Floor Statements

Mr. President, a lot of time when people come to Washington, they come up with ideas for new policies, and they have a theory of how those policies are supposed to work. What they don't always know are the unintended consequences of what that law is going to produce. As a matter of fact, I have said on occasion that the most certain thing that will happen when we pass a law is unintended consequences, and I haven't been proved wrong very many times on that.

The unintended consequences are things that nobody saw coming. They are things you didn't expect to happen the way they did. Smart people writing the laws may do all they can to anticipate everything they can, but there is always something never thought of. So it is helpful to have information that tells us what the consequences are likely to be.

The topic we are talking about here today is filled with intended consequences if you look just beyond the comment you are making at the impact it is going to have.

In this case, the proposed laws are a couple of ideas my Democratic colleagues have as to how to pay for the spending spree they are on right now. The tax-and-spend plans include a lot of bad ideas, but two of the tax ideas are particularly bad and will have particularly devastating impact.

First is a proposal from Senator Sanders to raise the death tax on farmers and ranchers, to change the exemption and do things that simply raise that tax. The second would be to impose the double-death tax by eliminating what Senator Moran was just talking about, the stepped-up basis in calculating how much families have to pay.

The research tells us what we can expect to happen if these two bills pass. Research was done at the Texas A&M University that looked at a representative group of 94 farms in 30 States. You can look at this research. You can verify my facts. With 94 farms, 30 States, they found that under current law, 2 of those 94 farms could expect to be hit by a big death tax when the farm goes from one generation to the next. But if the step-up basis tax hike proposed by President Biden and Democrats in Congress were enacted, the researchers found that 92 of 94 farms would be hit hard. The average additional tax liability would be $726,000. So 94 farms; 30 States; 92 farms affected; the average tax, $726,000. That is not the total taxes; that is just the additional taxes if these two bills pass.

If these tax hikes favored by the other side were allowed to pass, we would have 92 farms paying a higher tax bill. That average additional tax would add up to more than $1.5 million. Many families would be forced to sell all or part of their farm. And these aren't families who are inheriting big stock portfolios or families who are inheriting multimillion-dollar beach houses. They are not families who focus on every way you can think of to cheat the tax law. They are not billionaires looking for every way they can use a loophole. These are farmers and ranchers who have put their lives into the effort to make their farms work.

I will point out also that these same statistics would apply to many small businesses. Give this same speech for small businesses with many of the same considerations.

According to the Missouri Department of Agriculture, our State has 95,000 farms. They cover two-thirds of the State's total land acreage. The average Missouri farm is 291 acres, and almost all of them are owned by families. Between the investment there and the efforts that have been made, those families can be devastated in what they have worked hard to put together.

So for my friends on the other side of the aisle, I point out that unintended consequences are one thing, and unintended consequences often happen, but here we know what the consequences

are. So if these bills pass, this is intended consequences to make a big difference for family farms, for ranches, and, frankly, for small businesses as well.

I hope my colleagues will not go forward with these tax hikes on family farms. We know what damage it will cause. It is easy to verify. Don't make the family sell the farm. Don't make the small business sell the farm to a bigger business. Don't make these mistakes that have clear and intended consequences if this is what the Senate and the Congress will do.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, today I would like to recognize a good friend who has meant so much to those in St. Louis, across Missouri, and throughout the Nation. Betty Thompson passed away Sunday, July 11, 2021, at the age of 81.

Betty was a great leader, respected voice in the community, and was known for her service to others. Along with her public service, she was known for her generosity and caring nature to help those in need. She was the first African American to serve on the University City City Council and remained on that council for 18 years. She then was elected in 1997 to serve in the Missouri House of Representatives where she represented the 72nd District until 2004. From being a State representative to her advocacy for civil rights, she truly was a beacon of light.

Betty and I saw each other many times over the past 12 years. She provided a welcoming environment no matter the place and was always a trusted counsel during our conversations.

Jack and Betty Thompson were a month away from celebrating their 62nd wedding anniversary. Along with her husband, Betty is survived by her children Tony Thompson, Sonja Branscomb, and Kwame Thompson, and seven grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her son, Tyrone Thompson, and grandson, Tyrell Thompson.

I am grateful to have known Betty and thankful for the impact she has had on my own life, as well as those around Missouri.

Madam President, like all of us, I just got back from spending some time at home. I got back from being there and making a difference. I think one of the important things of being outside of Washington is you get a chance to hear what people are really concerned about. We have all kinds of speeches given here every day of what Members of Congress are absolutely sure people are concerned about. I

think that topic becomes much more crystal clear when you get home. I know it is certainly much more crystal clear to me when I am home in Missouri.

Over the Fourth of July holiday, there were a number of visits all over the State--to Columbia, St. Louis, Montgomery City, Monroe City. There were lots of events everywhere in the State at which I talked about the importance of getting the vaccine and the progress we were making there, but the first thing that people wanted to talk to me about was inflation. People are already seeing that prices are well above the numbers that they believe they are seeing that the official numbers are confirming.

In May of this year, prices were 5 percent higher than they were in May a year ago. In June, they were 5.4 percent higher than they were a year ago, but people are seeing a lot of prices that are higher than that. The price of whole milk is up 7.5 percent from a year ago. The price of an airplane ticket has averaged up about 25 percent from a year ago. Used cars are more expensive than they were last June. In fact, they are 45 percent more expensive than they were a year ago in June.

There is an incredible increase in the cost of things that people not only want to buy but on those things that are more pressing: what people have to buy and need to buy.

A lot of people specifically talked to me about gas prices. I was on the road a lot, driving a lot while I was home, and I saw those prices for myself. The average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline nationwide is about $3.15. That is 45 percent higher than in June of last year. That is a hidden tax that working people pay every day.

Whether it is a hidden tax on a glass of milk, a hidden tax on a tank of gas, or a hidden tax on other things that they like to do or have to do, it makes a real difference for the people who want to take a vacation or have to travel to work. In the part of Missouri that I live in, there are a lot of little towns that have manufacturing jobs. It is not unusual for somebody to drive 40 or 50 miles one way to get to that job, and if gasoline is 45 percent higher than it was a year ago, it makes a real difference. That is a real hidden tax, and it is usually a hidden tax on the people to whom the President rightly would not want to pass on tax increases.

I think the administration has to start taking into account the issues that are out there. Larry Summers and others from the Obama administration have warned of the great risk of inflation. When we talk about energy, for instance, I think we have to do that, clearly, in a way that, if we are making transitions to energy, we don't make those transitions in a way that needlessly have a negative impact on families and on opportunities.

In his first few days in office, President Biden rescinded the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, and not too long after that, he blocked the new oil and gas leases in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. These were things that Congress had talked about for a long time and, in some cases, were things Congress had specifically decided were timely to do, but an Executive order from the President decided, no, we are going to head in a different direction.

That was just the beginning, really, of what my colleagues have seen in the discussion in Congress and what my Democratic colleagues in Congress have in mind. So, if you like paying higher prices for gasoline, you are going to love what happens to the restrictions that go into effect and drive prices of all energy even higher.

The other thing I talked to small business owners about and, frankly, to all business owners about was the trouble in finding enough workers. Republican Governors in 25 States have now determined that the larger unemployment benefit kept people from going back to work. People were choosing to stay on the sidelines rather than go to work. Frankly, if you looked at that $618 weekly unemployment check that was the average in America in May, that unemployment check didn't have any childcare costs associated with it, and it didn't have any travel to work associated with it. You have to have a job that pays a lot to not consider, if I am continuing to get this check, why should I go back to work?

Missouri was one of the 25 States that decided that the extra bonus was not only bad for families in their not going back to work but that it was bad for our economy. So, as of June 12, the return to the important but much lower normal unemployment benefit happened in our State, and I think you can already see people making the decision that it is time to go back to work.

Surprisingly, even though we have created a lot of opportunities for people to stay home, the June economy created 850,000 new jobs, and we should all feel good about that, but if this is an economy that has created 850,000 new jobs, at some point, we have to stop pushing money into that economy that we don't have. There are, obviously, a lot of factors at play here, but the 850,000 people going back to work is an important and a significant thing.

Part of the explanation, obviously, is the rush by Republican Governors, principally, to eliminate that bonus, but part of it is just simply an economy that is already beginning to rebound--to rebound based on the current tax structure and rebound based on what governments already spend rather than this incredible rush to drive inflation even further.

The Congressional Budget Office put out a new report recently that read the Federal deficit for this fiscal year will be more than $3 trillion. The problem is that nobody has any idea what $3 trillion really is, and that probably includes most of us. If I said the deficit was $3 million or $300,000, somehow divided up to every American family, we would immediately think: Oh, my goodness. We could never deal with that.

By the way, it was just announced that there is a budget agreement on top of that $3 trillion deficit to spend another $3.5 trillion.

It is time we started talking frankly about how much $3 trillion really is. That $3 trillion is something that somebody has to pay back sometime. All that borrowing and spending has been one of the big factors contributing to inflation. It doesn't even count the $3.5 trillion, again, that had been added just overnight in that discussion.

Some people are beginning to call this Bidenomics. I think Congress has to take its share of responsibility here. The belief that we can spend without limit and that it won't cause any problems is outrageous. The idea that we can pay people not to work or pay them more than they would make if they did work is outrageous. All of these things lead to unintended consequences. There is a belief that high gas prices and inflation are just temporary and that people shouldn't be concerned about it. Well, people are concerned, and they should be concerned.

I hope my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will spend some time listening to people, hearing their concerns. I hope they will reconsider their policies that are fueling inflation and holding back our economy

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, when I look at this substitute, I am reminded of the adage, the new boss is the same

as the old boss. In this case, the new bill is the same as the old bill. It has a different number, but it still maintains the same flawed policies that S. 1 maintains.

Obviously, the majority would like to pass this bill or they wouldn't have labeled it their most important piece of legislation for this Congress. The House of Representatives labeled the same bill, ``H.R. 1,'' their most important piece of legislation for this Congress.

The changes basically give election officials more time to implement policies that I don't think we need, and I think the changes don't make the bill less bad. In fact, what the bill does is it creates a new boss for elections, but the new boss is the Federal Government. It is not about voting rights. It doesn't add any group or any individuals to the group of people who can vote, the kind of thing that Congress has done in the past, starting in the first century of the country and moving on until today. It is, frankly, a politically motivated, Federal takeover of the election systems that would make, in my opinion, elections more chaotic, less secure, less nimble in their ability to deal with individual circumstances that occur on election day.

(Mr. MARKEY assumed the Chair.)

The strength of the election system is the diversity of the election system. This is what President Obama thought in 2016. He may not still believe that, but I still believe it.

S. 1 would force a single partisan view of elections on more than 10,000 voting jurisdictions across the country, taking control away from States, taking control away from local officials--frankly, they are the closest people to the voters--and instead giving it to people in a far-away national capital without the same sense of importance of the people believing that what happened on election day at your precinct is what the voters intended to have happen that day and that the people who were voting were the people who were legally able to vote, not people who may have voted somewhere else--not people who may no longer live in the jurisdiction they are voting in and no longer qualified to vote for that county official or that State representative or whoever, but people who are legally able to vote.

I think this makes fraud easier to commit and, frankly, harder to detect. What we should be doing is making it easier to vote and harder to cheat. I think what we are doing here is making it easier to cheat and harder to find it out.

We allow, in this bill, if it was the law, unlimited ballot harvesting. This is where anybody can go around and collect ballots and, theoretically, be sure that they get to the election authority, but who knows? Who knows what ballot got lost in the mail and what ballot never got in the mail? One of the things the ballot harvester would develop a pretty good sense of is how the person voted whose ballot they were harvesting.

This bill undermines popular voter ID laws that more than half of the States have implemented.

It makes it more difficult to maintain accurate voter lists.

It permanently tips the scales in favor of our friends on the other side by politicizing the Federal Election Commission--a Commission that was established, just like our Ethics Commission in the Senate, with an equal number of one party and no imbalance. This politicizes the Federal Election Commission. It makes it a partisan Agency, not a bipartisan policing Agency.

It pours Federal funds into campaigns, and it chills free speech--bad policy, I think, in search of a problem.

Democrats have said this is necessary to increase voting rights, particularly for minorities, but the overall turnout in the year 2020 was about two-thirds of all the voters--the highest percentage of voters who participated in over a century. What we have here is an election that had the highest level of participation in over a century. Most States had their highest voter turnout in 40 years, and we decide we need to change the system.

S. 1 isn't just about bad policy; it is about what Democrats have seen as a political imperative.

Frankly, this has been the bill that Democrats have offered for about the last 20 years. It varies a little bit from time to time, but about 20 years ago and maybe before that. I was a chief election official in our State at that time. I don't remember Democrats offering this before 20 years ago. But starting about two decades ago, every couple of years and certainly every time Democrats get in the majority in the House, they pass this bill or one almost exactly like it.

When asked about what it would take to maintain the current majority in the House, Speaker Pelosi said: Well, it would be better if we could pass H.R. 1 and S. 1. Now, that sounds like she thinks there is a political advantage there. I respect the Speaker's political judgment and always have respected Speaker Pelosi's political judgment. Her judgment would be that this would be better for Democrats than not changing the current election law.

S. 1 is really full of unnecessary and, as it turns out, unpopular provisions under the label ``Would you like to vote for a bill that would secure democracy?'' Well, of course. Who wouldn't want to be for securing democracy? Fortunately, this bill has been around long enough that people have begun to understand what is in it--the same list that has been out there before.

This bill would render State voter ID laws meaningless by requiring States to allow affidavits in lieu of identification. In other words, you say who you are at the polling place. Well, anybody who is going to try to cast a ballot at the polling place they shouldn't cast is probably also likely to be willing to say they are qualified to vote at that election.

In a recent poll, a poll that came out this week, 80 percent of Americans supported voter ID laws. Another poll just a couple of weeks ago showed national support for voter photo ID was 75 percent. That included 69 percent of Black voters and 60 percent of Democrats.

So we have a principal position of this bill that 80 percent of all voters--at least 75 percent of all voters and 60 percent of Democrats are for, but this bill changes that law that makes sense to almost everybody.

This bill requires that unlimited ballot harvesting that I talked about just a minute ago. The only time I recall a congressional discussion recently about ballot harvesting was last year when the House of Representatives refused to seat a Republican-elected Member because that campaign had used ballot harvesting. Now we have a law that requires every State not to prohibit ballot harvesting. The risk of fraud, the risk of every ballot not getting to the place ballots need to be certainly increases when you hand them to a ballot harvester--usually somebody paid by a campaign or a party to go around and collect ballots and someone whose motivation to get those ballots all turned in may not be everything you want it to be.

Sixty-two percent of respondents in one poll said ballot harvesting should be illegal. It is another provision in this bill that clearly is not a popular provision if people begin to look at it.

Again, voting to protect democracy--sure, that is popular. But the way this bill does it, when people look at it, is not popular.

The bill requires States to give felons the right to vote in Federal elections when they are out of prison. Some States do that; some States don't. Of course, if this bill passed, every State would have the choice of going ahead and doing that or having two sets of voter rolls, one for Federal elections and another one for non-Federal elections. That, of course, makes no sense at all. What this bill anticipates is that no matter what States wanted to do, this is a provision they would have to adopt.

There is another way to get that done: Go to State legislatures and explain the value of having that changed if that change needs to be made.

This bill restricts the ability of States to maintain accurate voter rolls. Many States--States with Democratic Governors or Democratic secretaries of state, Democratic legislatures--have worked hard to see that they had a system in place where you would periodically check and see if the people who are registered to vote are still where they registered to vote from.

Our State--I think a lot of States--if you move to another county and register to vote there, you are supposed to

say as part of that process who you could notify to get you off the voter rolls, but there is no requirement that that has to happen. A periodic check of the voter rolls was seen not too long ago as a huge protection of democracy. This makes it much harder to do. But a 2018 poll found that 77 percent of Americans supported this kind of voter roll maintenance.

Frankly, it would be pretty hard to come up with a bill that had so many major tenets that were so out of step with what people think the government ought to do and what they want their State government to do and in most cases where State governments are doing this.

This bill provides government funding for campaigns--$6 of Federal money for every dollar raised from small donors. Small donors is under $200. Frankly, if you were doing this, there would be--the current Members of the Senate, under this bill, could receive up to, collectively, $1.8 billion from the Federal Government to run their campaigns, to attack their challenger, or whatever they want to do with their campaign money--$1.8 billion to do that. It is pretty easy to qualify for this money.

We saw people raise money in the first quarter of this year. That would have qualified--in the case of our friend the Senator from Texas, Senator Cruz, somewhere between $25 and $30 million would go to his campaign. We had a markup on this bill in the Rules Committee. Not a single member of the Rules Committee, Democrat or Republican, including Senator Cruz, thought Senator Cruz should get $24 or $25 million from the Federal Government for his campaign.

The bill creates a partisan Federal Elections Commission. It gets rid of that bipartisan makeup that has been there from the very start.

This bill chills free speech in that it creates a disclosure document that makes people really reluctant to give money to other groups who aren't candidates who like to talk about elections.

It federalizes redistricting. S. 1 would put in place one set of Federal rules for redrawing congressional districts. That has always been the role of the States. If the State wants to give that to somebody besides the legislature, they can do that, and many States have done that. But States have been the constitutionally designated place to determine how they draw congressional maps in their own States.

Even if a State manages to comply with all these requirements, under this bill, the Justice Department would have to be involved. Under this bill, the court of jurisdiction in all cases on redistricting would be the Federal court in Washington, DC, not the Federal court in the circuit that Missouri is in. You wouldn't even start at the district court in Kansas City or St. Louis. The Federal court in Washington, DC, would be the place you would go.

Of course, the purpose of the bill is to bring all these election decisions to one place. The idea that the best decisions are always made in Washington, DC, on all topics is an idea that most Americans don't agree with. There are things they think we can do and should do and can only do because they can't do them any other way, like defend the country and set big national priorities. But for well over 200 years now, local election officials responsible for the sense of credibility of what happens on election day have done this job. I think they have done it well.

This bill would require States to take burdensome actions and make expensive changes in their election systems. Even if the States have already adopted some of the so-called reforms, they in all likelihood would have to make changes in their system to comply.

So the Federal takeover of elections shouldn't happen. I urge my colleagues not to support it happening. The American people don't want to see the things imposed on our election system that are in this bill. I urge my colleagues to vote against this harmful legislation.

I yield the floor.

Thank you. Madam President.

Madam President, let me say, our times got changed today a little bit, and I was trying to finish another thing to get over here and hear in person what Senator Stabenow had to say. She has been an incredible leader in this effort, a great partner.

As she mentioned, we came to the floor the last day of October 2013, which was the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's signing the Community Mental Health Act. Well-intended, but an awful lot of it just didn't get done. Facilities were closed that maybe were well overdue to be closed, but the opportunities weren't put in place to replace them as that act had hoped they would be.

I think we have been in the process of making big strides toward doing that. That was 2013. In 2014, we were able to get the first pilot project for Excellence in Mental Health put into place, an eight-State pilot project, where we were looking not only at the impact on those individuals and families who needed to have their behavioral health issue treated like all other health issues but also, frankly, looking to see what impact it had on all their other health issues when your behavioral health issue is being treated as it should be.

One of the great costs in healthcare is missed appointments. You have got to believe that almost 20 percent of the population that has a behavioral health issue is more likely to miss an appointment than everybody else, and, of course, that costs the whole system, but it particularly costs them.

If you are going to the doctor when you need to, taking the medicine you are supposed to take for any kind of health issue, eating better, sleeping better, feeling better about yourself, your health issues are dealt with in a different way.

Nearly one in five Americans, according to the NIH, has a behavioral health problem, but only a fraction of those Americans get the care they need. The NIH says they have a diagnosable--almost one out of five Americans has a diagnosable and almost always treatable behavioral health problem. But, certainly, one out of five Americans who have that problem don't get the care they need to deal with that problem.

The COVID pandemic added to many of those challenges, and, realistically, it would, if you think about it. If you have got a behavioral health issue, that is not normally going to be helped by isolation, by worrying about healthcare for yourself or somebody you care about, wondering whether you are going to lose your job or someone in your family is going to lose their job. None of those things are going to be helpful.

The other area that comes into play there is an addiction issue of any kind. If you don't have a behavioral health issue before you have an opioid dependency or some other addiction issue, you certainly have one after that addiction takes over.

So all of those things were exacerbated by the pandemic. The percentage of Americans with symptoms of anxiety or depression grew by more than 40 percent. Drug overdose deaths increased by 20 percent between October of 2019 and 2020. It was 30 percent. I think I may have said 20--30 percent.

That was after 3 years of having drug overdose deaths headed in a dramatically different direction, but suddenly 2020 was the highest year ever for drug overdose deaths.

So the challenges of that are great. We now have 10 States, including both Missouri and Michigan, that went through a competitive process and became part of the original Excellence in Mental Health States.

In all of those States, we have certified community behavioral health clinics that have to meet standards. They have to meet standards of who staffs that clinic; they have to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with crisis management as a possibility. They can do preventive screenings. They can determine appropriate care coordination with other providers, like emergency room departments or veterans services.

All of those things make a dramatic difference in people's lives. People getting help through the clinics often have access to primary care treatment as well. I have visited a lot of those clinics in our State. I have seen what happens with these demonstration projects. They are enabling more people to get the complete healthcare they need--and, again, including mental healthcare and addictive treatment--quicker, closer to home.

In new data from the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, 84 percent of those clinics, the CCBHCs they are calling them--84 percent of them were able to see clients within the first week. I think 100 percent of them were able to see a client who needed to be seen that day, that day. I certainly hope that is the goal. I hope nobody goes to a clinic, if professionals believe you need help right now, who doesn't get help right now.

But 84 percent of the people who show up get an appointment within the

first week. That definitely was not the case 10 years ago, and it is not the case now in States that haven't become part of this program.

Ninety-five percent of those clinics are involved with law enforcement activities and nursing and criminal justice centers. In my hometown of Springfield, MO, every patrol officer who has been trained in crisis intervention has an iPad with them that they can connect anybody they are talking to with a 24/7 Burrell community health center.

And they do. I have seen that happen. I have traveled with officers who have done that. And, by the way, I am sure they didn't have me with an officer who wasn't really good, but you could see, no matter how good that officer was, the individual, when they were talking to somebody at the clinic who was a professional dealing with this all the time, you could see that conversation took on a totally different tone.

We have seen more and more efforts to try to help with substance abuse. We have been able to fund the federally qualifying clinics in new ways because of that.

So 10 States are totally in this program. Forty States, under an amendment we made a couple of years after we got started, have been able to take county units or other units that they can qualify into the Excellence in Mental Health Program.

So what we are working on now with our colleagues is an effort to, once again, make this available to the entire country. I think we have had enough proof in the last 7 years or so to show it makes a big difference.

Again, let me say, everybody has always known that this is the right thing to do, and they have always known it is the thing that even was financially smart in the long run. I think we are also showing here how, in the immediate healthcare context, it makes a financially smart investment to help somebody with their behavioral health challenges as you are working with all of their other health challenges.

Behavioral health, mental health needs to be treated like all other health. This Congress, this year, hopefully starting in this Senate, has the ability to say: OK. We are ready to open the door now to every State that wants to participate in a program that would treat mental health like all other health.

I know Senator Stabenow and I are going to be working hard together, and you are going to be helping us as we work to get this done.

Thank you for the time today. I look forward to the further debate of these issues. I think we have come a long way within the last 8 years. We can see the full opportunity here right on the horizon.

The Congressional Budget Office, every time they look at this, thinks it costs less than they thought the time before because they are seeing the overall impact in ways that we thought these pilots would prove.

So let's get this done this year. I look forward to working hard to do it and look forward to a full debate and vote on this issue on the Senate floor.

I would yield back.

Mr. President, you and I, as we sit on the Rules Committee, saw the debate on this bill--the bill that the sponsors call the For the People Act. I think it really more accurately could be called the ``For the Politicians Act.'' S. 1 was marked up in the Rules Committee last month, a markup that I certainly raised a number of concerns about the bill and others did too. It is more than 800 pages

that contains policies relating to election administration, to campaign finance, to redistricting, and much more.

Now, the truth is, we don't know what bill will come to the floor because this bill couldn't get out of committee. And apparently we are going to not use the committee process but, in fact, we will bring a different bill to the floor that nobody has seen yet. But this bill seems to get bigger over time, not smaller over time.

It includes the overwhelmingly bad idea that Congress should impose a Federal takeover of elections and force a one-size-fits-all approach on the more than 10,000 voting jurisdictions in the country.

There are very few things that you can develop a formula that works just right in 10,000 places. In fact, in our States and in the District of Columbia, we have a pretty significant problem coming up with 51 different structures that work for everywhere in every jurisdiction that is impacted by that.

This bill also has some deadlines that are so short that if it became law, it would create chaos in next year's elections and make the election process less trusted, not more trusted.

We should be focusing on Federal laws and State laws that make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. I think this bill makes it easier to cheat and harder to figure out whether anybody cheated or not.

S. 1 undermines the popular State voter identification laws. The majority of our States now require some kind of identification. And an overwhelming number of voters believe that voter identification at the polls is a good thing.

This bill allows political operatives to fan out across a community and collect an unlimited number of ballots. In fact, it says States can't even stop that process of ballot harvesting. Those ballot harvesters can collect ballots from you. They can collect ballots from your neighbors, from vulnerable voters like people in nursing homes. And, frankly, who knows if they turn them in or not? Who knows if they put them in the post office box or not? If they never show up, the ballot harvester, who may very well know that your ballot is a ballot they don't agree with, could just say, ``Well, I don't know what happened. It must have been lost in the mail,'' and who would ever know whether it was lost in the mail or not?

In addition to undermining voter identification laws and making it possible for complete strangers to take your ballot, S. 1 disrupts States' long-made efforts to maintain an accurate list of eligible voters. Voter rolls are the foundation really of election administration. I was the chief election official in our State. I was a local election official in our State.

Accurate lists of who can vote that people can look at before the election, during the election, and after the election create great confidence in the process.

Accurate lists ensure that voters are able to cast a ballot--and the ballot they should cast--in the districts they actually live in. That can be pretty complicated sometimes, and really only the election authority can be aware of that when they know exactly where you live.

Election officials, when you have accurate lists, know who has voted, and, frankly, they know who hasn't voted. So if the same person comes in or at least a person pretending to be the same person comes in a second time, they know that.

Accurate voter lists allow voters to check in more quickly to get that efficient and quick exercise of democracy done.

One of the things everybody constantly talks about is, well, we make it too hard to vote. If you really want to make it hard to vote, make it hard to figure out who the voters are who are supposed to be voting at a given precinct.

The right to vote is a bedrock principle in our democracy. The right to vote wherever you want to vote is not a bedrock principle in our democracy. You can't just decide: Well, this year I think it is going to be pretty competitive in some other State. I will just drive over there on election day and vote. Frankly, you can't just decide: You know, that congressional district next door to the one I live in looks more competitive than the one I live in. I think I will go over there and vote this year instead of in the district that the census tract would have put me in.

The right to vote is a bedrock principle. The right to vote wherever you want to isn't. Some of our great local administrators figured this out. In St. Louis County, the biggest single election jurisdiction in Missouri, you can vote anywhere in the county, but at the place where you go vote--the ballot for you individually is generated at the place you go vote, and it is counted in the races that are generated for you to vote in. That is pretty innovative. I don't think we could probably have ever figured that out at the national level.

But the point is, you are voting for the people who you are living in the district that person will represent, whether it is on the local school board or in the Congress or in the State legislature. That is a very complicated set of things that benefit totally from voter rolls and benefit from you voting where you live.

This bill prohibits States from putting in place really just reasonable election security measures that have been upheld by court. It takes away the guardrails that prevent fraud from happening and ensures that when you do have fraud, you have ways to figure out that fraud occurred and what to do about it. You pile up all the ways this legislation actually increases the likelihood of fraud, and you think about whether you really need a strong reason to change the system when, as Senator Grassley said, the system appears to be working pretty well.

Democracies benefits from local responsibility. One political party, however, thinks this bill will give it an electoral advantage. They have thought that for about 20 years. This is the compilation of 20 years of Democrats in the Congress thinking, what could we do to change the election law that would be helpful for us? That is where we are in this legislation. It was written by one party alone. It has been steered through Congress by one party alone. It has not actually been seen by anybody in the other party yet, and the majority leader says this bill, which probably still is going to be about 800 pages, will come to the floor next week. In both Chambers of Congress, there has been bipartisan opposition to the bill and no bipartisan support for this bill.

The danger of those kinds of sweeping changes really can do a lot to negatively impact our election system, but it doesn't stop there. It would turn the Federal Election Commission into a partisan tool where the party of the President has a majority. There is a reason that six- member Commission was equally divided when it was set up, just like there is a reason the Senate Ethics Committee is equally divided.

This bill would send Federal money to campaign coffers at the rate of $6 for every dollar raised for every contribution under $200. I think the number my friend Chairman Grassley was talking about was if you raised $5 million of under $200, you would get $30 million from the Federal Government--$30 million of government money that could clearly be used for something else. In fact, the current Members of the Senate would be eligible under the total restrictions of the bill to get $1.8 billion in Federal money. Talk about a conflict of interest when you vote for this bill.

The bill also changes redistricting established in the Constitution for the States and basically ensures that all congressional redistricting would be done by Federal courts. That doesn't affect the Senate much, but it affects the government a lot. It places heavy burdens on free speech and impacts every branch of the Federal Government.

I have heard proponents of this bill say that it is necessary to push back recently passed State voter laws and protect the voting rights of Americans. This bill has nothing to do with voting rights. It doesn't protect the right of a single American to cast a ballot. It doesn't bring new people into the system as the constitutional amendment did on women and other people who have been added, people who had been held in a terrible way in slavery, people who had been prevented from voting because of their sex or race, and people who were prevented because of age at one time. This bill does nothing of that.

This is a Federal takeover of elections. It should be rejected by the Senate. I believe it will be rejected by the Senate. We look forward to seeing the other side defend this bill next week.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I was watching Senator Ernst give this speech. And as to that ``Help Wanted'' sign, I thought I was back in Springfield, MO, my hometown, where I was this weekend. There were occasions when I was driving down a block, and I started looking to see if there was a place that didn't have a ``Help Wanted'' sign up. They were everywhere--``Help Wanted'' signs, hiring bonuses, rates well above the minimum wage. Our minimum wage is $10.30 in our State. There were rates well above that being advertised on the ``Help Wanted'' signs.

You know, we all were disappointed by the job numbers that were issued at the end of April. But, obviously, the job numbers didn't reflect the fact that there weren't jobs to be had. It was just that there weren't people taking the jobs to be had.

We need to think about everything we can to create an environment where people want to go back to work, where people are encouraged to go back to work, and where people who can't go back to work have that basic unemployment benefit. Nobody is begrudging that, but I think it is clear that we have made some mistakes here.

Now, many of us were concerned about this when it initially came up, and we were not able to turn back the additional bonus at the time, though the predictions were just too true about what might happen.

What small businesses in Missouri are saying is pretty consistent all over the State. In St. Louis, the manager of Mary Ann's Tea Room said: ``It is heartbreaking that the business is there, but I can't hire anyone.'' And that restaurant was forced to just close down because they didn't have enough workers.

In Kansas City, the president of the Big Biscuit restaurant said: ``We've never had a hiring drought like this before.'' And according to him, he said, there is ``no doubt we are up against unemployment that has been artificially increased and stimulus payments that give people the opportunity not to show up for work.''

In Branson, just as the busy summer season is getting underway, the general manager at Mel's Hard Luck Diner says he is so short-staffed that they have to close Sunday evenings now--a time when they would normally be open, just to compensate for the fact that they don't have enough people to do the 7 evenings and 7 days of business that they were used to doing. He says he can't even get people to show up for a job interview, let alone show up to work.

Just down the street in Branson, at one of the great theme parks in America, the Silver Dollar City Theme Park, they told me a couple of weeks ago that they could hire 150 people the next day--that would still be their view, by the way--if they could find 150 people. They have 150 jobs, and they have more customers than they have people, so not everybody could get in the park that would normally be able to come to the park.

In Columbia, right in the middle of our State, the owner of Just Jeff's said: ``There's not a person that I come into contact with . . . as a businessowner or manager or something like that, that isn't in a terrible pinch right now for help.''

That is just a snapshot of all we are seeing. I talked to one person who runs a family hotel chain. It is a big family hotel chain based in St. Louis. He said: We have the customers now who are coming back, but we don't have the help. We could fill more rooms than we are filling if we had people who could clean the rooms and get them ready the next day.

Businesses are ready to be back and be fully open, but they don't have the workers they need.

We had an amendment in the CARES Act, one of the five bipartisan bills we passed last year, that would have prevented people from making more when they are unemployed than when they

are working. I said at the time, when I voted for that amendment, that I was concerned that these enhanced unemployment benefits would really create a time when people didn't want to go back to work, and, unfortunately, that is exactly what happened in Missouri and around the country

It has been a tough year, we all know that, for small business owners. We stepped up and tried to think of early ways to keep people on their payrolls rather than on the unemployment rolls. By the way, even at that time, many of those businesses were saying, well, that is a great idea. We would like to keep them on our payroll, but they can make more money on the unemployment rolls. Is that fair to them, to not let them go to this unemployment that the government and its policies made so appealing?

They were trying to fight the worst public health crisis ever and trying to keep businesses afloat. Now they are trying to figure out: As we come out of the public health crisis, what do we do to keep that business going?

You know, that misguided government policy--that comment Ronald Reagan used to make--is one of the scariest things you could hear: ``I am from the government, and I am here to help.'' This seems to be a case where that truly has been a scary thing: The government, trying to help, trying to reach out and do what at least a majority of our colleagues thought was the right thing, has created a situation that is different than it needs to be.

Twenty-one States have now either decided to stop participating already or have announced that they are going to stop participating. Governor Parson in Missouri made that decision. As Senator Ernst mentioned, the Governor of Iowa has made and 19 other Governors have made that decision.

The average unemployment benefit in the States in America right now is $618 a week. That is the average. That includes the $300 that the Federal Government has put into every one of those checks that are still going out at that level. That is $15.46 an hour. Certainly, one way to mandate a $15 hourly pay rate is just to decide that is what you are going to make if you are unemployed. Well, it hasn't worked. It won't work. Our State of Missouri and other States are moving away from this.

In Washington, we make policies, and one of our responsibilities is to be sure that we are keeping an eye on unintended consequences. The law of unintended consequences is one of the great certainties of making law, and we need to watch out for that. We have a huge unintended consequence here. We saw what happened when now the Biden administration is trying to explain why it is not their policies that appear to be slowing the recovery down, but we all know that this is part of that problem.

We have done something to cause this problem. We need to figure out how to solve this problem. This should not be something that States, one at a time, reject. We need to get our economy back on track as quickly as possible.

There is virtue in work, and I hope we make work more appealing again than not working.

Thank you.

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Wyoming (Ms. Lummis) and the Senator from South Dakota (Mr. Thune).

Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Wyoming (Ms. Lummis) would have voted ``nay.''

Mr. President, I am saddened by the passing of Hal Sullivan. He had a unique ability to bring together organizations and private sector partners to make sure clients of the Fathers & Families Support Center had the tools they needed to be successful. I appreciated learning what he was seeing and hearing, and hearing his advice over the years. His work touched the lives of so many families throughout the St. Louis region, and his legacy of service will have a lasting impact throughout our State for generations to come.

Mr. President, I rise today to honor a Springfield, MO, resident who has dedicated 38 years of her life in service to the city of Springfield by helping facilitate economic development, creating and retaining thousands of jobs, and bringing life to the downtown area. Mary Lilly Smith started her career in 1983 as a city planner for downtown Springfield, where she helped create the city's initial neighborhood conservation office. During the next 38 years, Mary played an instrumental role in nearly 100 key economic initiatives.

Mary is best known for her 17 years as the economic development director. Along with her commitment to the downtown area, she created the Economic Development Incentives Policy Manual, which became a template for other towns and cities across the State to implement development policies. In addition to her economic development initiatives, Mary made sure to preserve the city of Springfield's incredible history. Throughout her nearly four decades of service, Mary has developed many different approaches to preserving and honoring the history of the area. She also developed the city's first capital improvement program, which facilitated a change in the review process for protecting architecturally significant historical properties.

Mary leaves behind a legacy for the city of Springfield to be enjoyed by all for years to come. For her many years of service, she has earned her retirement. As she enters this new chapter of her life, I offer Mary best wishes.

Mr. President, I want to talk also about infrastructure and associate myself with the interest that the country has in infrastructure.

In fact, one of the things that the government has done the longest has been roads and bridges and canals. I think, initially, the term ``internal improvements'' was, in the early 19th century, what they would have talked about when they talked about what we began to talk about later as ``infrastructure.'' During almost the entire history of the country, there was an understanding of what ``infrastructure'' meant in America.

Infrastructure is pretty popular, and infrastructure is definitely something that you generally can't do for yourself. You can't, on your own, provide the waterline that connects your house to the next house. On your own, you can't provide the road that gets you from home to work. On your own, you can't do a lot of things that we did early on and up until right now and call them infrastructure. Normally, they were seen as things like roads and bridges and dams--big projects that sometimes crossed State lines--or big projects that sometimes were just too big for a State or a town to handle, like water systems that needed to be improved.

When we did that--and I will talk later about the way we did that-- the bipartisan agreement also largely led to figuring out ways that infrastructure would pay for itself, in that the people who used the infrastructure would pay for the infrastructure, and we looked at that in a number of different ways.

Now, in the package that the administration has proposed, the $2.3 trillion package, there are lots of things in there that I don't disagree that the Senate should debate or I don't even rule out of hand that the country might want to do. Yet I think they are not infrastructure, and the funding way to get to them makes it harder to have the kind of bipartisan agreement that, I think, we could have in an infrastructure bill. The Republicans are for it, and the Democrats are for it in the House, in the Senate. Let's talk about how to get there.

Let's also make the point, of the $213 billion in this plan that is for Green New Deal building makeovers, there may be a place to do that, and it is something that we could clearly debate, but it is not the same thing as infrastructure. I was, at one time, the chairman of the Missouri Housing Development Commission. We did a lot of things to make it possible for people to have houses or for people to have buildings that they could have an opportunity to be a part of, but we never really called it infrastructure, and we did it in a different way.

On surface transportation, generally, for decades, that was paid by the highway trust fund. How did you fund the highway trust fund? You funded the highway trust fund by people pulling up to service stations and putting fuel in their cars, and when they did that, they paid into the highway trust fund. The more miles you drove, the more you paid into the highway trust fund, and Americans thought that was fair. We haven't raised the highway gas tax since 1993, and that could very well be a debate we should have as part of an infrastructure package. If not the gas tax, what other kind of user fee could there be? Lots of people use the highways, the roads, the bridges, and the Interstate Highway System who don't pay a gas tax now because they are transitioning to vehicles like electric vehicles that don't fill up at that gas pump.

That is a debate I think we should have as part of an infrastructure debate. Just last year, it was predicted

that the highway trust fund would run out of money before the year was over, and it did. Because we collect less money every year than we spend every year, we decided to subsidize that out of general revenue, but nobody in that debate ever thought that it should be the permanent solution.

For other kinds of projects, we look for ways to help the end user make a project possible both in urban communities and rural communities. There are programs in which you can replace your water system or your stormwater system with something that works and price it appropriately. What we have done there is say: Well, we are going to figure out how we can either guarantee your bonds or write down your loans or both so that the users in those systems over, maybe, 30 years would pay back in amounts they could afford--what happened when you turned the lead water pipe into an appropriate water pipe. I am in favor of replacing every lead water pipe in America, but I think you can do that in a way that the users of those systems pay for those systems just like all of their neighbors in neighboring communities are paying for their systems. We could help them do that, and we have proven we can help them do that.

We could also create an infrastructure bank. Senator Warner and I have worked on that for years. I think we are going to reintroduce the REPAIR Act, which would really be a nonpartisan financing authority whereby the government guarantees a certain amount of that money, and maybe government assistance in putting together a public-private partnership creates another way that a little bit of Federal money creates a lot more infrastructure activity.

You could look at these and other issues like asset recycling, where the government leases or sells some existing public infrastructure and uses the proceeds of that to fund new projects. In Australia, they used that system to help pay for an expansion of subway systems and other things. In fact, the Federal Government would encourage local governments to privatize one of their local government assets that had customers. Then they would take that money, maybe, and build sidewalks that don't have customers, and the water systems that would have customers would have helped to build the sidewalks as it would be managed by a private company, but all of those private companies would be regulated in a way that people who would be customers would know they were protected.

We have had a lot of bipartisan infrastructure bills over the last decades and more than decades. Infrastructure bills are not new to America. Figuring out how you have an infrastructure bill that meets the definition of ``infrastructure'' and a system where the infrastructure goes as far as it possibly can to pay for itself by those people who use it has always involved Republicans and Democrats reaching an agreement. I don't know that there has ever been a partisan infrastructure bill. It has always involved reaching agreement on what would be in the bill and reaching agreement on finding ways to pay for it.

New definitions can really confuse ideas that the American people think they understand. People are for infrastructure. They think that it is something the government should do. They can pass a test on what they believe ``infrastructure'' means if they have ever watched an infrastructure debate before. Let's find a way that we can move forward in a bipartisan way with an infrastructure bill that meets the standards of infrastructure and meets the standards of doing everything we can to be sure the system is fairly paid for by the people who use it and can afford to pay for it.

I yield the floor.

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Wyoming (Mr. Barrasso), the Senator from Indiana (Mr. Braun), the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Burr), the Senator from Montana (Mr. Daines), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe), the Senator from Wyoming (Ms. Lummis), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Marshall), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran), the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. Paul), and the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Portman).

Further, if present and voting: the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Marshall) would have voted ``nay.''-

Mr. President, I want to join my fellow Senators in remembering Senator Manchin's family, his sister, and the rest of his family as they deal with the loss of his brother-in-law.

I want to talk today about a draft I just received--a bill we are actually going to have a hearing on next week--S. 1, the so-called For the People Act.

This bill is the companion act to the House version of H.R. 1. I actually think it is even longer than H.R. 1, which I would have thought impossible. It is over 800 pages. I think they will be introducing the final version in the next day or so, and that is a good thing, since we are supposed to have a hearing on it in the middle of next week.

It packs a lot of what I consider bad changes relating to election administration, campaign finance, redistricting, and so much more into those 800 pages, but there is a lot of space there to pack things in.

I would have to take a lot more time than I have got today to talk about all the things in the bill that I have had concerns about, but I would say, to start with, this idea that one size fits all, this Federal takeover of elections, can't be in the interest of voters in our country.

It would force a single and, I believe, a partisan view of elections and how they should be run in 10,000 different jurisdictions in the country. I don't know how you do that. I don't know how you take 10,000 jurisdictions and try, at the Washington, DC, level in legislation, to determine changes like how they would register voters. Every State, under this bill, would do it exactly the same way--which voting systems they would use; how they would handle early voting and absentee ballots, no matter how long they had been doing it one way that worked for voters in their State; and how they maintain their voter list, whether you can go in and verify whether people on the voter list were still there.

We used to think that was a critically important protection in the election system; that you knew that the voters that had registered to vote in a jurisdiction actually were still in that jurisdiction. It was actually, in every State, a bragging point of responsible election administration. That would largely go away in this bill.

This bill would require States to make ballot drop boxes available for 45 days prior to the Federal election. Those are boxes that--it even designates the locations and tells the local jurisdiction how they need to handle those ballots as they come out of the boxes and would be processed.

Remember, these are not mailboxes. They would be the ballot drop boxes all over the jurisdiction, if you could find one.

It would mandate unlimited ballot harvesting. That is a process where one person could collect and submit as many ballots as they could collect and submit. You know, in recent elections, we have seen ballot harvesting as a real problem in these elections. Not only does one person have your ballot and get that ballot to where it should be, frankly, one of the problems always with ballot harvesting is maybe a person who knows voters pretty well would collect 20 and put 18 in the mailbox or take 18 to the vote counting area and the other two just somehow don't get there.

Unlimited ballot harvesting, prohibited in many States--and, in fact, in recent years the Democratic House of Representatives failed to seat an elected Representative in North Carolina because that person had used ballot harvesting.

The bill would require States to allow felons to vote in Federal elections. If you didn't like that, in this case, you could have two sets of voter registrations, one for Federal elections and one for all other elections.

And, by the way, if you did that, you would also have to have two different sets of ballots for an election day that had both local and State and Federal issues on the ballot.

And this bill would require that all of these changes be made quickly. Even jurisdictions that recently have changed their processes and spent a lot of time talking to people about those changes over maybe 2 years or 4 years would suddenly be told, no, you have to change them one more time. And maybe it is a day here or a day there, but that makes a big difference if you have already got in your mind how far before an election you have to register to vote or transfer your address or things that election administrators work on all the time.

You know, my first elected job was as the county clerk in Greene County, Springfield, MO, where I was the chief election authority. We had a county of about 180,000 people in it, lots of registered voters, but you had to take that very seriously.

And later I was the chief election authority in our State for 8 years as the secretary of state, and I know how much planning goes into the elections. I know how seriously local officials take it.

I also know how difficult it could be if every change you made had to be cleared some way with somebody in Washington, DC.

You know, States can often take years to transition to a new ballot system or transition to a new way they do things. They also can do it very quickly if they need to, and we saw that happen in a number of States last year.

I think this bill, if it did pass, really doesn't allow the time you need for planning.

The diversity of our election system is one of the great strengths of our system. There is bipartisan agreement on that. I have quoted President Obama on this before, but he said in 2016: ``There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you can even rig America's elections, in part, because they are so decentralized and the numbers of votes involved.''

This bill would undo that decentralized strength. It would undo that local and State responsibility for having laws that voters who vote for you understand you need to apply in the fairest and best way you can. The bill would make our system less diverse, less secure.

Unfortunately, this bill doesn't just stop at election administration. It takes the campaign finance system and changes it dramatically.

You know, when the Federal Elections Commission was created in the early 1970s, it was a six-member Commission. It was to be bipartisan. This turns it into a five-member Commission, with whoever is the President being able to appoint the third member on one side to always outvote, if they need to, the two members on the other side.

There have been many times, obviously, in the history of the Federal Election Commission when the vote has been 3 to 3 or 2 to 2, whatever the makeup was at the time. This would do away with that and basically turn the Commission from a bipartisan Commission into a prosecutorial body, where one side always has the majority if they want it. I think voters should and would be very concerned about that.

It would allow the Chair of the FEC to make key staffing changes. It would allow judges to review cases, even when the Commission found no violation of the law.

In addition, the bill would create a system of public financing for political campaigns by matching certain contributions with Federal dollars. The match would be 6 to 1. So in the matchable, low-dollar-- whatever you define that to be--contributions, if you raise $100,000 of those contributions, you would have $700,000. Six hundred thousand of those dollars could have been used by the Federal Government for other things rather than to finance politicians in a campaign.

Now, I understand why politicians would like that. I have raised as much money as most people in this body have raised, and, you know, the idea

that just the Federal Government would come in at some point and give me $6 for some percentage of those that I raised might be pretty appealing, but I think it would be wrong.

It takes jurisdiction away from the States into how to draw congressional districts. Now, this is going to be inconvenient if it passes because the Constitution specifically says the State legislatures decide how to draw a congressional district. It doesn't say the Congress of the United States tells the State legislatures how to draw congressional districts, but this bill would do that.

The bill requires redistricting commissions. It dictates who would serve on the commissions. It sets the criteria and the procedures for how you draw the maps. It lays out how the commissions have to take public input.

And if that weren't bad enough--it doesn't stop there--it even determines which courts act on all redistricting cases. And this would be a dramatic change where, again, you have a one-size-fits-all system in a country that clearly is not a one-size-fits-all country.

Since very few States currently have commissions like that, it would set a lot of deadlines that we don't currently have. Districts drawn using 2020 census data would all but be guaranteed to be drawn by Federal courts just because of the time that this bill sets out.

But the Federal court drawing the district isn't the big problem. The big problem is forever you have changed this and forever you have put the DC Circuit as the ultimate circuit to determine all redistricting cases. We have never thought that power belonged in Washington, DC, before, but this bill does.

It is an unprecedented power grab by the Federal Government at the expense of the States. I think it is a transparent attempt to stack elections in favor of one party. Election law should not be about a single party.

If this bill were to pass, it would do nothing, in my view, to bolster public confidence in elections. In fact, I suspect most election officials around the country would begin to say: I would like to be able to do something about that problem, but we will have to clear that with Washington, DC, first.

I think the divisions in the country would be worse, not better. Successful election laws are passed on a bipartisan basis. We did that with the Help America Vote Act after 2000. We provided assistance and some direction with the finances, but we didn't change a single State law after 2016. We left that up to the States. We created bipartisan impact when we did that.

We should continue to put the strength and the security of the country's elections before party. We should continue to oppose the efforts of a single party to make sweeping partisan changes in our election system. I don't talk to anybody who doesn't think that this bill, as a similar bill passed the House, would pass the House on a purely partisan basis. That would be a bad idea.

I encourage my colleagues to look carefully at S. 1, and I think if you do, a majority of the Senate will not support this bill.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, last year Congress provided nearly $68 billion in emergency funding for schools. About 10 percent of that has been used. This bill provides another $126 billion, with no requirement that we get kids back to school.

We know they need to be back in school. I think this amendment actually, if applied, almost ensures we won't get back to school this year.

Thirty days to come up with a plan; public comment on that plan. It is the middle of March before anybody even begins to make--have the 30 days to make that plan. We need to get kids back to school. The New York Times understands that.

Many States are saying the suicide rates, the emergency room mental health concerns demand that kids get back to school, and not next year but they get back to school as quickly as they can this year.

I think this amendment, while I am sure offered in good intention, works against that, not for it, and I would urge a ``no'' vote on the amendment.

Vote on Amendment No. 1344