

Mr. President, we will be having our closing remarks here in perhaps an hour and a half or thereabouts. We have several Members of the Senate who are on their way for their remarks, and several Members of the Senate have discussed various elements of the serious and unanswered ethics questions surrounding Congressman Price's nomination. It is my view that these are issues that have set off loud ethical alarm bells.

I want to take a little bit more time to lay out the full story here.

The stock trades Congressman Price made while working on health care policy do, in fact, raise serious ethical and legal questions. None of Congressman Price's stock trades raise more questions than the hundreds of thousands of shares he bought in the obscure Australian biotech company known as Innate. His stock in this company is by far his largest of holdings, both in terms of the hundreds of thousands of shares he owns and the value of those shares, and that exceeds a quarter of a million dollars.

Congressman Price told the Finance Committee that he did not get a special deal. He told the Health, Education, Labor Committee that he did not get a special deal. But the fact is, Congressman Price paid bargain-basement prices for Innate stock in a private sale last August. The private stock sale was limited to a small group of well-connected American investors.

Congressman Price's participation has been described as a ``sweetheart deal'' by Kaiser Health News and a ``privileged, discounted offer'' by the Wall Street Journal.

As I said during his nomination hearing, Congressman Price's participation in the private stock sale showed bad judgment at best. At worst, it raised serious questions about whether he violated the STOCK Act or other security laws. I will take a minute to read section 3 of the STOCK Act. It says: ``Members of Congress . . . may not use nonpublic information derived from such person's position . . . or gained from the performance of such person's official responsibilities as a means for making a private profit.''

It is well known that Congressman Price learned about Innate from a House colleague, Congressman Chris Collins of New York. Collins is not just a casual reader of the Australian business pages; he is actually a member of the company's board and its largest shareholder.

This raises additional questions: Did Congressman Price have access to nonpublic information about Innate or its private stock because of his position as a Member of Congress? Did he get special access to the discounted private sale because of his position? Does he stand to profit because of the information or access he may have received?

Finally, did Congressman Price tell the Finance Committee the truth about how he learned about the private stock sales and the ability of typical investors to participate?

Congressman Price would have us believe that he decided to make these investments based on his own research into the company. That is what he told the Finance Committee.

Let me quote from the Wall Street Journal's article published January 30:

Mr. Price wasn't in line to buy shares in the last private

placement because he hadn't previously participated in

private fundraising rounds. . . . Mr. Price first invested in

the company a year ago, buying shares through the open market

on the Australian exchange. He learned about the company from

Mr. Collins, who holds a 17 percent stake in it. Mr. Collins

said Mr. Price is ``one of my friends'' and that he sits

``next to him'' on the House floor. . . . Mr. Price got it on

the discounted sale after Mr. Collins filled him in on the

company's drug trial, according to Mr. Collins.

The fact is, you don't just get in on a private stock offering by accident. As the Wall Street Journal explained, Congressman Price didn't originally even meet the criteria for participating in the 2016 private offering because he hadn't participated in any previous offerings. Yet he was able to buy over 400,000 shares of stock with Congressman Collins' help.

My view and the view of my Democratic colleagues is that Congressman Price failed to come clean with the Senate Finance Committee on the details of the special discounted deal. He has assured the committee he followed the law, but straightforward questions have been met with dodging, weaving, and obfuscation. Details of his purchase continue to emerge, and the public's understanding of his involvement continues to evolve.

Meanwhile, as scrutiny of the deal continues to mount, Innate's top executives are defending Congressman Price at the behest of his colleague Congressman Collins, who sits on the company's board of directors.

After the Wall Street Journal story was published, the company and Congressman Price went into spin control. The public knows this only because Congressman Collins made a mistake that everybody who uses email for work has seen made at least once: He mistakenly hit ``reply all'' when responding to an email from the company's CEO, Simon Wilkinson. Instead of a private note to Mr. Wilkinson, the note wound up going to a CNN reporter covering the story.

In the email, Congressman Collins, the company's top shareholder, said the Wall Street Journal was ``yellow journalism,'' and he thanked Innate's chief executive, Mr. Wilkinson, for defending Congressman Price and the company. According to CNN, Congressman Collins acknowledged the email to be authentic.

The Finance Committee's own experience with Innate only adds to the sense that there is a coverup as Republicans seek to race Congressman Price across the confirmation finish line.

The day after the Wall Street Journal story ran, I wrote my own letter to Innate's CEO, Mr. Wilkinson. I asked the company to respond to the article and the inconsistencies in Mr. Price's explanations and for documentation of details of the private stock sales. The company refused to answer my letter.

This looks to me like a coverup, and it ought to shake this body's confidence in Congressman Price's nomination. This situation, in my view, demands that further questions be asked and answered. Instead of taking time to explore these issues, Republicans took the unprecedented step of suspending the Finance Committee's rules to rush this nomination to the floor before any more questions could be asked, let alone answered.

In years past, as with the nominations of Senator Daschle, Secretary Geithner, and Ambassador Kirk, the Finance Committee left no stone unturned in the vetting process. Not this time. The majority party, in my view, is on its way to an ethical double standard to cut off the vetting process. That leaves me with a question for Congressman Price and my Republican colleagues in the Senate: What is there to hide?

Mr. President, before I continue, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the letter that I sent to Simon Wilkinson, chief executive of Innate, on January 31, 2017.

I would also refer my colleagues to the following news articles: ``Trump's HHS Nominee Got A Sweetheart Deal from A Foreign Biotech Firm,'' a story published by Kaiser Health News on January 13, 2017; ``Representative Tom Price Got Privileged, Discounted Offer on Biomedical Stock, Company Says,'' a story published by the Wall Street Journal on January 30, 2017; and ``In accidental `reply all' to reporter, Collins thanks CEO for defending HHS nominee,'' a story published by CNN on January 31, 2017.

Mr. President, I wish to now discuss what is known about the facts and timing of Congressman Price's investment in Innate. This is a timeline that is based on public documents, press reports, and information the nominee provided the Finance Committee.

If you have never heard of Innate until the last few weeks, you would be forgiven. The New York Times described it as a ``tiny pharmaceutical company from Australia that has no approved drugs and no backing from flashy venture capital firms.'' Innate has fewer than a dozen full-time employees. The company's stock was first listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in 2013, and until recently its market capitalization was well below $100 million. Innate has never generated revenue from drug sales. It has repeatedly teetered on the brink of running out of cash. It has just 2,500 shareholders. By way of comparison, a major American pharmaceutical company could have hundreds of thousands of shareholders.

Innate is planning to submit an investigational drug application to the Food and Drug Administration, and its ultimate goal is to one day sell itself to a large pharmaceutical manufacturer, which would take its early-stage experimental therapy to market.

What I am describing is, this company is the poster child for obscure companies. It is so small and so obscure, it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. So the question is, How did Congressman Price come to learn about this company, and how did he decide to make it the single largest investment in his sprawling portfolio of health care stocks? The answer is, the Congressman learned about Innate in 2014 during a conversation with his colleague, Congressman Collins of New York. As I indicated, Congressman Collins sits on Innate's board of directors. Congressman Collins is also the company's largest shareholder, holding 38 million shares. Congressman Collins' adult children, his chief of staff, and many of his political backers are also heavily invested in the company. I am going to touch on those issues in a few minutes.

According to disclosures with the House Ethics Committee, Congressman Price bought some 61,000 shares of Innate stock in 3 separate purchases during January of 2015. At the time, the stock was trading at roughly 10 cents a share. Congressman Price testified to the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that he directed his broker to make the January 2015 purchases.

Fast-forward to August 2016. Congressman Price bought another 400,000 shares of Innate as part of a private stock sale for U.S. investors. When the private sale took place, Innate's shares were trading on the Australian Stock Exchange for the equivalent of 31 American cents. Participants in the private sale got the shares at a deep discount.

In written testimony to the Finance Committee, Congressman Price said he paid 84,000 American dollars to buy the 400,000 shares. He bought 250,000 of those shares for 18 American cents per share in one private stock placement. He bought another 150,000 shares for 26 American cents each in a second private stock placement. Congressman Price's House Ethics Committee disclosures showed that he acquired the stock on August 31. On that day, Innate's stock was trading for the U.S. equivalent of 31 cents a share on the Australian Stock Exchange. In my book, that is a special deal.

The bottom line is that Congressman Price bought these shares for $40,000 less than an average investor would have paid to buy the same amount of stock off the open market. That is nearly 33 percent off the price on the Australian Stock Exchange at the time. Since that time, Innate's stock has more than doubled. These facts are not in dispute.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record Congressman Price's written testimony in response to my questions for the record as part of his nomination hearings.

I also refer my colleagues to the following news articles and documents: ``Australian Drug Maker has Low Profile but Powerful Backers in Washington,'' printed in the New York Times on January 13 of this year; ``Aussie shareholding puts heat on President's Ally,'' published in the Australian on February 6 of this year; the 2016 Annual Report to Shareholders of Innate; a periodic transaction report that Congressman Price filed with the House Ethics Committee on September 12, 2016; a list of the 20 largest investors in Innate dated January 17, 2017; and a stock price history of Innate.

I wish to turn to the issue of misleading testimony. What remains unresolved are major inconsistencies between Congressman Price's testimony to the Finance Committee, statements by Congressman Collins, and statements by Innate's CEO Simon Wilkinson published last week in the Wall Street Journal.

Simply put, Innate's chief executive and Congressman Collins, the company's top shareholder, provided one version of events to one of the world's most respected newspapers. Congressman Price provided a different version of events to the Finance Committee and the Health committee. These inconsistencies are among the reasons that Democrats boycotted last week's Finance Committee markup. The Senate has an obligation to know the truth about these transactions in order to protect the integrity of this body and its constitutional duty to consider executive branch nominees.

Now, with respect to exclusivity of the sale, Congressman Price told the Finance Committee that the August sale was available to all Innate shareholders, which contradicts what Innate's management told the Wall Street Journal. Congressman Price was definitive in his response to my question during the hearing.

Reading back the transcript, I said: ``Well, you purchased stock in an Australian company through private offerings at discounts not available to the public.''

Here is Congressman Price's response: ``Well, if I may, those--they were available to every single individual that was an investor at the time.''

That is not what Innate executives told the Wall Street Journal. Here is an extended passage from the Wall Street Journal:

Rep. Tom Price got a privileged offer to buy a biomedical

stock at a discount, the company's officials said, contrary

to his congressional testimony this month. . . .

The cabinet nominee is one of fewer than 20 U.S. investors

who were invited last year to buy discounted shares of the

company--an opportunity that, for Mr. Price, arose from an

invitation from a company director and fellow Congressman. .

. .

At Mr. Collins' invitation, Mr. Price in June ordered

shares discounted in the private placement at 18 cents

apiece, and then more in July at 26 cents a share, Mr.

Collins said in an interview. Those orders went through in

August, after board approval. Mr. Price invested between

$50,000 and $100,000 according to his disclosure form. . . .

Mr. Wilkinson said investors who had bought in a previous

private placement were called to ``make friends and family

aware of the opportunity. . . . We are always looking to

increase our shareholder base. But those new parties have to

meet the definition of sophisticated financial investor.''

Only six U.S. investors, including Mr. Price, fell into the

friends-and-family category, Mr. Collins said. About 10 more

U.S. investors were offered discounted shares by the company

because they previously had been invited to partake in

private placement offerings.

In other words, Congressman Price not only got a deal that wasn't publicly available, he was in a special group of six investors in a special category called ``friends-and-family,'' whereas other American investors got in on the private deal because they previously participated in the company's private placements. Congressman Price bypassed that requirement. He got in as what could only be called a special guest--a ``friends-and-family'' guest of his House colleague, Congressman Collins.

As I mentioned earlier, when I asked the company how Congressman Price was able to get this special status, the company refused to provide an explanation. The Wall Street Journal also reported a key distinction between U.S. investors and the company's shareholders in Australia and New Zealand. The paper reported:

The discounted stock offered in Innate Immuno, as the

company is known, was made to all shareholders in Australia

and New Zealand--but not in the United States, according to

Mr. Collins and confirmed in a separate interview with Innate

Immuno CEO Simon Wilkinson.

The Wall Street Journal's account is supported by company documents, specifically a ``Rights Issue Booklet'' that Innate published on June 10, 2016. The booklet noted that the shareholders would buy one new share for every nine shares they already own. The booklet noted that the shareholders would have ``the option to pay for their new shares in either Australian dollars or New Zealand dollars.'' The booklet goes on to describe the private stock sale in which Congressman Price participated. I will read briefly from the book:

In conjunction with this rights issue, Innate announced

that it also completed a private placement at an issue price

of U.S. 18 cents, raising U.S. $1.8 million.

The booklet states clearly that the private placement was announced on the June 10, 2016, the same day Innate announced the rights issue for investors in Australia and in New Zealand.

Our staff has reviewed all of the company's publicly available documents and found no similar advertisements for the private placement to American investors. So this paper trail pokes more holes in Congressman Price's argument that the private stock sale was open to all the company investors.

First off, the company didn't announce the existence of the private sale until after it already had been completed. So unless an investor was on the company's short list of go-to people, they were just excluded.

Second, the company's documents clearly show that Congressman Price and other participants in the private stock sale were able to buy far more discounted shares than the company's typical investors. Innate documents showed that the company restricted the number of shares the typical investor could buy in the rights issue to just one new share for every nine they already owned. No such limit appears to have been imposed on Congressman Price and the other American participants in the private stock sale. In fact, Congressman Price owned just over 60,000 shares at the time of the sale. His participation in the private stock sales allowed Congressman Price to buy 400,000 more shares. If Congressman Price had been held to the same rules as everyday investors, he would have been restricted to buying less than 7,000 shares.

The bottom line to me is what Congressman Price said was untrue. The deal Congressman Price got was not open to every other shareholder. And again, when I sent a letter last week to the Innate CEO, asking him to explain all of this, he declined. He told my staff that as an Australian firm, the company had no obligation to cooperate.

So to recap, Congressman Price told the Finance Committee and the Health Committee that the stock sales he participated in were open to all shareholders. That is not true. The private sale does not appear to have been widely marketed to American investors and was certainly not advertised in the company's public documents. The private sale reportedly included less than 20 American investors. Congressman Price was part of an even smaller subgroup known as friends and family, invited by other investors--in this case, by his House colleague, Congressman Collins. How many people were eligible to be in the friends and family group? Just six.

That brings me to the next issue, which is, How did Congressman Price learn about the special sale in the first place? Congressman Price told the Finance Committee his conversations with Congressman Collins had no influence on his investment decisions.

I am going to again quote from his written response to questions for the record asking Congressman Price to describe the communications with Congressman Collins regarding Innate. Congressman Price said:

I had a conversation with Representative Collins in the

fall of 2014 that brought Innate as a company to my

attention. The nature of the conversation did not, however,

influence my decision to invest in the company in either 2015

or 2016. I believe I had subsequent general communications

with Representative Collins regarding Innate. I do not have a

specific recollection of when those conversations occurred or

their substance. Any such communications did not impact my

investment decisions, however, because my

purchases of Innate were based solely on my own research.

I am going to quote again from the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Price got in on the discounted sale after Mr. Collins

filled him in on the company's drug trial, according to Mr.

Collins. Mr. Collins said he told Mr. Price of the additional

private placement. He said Mr. Price asked if he could

participate in it. ``Could you have someone send me the

documents,'' Mr. Collins recalled Mr. Price asking him.

Congressman Price wants us to believe that Congressman

Collins had no influence on the decision to buy Innate stock.

But Congressman Price would not have known about the company

in the first place if he hadn't talked to Congressman

Collins, and he wouldn't have known about the private

placements without hearing about them from Congressman

Collins.

Congressman Price characterizes his conversation with Congressman Collins in 2015 and 2016 as being general in nature. But again, according to the Wall Street Journal, Congressman Collins, one, told Congressman Price about the upcoming drug trial; two, alerted him to the private stock sale; and three, arranged to ensure that he could participate. To me, this seems like more than ``subsequent general communications with Congressman Collins regarding Innate'' as Congressman Price put it in his written response to the committee.

With respect to reporting to the committee and the Office of Government Ethics, I would just say that I think I described issues-- ethical issues--that are serious enough on their own. However, it took no small amount of effort to unravel Congressman Price's holdings in the company because he failed to fully disclose them to Federal ethics officials, the American people, and the Finance Committee. I don't believe this issue would have ever come to light if it were not for the work of the committee's minority investigations team.

On February 7, 2 days ago, Congressman Price sent a letter to the independent Federal ethics officials at the Office of Government Ethics that amended his original public ethics disclosure. This letter confirmed the suspicions of Finance Committee Democrats that Congressman Price's original ethics disclosure to the public understated the value of his Innate stock holding by roughly a quarter of a million dollars. Put another way, his stake in Innate was more than five times the figure initially reported to the American people.

Congressman Price's original disclosure reported that he owned less than $50,000 in Innate stock. At the time the disclosure was filed, by my calculation, his shares had a value of more than $250,000. Today his stake is valued at more than $300,000. Quite simply, it appears the shares he bought in the private stock sale in 2016 were excluded entirely from the Congressman's financial disclosure to the Office of Government Ethics. And because it is the Office of Government Ethics disclosure that is posted on a public Web site so the public can see the investment ties and investments the President's nominees hold, the American people, too, were kept in the dark about how much stock Congressman Price held in this company.

In addition, the Congressman was also less than forthcoming in his disclosure of the value of Innate holdings to the Finance Committee. In his response to the committee questionnaire, Congressman Price valued Innate stock he bought in the private sale between $50,000 to $100,000. However, that amount was based on the $84,000 discounted price the Congressman paid to buy his stocks in the August private stock sale. It was not based on the actual value of the stock on the Australian stock exchange--the true value of his holdings.

By December, when he made his disclosure to the Finance Committee, the stock price had nearly tripled and the shares he bought in those private sales were worth nearly $230,000. In other words, he told the committee that his private purchases were less than half the value they really were.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following items be printed in the Record: a memo from Finance Committee Staff to the Finance Committee, dated January 23 of this year, and a letter from Congressman Price to the Office of Government Ethics dated February 7, 2017, amending his public ethics disclosure.

I also refer my colleagues to the following documents: an announcement by Innate on June 10, 2016, entitled ``Private Placements and

Rights Issue to Raise Additional Working Capital,'' and the Public Financial Disclosure Report signed by Congressman Price on December 15, 2016, that was filed with the Office of Government Ethics.

I want to take a minute to return to the Innate company itself. I noted earlier that the company has put on a full court press to defend Congressman Price in recent weeks, as details of his special deal have come to light.

I am going to describe why that might be. Innate's executives have sought to portray the company as being a small firm from Down Under that has been inadvertently caught in political crossfire on the other side of the world. But the fact is that Innate has longstanding connections to Congressman Collins and his inner circle, a circle that includes Congressman Price. As the Australian City Newspaper wrote this week, ``Mr. Collins, his children and his `intimate political allies' and donors controlled at least 27.25 percent'' of Innate's voting shares.

Then there is the baffling assertion mailed by Mr. Wilkinson, the CEO, that he only recently learned of Congressman Price's existence through news articles. This is a stretch to believe and flies in the face of Congressman Price's own testimony.

On January 13, the New York Times reported:

Mr. Wilkinson and Michael Quinn, Innate's chairman, said

they had never heard of many of the company's more prominent

investors, and said they first learned that Mr. Price had

invested in the company from an article in the Wall Street

Journal, which first reported his investment.

On February 5, Mr. Wilkinson, the CEO of Innate, told the Buffalo News, ``I think the first time I heard that a gentleman named Tom Price had invested was after the U.S. media started reporting it.''

But Congressman Price was quite clear that he had communicated with Wilkinson. In written testimony, responding to questions for the record, he said: I also communicated with Simon Wilkinson of Innate regarding my interest in participating in the 2016 private placement of company stock. According to Innate's Web site, Mr. Wilkinson is currently the managing director and CEO of the company.

Congressman Price's name was also listed twice in the documents of the company, which reported the private stock sale participants to the Australian stock exchange last summer. Congressman Price also appeared to have bought nearly 5 percent of the discounted shares made available in the private stock sale. Given all that, it seems difficult to believe Mr. Wilkinson's story that he had no idea who Congressman Price was.

Finally, The Australian, the Sydney paper I just mentioned, reported on Monday that Innate and Congressman Collins are facing questions about possible violations of Australia corporation law with regard to his holdings in the company. So why does this matter? It matters because a nominee to be a Cabinet Secretary, Congressman Price, was brought into this web of questionable stock transactions and obfuscations about just how special the special deal he really got was by a company insider, his friend, Congressman Collins.

As I get ready to close, I refer my colleagues to the following articles and documents: ``Congressman Collins under fire for `suspicious' stock trades,'' published in the Buffalo News on January 17 of this year; ``Collins shared biotech stock news with big Buffalo names,'' again from the Buffalo News on January 19; ``Collins' controversial stock venture could be boom or bust,'' from the Buffalo News on February 5 of this year; the Notice of Innate's 2016 Annual Meeting and Explanatory Statement filed on July 29 of 2016; documents filed by Innate on September 12, 2016, and September 26, 2016, reporting results of the 2016 private stock placement.

As we close, I want to return to section 3 of the STOCK Act. It says:

Members of Congress . . . may not use nonpublic information

derived from such person's position . . . or gained from the

performance of such person's official responsibilities as a

means for making a private profit.

So did Congressman Price have access to nonpublic information about Innate or its private stock sale because of his position as a Member of Congress? I believe the answer is yes.

Did he get special access to the discounted private sale because of his position? I believe the answer is yes.

Does he stand to profit because of the information or access he may have received? I believe the answer is yes.

Finally, did Congressman Price tell the Finance Committee and the HELP Committee the truth about how he learned about the private stock sale and the ability of average investors to participate? Congressman Price told the Finance Committee and the HELP Committee that the special stock deal he got in on was open to everyone.

According to the Wall Street Journal and company documents, that is not true. The deal he got was clearly different than what was offered to everyday investors. According to the Journal, his previous purchase of Innate stock did not qualify him to participate in the private placement without being a specially invited friends and family guest. This arrangement allowed Congressman Price to buy more shares than other investors were allowed to buy.

Congressman Price told the Finance Committee that his conversations with Congressman Collins, again, a director of the company, its largest shareholder, had no influence on his investment decisions. According to the Journal, this is not true. The Journal report made clear that Congressman Collins told him about the upcoming drug trial, alerted him to the private stock sale, and arranged to ensure he could participate.

Now the majority party has shut down the vetting process, allowing Congressman Price's nomination to reach the floor before all the facts have come into view. I believe the Senate can do better. It needs to do better. The American people are owed better.

I thank my colleagues, particularly Senator Reed, for his patience and his courtesy.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, the debate on Congressman Price's nomination, in my view, is a referendum on the future of health care in America.

On this side of the aisle, we think it is worth spending 30 hours talking about a subject this important to our people. My view is that this is about whether the United States is going to go back to the dark days when health care worked only for the healthy and the wealthy.

Based on the public record, Medicare is a program Congressman Price does not believe in, and it offers a guarantee of services he doesn't believe seniors should have.

On the Affordable Care Act, he is the architect of repeal and run. He wrote the bill himself. He proposed weakening protections for Americans with preexisting conditions. He would shred the health care safety net--Medicaid--for the least fortunate among us. He would take away health care choices for women, particularly the opportunity to go to the physician that they trust.

As we wrap up and get ready to vote, think about the common thread among these proposals: They take away coverage from our people, make health care coverage more expensive for millions of people, or both. That is what Congressman Price stands for when it comes to health care. Every Senator who casts a vote for Congressman Price has to stand by that agenda.

Beyond what this means for the future of American health care policy, there is the lingering spectre, as I have discussed tonight in detail, of serious legal and ethical issues. Congressman Price got special access to a special deal on stock in an Australian biomedical company. He claimed multiple times before Senate committees that the deal he got on discounted company stock was open to all shareholders. All the evidence--all the evidence--says that this is untrue.

First, he had to go through the back door to get access to the discounted price. He got a special friends-and-family invite from his colleague in the House, Congressman Chris Collins, the company's top shareholder and a member of its board.

Second, rules that apply to other investors didn't apply to Congressman Price. Other shareholders were bound by a limit. They were able to buy one discounted share for every nine they already owned. That would have allowed Congressman Price to buy just 7,000 discounted shares. He bought 400,000 discounted shares. In my view, he can't get around that. That is the definition of a special stock deal.

The Congressman introduced legislation that would have lowered the tax bills of three major pharmaceutical companies in which he owns stock. He invested $15,000 in a medical equipment company and then introduced legislation to increase the amount Medicare pays for that type of equipment. Parts of his bill went on to become law. He bought thousands of dollars' worth of stock in a company called Zimmer Biomet less than a week before introducing legislation that had the potential to drive up the value of those shares. Now he has argued that he didn't purchase the stocks; his broker did. But at the very least, he would have known about those deals within days of the purchase when he filed the periodic transaction reports in the House. Under his brokerage agreement, he could have quickly resold the stock, but he did not. Furthermore, he didn't consult with the Ethics Committee regarding any of the trades I have spoken about as directed by the House Ethics Manual.

As I wrap up, I want to put a human face on why so many Senators on this side of the aisle have come to the Senate floor to speak so passionately about their grave concerns with this nomination. Nothing sums up our concerns more clearly than a line from an op-ed Congressman Price wrote in 2009 that discusses Medicare. His quote speaks volumes about his perspective on this program.

It is a lifeline. I first became acquainted with it back in the days when I was codirector of the Oregon Gray Panthers, ran the legal aid program for older people. I saw then that seniors were walking on an economic tightrope, balancing their food bill against their fuel bill, their fuel bill against the rent bill. They saw Medicare as one of the great achievements in American policymaking.

Here is what the Congressman wrote--his words, not mine: ``Nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare.'' When I read that, I was reflecting on my Gray Panther days, and I think a lot of other Senators go back working with community organizations. We just heard a wonderful presentation from Senator King, who was also a legal services advocate.

Before Medicare, before this program that Congressman Price thinks is such a negative intrusion into medicine, a lot of older people were warehoused in poor farms. I am absolutely certain that Congressman Price doesn't want to go back to those days, but when he speaks about the involvement of Medicare in American health care as though a plague has descended on the land, we just have to question his commitment to a program that has become a lifeline to millions of older people.

The fact is, Medicare has always been a promise. That is what we said back in the early days with the senior citizens. Medicare was a promise. It was a promise of guaranteed benefits. Again, based on the public record, Medicare is a program Congressman Price doesn't believe in, and it offers a guarantee of services he doesn't think seniors ought to have.

He has said he wants to voucherize the program within the first 6 to 8 months of the administration. What we are talking about when you want to do that is you are breaking the promise of Medicare. You are breaking the promise of guaranteed benefits, and you are going to sort of hand people a piece of paper and say here is your voucher, I

hope it works for you. If your medical expenses are greater than your vouchers, that is the way it goes, tough luck.

The price budget cut Medicare by nearly $1 million. By the way, that is exactly the opposite of the Trump pledge, not to cut Medicare that the American people heard on the campaign trail. There is a big gap between what President Trump said about Medicare and the bills and legislative efforts of Congressman Price in the other body--big gap. That is why it sure looks to me like the promise of Medicare is one that Congressman Price would break.

By the way, we all ought to understand that if confirmed, Congressman Price would be the captain of the Trump health care team. What he says matters, and what he offered--legislatively, his positions and his votes. He voted again and again to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

It really matters what his past record is. If past is prologue, it is certainly relevant. It really matters. He was the architect of what amounted to repeal and run. He wrote legislation creating loopholes in the protection for those with preexisting conditions, and the big beneficiary there was clearly the major insurance companies.

Women would find it much harder to make the health care choices they want and see the doctors they trust if the price proposals were lost. Medicaid pays 65 percent of the nursing home bill in America. And on this side of the aisle, we are going to fight Congressman Price's block grant proposals that are going to put seniors at risk.

I am going to close with this. I always hope I am wrong when I raise the prospects of real threats to the welfare of the American people because the reason public service was important to me was because of those first days with the Gray Panthers. I never thought I would have that kind of wonderful opportunity; that I would have had this opportunity for public service. For me and so many on this side of the aisle--I see my colleagues who have been active in their communities-- this has always been about the welfare of the American people. That is what it is about--all those faces we see when we are home, having community meetings and getting out with our people.

The public record in this case indicates that as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Congressman Price would, in fact, be an extraordinary threat to seniors on Medicare, vulnerable older people who need Medicaid for access to nursing homes, millions of kids for whom Medicaid is the key to a healthy future, and women across the country who have a right to see the doctors they trust.

I am going to oppose this nomination. I urge my colleagues to join me in opposition.

Mr. President, I wish to take a few minutes to address Congressman Price's stock purchases. At best, this is behavior that cuts ethical corners. At worst it is dangerously close to outright insider trading. Congressman Price has a lot of questionable trading activity. He introduced legislation that would lower the tax bills of three major pharmaceutical companies he owned significant amounts of stock in. He invested $15,000 dollars in a medical equipment company then introduced legislation to increase the amount Medicare pays for that type of equipment. Parts of his bill went on to become law.

But let's look at one investment in particular, Congressman Price's investment in Zimmer Biomet. Zimmer is a medical device company that specializes in joint replacements, including knee, hip, shoulder, and foot and ankle replacements.

Hip and knee replacements are high cost procedures, and they are two of the most common procedures performed on Medicare patients. According to CMS, more than 400,000 hip and knee replacement procedures were performed in 2014, costing more than $7 billion for the hospitalizations alone. Despite the high frequency of these surgeries, costs vary widely across geographic areas, and complications like infections or implant failures after surgery can be three times higher at some facilities.

In November 2015, in an attempt to incentivize higher quality procedures for Medicare recipients and control the cost of these replacements, CMS finalized a new pricing model slated to be implemented in April 2016. This new pricing model was a cost-bundling payment model; instead of Medicare paying for each individual service, Medicare reimburses hospitals with a single lump-sum payment, allowing hospitals to coordinate overall care for the patient.

These changes were designed to incentivize improved care for patients, lowering costs and improving quality. However, according to independent analysts, medical device companies, especially those who specialize in orthopedic implants, could face ``material headwinds'' from the new pricing model since hospitals facing reimbursement pressures are likely to pass some of that burden onto those device companies.

In September 2015, Congressman Price led an effort to send a letter from members of the House of Representatives to CMS challenging many of the features of the CMS proposal. A copy of the letter, dated September 21, 2015, is available on the Congressman's website.

This is where Zimmer Biomet comes in. Zimmer is a medical device manufactrurer with significant exposure to the new pricing model. According to analysts, over 60 percent of Zimmer's revenues come from hip and knee devices, and the CMS guidelines had the potential to significantly affect the company's profits.

On March 17, 2016, a few weeks before the CMS model was set to go into effect, Congressman Price bought thousands of dollars worth of Zimmer Biomet stock through his brokerage account. On March 23, 2016, less than a week later, Congressman Price introduced H.R. 4848, the ``HIP Act,'' which would have delayed the implementation of CMS regulations for Medicare coverage of joint replacements.

Let's pause right here. In 2016, Congressman Price had a financial stake in one of the companies that stood to benefit most from the legislation he was promoting. Those basic facts are not in dispute. Congressman Price introduced legislation that had the potential to add to his personal fortune.

Now, various arguments have been made, by Congressman Price and others, to defend this activity. First is the argument that there wasn't much money at stake, just a few thousand dollars. But the truth is a few thousand dollars is a lot of money to a lot of Americans. An unexpected medical bill that size could have a serious effect on many Americans and the person in charge of our health care system should take that amount of money just as seriously.

Second, there is the argument that he didn't purchase the stock; his stockbroker purchased it. I am going to return to that issue in more detail in a moment, but one thing is clear. That is the fact that Congressman Price knew this stock had been purchased in his name, in his account, within a matter of days.

On April 15, 2016, Congressman Price filed what is called a Periodic Transaction Report which Members of Congress are required to do within 30 days of reportable stock purchase. Not only did Congressman Price file a report that he had purchased Zimmer Biomet along with dozens of other stocks, he initialed the entry for Zimmer Biomet in order to correct a mistake on the document; a correction making it clear that the Zimmer Biomet transaction was a stock purchase.

There is also the question of whether this activity violated House Ethics rules. Congressman Price also said, in answer to written questions, that ``no conflict existed and no consultation was necessary.'' He also said, ``Throughout my time as a Member of the [House], I have abided by and adhered to all ethics and conflict of interest rules applicable to me.''

He gave the same answer regarding three other bills that appear to conflict with investments he held: H.R. 4185, the Protecting Access through Competitive-pricing Transition Act of 2015, the PACT Act; H.R. 5400, a bill pertaining to tax rates in Puerto Rico, which would have likely impacted drug manufacturers he owned Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Amgen; H.R. 5210, the Patient Access to Durable Medical Equipment (PADME) Act of 2016.

Let's go through that in some detail.

It is true that the House Ethics rules, like the Senate Ethics rules, allow a

member to cast a vote on a matter relating to a company in which he or she owns stock. However, that standard only applies to casting votes. If you do more, and become an active advocate of a bill that could benefit a company that you own stock in, a different standard applies.

On page 237 of the House Ethics Manual, it says that before undertaking active advocacy of legislation that will benefit a company in which a member owns stock, such as before introducing a bill, ``the Member should first contact the [Ethics] Committee for guidance.''

The Ethics Manual is crystal clear. If you go beyond voting, and you are actively pushing a bill that would benefit a company in which you own stock, you should consult with the Ethics Committee.

Congressman Price did not consult with the Ethics Committee regarding any of these trades.

In a written question, I asked Congressman Price about this. I asked whether, in light of the House Ethics Manual's recommendation, he had consulted with the Ethics Committee regarding his purchase of Zimmer Biomet and other stocks. He did not answer the question. Instead, he resorted to the same talking point--that the Zimmer Biomet stock was purchased by his broker and that there was not need to consult because there was no conflict.

By my reading, this interpretation is flat wrong. Under the House Manual, he should have consulted with the Ethics Committee.

To be clear, the Ethics Committee might have concluded that it was a relatively small purchase, and that Congressman Price's advocacy was consistent with his longstanding position, and therefore that it was fine for him to go ahead and purchase the stock and then introduce the bill. On the other hand, the Ethics Committee might have reached a very different conclusion. It might have advised him to refrain from purchasing the stock.

The public will never know, because he didn't ask. Despite the clear guidance in the House Ethics Manual, he didn't even ask. And now the majority party is carrying his nomination toward the finish line.

Apart from conforming with House Ethics rules, there is also the question of whether Congressman Price's activity violated insider trading laws. Lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have a duty of public trust. The STOCK Act, which Congressman Price and I both voted for in 2012, and longstanding SEC rules denote that Members of Congress have a fiduciary duty to the American people. What that means is that we will use the public power we've been granted to benefit the interests of all Americans. The SEC's Rule 10b5, in particular, prohibits the purchase or sale of stock on the basis of material nonpublic information.

As a threshold matter, Congressman Price claims that insider trading laws don't apply to him because the Zimmer Biomet stock was purchased by his broker without his knowledge. But as I've discussed at length, this argument is a red herring because Congressman Price did have knowledge of these trades. He submitted signed records of the trades shortly after they were made. Furthermore, the laws related to insider trading give clear guidance on how to trade through a broker without violating insider trading laws. And just as with the House Ethics rules, when faced with clear guidance on how to manage conflicts of interest, Congressman Price chose not to follow it.

Whether those stocks were purchased directly or through a broker is not, by itself, a defense to insider trading. According to SEC rules, Congressman Price and his broker needed to agree to a ``written plan for trading securities'' that does not ``permit the person to exercise subsequent influence over when, how, or whether to effect purchases or sales of securities.'' So, if Congressman Price had, in writing, given his broker complete control over his portfolio we wouldn't be discussing this issue today. But he did not do so.

Congressman Price returned to the ``my broker did it'' defense for weeks before finally providing the Finance Committee with an excerpt of his brokerage agreement.

Here's what it says:

In the Portfolio Management (``PM'') program, a Financial

Advisor(s) who meets the program certification requirements

manages your assets on a discretionary basis. In other words,

your Financial Advisor, and not you, has the discretion to

decide what securities to buy and sell in your account. This

discretion is subject to the parameters described below and

your ability to direct a sale of any security for tax or

other reasons.

In the course of our investigation, committee staff spoke with experts, and they confirmed what seems obvious from the plain language of the text. This agreement does not hand over complete control of Congressman Price's portfolio to his broker. His agreement with his broker simply does not shield him from insider trading laws, no matter how many times he tries to say it does.

This isn't a question of whether Congressman Price followed the technical letter of the law, he didn't follow it in spirit either. Congressman Price could direct his broker to make trades when he wanted to, and he did. Case in point, when Congressman Price wanted to act on a stock tip from Congressman Collins, he called up his broker and had her buy shares of an Australian biomedical firm called Innate Immunotherapeutics.

Another question raised by Congressman Price's conflicts of interest is whether they go beyond a violation of the public's trust and constitute an outright violation of insider trading laws. That question cannot be answered today. We have seen that time and time again that Congressman Price purchased stocks then turned around and promoted legislation that would help those companies, and his investments in them. What is not clear is whether the introduction of this legislation meets the legal standards of being ``material'' and ``nonpublic.'' Neither case history, nor the legislative history of the STOCK Act provide clear guidance on when pending legislation is material and nonpublic.

The bottom line is that Congressman Price's activities are in uncharted waters. That is why the public and members of this body ought to be outraged that the majority party has cut off the vetting process and rushed this nomination toward completion.

In my view, because of how this nomination was handled, the Senate Finance Committee has set a double standard. If you look to the recent past at the nominations of Senator Tom Daschle, Secretary Tim Geithner and Ambassador Ron Kirk at the outset of the Obama administration, the vetting process was extremely thorough and bipartisan. The committee turned over every stone, peered around every corner and followed every lead to its conclusion. Now, when a glaring issue comes up that undeniably deserves investigation, the party in power has shut down the vetting process. The Finance Committee and the Senate ought to do better.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, before I begin my remarks, I want to make sure that everyone understands that Senator Murray has been on this floor hour after hour for a reason; that is, these nominations are enormously important. This one is right at the heart of what families and parents and communities want because it deals with education.

I heard that again this weekend. I had three townhall meetings, mostly in rural areas. We had record turnouts. As Senator Murray knows, Oregon and Washington have been pounded in the last few weeks with bad weather--had to fly all night to get back for this debate. Everybody said how important this was because they understand what Betsy DeVos, if she is confirmed, would mean for our country.

I want to start by putting a focus on this issue around what Oregonians are particularly concerned about this morning. They are concerned, when we talk about education, about boosting our high school graduation rates. Parents, teachers, and communities are all

mobilized. I want to start my remarks by saying that I know people across the country are concerned about this. We worked very closely with Senator Murray and Senator Alexander on this.

The reason that Oregonians feel so strongly is that we have been first in so many areas, for example, protecting our natural treasures, but we are not where we want to be in terms of high school graduation rates. For communities across Oregon, the business community, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Independents--you name it--it is top priority business for our State to improve high school graduation rates. That is because we understand that getting those graduation rates up is crucial to making sure that young people can be better prepared for their next step, whether that is college, whether it is the workforce--anything they want to do.

I want to start my remarks with respect to the DeVos nomination very specifically. I do not believe improving high school graduation rates can be built on a foundation of alternative facts. Yet that is what Betsy DeVos has been promoting. For example, she recently told the Senate that graduation rates at virtual private schools--private schools which she has invested in--were almost twice as high as the actual graduation rates at those schools.

She said that at the Nevada Virtual Academy there was a graduation rate of 100 percent. The actual graduation rate is 57 percent. She claimed that at the Ohio Virtual Academy there was a graduation rate of 92 percent. The actual rate is 46 percent.

I think this pretty much qualifies as a set of alternative facts. At home, at the kinds of townhall meetings I had this weekend, people would probably call them four-Pinocchio falsehoods and ideological hocus-pocus. The alternative facts may be the DeVos way, but they aren't the Oregon way.

As I said to Oregonians this weekend--we had teachers and community leaders come to these meetings--what we do is operate on something we call the Oregon way. The Oregon way is about Democrats and Republicans, people of all philosophies. We had great Republican Governors--Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield--who also served in this body and were independent. We want fresh, practical approaches.

We focused on our ideas that work, ideas that get results, and we focus not on alternative facts but on the truth. What I heard again this weekend at home is that we are bringing together teachers in the classrooms and parents and community leaders and trying to determine what are the key factors in why students are not graduating. At home people are asking, how do you get results? What actually is going to work in the classroom and at our schools? Educators and principals tell me that mentoring programs work. They tell me at home that summer learning programs work. They point out the track record of afterschool programs, and they have the facts to back them up. These facts aren't alternative facts. They are not inflated graduation rates, the way Betsy DeVos told the Senate. These are based on actual studies: Studies that have shown that youth--especially at-risk youth--with mentors are more likely to join extracurricular activities, take on leadership roles at school, or volunteer in their communities. Afterschool and summer learning programs, again, have very solid track records, providing a safe place to learn and keeping low-income and at-risk youngsters on a path towards graduation.

Those same educators have told me in my townhalls that they oppose elevating Betsy DeVos to a job with the important responsibility of steering the future of our Nation's children. The reason they have expressed these views is much like what I have stated to the Senate; and that is, that the evidence--not alternative facts but hard evidence--doesn't back up many of the judgments Betsy DeVos has made in guiding her work in this field.

In Oregon, citizens--thousands of them--worry that the confirmation of Betsy DeVos is going to make it harder to help students succeed in the classroom and graduate from high school. This graduation rate for us in Oregon--and I am sure we are not alone--takes on a new and important urgency because of the changes that were made last year-- bipartisan changes Senators Murray and Alexander made to pass the Every Student Succeeds Act. The whole point of this bill was because, of course, there was great frustration across the country with No Child Left Behind, the predecessor.

I remember at one point illustrating the frustration with that law. We had a wonderful school in rural Oregon with mostly low-income youngsters and mostly minority youngsters. They worked like crazy. Their parents were very involved. Their teachers rolled up their sleeves, and they were doing well at getting their test scores up. At one point, we were told they were going to be labeled a failing school, because, apparently, for a short period of time, a number of youngsters had the flu, and so the attendance rate wasn't what it should be. Those were the kinds of stories that illustrated why it was so important to fix No Child Left Behind and focus on approaches that work.

It is my view that what Senator Murray and Senator Alexander did with respect to bipartisan leadership was to work for an important bill-- important for the future of students, important for their ability to get a job and do what they want in their years ahead. When you have a bipartisan bill that the President has signed into law, replacing failed education policies, and giving teachers more control over their classrooms, you ought to move quickly and boldly to carry out that law. That law included a provision that I wrote to help high schools with low graduation rates turn around student achievement by putting the most disadvantaged students on a path to success. It allows local educators--this isn't run by Washington, DC. I am always hearing that everybody is talking about having it run from Washington, DC. That is not what I voted for. What I voted for--and the majority of Senators voted for--was a fresh approach allowing local educators to promote and expand programs and policies that actually work in their community. They recognized that what works in Coos Bay or Roseburg, OR, may not necessarily work in Tallahassee.

We wrote a bipartisan bill to come up with approaches tailored to what local educators want to pursue. Now as we are moving to see this law implemented in the States and as schools across the country are moving to implementation, it is more important than ever that the Senate get this right, that we get it right now, and that we use approaches grounded in the facts and grounded in the reality of public education. My concern is that--based on Betsy DeVos's record, which I have looked at in length--bipartisan work could be undercut by a system that has not been shown to improve academic outcomes for students.

In Detroit, Mrs. DeVos has spent years advocating for a voucher system that gives taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools. Her efforts have essentially left public schools to do more for their students with less of the funding they desperately need. I was on a program this morning, a radio program. They were discussing the views of various Senators on this. I heard discussion of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle describing the fact that they were supportive of Mrs. DeVos because they thought her unconventional approaches and her fresh ideas were a real advantage in her having this position.

I don't take a back seat to anybody in terms of being for unconventional approaches. I think it would be fair to say that pretty much most of my time in public life has been defined by taking unconventional approaches. So I welcome new ideas from people who have not been involved in government--and ideas that, frankly, are out of the box, that are unconventional. But they still have to be based on hard evidence that they are going to work.

We are trying fresh approaches in Medicare, for example. The idea is that Medicare today is no longer the Medicare of 1965. It is all about chronic disease--cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and strokes. A big bipartisan group of us here in the Senate have written bipartisan legislation to try a very different approach--certainly unconventional--but it is grounded on the facts. It is grounded on what we know about taking care of folks at home and on the benefits of telemedicine.

So that is why I am opposing the DeVos nomination. It is not because

Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my postcloture debate time to Senator Schumer. I want to thank Senator Thune for his courtesy.

Mr. President, as the Senate begins to consider the Price nomination, I wanted to see if I could put a little perspective on the upcoming debate.

Focusing on bipartisanship has always been important to me. I know many of my colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee, on the Democratic side, share that view, and in 2009, the nominations of Democrats Tom Daschle, Tim Geithner, and Ron Kirk were all handled in a bipartisan way.

Issues came up in the vetting process in each of these cases, and both sides of the committee took the investigation seriously. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in 2017.

While Congressman Price served on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, he traded in health care stocks, pushed policies that helped his portfolio, and got special access to a promising stock deal.

I asked the congressman directly in his Finance Committee hearing whether he got a special deal. He said that he did not.

I don't think you could be much clearer than the following passage from a recent report by a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He wrote: ``Rep. Tom Price got a privileged offer to buy a biomedical stock at a discount, the company's officials said, contrary to his congressional testimony this month.''

I want to repeat that because I think it goes right to the heart of why Finance Committee Democrats feel that the effort to do the vetting necessary with respect to Congressman Price is not completed.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Wall Street Journal--I will just read it again--wrote: ``Rep. Tom Price got a privileged offer to buy a biomedical stock at a discount, the company's officials said, contrary to his congressional testimony this month.''

So, as I indicated, my Democratic colleagues and I on the committee said it was important to take more time to look into this issue. But the majority, when we said we needed to take more time to look at it, decided to look the other way. That is the first reason for concern on my side.

The second is how Congressman Price would manage Health and Human Services, a Department that is really all about people: services for seniors, services for the poor, for the disabled, for children, and for families. These are the powerful threads of our safety net. If the safety net is not there for those who have nowhere else to turn, those poor will suffer greatly.

Now, the debate on Congressman Price's nomination, in my view, is a referendum on the future of health care in America. In short, it is a debate about whether it makes sense for our country to go back to the dark days when health care worked only for the healthy and the wealthy.

Based on the public record, Medicare is a program Congressman Price doesn't believe in, and it guarantees services he doesn't believe seniors should have.

On the Affordable Care Act, he is the architect of repeal and run. He wrote the bill himself. He proposed weakening protections for Americans with preexisting conditions. He would slash Medicaid, shredding the health care safety net for the least fortunate in our country. He would take away health care choices for women across the country.

Look for the common thread, Mr. President and colleagues, among the Price proposals. They take away coverage for our people and make health care more expensive for individuals or both. That is where Congressman Price stands when it comes to American health care.

Every Senator who casts a vote for Congressman Price has to stand by that agenda. Beyond what this means for the future of American health care, there is the lingering specter of serious legal and ethical issues.

Tonight and in the hours ahead, this debate is going to tackle each of those issues and more. As it gets underway, I am going to begin with Medicare.

In my view, Medicare has been a historic achievement in the way policy is made in our country. In any debate like this one, I recall my days when I was the codirector of the Oregon Gray Panthers, when I worked with seniors who couldn't imagine life without Medicare. But I will tell you, they told me stories about what it was like for their grandparents when there wasn't Medicare. There were poor farms-- literally, poor farms--where older people who had served our country in the Armed Forces very often spent their last days in what amounted to squalor at these poor farms. Then Medicare came along. For millions of older people, it was a godsend.

So I want to start my discussion with respect to Medicare with a comment that Congressman Price made about Medicare in 2009. It is a quote that speaks volumes about the Price perspective on the Medicare program that is so treasured by millions of older people.

Congressman Price wrote in 2009: ``Nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare.''

I would just say to my friend, the Presiding Officer of the Senate knows how seniors in Oregon see this. Seniors in Oregon consider Medicare to be a Godsend, not an intrusion into medicine, as you see from the Price perspective.

Here is the bottom line, colleagues, as we begin here today: Medicare is a promise. Medicare is built on a promise of guaranteed benefits-- guaranteed benefits that will be there for you. It is not a voucher. It is not a slip of paper. It is guaranteed benefits that you can count on, and it is a promise that Congressman Price has indicated--and it is a matter of public record--it is a promise that Congressman Price is more than willing to break.

It is a promise that when you turn 65, you will be guaranteed health care benefits regardless of your economic station in life or the status of your health. And the reason Medicare was built with this special guarantee is straightforward: No American knows how healthy they will be when they reach age 65. Perhaps you are a marathoner at age 50 and you develop arthritis or Alzheimer's or cancer a decade and a half later. Furthermore, no one knows what the economy is going to look like years ahead or decades ahead into the future. For the less fortunate, high inflation or a stock market crash could all but wipe out what they set aside over a lifetime of work. Seniors could find their benefits exposed to new danger every time there is a financial downturn.

During the recent campaign, the American people heard a standard Trump pledge: No cuts to Medicare. But when you look at the Price record and the promise of President Trump, there is a big gap between the two. When you look at Congressman Price's plan, it is clear that the Trump pledge was on the ropes the minute he was nominated. In fact, Congressman Price said that he wants to voucherize Medicare within the first 6 to 8 months of the administration. Let me repeat that again.

Mr. President, some of these statements that the Congressman has made are so far-fetched that once in a while I am going to have to repeat them so that people really get a sense of why we are so concerned.

Congressman Price said he wants to voucherize Medicare within the first 6 to 8 months of the administration. So what that would mean is that right out of the chute, the Medicare promise, the promise of guaranteed benefits--Congressman Price wants to break the promise. In his budget, the Congressman called for privatizing Medicare and cutting it by nearly $500 billion.

He also championed legislation to allow a practice called balanced billing in Medicare. That means seniors could be forced to cover extra charges above what the program pays for the services they receive in the doctor's office. Older Americans on fixed incomes would be forced to pay more for their care.

Colleagues, I believe the Congress has no greater duty than to uphold the promise of Medicare. In my view, there is no need to mince words: Privatizing Medicare as Congressman Price has thought to do means an end--an end to the program-guaranteed health benefit. It would break the Medicare promise, the promise of guaranteed benefits and services, and end Medicare as our country knows it.

Now let me turn to the Affordable Care Act. When it comes to the Affordable Care Act, for years now, there has been a steady drumbeat coming from my colleagues on the other side: Repeal and replace. Repeal and replace. I think it has gotten to the point where children sing it almost as a jingle. Repeal and replace. It has been said so many times. A government shutdown all built around that slogan--repeal and replace.

At one point, the President-elect said repeal and replace would happen, in his words, ``simultaneously.'' Shortly before inauguration, he said they would come within the same hour, and he said Congressman Price was writing the replacement plan and it was nearly ready to be unveiled.

But the public heard a different story during Congressman Price's Finance Committee hearing. At that hearing, our colleague Senator Brown of Ohio asked: The President said he is working with you on a replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act, which is nearly finished, and it will be revealed after your confirmation; is that true?

That was the question posed by Senator Brown to Congressman Price.

The Congressman said: It is true that he said that, yeah--that he said that, yeah. A moment later he added, ``I have had conversations with the President about health care, yes.''

So if anybody is waiting for the curtain to rise on the Price replacement plan, it sounds like you are going to have to wait a while longer. In fact, the President said this weekend, just this weekend, Americans might have to wait until next year to see the replacement, but the uncertainty about what comes next sure hasn't slowed down the charge of many toward repeal. In fact, the President issued a day one Executive order instructing the executive branch to roll back the Affordable Care Act in any way possible.

So I thought given these developments, the fact that Congressman Price is the architect of a repeal-and-run bill; that the President immediately on day one tried to set in motion a strategy to gut some of the key protections in the Affordable Care Act, I thought I ought to follow this up with Congressman Price during his nomination hearing in the Finance Committee. So I asked Congressman Price during his finance nomination hearing whether the Congressman would state that nobody would be worse off under the President's Executive order--not real complicated.

There had been all this talk through the campaign about how now President Trump could do a better job, less money. That was the constant refrain. I decided, given these ominous developments that I just described since the beginning of this year, I thought I would just ask Congressman Price whether anybody would be worse off under the Executive order. He ducked the question.

I remember asking him about whether people would be worse off with respect to coverage, and I remembered he said something about how people would have access to health care. Well, I will tell you, hearing the word ``access'' rather than ``coverage'' means that

somebody is walking back a commitment to people really getting care. Everybody pretty much can have access. Sure, if I had the money, I could get it. It is about coverage. So we asked Congressman Price whether people would be worse off and he ducked the question.

So then I asked if he would commit that no one would lose coverage, and he ducked once more.

Then I asked if he would commit to holding off on implementing the Executive order until a replacement plan was enacted. He ducked.

So the Congressman was given an opportunity to, in effect, say that he would honor what the American people were told by President Trump in the campaign; that the two would be hand in hand, the replacement and repeal would go hand in hand, but he had the chance to say that at the nomination hearing and he ducked and ducked and he ducked some more.

Americans are still being told that the Affordable Care Act is the problem and it has to be repealed. It looks to me that what Republicans have on offer now isn't repeal and replace at all. It is what I have been calling it since last year, repeal and run, and the architect of repeal and run is Congressman Price. In fact, he wrote the bill. He wrote the bill that would have gutted the ACA the last time around.

Under the Price plan, 18 million Americans would lose their health insurance in less than 2 years. By 2026, it would be 32 million who would lose coverage. Today 26 million Americans are uninsured. In a decade it would be 59 million. Working Americans would make up four out of every five people who lose their coverage. These are folks struggling to climb the economic ladder. No-cost contraceptive coverage for millions of women would be gone. We would have hundreds of thousands of women losing access to care almost immediately just by the defunding of Planned Parenthood. Hundreds of thousands more would lose their choice to see the doctors they trust. Just think about that. Legislation that is going to take away from American women the chance to see the doctor of their choosing, the doctor they trust. I don't know anybody in the last election who thought they were voting to see women lose the choice of the doctor they trust.

Under the Price plan, premiums jumped by hundreds of dollars a year as the individual market for health insurance collapses. Health care costs skyrocket. It is a gut punt to all, even those who get their health insurance at work because what it would do is, in effect, it would shrink--it would shrink the health care market in a way that there would be many more people who are seriously ill and had great expenses, and when you try to pass those on, that would mean people in the marketplace and those who had health insurance from their employer would see increases.

Another issue in the Price plan that ought to set off any alarm bells, in my view, is what Congressman Price has proposed for those with preexisting health care conditions. This is especially important in my view. When I proposed my own health plan, eight Democrats, eight Republicans, I was especially pleased that Senators on both sides of the aisle understood that making sure that insurance companies could not knock the stuffing out of people with a preexisting condition any longer was central to reform. Because when you allow discrimination against those with a preexisting condition, what you are essentially saying is health care in America is going to be for the healthy and wealthy. If you are healthy, no problem with a preexisting condition. If you are wealthy, again, no problem.

So right at the heart of the Affordable Care Act is a guarantee that insurance companies cannot discriminate against Americans with preexisting conditions. Frankly, I was very pleased to see that because as I indicated, 16 Senators--8 Democrats and 8 Republicans--on our bill said that was right at the heart of what they wanted in health care reform. So the ACA--the Affordable Care Act--said, No denying coverage to pregnant women, no denying coverage to cancer patients, no denying coverage to kids with autism. Under the Affordable Care Act, that is the law of the land. It protects every single American. No American under the Affordable Care Act should have to feel, when they go to bed at night, that they are going to get hammered as in the old days because they have a preexisting condition.

Now, Congressman Price, once again turning to the public record--it is all in the public record here. Congressman Price doesn't believe the American people should have the protection of that kind of real ban against discrimination for a preexisting condition. In fact, he was quoted in 2012 saying that it was, in his words, ``a terrible idea.'' So he, like the law, changed, and his way to change a law that guarantees universal protection is to get rid of the guarantee that you aren't going to get discriminated against if you have a preexisting condition.

Our colleague, Senator Nelson of Florida, asked Congressman Price about the issue of making sure those with preexisting conditions don't get discriminated against when the Finance Committee held their nomination hearing. Once again, Congressman Price ducked, bobbed, and weaved. Senator Nelson asked if the Congressman thought that the proposal to continue the ban on discriminating against people with a preexisting condition is a terrible idea. Here is what Congressman Price said: ``What I have always said about preexisting conditions is that nobody, in a system that pays attention to patients, nobody ought to be priced out of the market for having a bad diagnosis. Nobody.''

Now, that probably is a pretty good sound bite. It is a good sound bite if you are trying to duck a question, but it is not a real answer to what Congressman Price was asked by Senator Nelson. And if you examine Congressman Price's own proposal, when it comes to actually protecting people with a preexisting condition from discrimination, you can see why Congressman Price isn't very interested in giving a straight answer.

I am going to turn now to one of the Congressman's bills. It is ironically called ``Empowering Patients First.'' Instead of a ban on discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, the Price bill opened up loopholes to benefit insurance companies. The Price plan hinged on something called continuous coverage, and Americans are going to probably hear a fair amount about that in the months ahead.

The Price plan said that insurance companies had the right to inspect your recent past when you applied for coverage to the private market. If they found gaps when you went without insurance, they could deny coverage for your preexisting condition for up to a year and a half, or they could hike your premiums by 50 percent. In short, under the Price plan, insurance companies could take your money and skip out on covering the health care that you actually need.

Short summary of the Price health provision there: Worse health care, higher costs.

Now let's think about what this would mean for a cancer patient who suffers a job loss: Up to 18 months without coverage for cancer treatment they need that could be the difference between life and death. Congressman Price's bill didn't allow any special exceptions for certain gaps in coverage. No matter why you lost your insurance--maybe a layoff, maybe your spouse passed, quitting your job to start a business or go back to school--insurance companies with the Price plan again would be allowed to discriminate. And Congressman Price's bill didn't create any safeguards for particular patients with life- threatening illnesses. No matter what kind of preexisting condition you have, you would be at risk of losing access to care. And going by the practices those companies followed before the Affordable Care Act, more than 130 million Americans under age 65 may have a preexisting condition.

Now, it is correct that Republicans may not decide to go ahead with Congressman Price's bill as the final measure on replacement. But make no mistake about it: If confirmed, Congressman Price will be the captain of the Trump administration's health team. His proposals matter. And his approach is one that is followed by just about every other Republican who has put forward a plan of their own.

Colleagues, I think it would be an enormous mistake for this Senate-- for

our country--to turn back the clock and go back to the days when health care was for the healthy and wealthy. I don't think there ought to be a debate about the need for real, truly strong protection for our people against discrimination for those with a preexisting condition.

The Affordable Care Act locked it in to black letter law. It set a new standard: Nobody in America is going to be denied insurance due to a preexisting condition. In my view, it would be unconscionable to look to yesteryear, turn back the clock, and undermine those strong protections for the millions and millions of Americans who suffer from those preexisting health conditions. That, as a matter of public record, is what Congressman Price's proposal would do.

I want to turn now to his ideas with respect to Medicaid. This, in my view, is an especially important program, and a part of it that is usually missed is the nursing home benefit for seniors. Back when I was the director of the Oregon Gray Panthers and I ran the legal aid office for the elderly, I saw in particular what Medicaid meant for seniors who needed nursing home care.

Medicaid now covers costs for two-thirds of the seniors in nursing homes. And I think we ought to think about who these people are because these are people in Colorado, in Oregon, and across the country, who worked hard. They always played by the rules. They put their kids through school. They were part of their communities. They saved, they scrimped, they didn't go on an extra vacation; maybe they were thinking about buying a boat, but they didn't do any of that. They didn't do any of that because they wanted to save and make sure their spouse could have a dignified retirement, that they could put their kids through school, and they did everything right. So they saved and they saved and they saved.

But the fact is, it costs a lot to be a senior in America today. So perhaps they spent down all those savings, and their kids--the kids they love so much--aren't doing that well economically, so it is hard for the kids to help out with long-term care.

Without Medicaid--and particularly the nursing home benefit--seniors, 65 percent of whom depend on the program for nursing homes, wouldn't be able to have a dignified retirement.

So that nursing home benefit that is paid for by Medicaid is also one that Congressman Price has proposed slashing. He does that by cutting $2 trillion out of Medicaid over the course of two stages. First, Congressman Price repeals the expansion of Medicaid created under the Affordable Care Act. This means that more than 11 million Americans lose their coverage. And it is a plan that even Republican Governors are speaking out against. John Kasich of Ohio--I think he would probably tell you he is not anybody's idea of a bleeding heart liberal--said recently: ``So if all of a sudden that goes away, what do we tell those 700,000 people? We are closed? Can't do that.''

But that is exactly what Congressman Price's plan is going to end up doing. It is going to end up telling those 700,000 Ohioans, along with millions of people across the country in Oregon, and across the land-- and that is because he is pushing to take away their coverage and hasn't offered any real alternative that would preserve their access to care.

So for all of those seniors--the ones who worked hard and saved and did everything right--we all know them; perhaps they are the widower down at the end of the block--there is not going to be a way to pay for their health care, and they are not going to be able to have a dignified retirement, in spite of the fact they did everything all their life to plan and save.

Congressman Price's second Medicaid cut turns the program into a block grant and introduces a cap approach. That slashes another 30 percent of its funding and sets it up to be squeezed even more down the road.

Now, Medicaid goes a lot further in terms of taking on some of the biggest health care challenges in America. I cited the nursing home benefit because that is one that I dealt with again and again when I was director of the Gray Panthers. But the fact is that the program is helping communities across the country take on a whole host of health care challenges. The opioid epidemic is one example.

Now, we know that opioid addiction has hit American communities like a wrecking ball. More than a million people struggle with substance abuse, and they would lose access to care if the Price plan to repeal Medicaid expansion goes through. And further cuts to Medicaid would make the problem even worse, and it wouldn't just be for adults.

Tens of thousands of babies are born with a dependency to drugs each year. It is largely a product of the opioid crisis. My view is that number can only rise under Congressman Price's plan to cut Medicaid, a key source of primary care, prenatal care, and substance abuse treatment for pregnant women.

Medicaid is also the biggest source of funding for community and home-based care for those vulnerable Americans with serious disabilities. It is a huge source of AIDS treatment in America, particularly with the Affordable Care Act expansion.

All in all, 74 million Americans rely on Medicaid, and they are certainly not among the most fortunate. Half of them are kids, including millions with special needs. The program covers nearly half of all births and millions of Americans with disabilities.

I want to come back again to the faces of these people because I am not sure, when people hear the word ``Medicaid,'' what they see. I mention that it is so many seniors who, after planning, saving, and scrimping, need the program for nursing home care. It covers people who toil through hard work, even multiple jobs, bringing home just enough to keep them out of poverty. For many, signing up for the Medicaid Program brought an end to the years when they had to choose between visiting the doctor and putting food on the table. Medicaid is their health care safety net. Make no mistake about it; Congressman Price's proposals leave that safety net in tatters. There isn't any other backstop for those vulnerable Americans. From small, tiny children to seniors who depend on it for nursing home care, there is no other backstop if their access to health care through Medicaid goes away.

One of the arguments made by advocates of block grants and caps is that States would have flexibility, and they point to a section of the Affordable Care Act I wrote to support their case. I believe they are talking about what is called section 1332. There is a big difference between what I wrote in the Affordable Care Act and what block grants would do. We had a number of Senators on both sides of the aisle who were interested in this issue. What I wrote is this: With that flexibility, the Affordable Care Act lets States do better by their people. The Price plan to block grant and cap Medicaid costs lets States do worse.

Slashing Medicaid also hits State budgets extraordinarily hard. That is a big reason why Governors across the country have been skeptical-- even Republican Governors, like John Kasich and Rick Snyder of Michigan. Today, Medicaid comes with an open-ended kind of feature. Federal funding for the program doesn't tick down to zero. Nobody gets cut off. If you are working in America and are eligible for Medicaid, you don't have to worry about being locked out of the doctor's office if the program goes into the red. Block granting and capping the program changes that. States get a chunk of money each year. There is a big risk that money runs out, especially during times of economic downturn. That is when Medicaid is needed most, at times when working Americans have the most trouble walking the economic tightrope.

This is in addition to the undeniable, routine demands on the program: an aging baby-boomer population that will be in increasing need of nursing home and home-based care, public health emergencies like the Zika virus that can come without warning, natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Flint water crisis that devastate communities, new high-priced drugs that can be cures but come with a steep price.

The reality is if a State's block grant runs out, that raises questions that ought to be alarming to all who care about vulnerable Americans having access to the care they need.

What happens if seniors lose their nursing home benefits in the middle of the year? Where would they go? Would patients in substance abuse treatment

lose access to care? If a State's Medicaid funding dries up midway through the fiscal year, who would pay for a birth? Would the parents of a newborn child have to bear the entire cost when they are on a modest income, working hard, and a hospital bill could reach tens of thousands of dollars?

When it comes time to pitch this very extreme health care agenda to the American people, Congressman Price is very articulate and sticks closely to well-rehearsed language. That is because the Price agenda would strip tens of millions of Americans of their insurance coverage and force people to pay much higher costs for much lesser care. It isn't going to go over very well when people really understand what is at stake.

One of the priorities Congressman Price talks about most frequently is access--always saying that his vision is Americans are going to have access to care. That is one very hollow theory. Access to health care doesn't mean a lot if you can't afford the cost. So when Americans hear the Price plan that people will have access, rather than coverage, pay attention. Pay attention, because if you have coverage today, and he is going to promise you access in the future, chances are you are going into the hole and you had better figure out how you are going to pay for it.

The Congressman talks about flexibility for patients. But under Congressman Price's plans that wipe out consumer protections and minimum standards for coverage, it is insurance companies that get the most flexibility.

The Congressman likes to talk about using metrics to measure health care. It is very hard to follow what this metrics approach is all about. When his proposals are challenged using facts and figures, including those that come from our nonpartisan scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office, he disagrees or he dodges. During his hearing, he just disagreed with the Congressional Budget Office when I asked him about some of his funding cuts that would deprive women of access to preventive care. He objects to even the simplest of measures--how much funding his proposals cut from our health care programs--as calculated by the nonpartisan experts. In my view, you can't run from the metrics when they don't tell you what you want to hear.

Finally, the Congressman and many others say patients should be at the center of care. Now, I want it understood, I don't see how anybody could dispute that idea. Of course patients should be at the center of care. But when I look at the Price proposals, I don't see the patient at the center of health care. I see money and I see special interests at the center of health care.

The Price plan tells vulnerable Americans that their health care will only go as far as their bank accounts are going to take them. The well- to-do may be able to manage just fine under the Price proposals and the costs they push onto patients, but I am absolutely certain that millions of working Americans won't be able to do it.

I am going to wrap up talking about several glaring ethical issues with respect to Congressman Price. I will begin with the Congressman's significant investments in an Australian biomedical company. A lot of information about those investments has come into view over the course of months of investigation and reporting. What the facts show is that in 2016, the Congressman was part of an exclusive deal to buy stock at a discounted price--a deal called a ``private placement.'' On multiple occasions he was given opportunities to come clean and explain his participation in the special stock sale. He never has. Now, the majority on the Finance Committee has cut off the vetting process before getting all the facts or having the Congressman correct the record. So I am going to take a moment tonight to lay out the facts.

It is well known that Congressman Price learned about the company from a House colleague, Congressman Chris Collins. But Chris Collins isn't exactly a casual observer of the Australian business pages. He is Innate's--the company's--largest shareholder and a member of its board. Many of the company's other major shareholders are people in Congressman Collins' orbit, family members and chief of staff and others that he is close to. After learning about the company from his colleague, Congressman Price made his first purchase of the company's stock in 2015. He bought 61,000 shares.

Now let's fast forward to August 2016. The Congressman bought another 400,000 shares of Innate as part of a private stock sale for U.S. investors. When the private sale took place, Innate's shares were trading on the Australian stock exchange for the equivalent of 31 American cents, but participants in this private sale got the shares at a steep discount. That discount meant that Congressman Price paid tens of thousands of dollars less than a typical investor would have paid on the open market.

With respect to that purchase, the record remains unclear. It does come down to two issues: how he came to participate in the private placement, and whether he got special access that other investors didn't have. On those issues, Congressman Price tells one story; company officials, Congressman Collins, and public documents tell another.

First I am going to examine how Congressman Price came to participate in this private deal. As he tells it, he decided to make that purchase based on his own research into the company. But the Wall Street Journal and a little common sense say otherwise. I will read from a January 30 report.

Mr. Price got in on the discounted sale after Mr. Collins

filled him in on the company's drug trial, according to Mr.

Collins. . . . Mr. Collins said he told Mr. Price of the

additional private placement. He said Mr. Price asked if he

could participate in it. ``Could you have someone send me the

documents?''

Mr. Collins recalled Mr. Price asking him.

It paints a pretty clear picture. Congressman Price got information from his colleague, the company's top shareholder, and he got an invitation to a special deal. The claim that his conversations with Congressman Collins had no effect on Congressman Price's decision to invest just does not pass muster.

So I will turn to the second point--whether or not the deal was available to all company shareholders. Congressman Price insists it was. Here is the exchange he and I had during his nomination hearing in the Finance Committee.

I said: ``You purchased stock in an Australian company through private offerings at discounts not available to the public.''

Congressman Price responded: ``Well, if I may, those--they were available to every single individual that was an investor at the time.''

But that is not what Innate management--including the CEO--told the Wall Street Journal. According to the Wall Street Journal's report, Congressman Price was one of six special American investors in a category called ``friends and family.'' I will read a passage from the story.

The cabinet nominee [Mr. Price] was one of fewer than 20

U.S. investors who were invited last year to buy discounted

shares of the company--an opportunity that, for Mr. Price,

arose from an invitation from a company director and a fellow

congressman.

At Mr. Collins's invitation, Mr. Price in June ordered

shares discounted in the private placement at 18 cents

apiece, and then more in July at 26 cents a share, Mr.

Collins said in an interview. Those orders went through in

August, after board approval. Mr. Price invested between

$50,000 and $100,000, according to his disclosure form . . .

Mr. Wilkinson [the company's CEO] said investors who had

bought in a previous private placement were called to make

friends and family aware of the opportunity. . . . We are

always looking to increase our shareholder base. But those

new parties have to meet the definition of sophisticated

financial investor.

Only six U.S. investors, including Mr. Price, fell into the

friends-and-family category, Mr. Collins [his friend in

Congress] said. About 10 more U.S. investors were offered

discounted shares by the company because they had previously

been invited to partake in private placement offerings.

Furthermore, Congressman Collins and Mr. Wilkinson added more detail.

The discounted stock offer in Innate Immuno, as the company

is known, was made to all shareholders in Australia and New

Zealand--but not in the U.S., according to Mr. Collins and

confirmed in a separate interview with Innate Immuno CEO

Simon Wilkinson.

Bottom line, Congressman Price got in as a special guest, a friends and family guest of Congressman Collins. What he told the committee-- that the

deal was open to shareholders--was dead wrong. I am going to repeat this quote from the Wall Street Journal. This was part of a report that was authored by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. This is what he wrote in the Wall Street Journal: ``Rep. Tom Price got a privileged offer to buy a biomedical stock at a discount, the company's officials said, contrary to his congressional testimony this month.''

The stock deals I outlined are of very great significance. They aren't the only ethical issue at hand. Congressman Price introduced legislation that would lower the tax bills of three major pharmaceutical companies in which he owns significant amounts of stock. He invested $15,000 in a medical equipment company and then introduced legislation to increase the amount Medicare pays for that type of equipment. Parts of his bill went on to become law.

Then there is his investment in a company called Zimmer Biomet. In 2015, Medicare was preparing a new pricing model that would change the way the program paid for hip and knee replacements. Instead of paying for each individual service, Medicare said it would try to make its payments more efficient by bundling the costs together in one lump sum. The new system, however, had the potential to affect the revenues of Zimmer Biomet.

On March 17, 2016, a few weeks before the government's model--that is, the CMS model was set to go into effect--Congressman Price bought thousands of dollars' worth of Zimmer Biomet stock through his brokerage account. On March 23, 2016, less than a week later, he introduced H.R. 4848, the HIP Act, which would have delayed the implementation of CMS regulations for Medicare coverage of joint replacements. He was the lead Republican sponsor of the bill.

Bottom line, Congressman Price introduced legislation that certainly had the potential to add to his personal fortune. Congressman Price has argued that he didn't purchase this stock and others; his broker was making the deal. But at the very least, he would have known about the deals within days when he filed his periodic transaction reports with the House.

On August 15, 2016, not only did Congressman Price file a report that he had purchased Zimmer Biomet along with dozens of other stocks, he initialed the entry for Zimmer Biomet in order to correct a mistake on the document.

Wrapping up, I want to go back to the fact that when Congressman Price came before the Finance Committee, he didn't give us the whole story. In effect, I think the Finance Committee regrettably has an ethical double standard now. Look at the nominations of Tom Daschle, Tim Geithner, and Ron Kirk at the outset of the Obama administration. That vetting was vigorous. It was bipartisan. We looked over every stone and peered around every corner. Now, when a glaring issue comes up that undeniably deserves investigation, the party in power is shutting down the vetting process and moving toward confirmation. I think this is sending a dangerous message to nominees in the future.

I will close by way of saying this is a nominee with an extreme agenda. His proposals strip tens of millions of Americans of their health care coverage. His proposals would put Americans with preexisting conditions in danger of losing coverage through the care they need. It would unravel the Medicare promise, the guarantee of secured benefits of vital importance to millions of American seniors.

When it comes to ethics, as I have described, Congressman Price falls well short of the standard the American people expect nominees to meet. I will not support his nomination. I urge my colleagues to join me in opposition.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, before he leaves the floor, I want to thank Senator Leahy, particularly because, once again, on this issue he showed there was a path forward that was bipartisan. The senior Senator from Vermont got together with our colleague from Utah, Senator Lee, and the two of them set out from the get-go to try to find common ground.

I think most people didn't give us great odds. Senator Leahy and I used to talk about how when we began the effort, being on the Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee, a group of us could probably have met in a phone booth, but then, under Senator Leahy's leadership, we began to pick up colleagues from both sides of the aisle.

The Obama administration, which we both remember, had reservations at the beginning. We said: Look, we can find a way. The intelligence community said to go forward with this, but this didn't happen by osmosis. It happened under the leadership of Senator Leahy and Senator Lee, our colleague on the other side of the aisle. One of the reasons we feel so strongly, as the Senator from Vermont has stated, is that if we are not careful, particularly with this nomination, we could undo, we could unravel a lot of that good bipartisan work.

I know my colleague has a tight schedule, and I so appreciate his coming over and very much recognize that one of the reasons we are here is to make sure we don't undo the good bipartisan work that he has authored.

Madam President, today the Senate is doing something that doesn't happen often around here--having an open debate about the future of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Central Intelligence Agency, in my view, is an enormously important and valuable part of our government. It is staffed by thousands and thousands of patriotic Americans who make extraordinary sacrifices on our behalf. They work so hard to protect our country in so many ways Americans will never find out about. They give up their time. They give up their weekends, family vacations, and all kinds of things that would be scheduled that they would enjoy personally, and they give it up on 1 or 2 hours' worth of notice because they want to protect the security and the well-being of our Nation. The fact is, many at the CIA have risked their lives defending us and some have made the ultimate sacrifice with their lives.

When you talk about the CIA on the Senate floor, it is especially important to protect the people I have just mentioned and to protect what are called their sources and methods. Sources and methods are the secret means by which the CIA gets the information that is needed for our national security, and it needs to stay classified. While sources and methods need to stay classified, the debate about our laws and those who execute them is a public matter. The policies that guide what the CIA does in its important work--the debate about policies always has to be public. The nomination of a CIA Director is a rare and important chance to talk about what the nominee thinks those policies ought to be.

In the beginning, I am going to offer my guiding principle. Smart national security policies protect both our security and our liberty, and they recognize that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive; that it is possible to have both; that it is essential to have both. Nothing illustrates the need for policies that promote security and liberty more clearly than the issue of encryption, which we will be talking about--in my view--at length in this Congress as part of the intelligence debate.

Strong encryption protects Americans from foreign hackers, criminals, identity thieves, stalkers, and other bad actors. It is the key to protecting our cyber security. Yet there are some in government and some in the Congress who think it would make sense to require American companies to build backdoors into their products so the government can get access to that information. My own view is this would be an enormous mistake, a mistake from a security standpoint, a mistake from a liberty standpoint, and also very damaging to our companies-- companies that produce jobs with good wages. I have been fighting against ill-advised encryption proposals because they would be bad for security for the reason I mentioned. It would be a big gift to foreign hackers and bad for liberty. The reality is, if we require our companies to build backdoors into their products, the first thing that is going to happen is all the companies overseas, where they will not have such rules, will benefit enormously. A lot of good-paying jobs-- high-skill, high-wage jobs--would be at risk. I bring this up only by way of stressing how important it is that we get this right; that we advance policies that promote security and liberty and we recognize right at the get-go that they are not mutually exclusive.

With that in mind, we turn to the nomination of Congressman Mike Pompeo to be the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. After consideration of his testimony and a review of his past statements--and response to written questions--I have concluded that he is the wrong man for the job. He has endorsed extreme policies that would fundamentally erode the liberties and freedoms of our people without making us safer. He has been unwilling to provide meaningful responses to my questions with respect to these views. When he has provided responses, they have often either been so vague or so contradictory that it is impossible to determine what his core beliefs are or what he might actually do if he is confirmed.

On issue after issue, the Congressman has taken two, three, or four positions, depending on when he says it and whom he is talking to. He has done this with surveillance, with torture, with Russia, and a number of other subjects. So now we are at the end of the confirmation process. There has been a hearing. I met with the nominee in private. We submitted two sets of questions, both before and after the hearing. Despite it all, it has been impossible to walk away with consistent answers on the Congressman's beliefs on how he would lead the Central Intelligence Agency.

Let me begin with surveillance. Just over a year ago, after the USA FREEDOM Act had become law, Congressman Pompeo wrote in an op-ed that Congress should pass a law reestablishing collection of all metadata. This was a reference to the program in which the government collected and kept the records of tens of millions of innocent Americans. When the American people found out about this program, they were rightly horrified and they rejected it, which was why--as we touched on this afternoon on a bipartisan basis--Congress abolished the program through the USA FREEDOM Act. That law got the government out of the business of collecting these millions of phone records on law-abiding people, and it did nothing to harm our security. For example, I am very proud that I was able to work in a bipartisan way to author a provision that allowed the government, in emergency circumstances, to get phone records immediately and then go back later and seek court approval. I wrote that provision to make sure that when the security of our great Nation was on the line, it would be possible for our national security officials to move immediately, without delay, to get the information that was needed. Congressman Pompeo himself voted for the USA FREEDOM Act before he turned around 8 months later and wrote that he wanted to reestablish this sweeping and unnecessary program. So understand the timeline. The Congressman talks about voting for the USA FREEDOM Act, but after he cast that vote, he came out in a widely circulated article in the Wall Street Journal for a proposal that really makes all the earlier collection of phone records about law-abiding people look like small potatoes. I am going to discuss that this afternoon.

The question really is, What does the Congressman believe? Does he stand by his vote to abolish the NSA phone records dragnet? Was that what he was suggesting when he brought up that vote during his hearing or does he stand by what he wrote in his major opinion article that came out well after the law he voted for? In response to questions, the Congressman wrote

that he believes the collection of tens of millions of Americans' phone records provided a significant tool for the intelligence community and that ``I have not changed my position.'' That sounds like an endorsement of the mass surveillance of phone records.

Again, in the hearing, the nominee said something else. Senator Heinrich asked him whether he had been briefed on whether the current process--where the government collects phone records on an individual basis rather than in bulk from millions of Americans, even if they are not suspected of a crime--protects our Nation as well as the liberty of millions of innocent Americans. The Congressman is a member of the House Intelligence Committee so he has had the opportunity to be briefed on this topic, but here is his response to Senator Heinrich: ``Senator, I have not had a chance to have a complete briefing on that, but I can say I have not heard anything that suggests that there is a need for change today.'' In other words, in just a matter of days, Congressman Pompeo has taken the position, first, that the bulk collection of American phone records was a significant tool and that it should be reestablished, and, second, while testifying to the committee, that he has no basis on which to believe that is necessary. That is such a head scratcher, I just don't know how to go about squaring these truly conflicting statements.

What troubles me especially is if the Congressman were to be confirmed as CIA Director, the doors would close and he would operate in secret. Yet Americans do not know which position he would take in running the CIA. The American people have no idea how Congressman Pompeo would advise the President and his national security team on what is truly necessary to protect the Nation.

Phone records are not the only communication records we need to be concerned about. Until a few years ago, the NSA also ran a program in which millions of Americans' email records were collected. Since the Congressman wrote that he wanted to reestablish collecting all of the metadata, I asked him whether he would support the resumption of that program as well and whether he believed that millions of Americans' email records should be combined with millions of American phone records. He could have said no. He could have clarified that he was only talking about phone records. Instead, he ducked taking a position. In fact, he even indicated that he would be open to including email records in his new database. His exact words were: ``If I am confirmed and agency officials inform me that they believe the current programs and legal framework are insufficient to protect the country, I would make appropriate recommendations for any needed changes to laws and regulations.''

What is especially troubling about this is that the bulk email program was discontinued because it wasn't effective. I spent a lot of time pressing intelligence officials to give us some evidence that you had to go out and collect all of these email records from law-abiding Americans. In the end, the Agency decided to look at it, and they came to the same conclusion I did; that it wasn't needed. That is not a judgment about whether the program violated Americans' privacy because it definitely did that. The NSA determined that--in its words, not mine--the program did not meet their ``operational expectations.'' This is public information. All the details are available to the House Intelligence Committee on which the Congressman sits. This should have been an easy answer for the nominee, but he refused to rule out the inclusion of millions of Americans' email records--records the NSA has said it doesn't need--in what would be his idea of a massive new government database.

The collection of phone and email records of millions of innocent Americans is small potatoes compared to what the nominee wrote next. His proposal was to combine all of the communications metadata, and these are his words, with ``publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive searchable data base.'' This is far bigger and more encompassing than any such data collection program that the Bush-Cheney administration ever imagined.

I have been a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee since before 9/11. I have been in a lot of debates about the appropriate scope of government surveillance. I have never heard ever--not from anyone--an idea so extreme, so overarching, and so intrusive on Americans' privacy. I wanted to give the Congressman the opportunity to explain what he was actually proposing. So during the confirmation hearing--and later in what are questions that are submitted to him--I tried to find out what his database would include and what, if anything, it wouldn't include. I could not get substantive answers. What we basically got was a big word salad with a liberal helping of words that just kind of skirted the issue. My folks would call them weasel words.

The Congressman did mention social media in his answers. But it is one thing for the government to read the social media postings of Americans because there is a specific reason to do so; it is something else entirely to create a giant government database of everyone's social media postings and to match that up with everyone's phone records. We asked where the nominee would draw the line. He wouldn't say.

Congressman Pompeo's vision of this vast government database doesn't stop, by the way, with social media. What he wrote in his responses to my questions was that he was ``generally'' referring to publicly available information on the Internet or other ``public databases.'' I will repeat that. He was generally talking about information already in the public domain. That raised the question of what else the nominee wanted to enter into a giant government database of information on millions of innocent Americans. For example, did he have in mind information on Americans that the government could obtain or purchase from third parties, such as data brokers who collect information on the purchasing history of our people? Imagine putting every American's purchases into a government database, along with their social media postings and all of their phone records.

After two rounds of submitted questions and a hearing, it was not clear what the Congressman meant when he referred to ``all metadata'' or how he defined ``publicly available financial and lifestyle information.'' What we do know for sure is that he wouldn't give us any real sense of what he wanted to do with this proposal. He was unwilling to talk about it.

The responses I got from the Congressman on this and other topics generally fell into three categories. The first was, I will do what is legal. The second one was, when it comes to Americans' privacy, that is the FBI's problem, not the CIA's. And third, as CIA Director, I won't do policy. I am going to briefly state why these are unacceptable answers.

First, I asked the Congressman if there were any boundaries to his proposed new, vast database on Americans. His response was, ``Of course there are boundaries; any collection and retention must be conducted in accordance with the Constitution, statutes, and applicable presidential directives.'' That is not a response. Just because the government may be able to legally obtain information on Americans on an individualized or limited basis doesn't necessarily make it legal, much less appropriate, to create this vast database with all kinds of information on law-abiding Americans. If you take his response to mean that the only boundaries are those established by law, then it is worth considering how the intelligence community has frequently interpreted the legal limits in which it operates: flexibly and in secret.

Even if we imagine that there are established legal boundaries that would rein in the Congressman's CIA, consider what he himself has said about those legal boundaries. He wrote in his op-ed--and these are his words, not mine--that ``legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.'' It is also significant that throughout his response to questions, he refers to CIA policies, procedures, and regulations. As CIA Director, he would be in a position to change those.

It seems to me that the Congressman can't have it both ways--he can't say he is bound only by legal restrictions and avoid saying what he thinks those restrictions should be.

The nominee's second way to avoid answering these questions was by arguing that concerns about the privacy of

Americans are the business of the FBI, not the CIA. That is just not the case. There is a long and unfortunate history related to the CIA and domestic intelligence, which the Church Committee documented in the 1970s. I will be clear--I don't believe the CIA is up to anything like this today, but the possibility of returning to those days is certainly a possibility if the Director of the CIA takes the flexible approach to the rules that are intended to keep the CIA out of the lives of American citizens. I will give just a few examples.

On January 3, the Director of National Intelligence put out new procedures about the distribution within the intelligence community of what is called raw signals intelligence. These are the actual content of communications, as opposed to an analyst's report about these communications. According to the new procedures, these communications can be provided to the CIA if the CIA Director asks for them and explains to the NSA why the CIA needs them.

Here is why this matters to the privacy of Americans: When raw communications are distributed to the CIA, they include the communications of Americans that have been sucked up in the overall collection. So at this point, the CIA would have these communications. According to the new procedures, in some instances the Director of the CIA can approve CIA searches of that data for the communications of Americans. The Director of the CIA can also approve the use of Americans' communications. The question is, How would the Congressman exercise these authorities? We just don't know.

Another example would be the CIA's own procedures for dealing with information on Americans. Last week, the CIA updated these procedures in a 41-page public document. They covered, for example, the CIA's collection of vast amounts of information that includes the communications of or information about Americans--what can be collected by the CIA, what can be kept by the CIA, what can be distributed by the CIA. The new procedures also cover when CIA officers are required and when they are not required to identify themselves when participating in organizations in our country.

Just reading these procedures makes it clear that the CIA's activities bump up against the liberties of Americans all the time. That is why the regulations exist. But if a CIA Director has extreme views with regard to the liberties and freedoms of our people, that could very well be reflected in how the Agency implements these procedures or whether they get rewritten. How would the Congressman apply these rules? Would he propose new ones to make it easier for the CIA to look at more information about Americans? Again, we just don't know.

One thing is clear: The views of the CIA Director about the liberties and freedoms of Americans are just as relevant as those of the FBI Director.

The nominee's third effort to avoid discussing his position was to say that as the CIA Director, he wouldn't be responsible for policy. As he asserted in his opening statement at the hearing, he would ``change roles from policymaker to information provider.'' But anyone who is familiar with the role of the CIA Director knows that is just not what happens at the Agency.

First, the CIA Director does far more than deliver analysis to government officials. Collection priorities, methods of collection, relationships with foreign services, covert action, and many other responsibilities of the office are policy matters.

In addition, the CIA Director and other leaders of the intelligence community are asked repeatedly what they think is necessary and appropriate to keep our Nation safe. At a moment of crisis, these questions are especially pressing. We now know what happens in those moments when leaders give wrong answers. After September 11, the Directors of the NSA and the CIA offered their views of what should be done. We all thought they had time stamps on them because we came back to look at them after the immediate crisis was over, but our country ended up for a fair amount of time with programs that ripped at the very fabric of our democracy. There were warrantless wiretappings and torture.

The Director of the CIA is a unique position. When someone is nominated to lead a department that operates more or less openly, at least the public can assess his or her performance, and at least a fully-informed Congress can respond when he or she implements wrongheaded policies. But the CIA Director operates in secret. What the public finds out is entirely up to the CIA and the administration.

When it comes to deciding whether this is the right person for the job, there is nothing for the public and most of the Congress to go on other than what the nominee has said and done before and during the confirmation process. Unless this is going to be a rare exception and the Congressman would be a historically transparent CIA Director--and there aren't any indications of that--then what we are talking about in this confirmation debate today and why I thought it was important to have a real debate today is that what we are talking about in terms of much of the future of the CIA and the person who heads it--this is a one-time shot for that discussion. That is why I don't consider the vetting process to be finished.

(Mr. MORAN assumed the Chair.)

On the topic of the proposed massive new database and on a range of other topics both classified and unclassified, the Congressman did not provide substantive responses, so I have resubmitted my questions to him.

Now, some--I heard this mentioned today--have said the Congressman answered every question. They claim that somehow we are stalling, that stalling is taking place for political reasons, so I want to be very specific about what I mean when I say the Senate has not gotten responsive answers.

The facts show that the nominee has gone to great lengths to dodge, evade, and in effect tiptoe around a significant number of the questions that were put to him. We held our hearing on January 12. I asked the Congressman about what information that he would put in his comprehensive, searchable database. I didn't get a meaningful response, so I said at the hearing that I would like the nominee to furnish in writing what limits, what safeguards, what railings would exist with regard to this massive new database, far more encompassing than the one the Congress voted to sideline.

The next day, I sent over specific questions. I asked him in writing, as I had at the hearing: What are the boundaries for collection on Americans who aren't connected to a specific investigation? This is fundamental. What are the boundaries on collecting information on Americans who aren't connected to a specific investigation? It is particularly relevant since the nominee proposed this vast and sweeping new database.

I wanted to know, and I believe the American people would like to know because, as I said at the beginning, I think the public wants security and liberty. That is what I am committed to doing. That is what we did in the debate about the FREEDOM Act, where we stopped collecting all of these phone records of law-abiding people, but I wrote the provision that increased government's authority in emergency situations.

People want to know: Are there any kind of limits and safeguards, particularly if you are proposing something brandnew, a centralized database, after the Congress voted to curtail something much more limited?

The Congressman responded by saying that publicly available information can be useful in stopping terrorist attacks and that publicly available information involves fewer privacy concerns compared to surveillance.

I agree on both counts. Nobody, no sensible person would dispute these matters.

The question which remains unanswered is whether publicly available information on every American should be gathered up into what the Congressman describes as a ``comprehensive, searchable database.''

Since I had trouble getting an answer at that point, I also sent a written question about whether--if information on an American is legally available to the government on an individualized or limited basis, does that make it legal or appropriate to compile it into a bulk, giant database?

The Congressman testified that the boundaries of his database of ``publicly available financial and lifestyle information'' were legal. That raised the question: Is this whole database, this huge, new database legal or not?

He responded: ``I have not consulted legal experts.''

That is it. That was his answer.

So, again, when you have this sweeping new proposal, far more encompassing than anything I have heard people talk about, the Congressman, when asked whether the database was even legal, said that he had not consulted legal experts.

Here is another question I submitted. I asked if his comprehensive database should include information from third parties, such as data brokers. And I think the distinguished Presiding Officer, who has a great interest in these issues in the private sector, knows about the possibilities of abuses with data brokers. I wanted to know whether this database was going to include this kind of information.

Here is the Congressman's response in full: ``I have not studied what information is available from third parties and the applicable legal restrictions on obtaining such information.''

That is it. Nothing more. He could have said, for example, that he wasn't contemplating including information from data brokers in this database. He could have elaborated on what he actually meant. He didn't do either. It was just more stonewalling.

Now, I want to make it clear. The question that I have asked--and I heard a comment about why would we be taking this time. The questions were prompted because of the Congressman's own words. He is the one who proposed a vast database on innocent Americans. He is the one who will not articulate the boundaries of what is a very extreme proposal. These are basic questions that are directly relevant to this nomination. They are questions that Americans need answered, and they go right to the heart of how, in the future, we will have smart national security policies that protect both our security and our liberty.

The American people thought after the USA FREEDOM Act was passed-- this was before, as I mentioned, the Congressman's new idea, something vastly more involved. The public thought when the FREEDOM Act was passed that the government was out of the business of collecting millions and millions of phone records on law-abiding Americans. Now we are talking about a nominee to be CIA Director who not only wants to bring this back but proposes something that makes the collection of millions of phone records on law-abiding people look like nothing.

That is why I wanted this debate. That is why I wanted us to have a chance to talk about it in the light of day, rather than late Friday night in the middle of inauguration parties. I wanted the public to understand what the issues were and these questions I had about the Congressman's own words. That is what this debate is about: What is the Congressman really talking about with his own words?

When I receive meaningful answers to these and other questions, I will consider the confirmation process complete. Until then, I don't believe our work in reviewing the nominee and his views is done. That, in my view, is the only way to pin down a nominee who has taken multiple positions with regard to some of the most important issues.

By the way, I think it is worth noting, with respect to trying to get some guardrails and protections into the most sweeping new surveillance program I have ever heard of, that the Congressman said in his testimony to the committee: ``I take a back seat to no one with respect to protecting Americans' privacy.''

Now I want to turn to several other issues. I tried to get answers from the Congressman about the outsourcing of surveillance against Americans. During the campaign, the President invited the Russian Government to continue hacking operations against his political opponent. The President also said, with regard to Russian hacking, that he would ``love to have that power.'' That is his quote, not mine.

So the question I wanted answered is: What would happen if the Russians, or some other foreign entity, collected the communications of Americans and, instead of giving them to WikiLeaks, provided them directly to our government? This could be information about our political leaders, journalists, religious leaders, business people, typical innocent Americans.

At the hearing, the Congressman testified that it is not lawful to outsource collection that the Agency isn't authorized to conduct itself. That sounds like a reassuring statement to me. The problem is, we are in a world in which the President of the United States has already openly encouraged a foreign adversary to use its hacking capabilities to attack our democracy.

What if a foreign adversary does it again and provides the fruits of that hacking to the government without waiting for a specific invitation from the CIA? What happens then?

In response to questions, the nominee wrote that only in ``very limited circumstances'' would the collection of Americans' communications be so improper that it would be inappropriate for the CIA to receive, use, or disseminate them.

So I asked what those circumstances would be. The response was that it was ``highly fact-specific.''

The vagueness here also is very troubling, so I tried to follow up. What if the information came from an adversary, rather than an ally? Did it matter what the intent of the foreign partner was--to support our national security or further disrupt our democracy? Did it matter if the information was about Americans engaged in First Amendment- protected activities, rather than about terror suspects? What if the information provided to the government involved thousands or millions of U.S. persons? I received no substantive answer other than all of these issues were ``relevant.''

Other members of the committee and I asked other questions relating to the collection and use of information on law-abiding Americans. First, I asked the Congressman about section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, specifically about the government's backdoor searches of data for information on Americans.

He responded that the CIA can conduct these warrantless searches if they are ``reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information.'' This is certainly potentially troublesome and is an issue that the Senate is going to need to take up when considering the reauthorization of that part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Perhaps more concerning, however, was the Congressman's statement that when we are talking about collection outside of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the rules of what the CIA can access, query, use, and retain should be even more broad and more flexible. And I will just say, I don't know how you get much broader and more flexible than the standard that currently applies to section 702.

Then I asked the Congressman about encryption, and, frankly, I did because I had gotten the sense that maybe he held moderate positions, and, as I said earlier, I am very troubled about the possibility that American companies would be required to build back doors into their products and that strong encryption would be weakened. I think this is a massive gift to foreign hackers. I think it is a huge gift, by the way, to pedophiles because if you weaken strong encryption, you weaken that feature that parents use to make sure they are watching their child and their child is safe.

I think it is very important not to weaken strong encryption from a security standpoint, from a liberty standpoint. And I think it is just flatout nuts to do it to our companies because our companies wouldn't be able to compete with the companies overseas that would continue to rely on strong encryption to be able to assure that their customers' data was protected.

So I had kind of gotten the thought that the Congressman had moderate positions. I asked him about that. And all he would say was that it was a complicated issue, and he said that he might begin to form some judgments.

This is an issue that has been discussed extensively in the Congress. It has been discussed in this body. It has been discussed in the other body. There are Members of both the Senate and the House, high-ranking senior Members, who have a difference of opinion with me on encryption. They want to weaken strong encryption. They think this is what the government needs to get this data. I think that is a flawed view, but people can have differences of opinion. That is why we have our unique system of government; we have

real debates, unlike what goes on in most of the world.

But here is a topic that has been discussed extensively in Congress. And it was my hope that the nominee would at least have some sort of judgment about this issue and could express that to the American people prior to a confirmation vote.

Instead, what I got was: It is complicated. I think everybody understands that.

Now I would like to turn to the question of torture. I simply have not been reassured by the shifting statements about torture that the nominee has given, so I would like to walk through this.

I happen to share the views of our very, very widely respected and acclaimed senior Senator from Arizona that it is just not effective, and he makes the case more eloquently than I. But that is not what is at issue here specifically. It is about trying to sort out the nominee's shifting statements about torture.

As late as 2014, he cited ending the CIA's torture program as purported evidence that President Obama had refused to take counterterrorism seriously. That is a pretty extreme view. By then, even Members of Congress who had previously supported the program believed it was best left in the past, but not our nominee to head the

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

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

Mr. President, I want to be very brief. I know colleagues are facing tough weather and are trying to deal with the logistics of all that. I just want to close with a couple of points.

The first is that I have heard several of my colleagues say to me that a central reason for voting for Congressman Pompeo this afternoon is that they have said that he voted for the USA FREEDOM Act. That is correct. The problem is that just a few months after he cast that vote, the Congressman turned around and said he wanted to reestablish the bulk phone record program in a way that was vastly more encompassing and way more intrusive than the USA FREEDOM Act abolished. What he was proposing after he voted for the USA FREEDOM Act, which says that Congress says you ought to have limits, was a bulk metadata program that was way beyond anything that the Bush-Cheney administration ever imagined.

I have been on the Senate Intelligence Committee since before September 11. I have been in the middle of countless debates about the appropriate scope of government surveillance, but I have never heard-- not from anyone--an idea that was so extreme and so overreaching and so intrusive of Americans' privacy. I bring this up only by way of saying that, if confirmed, the nominee is going to be dealing with a whole host of issues that, if we really think it through carefully and thoughtfully, we can find a way to ensure that Americans have security and liberty and that the two are not mutually exclusive. If we do it wrong, which would certainly happen if one were to weaken strong encryption, we will end up with less of both--less security and less liberty.

With respect to the process, I would only say that this matter of the way the Congressman handled his views with respect to surveillance and torture and Russia really reflect how his views change on a major issue, whether it is surveillance or torture or Russia, depending on the time and who he is talking to. I just don't think that ought to be the standard for winning support to head an agency as important as the

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Eric Skidmore, Kailee Farrell, Benjamin Willis, Kelly Singleton, and Kathryn Haake, legislative fellows in my office, be given floor privileges for the rest of this Congress.

Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. President, I will be very brief, just to respond to my good friend from Arizona who said that the Senate not taking up Pompeo would be contradicting the will of the people. That is not the case at all. This is about whether the Senate is going to be a rubberstamp and whether the Senate is in effect going to abdicate its responsibility to do oversight.

Let me just mention four points real quickly.

No. 1, this nomination has not been considered in the Intelligence Committee. It could have been. It was not.

No. 2, we have not been able to get answers to our questions. A major question in particular, this body voted to sideline a law that collected phone records on law-abiding Americans. Congressman Pompeo has proposed something that makes the law we sidelined look like small potatoes. He is talking about collecting lifestyle information on all Americans. We are trying to get an answer about whether there are any legal boundaries at all. We have not been able to get them. That is argument No. 2.

Argument No. 3 is that we have never confirmed on inauguration day a CIA Director. That is the history of this particular nomination. No. 4, I want to talk about the realities of national security because I share the view of the chairman of the committee that this is a dangerous time. That is not up for debate. There are lots of people out there who do not wish our country well. If we were to have a tragedy tonight or tomorrow--heaven forbid that happens to our great country--if it did, we would have the talented senior people at the CIA there to protect our country, and I would submit, however you feel about Mr. Pompeo, the reality is that if he got confirmed tonight or tomorrow, and heaven forbid there was that tragedy, we would still be relying on those trained, talented professionals at the CIA who have been there, in some cases for decades, to protect our country when we are vulnerable.

That is what this is all about, ensuring that we actually have some discussion here when there are outstanding questions. Senator Leahy, Senator Blumenthal, and I have all said we just believe there ought to be some debate. There hasn't been any in the Intelligence Committee. There hasn't been any on the floor. I have gone through the history of this nomination and explained what would happen if a tragedy were to befall our great country. That is why I think we ought to have a debate in broad daylight, not when Senators are trying to figure out if their tux is going to fit and we can't get people into a real discussion.

I object, Madam President.

Reserving the right to object.

Madam President, this would ensure that there would be a debate about the CIA and its future Director in the light of day. I am not going to object, and I withdraw my reservation.

Mr. President, I spent the last few days having town hall meetings at home. It was a big challenge. We had a tremendous amount of snow. The distinguished Presiding Officer is very familiar with that. We had the most snow since 1937, and it just goes on and on. We are battling freezing rain. Yet Oregonians came out in big numbers to participate in the discussion about what is going on in Washington, DC. They were particularly troubled about what was being done at the Environmental Protection Agency in the nomination of Scott Pruitt to head it. We had 200 people in McMinnville on Saturday night, a small community. I think the temperature was about 22 degrees. What really troubled them is that it sure looks like, when you examine the record of Mr. Pruitt, that he is trampling on everything we call the Oregon Way. The Oregon Way is something that Democrats, Republicans, people across the political spectrum subscribe to because it involves protecting our treasured land, air, and water. It was something we want for our generation, and we will pass it on to our kids, and it has been hugely valuable to us in attracting more industries that pay well because the workers at those industries want clean air and clean water.

When you look at Mr. Pruitt's career, it really upends everything that I would call the Oregon Way--repeated attempts to weaken or eliminate health-based environmental standards, air quality standards for toxic air pollutants, limits on carbon emissions to take on the challenge of climate change. These rollbacks are particularly harmful to children and low-income households, communities of color, minorities, families, and communities.

Yesterday, Senator Merkley and I spoke at our wonderful Martin Luther King Day Breakfast put on by The Skanner. Bernie and Bobbie Foster have been doing this for years. All I could think of is, if you roll back clean air and health standards, the people who are going to be hurt the most are low-income minorities, and communities of color. I don't see a big outcry in America for policies that would do that kind of harm to some of the most vulnerable Americans.

Mr. Pruitt also has a troubling history of denying that fundamental science really ought to be the basis of American policymaking when it comes to environmental protection.

For example, he disputed the Agency's science-based findings in 2009 that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. Now, my view is that this is an inarguable and unfortunate reality of climate change. But Mr. Pruitt's challenge suggests either a misunderstanding about how environmental agencies ought to make science-based decisions or, even worse, a habit of setting science aside when the outcome is at odds with the special interests.

Again, that comes back to the kind of comments that were made during my five town hall meetings over the last few days at home. People would say: Look, Democrats and Republicans at home in Oregon, great Republican Governors--particularly led by the late Tom McCall--they would constantly come back to the proposition that you should not let the special interests trample on your treasures, your land and your air and your water, because not only was it bad for this generation--our generation--but it would be particularly damaging to our young people.

So it is really troubling that this has been the choice of the President-elect. My own view is that when it comes to environmental standards, one of the unsung successes of the last few years has been a rule cutting emissions of mercury, arsenic, lead, and other dangerous materials. It prevented, in 2016, 11,000 premature deaths. My concern is that a lot of those deaths would be seen in minority communities and communities of color, the people I was concerned about when we had our Martin Luther King Day Breakfast.

Mr. Pruitt worked hard to gut that rule. He really pulled out all the stops to oppose a rule cutting emissions of mercury, arsenic, lead and dangerous heavy metals. He worked hard to gut it. If he is confirmed, he may just possibly be successful.

Now, the message that I have heard again and again is that we can do better than this. We can do better than this. I think the American people, when they see what is at stake--it has been hard to follow all of the hearings. I know that I was very interested in the questioning in the Foreign Relations Committee by the Presiding Officer. I was trying to follow all the nominations, and I could not get to all the hearings. I could not follow all of the questioning that I thought was important.

But even when all of this is going on, when people tell you before a Trailblazers game--at home in Portland, a pregame event--that they are unhappy about the environmental rules and the prospects of the environmental rules being gutted by the new head of the EPA, you know that you have people alarmed.

Oregon is no stranger to the threats of pollution. In 2015, there was a discovery that heavy metals, including cadmium and arsenic, had been emitted for decades into the air of Portland neighborhoods at dangerous levels.

This pollution was caused by a regulatory loophole the size of Crater Lake. At the time, I called on the Environmental Protection Agency to take action. Within days, they were on the ground in Portland helping to assess the public health risks. Not long after, they identified the cause of the regulatory oversight and corrected course.

It seems to me that Americans need to trust that the Environmental Protection Agency will be able to defend their communities from air pollution or from water contamination. That is how we have always looked at it in my home State of Oregon. We always felt that we could trust those that we elected of both political parties for years and years to say: You don't mess with Oregon's land and air and water.

Now, obviously, we have continued, even with that ethic, to have problems. While I was pleased that we were able to get some significant public health changes after we made that discovery in 2015 that there were heavy metals, including cadmium and arsenic, in the air of our neighborhoods, we have to do better. We have to do better at every level of government, and the EPA plays a critical role in ensuring clean and safe water, whether the water is running through a mountain stream or through a pipe to a Portland kitchen. Cities across the country, like my home town of Portland, are facing threats with high levels of lead in the water supply and outdated infrastructure to fix the problem.

These communities are counting on the Environmental Protection Agency

to be in a partnership with them to get this fixed to enforce strong water quality standards, and it only can happen if you have strong leadership that starts at the top. The American people have a right to have confidence that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is going to defend the health and well-being of our communities and not the profits and the pocketbooks of the most powerful special interests in our country.

I am going to close by saying that I am not confident that a Pruitt EPA will stand on the side of those families against the special interests. That is why tonight I state that I will be opposing the nomination of Mr. Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 188 and ask unanimous consent that it be reported by number.

Mr. President and colleagues, this amendment is supported by a number of Senators because, as the Senate majority plows ahead with a scheme that I call repeal and run, it is putting tens of millions of Americans in danger of losing their health insurance, and Americans are waiting for Congress to step up and adopt smart policies that will drive down the cost of prescription medicine.

We understand this is an era of miracle cures and treatments. There are drugs on the market today that were science fiction not very long ago. With drug prices rising, the question is whether Americans are going to be able to afford them. This is a growing source of inequality, and it cannot go unchecked.

Here is my bottom line.

In a country as rich and strong as ours, cures have to be available for everyone, not just the wealthy.

I urge support for this amendment.

Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive section 305(b)(2) of that act for purposes of the pending amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam Clerk, because health care--

--should not just be for the healthy and wealthy, I vote no.

Madam President, I am very pleased to be able to join Senator Donnelly, Senator Hirono, and Senator Blumenthal on this extraordinarily important issue that goes right to the heart of what we want health care to be in this country. I have always felt that the really big issues, the really important issues, need to be bipartisan. You need to find a path to some common ground.

As Senator Donnelly and our colleagues have pointed out, what is being discussed now is an inherently partisan process for dealing with one of the most sensitive and most important issues of our time; that is, Medicare and what it represents. I had a chance to listen to Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono discuss this issue. It made me recall my days when I was director of the Oregon Gray Panthers, the senior citizens group. I was director of the group for almost 7 years before I was elected to Congress. This was back in the days when I had a full head of hair and rugged good looks.

We always talked about Medicare being a promise. It was a promise of guaranteed benefits. They were going to be there. They were going to be secure. They were going to be defined. In effect, all who supported Medicare said they would oppose unraveling that promise, unraveling that pledge of guaranteed benefits. It seems to me, without strong legislation, the kind of legislation my colleagues are advocating, we are putting that promise at risk.

I think when you look back at the history of what was available for older people before Medicare, you would see why this promise and this pledge is so important. For so many older people, there was, essentially, what amounted to poor farms. We had one not far from where we lived at home in Oregon. When Medicare was being debated, people brought out those pictures. They talked about what it meant, in a country as strong and good and rich as ours, for older people not to have a life of dignity and security and decent health care.

When Medicare was adopted in 1965, it was all about the promise. It was all about the guarantee. That is what Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono are standing up for as part of this debate. I know that some who don't share our view are going to say: Well, there are tremendous challenges with respect to Medicare. There is no question about that-- 10,000 people turning 65 every day for years and years--but there is so much that can be done, Democrats and Republicans, if you want to reject something that is partisan like reconciliation and come together. You can come together around updating the Medicare guarantee. I say this to my friends Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono, who have done such good work on this.

We are not saying there aren't any challenges. The fact is that Medicare today in 2017 is very different than Medicare when it began in 1965. It is dominated by chronic illness: cancer, diabetes, heart disease. But we can come up with fresh, practical approaches for dealing with those challenges, consistent with what Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono are talking about, which is keeping the Medicare promise, keeping the Medicare guarantee, not allowing the program to be privatized.

We started on that with the Affordable Care Act. There were a number of us in the Senate. Senator Isakson was very involved. At the time, Senator Markey was a Member of the other body. We advocated for something called Independence at Home, which allowed the Medicare Program to begin to take care of those with chronic illness at home.

So I am very appreciative of what Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono are doing because what they are saying is this: Instead of gambling on the health of older people with a partisan reconciliation process, let's work in a bipartisan way to build on the promise of Medicare, the promise of those guaranteed benefits.

We can do that. We can do that by creating more options for caring for older people at home. We can do it by expanding telemedicine and using new technology. We can do it by creating more opportunities for nonphysician providers. These are all ways that we can build on the Medicare promise and the Medicare guarantee and deal with the challenges of our time. But we are not going to be able to deal with those challenges through partisan approaches like reconciliation that would privatize the program and unravel the promise.

So I am very pleased to be able to have a chance to be out on the floor with my colleagues who have been strong advocates for Medicare, who rightly put this issue front and center in the debate, because I think a lot of what is being discussed is really getting lost. A big part of this debate really seems to be about creating a Trojan horse to give tax cuts to some of the most fortunate, while, in effect, raising health care costs for millions of others and breaking the Medicare promise, which is what my colleagues are seeking to protect in their amendment No. 20.

We are going to be talking more about this. Certainly, as the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, we will be having significant debates about these issues in the committee. But I am very appreciative that Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono have allowed us to jump-start what this debate is really all about; and that is, keeping the promise of Medicare, keeping the promise of guaranteed benefits, working in a bipartisan way to update the guarantee to deal with chronic illness and improve options for home care. I commend them both for their good work.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, my colleague from Illinois has addressed very clearly what some of the human consequences of this are going to be. I am going to take a few minutes as well to describe it. I am very pleased our colleague Senator Murray is here because she has really led the effort--and I have been very pleased to join her--in terms of trying to promote expanded health care services for vulnerable women in America.

I say to Senator Murray, I saw there was a comment made by some who advocate the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. They said: Nobody was going to get hurt--nobody in America was going to get hurt. The reality is, that is not true for the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of women who depend on Planned Parenthood for basic health care, for preventive health services, for essential services, for example, like cancer screens.

So this notion that somehow nobody is going to get hurt by repealing the Affordable Care Act is simply contradicted, from rural Oregon to rural Maine, when you see the kind of pain and suffering this is going to end up generating for some of the poorest and most vulnerable women in our country. The fact is, what has been set in motion by Republicans here in the Senate is a scheme that I call repeal and run. It is about very large tax breaks for the most fortunate, paid for by taking health insurance away from millions of working people. Under it, the insurance companies are back in the driver's seat, health care costs skyrocket across the board, and that is true even for those who get their insurance at work.

The replacement plan our colleagues on the other side have promised for years is somehow hidden away, with tens of millions of Americans in the dark about what is coming next for their health care.

Whenever I hear about the replacement, the whole notion of what would be there for families in the future, it reminds me of what used to be the old movie house in town. It had a big marquee up at the top of it, and it would always talk about the movie ``coming soon,'' but the movie never actually got there. When I hear about the replacement, what I think about is that everybody is going to be sitting in the dark again.

What is essentially at stake here is whether America is going to go back to the days when health care was for the healthy and the wealthy. That is what health care used to be all about. If you were healthy, no problems, nothing to worry about. If you were wealthy, you could just write out checks when you had a whole host of preexisting conditions.

What the Senate is going to vote on this week is whether to green- light the first step in this scheme to go back to the days when health care was for the healthy and wealthy with a budget resolution.

I think it is fair to say budget resolutions usually aren't the prime topic at dinner table conversations in America, but this year there are serious consequences--serious consequences--personal, life-and-death consequences because of this scheme that is being pushed through the Senate. That is where I believe the focus ought to be and why I am going to spend the remainder of my time talking about persons whose lives in Oregon are going to be directly affected and, in some cases, endangered.

Maleta Christian is from Douglas County, OR, a beautiful rural community. She is a personal support worker, providing care to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She had always carried health insurance until she was unexpectedly laid off from her job. She was without coverage for more than a year, but then she was able to buy a plan through the Affordable Care Act.

For Maleta, having insurance meant cancer screenings that, very likely, saved her life. Doctors found tumors that had to be removed. Later, she was diagnosed with a degenerative hip and back problems that caused her pain every day, making it difficult to get through a physically demanding and grueling job.

Her prescription drug coverage, which she gets through a plan under the Affordable Care Act, is what makes it possible for Maleta to get up every morning and get through that workday. Thanks to the care she has received, Maleta made it to her daughter's wedding, and she was proud that she even baked the cake.

Another Oregonian, Rita from Salem, comes from a family who has been struggling with depression. It is a condition that has been stigmatized for far too long in this country.

I know something about this because my late brother, Jeff, faced the stigma of mental health. He was a schizophrenic, and he passed at far too early an age. Far too many of those with mental illness have been denied care and shunted to the fringes of society.

Before Rita got coverage through the Affordable Care Act, she was forced to pour a staggering share of her income into health-related expenses. It was nearly two-thirds in 2011. Even then, she didn't have access to the mental health treatments she needed. Her depression used to keep her out of work.

With coverage from the Affordable Care Act tax credits that made it affordable, Rita's costs have fallen substantially. She now gets the prescription and therapy that help her manage her condition, and she can live a healthier life.

Another of my constituents is Mary, who lives in Milwaukie, OR, with her husband and 7-year-old daughter. She has a hereditary disease known as HAE. It is a rare genetic condition that causes dangerous swelling, lasting days at a time, affecting various parts of the body. If Mary goes without treatment, attacks come on regularly, even multiple times a week. When they do, it is completely disabling.

Before she got insurance through the Affordable Care Act, she rotated through health plans and insurers to maintain coverage and avoid hitting caps on treatments. She sought out clinical studies to get free care, typically participating in one each year.

So on top of holding down a job, raising a daughter, battling a life- threatening condition that affects 1 in 50,000 Americans, she was basically out trying to cobble some decent health care together. The system was so badly broken, she basically sewed her own health care safety net, but the ACA protected patients like Mary from discrimination and guaranteed access to care.

These are three Oregonians. They come from different backgrounds, and they have battled different conditions, but they share a lot in common with each other and with people around the land.

Not long ago, in the eyes of insurance companies, the women who I just mentioned would have worn their preexisting conditions like scarlet letters. But the insurance they have now gives them the opportunity for healthier, more productive lives, and that is what is endangered because of the scheme that is being pushed through Congress, pushed through the Senate by Republicans right now.

Costs are going to shoot up if the plan goes forward. The premium subsidies millions of Americans count on to buy insurance could be eliminated. Even if Americans with preexisting conditions have access to health care after this repeal scheme goes through, it doesn't mean they can afford it.

What my colleagues on the other side have said repeatedly for years is that they were going to repeal and replace--no gap, no harm done to anybody. The replacement would be ready on day one.

It sure looks as though that promise is going to be broken. The replacement is still hidden somewhere, but the process of repeal is rolling forward. In the meantime, millions of Americans are left guessing what is going to happen to their care if this plays out.

The bottom line for me and my colleagues is really this. If Members on the other side want to debate how to solve this country's health care challenge, we will have that debate.

I would say to my colleagues on the other side: I have spent about as much time as anybody here in this body looking for bipartisan approaches to address health care. So let's find ways to bring down costs for families. Let's make prescription drugs more affordable. Let's uphold the promise of Medicare because that is what it is; it is a promise of guaranteed benefits. But we are not going to be able to do that on a partisan scheme called the budget resolution and reconciliation. That is not about bringing people together for a bipartisan effort. That is about tearing things down, tearing down the Affordable Care Act, so I want that understood.

My colleague Senator Murray is here. She and I work together closely because of our committees. We feel very, very strongly about how uniquely important this time is because this is a time when our country has to decide not to go back to the dark days when health care was reserved for the healthy and wealthy. That is what the other side has on offer right now. It is a proposition that my colleagues and I are going to fight with all our strength.

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