Floor Statements

Mr. President, well, not exactly. Yesterday I spoke about the big banks that have violated our banking laws time and again, banks like Wells Fargo and Citigroup. I talked about foreign banks like Santander and Deutsche Bank--the President's personal German bank, I might add. Santander, a Spanish bank, has foreclosed on the cars of American service men and women when they are overseas serving our country, and we are rewarding that Spanish bank. We are rewarding a Swiss bank that has broken international law in support of Iran. We are rewarding these foreign banks.

I liked this bill at the beginning. I have been working on these issues with Chairman Crapo, whom I respect--I really do--for some years, and we worked on coming up with a bill that would help community banks and the midsized regional banks, three of which are located in the Presiding Officer's boyhood State and my State of Ohio--Fifth Third, KeyCorp, and Huntington. We wanted to do those things.

You know, in this place, when we work on something to help the small guy, the big guy thinks: Well, don't leave me out. I want to be part of this. I want to get my things too.

So we start helping community banks, we start helping the little guy, and all of a sudden, Wall Street gets its hand out, just like on the tax bill. I guess I believed my colleagues on the tax bill when they said it was a middle-class tax cut bill. Well, it kind of didn't end up that way. By the end, 81 percent of the tax benefits went to the richest 1 percent.

That is what we do. We start here. We go back home, and we talk about helping the middle class and helping the little guy. No matter whether she punches a time clock or works construction, we want to help middle- income people. But you know what--by the time the lobbyists swoop in, by the time they are here, and they start talking to their friends and start doing what they do, then all of a sudden, these bills help the big guy. They help Wall Street. It is no surprise; it has happened here before.

I particularly think we would learn about it when it comes to what happened 10 years ago. There are some pretty smart people in the Senate, but they have some kind of illness that I don't entirely understand called collective amnesia. They forget. They forget what happened 10 years ago.

Where I live, Cleveland, OH, and where the Presiding Officer grew up in greater Cleveland, in my neighborhood, ZIP Code 44105, in early 2007, in the first half of that year, more people lost their homes through foreclosure than any other ZIP Code in the United States of America. The neighborhood that I live in is not a gated community. I live in an area of about 200 relatively new homes. When I drive about 500 yards in any direction, I see the blight that came because of what Wall Street and, frankly, this Congress and the regulators, the Bush regulators--I can mention names; it is all public record--did to our economy. And 10 years later, we have kind of forgotten about all that.

Well, the people who lost their homes haven't forgotten about it. The people who lost their jobs haven't forgotten about it. The people who lost their retirement savings haven't forgotten about it. It is just a bunch of Members of Congress, a bunch of Republican members of the Banking Committee, a bunch of Members on that side of the aisle--almost all of whom, I believe, are supporting this bill--they seem to have forgotten what happened to the economy 10 years ago.

After starting with a relatively simple and benign, let's help the community banks and the credit unions--which I want to do, too, and have a voting record to prove it--and help some of the smaller regionals, such as Huntington and Fifth Third and Key Corp in my State, it just sort of got out of hand.

Well, now they are coming back and saying: Well, we will make a couple of changes. Let's talk about these couple of changes that Houdini would be proud of, sort of some sleight-of-hand kinds of changes. In fact, these changes have made the bill worse, and I will explain.

Last September, we learned that Equifax had allowed hackers to exploit a known security flaw and make off with names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, and all matter of private information of 143 millions Americans. There are probably 50 people in the Gallery. If the national averages hold out, 25 of them were wronged by Equifax. They were fraudulently or incompetently--perhaps through incompetence-- attacked by Equifax. In my State, it was about 5 million people. Around the country, it was about 143 million. In fact, most of the people in the Gallery are adults, so it is more than half the adult population that was wronged by Equifax. Half the country is vulnerable to identity theft.

Americans are furious with Equifax, as they should be, but this amendment that apparently is in the substitute bill for reasons I can't fathom includes provisions designed to help Equifax. It is not just that this body doesn't punish Equifax and that these executives have no contrition--of course nobody went to jail.

The people we send to jail in this country--we almost never send people to jail for financial fraud. They dress well, they are sophisticated, they belong to the right country clubs, and they would never go to jail. Let me back off on that for a moment and talk again about Equifax.

Equifax and other credit reporting agencies apparently have been upset about a proposal to give men and women in the military credit monitoring. Think of that. Equifax executives didn't like that there was a proposal to give the people serving this country credit monitoring.

I understand what Santander did; they repossessed autos of men and women from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton and from other places who were overseas serving. They repossessed their cars, and we rewarded them, so I guess Equifax thought, well, there is a good trend here, a good precedent there. We don't want to give men and women in the military credit monitoring.

So we have an amendment to fix that. A small gesture to the people who serve our country, though, seemed too much for the Republicans and too much for Equifax. In exchange for this token benefit, they demanded that consumers and servicemembers give up their right to take Equifax to court. So Equifax is willing to do a little bit for people, just a little bit, but damn it, you can't sue us then. That was the deal--you can't sue us. We will give you a little bit of credit monitoring, but in return, you can't sue us for anything. I am not a lawyer, but that is called a right to action. So the next time the company's recklessness exposes sensitive financial data, sorry, you can't sue us. Sorry about that; that is the way it goes.

In the end, Equifax--shocking--got exactly what it wanted. Equifax let your data loose and ruined your credit score, but you won't be able to sue them. Sorry about that.

It gets worse. Equifax--a company that can't even safely store consumers' data--and that is their job; that is what they are hired to do, even though we don't individually choose them. The company spent nearly as much on executive salaries as it did on cyber security. So this company's job is to protect private data, but they didn't really invest that much in cyber security

because, for whatever reason, they paid their executives about the same amount of money.

Now Equifax wants in on the credit-scoring business. Along with two other major credit reporting agencies, it has created a product to compete with Fair Isaac's FICO score.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has a process in place to try to broaden the factors it looks at in determining creditworthiness, but, as Director Mel Watt testified in the Banking Committee, it is complicated and it is time-consuming. Understandably, FHFA wants to get it right, and so do the lenders that sell loans to Fannie and Freddie. But instead of allowing FHFA to take the time it needs to get it right, this bill ignores that, and it sets up its own process. We have not taken any testimony on this legislation from market participants or from the government agency. I have my hunch, though, as to who is pushing for it. Guess who is one of the biggest beneficiaries of this change. The pages would know the answer to that, if they are listening. Equifax, of course.

I know my colleagues were well-intentioned. It would be great if we had additional ways of determining whether someone is creditworthy and if we could give more Americans the opportunity to become homeowners. But determining creditworthiness and balancing access to credit with the need to make sure we don't end up with millions of foreclosures is complicated. That is why we have FHFA, and that is why we have a process in place.

We know there are problems with the current system, and more data would improve our efforts to combat discrimination in housing. The Center for Investigative Reporting just completed a valuable study of tens of millions of mortgage records and found out that across the country, people of color are far more likely to be turned down for a loan, even when you take into account factors like income and the size of the loan. I will repeat that. Holding all things equal except for race, people of color are far more likely to be turned down for a loan. We know that.

The trade associations for lenders argued that the study was flawed because more data--data like credit scores and debt-to-income ratios-- was needed to prove discrimination. The good news is that Dodd-Frank did that. It required this very kind of data to be collected, and beginning in January, banks and credit unions began reporting it.

Problem solved, right? Well, once the more detailed data set is available and large enough, watchdogs can then undertake better analysis, target the bad actors, and allow the good lenders--and most of them are--to continue with their business without a regulator knocking on their door. But who are we kidding? This bill wants to do away with that too. I thought we had solved the problem. The substitute would repeal the reporting required by Dodd-Frank for 85 percent of all banks.

Backers of the substitute will claim it has addressed complaints that this effort will undermine enforcement of civil rights laws, but it hasn't. Backers will point to a provision which says that banks that flunk the Community Reinvestment Act exam and get a rating of substantial noncompliance are ineligible for the reduced reporting of mortgage data. That sounds good, but in all of 2017, out of the thousands of Community Reinvestment Act exams, only two banks out of thousands flunked. When we have reason to believe banks all across the country are discriminating in their lending, even if it is unintentional--and sometimes it is--looking at data from two banks out of thousands isn't going to tell us a whole lot.

The substitute would maintain current laws for banks that are given a ``needs to improve'' rating on their CRA exam over two consecutive exam cycles. Let's say a bank is engaged in discriminatory lending. The examiner gives it a ``needs to improve'' rating. This amendment says: No harm, no foul; the first one is free. Really? A few years later, when the next exam rolls around, if the bank is still discriminating, only then will it have to submit to the amount of data required today. So this amendment says it is OK for a bank to engage in legally sanctioned discrimination for years before it faces any consequences. Why would we do that in this bill?

In sharp contrast to the slow-motion response to discrimination, when it is the bank that wants the data from the Federal Government, the sponsors of this bill can't move fast enough. It is like everything around here--when Wall Street says ``jump,'' most of this Senate jumps, and frankly, straight down the hall in the House of Representatives, they jump faster and higher.

There was a bill introduced just this Monday, referred to the Finance Committee, that would allow credit card companies to tap the Social Security Administration database to verify identities. There hasn't been a hearing on it, and it hasn't gotten attention, but guess what-- it is in the substitute bill. So the banking majority can move very fast when it comes to helping the banks; they can't move so fast when it comes to prohibiting discrimination against people of color. I suppose I understand why, but that is pretty outrageous. The demand on SSA would explode. Will the system be able to handle it? Will the public interfere? Will this public interface be one more way that hackers could gain access to the Social Security database? I don't know because there has been no time for the Finance Committee to look at this bill. Protecting people's Social Security numbers is the last place--the last place--where we should be rushing things to please the big banks.

Whether it is a State as conservative as Tennessee or as liberal as California, I am guessing most Americans don't want Congress to rush something through that might expose their Social Security numbers without really understanding it through congressional hearings and examination.

This would all be bad enough, but it is not just Equifax that gets goodies in this bill. This bill is a gift to foreign megabanks. Yesterday we saw a new provision on foreign banks included in the substitute to clarify the legislation, but it doesn't fix the issue. The substitute includes a figleaf to try to convince the public that this bill doesn't do what it actually does do.

This provision provides some vague and ambiguous language that puts the question to the Fed. In this bill, we say: You can regulate the foreign banks or you don't have to regulate the foreign banks; it is up to the new Federal regulators. It is your choice. The legislation doesn't require the Fed to keep strong rules in place that are already in place. It doesn't stop the foreign banks from suing the Fed if it doesn't obey the request.

We are expected to trust Randal Quarles to be tough on foreign banks--most of you don't know Randal Quarles. I have had conversations with him. He is a smart man. He is well educated. He is a nice guy--but that is not a bet I want to make. That is not a bet Congress should make.

Just this week, Governor Quarles spoke at an international banking conference, and he promised--it was an international banking conference. That would probably not be with Wells Fargo, probably not JPMorgan Chase, probably not Bank of America; it would probably be with Santander, UBS, Swiss Bank, or Barclays--the British bank--or the President's personal bank, the German bank, Deutsche Bank. Those are who attended. He said, if we really want to fix the foreign bank issue--he said he plans to deregulate those foreign banks.

I know the supporters of this bill think they can sort of obfuscate-- I don't think they are lying. I think they are just obfuscating and not really being straightforward about what this bill does for foreign banks, and I know they did this for foreign banks because I asked Treasury Secretary Mnuchin--Senator Corker was in the room with the Banking Committee--and he said: Yes, we plan to deregulate the foreign banks.

We know that. We know that from other former regulators: Paul Volcker, former head of the Federal Reserve appointed by both President Carter and President Reagan; we know that from people like Sarah Bloom Raskin, who was a member of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve; we know that from professors and other regulators. I know Sheila Bair, a Republican nominee appointed by President Bush to run the FDIC, is concerned about this bill. We know that.

So if we want to fix the foreign bank issue, let's just adopt my amendment. Let's fix it. It is simple: No favors for

the biggest global banks here in the United States. Don't give the regulators the option because we know whom the regulators for the banks are. We know most of the regulators for the banks used to work on Wall Street. You go to the White House, and the White House looks like a retreat for Wall Street executives.

We want to write strong laws, clear laws. We don't need to place blind trust in the people who have failed us before--Quarles, Mick Mulvaney, Otting, and Mnuchin. We are expecting these people who have been strong in their public announcements to be right in their public actions? We are entrusting these people who have profited--I could name the names. We are entrusting these people who now have public service jobs and who have profited from Wall Street malfeasance to protect our economy and our country from Wall Street malfeasance.

I take the side of Paul Volcker, Sheila Bair, Tom Hoenig, Barney Frank, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Phil Angelides, Antonio Weiss, and Michael Barr. They are all people who have counseled us--all good public officials, all former regulators. Not quite half, but a number of them are Republicans, and some are Democrats. They are all people who counseled us to vote no on this bill and whose concerns have not been addressed by this substitute.

In addition, the substitute raises $675 million to pay for the privilege of deregulating the banks, but all it could manage on lead poisoning in housing was a report from HUD.

Where are our priorities? The Congressional Budget Office said this bill makes it more likely they will need a bailout, more likely to lead to a bailout for the big banks. So $675 million of taxpayer money is squandered instead of doing infrastructure, instead of dealing with lead. That is part of the issue we dealt with in our committee. That is why I supported Secretary Carson for his confirmation, because I thought he was going to do something about lead. Shame on me for believing that, when I have seen nothing so far.

Instead of those $675 million going to Wall Street, wouldn't it be great if we could direct those hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent children from developing developmental disabilities brought on by lead?

Remember, I talked about my ZIP Code, 44105. Look at those houses. Drive through Cleveland. Drive through Memphis. Drive through Omaha. Drive through all kinds of cities in this country. You will see houses that were built in 1950 or before, and 80 or 90 percent of them have toxic levels of lead. We have sentenced millions of American children to live in those homes.

This is called the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. We have done nothing in this committee for the last 5 years--not a damn thing--about getting that lead out of those homes and stopping the poisoning of children. We could be doing that but instead we are giving more to Wall Street.

This substitute doesn't make this bill better. By papering over its fundamental problems, by treating servicemembers as second-class citizens--think of Santander, think of the amendment Senator Reed from Rhode Island is working on--we are opening up the Social Security system to possible threats. It represents a step backward.

I urge my colleagues to reject the substitute and the underlying bill.

I yield the floor.

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

Thank you, Mr. President.

The legislation we are considering today has been portrayed as modest, not that big of a deal, that it doesn't matter that much, that it is something narrow to help community banks and credit unions and regional lenders like the three institutions in my State--Huntington, Key, and Fifth Third--all pretty much things I support. Unfortunately, that is really not the only thing this bill does.

I tried for months to work with Chairman Crapo, whom I respect and admire--and I mean that. People say those things on the floor, but I actually mean that. I tried for months to work with Chairman Crapo on a commonsense package of reforms aimed at community banks and credit unions and small and midsized financial institutions. We had a lot of agreement on that. Then the creep began. Then the expansion began. Then leaking into this process were all kinds of help for all kinds of bigger banks.

These are the local lenders that we want to help to fuel home ownership and small business in our community. I get that. These are the community banks in Lakeview, Cleveland, Milford, Parma, and West Chester, the banks that we lost when the big banks crashed the economy a decade ago.

I know people in this institution--especially those who get lots of money from Wall Street--like to blame Dodd-Frank for so many community banks going out of business, but it was really what led up to the crash, including the crash, that caused so many community banks to go out of business.

Here is how this place works. I think most Senators understand this. If they don't understand it, they don't want to understand it. When the big banks and when Wall Street and the lobbyists--and there are hundreds of them for big banks in this town--when the big banks spot some legislation crawling through this body, when they see a bill in front of the Senate or the House that might help some small institutions, do you know what they do? They see an opportunity. They see an opportunity to grab more for themselves. It is the history of this country. We know what happens whenever Congress listens to Wall Street and listens to the big banks and Wall Street and the big banks get their way. Inevitably, the economy stumbles or, worse, crashes because we have given too much to the big banks. They put too much risk on the system, and in places like my ZIP Code in Cleveland, OH--ZIP Code 44105--my ZIP Code in 2007 had more foreclosures than any ZIP Code in the

United States of America. That is not because people in my ZIP Code have anything about them that they deserved this; that is just what happens in an economy when the big banks get too powerful, when Wall Street runs Congress, and we see what happens.

Now we see Wall Street moving in, trying to grab more for themselves despite the fact that some of these big banks wouldn't exist today without taxpayer bailouts of a decade ago. We remember what happened. This body bailed out the biggest Wall Street banks, which didn't deserve it, to be sure. But we didn't bail out the big banks--at least most of us didn't--to help the big banks, we bailed out the big banks to help Main Street, to help the economy.

So these Wall Street lobbyists have swarmed into this institution to grab more for themselves despite the fact that they wouldn't exist today without taxpayer bailouts, despite the fact that Wall Street banks are now making record profits, and despite the fact that the tax cut this body just jammed through Congress--81 percent of the recent tax cuts from the end of last year, 81 percent of that bill over time will go to the richest 1 percent of the people in this country.

You have taxpayers bailing out the big banks, then you have this huge tax cut go to the big banks, and now they want more. They want this legislation that will weaken rules and make the big banks even more profitable. They always want more. Understand, it is American history. It is what we have seen in the last 10 years. It is what we have seen since the Great Depression seven decades ago. The big banks always want more, and it is always at the expense of everyone else. This legislation gives them exactly what they want.

Listen to this. Not long ago, a bank lobbyist--one of the top bank lobbyists working for the American Bankers Association--said: We don't want a seat at the table, we want the whole table. They are about to get it under this bill--the whole table.

This bill weakens stress tests for the 38 biggest banks in the country, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Citigroup. You know these banks. These banks in the aggregate are almost half of the assets of banks in our country--banks that together took $239 billion in taxpayer bailouts. Now, $239 billion--that is 239 thousand million dollars. That is a whole lot of money.

Stress tests are the best tool we have to make sure another bailout never happens again. This bill weakens these tests. It changes the requirement from present law--semi-annual stress tests. So instead of having these tests twice a year, they are now going to be periodic. What does periodic mean? Well, we don't know. The bill doesn't define it. Former Fed Governor Dan Tarullo, the architect of many of these post-crisis reforms, has called this provision ``quite vague, with little indication of what kind of test is contemplated for these banks.''

We also know something else. When Congress writes vague laws using words like ``periodic''--vague, versus specific--``semi-annual''--when Congress writes vague laws, bank lawyers, who are really good, very smart, and very well paid, can drive a truck right through those loopholes. We know that.

Do we really want to give the current crowd in charge more leeway--a White House that looks like a retreat for Wall Street executives? We are talking about an administration stocked with former bank executives. Are these really the people we want to give the opportunity--are these the people we want to trust to interpret vague words like ``periodic''?

This legislation weakens oversight of foreign banks operating in the United States, many of which have a track record of breaking U.S. laws. Think about that. We are not only deregulating a number of these large banks in this country, we have singled out that we are going to give a break to foreign banks.

Let me talk about the rap sheet of some of these foreign banks. Santander, a Spanish bank, illegally repossessed cars from members of the military who were serving our country overseas. Think about that. We have somebody from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base who is serving overseas. Santander repossessed her car or his car when he or she was serving overseas. Yet we are going to give a break to that Spanish bank?

Deutsche Bank, the President's favorite--President Trump, the businessman Trump's favorite bank--Deutsche Bank manipulated the benchmark interest rates used to set borrowers' mortgages. So we are going to give Deutsche Bank a break? We are going to deregulate part of Deutsche Bank?

Barclays, a British bank, manipulated electric energy prices in Western U.S. markets. My constituents don't live in those areas that were hurt by that, but a whole lot of people do in this country.

Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, illegally did business with Iran. I know what the Presiding Officer, the Senator from Arkansas, thinks about Iran. Yet we are going to vote--he is going to vote--all of us are going to vote for a bill that rewards a Swiss bank that illegally did business with Iran? Is that the message we want to send? I guess it is.

UBS, another Swiss bank, sold toxic mortgage-backed securities. It goes on and on and on. We are rewarding these foreign banks that have defrauded our constituents and our government and clearly don't have much regard for U.S. law, and we are going to give them breaks.

Again, we have heard from Governor Tarullo, we have heard from former Fed Chair Volcker, we have heard from former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Sarah Bloom Raskin on this. They don't want to loosen foreign bank oversight, and they are joined by Republican former regulators, like Sheila Bair, Tom Hoenig, and others, who think this bill doesn't make sense.

The bill also requires the Fed to further weaken the rules just for the dozen or so banks with $250 billion in assets. It subverts the Fed's independence; it subjects the Fed to pressure from FSOC and the Treasury Secretary--the same Treasury Secretary who foreclosed on 40,000 Americans at OneWest. We are giving more power to help the banks to a Treasury Secretary who, before he became Treasury Secretary, played a major role in foreclosing 40,000 homes, including hundreds of homes in my State of Ohio. It opens the door for more lawsuits when banks try to avoid the rules they don't like.

The former Commodities Futures Trading Commission Chair, Gary Gensler, wrote to the Senate last week that this change ``may subject the government to additional lobbying and possible litigation from individual banks seeking specially tailored rules.''

Back about 10 years ago, when President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank law, that same day, the top financial service lobbyists in this town-- the day Obama signed the bill, the day the President signed Dodd-Frank, the head of the top financial services lobbyists in this town said: Well, folks, now it is halftime.

What did he mean? He meant, OK, we lost the first half, but we are going to go to work to do everything we can to block and misinterpret and reinterpret and eventually scale back and repeal as much of this law as we can. They went to work on the agencies. This is the culmination of their efforts. They now have a pro-Wall Street majority in the Senate, a pro-Wall Street majority in the House, a President whose office looks as if it is a retreat for Wall Street executives, and they are ready to go to help Wall Street, even though--I don't know when; maybe the Senator from Massachusetts knows--1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years from now, it makes a bailout more likely.

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office recently said that this bill will make a bailout more likely and that it is a $672 million giveaway to Wall Street.

This bill makes another change to big bank rules that now stops them from borrowing more money than they can afford. The New York Times described this provision as weakening rules ``aimed at keeping banks from being able to take big risks without properly preparing for a disaster.'' Just let that sink in, because Ohio families know how bad a disaster can be; ``aimed at keeping banks from being able to take big risks without properly preparing for a disaster,'' isn't that what we want?

Don't we want bank regulators, don't we want bank rules to stop the big banks from taking risks that could end up in a disaster? As I said, my neighborhood knows what disaster is. As I said, in 2007, there were more foreclosures in my ZIP Code in the first half of that year than in any other ZIP Code in America.

Families in my State were hurt by this. People lost retirement accounts, people lost their homes, people lost their jobs, plants closed--all of that.

Wall Street lobbyists came out of that last disaster just fine. I am thinking that probably none of them had their houses foreclosed on. I know that nobody who tanked the economy went to jail. So folks in New York and Washington, most of them are doing fine. They might not appreciate what disaster means when we talk about the economy, but Ohio families who lost their homes and their life savings know what that means.

Do you know what else? For 14 years in a row, there were more foreclosures in my State each year than there were the previous year. OK, that is a statistic, and maybe you don't know any of those people. Well, the fact is that every time that happened, people lost their possessions. Their lives were turned upside down. Their kids may have had to go to a different school. They probably lost their family pet because they couldn't afford it. It was one thing after another for those families. We don't think much about them.

Here is how to think about this rollback. Bank capital requirements are like a dam that keeps the risks inside the bank. It keeps the risks from flooding out into the rest of the economy. So if the banks are going to take risks, you want to keep them contained in the bank so that only the bank gets hurt, but this bill punches a hole in that dam by loosening the rules on five of the biggest banks. Once the dam starts to leak, it is more likely that bad decisions by those banks could spill out and harm taxpayers and retirees and bank customers.

These banks have $5 trillion in combined assets. Should we feel safer with a weaker dam around a potential $5 trillion flood of banking assets? If that weren't bad enough, we have a team of lapdogs at our financial agencies who think this bill is just a starting point. Think about who they are. I don't come to this floor and attack individual people, but I do come to this floor and point out the history of some of these regulators.

Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin was a bank executive who ran a bank that foreclosed on thousands of customers, many of them unfairly or possibly illegally. One of his top people, Mr. Otting, is the new Comptroller of the Currency. Mulvaney is the new Director of the Consumer Bureau, and he thinks the Consumer Bureau shouldn't even exist. Those are the kinds of regulators we see. Randal Quarles is the head of supervision at the Federal Reserve, and he said as late as 2006 or 2007 in the Bush Treasury Department that things were fine in our country. These are the people we have entrusted to do the regulations, to hold back this dam that they have weakened legislatively. They are the ones who are charged with holding it back.

If we want to help community banks, let's help community banks. Let's not try to sell it the same way this majority sold the tax cut bill. They said that it was a tax cut for the middle class, but 81 percent of the benefits over time went to the wealthiest 1 percent, so it wasn't a tax cut for the middle class any more than this was a bill for community bankers.

The community bankers will get some help. I want to do that. I know Senator Warren wants to, and I know all of us on the floor want to do that, but that is not what this bill really does. If we want to help community banks, let's help community banks. If we want to help credit unions, let's help credit unions. If we want to help regionals like Fifth Third and Huntington and KeyBank in my State, let's help the regionals like that.

Why do the biggest banks have to say: Give me more; give me more; give me more.

Let's take Wells Fargo. What has Wells Fargo done to deserve an ounce of leniency? This is a bank that created more than 3.5 million fake accounts, including hundreds in my State. It is a bank that illegally forced unwanted auto insurance on its customers and charged homeowners improper fees to lock in their mortgage rates. So why would we want to help them with this bill? Just last week, the bank disclosed yet more problems with its money management unit. So why do we want to help Wells Fargo with this bill? It is a bank that outsources jobs. Six hundred call center jobs have been sent overseas by Wells Fargo just in the last year. So why do we want to help that bank in this bill? For those lucky enough to keep their jobs, it is a bank that mistreats its workers, punishing them with a high-pressure sales culture, and some of them lost their jobs as a result. Yet this bank, like the other big banks--they want more, more, more. I don't know why, but this Congress wants to give it to them, apparently.

What has the Senate done to respond to Wells Fargo's misbehavior? Well, first of all, Republicans a couple of months ago passed a $1.5 trillion--that is 1,000 billion--tax cut, and one of the biggest beneficiaries was Wells Fargo. What did they do with that money? They say that they gave a little bit to employees. They say that maybe they will invest a little more. What they really did--they announced that they are going to buy back $22 billion of stock this year. When they buy back stock, the price of the stock goes up, and executives and shareholders are enriched. So the stock buyback investment--the $22 billion they are spending to buy back stock--is 288 times what Wells Fargo will spend on pay raises for its workers. So it gives a little bit to its workers. Whatever it gave to its workers, multiplied by almost 300--that is what the executives and the shareholders are going to get. So why are we doing favors for Wells Fargo in this bill?

I don't mean to pick only on them. It is not just Wells Fargo.

What has HSBC done to deserve special treatment? Since the crisis, the Department of Justice prosecuted the bank for laundering money on behalf of the Sinaloa drug cartel. In the midst of an addiction crisis, we are going to reward a bank that illegally laundered money for a drug cartel?

Why are we doing any favors for Citigroup? Last month, Citigroup announced it had systematically overcharged almost 2 million of its customers on their credit cards.

Why are we giving a single ounce of help to these big banks? They are repeat offenders. Not only are they repeat offenders--and as we help these big banks in this bill, we say we want to help the community banks--these repeat offender big banks are banks that compete with our local lenders and probably will put more and more of them out of business as these bigger banks get more and more powerful.

The four biggest banks held 6 percent of industry assets in 1984. In 1984, 33 years ago, 34 years ago, the four largest banks in the country held 6 percent of industry assets. Today, the four largest banks hold 51 percent of industry assets. So what we are doing is giving them more--what we are doing is giving them more. Think about that. Thirty- plus years ago, the biggest banks held $1 of every $16 of banking assets. Now they hold $1 out of every $2. Think about how many community banks these big banks have been able to gobble up. This bill will lead to more consolidation, more concentration, fewer customer choices, less investor choice.

One article from American Banker talking about this bill said it could ``kick-start bank mergers and acquisitions.'' What that means in plain English is that big banks will get bigger. So we are helping the big banks get bigger, and we are falling over ourselves this week to help these banks because they just don't have enough. But we are doing nothing for consumers this week. We are doing nothing for workers, nothing for those tipped employees that the Department of Labor is cheating out of their tips and basically legalizing wage theft. We are doing nothing for middle-class workers. We are doing nothing for those supervisors making $30,000, $40,000 a year, who are having their overtime taken from them. We are doing nothing for them.

If we are trying to help our community banks and credit unions, why give favors to their big competitors--to the big banks?

This isn't the weather. We can do something about the challenges Ohio faces. We can stop these crises that tear apart families and entire communities. We can do that by stopping this bill, to begin with.

Don't take my word for it. The Congressional Budget Office says that the risk of another financial crisis is very low right now because of the rules we passed in Dodd-Frank. Just dwell on that for a moment. They said that the risk of another financial crisis right now is very low because of the rules we passed in Dodd-Frank, but they went on and said that this bill increases the risk of another bank failure and another bank bailout.

All of my particularly conservative friends in this body always talk about how they hate bailouts. They are always against bailouts. They are against bailouts for middle-class families. Their voting record doesn't really show that they are against bailouts for the rich, but that is a whole other subject.

This bill that we are about to vote on this week, this bill that the banking industry is salivating over, this bill that they just can't wait to pass and get to the President's desk--and we know all the advisers sitting around the President, all the people in the Oval Office, all the people in the Cabinet room are all whispering in the President's ear: Mr. President, you are going to sign this bill, and this is going to be great.

The President said in his campaign: We have to go after Dodd-Frank. All the big bankers in the country know this is going to be a great thing.

We are spending all this time doing this to help the big banks but, again, nothing for workers, nothing for middle-class employees, nothing for consumers, nothing for infrastructure--all the things we ought to be doing.

I am just not willing to ask taxpayers to take that gamble of increasing the chances of another bank bailout. We don't have to. We could amend this bill just to help the small community banks and credit unions that we all agree should be helped. We could amend this bill in a modest way to help the regional banks that have generally been good actors in this equation. I am offering amendments this week that would do just that.

We don't have to give the big banks more just because they come here, just because they have the best lobbyists, just because they ask for it. We don't have to be at their beck and call. Let's do this right this week.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I would like to have been here today to offer strong bipartisan support for a bill that would help with rules and regulations for the smallest banks and credit unions in the country. There is a real effort on the part of a lot of us to come to an agreement particularly aimed at those banks, the community banks and the regional banks. I have three. Senator Portman's and my State is the only State in the country that has three regional banks, the banks that have $50 billion, $100 billion, $150 billion--Huntington, KeyCorp, and Fifth Third.

Unfortunately, this bill started off that way, but it has become something else, and the something else is that this bill seems to me and many others to be more concerned with the largest banks and Wall Street than it does with community banks.

There are lots of things that can come out of this bill. The bill gives regulators way too much flexibility--regulators such as Mulvaney, Otting, Quarles, and others. It vests more power in FSOC--something that the Republicans didn't want to do until they got regulators like Mnuchin, Mulvaney, and people like that who are much more likely to side with Wall Street. The White House is increasingly looking like a retreat for Wall Street executives, and these are the people who are going to be doing the regulation of this bill.

Republicans and Democrats alike who believe in the need for regulation are concerned about this bill or are opposed to this bill, people like Dan Tarullo, who used to be a member of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve in charge of regulation; Paul Volcker, a Federal Reserve Chair who was selected by a Republican and a Democratic President; Sarah Bloom Raskin; Gary Gensler; Tom Hoenig, a Republican; Sheila Bair, President Bush's nominee at the FDIC; Phil Angelides, who did a good analysis of what actually happened 10 years ago when Wall Street almost collapsed our economy.

This body seems to have experienced sort of a collective amnesia. Take a look at what happened to the economy 10 years ago, and today we are giving relief to many of the largest banks in this country, relief that these things on the stress test--a weaker stress test, a less regular stress test, will mean many of the larger banks simply will not be under the intense examination that we have done in the past. What does that mean? What that means is those banks are more likely to jeopardize the safety and soundness of the banking system. Again, we know what happened 10 years ago when we had to bail them out.

There is a Washington Post article that came out today. The headline is ``Senate banking bill likely to boost chances of bank bailouts, CBO says.'' The CBO says that the Senate banking bill is likely to boost chances of bank bailouts. Why would we do that when banks are doing very well? Banks of all sizes are very profitable these days. We just did a tax bill that gives the largest banks--the financial services industry overall but especially the Wall Street banks--huge tax breaks. So we are going to pass a bill that the Congressional Budget Office--a neutral scorer here, the referee--the Congressional Budget Office says that this will cost taxpayers $671 million, and it will increase the chances of a bailout. Why would we pass a bill to give the banks breaks and then give them $671 million of taxpayer dollars? I just don't understand why we as a Senate would want to do such a thing.

Nobody in Ohio, except for some bank executives, are clamoring for this bill. Nobody is saying: Oh, we have to deregulate the banks. We have to help the biggest banks. We have to help these banks that drove us into the ditch 10 years ago. It simply doesn't make sense.

I ask for a ``no'' vote on the motion to proceed.

Cloture Motion

Mr. President, 10 years ago almost to the day, this country was on the verge of a financial crisis that would wreck the lives of millions of families. The experts--let's say the so-called experts--had their heads in the sand. They shrugged off the warnings. They told the public everything was fine.

Jim Cramer was telling hard-working Americans to invest their money in Bear Stearns. Maybe younger Members of the Senate don't really remember what Bear Stearns was. Jim Cramer said: ``I'm not giving up on the thing.''

Bank of America was putting the finishing touches on its plan to buy the subprime lender Countrywide, which they called ``the best domestic mortgage platform.''

Hank Paulson, the last Treasury Secretary who got plucked from Goldman Sachs--we have had at least one since--downplayed homeowners' pain. He said: ``You know, the stock market goes up and down every day more than the entire value of the subprime mortgages in the country.''

Meanwhile, advocates in communities--the people who were actually dealing with the consequences of the crisis--were sounding the alarm. The fair lending group Greenlining began meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan at least once a year, starting in 1999--1999-- to warn about predatory mortgage lending. Attorneys general from across the country started to caution about troubling trends.

In Cleveland, which is in the Presiding Officer's home State, we saw home prices climb 66 percent in 10 years, with the housing market juiced by ``flipping on mega-steroids,'' according to a government panel that investigated the crisis. City officials in Cleveland began to hear reports that predatory home refinances were being pushed on buyers regardless of whether they could afford to repay the loans. Those refinances mean fees to bankers.

Foreclosures began to shoot up in Cuyahoga County--5,900 foreclosure filings in 2000, and by 2007, 15,000. My wife and I live in ZIP Code 44105, which includes Slavic Village in Cleveland, OH. In the first half of 2007, that ZIP Code had more foreclosures than any ZIP Code in the United States of America.

The city of Cleveland went to the Fed and asked it to use its authority to restrain subprime lending. The Fed did nothing. The people in charge in Washington were too certain, too detached, and perhaps too comfortable to listen to the warnings from Ohioans and from people across the country.

We saw what happened. All of these people who had the hubris to say that the economy could keep growing and keep growing and keep growing while the middle class was being looted--those people, thank you very much, weathered the crisis just fine. No one with a cable show had their home foreclosed on. Nobody on Wall Street who tanked the economy went to jail. In fact, many of these same people now have fancy jobs in fancy buildings and dress in fancy clothes and have fancy titles and work on Wall Street and in the White House. But in ZIP Codes like 44105, in Slavic Village and Cleveland, OH, and places like it across the country, parents were sitting down at kitchen tables to have painful conversations with their children.

Think about what this means. You lose your job, or you can't keep up with your mortgage payment. The husband, the wife, two teenage children. You have a family pet, a dog. You realize you are falling further and further behind. You are still working and you are still trying, but things aren't going well. The first thing you do--your dog has to go to the vet. You can't pay for that. You simply don't have the money. You take the dog to the shelter. You do what a lot of families in Cleveland unfortunately do; you just try to give your dog away or do something.

You then face your children. You say to your children: We are going to lose our home. We are going to have to move. We don't know where we are going to move yet. We don't know which school district. We don't know where your friends will be because we are going to have to move.

I don't think people around here really think much about what foreclosures mean to families. Remember what I said--5,900 foreclosures in Cuyahoga County in 2000 and 15,000 by 2007. Hundreds of those were in ZIP Code 44105. Think what that does to those families. My colleagues, when we vote today and tomorrow and Thursday on whether we are going to pass this giveaway bill to Wall Street, just think about that.

The CEOs and the boards at the banks and people in Washington who are supposed to be watching failed these Americans. That is why Congress, including some Republicans, did something about it 10 years ago, something to stop this from ever happening again. We passed a law. We created important protections for the financial system, for taxpayers, for homeowners. We held banks and watchdogs accountable to prevent another crisis.

Fundamentally, we did it right a decade ago, but Wall Street never gives up that easily. They didn't like that bill. They opposed that bill--most of them. Big bank lobbyists, the same ones who were so sure the 2000s crisis wasn't going to happen, those who flippantly said that things are all right--remember what Hank Paulson said. Hank Paulson, the Bush Secretary of the Treasury, said: You know, the stock market goes up and down every day more than the entire value of subprime mortgages in the country. Well, Hank Paulson didn't pay much of a price.

None of the regulators paid much of a price.

Ten years ago, we did it right. As I said, the big banks never gave up. Big bank lobbyists went to work.

Get this: The day the President signed the Dodd-Frank bill implementing these safety rules and regulations--implementing the consumer protections, making sure that the government was actually on the side of consumers and people paying their mortgage and homeowners-- the same day President Obama put his ``Barack Obama'' signature on the Dodd-Frank law, the top financial services lobbyists in Washington said: Now it is half time. In other words, we may have lost the first half. They passed this bill. We didn't want it, but don't worry about us in the second half.

To these people, the economy is a game. They can't tell the difference between putting millions of Americans' lives and homes and savings at risk and a game of pickup basketball.

Piece by piece, Wall Street has gone to the agencies, they have gone to the courts, they have gone to Congress to dismantle the consumer protections we put in place. The drumbeat is constant. It is ongoing. It has been happening for 10 years. They always want a new exemption, they always want a weaker standard, they always want a new tax break, and do you know what? They can always find a whole lot of Senators and House Members who will write a letter to the Federal Reserve, who will make a call to the Office of Consumer Counsel, who will go at it and will attack in public the Consumer Bureau. They can always find Members in this body who are fueled by lots of Wall Street contributions and a lot of allies in New York. They can always find people to do their bidding. That is why you see this drum. That is how you hear this drumbeat. They want a new exemption, a new weaker standard, a new tax break.

The last year has been a really good time to be a bank lobbyist. After the crisis, we had created the Consumer Protection Bureau to represent the interests of regular Americans who have to fight with their bank or their credit card company. Now, in this administration, the Consumer Bureau, unbelievably so, is run by a guy who believes-- publicly said it--it shouldn't even exist. The Consumer Bureau's new protections are under attack.

One quick story. All Democrats, even some Republicans, agreed we should protect consumers' right to take their bank to court. What is more American than that; if you think your bank cheated you, that you should be able to go to court.

Bank lobbyists, with a lot of allies on this side of the aisle, convinced the Vice President of the United States to come to this very Senate Chamber late at night--late at night here, at 9 or 10, the public is not watching, but you can be damned sure the special interests are alive and well and watching in their offices and making calls and doing all that.

The Vice President of the United States came to this Senate Chamber to break a tie, to cast a tie-breaking vote to vote against hard- working American families. Instead of protecting these families, the Vice President and his allies in the Senate--they voted for Wells Fargo, they voted for Equifax, they voted for Citigroup. The rule is gone. That rule to ensure that consumers have their day in court if their bank cheated them, that rule is gone, piece by piece by piece.

The watchdogs who are supposed to be protecting Main Street all come to their jobs fresh from--surprise--Wall Street and K Street. The President's Cabinet looks like an executive retreat for Wall Street bankers. They have released blueprint after blueprint on how to dismantle all the rules put in place after the crisis, and they are putting their people in place to do it. They just rammed through Congress a bill to give Wall Street an enormous tax break that will cost American families $1.5 trillion, but it gives big bank CEO's a huge raise.

That is 10,000 times more than what we spend at HUD every year to protect kids from toxic levels. Back to ZIP Code 44105, the health department of the city of Cleveland told me almost all those homes built before World War II, 99 percent of them have levels of toxic lead that will make children sick--99 percent of those homes. Yet we can do this big tax cut and not take care of those families.

Not long ago, another bank lobbyist told us their plan: We don't want a seat at the table, he said, we want the whole table--and they are about to get it under the bill the Senate will consider this week. Piece by piece, they tear these protections down. This bill gives them the whole table. It leaves nothing for working families.

If you thought the Secretary of HUD's $31,000 he spent to buy that fancy table for his dining room--31,000 taxpayer dollars--if you thought that was a bad deal for taxpayers, wait until I tell you about the billions and billions of dollars at risk that are packed into this effort.

This bill puts Americans at risk of another bank bailout. The Congressional Budget Office, the independent, nonpartisan scorekeeper, confirmed yesterday that this bill would increase the probability of a big bank failure and a financial crisis. It will add $671 million to the deficit. The Washington Post said: ``Senate banking bill likely to boost chances of bank bailouts.''

It is bad enough we are going to pass--after banks have been so profitable the last decade, after they were bailed out by the public-- thank you very much--they have had a really, pretty darned good decade. Then they got a big tax cut. Now they want this and a little cherry on top. First, they get this bill, which is about to pass--which will be really good for bankers--but then they get $671 million extra from taxpayers. So, again, thank you very much, taxpayers, for taking care of the banks. So we are going to weaken the rules, and we will pay Wall Street for the privilege of doing it.

This bill weakens stress tests for all large banks, even Wall Street megabanks that are designated as global, systemically important banks-- like JPMorgan Chase, $2.5 trillion in assets. Now, 2.5 trillion is 2,500 billion, and a billion is a thousand million. So $2.5 trillion-- that is hard to calculate, but that is a lot of money. So JPMorgan Chase gets a break. They get their $2.5 trillion in assets. Bank of America gets a break. They get $2.3 trillion in assets. Wells Fargo, which can't stay out of trouble--every week there seems to be something new--$1.9 trillion in assets. Citibank, $1.9 trillion in assets. These banks--and the Wall Street Journal, hardly a paper hostile to business or a bank that is really always close to Wall Street. Wall Street Journal headline this morning: ``[Wall Street] Banks Get a Big Win in Senate Rollback Bill.''

So don't let my colleagues--don't let anybody who supports this bill--tell you this is all for the community banks. The community banks get some things in this bill. I would love to support the community banks and make this a bill about community banks, about credit unions, even about the regional banks like the ones in my State that generally do the right thing--Huntington and Fifth Third and KeyBank. But this bill, this is the Wall Street Journal: ``Big Banks Get a Big Win in Senate Rollback Bill.''

This is about those four banks I mentioned: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup. These banks hold 51 percent--more than half--of all industry assets. They are a pretty darned big part of our economy, and we are doing things for them. As they are profitable, as their executives make maybe tens of millions of dollars, as they are doing stock buybacks to make even more millions of dollars, we are doing things for them. We are not dealing with infrastructure, we are not dealing with the opioid crisis, we are doing nothing here about guns, but we have time to do a lot for America's largest banks. With this deregulation, these are banks whose collapse could cause ripples across the world.

Together, the country's biggest banks took $239 billion in taxpayer bailouts. So without the rigorous annual stress test that we put in Dodd-Frank a decade ago and we are relaxing now, taxpayers could, once again, be on the hook if too-big-to-fail banks collapse, and we don't have the right tools in place to see it coming.

This is maybe even more unbelievable than the fact that this body has fallen all over itself to help the biggest banks. This bill also weakens the oversight for foreign megabanks operating in the United States--the same banks that repeatedly violate U.S. laws. Let's

run through the rap sheets of some of these banks.

Deutsche Bank, a big German bank, manipulated the benchmark interest rates used to set mortgages. It is also known as the only large bank in the world that will finance the President's businesses.

Santander, a Spanish bank, illegally repossessed cars from members of the military who were serving our country overseas. So we are going to give a break to a Spanish bank that repossessed the cars of men and women at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and others when they were serving overseas. Santander repossessed their cars, a Spanish bank, and we are going to deregulate and make them more profitable with less accountability.

Barclays, a British bank, manipulated electric energy prices. If you live on the West Coast--I don't; my constituents weren't affected--but a whole lot of people were as they manipulated energy prices.

Credit Suisse and UBS, two Switzerland banks--one of them illegally did business with Iran. We have tried to tighten the sanctions on Iran to get Iran to behave better so they don't continue to harass--or worse--Israel and all the threats they make. We are going to help a bank that did business with Iran, and UBS sold toxic mortgage-backed securities.

It didn't have to be this way. I tried for months to work with the chairman of the committee--and I like Senator Crapo a lot. We work together well. I tried for months to work in a commonsense package of reforms aimed at lifting up community banks and credit unions. That is what we ought to do. That is what we could do. That is what we still could do. These are the local financial institutions that fuel home ownership and small businesses. I know a lot of them. They come to see me when they are in Washington. I see them in their communities. I see them in Sycamore, Columbus, and Mansfield, and all over the State. These are not the people who caused the meltdown 10 years ago. These are the ones who got dragged down when big banks crashed the economy. I support relief to those banks and regional banks that do things right and play by the rules. I want to do more to help average Americans who have to cope with unfair tricks and traps, but that is not what this bill does. That is how it started out. That is what Wall Street wants you to think; this is a bill for the community banks.

Don't forget, they said that about the tax cut bill: It is a tax cut for the middle class. Well, 81 percent of the benefits of the tax cut go to the richest 1 percent. So don't always believe what they say when they talk about this.

This was a false choice. Why should we have to roll back rules for the largest banks in Switzerland to help out community banks or credit unions in Ohio? Of course we shouldn't. It has been a false choice. We could pass a bill today that helps those local banks invest more in their communities while keeping in place strict rules for Wall Street megabanks, but Wall Street and Republicans don't want to do that. They want to use the little guys, the community banks we all want to help. They want to use the little guys to extract something for the big guys. It is the oldest trick in the book around here.

We are going to cut taxes for the middle class. Well, really we are kind of hoping we can give big tax breaks to the richest 1 percent. We are going to help the community banks, but really we are hoping--we know we are going to help Wall Street.

This city, Washington, this government, this Senate, this Senate Banking Committee are all suffering from collective amnesia. They just forgot what happened 10 years ago. Maybe it is convenient they don't want to remember what happened. Thankfully, the IMF, the International Monetary Fund--an agency of international financial experts--has done us a favor, to help jog memories. They have cataloged 300 years of history of bank deregulation efforts all across the globe. Do you know what they found? We deregulate, the economy explodes. We put in protections, the economy gets better. We deregulate again, the economy explodes. We put in protections, the economy gets better. We deregulate again--wash, rinse, repeat.

We can do better. We owe it to the people we serve to do better. The Senate owes it to 176,000 kids in Ohio and other kids across the country whose lives and education were disrupted by the foreclosure crisis. Think how many children lived in homes when their parents were foreclosed on or their parents were evicted, and everything in their lives turned upside down. We don't care about them. We are going to forget about them, this collective amnesia. We are going to forget about them because we want to help the big banks get bigger and bigger and bigger. Is that what we are going to do? We owe it to the millions of people whose retirements were wiped out. Millions of Americans lost big chunks of their retirement, but we bailed out the big banks at the same time. We owe it to the students who graduated in the great recession and may have low earnings for the rest of their lives.

The watchdogs who understand these markets are trying to warn us. Paul Volcker, former Chair of the Federal Reserve, has cautioned us about this bill. He was the Fed Chair for a Democrat and a Republican President. Sheila Bair, who helped us put protections in place after the crisis, is a Republican warning us about this bill. Tom Hoenig, the current Vice Chair at the FDIC, selected to that position by Republicans, has told us this bill is harmful. Barney Frank, as in Dodd-Frank, has said he would vote no if he were here. Former member of the Federal Reserve Dan Tarullo, who used to do the bank regulation with the Federal Reserve, has outlined a long series of concerns. Sarah Bloom Raskin, Antonio Weiss, Gary Gensler, law professors, fair housing advocates, big bank experts, people who provide legal services across this country who deal with foreclosures and civil rights groups are telling us we can't go down that path again.

We know what happens next. It is hubris to think we can gut the rules on these banks again but avoid the next crisis. If you strip the rules away from the big banks and you turn your back as regulators on misfeasance and malfeasance, that collective amnesia--we are going to pay for it, and we know we are.

There are so many important things we should be doing here instead. We should be addressing the fact--and the Presiding Officer and I have been working on this bill--that workers and retirees in Ohio and across the country might have their pensions they have spent a lifetime earning slashed in half if Congress doesn't act. We can be doing that. We could be addressing the fact that 400,000 Ohioans pay more than half their income each month on rent to keep a roof over their head. We could be creating jobs. We could be attacking the opioid epidemic. We could be fighting against high drug prices. We could be investing in our crumbling roads and bridges. Instead, guess what. We are here helping the big banks. Everybody is willing to work full time to help Wall Street.

It is a question of whose side are we on? Are we on the side of megabank lobbyists or are we on the side of American taxpayers and homeowners and students and workers?

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Reilly Steel, a fellow with the Banking Committee, be granted floor privileges during the pendency of S. 2155.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 3 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, earlier today I talked to a server who worked in a restaurant in Northeast Ohio, in Trumbull County, north of Youngstown, and she is concerned, as I am, about a proposal from the U.S. Department of Labor that pretty much legalizes wage theft.

We know, in this country right now, servers, or tipped workers, can be the person who pushes the wheelchair in the airport. I spoke to somebody the other day who drove one of those airport carts in the Cleveland airport. She makes $5 an hour because she is supposed to rely on tips to get up to the minimum wage, but she doesn't always get tips, or a server who works in a restaurant, in a diner in Garfield Heights or in Chillicothe, OH, and makes sometimes only $2.10 an hour and relies on tips. That is enough of a problem--that companies that employ tipped workers can pay such low wages--but that is compounded by this rule that comes out of the White House and the Department of Labor that really is tantamount to wage theft. The rule simply says the tips you put on the table at a Denny's or at a Bob Evans, the management--the employer--can take those tips and distribute them however he or she wants to other workers in the restaurant.

Now, plenty of waitresses and plenty of waiters and servers give out some of their tips, distribute them to the bartender or others, and that is their choice, but for the employer to be able to take the tips from a worker, from a server, and decide whom to give it to in the back office or in the kitchen--someone they are not paying enough to anyway; to make up for that--or for the employer to just take the money and put it in their pockets, under this rule coming out of the Department of Labor--this is the Secretary of Labor and a government that is supposed to represent workers, supposed to advocate for labor. This administration has turned that upside down, where the Secretary of Labor is advocating for employers and basically legalizing wage theft-- taking that money from tipped workers who work so hard.

We know how hard everybody at a diner works. They are not making a lot of money. They rely on those tips. We are going to say--the U.S. Government, the Department of Labor, the President of the United States--is going to say: Oh, it is all right to take some of these tip dollars and put them in my pocket as the employer. Give it to the workers in the kitchen whom the company underpays because they are going to supplement their underpaid wages with tips. It is mean- spirited, it is legitimatizing wage theft, and we have no business doing it. There are 24 of us who have sent a letter to Secretary of Labor Acosta condemning his decision.

First of all, they did a study and found that this would take literally billions of dollars from the pockets of workers. They buried that study. We are saying, at least let that study out. Let people comment. Almost $6 billion in tips every single year will be lost because of this decision. It is a really bad idea. It is mean-spirited, and it frankly legalizes wage theft. It should be defeated.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this month, Ohio laid to rest two remarkable public servants, Westerville Police

Officers Eric Joering and Anthony Morelli. Together, these men dedicated decades of their lives to the police force, giving the ultimate sacrifice to keep their fellow Ohioans safe.

Officer Joering and Officer Morelli were doing their jobs, responding to a desperate 9-1-1 call when they were tragically shot and killed earlier this month. In the days since their passing, we have heard stories of their incredible service to their community, their fellow officers, and their families.

Both men were married with children. Officer Joering was 39 and had three young daughters. His pastor, Reverend Hammond, spoke to the local news about Officer Joering's dedication to his family. He said that Officer Joering would do anything for his daughters. He let them style his hair. He let them paint his nails. Reverend Hammond quipped: ``I heard he drew the line at makeup.''

Officer Morelli was a 30-year veteran of the Westerville police force. Westerville is a Columbus suburb. He had two children. His daughter is getting married this summer. His colleagues remembered his infectious smile and his passion for life. Westerville Police Chaplain James Meacham said Officer Morelli ``went to heaven and partied.''

These two heroes were laid to rest 10 days ago with services at St. Paul Catholic Church in Westerville, drawing thousands of Ohioans and fellow officers to pay their respects. Thousands of people waited in line in the cold and rain to enter the church. Officers from around the country came to honor these men, as they so often do. The church parking lot filled with patrol cars from Illinois, Texas, West Virginia, Michigan, and so many other States. They had to use a TV at a gym next door as an overflow room to accommodate everyone. After the services, a long procession of police vehicles wound its way through Westerville. Ohioans lined the streets, waving American flags and wearing blue ribbons pinned to their raincoats.

The tribute to these officers won't end with that memorial service. In times of tragedy, Ohioans always rise to the occasion. A donation page for the families set up by the local Fraternal Order of Police has raised more than half a million dollars. The city of Westerville will honor Officers Morelli and Joering with a permanent memorial in First Responders Park. The Westerville City Council voted unanimously to retire Officer Joering's K-9 partner, Officer Sam, and send him home with Officer Joering's family. They were there last week to take Sam home. One of Joering's daughters wore Sam's badge around her neck. Otterbein University, the local 4-year, private, distinguished university very nearby, will offer full-tuition scholarships to each of the three Joering girls.

While none of these gestures can ever repay them or their loved ones for their service and sacrifice, today we honor these heroes' memories and lift up the entire Westerville community and all those who knew them.

The best way for the public to honor these public servants is by supporting all Ohio officers and working to give law enforcement the resources they need to do their jobs. From the bipartisan legislation we passed last year to speed up claims processing for the families of fallen officers, to getting local police officers the resources they need to protect themselves as they fight the opioid epidemic, we must do all we can to support these women and men who sacrifice so much.

Let's honor the memory of Officer Joering and Officer Morelli by recommitting ourselves to protecting and supporting their fellow officers and the families who sacrifice alongside them.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 10 minutes.

Madam President, I rise to honor a member of my staff, Jonathan Miller, who has dedicated his life to serving his country and his State.

Not only does Jonathan serve the people of Ohio each day on our staff, helping Ohio servicemembers and veterans, but he also wears the uniform himself, first as a member of the National Guard and now as a member of the Army Reserve. Earlier this month was his last day in the office for a year as his unit is deploying to fight for our country.

Jonathan grew up in Macedonia, OH, and graduated from Nordonia High School and Ohio University. In 2011, while working toward his master's degree, he enlisted in the National Guard. Jon told me he enlisted, in part, because he was ``inspired by the debate and repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the stories of veterans in my family,'' like so many who join the armed services because of patriotism, family values, and family precedent.

He said: ``The Army seemed like the place for me to help my community and my country and to experience new people, places, and ideas.''

Jonathan went through officer candidate school in 2013 and now serves with the 300th Chemical Company, Army Reserve, out of Morgantown, WV. He has worked in our office since 2015 and has impressed all of us with his dedication to both of his jobs. In the Senate, he handles veterans and military issues along with energy and environmental policy. He has read, literally, thousands of letters from Ohio servicemembers and veterans over the years and has always worked to make sure their views and concerns have been heard and that our office has helped them whenever we have been able to. He has often called the families directly to follow up and listen to their stories.

In 2016, during a meeting with the Gold Star Wives of America, Jon learned that education benefits for some spouses who had lost their loved ones in the earliest days following 9/11 would expire before they could make full use of this benefit their families had earned. He immediately brought this issue to my attention, and we worked to introduce the Military Spouses Achieving College Education for Survivors Act. We passed this bipartisan legislation as part of a larger veterans package that will directly affect veterans and their families in my State, in Nebraska, and other States across the country.

Jonathan has played a critical role in ensuring that our military installations in my State have the support they need to perform critical national security missions--from the 180th in Toledo and the 910 in Youngstown, to Camp Ravenna, to the base in my hometown of Mansfield, to Springfield, and of course to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He often attends visiting Ohio Honor Flight ceremonies, representing our office and supporting Ohio veterans who visit the memorials that have been built in their honor.

His love for the outdoors and for Ohio has also shone through in his work on issues like protecting the Great Lakes, including the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and in preserving the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which is near his childhood home.

I would add that Ohio is one of the lucky States east of the Mississippi in that it is one of the few States that has a national park, and it is not far from the population centers of Cleveland and Akron. Even though the Trump administration tried to zero out--the way we talk about it--or dramatically cut funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, I and Senator Portman, a Republican, worked together to restore that funding.

We know keeping Lake Erie clean is an ongoing challenge. Right off the city of Toledo, Lake Erie is only 30 feet deep, contrasted with Lake Superior, which is 600 feet deep, on the average. That means, whether it is Ashtabula and Cleveland in Lake County to the east or it is Toledo to the west, Lake Erie is much more vulnerable to pollutants than are the other Great Lakes. This is why the work Jonathan does is so important in keeping that Great Lake clean.

At the end of the week, while others might look forward to a relaxing weekend with family and friends, so often, Jonathan heads out for drill with his unit. He used to drive from Washington to Illinois and, later, to West Virginia for the weekend as part of his service. Now his unit is deploying. While we will miss his expertise, his enthusiasm, and his unique perspective in this office this year, we are also so grateful for his service to Ohio and to our country.

One final note, before his deployment, last month, Jon got engaged to his partner Kevin. Jon and Kevin will join so many of Ohio's military families who understand the unique challenges of having a family member serving far from home.

One of the things that is so important that we as Members of the Senate must do is recognize the service of our men and women in uniform. We should also recognize the importance of the service and sacrifice of those family members who are left behind and who often live in the margins financially.

On behalf of my whole office, we congratulate Jon and Kevin on their engagement. We wish Jon well on his tour overseas, and we thank him for his sacrifice and his service.

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

Mr. President, today, we consider the nomination of Federal Reserve Board Governor Jerome Powell to be Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, one of the most important jobs in our government. The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. It is responsible for monetary policy, ensuring the stability of the financial system and the safety and soundness of our banks.

The Federal Reserve in Washington, DC, also has 12 regions or districts around the country. One of them is located in my hometown of Cleveland. Governor Powell has been a member of the Federal Reserve Board since 2012. He supported important principles of monetary policy and critical elements of financial regulation. His track record over the past 6 years shows that he is a thoughtful policymaker.

As the Chair of the Board of Governors, he would lead the Federal Open Market Committee within the Federal Reserve. Governor Powell supports the statutory dual monetary policy goals of maximum employment and price stability--the cornerstones of a well-functioning economy.

Senator Crapo, who is joining me today, is chairman of the committee. We listened to testimony today about the nomination of another Fed Governor--not the highest position, as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, but a Federal Reserve Governor--Mr. Goodfriend. The answers we elicited from him seemed to be, from my interpretation, that it was not clear that he has the same belief and respect for the dual mandate. The dual mandate, unlike what the Europeans do, is especially important for workers in this country. In Europe, the only charge of the central bank is to keep inflation down. In our country, the Federal Reserve, what we call our central bank, has two jobs equally balanced--the dual policy-- and that is to keep inflation down and to keep employment up. They are maximum employment and price stability, the cornerstones of a well- functioning economy.

To advance those policy goals, Governor Powell supports the Federal Reserve's current path of gradual increases in interest rates. He believes they should continue. At the same time, Governor Powell recognizes the importance of an independent Federal Reserve. That is very important. I don't want Members of Congress--with our prejudices, biases, and political ideologies--to influence or to compromise the independence of the Federal Reserve. Governor Powell recognizes that independence. He is committed to following an example of prior Federal Reserve Chairs by doing the job without a view to political outcomes.

Governor Powell played a significant role in implementing crucial reforms under Dodd-Frank. He understands the importance of the rules for stress tests, capital standards, and resolution planning. We need the Federal Reserve to make sure that those rules are applied thoroughly and consistently so that gaps or failures don't create larger risks through the financial system.

We know that too many people in this body seem to have a collective amnesia about what happened 10 years ago. It is up to us to remind Governor Powell, and it is up to him to remember what happened 10 years ago and to learn from it. As Chair, Governor Powell is responsible for making sure the Fed fulfills its consumer protection role.

Americans work hard to make ends meet. They shouldn't have to struggle with unfair and abusive practices by financial institutions.

The Trump administration is engaged in an effort to undermine important financial system protections and reforms put in place in the wake of the great recession.

Governor Powell has seen the developments in the safety and stability of our banks during his time at the Fed. I expect him to maintain and to improve those standards. Ohioans, still recovering from the last financial crisis, can't afford the consequences of another financial crisis. I know Governor Powell wants the Fed to play a part in the success of the economy and American families. I call on him to continue the Federal Reserve's measured path for monetary policy and to support the strong regulations he helped put in place.

For some people, it is easy to forget how much damage was done by this lack of strong oversight of our financial system, especially during the last 4 years of the Bush administration, where millions lost their homes. I know Chairman Crapo and I have talked about this. The 44105 ZIP Code that my wife Connie and I live in, in Cleveland, in the first half of 2007, we had more foreclosures in that ZIP Code than any ZIP Code in the United States. Think of what it does to people's lives. Think of what it does to our families. Millions of people lost homes, millions lost jobs, millions lost much of their life savings.

For the wealthiest Americans, the nearly 9 years of gains in the stock market makes the crash of a decade ago a distant memory, but for the vast majority of Americans who have little in direct holdings in the stock market and not too much in other areas either, their wages have been flat, and many still have not recovered from the crisis.

The Fed's latest survey of household wealth indicates--get this--44 percent of Americans can't cover an emergency expense of $400. Forty- four percent of Americans can't cover an emergency expense of $400 without selling something or borrowing. For some, if their car breaks down, and they need $400 to fix their car to get to work, they have to go to a payday lender, and then their trouble starts. Then they have to go get a second payday loan and then a third payday loan.

Income inequality is the worst since the 1920s. The racial wealth gap is enormous. The median Black household has only $11,000 to its name, one-twelfth of its White counterpart.

The Fed can't solve all of our problems, but it can make them worse. Right now, the Fed seems puzzled by why low unemployment is not producing more inflation. Perhaps it is because more Americans are struggling paycheck to paycheck. They can't bid up the price of goods until they get out of debt. Yet even in the face of continued low inflation, there are those pushing for rate increases to give bondholders better returns. Others want to go back to some of the same banking practices that brought about the financial crisis.

The independence of the Fed is critical but only if it is used to make decisions based on data and experience, not ideology. That is exactly what Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen did over the past decade in helping to guide the Nation to one of the longest lasting recoveries in our history.

Go back to the year 2010. We know when President Obama took office, we were losing 800,000 jobs per month in this country--700,000 the second month--hundreds of thousands, millions of jobs at the beginning of his administration.

Starting in 2010, in large part because of the auto rescue and other things, our economy began to turn around. Since 2010, we have had job growth in every single quarter--every single quarter--since the auto rescue. President Trump loves to take credit for the job growth month after month. The fact is, it was launched early in the Obama years, and we have been able to sustain it--not economic growth to the level we want, not job growth to the level we want, certainly not pay increases to the level we want but something.

I hope Governor Powell will uphold that tradition that Chairman Bernanke and Chairwoman Yellen began.

I plan to support Governor Powell's nomination. I urge my colleagues to do the same.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, the news is good today. It looks as though we are close to a resolution, and what makes that resolution attractive to me is not just that we are going to see the government run, which is the job of this Congress--this is the first time, as we know, that Congress, the House, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court were controlled by one party--it is the first time that that has been the case in a government shutdown, so we know where responsibility lies. But that is the past. I want to look at the future. The future is, this should make it easier because of the discussions so many of us had over the weekend with Senators in our own party and the other party. Regardless of the party of any of us, I think we are reaching a place where we can get serious about negotiations on a whole lot of issues. Once this is behind us, after this vote later today, once the House passes the continuing resolution and once the President signs it, I am hopeful that we can get serious about a whole host of other issues.

In Ohio in the last 2 weeks, two hospitals have closed down--one for- profit in Massillon, a small, industrial city not far from Canton, OH, and a not-for-profit hospital in Dayton, OH. Both announced the closure of those hospitals, and we know what that means to people in the neighborhoods, people in the region. It means slower response time, lost jobs--the loss of all the things that a good hospital means in a community.

Part of the reason for those hospital closings, frankly, is that we haven't done our jobs here--the attacks on the Affordable Care Act, the unrelenting attacks from the President and from the majority party here. I stood with my Governor, a Republican Governor--I am a Democrat--Governor Kasich and I--against these Medicaid cuts, against the attacks on the Affordable Care Act, against the shrinking of the signup period, the undercutting of the marketing campaigns, and all the things that have caused more volatility and instability in the healthcare market.

I am hopeful that after this bill is signed by the President later today and the government reopens, we can then get serious about what we do about not just CHIP--I thank people of both parties here for finally--although it took 4 months--giving CHIP not just new life but 6 years of life. I am thrilled about that. But to make CHIP work, we need community health centers because in a working family, each making $10 an hour--if they don't have enough money to buy insurance or if they don't have a job, perhaps, that has insurance, they rely on CHIP. Well, if their child gets sick and wants to go to a health center, if the community health centers are closed or underfunded or underoperating, there is no place to go. So you don't need just CHIP; you need the community health centers too.

We need to pay attention to rural hospitals. A lot of my State is rural. I have been, for instance, to the Bryan Hospital. Phil Ennen is the president of that hospital and does a very good job with a difficult task, because in small towns--it is a county in the northwest corner of the State. The county borders Indiana to the west and Michigan to the north. Small towns like that have more challenges running their hospitals, and I am hopeful we can focus on that.

We can focus on 340B, which is a Medicaid prescription drug cost provision. I am hopeful that we can focus on the disproportionate share of payments. I am hopeful that we can focus on some of the Medicare extenders so that we can, in fact, bring some stability to this healthcare system.

These two hospitals in Dayton and Massillon that have announced their closure--we are working to try to keep both open. It is a real challenge. I hope the closure of those hospitals isn't just the harbinger of more to come because of the volatility created in the healthcare market by this administration and this Congress's attack on the healthcare market and the healthcare laws over the last year, but that is why we need serious, long-term negotiations here.

The other issue that is so important is pensions. In the Presiding Officer's home State of Indiana, in my State of Ohio, in Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, there are literally hundreds of thousands of teamsters, coal miners, ironworkers, carpenters, and confectionary workers who, even though they paid into a pension for 30 years, even though they gave up dollars today at the bargaining table so they could put dollars aside for the future, often matched by their employer--because of Wall Street greed and Wall Street malfeasance and misfeasance, in part, these pensions are going to face huge cuts.

Senator Young, Senator Donnelly, Senator Portman, Senator Johnson, and a number of us are working out some--I hope working toward some agreement on pensions so we can make sure that if you didn't work 40 years you wouldn't see a 40-percent cut in your pension. I start with the Butch Lewis Act legislation that I have introduced with a number of cosponsors. We

want to work with both parties to make sure this works. I am hopeful this deal today helps to clear a path so that the two Senators from Indiana and I and Senator Portman and others can work together to make this happen. It is so important. In my State alone, it is 50,000 teamsters. It is another 5,000, more or less, coal miners. It is another 7,000, 8,000, or 10,000 other workers.

The last thing I want to say, again, is that every one of these cases is a union plan. These union members gave up wages today. They understood: I don't take as much pay today, but that money will be set aside so I have healthcare and my pension is there when I retire in 30 years.

They did it right. They played by the rules. Their government needs to back them up. That is the importance of this pension bill. That is why I appreciate the work of the Presiding Officer and others in coming to some agreement and making this work.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, Senator Murphy is right. It is not just what is in the resolution that concerns a number of us, including funding for the Affordable Care Act. We remember debates here in this body--there are a whole lot of Members of Congress, who have insurance paid for by taxpayers, who are willing--by cuts in Medicaid and other repeals as far as the Affordable Care Act--who are willing to take insurance away from so many of our constituents. Constituents who make $8, $10, and $12 an hour aren't lucky enough to have the health insurance we have, but we have provided for it through this bill. I am a Democrat, and I stood for months with my Republican Governor, John Kasich, in fighting for that.

As a number of people have pointed out, there is not what there ought to be for community health centers in this bill. I know that in North Carolina, as in my State, there are a number of rural hospitals. We have had two major hospitals announce their closure--one in Massillon and one in Dayton. The one in Massillon is a hospital that serves a town of slightly under 40,000 people. The closest hospital is 15, 20, 25 minutes away for emergency care in Canton. The hospital in the middle of Dayton has announced its closure, partly because of what this body has done--the unevenness and the attacks on health insurance, what was in the tax reform law and what that will mean for insurance prices. We know it has made our healthcare system less stable. And we know how this bill has been written.

Down the hall about 100 feet, is the office of Senator McConnell, the majority leader. The Affordable Care Act repeal was written in that office, behind closed doors, by insurance companies and Wall Street lobbyists. The tax reform bill, where 80 percent of the tax cuts went to the richest 1 percent of the people--that was written in Senator McConnell's office by a bunch of Wall Street and tax lawyers. Now this resolution to ``keep the government open'' again was written down the hall in Senator McConnell's office. There was no input from Democrats. There are 49 Democrats in this body. I believe we represent more than half of the population of this country. Yet we were not even included in this discussion.

This is the first time ever where one party controls the White House, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, and yet they have not even included--one, they are not competent enough to run the government. They just do this ``limp along one month at a time'' resolution. This is the fourth resolution, the fourth temporary budget, the fourth continuing resolution just since September.

Does that mean that what I said--that Senator McConnell didn't have lobbyists in his office writing legislation, is that what the rule XIX means and what the Presiding Officer is now discussing with the Parliamentarian or that my friend from North Carolina is alleging?

Thank you, Mr. President. I am not impugning anybody's motive. I am just stating what I read in newspapers and what seems to be fact, but I am not impugning motives here.

I would add one other thing before making a motion, Mr. President. I appreciate the reminder from the Senator from North Carolina.

Secretary Mattis, the Secretary of Defense--I don't know if Secretary Mattis is a Democrat or Republican; I don't really care; he obviously was confirmed by the Senate and nominated by this President--came to the caucus and talked to our Democratic meeting and talked to us about the importance of giving us some permanence and predictability in the budget process. For us to continue to limp along one month at a time is not the way we should be governing this country.

The Air Force Under Secretary, Matt Donovan, said: What we are really concerned about is that the further along we go into the fiscal year with these short-term CRs, the more likely a full-year CR becomes. That is not a good thing for any of us. It will have damaging impacts on readiness and modernization.

The former Air Force Secretary, with whom I was having breakfast at the Pentagon a couple of years ago, explained all the costs, all the expenses every time the far rightwing of the tea party--the Republican Party in the House--threatened a government shutdown, every time we get close to it, the Air Force, the military has to spend money--taxpayer dollars--to prepare for what if, in fact, they shut the government down.

We can't run our government, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks at a time, and we don't have to.

My Republican colleague, my friend from Kansas, just joined again the Banking Committee. He said this week that people want to make sure we don't have a shutdown. People who want to resolve differences should know there are other options besides doing another short-term CR.

I was speaking to some people in Dayton today. Dayton is the home of the largest single-site employer in Ohio, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The reason I am cochair of the Air Force Caucus is because of Wright-Patterson, in Springfield, Mansfield, and Youngstown and their Air Force employees in my State.

I don't want people to go to work tomorrow morning--whether they are inside the fence, civilians or military, or whether they work outside the fence, outside the gate--and find out the government is closed.

That is why we have another option. I am asking the Republican leader to reopen the government right now.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 36, H.R. 1301; that the amendment that would provide for a continuing resolution to fund the government through Wednesday, January 24--3 days--which is at the desk, be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and

that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I agree with the senior Senator from Hawaii. Give us just a day. Go back to the Murphy continuing resolution. You don't need to have 3 days. Give us 1 day so we can reel in the government, so that if we don't finish by 6 or 7 or 8 o'clock tomorrow morning, the government is closed right now. We know that.

I would like to ask Senator Tillis and the Presiding Officer and the Republican leadership if they would just give us that day or two to negotiate in earnest and fix this. All of us are willing to stay here all night. We stayed the weekend, and we will stay as long as we need to because I don't want the public to see ``closed'' signs on all of these government offices. I don't want to see Federal employees show up to work and be turned away. I don't want to see workers inside and outside the gate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base find out that their lives have changed.

We can fix that by asking unanimous consent to open up the government now and give us a few days to do this.

Mr. President, I have heard my colleagues talk about CHIP and take credit for CHIP and it is so great what they did. Of course, I am glad they now are actually for it, but I have worked on CHIP for a long time, for more than a decade. I am on the Finance Committee--I think the only one in this room right now who is on the committee that worked on this. We have been asking--CHIP expired September 30. Early September, we asked Chairman Hatch to move on CHIP. October, November, December, in the middle of the tax bill, we asked Chairman Hatch to move on CHIP. Finally, he did. It was a bipartisan vote. I will give both parties credit. The other Senator from Ohio, Mr. Portman, voted for it. Only Senator Toomey opposed it in the whole committee, but then it sat there. It hasn't had a floor vote.

So it expired September 30. We went October, didn't do anything; November, didn't do anything; December, didn't do anything. Now, January 21, more than a year after President Trump was inaugurated, they seem to want to do something on CHIP. I appreciate that they do. Don't get me wrong. I care so much about this.

Of course.

I thank the Senator from New Jersey, who has been a real leader on this issue too. The bill would have come to the floor before the clock started because it would have come to the floor in September, likely, before it even expired.

Think about it. We talk a lot about issues and talk a lot about numbers in this body, but think about this for a moment. You are a parent in the State of Virginia, 10 miles from here, and you are making $9 an hour and your wife is making $11 an hour and you qualify for CHIP because neither you nor your spouse has insurance. You qualify for CHIP--209,000 in my State, 100-and-some thousand in Virginia.

Do you know what happened to you in the last month? You got a letter from the State of Virginia probably around Christmas. I am not sure when the letters were sent. You got a letter saying: Sorry, your health insurance is about to expire for your children. Imagine. You go out to the mailbox, you pick up the mail, you tear an envelope open, you open this letter, and you see you are going to lose your health insurance. Why? Because the people in this body, who get government insurance, insurance paid by taxpayers--the 100 privileged Senators, the 435 privileged House Members. We have insurance, but we don't care enough to do this? Again, we had September, October, November, December, January. Now it is in this bill as a political thing instead of really genuinely caring about CHIP.

So say a lot of things on the other side of the aisle, but don't try to tell us they genuinely care about the 209,000 CHIP beneficiaries in my State, the 100-and-some thousand and another couple hundred thousand in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Hawaii because it just ain't so.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Casey and Senator Stabenow for their leadership. They are exactly right about this. They are right about maternal health, CHIP, rural hospitals, and community health centers that so many people depend upon, and I thank them very much for their work. I thank the ranking member of the Finance Committee, Mr. Wyden, for joining us. Mr. Carper, I believe, will be joining us too.

It has now been 112 days since funding expired for the Children's Health Insurance Program. It has been 112 days of uncertainty for families, 112 days of mothers worrying about being able to afford their child's checkups, 112 days of fathers who will have to choose between the heating bill and medicine for their kids, and for every one of those 112 days, the Republican leaders in Congress have made a choice about extending CHIP, and we know it is something that has been bipartisan for two decades.

The chairman of the Finance Committee loves to brag about the fact that he was there at its inception. He invented it with Senator Kennedy or he invented it and Senator Kennedy came along afterward or whatever actually happened 20 years ago, he loves to brag about it. In the Finance Committee, with Senators Casey, Carper, Wyden, Stabenow and others, we asked him about it repeatedly during the tax bill.

Again, they were willing to pass a tax cut in December, where 81 percent of the benefits in that tax bill went to the richest 1 percent. That bill will encourage more companies to shut down in Erie, PA, and Ashtabula, OH, or in Pittsburgh or in Cleveland and move overseas. They were willing to do that. We asked them over and over--Senator Hatch and others in the Finance Committee--let's pass CHIP. They just couldn't get around to it. They made a choice. They made a choice to do tax cuts for the rich. They made a choice to let CHIP expire. They made a choice not to bring a bipartisan bill passed out of the Finance Committee to the floor. They made a choice to spend their time and energy on other things.

They have a choice today. I am calling on my colleagues on both sides of the aisle--and I think Senator Stabenow will make a motion to do this--to pass a permanent extension of CHIP, with no strings attached, the policy we agree on, protecting health insurance for 9 million children, with an added bonus of saving $6 million in savings for the Federal Government because CHIP frankly doesn't cost very much.

Children don't get sick very often and don't require a lot of medical care. Some children do, and that is the whole point of CHIP, so healthy children can stay healthy and get regular checkups and, with an occasional ear infection, go to the family doctor with an ear infection on the first day, rather than the emergency room after the child might experience intense pain or even, later in life, hearing loss, in some cases. It is there for those like Crystal's child in Columbus, OH, whom we talked about.

It is a policy that doesn't just make moral sense, it makes financial sense. It is time for Republican leaders to stop holding CHIP hostage and families hostage to their failed budget process. I know they broke out a plan the other day, as their political talking point, to try to use it to pass a bill that really wasn't all that good a bill. These are not bargaining chips, these are kids.

In my State--the State where the Presiding Officer grew up--209,000 Ohio kids, and 9 million kids nationwide, roughly a number not much higher than that in Pennsylvania and lower than that in Michigan, in the 3 of our States, there are 600,000 kids who right now are getting insurance from CHIP. Remember, these are kids whose parents generally work making $8 to $10 to $12 an hour. They are not kids whose parents have jobs that pay insurance. They are not Congressmen and Congresswomen and Senators who have really good health insurance but for some reason think it is OK to deny it from others, from working families. These are working families. These are children whose parents have jobs but don't have insurance.

Think about the families and the stress they are facing. Think about the letters I get and Senator Casey gets about the stories we get from Ohio and Pennsylvania families.

Josh from Cleveland said CHIP ``helped me arrange for my family to get the health coverage they needed while I looked for a new job. As a parent . . . that peace of mind, knowing that my family is secure getting the

medical help they need should something God forbid arise, is priceless.''

The letter he sent to us underscores the fact that all kinds of parents over the Christmas season, over the holiday season--low-income, hard-working parents, in most cases, $8 to $12 an hour--they are not buying a lot of stuff for their kids at Christmas anyway. They are trying to figure out how this is going to work over the Christmas season, but they are anxious. They have to worry about whether they are going to have insurance in the new year while Congress passes the tax cuts.

Tiffany from Cleveland wrote:

My son relied on CHIP. . . . Without CHIP, we would not

have been able to afford to get him intensive speech therapy

for his severe . . . diagnosis. Without this speech therapy,

he would not be able to speak today. CHIP gave him a voice.

Now I want to use my own voice to give other kids like him a

chance.

Linda from Johnstown wrote to me about her daughter and grandchild.

The CHIP Program is vital to my daughter and grandchild. My

daughter is a hard-working, tax-paying, 26-year-old, single

mother with a 4-year-old son. She works over 40 hours each

week as a chef. They do qualify for CHIP and it is a

tremendous help. . . . Without the CHIP program, she would be

forced to find other ways to make ends meet, or perhaps even

to quit working, so that she would qualify for full public

assistance.

So I remind my colleagues, all of whom have insurance paid for by taxpayers, if we don't pass CHIP, people like this young woman--people like Linda's daughter, who has a child--she might have to quit her job as a chef, her more than 40-hour-a-week job, so she can then go on Medicaid and get insurance for her child. Does that make any sense to anybody?

Another grandmother--it is always the grandmothers; never underestimate them--Suzanne from Columbus wrote to me:

As a pediatric nurse for 40 years, I have seen firsthand

how . . . CHIP . . . has provided essential healthcare and

saved lives.

As a grandmother, my grandchildren . . . benefited. Their

father is deceased and my daughter can't afford the high cost

of her company insurance but makes too much to qualify for

Medicaid. Without this program, my grandchildren would not

have had adequate healthcare.

So many of these families--think about them. As Pope Francis admonished his priests: Go out and smell like the flock. Go out and listen to your constituents around the country, I beg my colleagues. I think, if you had, that we would have seen CHIP reauthorized months ago, but that is the past.

So many of these families are just like Linda's and Suzanne's daughters. They work full time. They just aren't lucky enough to work for employers that offer health insurance. All of us are that lucky. Again, I don't know how we can stand here with insurance paid by taxpayers and not do anything about it. Make no mistake, that is what Republican leaders did for 112 days.

I know that most of my colleagues wanted to pass CHIP in September before it expired, then in October, then in November when we begged the Finance chair to do it, then in December during the tax reform. I know my colleagues wanted to that, but for whatever reason, Senator McConnell, whose office, as we know, is down the hall and has lobbyists running in and out--CHIP families didn't really have very good lobbyists. I don't know why it works that way, but insurance companies did, and I guess that is how this town works.

I asked Leader McConnell and Senator Hatch time and again to bring this bill to the floor and allow a vote. Senator Casey asked them; Senator Stabenow and all of us did. It was September, October, November, and December, but they chose to do other things. They have a chance to make a different choice today, a chance to stop using children and families as bargaining chips, a chance to choose making policy over playing politics. If this is really about children's healthcare, I challenge Leader McConnell to bring a clean, permanent CHIP bill to the floor right away. There is no reason to hold this up while we continue to fight over the budget process. Pretending that the two must pass together, of course, is a fallacy.

A permanent CHIP extension that provides certainty to families and $6 billion in savings to the Federal Government will pass overwhelmingly. We will be the first enthusiastic votes cast.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Thanks to Senator Schumer and my colleagues, who will join us in the course of the evening, for coming to the floor tonight to shine a light on the more than 1 million workers and retirees all over this country who are on the verge of facing massive cuts to the pensions they have earned. This crisis affects thousands of Ohioans--perhaps more than 60,000 is our count. It affects the massive Central States Teamsters Pension Plan, the United Mine Workers Pension Plan, the Ironworkers Local 17 Pension Plan, the Ohio Southwest Carpenters Pension Plan, the Bakers and Confectioners Pension Plan, and others. It has an impact on workers, retirees, and businesses in every single State in the United States.

It is bad enough that Wall Street squandered workers' money; it is worse that the government--that this body, that the House--hasn't yet stepped up. The government is supposed to look out for these folks and is so far turning a blind eye to the promise made to these workers.

The Senate found the time to pass a massive tax giveaway for corporations that shipped jobs overseas. We know that the tax bill made it even more likely for manufacturing companies to shut down in Mansfield or Limerick or Chillicothe or Portsmouth or Springfield, OH, and move overseas. They shut down production here and move overseas, set up production there, and sell their products back into the United States. The Senate's bill does that, but it did nothing for hard- working Americans who worked their whole lives to earn their retirement. It is disgraceful, and time is running short to make these pensions whole.

I urge my colleagues in this body--colleagues with healthcare and retirement plans paid for by taxpayers--to remember that. My colleagues--all of us have our healthcare and pensions paid by taxpayers. I urge my colleagues of this body to think about these retired workers and the stress they are facing. It is an expensive time of year for people with fixed incomes. Their heating bills go up. They try to scrape together what they can for the holidays for grandkids. They have loved ones who are sick, and some of them are sick themselves.

Remember, this is about more than just these retirees and their families; hundreds of thousands of workers give up money from each and every paycheck to fund a pension they expect to be there when they retire. Think about that. Those who haven't really looked at what happens in union negotiations, where workers sit at the bargaining table, and they give up income today to put money aside for the future for their pensions--that is what they did. They gave up income 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, even 40 years ago, put it aside--often matched by employers. That money then comes back to them in the form of a pension when they retire.

If we don't protect those pensions, how do any workers know their retirement is safe? How do you plan for your kids? How do you plan for your family's future? How do you do that when this kind of uncertainty hangs over your head? These Americans have done everything right. They have worked their whole lives to earn these pensions. They have put in long hours to support their families. They did it so they would be able to spend their retirement years enjoying time with their grandchildren, not worrying every day about how to make ends meet. The reason they thought it wasn't just blind hope was because of the legally binding contracts they negotiated in good faith.

When I first started in public service, when the legislature wasn't in session, I used to spend hours at the United Steelworkers Local 169 in Mansfield, OH, listening to workers talk about their dreams. We talked about a lot of things. I would talk about their kids, whom I had gone to high school with at Mansfield Junior High or Johnny Appleseed Junior High or Brinkerhoff Grade School. But one thing I heard over and over is how workers, as I said earlier, gave up pay today at the bargaining table for the promise of a pension to be there when they retired. It is pretty simple. They sat at the negotiating table. They earned their pensions. They gave up pay raises to do it. But now their government has allowed Wall Street to blow it, and tough luck for them. Not on our watch, Mr. President.

Before the holidays, I stood in this building with many of my colleagues and with Rita Lewis, the widow of Butch Lewis, who had worked 40 years as an Ohio teamster. Butch died of a heart attack on New Year's Eve a couple of years ago. If he were here today, Butch would tell you that he didn't work those 40 years to get just 40 percent of his pension. Sadly, Butch passed away far too soon after fighting for the retirement he and these workers earned. It is my honor to name our Senate bill the ``Butch Lewis Act'' after him.

This isn't a partisan issue. It affects communities we all represent. It affects Teamsters in Michigan and in Ohio. It affects workers in Montana, the Presiding Officer's State. It affects mine workers in the majority leader's State. It affects teamsters, truckdrivers, in the Democratic leader's State.

My colleagues on both sides of the aisle have voiced support and the desire to work together in good faith to keep this promise. Now we just need to sit down together, put politics aside, and get it done. A number of Republican Senators have been in negotiations with Democratic Senators that we have led to make sure this can get done. But fundamentally it is about whose side you are on. It is about who we work for. Many of my colleagues made it pretty clear in December with their tax vote that they work for Wall Street and the corporations that send job overseas, but I say we work for these truckdrivers, ironworkers, carpenters, confectionary workers, and teamsters. They are not asking for a handout; they are asking for what they earned over a lifetime of work. It is time for us to do the job the taxpayers sent us here to do and save those pensions before it is too late.

I am joined on the Senate floor today by the senior Senator from Michigan and the senior Senator from Indiana, Senator Stabenow and Senator Donnelly, who have been very active on this issue. I know Senator Casey is going to join us, and others who have been very active, standing up for these retirees, understanding that the teamster retirees and mine workers and ironworkers and others gave up money today, gave up raises at the bargaining table, to put money aside for retirement. We owe that to them. It is time the Senate does its job.

I yield the floor to Senator Stabenow.