Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I further ask unanimous consent to speak for perhaps as long as but probably shorter than 20 minutes as in morning business.

Madam President, every week that we are here, I try to remind the body of the damage carbon pollution is doing to our atmosphere and oceans, try to awaken us to our duty. I have done it more than 30 times now. I have tried to kick out the underpinnings of any argument that the deniers could stand on.

I have kicked out the scientific so-called denial argument, which actually properly belongs in the category of falsehood, not argument. I have kicked out the economic denial argument, pointing out that in a proper market, the costs of carbon must be in the price of carbon. I even tried to kick out the religious denial argument, showing that the belief that God will just tidy up after us, however stupidly we behave, runs counter to history and counter to Biblical text.

So today let's take a crack at the political argument. How wise is it for the Republican Party to wed itself to the deniers and proclaim that climate change is a hoax?

Make no mistake, that is the Republican position. The consensus Republican position and the default Republican position is that climate change is a hoax. It has been said right on this floor and in committees and, as far as I know, not one Republican Senator has stood afterwards in this Chamber to say: Wait a minute. Not so fast. That is actually not the case. Any Republican Senator who disagrees, please, come to the floor and articulate a Republican position other than that climate change is a hoax.

This Chamber looks relatively empty, but on C-SPAN lots of people are watching, and lots of Republicans are watching. Yet not one Republican, over all 30 speeches, has ever gotten back to me, even quietly on the side, to say: You know what. This is really getting serious. Let's see if we can work on this together.

An iron curtain of denial has fallen around the Republican Party. So let me respectfully ask my Republican colleagues: What are you thinking? How do you imagine this ends?

More than 95 percent of climate scientists are convinced that human carbon pollution is causing massive and unprecedented changes to our atmosphere and oceans. You want to go with the 5 percent, and you think that is going to be a winning strategy?

Moreover, it turns out that a lot of those 5 percenters are on the payroll of the polluters. You know that. It is public knowledge. Some of those payroll scientists are the same people who denied acid rain, who denied the dangers of tobacco.

You still like those odds? Those are the folks to whom you really want to hitch your Republican wagons? You have to know they are not telling the truth. So where does this go? What is the endgame?

Our planet has had a run of at least 800,000 years, with levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 170 and 300 parts per million. That is measurement not theory--800,000 years. Homo sapiens have only been around for about 200,000 years, so that 800,000 years--8,000 centuries--takes us back a ways. Madam President, 800,000 years, between 170 and 300 parts per million, and in just the last 50 years, we have blown out of that range and have now hit 400 parts per million and climbing. You really want to be on the side of ``nothing is going on here''? Really?

Have you noticed the floods and wildfires and droughts and superstorms and tornadoes and blizzards and temperature records? Have you noticed those warming, rising seas? Have you noticed species invading new territories and miles of dead pine forests in the Rockies and Arctic sea ice disappearing?

Do you understand that carbon in the atmosphere gets absorbed by the sea and that is a law of science and is not debatable? Do you understand that because they are absorbing the carbon, the oceans are getting more acidic--30 percent more acidic already and climbing?

Do you understand that is a measurement, not a theory? It is one thing to be the party that stands against science. Are you really also going to be the party that stands against measurement? Do you know the measurement is showing the oceans are not just becoming more acidic, they are becoming more acidic at the fastest rate recorded in a geologic record of 50 million years?

Have you not heard about the coral reefs, those incubators of our oceans, bleaching out and dying off, with almost 20 percent gone already worldwide? If you are a denier, look around. Do you think the news is getting better for you?

Let me ask my Republican friends, what is your best bet on whether this climate and oceans problem gets better or worse in the next 20 or 40 years? Seriously. Your party's reputation is on the line here. All the chips. Tell me how you are going to bet. Do you want to bet the reputation of the Republican Party that suddenly this is all going to magically start getting better? Because that is what you are doing right now.

Let me ask you this: What are the young people of today going to think when they are 37 or 57 and it is worse, maybe a lot worse? What are they going to think about the Republican Party then, that you took the 5-percent bet with their futures; that you went with the polluters over the scientists? Young people are already out there asking their universities to divest from coal, as they divested from the evils of apartheid and the dangers of tobacco. Good luck with the youth vote when you lock in with the coal merchants. By the way, the youth vote grows. It grows up and it sticks around.

How is it going to look for the Republican Party when the historical records show, because facts have a funny way of coming out, that the campaign to fool the public on climate change was as phony and dishonest as the campaign to fool the public on acid rain and the campaign to fool the public on tobacco, when the historical record discloses that 5 percent wasn't even real, and was actually a scam paid for by the polluters? You, your great party, with young American's futures in the balance, took sides with the scam.

If that is the state of play for young voters as they come of age, why would those young people ever trust the Republican Party on anything else ever again?

Speaking of taking sides, have you noticed who is left on your side? The Koch brothers, billionaire polluters; the big oil companies, the biggest polluters in the world; the coal barons with their legacy of pollution, strip mining, mountaintop removal, and safety violations that kill their miners. That is a fine cast to be surrounded by.

But wait, you say, there is more. There is the Heartland Institute, and the Institute for Energy Research, and the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Heritage Foundation. There are many organizations. Right. Like the heads of Hydra, they may look like many, but, as you know, in reality, it is all the same beast. It is all the same scheme. It is all the same money behind the scheme. You can name those front organizations and many more, but none of it is real. They are all part of the same cheesy vaudeville show put on by the big polluters.

Do you, I ask my Republican friends, want to lash yourself to that operation, to go down with that ship? The great Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, branding itself as the one that gave it all to protect a gang of scheming polluters? That is where you are headed.

Look who is on the other side on record against you seeing through that nonsense. How about the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our military leaders? How about the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops? How about NASA? NASA is driving a vehicle as big as an SUV around on the surface of Mars right now. They sent it there. To Mars. They landed it there safely. Now they are driving it around on Mars. Do you think those scientists might know what they are talking about? How about every legitimate American scientific professional society, about 30 strong? How about major American corporations such as Walmart, Ford, Apple, Coca-Cola? How about global insurance and reinsurance businesses such as Lloyds of London and Munich Re, whose businesses depend on accurate risk models?

Indeed, today, Frank Nutter, the president of the Reinsurance Association of America, is reported as saying:

Insurance is heavily dependent on scientific thought. It is

not as amenable to politicized scientific thought.

So I ask my Republican friends, whose side do you like in this? In this corner, the Joint Chiefs, the bishops, Walmart, Ford, Apple, Coke, NASA, 30 top scientific organizations, the top insurers and reinsurers, and, by the way, several thousand legitimate others. In that corner, the polluting industry and a screen of sketchy organizations they

fund. Let's be serious. Do you want to bet the reputation of the Republican Party that the polluters are the ones we should count on here? Because that is what you are doing. For what? To protect market share for the polluters. That is your upside. The reputation of the party hangs in the balance and your upside is market share for polluters.

Look, I am willing to do a carbon pollution fee that sets the market in balance and returns every single dollar to the American people. No new agencies; no new taxes; no bigger government; every dollar back; a balanced market with the costs included in the price the way they are supposed to be, which will make better energy choices, increase jobs, and prevent pollution.

Yes, that does mean less market share for the polluters as new technologies emerge--that is actually the point--but every single dollar back in Americans' pockets. By the way, three-quarters of the American people believe climate change is real and that we need to do something about it.

You may have a question for me: Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves?

I will tell you why. We are stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together.

When cyclones tear up Oklahoma, hurricanes swamp Alabama, and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. The damage your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas; it hits Rhode Island with floods and storms, it hits Oregon with acidified seas, and it hits Montana with dying forests. Like it or not, we are in this together. You drag America with you to your fate.

I want this future: I want a Republican Party that has returned to its senses, is strong, and is a worthy adversary in a strong America that has done right by its people and the world. That is what I want. I don't want this future. I don't want a Republican Party disgraced, that lets its extremists run it off the cliff. I don't want America suffering from grave, economic, environmental, and diplomatic damage because we failed, because we didn't wake up and do our duty for our people, and because we didn't lead the world.

I do not want that future, but that is where we are headed. I will keep reaching out and calling out, ever hopeful you will wake up before it is too late, both for you and for the rest of us.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

I ask consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, I am back again to remind this body and the American people for what I think is perhaps the 32nd speech on this subject that I have been giving weekly, that it is time, indeed it is well past time, for Congress to wake up to the disastrous effects of global climate change. The famous Mauna Loa Observatory has for the first time ever hit 400 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. That is an alarming benchmark to have hit.

What is happening? Over on the House side today they are repealing ObamaCare for the 37th time. That is the level of seriousness in Washington right now. In particular, our oceans--the Presiding Officer represents the Bay State, I represent the Ocean State--our oceans face an unprecedented set of challenges that come from climate change as well as from pollution and energy exploration and more.

We just have to look around to see it. We can look up to the far north and see that the Arctic ice is melting. Indeed, last summer sea ice extant in the Arctic Ocean hit a record low.

If we go south to the tropic seas, we will see that live coral coverage on Caribbean reefs is plummeting. It is down to less than 10 percent today. If we go to the top of the food chain, we will see marine mammals so laden with PCBs, flame retardants, mercury, and other bioaccumulative pollutants that many of them are swimming toxic waste-- living, swimming toxic waste.

If we go to the very bottom of the food chain, we will see that the population of phytoplankton--some of our smallest ocean inhabitants and the basic building block for the oceanic food chain--has dropped 40 percent during the 20th century.

If we go far away from where we are, we will reach the great Pacific garbage patch, which is growing and swirling about the northern Pacific Ocean.

Close to my home--and near the Presiding Officer's home--is Narragansett Bay, which is 4 degrees warmer in the winter than it was a few decades ago.

Globally, the most threatening challenge, and the force behind many others, is ocean acidification. Our oceans have absorbed more than 550 billion tons of our carbon pollution. Try to wrap your head around a number that big. That is the carbon the ocean has absorbed from the excess we have pumped into the atmosphere.

The result is pretty clear, and it is a matter of basic chemistry. The oceans have become more acidic. Indeed, they have become 30 percent more acidic. By the way, that is a measurement, not a theory.

By the end of this century, the increase could be as much as 160 percent more acidic. That makes life a lot harder for species such as oysters, crabs, lobsters, corals, and even those plankton that comprise the base of the food web.

Ocean temperatures are changing dramatically--also driven by carbon pollution. Sea surface temperatures in 2012, from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Hatteras, were the highest ever recorded in 150 years. By the way, that is another measurement.

Fish stocks are shifting northward with some disappearing from U.S. waters as they move farther offshore. As we know, when the temperature rises, water expands in volume. On top of that, fresh water pours out of Arctic snowpacks and ice sheets that are melting, and as a result sea levels are rising.

Tide gauges in Newport, RI, show an increase in average sea level of 10 inches since 1930. That is a big deal when we in Rhode Island think of how devastating the great hurricane of 1938 was to our shores and what more would now befall us with 10 more inches of sea for such a storm to throw at our shores.

At these tide gauges, measurements show not only the sea level rising but the rate of sea level rise is increasing. This matches reports that since 1990, the sea level has been rising faster than the rate predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I have said before: We will continue to take advantage of the ocean's bounty, as we should. We will trade, we will fish, and we will sail. We will extract fuel and harness the wind. We will work our oceans. Navies and cruise ships, sailboats and supertankers will plow their surface. We cannot undo this part of our relationship with the sea. What we can change is what we do in return. For the first time we can become not just takers but caretakers of our oceans.

We are beginning to take some baby steps. Last week, the Senate voted 67 to 32 to authorize a national endowment for the oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes, which is a funding stream for research, restoration, and protection of our marine and coastal resources. I hope that before long we can find a way to fund it by working with all of my colleagues. The famous ocean explorer Bob Ballard has described as ``a major problem . . . the disconnect between the importance of oceans and the meager funds we as a nation invest to not only understand their complexity, but become responsible stewards of the bounty they represent.''

This endowment--if we can get it over the remaining legislative hurdles and get it funded--will help us become more responsible stewards of that bounty. It will help us better respond to oilspills, it will help coastal States protect or relocate coastal infrastructure, and it will help our fisheries and marine industries take part in economically important conservation efforts.

I sincerely appreciate the support shown for this amendment by colleagues from every region of the country and both sides of the aisle. Protecting the oceans upon which our communities and our economy depend is neither a Democratic nor a Republican objective, and there ought to be a great deal of agreement on the need to meet these challenges.

We also see that agreement in the bipartisan Senate Oceans Caucus, which works to increase awareness of and find common ground on issues facing the oceans and coasts.

My fellow cochair Senator Murkowski, honorary cochair Senator Mark Begich, Senator Mark Wicker, and all of our partners are working to stop illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing. We are working to clean up marine debris and collect baseline scientific data so we can make policy-informed decisions. This is important work. It demonstrates the good both parties can accomplish when we come together. I look forward to getting it done, but it is not enough. Until we address what is causing our oceans to change so drastically, until we protect our planet from carbon pollution unprecedented in human history, we are doing little more than putting Band-Aids on a gaping and growing wound.

I want to push back on the idea that so many of us seem to have accepted, that we cannot do anything serious on carbon pollution. In fact, we can. The tools to do it lie right around us, if only we would pick them up and go to work.

Very simply, here is my case: Pricing carbon is necessary. Make big carbon polluters pay a fee to the American people to cover the cost of dumping their waste into our atmosphere and oceans--a cost they now push off on to the rest of us--and return that fee to the American people.

At present, however, political conditions in Congress do not allow us to price carbon. It is necessary. Political conditions do not allow us to do it, so we must change those political conditions.

Changing the political conditions will require three actions: No. 1, there has to be a regulatory threat to the polluters. No. 2, there must be a political threat to the deniers here in the Senate and in Congress. No. 3, those of us who wish to limit carbon pollution must gather the armies that are on our side.

Let me go through those steps. First, as long as the polluters and their allies control Congress, legislative action is unlikely. That means we have to rely on the executive branch for regulatory action-- very strong regulatory action that will change the equation for the polluters. That is the test. Will it change the equation for the polluters?

The status quo is a win for the polluters. They pollute for free. Change that balance, and it will not take them long to come to Congress. Why? Because regulatory action puts costs directly on the polluters but creates no revenues for them. A carbon pollution fee, now that creates revenues. A portion of that could offset their costs of transitioning to a green economy.

If that is the choice they have--regulation with no revenues or a fee they can get revenues from--it becomes in their interest to strike a deal in Congress. This regulatory step in the executive branch will, however, require an awakening at the White House.

Second, to create a meaningful political threat, the advocates out there for our climate and our oceans will need to employ all of the sophisticated political tools the polluters use--all the political artillery of the post-Citizens United world.

There is an expression that you should not bring a knife to a gunfight. Right now climate advocates bring not even a knife but a feather to this gunfight. It is no wonder we lose. When deniers in Congress see real artillery coming on the political field against them, some will rethink.

Third, and last, is gathering the armies. There is astonishingly wide support for action on climate. Obviously environmental groups support this, as

well as the green energy and investment industry, our national security officials, property casualty insurers and reinsurers, young people-- such as the growing college movement for coal divestment--faith groups, many utilities, celebrities, hunting, fishing, outdoor, conservation groups, retailers, such as Apple, Coca-Cola and Nike, labor groups, mayors, local officials, and the public. The public is with us, and the polls show that.

The problem: Most of this support is latent and unorganized. None of these groups feel they can carry this battle on their own; yet if they choose to unite, create an allied command, assemble these various divisions and join in on a strategy that deploys them all effectively into action, that latent strength becomes potent strength, and that is a game changer.

When the polluting industry is looking down the barrel of a regulatory gun, when their political allies are fearful of a strongly backed political operation--backed also by the American people--when mobilized and motivated forces from a wide swath of the economy and multiple sectors are all active, the political landscape then shifts dramatically and a price on carbon is achievable.

I propose to the American people, to those who believe it is time to wake up and take action, to fend off devastating changes to our oceans and our climate: Let us be not faint of heart. Let us have the strength of our convictions and get to work and get this done. We can do it. The tools to do it already lie all around us. This can all take place quite rapidly. Let's get it done.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I rise today to speak in support of the Water Resources Development Act, the main vehicle for authorizing vital water projects developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and for setting Army Corps water resource policies. Water resource and flood control projects spur economic growth and create jobs. They fortify communities against storms and floods. They maintain our water and waste water systems. They help maintain our favorite outdoor recreational destinations. And they can protect America's cherished and economically important--fish and wildlife.

Unfortunately, in Rhode Island and across the country, aging water infrastructure is rapidly approaching the end of its useful life, and funding available for upgrades is far outpaced by the need. This bill will increase the Army Corps' capacity to address the dismal state of our water infrastructure while improving the agency's operations.

I want to express my gratitude to our chairman on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Boxer, as well as our ranking member, Senator Vitter, for their hard work in drafting a bill that addresses a number of national and regional priorities in a bipartisan fashion.

I particularly appreciate the inclusion of several provisions designed to clean up the process at the Army Corps, to clear the backlog of construction and maintenance projects, to improve transparency in developing and carrying out civil works projects, and to give local communities a better chance to understand what to expect.

According the Office of Management and Budget, ``The Corps' enormous backlog of ongoing civil works construction represents a significant source of unrealized economic and environmental benefits. . . . This growth trend in the construction backlog unfairly penalizes both taxpayers and project sponsors.''

The bill before us establishes an independent commission to work through an estimated $62 billion backlog of projects and sets a timetable for downsizing the corps' burdensome to-do list. My colleagues on both sides of the aisle should appreciate the responsible use of corps resources and of taxpayer dollars.

This bill also makes the corps more responsive to communities and businesses, requiring the corps to make more information available to the public about projects under its Continuing Authorities Program, including available funding, cost estimates, and the criteria used to prioritize projects. States like mine and our communities and companies can't plan around water resource projects because they are so often left in the dark.

For example, Hope Global has manufactured textiles in Rhode Island since 1883. Today it makes fabrics that are

used in everything from cars to parachutes to construction. During the historic 2010 floods in our State that clobbered Hope Global, I literally entered the building through the shipping bay in a boat. Hope Global survived, thanks to the dedication and quick thinking of its CEO and employees, but the risk of future flooding along the Blackstone River looms over this business and many others in the area.

The corps has partnered with the State of Rhode Island to conduct a feasibility study for flooding mitigation on the Blackstone River. The State used its limited resources to fund the study, hoping to solve the flooding problems once and for all. Three years later, due to lack of transparency in the corps budget, we still don't know where this project stands. This bill will change that, so communities like those in my State can make informed decisions about their future.

Episodes like the 2010 floods and, more recently, Superstorm Sandy underscore the need to keep communities safe in the face of a changing climate. The Army Corps of Engineers helps communities prepare for extreme weather events and addresses flood control hazards. In many places, these twin objectives can be pursued through the restoration of natural ecosystems. This reauthorization places greater emphasis on natural defenses like the wetlands and dunes that have protected our coastlines for millennia.

Coastal and freshwater wetlands act like sponges during floods, absorbing water and dissipating the impact of wave energy and storm surge. Shoreline vegetation, natural dune formations, and barrier islands do the same. This draft recognizes the benefits of natural resiliency.

This bill also reauthorizes the National Dam Safety Program, which is vitally important to my small State. Rhode Island has about 700 dams, some dating back to the colonial era. One hundred seventy-nine are rated a ``high'' or ``significant risk.'' Nationally, America's dams received a grade of ``D'' on the American Society of Civil Engineers 2013 Report Card. The Society cited more than 4,000 deficient dams, including more than 2,000 that would result in loss of life if they failed. The Dam Safety Program helps States monitor for deteriorating dam conditions that put communities in danger.

This legislation is not without its detractors, but I think it is important to recognize that both sides have had to make compromises to get this bill to where it is today. That is the hallmark of our legislative process.

For example, this reauthorization contains new measures to ensure the timely completion of environmental impact studies and reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. While this has raised concerns from some, ensuring prompt environmental review of projects does not mean we are disregarding these reviews entirely. Comprehensive environmental review of federal projects remains critical to protecting the environment and public health from harm, and this bill includes provisions that will prevent harmful projects from being expedited.

WRDA supports projects that protect communities and their water resources. I would have preferred to leave NEPA requirements unaltered; however, I believe the compromise the chair and ranking member negotiated on this issue was worth the price of being able to implement long-overdue improvements to our nation's water resources infrastructure.

As we grapple with the mounting effects of a changing climate, our towns, our rivers and ports, our beaches and bays rely on the safety and efficiency of modern and resilient water infrastructure. The Water Resources Development Act of 2013 gives the Army Corps of Engineers and its public and private sector partners the tools to provide and maintain that infrastructure. I urge my colleagues to support this important, bipartisan legislation.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business for up to 15 minutes.

Madam President, I wish to thank the distinguished Senator from Illinois for his statement. We serve together on the Judiciary Committee. I hope that in that committee as well we can work on ways to improve the prosecution--particularly of rape offenses-- within the military by the Department of Justice.

We need to break through the agreement that now prevents the Department of Justice from prosecuting those crimes for the crimes they are simply because they take place in the military.

Madam President, I am here to speak today because Washington, DC, and the rightwing outrage machine are all abuzz about the scandal that the IRS appears to have targeted organizations for inquiry based on tea party affiliation. Obviously, that is wrong, but let's not forget that is not the only IRS scandal--that is not the only scandal in town. There are two IRS scandals. The other is the IRS allowing big, shadowy forces to meddle in elections anonymously through front groups that file false statements with the IRS.

Let's go through this. Let's begin with the principle that it is pretty clear that Americans have a strong democratic interest in knowing who is trying to influence their vote in elections. That is kind of democracy 101.

Even the Supreme Court, which can hardly agree 8 to 1 on what time it is, agreed 8 to 1 that knowing who is trying to influence our votes is really important. Here is what they said: ``Effective disclosure'' would ``provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.'' That is very much a part of the democratic process.

Some folks don't want us to know who they are when they meddle in our politics, such as big companies taking positions that would annoy their shareholders or their customers and secretive billionaires who want influence without accountability. They want to pull the strings behind the scenes. It also includes polluters, Wall Street, Big Oil, and other folks the public is fed up with. They all have lots of reasons for wanting to stay secret.

The law in America requires lots of disclosure, and the Supreme Court has emphasized the importance of lots of disclosure.

What is a company or a billionaire trying to hide their influence- seeking going to do? How does the secret money get in? Well, it is easy. They create a front organization, usually with a phony-baloney happy name, and hide behind that--except it is not quite that easy. There are not that many types of organizations that can hide their donors that way. The most commonly used is called a 501(c)(4), which is a tax-exempt, nonprofit form of corporation that is regulated by--guess who--the IRS.

There is one big problem for people wanting that secret influence in politics; that is, that kind of organization, the 501(c)(4), needs to be set up under the law ``for the promotion of social welfare''-- indeed, the law says ``exclusively'' for the promotion of social welfare. According to the IRS's own regulations, ``The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.'' So that is a problem.

Well, the first kind of miniscandal is that the IRS has decided that an organization is organized exclusively for the promotion of social welfare if it is primarily engaged in social welfare activities. By ``primarily,'' they mean 51 percent, so the other 49 percent can be purely political. So ``does not include direct or indirect participation in political activity'' has been turned into ``actually does include but up to 49 percent,'' which is nonsensical. As I said, that is a miniscandal of its own.

Let's go on. The IRS allowing a bunch of political operatives to form nonprofit groups that don't disclose their donors and then collect millions of dollars and spend them on elections in contravention of a clear statute and seemingly in violation of their own rules also requires that they usually make some false statements. That is where the scandal really worsens.

There is a form called the 1024 form that is the application form for 501(c)(4) status. If we go to that form, we will see question 15. Question 15 asks:

Has the organization spent or does it plan to spend any

money attempting to influence the selection, nomination,

election or appointment of any person to any Federal, state,

or local public office or to an office in a political

organization?

That is the question on the form, and it has to be answered under oath.

A considerable number of groups appear to have lied on their applications for nonprofit status as well as on their returns, and they have lied with absolutely no consequences.

There is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonpartisan investigative group called ProPublica. ProPublica has investigated these 501(c)(4) filings. As part of their investigation, they looked at 104 different organizations that had reported to the Federal Election Commission or to the State equivalent Federal elective bodies--104 organizations that reported electioneering activity, that they were involved in trying to elect candidates. In those filings to the Federal and State election boards, they said: Here is what we spent on influencing those elections.

ProPublica cross-checked those 104 that had filed statements saying how much they had spent to influence elections and 32 of them--32 of them--told the IRS they spent no money to influence elections, either directly or indirectly. Both statements cannot be true. An organization cannot tell one Federal agency how much they spent to influence elections and tell another Federal agency they spent no money to influence elections and have both statements be true.

Then we look at these organizations' behavior and the false statements look even worse. One organization said it would spend 50 percent of its effort on a Web site and 30 percent on conferences. The investigation showed its Web site consisted of one photograph and one paragraph; no sign of any conference. The same group declared it would take contributions ``from individuals only'' and then took $2 million from PhRMA, the pharmaceutical lobby.

Another declared to the IRS it had spent $5 million on political activities, but it told the Federal Election Commission it had spent $19 million on political advertisements.

Another pledged its political spending would be ``limited in amount and will not constitute the organization's primary purpose.'' Then that organization went out and spent $70 million on ads and robocalls in one election season. It is almost funny it is so bad.

But there is nothing funny about making a material false statement to a Federal agency. That is not just bad behavior, it is a crime. It is a statutory offense under 18 U.S. Code section 1001. The Department of Justice indicts and prosecutes violations of this statute all the time, but they never do for this. Never. Why? It appears there is a bad agreement between the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service that the Department of Justice will not prosecute false statements if they are made on this form unless the case has been referred to them by the IRS.

So that is really scandal two right there. No matter how flagrant the false statement, no matter how great the discrepancy between the statements filed with the IRS under oath and the statements also filed with the Federal and State election agencies, no matter how baldly the organization in practice contradicts how it answered IRS questions about political activity, the IRS never makes a referral to the Department of Justice. Thirty-two flagrantly false statements and, as far as anyone knows, not one referral to the Department of Justice as a false statement. It is a mockery of the law and it is a mockery of the truth.

There is an easy solution. The Department of Justice prosecutes these false statements in lots of other instances. Prosecute these. Juries are good at sorting out what is a lie and what is not.

Investigations, interviews, statements, and subpoenas can look behind what appears to be a false statement, and prosecutors can get a full sense of the case, in a grand jury, before any charges are finalized. But they can't if they don't even look.

Right now, multiple organizations lie with impunity and in large numbers. It is indeed a scandal that the IRS will not even make a referral. Frankly, it is no great credit to the Department of Justice that the Department will not act on its own with all of this so public and so plain. Hiding behind their agreement with the IRS, on these facts, is not that great Department's finest hour.

So it is very wrong. It is very wrong that the IRS required additional information from a number of organizations--mostly small organizations--based on a screen that incorporates those organizations' tea party orientation. But it is also very wrong that the IRS goes AWOL when wealthy and powerful forces want to break the law in order to hide their wrongful efforts at secret political influence. Picking on the little guy is a pretty lousy thing to do; rolling over for the powerful and letting them file false statements is pretty lousy too. Two scandals. Let's not let one drown out the other.

I yield the floor.

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

May I ask further consent that time during all of the quorum calls be charged equally to both sides.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, through the Chair, I will tell the distinguished chairman that I, with great enthusiasm, intend to offer my amendment. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will support it.

You should support it if you are from a coastal State because the coastal problems that coastal States face are so often overlooked. If you are not from a coastal State but you visit coastal States to go to the beach, if you like to eat fish or, frankly, if you like imported products that come through our coastal ports, you too have an interest in this legislation. I hope you will support it.

Finally, this is a piece of legislation that was agreed to before by this body in the form of the RESTORE Act. In the RESTORE Act, we literally sent billions of dollars to our colleagues along the Gulf States for remediation, repair, and economic reconstruction after the two disasters of Hurricane Katrina and the explosion of the oil

well. Those two disasters. So for reasons that don't merit further discussion here today, that part of the agreement was left unaccomplished.

Whether you are from a coastal State or whether you enjoy coastal products or visits, I would urge my colleagues, for the sake of the Senate being a place in which a bargain once struck is honored, that we owe a vote strongly in support of the authorization--and this is only an authorization, no funding whatsoever--of a national endowment for the oceans that will allow coastal and Great Lakes States to at least be able to compete for funding to be obtained later through existing structures--no new bureaucracies--so we can do what we need to do to protect our coastal economies.

I thank the chairman.

If I may seek recognition.

At the Chairman's suggestion, and with her permission, I ask unanimous consent that my amendment be called up.

I ask for the yeas and nays, Madam President.

Madam President, while the chairman goes about the parliamentary task of organizing a sufficient second on the national endowment bill, I do wish to describe some of the changes our coastal and Great Lakes States are seeing and need to deal with.

Probably the most obvious of all are the storms we have been seeing-- the unprecedented and extreme storms we have been seeing--along our coasts. Whether it was Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy, we have seen unprecedented damage done at the merger of land and sea, where driven by these powerful storms the sea can wreak such havoc on the land. But it goes well beyond the damage of extreme storms. If we go out into the Gulf of Maine, we can see the cod catch, which is a historic fishery going back centuries, has now collapsed to the point where the Draconian measures that must be applied to that fishery actually risk extinguishing the fishing industry for cod in some of our Northeastern States.

We can move down the coast to the Carolinas, where highway departments are raising the bridges out to the Outer Banks in order to prepare for higher seas and stronger storm surges. We can go further south, to the Florida coast, where in some parts of that ocean--the Caribbean ocean nearby--as little as 10 percent of the coral remains alive. That is actually a pretty big industry for Florida. I think they do 15 million scuba dives a year for recreational purposes--15 million scuba dives--which are not just economically valuable for the dive boat owners and operators but for the people who travel, who have meals and who stay in hotels and buy equipment. They are not going to come to do scuba diving there as much if the famous Caribbean reefs and coral reefs off of Florida continue to die at the rate they are.

We can go all the way across the country to the West Coast, where we see the oyster fisheries in Washington and Oregon threatened by the acidification of the oceans. There have been oyster hatcheries that have had massive die-offs within the hatchery when acidified water from the sea welled up and came into the intakes of these, in many cases, multigenerational family operations and were too acidic to allow the larval oysters to develop their shells, resulting in massive die-offs and economic loss.

I can tell two stories about my home State of Rhode Island that are very current. In Rhode Island, the biggest storm we have seen, worse even than Superstorm Sandy in recent decades, was the famous hurricane of 1938, which did immense damage along our shoreline at a time when our shoreline was far less developed than it is now. Between the 1930s, when that hurricane took place, and now, the sea level at the Newport tide gauge in Newport, RI, has actually climbed 10 inches. So when the next hurricane of 1938 comes--or perhaps even a bigger one, as our current experience of storms would seem to suggest is possible--it will be driving a higher ocean against the shore and probably not just 10 inches higher, because a storm surge will stack that 10-inch increase as it crashes against our Rhode Island shores, and that can be a game changer.

States such as Rhode Island have to do a lot of work to reconfigure where the so-called velocity zones are, where it is safe to build or not safe to build, what is actually now vulnerable in a 100-year flood or a 500-year flood as things change along our coasts. That is something that is a little hard to debate. It is actually a measurement. It is a measurement of 10 inches on a tide gauge. This is not some theory. This is what has happened. That water lying out there 10 inches higher is a terrific risk to our State and something we have to prepare for. Given the way State budgets are, we would like to be able to compete, once we have found some Federal funding, for the ability to figure things out so investors and people living along coastal communities can have a solid and fact-based appreciation of what the risks are to them from this worsening condition of stronger storms and higher measured sea levels.

Another Rhode Island-specific example is the winter flounder. The winter flounder is a major catch species in Narragansett Bay--or at least it was. We can go back to the earliest Native American settlements and find winter flounder bones around the settlements. For many years the winter flounder was the biggest catch in Narragansett Bay. I know a certain amount about it because when my wife did her Ph.D. thesis, she studied the winter flounder in Narragansett Bay and what was happening to it and how its life cycle interacted with another bay creature called the sand shrimp--or the Crangon septemspinosa, which is the technical name. In the time between when she wrote her thesis and now, the catch of winter flounder in Narragansett Bay has crashed more than 90 percent. It is no longer an active direct fishery in Narragansett Bay.

I can remember not that many years ago, it doesn't seem, driving over the Jamestown Bridge or the Newport Bridge or the Bristol Bridge and looking down and seeing trawlers working the upper bay trawling for winter flounder. We don't see that any longer because that fishery has crashed.

It has crashed for two reasons. One is the bay is warmer in the winter. I am

having a dispute with PolitiFact right now, but I stand by my assertion it is 4 degrees warmer in the winter. They think it is more like 3 degrees warmer in the winter than it was 30 years ago. Four degrees in water temperature may not seem like much to us humans, but we don't live in that environment. If that is your environment, 4 degrees sends a signal to certain species they don't belong there any longer and to move to cooler waters.

The other thing it has done is it has allowed this other bay creature, the sand shrimp, to move in earlier to the bay when the larval winter flounders are still small enough to be eaten by the sand shrimp. It used to be the sand shrimp would come in and they would feed on the larval winter flounders, but enough of them would get big enough soon enough that they got too big to eat for the sand shrimp. In fact, as they got bigger, they would turn around and eat the sand shrimp. That was the cycle of life. Now the sand shrimp come in earlier. There are fewer winter flounder because of the temperature, and because they are getting in earlier, it is a much more dangerous environment because the larval winter flounder are smaller and remain prey longer. So for all those reasons, there goes what once was a very key fishery.

These are just individual examples. Every coastal State, every Great Lakes State could come and have their Senator give the same speech with at least two examples of things that are changing and making a dramatic difference in the coasts. The phrase I use is: The faster you drive, the better your headlights need to be. These changes are coming fast. Things that used to happen across centuries are happening in decades; things that used to happen over decades are happening in years. We need to have better headlights as we see these changes coming at us, and the headlights are the science, the research, the information, and the ability to do this kind of work.

I hope my colleagues, on the merits, will support my amendment. I hope even if they do not particularly care, even if they are from an inland State and don't have a great interest, that simply in the interest of the spirit of the Senate they will respect an agreement once it has been reached and will make an effort to make sure agreements, when struck, aren't broken and that I will get my partisan support.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President and colleagues, if I could have my colleagues' attention for a moment, I would appreciate it. This is a measure that this body has voted on before in a strong bipartisan vote. This was part of the RESTORE Act, which was a part of the highway bill.

For reasons that don't merit further discussion now, this piece of it fell out of the bargain that had been reached at the last minute in conference.

I hope this will be a bipartisan vote with support on both sides. If you supported the RESTORE Act, you have already supported this bill. If you believe that deals should be deals in the Senate, then you should support this bill. For all of us in coastal States who are facing very unique pressures, it is very important that we as a body support this bill.

It does not create a single extra bureaucracy or person. It works within the existing government, and it adds no funding. I am going to have to work with all of you to find funding for it later and within our existing budget constraints.

This is just the authorization. Please give me a strong bipartisan vote.

Mr. President, I appreciate the chairman's leadership and her offer of 5 minutes of time. I will not need anything near that. I want to take this moment to extend to all of my colleagues a very heartfelt thank you for that last vote.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask consent to follow Senator Moran at the conclusion of his remarks.

Mr. President, I would like to ask consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as if in morning business.

As I am sure the Presiding Officer suspects, I am back on the floor again to urge that we awaken to what carbon pollution is doing to our planet, to our oceans, to our seasons, and to our storms. I wonder why is it that we are so comfortably asleep when the warnings are so many and so real. What could beguile us away from wakefulness and duty?

I was recently at a Senate meeting when I heard a Member of our Senate community say: ``God won't allow us to ruin our planet.'' Maybe that is why we do nothing. We are comfortable that God somehow will not allow us to ruin our planet. That seems like such an extraordinary notion, I thought I would reflect on it in my remarks this week.

First of all, the statement refers to God and is couched in religious terms, but is it truly an expression of religious inquiry? I think not. It is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking. The statement that God will not allow us to ruin our planet sweeps aside ethics, responsibilities, consequences, duties, even awareness. It comforts us with the anodyne assumption that no matter what we do, some undefined presence will--through some undefined measure--make things right and clean up our mess. That is seeking magical deliverance from our troubles, not divine guidance through our troubles.

Is God truly here just to tidy up after our sins and follies, to immunize us from their consequence? If that is true, why does the Bible say in Galatians 6:7, ``Do not be deceived . . . whatever one sows, that will he also reap.'' If God is just a tidy-up-after-us God, why does the book of Job 4:8 warn that ``those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.'' If God is not a God of consequences, why does Luke 6:38 tell us, ``For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.'' Proverbs 22:8 tells us, ``Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity.''

Jeremiah 17:10 says, ``I the Lord search the heart and test the mind to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.''

So it seems we should not walk in the counsel of the wicked or sit in the seat of the scoffers and then expect there will be no bitter fruit of our deeds, no consequence.

We are warned in the Bible not to plow iniquity, not to eat the fruit of lies. Where in the Bible are we assured of safety if we do? I see no assurances of that. The Bible says in 1 Samuel 2:3 that ``the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed.'' At Thessalonians 1:6, ``God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict.'' Those who ``sow the wind,'' the Bible says, ``they shall reap the whirlwind.''

Look at our own American history. If God is just here to tidy up after our sins and follies, how could Abraham Lincoln say this about our bloody Civil War to free and redeem us from the sin of slavery? Here is what Lincoln said about that war:

Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth

piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of

unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood

drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the

sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must

be said: ``The judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous

judgment altogether.''

That was Abraham Lincoln. Blood drawn by the sword in equal measure to that drawn by the lash as the true and righteous judgment of the Lord--that doesn't sound like a God of amnesty.

Go to the very beginning. If we live in a state of God-given general amnesty from consequences, why were Adam and Eve expelled from Eden for their sin? Why was Cain sent into the wilderness, condemned to wander for the crime against his brother? If it is your assertion that God's love has no measure of tough love, wander a bit through the Old Testament before getting too married to that idea.

If the Old Testament is too bloodthirsty for you, look at Revelations 11:18:

And thy wrath is come, and the time . . . that thou . . .

shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.

If we believe in an all-powerful God, we must then believe that God gave us this Earth, and we must in turn believe God gave us its laws of gravity, chemistry, and physics. We must also believe that God gave us our human powers of intellect and reason. He gives us these powers so we, his children, can learn and understand Earth's natural laws, which he also gave us, so that as his children we can use that understanding of Earth's natural laws to build and create and prosper on his Earth.

Hasn't that, in fact, been the path of human progress? We learn these natural laws, and we apply them to build and create and we prosper.

Why then when we ignore his plain, natural laws, when we ignore the obvious conclusions to be drawn by our God-given intellect and reason would God--the tidy-up God--drop in and spare us? Why would he allow an innocent child to burn its hand when it touches the hot stove but protect us from this lesson? Why would he allow a badly engineered bridge or building to fall, killing innocent people, but protect us from this mistake? Why would he allow cholera to kill in epidemics until we figure out that the well water is contaminated?

The Earth's natural laws and our capacity to divine them are God's great gift to us, allowing us to learn and build great things and cure disease. But God's gift to us of a planet with natural laws and natural order has as an integral part of that gift consequences--consequences when we get

that law and order wrong. The child's hand burns, the bridge falls, the disease spreads. If it didn't matter whether we got it right or wrong, there would be no value to God's creation of that natural law and order in the first place.

So is that then to be our answer to polluting our atmosphere with carbon by the megaton and changing our climate and changing our seas? Is it to be our answer to that, that God would not allow us to ruin our planet? We are to continue to pollute our Earth with literally megatons each year of carbon, heating up our atmosphere, acidifying our seas, knowing full well by His natural laws what the consequences are? Instead of correcting our own behavior, we are going to bet on a miracle? That is the plan? Excuse me, but that is not the American way. President Kennedy described the American way as he ended his inaugural address connecting our work to God's:

. . . let us go forth, to lead the land we love, asking His

blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's

work must truly be our own.

That is the order of things. We are here to do God's work. He is not here to do ours. How arrogant. How very far from humility would be the self-satisfied smug assurance that God--a tidy-up-after-us God--will come and clean up our mess; that on this Earth, God's work need not be our own.

Remember the story of the man trapped in his house during a huge flood. A faithful man, he trusted God to save him. As the waters began to rise in his house, his neighbor came by and offered him a ride to safety, and he said: I am waiting for God to save me. So the neighbor got in his pickup truck and drove away.

As the water rose, the man climbed to the second floor of his house, and a boat came by his window with people who were headed for safe ground. They threw a rope and they yelled at the man to climb out and come with them, but he told them: No, I trust in God to save me. They shook their heads, and they moved on.

The flood waters kept rising, and the man clambered up onto his roof. A helicopter flew by, and a voice came over the loud speaker offering to lower a ladder to the man, let him climb up and fly to safety. The man waved the helicopter away, shouting back that he counted on God to save him, so the helicopter left.

Well, eventually the floodwaters swept over the roof, and the man was drowned. When the man reached Heaven, he had some questions for God:

God, he asked, didn't I trust in You to save me?

Why did You let me drown?

God answered: I sent you a pickup truck, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter. You refused my help.

Just as God sent the pickup truck, the boat, and the helicopter to the drowning man, he has sent us everything we need to solve this carbon pollution problem. We just refuse. We just refuse. Some of us even deny that the floodwaters are rising.

As I have indicated in previous speeches, climate denial is bad science. Indeed, it is such bad science it falls into the category of falsehood. Climate denial is bad economics, ignoring that in a proper marketplace the costs of carbon pollution should be factored into the price of carbon. Climate denial is bad policy in any number of areas-- bad national security policy, bad environmental policy, bad foreign policy, bad economic policy.

Although I am a Senator, not a preacher, from everything I have learned and believe, it seems to me that climate denial is also bad religion and bad morals. Hopes for a nanny God who will, with a miracle, grant us amnesty from our folly is not aligned with history or text of the Bible.

We need to face the fact that there is only one leg on which climate denial stands: money. The polluters give and spend money to create false doubt. The polluters give and spend money to buy political influence. The polluters give and spend money to keep polluting. That is it--not truth, not science, not economics, not safety, not policy, and certainly not religion, nor morality. Nothing supports climate denial--nothing except money.

But in Congress, in this temple, money rules. So here I stand in one of the last places on Earth that is still a haven to climate denial. In our arrogance, we here in Congress think we can somehow ignore or trump Earth's natural laws--laws of chemistry, laws of physics, laws of science--with our own political lawmaking, with our own political influence. But we are fools to think that. The laws of chemistry and the laws of physics neither know nor care what we say or do here.

So we need to wake up. We need to walk not in the counsel of the wicked, nor sit in the seat of scoffers, but with due humility awaken to our duty and get to work because here on Earth God's work must truly be our own.

Thank you very much. I yield the floor.

I just want to say how honored I am to serve on Senator Boxer's committee with her as our chairman and leader and how eager I am to fight beside her in the struggles ahead.

With that, with my appreciation, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me thank the distinguished Senator from Louisiana for his hard work, along with Chairman Boxer, to get us to this point, which I think is a very auspicious point with a very bipartisan bill on the floor and with the Senate on the cusp of an agreement that will allow us to implement the managers' amendment and call up the first tranche of Senate amendments.

I thank him and the Chairman for agreeing that an amendment of mine will be one of that first tranche of amendments. I am not going to call it up now because the agreement is not finalized, but I will discuss it so we can save time later on once the bill is pending.

My amendment would establish a national endowment for the oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes. Our oceans and our coasts face unprecedented challenges. Our coastal States, including our Great Lakes States, badly need this endowment. Water temperatures are increasing, the sea level is rising, and ocean water is growing more acidic.

Right now, we as a country and we as States and local communities are ill prepared to engage in the research, restoration, and in the conservation work that is necessary to protect our coastal communities and our coastal economies.

The noted ocean explorer Bob Ballard, who famously discovered the wreckage of the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic, has said:

a major problem . . . is the disconnect between the

importance of our oceans and the meager funds we as a nation

invest not only to understand their complexity, but to become

responsible stewards of the bounty they represent.

Just how large is that bounty our Nation reaps from our oceans? Well, in 2010, marine activities such as fishing, energy development, and tourism contributed $258 billion to our U.S. gross domestic product and supported 2.8 million jobs. Along our coasts, shoreline counties, which actually include many of our biggest cities, generated 41 percent of our GDP, which is $6 trillion.

Coastal communities are the engines of our economy, and changes in the oceans put that economy at risk. We must find ways of using these vital resources without abusing them.

Last month the Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee heard from scientists and industry leaders from across the country who are deeply worried about threats to our oceans. On the Pacific Coast, ocean acidification is killing off the oyster harvest--a major cash crop for that region. They are being killed off by sea water too acidic for the larval oysters to form their shells.

Live coral in some Caribbean reefs is down to less than 10 percent, which is bad news for Florida, which usually sees over 15 million recreational dives every year. Think of what those 15 million dives mean for Florida's economy. This not only affects the dive boats and trainers who take people out for scuba diving, but for hotels, restaurants, and retailers.

Evan Matthews, the port director for the Port of Quonset in my home State of Rhode Island, spoke on behalf of America's port administrators to tell us that rising sea levels make port infrastructure more vulnerable to damage from waves and storms.

Virtually all of our economy is touched by what goes through our network of coastal ports, and damage to any of them--since they work as a network--could disrupt the delivery of vital goods not only to coastal States but to inland States as well. So it affects all of us.

But for the coastal States, this is very big. We have work to do preparing for changes in our oceans and preventing storm damage such as we saw in Superstorm Sandy. We need to reinforce natural coastal barriers such as dunes and estuaries that help bear the brunt of storm surges as well as acting as nurseries for our bounty of fish. We will need to relocate critical infrastructure such as water treatment plants and bridges, which are increasingly at risk of being washed away. We need to understand how ocean acidification and warming waters will affect the food chain and our fishing economies. We need to know where the high-risk areas are so coastline investors can understand the geographical risks.

These are coastal concerns, but they have implications for all 50 of our States. If you eat seafood or take a beach vacation in the summer, this concerns you. If you have purchased anything produced outside the United States and imported through our network of coastal ports, this concerns you. According to 2011 data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 75 percent of U.S. imports arrived on our shores through our ports, so they probably should concern you.

The National Endowment for the Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes can help coastal States and communities protect more habitat and infrastructure, conduct more research, and clean more waters and beaches. The need is great and we must respond.

This amendment will just authorize the National Endowment for the Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes. We will have to figure out how to fund it later. When we have figured out how to fund it, the endowment would make grants to coastal and Great Lakes States, to local governments, to planning bodies, to academic institutions, and to nonprofit organizations to learn more about and do a better job of protecting our coasts and oceans.

It would allow researchers to hire technicians, mechanics, computer scientists, and students. It would put people to work strengthening or relocating endangered public infrastructure. It would help scientists, businesses, and local communities work together to protect our working oceans, and it would protect jobs by restoring commercial fisheries and promoting sustainable and profitable fishing.

How great is the need for these projects? We know because a few years ago NOAA received $167 million for coastal restoration projects through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. When they asked for proposals, more than 800 proposals for shovel-ready construction and engineering projects came in--projects totaling $3 billion, seeking that $167 million in funding--projects from Alaska to Florida to the Carolinas to Maine. But NOAA could only fund 50 of the 800. The National Endowment for the Oceans will help us move forward with more of these key projects to help protect our oceans and drive our economy.

We will continue to take advantage of the oceans' bounty, as we should. We will trade, we will fish, and we will sail. We will dispose of waste. We will extract fuel and harness the wind. We will work our working oceans. Navies and cruise ships, sailboats and supertankers will plow their surface. We cannot--we will not--undo this part of our relationship with the sea. But what we can change is what we do in return.

We can, for the first time, give a little back. We can become stewards of our oceans--not just takers but caretakers--and we must do this sooner rather than later, as changes to our oceans pose a mounting and nationwide threat.

Let me quote Dr. Jeremy Mathis of the University of Alaska, who said this recently:

This is going to be a shared threat. . . . [I]t's not

unique to any one place or any one part of the country. And

so we're going to have to tackle it as a nation, all of us

working together. . . . Whether you live along the coast of

Washington or Rhode Island, or whether you live in the

heartland in Iowa, this is going to be something that touches

everybody's lives.

So today I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this amendment to authorize the National Endowment for the Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes. It will not obligate any funding. We will figure out later an appropriate way to fund it. But at least help our Nation take this important step protecting our oceans and coasts; protecting the jobs they support through fishing, research, and tourism; protecting the stability of our national economy, which depends on ports and maritime activity; and, of course, protecting the property and the lives of the millions of Americans who live and work near the sea.

Colleagues, you can help us become, as Dr. Ballard said, ``responsible stewards of the bounty [the oceans provide].''

For those who are not sure, let me add one further consideration for my colleagues, a Senate consideration. This endowment, together with funding--indeed, permanent and directed funding--was part of a negotiated package with billions of dollars in benefits to America's gulf States. For reasons that are not worth discussing and are no one side's fault, that agreement was broken and this part of that deal fell out. If you believe people should keep their word around here, if you believe agreements forged in the Senate should stick, then I would ask my colleagues, just on those grounds, to support this partial repair of that broken agreement.

I look forward, for that and other reasons, to having bipartisan support for this amendment, and I hope we can make a strong showing in this body to carry it forward as part of this important water resources development legislation.

With that, I will take this opportunity to yield the floor. Seeing no one seeking recognition, 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 don't think it will take this long, but I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. President, I come to the floor again to address climate change, particularly today the change that carbon pollution is wreaking in our oceans.

Water temperatures are increasing, sea level is rising, ocean water is growing more acidic, and powerful storms are becoming more frequent and more intense. It is time to wake up to the threat to our oceans and coasts posed by carbon pollution.

The rate at which carbon is now being dumped into the atmosphere and absorbed by our oceans is unprecedented. NOAA estimates almost 1 million tons of the carbon dioxide we dump into the atmosphere is absorbed into the oceans every hour--1 million tons every hour. We know with scientific certainty that carbon pollution causes the ocean to become more acidic. Indeed, we measure that carbon pollution has caused the global pH of the upper ocean to increase nearly 30 percent--by some measures nearly 40 percent--since preindustrial times.

In Rhode Island, the Ocean State, coastal activities define our heritage, our culture, and also our economy. Our coastal waters are spawning grounds, nurseries and shelters for fish and shellfish, which we enjoy and from which we profit. Our shores and coastal ponds are barriers that protect our coastal communities from ocean storms and that naturally improve water quality. Our oceans and coasts make coastal States such as ours who we are.

We will continue to take advantage of the ocean's bounty, as we should. We will trade, we will fish, and we will sail. We will dispose of waste, we will extract fuel and harness the wind. We will work our oceans. Navies and cruise ships, sailboats and supertankers will plow their surface. We cannot undo this part of our relationship with the sea. What we can change is what we do in return. If we use our best science and judgment to plan for the uses of our oceans, we will continue to reap the value they provide.

Carbon-driven changes to our planet will continue and will accelerate. The faster you are driving, the better your headlights need to be. Our headlights in this area are scientific research and planning. As we move ever faster into this uncharted territory, our headlights had better be working to preserve the valuable ecosystems upon which our communities and economies rely.

The National Ocean Policy, signed by President Obama in 2010, provides a commonsense framework for sensible research and planning and public-private cooperation, as we face the significant challenges bearing down on our oceans and coasts--on both our ecosystems and our industries.

Last week, the White House released the National Ocean Policy Implementation Plan, a blueprint for effective management of our oceans and the Great Lakes. It is not easy to balance the competing needs of commerce, conservation, culture, and recreation. More than 20 Federal agencies oversee our marine industries, governing everything from fisheries to oil and gas leasing. The implementation plan takes this on and moves us toward better and more collaborative management of ocean resources.

The implementation plan gathered the thoughts of a wide range of key stakeholders: maritime and energy industries, conservation and recreation interests, academic experts, and Federal, State, local, and tribal governments. The plan supports economic growth by streamlining permitting and approval processes, by improving mapping and ocean observing, and by providing greater access to data and information. The plan lays out specific actions and timelines to protect and restore coastal wetlands and reefs and to prevent economic losses and job losses due to degraded shores and degraded waters.

Our coasts need immediate attention, so the plan could not come too soon. It states:

Our nation lost nearly 60,000 acres of coastal wetlands

each year between 1998 and 2004. . . . Habitats are being

altered by invasive species that threaten native aquatic life

and cost billions of dollars per year in natural and

infrastructure damage.

The implementation process the administration is pursuing is all about local needs and concerns. So the National Ocean Policy establishes voluntary regional planning bodies. Local people can get together, layer together the relevant data, and promote greater and more responsible use of their region's ocean resources.

In New England, we have seen the value of this cooperative ocean planning. Rhode Island's Ocean Special Area Management Plan--a special area management plan is called a SAMP in the trade--has made ecosystem restoration and industry interests advance simultaneously. I recently spent time at the Northeast Regional Planning Body meeting in Rhode Island and I know our region is excited to move forward with a regional process.

So let's look at some of the practical results when you get the information and the affected people in the room together. In Rhode Island, the wind energy industry, with its vast potential for manufacturing and maintenance jobs, is rapidly developing wind farms off of our coasts. Thanks to the groundwork that was laid by the Rhode Island SAMP, wind developers moved fairly smoothly through the regulatory thicket and they have avoided interference with marine highways, critical fisheries, habitats, and naval training ranges.

There is actually quite a good report I commend to all my colleagues on the ocean SAMP published by the Rhode Island Ocean Special Area Management Plan. It is a practitioner's guide, and it is a very effective document that shows how well this worked.

In this process, local people were listened to and they were heard. When the Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced this wind energy area here off of the Rhode Island coast, there was an area named Coxes Ledge, and the fishermen were concerned. The floor of the ocean at Coxes Ledge made it particularly rich fishing grounds and they didn't want it interfered with by having that area put up for wind farm development. Sure enough, when the map came out, the curve of Coxes Ledge is going right through the middle of the wind farm area, protected for the fishermen. They were listened to and they were heard.

So much of this is simple common sense. In Massachusetts, the endangered North Atlantic right whale, a population of about 450 of them, feeds in the waters just off of Boston. The whale strikes between shipping and the

right whales were becoming a problem. And because the right whale is endangered, it was becoming a real risk for shipping going in and out of Boston Harbor. So they found data that showed where the whale strikes were likely to be and they mapped that data. When they mapped the data, they saw if they moved the shipping channel out of Boston Harbor up a little bit they could come through an area that was largely safe from whale strikes. The cost to the industry was somewhere between 9 and 22 minutes of extra transit time--virtually nothing--while the number of whale strikes has dropped significantly.

Here is another example from outside of Delaware. The green sort of neon-colored dots here track the signals coming off cargo ships going in and out of Delaware Bay. As you can see, there is a pretty solid track coming out of Delaware Bay right through here. When Delaware first proposed its wind energy areas, they proposed these light green blocks as wind energy areas. This one, as we can see here, was planned right on top of the main shipping channel heading southeast out of Delaware Bay.

Critics say these kinds of efforts to get the data and the people in the room together ``zone'' the ocean. That is just plain factually wrong. The policy brings together people who use our ocean. In this case, the case of Delaware Bay, simply putting everybody in the room allowed the wind energy areas to be modified to avoid the conflict. So the southeastern area comes out and the turbine areas are beside it and the problem has been solved. That is not zoning, that is what military officers would call situational awareness; what the military would call deconfliction. What it really is is common sense.

As Nancy Sutley, the Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said:

With increasing demands on our ocean, we must improve how

we work together, share information, and plan smartly to grow

our economy, keep our ocean healthy and enjoy the highest

benefits from our ocean resources, now and in the future.

Our ocean and coastal economy is important. Shoreline counties in this country generate 41 percent of our gross domestic product. In 2010, 2.8 million jobs were supported by maritime economic activities; commercial ports supported 13 million jobs; energy and minerals production supported almost three-fourths of a million jobs. But all of this activity creates opportunities for conflict.

The National Ocean Policy Implementation Plan is a blueprint to resolve those wasteful conflicts, to ``deconflict'' intelligently, and to streamline efforts across the Federal Government to keep our oceans and our ocean economy thriving. And it lets each region go forward at its own pace.

Michael Keyworth, recent head of our Rhode Island Marine Trades Association, helped develop the Rhode Island Ocean Special Area Management Plan, SAMP, said this:

The National Ocean Policy Implementation Plan will enable

regions like New England to move ahead with this smart ocean

planning by engaging people like me, who live and work on the

water every day, while not forcing planning on other regions

that do not currently want to engage in the process.

Climate change is upon us, and its effects will only accelerate as we continue to spew megatons of carbon into our atmosphere. Changes are occurring fast in the oceans. That fact makes it all the more important that Congress remain vigilant and that we put our full support behind the commonsense framework of the national ocean policy.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, last month, the Senate approved a budget that included a blueprint for balanced and responsible deficit reduction. That budget was skillfully managed by our Budget Committee chairman, Senator Murray. It would complete the deficit reduction needed to stabilize our Nation's finances with a mix of smart spending cuts and revenue from closing wasteful tax loopholes. Top economists agree we need about $4 trillion of deficit reduction to make our finances sustainable, and our budget gets us there. Together with the deficit reduction enacted last Congress, the Senate budget would reduce the deficit by $4.3 trillion through a nearly 2-to-1 mix of spending cuts and revenue.

House Republicans took a very different approach with their budget, making only cuts--drastic cuts--to education, law enforcement, medical research, and even ending Medicare as we know it for future retirees. The House budget derives its deficit reduction from cuts that primarily hurt low-income and middle-class Americans, while refusing to touch a single tax giveaway to wealthy and well-connected special interests. Senate Democrats took a middle course; House Republicans produced an extremist tea party wish list.

In his own budget plan, President Obama included some smart provisions such as investments in infrastructure and the Buffett rule for tax fairness. I respect the President's outreach to a compromise with Republicans, but I cannot support the cuts to Social Security benefits in his plan. It is simply wrong to place the burden of deficit reduction on seniors and the disabled. Social Security--one of the fundamental pillars of the American middle class--has not contributed and will not contribute to our deficits. Social Security is fully funded by its participants through payroll taxes and cannot by law add to the deficit.

Under current payroll tax levels, Social Security will have the funds to pay 100 percent of benefits until 2033. It is true we do need to make some adjustments to ensure that full benefits can be paid beyond that date, but that task has nothing to do with deficit reduction. Even if Congress did nothing before 2033, the projected shortfall would force automatic benefit cuts, not deficit spending.

I do look forward to working with Senators of both parties to ensure that Social Security remains fully solvent for generations to come, but that discussion does not belong in the unrelated debate on our Nation's budget deficits.

The Social Security cuts the President has proposed are not just in the wrong discussion, they are wrong themselves. To reflect inflation, Social Security recipients each year get cost-of-living adjustments, what we call COLAs. The President's proposal changes the formula used to make that determination, shifting to something called the chained Consumer Price Index or chained CPI. It sounds innocuous, but make no mistake, it is a benefit cut cloaked in technical jargon.

The argument for a chained CPI is that it is a more accurate measure of inflation--that it takes into account real-world decisions consumers make to modify their buying habits as prices fluctuate. As the price of apples goes up, we buy more bananas, so the overall effect on our budget is moderated. The result is lower annual cost-of-living adjustments--about 0.3 percent each year. But let's take a look at how seniors fare under the existing COLA structure.

In 2010 and 2011, seniors received no cost-of-living adjustment whatsoever--0.0 percent in 2010, 0.0 percent in 2011. But according to the existing consumer price formula used by government accountants, prices didn't rise enough to justify COLAs. That is what the COLA formula says. But in real life, what did it look like?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, seniors saw food prices rise 1.5 percent in 2010, medical costs increase 3.3 percent, and they saw their gas and home heating oil go up by more than 13 percent each, and the COLA covered zero percent.

The next year, 2011, these costs increased again. Food prices jumped 4.5 percent, medical care jumped 3.5 percent, gasoline jumped 9.9 percent, and fuel oil jumped 14.3 percent, and again the COLA for seniors was zero.

So 2010 and 2011 add together; they are not included in one another. So food and beverage is a total of 6 percent, plus, allowing for compounding, 6.8 percent for medical care, 23.7 percent for gasoline, and 27.8 percent for

fuel oil--all with a COLA of zero percent.

The numbers show what Rhode Island seniors know: The problem with the Social Security COLA is that it is too low, that it doesn't meet the real costs seniors experience in real life.

Why does this happen? The existing cost-of-living formula considers prices across the whole economy, including products seniors are not so likely to buy, such as flat-screen TVs and smart phones and sporting equipment. Their prices may have fallen, but seniors don't benefit much from those lower prices.

The problem is that the current system fails to account for seniors' true costs in these areas. So my position is that we should move on to a more accurate formula for seniors, one that focuses on food, medicine and heating oil and gas and the other things seniors actually buy. I have been proud to support legislation to change the Social Security COLA formula to one that is geared more toward seniors, and I will continue to fight for the adoption of that new formula.

Chained CPI takes us in the opposite direction. It assumes consumers will alter the types of goods they buy as prices rise. But seniors on fixed incomes have little ability to shift their buying habits away from these basic expenses, things such as food, medical care, gasoline, and fuel oil. It is hard to shift away from those. The lower COLAs that chained CPI would produce will only cut into seniors' already tight budgets, and force seniors to bear the burden of reducing deficits that Social Security had no part in creating. A 0.3-percent reduction each year might sound small, but over time the power of compound interest makes those benefit cuts significant.

For people currently nearing retirement, these cuts would amount to annual benefit reductions of $658 by the time they reach age 75, $1,147 by the time they reach age 85, and $1,622 by the time they reach age 95. That same power of compounding makes these cuts even larger for future generations of seniors. Perhaps $658 or $1,1622 doesn't sound like much money to some folks around here, but to a senior in Rhode Island living on Social Security, that is real money.

After getting no COLA for 2 years in a row, Bethany, a senior from Smithfield, RI, wrote to me:

My health is not the best and it's not easy trying to

survive on my Social Security and the increasing prices of

gas, food, etc. and co-pays for medical. . . . The COLA

calculation for Social Security doesn't work. We need an

increase yearly to stay even with rising premiums and

everyday expenses. Please continue to fight for Social

Security and Medicare.

Deanne from Coventry, RI, wrote to me in February:

I am 68 years old and retired. I cannot work even part time

because of severe Arthritis. My son lives with me who is

permanently disabled due to an accident when he was 9 years

old. He is now 44 years old. We just make ends meet with

Social Security as we have no other income. We wear sweat

shirts and pants to bed and coats in the house during the

winter because we can't pay the high prices of oil. If Social

Security gets cut, I don't know how we will make it. I have

worked all my adult life until the last two years. I NEED my

Social Security. . . . In the face of ever-increasing prices

for health care, home heating, prescription drugs and grocery

bills, asking seniors to give up more and more of their

Social Security benefit as they age when every dollar counts

is just plain wrong.

These are real-life experiences of people who are the kind of folks chained CPI would affect. Yes, we need to make additional sacrifices to complete the job of deficit reduction; no, those burdens should not fall on our elderly and disabled constituents. Our deficits come from unnecessary Bush-era tax cuts that virtually exclusively benefited the wealthy, they come from a decade of wars we didn't pay for, and they come from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. They have nothing to do with Social Security, so don't take it out on the seniors.

As the Senate budget shows, we can complete the task of stabilizing our Nation's finances in smart ways, in fair ways, in balanced ways, in ways that don't put the burden on those who can least afford it.

When I ran for this office, I pledged to the people of Rhode Island that I would oppose cuts to Social Security, and I will keep that promise.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to a period of morning business with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration, en bloc, of the following resolutions, which were submitted earlier today: S. Res. 111, S. Res. 112, S. Res. 113, and S. Res. 114.

I ask unanimous consent the resolutions be agreed to, the preambles be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table en bloc, with no intervening action or debate.

I understand there is a bill at the desk. I ask for its first reading.

I now ask for a second reading and in order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I object to my own request.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, April 25, 2013; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; that following any leader remarks, the Senate be in a period of morning business until 10:30 a.m., with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each, with the time equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees with the majority controlling the first half and the Republicans controlling the final half; further, that following morning business, the Senate recess for 1 hour to allow for a Senators-only briefing; and that when the Senate reconvenes, the Senate resume consideration of S. 743, the Marketplace Fairness Act.

Mr. President, I have been asked to inform the body that the filing deadline for all first-degree amendments to S. 743 is 1 p.m. tomorrow. Unless an agreement is reached, the cloture vote on S. 743 will occur on Friday morning.