Floor Statements

Madam President, this month I join Senator Grassley of Iowa and a bipartisan group of my colleagues to recognize May as National Foster Care Month.

It is an opportunity to acknowledge the millions of foster parents and children in foster care around the country. More importantly, it is a call to action. We simply leave too many children behind.

Poverty should never be the reason children are separated from their parents. There is no dignity in removing children from their mothers or fathers because they don't have adequate housing or affordable childcare or jobs that allow them to take time off when their children get sick.

Right now, child welfare agencies are overwhelmed by the number of children who enter the system, and the addiction crisis just makes it worse. In Ohio, parents' substance abuse is listed as one of the causes for one-third of all children who enter the system. Children who are already in the system stay there longer, especially teenagers. We have to do better than that.

Last year, we passed and the President signed the bipartisan Family First Prevention Services Act, which is an important first step. It has the potential to change our child welfare system over time. Yet the changes the Family First Prevention Services Act requires ultimately have to be made at the State level. We have to make sure that States have the support they need and that they actually do what the law requires.

That is why, this month, I introduced the Family First Transition and Support Act--to help all States transition to the family first era. It would provide funding for States to recruit and retain quality foster parents who meet the needs of children. Our bill would expand funding for kinship support services, which would help family members who raise children pay for essential needs and services, like childcare, transportation, and other things.

This is especially important with the rise in having other family members raise the children because of the addiction crisis. In Ohio, Arizona, and all over this country, we have seen a big increase in there being grandparents who raise grandchildren, in large part, because the children's parents have had addiction issues or have actually died of overdoses.

The grandparents with the grandchildren face unique challenges and don't often qualify for the same support as foster parents. It means that they are going back to work. It may mean that a 68-year-old grandmother who lives on a pension and thought she was retired has to go back to work in order to raise this child to make enough money or has to take money out of her retirement savings.

Relatives' care is vital to keeping kids safe at home and in their communities. Our bill would provide real funding to get these grandparents and other family members more support. There is no formula here, but most of the time, it is better if grandparents can raise these children rather than send them to foster parents, who are strangers. The grandparents, obviously, know and love the children. It doesn't mean foster parents can't, of course, but so often the grandparents are financially challenged.

I get letters all the time from Ohioans who tell their stories and ask us to support these family members.

A man from Richland County, where I grew up, wrote to me saying:

I ask that family members be given the same financial aid

as foster parents. Most of the family members are

grandparents or great-grandparents on fixed income with

little or no money.

Another woman from the county just south, Knox County, south of Mansfield wrote:

I am a grandmother raising my grandson. He is 15 years old,

a great kid, and has been living with me almost all his life.

I lost my beautiful daughter to an overdose.

She was raised in a good home, but was affected by this

disease for the past 9 years. We loved her and miss her every

day.

This letter goes on:

Grandparents that lovingly accept their grandchildren,

under sometimes awful [conditions]--

Just think of that. She is raising a grandson when her daughter died of an overdose.

Grandparents that lovingly accept their grandchildren,

under sometimes awful circumstances, often don't know what to

do.

Thank you so much for getting this program and money to

support it on board. Grandparents do so much, without much

help.

Last year we were able to break through the partisanship and get the Family First Act signed into law. This bill is the commonsense next step.

This Foster Care Month, I hope that my colleagues will live up to their talking points about supporting children and families. We hear every day here how much we support children and families. Well, do something about it. Work with us to pass this bill.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I rise today to honor a member of my staff, Seth Pringle, who has dedicated his life to serving his country and the people of Ohio. Not only does Seth serve the people of Ohio each day on our staff, helping Ohio servicemembers and veterans, but he also serves in uniform himself as a member of the Army National Guard.

This past week was his last in our office for a year. He is heading out soon to deploy with his unit to defend our country overseas.

Seth earned both a master's and a bachelor's degree from Kent State University. He didn't stop there. He is currently pursuing a master's in national security from the University of Akron while also working for our State and serving his country.

Seth has worked in our office since 2015. He joined our team as an intern in the Cleveland office. He impressed all of us. He was hired first part time and then as a full-time staff member, serving as a constituent advocate on veterans and military issues.

Seth has helped hundreds of Ohio servicemembers and veterans navigate the military and the VA's bureaucracy so that they can receive the medals and timely medical care and benefits they earn.

About a year and a half ago, I joined Seth and members in the community in Cleveland to present long-overdue medals to George Burress, a Vietnam veteran who served as an Army infantryman and earned the Combat Infantryman Badge, as well as five other

well-deserved honors. Mr. Burress had never received those medals due to a paperwork error. Because of Seth's work, we were finally able to present this Ohio veteran with the honors he had earned for serving our country.

There are so many stories like that one of American heroes finally receiving the honors and the Federal benefits they have earned. So many of those stories are because of Seth's hard work.

Seth Pringle does so much for the people of Ohio, and at the end of the week, when others might look forward to a relaxing weekend with friends and family, Seth often is headed out for drill with his unit.

Now Seth's unit is deploying. While we will miss his expertise, his dedication, and his unique perspective in the office this year, we are so grateful for his service to our country.

On behalf of everyone in my office and on behalf of Ohio's 12 million citizens, we wish Seth Pringle well in his tour overseas--and all of his unit, of course. We thank him for his sacrifice and his service.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, each year during National Police Week we honor our law enforcement officers and the families who support them and sacrifice alongside them. It is so important to remember that, as much as the sacrifice of the officer or the man or woman overseas fighting for our country, the sacrifice of the family is in many ways just as great.

They all give so much in service to their communities. Too many make the ultimate sacrifice to keep us safe.

This year we add the names of four Ohioans to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Ohioans who laid down their lives last year were Officer Eric Joering of Westerville, a Columbus suburb; Officer Anthony Morelli, also of Westerville; Officer Vu Nguyen of Cleveland; and Officer Matthew Mazany, of Mentor, a community east of Cleveland along Lake Erie. Each of these losses is a tragedy for a family, for a community, for their fellow officers.

Sadly, we already know the names of two people who will be added to the memorial next year: Detective William Brewer of the Clermont County Sheriff's Office east of Cincinnati and Officer Dale Woods of the Colerain Township Police Department near Cincinnati. Both were killed in the line of duty in 2019.

We can't begin to repay the debt we owe them and their families, but we can work harder, frankly, to support their families and their fellow officers as they work to keep our communities safe.

It is why I am working with my colleague Senator Portman on our bipartisan POWER Act to get officers the tools they need to screen for dangerous opioids in their communities.

This bill builds on my INTERDICT Act, which the President signed into law last year. That law is getting new, portable, handheld screening devices to Customs and Border Protection agents to detect fentanyl and carfentanil at the U.S. border and stop them before they reach Ohio streets.

The POWER Act will give our local and State law enforcement access to the same high-tech tools.

All of our law enforcement officers know how big of an issue illegal fentanyl has become. They deal with it, it seems, almost every day.

This week I am joining Senator Inhofe to introduce the bipartisan Law Enforcement Training for Mental Health Crisis Response Act.

We have seen too many officers hurt. We have seen far too many police officers and sheriff's deputies and Federal agents killed responding to people in their communities suffering a mental health crisis. This bill would invest in training to help officers resolve those situations safely for themselves and for the communities they serve.

This National Police Week, let's offer more than gratitude to the people who put their lives on the line to keep us safe. Let's support these women and men by getting them the tools they need to do their jobs for themselves and for our communities.

Madam President, over the past couple of months, we have seen State legislatures around the country taking drastic, unconstitutional steps to insert themselves into personal, private healthcare decisions that should be--and have been in the past--between a woman and her doctor.

Ohio and Georgia, two States that wouldn't seem on the surface to have that much in common, have both passed laws that would fundamentally eliminate a woman's right to make her own healthcare decisions.

Who made these laws? It is always the same. It is predominantly men who don't even understand how women's bodies and how preventive care like birth control work.

We have one Ohio legislator, a man, who sponsored a bill banning insurance companies from covering certain types of birth control, and then he admitted he didn't really know how birth control actually works.

When asked about the different kinds of medications and birth control devices, he said: ``I don't know because I'm not smart enough to know.'' But he thinks he should make decisions for women.

You would think he is smart enough to know better. You would think that millions of Ohio women know best how to take care of their own bodies.

He was also making up medical procedures. He actually wrote into a version of the Ohio bill an exception allowing insurance companies to cover a made-up medical procedure where a doctor would reimplant an egg from an ectopic pregnancy.

This is a total fantasy. No such medical procedure exists, yet that is what he did.

He is 1 of 99 votes in the Ohio legislature, and he happens to be in the majority, and he happens to be one of the authors of these bills, and he happens to be a supporter of whatever it takes to put Planned Parenthood out of business.

It is not only idiotic to suggest that those medical procedures exist, it is actively harmful to spread information, not to mention insensitive or cruel--that might be the better word--to the women and families coping with the very real struggles involved in an ectopic pregnancy. That inaccuracy in the law could create serious confusion about how and when doctors could treat women for ectopic pregnancies and put women's health at risk.

After he was asked over and over again what in the world he was talking about, he said: ``That's clearly not my area of expertise.''

Yet he was going to legislate in an area where, self-admittedly, he didn't have expertise. He was going to tell women what they had to do-- fantasy or not--with birth control. He was going to try to tell women what to do with their own bodies. He thought it was a good idea to legislate on it and to insert himself in the medical decisions of millions of women in my State.

Unfortunately, this administration is only making things worse. President Trump and the men he has put in charge, the judges he has appointed--look at the Supreme Court--put their thumb on the scale of justice, always choosing corporations over workers, always choosing Wall Street over consumers, always choosing insurance companies over sick people and, frankly, increasingly over women's bodies and women's decisions.

President Trump and the men he has put in charge are encouraging these male lawmakers in States like Ohio and Georgia and Alabama, where it may be worst of all--they are taking the country backward when it comes to women's health.

Rather than making it easier for women to get care, they make it harder. This administration put out a new rule 2 weeks ago that would allow healthcare providers to refuse to provide needed care for a woman if the treatment supposedly violates their personal beliefs.

In other words, if a woman had a miscarriage and she came in needing emergency care, the doctor could refuse to treat her simply based on his own personal issues and biases. How does that follow the physician mantra of ``do no harm''?

It is not just medical professionals who could refuse care; it is hospitals, and it is insurance companies too. I don't know how anyone could suggest a for-profit insurance company has a conscience, yet, apparently under these kinds of laws, it does.

Under this rule, an insurance company can consider the coverage of some services--and we know these are always services related to women, and they are always services related to LGBTQ people, all Americans-- against that corporation's supposed conscience. So if the corporation doesn't believe in human rights, doesn't believe in equality of gay people, of LGBTQ people, doesn't believe women should have control over their bodies, that corporation, licensed under the law--they have a conscience, and they can refuse care. That is what these legislatures are doing, and that is what this President wants to do.

That conscience clause that these corporations and these insurance companies say they believe--I wish that conscience clause would kick in when they are raising premiums, when they deny people coverage for their medication. When they take away an exclusion for a preexisting condition, where they cancel someone's insurance or never insure them because of a preexisting condition, that is not a conscience thing because they are a corporation, but when it comes to women's health, it is.

One woman from Butler County in Southwest Ohio wrote, and she said:

I'd like to know why insurance companies are allowed to

pick and choose the drugs they will and will not cover. Since

when did they become doctors?

This is just the latest in a long line of rules that hurt women.

They have rolled back title X protections, instituting a new gag rule that would ban many clinics from talking about birth control and family planning options with their patients, limiting their patients' access to accurate medical information.

I just don't understand. Some of these people don't like abortion. I understand that. They want to take away women's healthcare decisions, but they will not help women get contraceptives, and they will not explain the options women have when they come in and want to talk to the doctor about those kinds of things. I just don't get that.

I get letters from women in Ohio who also don't get that, who are scared about what these changes mean.

One woman from Mahoning County wrote to me:

I am a 24 year old woman living with PCOS, a hormonal

disorder. Complications of PCOS include Type 2 Diabetes, high

risks of miscarriage and infertility, and even cancer.

It is not curable, but it can be treated with birth

control.

This domestic gag order will put millions of women at risk

across this country.

Let me read again what she said:

I am a 24 year old woman living with PCOS, a hormonal

disorder. Complications include Type 2 Diabetes, high risk of

miscarriage and infertility, even cancer.

It is not curable, but can be treated with birth control.

This domestic gag order will put millions of women at risk

across the country.

Who said these people can practice medicine when they are without a license and do these kinds of things?

I hope my colleagues will think about these women. I hope my colleagues, especially my male colleagues, will spend a little more time trying to help women get the healthcare they need instead of trying to meddle in decisions that always, always, always should be between a woman and her doctor.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 3 minutes to address the Senate.

Mr. President, the Senate is finally holding long overdue votes on nominees to the Export-Import Bank of the United States. To me, this is about Ohio businesses; this is about American workers; and this is about the dignity of work. All three of these nominees are qualified.

For nearly 4 years, the Export-Import Bank has been forced to stop most of the work supporting American jobs. A small group of opponents, supported by special interests in this town, tried to kill this bank altogether. Ex-Im has been paralyzed because of leadership in

this body and because of the President and the Vice President of the United States. The Bank is technically open but can't approve any transaction greater than $10 million.

The Senate's inaction, the President's inaction, and the Vice President's inaction have hurt Ohio manufacturers. In the past, Ohio companies exported more than $400 million a year in products using Export-Import Bank credit assistance. That amount has been cut nearly in half. That means jobs. It means good-paying industrial jobs. If the President and Republicans in Congress were serious about helping American manufacturers after years and years of obstruction, which they have done, they would approve these nominees and work with us to authorize the Bank this summer.

My colleagues have a choice: Do they care about these businesses; do they care about manufacturing; do they care about workers; do they care about the dignity of workers; or do they care more about their extreme special interest politics?

I stand with our workers. I will vote to reopen the Export-Import Bank.

Thank you.

Mr. President, I will be brief. I see my colleague from Tennessee is here.

Earlier this afternoon, the President's designee, Stephen Moore--not quite yet his nominee, but the President put his name out there to be a Governor of the Federal Reserve--withdrew his name from consideration, in large part because so many Republicans in this body were unhappy with his selection.

This is the second Trump failure for the Federal Reserve just in the last month. He was about to nominate Herman Cain. There was a lot of outcry about his lack of qualifications. I am not sure why the President came up with him. Then he withdrew, and Stephen Moore's name had been put out there, too, and there were the same kinds of complaints about Moore--not just about what he wrote and said over the years, but really about his reputation as a thinker, as an economist, and as a strategist on economic issues.

The President has tried twice. I don't know when we have ever seen this before, where the President hasn't been able to find somebody who understands the independence of the Fed and is qualified to take on that awesome responsibility to be on the Federal Reserve. It is as influential as any economic position in this government, I think.

Now the President has two new chances again. I am hopeful that he will think about not appointing somebody whose whole mantra is trickle- down economics--to give tax cuts to the richest people in the country and

hope it trickles down and we get a better economy. That never works.

I am hopeful that the President better understands that you focus on the middle--my earned income tax credit bill, for instance--and you focus on tax breaks for the people making $20,000, $30,000, $50,000, and up to $100,000 a year. They will spend those dollars they get in tax breaks and build the economy, whether in Terre Haute, in Nashville, or in Cleveland. We know how important that is.

I hope the President will look at the next Governor of the Federal Reserve--these two appointments--and think about the dignity of work and think about someone who respects and honors work.

You may remember that Stephen Moore made some really caustic and nasty comments about two great cities in my State--Cleveland and Cincinnati. As much as that was offensive, what is really offensive is how he just doesn't seem to respect the dignity of work and respect these workers. Whether they are physical therapists at hospitals, whether they clean bathrooms at hotels, whether they are construction workers, whether they are midlevel managers, or whether they are salespeople on the road, it is important that we honor and respect work and understand the dignity of work. I am hopeful the President will see that the next two nominees for the Federal Reserve will think about the American workforce.

One of my most fun moments and most productive moments and days in my time in the Senate was when I asked Janet Yellen, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, to come out and visit a major aluminum stamping plant for helicopter blades in Cleveland, which is not far from where I live. It gave her a perspective of seeing what Americans do for a living sometimes in manufacturing, sometimes in sales, sometimes in service-- whatever it is.

I am hopeful that this is who the President will look at--somebody who will respect the dignity of work, someone who will want to go out, as Abraham Lincoln said, and get ``my public opinion baths'' and get outside the hallowed halls of the Federal Reserve, see America, and translate that into a policy that really does help working families.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to honor the career of my longtime chief of staff, staff director of the Democratic staff on the Senate Banking Committee, former staff director for Republicans on the HELP Committee, and my good friend Mark Powden.

Mark is the model of a public servant and of a Senate staffer. He spent decades serving in these Halls, first for Senator Jeffords, and then, in 2007, he joined my office, becoming my chief of staff less than 2 years later.

I was a brandnew Senator. I still had a lot to learn. There were few better teachers in this institution and this city than Mark Powden. He helped steer our office in its early days, setting up a well-oiled machine, I would like to think, that would serve Ohioans at home and advocate for them in Washington. Under Mark's leadership, we delivered results for the 12 million people in Ohio.

When the country wanted to write off the American auto industry, we said no. We weren't going to abandon this industry and millions of American workers--literally hundreds of thousands in Ohio. Mark was passionate about making sure we got the best deal possible for Ohio workers. It wasn't just auto workers.

Mark took over the job as chief of staff in my office during the depths of the recession around the time President Obama took office, after the economy was tanking with a loss of 800,000 jobs a month at the end of the Bush administration. Ohio had lost 423,000 jobs over a 2-year period--nearly 8 percent of the jobs in the State. Under Mark's leadership, we worked to create the Hardest Hit Fund, which targeted resources to communities in places like Ohio that had been devastated by the financial crisis. Mark and so many others have heard me say that the ZIP Code where my wife Connie and I live in Cleveland, OH--ZIP Code 44105--at that point, in the first half of 2007, there were more foreclosures in that ZIP Code than in any other ZIP Code in the United States of America.

Mark always made sure that investing in Ohio was a priority. We helped secure $100 million to expand cancer research and treatment at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and James Cancer Hospital.

Through all of these accomplishments, Mark remained true to his Vermont roots. It is where he grew up. His first major job in Washington was with a Republican in those days, a Senator from Vermont. He tried his hardest always to bring Vermont's bucolic vales to the Nation's Capital, and he maintained the utmost respect for the institution of the Senate.

He had an incredible wealth of knowledge on the history of this place and on legislative procedure and tradition, and he passed it on to other staffers--from my new chief of staff, when Mark moved over to lead the Senate Banking Committee, to the LCs new to the Senate, hoping to learn. We will miss all that about Mark Powden.

I will miss Mark's counsel. I will miss his hard work. I will miss his sense of humor. I will miss his modesty. I will particularly miss his farmer jokes that he tells so well after growing up in rural Vermont. It is not surprising that Mark would not want to be here today as I honor him because he just doesn't want to show up to be honored. But after decades in public service, he has earned a long retirement with his wife Wendy; his two sons, Joseph and Russell; and his entire family.

Mark, thank you for what you did for me, thank you for what you did for our State, and thank you for what you do for our country.

I would add to this that one of the people Mark helped to teach is with me on the floor today. She is about to join a Presidential campaign. Her name is Hannah Fine. I want to recognize her service. This is the first time, I believe, she has been on the Senate floor for a moment like this. So, Hannah, thank you.

Mr. President, over the past few weeks, we have learned more and more about the President's pick, Stephen Moore, for the Federal Reserve.

We now know he has made all kinds of offensive, disparaging comments about women, even about women who play sports. He has even questioned women who are in broadcast booths. We know he is against child labor laws. He thinks we should have 11-year-olds working. He has said that he wants people to start working at 11, at 12. He has said he is a radical in this.

Think about this. The President is about to nominate for the Federal Reserve a gentleman who says he is an economist but who really isn't. He didn't get his degree and didn't get a Ph.D. in economics, as Federal Reserve people often do. Yet put that aside.

He said: I am a radical in child labor. I mean, who thinks that way in the year 2019?

Other things we know, he was banned from the op-ed page of the Kansas City Star after publishing an editorial with all kinds of factual errors. See, the editor knew he was a conservative. The editor may have been a conservative. I don't know. That is not the point. The point is it was filled with factual errors, and the editor said: Those kinds of factual errors are just unacceptable. We are finished with him--not that the editor doesn't agree with certain viewpoints, but she just said: We are not running him anymore because he doesn't tell the truth.

We have him on videotape showing breathtaking contempt for people in the middle of the country, from places like Arkansas and Kentucky and Tennessee and my State of Ohio. Here is what Mr. Moore said, and it is on tape and many people have seen it:

If you want to live in the Midwest, where else do you want

to live besides Chicago? You don't want to live in

Cincinnati--

The home of Senator Portman--

or Cleveland.

My home. He said:

You don't want to live in Cincinnati or Cleveland or these

armpits of America.

That is what he said.

President Trump is showing his disregard for Cincinnati and Cleveland and Kentucky and Arkansas and Tennessee and the middle of the country by nominating someone who is so out of touch and has such contempt for the middle of this country. ``The armpits of America'' is what he called two of my State's great cities.

Make no mistake, he wasn't just insulting Cleveland and Cincinnati; he was insulting Little Rock; he was insulting Nashville; he was insulting people who get up every day and work hard. He was dismissing millions of Americans. He was undermining the dignity of work by dismissing them, people who have been ignored by Washington and have been preyed upon by Wall Street.

Across the industrial heartland, tens of millions of Americans raise families; they serve in our military; they power our companies; they contribute to our country.

Mr. Moore, how dare you demean them and diminish them with those kinds of comments? How dare you insult them and their hometowns?

You can't fight for these Americans when you don't know the first thing about the places they live. You don't understand that all work has dignity. You don't understand the dignity of work. You don't understand honoring and respecting work.

It is particularly ironic where Mr. Moore made these comments. He was speaking at an event sponsored by a think tank called the Heartland Institute, located, I believe, in Chicago. Can you believe that?

Take a look at who is really behind this group, the Heartland group. I mean, people can name themselves whatever they want. They call themselves the Heartland Institute, but they are funded by ExxonMobil, the biggest oil company, I believe, in the world. They are funded by Philip Morris, one of the tobacco giants--Big Tobacco--that poisons our children. Four hundred eighty thousand people die every year from tobacco in this country--480,000 people. You know what that means? It means Philip Morris has to find 1,300 new customers every day just to make up for the people tobacco has killed.

So the Heartland Institute is funded by ExxonMobil; it is funded by Philip Morris; it is funded by the Koch brothers--or at least we used to know they were funded by these groups.

Today, unfortunately, they don't disclose who their individual donors are, which is pretty shocking. The Heartland Institute didn't want people in the actual heartland to realize they are nothing but a corporate front--a corporate, special interest-funded front.

What have they done with those donations? Well, you can expect them to do the bidding of ExxonMobil; you can expect them to do the bidding of Philip Morris; you can expect them to do the bidding of the Koch brothers, and those interest groups have certainly gotten their money's worth.

The Heartland Institute has pushed junk science on behalf of tobacco companies to try to block and stop and neuter anti-smoking public health laws.

As recently as the late 1990s, their president wrote an op-ed. I mean, this isn't really funny at all. I don't know why I laughed, but it is so ridiculous. The president of that group wrote an op-ed claiming that moderate smoking--moderate smoking--doesn't raise your risk of lung cancer. You know, getting those 15-years-olds to start smoking only a little bit, I guess that is OK because that doesn't increase their chance of lung cancer. That is their notable achievement.

So, of course, we shouldn't be surprised that the men in the room-- and it was almost all men. You could tell from the video and the audio that the men in the room, when Mr. Moore talked about my city, Cleveland, Senator Portman's city, Cincinnati, talked about them being armpits of the Nation, the men in the room howled with laughter because look who comes to the Heartland Institute. It is a bunch of lobbyists, a bunch of drug company people, a bunch of oil company men, a bunch of tobacco men, a bunch of gun lobby people. All these people who come to the Heartland Institute, of course, they were laughing at those people in the industrial Midwest, in Cleveland, in Mansfield, in Toledo, in Zanesville, and all over our country. That is what these phony, rightwing, tobacco-funded think tanks really think of America's heartland.

President Trump likes to pretend he cares about people in places like Cincinnati and Cleveland. He likes to

make big promises to the people in the heartland, but look at whom he puts in charge--these conservative elites. Make no mistake, they are far-right conservatives, and they are elites. They all think they are better than the rest of the country. These conservative elites, whether they are on Wall Street, whether they are in Trump Tower, whether they are at the White House, where the White House looks like a retreat for Wall Street executives, whether these conservative elites are going in and out of the office doors of the Senate majority leader with their requests for tax cuts in hand, these are people who have contempt for the people they are supposed to serve.

Stephen Moore says he doesn't want to be judged on all the extreme and offensive articles he has written; he wants to be judged by his economic record.

So let's do that. Let's look at his economic record. It is just as bad. It is in line with views of all these rightwing elites. It stems directly from contempt for ordinary people. You see it in their policies: Make it easier for Wall Street to pay these huge--$1 million, $2 million, $5 million, $10 million--bonuses that Wall Street elites get, so often at the expense of workers.

I was at my high school reunion in Mansfield, OH, some time ago. I sat across the table from a woman who had worked at one of America's largest banks. When I grew up and I used to put my family farm paycheck into this bank, it was called Farmers Bank in those days. It has been bought and sold and bought by other bigger banks. The point is, she had worked as a teller in this bank for 30 years. She was making $30,000 a year. Yet Wall Street continues giving million-dollar bonuses, massive tax cuts for corporations, for billionaires and pennies for working families.

Look at what happened in Kansas, where Stephen Moore was banned from writing in the newspaper because he lied so much. He helped design the tax cut boondoggle that bankrupted the State. It was the plan that eliminated taxes entirely for LLCs and passthrough corporations. The people who paid the price were millions of ordinary Kansans. There was no money for teachers. There was no money for healthcare. There was no money for higher ed.

When Republicans in the State finally rebelled and repealed that Stephen Moore far-right tax plan, Kansas had fallen behind the rest of the country. They were actually losing jobs in Kansas, a once prosperous State, while almost every other State was adding them.

One advocate in Kansas who saw his work up close said: ``I wouldn't let Stephen Moore within 100 yards of my enemy's piggy bank, let alone put him on the Federal Reserve.''

So why on Earth would we want to hire that guy to help run our national economy? It is pretty clear that creating jobs for workers in the heartland doesn't really matter to Stephen Moore and his crowd. After all, they don't even want to set foot there.

It comes back to the dignity of work. We need people in office who understand, who respect work. Whether you punch a clock or swipe a badge, whether you work on a salary, whether you work for tips, whether you are raising children, whether you are taking care of an aging parent, it comes down to honoring and respecting work--something apparently Stephen Moore and his far-right elitist crowd know nothing about.

The last thing we need is another conservative elitist looking down his nose at American workers, at Ohio workers, at workers in Arkansas, at workers all across this country.

Mr. President, last month, GM laid off thousands of workers in Lordstown, OH, and around the country. Lordstown is a community near Youngstown and Warren in Northeast Ohio.

Many of us warned the President that if he let this happen, the layoffs wouldn't stop with GM. Those job losses would work their way up and down the entire supply chain--the people who stamp the metal, the people who make the components, the people who make all kinds of products that only go into the production of a car, the assembly of a car--but the President did nothing other than rub salt in workers' wounds by boasting about imaginary new factories coming to Ohio that were supposedly going to open.

Now, this weekend, we found out that the additional layoffs we feared are starting to happen.

Falcon Transport was part of the auto supply chain in the Mahoning Valley, transporting parts for GM Lordstown. This weekend, with no notice, they closed their doors, leaving 500 Ohioans out of a job.

They didn't just close their door; workers found out about this with an email, I believe, the night before or early Monday morning in their inboxes or people saw posts on social media telling them not to show up for work the next day. Some drivers were left stuck all around the country when they found out.

Workers in my State everywhere deserve better than an email letting them know their livelihood has been taken away. The entire community of Lordstown and Trumbull County and Mahoning County deserve better than a President who breaks his promises.

Remember, President Trump came to Mahoning Valley many times during the campaign, but he came there since the election as the President of the United States, and he said: Don't move. Don't sell your house. We are going to fill up those factories or we are going to rip them down and build new ones. Don't move. Don't sell your house. We are going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build new ones.

People trusted him. A lot of people had voted for him. They put their faith in him. They believed what he said.

What did Trump do? Instead of working to save their jobs, he turned around and handed corporations a 50-percent-off coupon to send their jobs overseas.

Here is how it works. If you are producing in Dayton, OH, you are paying a 21-percent corporate tax rate. If you move your production to Mexico, you pay 10.5 percent. So the President of the United States, in the tax bill a year and a half ago that passed this Congress--the President of the United States essentially gave a 50-percent-off coupon to American companies on their taxes. So if you move overseas, we will give you 50 percent off. It is part of the President's phony populism. Call yourself a populist, but if you are a populist, you are never racist, you are never anti-Semitic, you don't give tax cuts to rich people and then stick it to the middle class. That is what has happened over and over again--a betrayal.

I am calling on the President--maybe he should try keeping his promises, maybe he should actually fight for autoworkers, maybe he should actually stand up and support workers up and down the auto supply chain for a change. End the tax cut for corporations that-- again, they shut down an American plant; they move overseas; they get a 50-percent-off coupon on their taxes.

If you love your country, you fight for the people who make it work.

Mr. President, I rise today to honor the career of Diana Milete. Diana has spent her life in public service and has made a difference in the lives of tens of thousands of Ohioans.

Diana came to my congressional office when I was very first elected to the House and has been with us ever since, through all my time in the House and my entire 12 years in the Senate. When she retires at the end of this month, she will have spent more than three decades in Federal service.

Helping Ohioans is one of the most important things our office does, and as the head of our constituent services program, her work has touched the lives of more than 59,000 Ohioans. These were seniors trying to navigate Federal Agencies to get the Medicare and Social Security benefits they earned over a lifetime of work. They were veterans and their families trying to secure medals and VA benefits. They were Ohio workers trying to claim the tax credits they earned.

Diana went above and beyond the call of duty for so many Ohioans.

I remember 2\1/2\ years ago, right before the Fourth of July, our office received a request for assistance from a

man in Cleveland named Danny Salazar, who was trying to arrange visas for his family to visit him from the Dominican Republic. You may recognize the name Danny Salazar--he was the Cleveland Indians' star pitcher, and the reason he wanted his family to come visit was because he had been selected to play in the MLB All-Star Game in San Diego. Diana got right on the case, and, working with other members of our team, she was able to make sure Danny's family got visa appointments in time for the game. Danny's mother got to come watch the game with her son, and he sent our office a picture of him and his family at Petco Park--a picture that hung on Diana's wall.

Of course Diana's efforts weren't restricted to Major League Baseball players. Our office helps any Ohioan who needs it, and we have received piles of letters over the years from Ohioans writing to thank Diana for all her hard work for them.

After Diana helped her with her Social Security claim, a woman from Elyria wrote: ``Diana, you are an angel in disguise. You literally saved my life and ended my despair.'' Another woman from Avon wrote to Diana, ``Many thanks for doing the near impossible!''

Diana didn't stop with helping individual Ohioans. Over the years she worked on several cases related to ALS patients, who faced a mandatory waiting period of two years before they could receive disability benefits. Tragically, ALS is a fast-progressing disease, and many patients pass away before the 2-year waiting period is over. Diana brought the issue to our office's attention, and our legislative staff went to work. I joined my colleagues in the House and Senate to introduce legislation to fix this, and we eventually got it done. We reduced the 2-year waiting period to 5 months. This year, as Diana's time with our office comes to a close, I have joined a bipartisan group of colleagues to introduce legislation to eliminate the waiting period for ALS patients all together. That is how our office works best--we talk to Ohioans, dedicated workers in Ohio like Diana listen to their stories and bring their issues to the attention of our office, and our legislative staff works on a solution.

We are all going to miss Diana when she retires at the end of this month, but she has earned a long and happy retirement spent with her family in Lorain. Diana's impact on this office will be felt long after she is gone. She has built one of the best casework operations in the country, and I know her team is going to carry on Diana's legacy, serving Ohioans with compassion and dedication for years to come.

Diana, thank you for your service to the people of Ohio.

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

Mr. President, today on the other side of this building, the CEOs of the biggest Wall Street banks face tough questions about the way their banks have scammed and broken laws and gotten away with it, as every American knows. Our Banking Committee staff analyzed the data, and it is pretty clear that these banks are breaking the laws over and over and over.

Watchdogs will take enforcement actions against a bank only to find out the same bank is breaking the rules in an entirely different way in a different part of the bank at the same time. We need to hold these banks and the corporate executives who run them accountable for their actions, which we have simply not done. Trump regulators haven't done it, and the Senate majority hasn't done it. We simply haven't done it. Hard-working Americans face real consequences when they break the law, and so should Wall Street banks.

The chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters, is doing the right thing in the House calling in these CEOs. We need to be doing the same thing in the Senate. I have called on my counterpart on the Banking Committee, Chairman Crapo, to hold a hearing so we can question big bank executives about their law-breaking.

There are plenty of actions the President and his administration could take on their own to punish these banks when they break the rules, but instead this administration and this majority leader do exactly the opposite. Last year, Congress passed and President Trump signed legislation rolling back laws protecting working families from Wall Street greed. The big banks, of course, ask for weaker rules. They have forgotten what happened. Well, they haven't forgotten, but they hope the public has. Certainly, the Senate Republicans have forgotten what happened 10 years ago to this country. So Congress passed and the President signed legislation rolling back laws protecting working families from Wall Street greed. As I said, the big banks wanted weaker rules and they got them, even though that puts millions of families at risk of losing their jobs and losing their homes again. President Trump said: OK, let's do what the big banks want.

We know that the White House looks like a retreat half the time for Wall Street executives, and we know the President of the United States does the bidding of Wall Street over and over.

The year before weakening these rules, Congress passed and President Trump signed a $1.5 trillion--that is 1,000 billion, $1.5 trillion--tax cut for corporations, big banks, and the richest Americans. Since the Republican tax bill passed, corporations have bought back $900 billion of their own stock.

I was in the White House one day with a group of Senators, meeting with the President of the United States, and he said that this tax bill they were about to pass--that he hoped would pass--would mean that the corporations would invest all these dollars into higher wages for workers and new factories and growing the economy. Well, what happened with a lot of this money was they used this money for stock buybacks.

Of the eight companies with the most stock buybacks--with billion dollars of stock buybacks--half of them were Wall Street banks. We know Wall Street can never get enough--never enough power, never enough money. They always want more. One bank lobbyist said: We don't want a seat at the table; we want the whole table.

And this Congress and this President think that is just fine.

The tax giveaways, letting banks haggle over their stress test results, and taking away customers' rights to have their day in court when the banks scam them, apparently, just wasn't enough for Wall Street. Two days ago, the Fed announced that they are going to roll back more rules on foreign megabanks. These are not just U.S. banks with U.S. employees. These are foreign megabanks. We are talking about banks that have broken U.S. law over and over and over. I am not going to document all of those. But there are many, many cases of these foreign megabanks breaking U.S. law--banks like Santander, which illegally repossess servicemen's cars. So when men and women are overseas protecting our country, Santander, a Spanish-owned bank doing business in the United States, actually repossessed these servicemembers' cars.

Deutsche Bank has laundered money. We know Deutsche Bank is about the only big bank in the world that will finance the President because he has a history and a habit of cheating banks and not paying back loans. So because of the relationship that Deutsche Bank and President Trump have, Deutsche Bank is doing just fine. We also know that Deutsche Bank laundered money, breaking U.S. law. Not even counting the President's insidious activities with them, Deutsche Bank broke U.S. law by laundering money. But do you know what? The Fed gives them rollback rules because we don't want to be too tough on the foreign megabanks.

Last year, when the President signed his big bank bill, I warned that it would mean looser rules on those big, foreign banks. They all said: No, that is not going to happen. Federal Reserve Chairman J. Powell himself said it wouldn't happen; they are not going to weaken the rules on the foreign banks. Well, either they were naive at the time--I think J. Powell is an honest man. I guess I didn't know he was this naive. But he and others would say: They are not going to weaken foreign bank rules.

Well, now they have.

When the Fed made the announcement of its plan to go easy on foreign banks, they said--I am not kidding; this is a quote: ``This proposal should look familiar because it shares the same basic framework as the domestic proposal.'' It is as if that is a good thing, as if they are bragging that we are treating the foreign banks the same way as domestic banks, but these foreign banks happen to break the law over and over--Deutsche Bank, Santander, and other banks.

That is not even the only good news for megabanks this week. We got word that the Fed and President Trump's appointees are going to let the biggest Wall Street banks off the hook on another rule, but one that requires something called living wills. Now, living wills doesn't sound like much. It doesn't mean much to Members of this Senate and to the general public, unless they are in the Banking Committee and they spend a lot of time on this.

Living wills are blueprints from banks that are supposed to prove they will not wreck the economy and cost taxpayers billions of dollars if they go bankrupt. Now, pretty much the way it works is like this. The Federal Reserve goes to these banks and they require these banks to show what would happen if there were a significant downturn in the economy like there was a decade-plus ago.

When the economy went south in 2007, 2008, and 2009, for these banks--because they weren't strong enough, because they hadn't had these stress tests, and because they hadn't gone through these rules because it wasn't Federal law at the time--it wasn't clear that these banks would be able to withstand that kind of plummeting of the economy when demand shrinks and all the things that happen in a recession. They weren't. So that is why government bailed them out. That is why the lobbyists lined up in Leader McConnell's office--then, I guess, it was Leader Fritz's office or Leader Lott's office--and got so much of what they wanted from Senate Republicans in those days.

The whole point of these living wills is that banks can show, through a series of complicated tests, that even if the economy goes bad, these banks aren't going to tank, these banks aren't going to go out of business, and these banks aren't going to need a Federal bailout. That is the whole purpose--a big part of the purpose--of Dodd-Frank, the Wall Street reform bill.

Again, these living wills are blueprints from banks that would prove they will not wreck the economy and cost taxpayers billions if they go bankrupt. Under the bill that passed a decade ago to fix this, they had to go through a stress test every year. Well, this bill the President signed said that, well, they will not have to go through it quite every year. The debate was--I said I didn't think we should do it. My Republican colleagues said: Well, it will probably be every other year. Maybe that is not so bad.

I said: Well, probably it is. It ought to be every year.

Now the Federal Reserve has said it is just going to be once for every Presidential 4-year term--once every 4 years. Nobody saw that coming. I guess the banks saw it coming because the banks had a lot of influence with them.

So the Wall Street reform law required them to file these plans every year, and now they require them only every 4 years. It is said that if those plans didn't look credible and if the banks failed their stress tests--in other words, they weren't strong enough to withstand a recession--then, the Federal Reserve and others would have the power to go in and make these problem banks simpler and smaller. In other words, if the banks couldn't withstand a bad economy and if these banks were too fragile and caused too much damage to the economy if they didn't pass the stress tests, these banks, then, could be broken up into smaller units, making them stronger. But now financial watchdogs only have to check into those plans just once a Presidential term, every 4 years. A lot can change and a lot can go wrong in 4 years. Just ask any family or anyone how their income or rent or savings change. They may not be the same month-to-month let alone every 4 years.

The people in this town, especially Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee, have this collective amnesia. They may have forgotten what the financial crisis and the housing crisis meant. The families who lost their homes, lost their jobs, lost their retirement savings and their college funds haven't forgotten. They haven't recovered from the financial crisis. They haven't recovered from decades of bad trade policy and bad tax policy that make it harder and harder for their work to pay off.

I don't think Members of this body--there is a wonderful quote from President Lincoln when he said to his staff: I need to go out and get my public opinion back. I need to go out and listen to what people are saying and look at how they are living and talk about their lives.

It is not something people around here do much of, especially when it is people who might be vulnerable to losing their homes.

I live in Cleveland, OH, Connie and I. We live in ZIP Code 44105. There were more foreclosures in my ZIP Code than in any ZIP Code in the United States of America. You can still see the urban blight and the residue in what is left--the remains of those foreclosures.

Think about what it means to a family personally. The first thing they have to do is get rid of their pet. Their pet costs too much money, no matter how close their son or daughter or they themselves may be to their dog or cat.

Then they have to make all kinds of decisions: We are going to have to

move. We are going to have to go to a new school district--all the kinds of heartache when your life has been turned upside down because you are foreclosed on.

I am not an alarmist or predicting anything in the next few months, but if we keep going down this path, weakening Federal banking law, doing the bidding of Wall Street, if the lobbyists continue to go in and out of the office of Senator McConnell, the Republican leader's office, and the bank lobbyists who go in and out of there and get their way--if that happens and continues to happen, who knows what will happen again in the next 2, 3, 5, 10 years.

The more we roll back these rules on Wall Street, the more we give breaks to foreign megabanks, the greedier the big banks get, the more risk they take on, and the higher the chance that one of their big risks doesn't pay off.

Mr. President, you know who is paying the price when Wall Street bets don't pay off. It is you, it is the workers, families, and taxpayers. It is your money, the American people's money they are gambling with. So instead of making it easier for Wall Street to make big bets and break the law without reaping consequences, why don't we make it easier for families to afford healthcare? Why don't we make it easier for working parents to afford childcare? Why don't we make it easier for workers to save for retirement? Why don't we make it easier for students to pay for college? Why don't we honor the dignity of work and make sure hard work pays off for everyone, whether you swipe a badge or punch a clock or work for tips or work for a salary or whether you are taking care of children or an aging parent? Why don't we make it easier for them with a tax code and trade policy that works? Instead, all our efforts and all of the administration's efforts--as I said, the White House looks like a retreat for Wall Street executives. So much of their efforts are to make it easier for corporations and to make it easier for the big banks.

It is time we listened a little more to the Americans we serve, a little less to the biggest Wall Street banks that have gotten enough handouts already.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, we lost an American hero today--the last in the line of heroes that will I explain in a moment. He was Ohio native Lt. Col. Richard Cole, and he was the last of the fabled Doolittle Raiders.

In the spring of 1942, the Nation was reeling from Pearl Harbor, and 80 Americans embarked on a mission that many thought to be impossible. They knew the dangers. They knew many of them would not come home. The Raiders showed America and the world that the United States and the Allied Forces could win the war. It was considered a turning point in the news coverage and in people's minds.

Like my dad, the Doolittle Raiders came from a generation that spoke proudly of their service to their country. They rarely drew attention or talked much about their own courage. They sought no recognition but, oh, how they earned it.

It was an honor to help award the Congressional Gold Medal to the Doolittle Raiders in Washington 4 years ago--a long time in coming and so deserved. I believe, at that time, there were five Doolittle Raiders left, and after the death of Mr. Cole, there are none today.

I am so glad that Dick Cole was able to live to receive that medal, as were a handful of others. These men are no longer with us, so it is all the more important that we continue to tell their story. My heart goes out to the families and friends of Lieutenant Colonel Cole and to those of all the Raiders. I thank the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders Association for keeping that memory alive.