Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, most people who are watching TV or who are watching C-SPAN know we are at a very important place here. We are in a position wherein, at midnight tomorrow night, if Congress doesn't act, we will shut down the government. What does shutting down the government mean? It means a lot of things.

It means there are going to be a number of employees who will be wondering when they will get their next paychecks or whether they will get repaid, depending upon whether we make a decision to pay them for time worked.

It means people who need desperately needed services may be wondering whether they will be able to get those services, and--if, for no other reason, even if the money is there--is the distraction going to slow down badly needed services to a number of people who rely on the Federal Government as their safety net?

It is going to mean our military will wonder whether America will really be behind them anymore because the games we are playing in the Senate are more important than the work they are doing to protect the Nation and to protect our allies. It is going to mean a lot of very negative things that should be avoided. I am going to talk a little bit about it.

What I first want to do is to summarize what we are trying to do-- people like me who are going to support the continuing resolution. Now, to be honest with you, I hate the whole continuing resolution process.

When I was younger, there was a time when our family was struggling. My father was doing construction work, and he literally had to borrow money to pay for the materials he needed to actually do the job so that he could pay the bills for the family. The way he did that and the way you still do it today, in struggling families, is that you get these 90-day notes. You go to a banker, you tell them you have a project to work on, and you prove to them that you can pay the money back in 90 days and then you pay them back.

Well, that is how we are running the business of the most important Nation that has ever existed. A 1-month CR, a 3-month CR, or a 12-month CR is not the way you run the greatest Nation on the face of the planet. It has a number of problems with it, not the least of which is that you can't give the military any certainty to know what they can invest in for the next new generation weapon or defense system, because they simply don't know if the money will be there for them to make that investment. It means that we are getting far less production for our dollar, we are inefficient, and we are sending a message to the world that we are not serious about the long-term investment that we need to make for our safety and security.

It also affects a number of other agencies, but I think this is very important in these times with all the heightened threats across the world. If we send a message that we are not here for the long term and we are not willing to make those long-term investments, that is a bad message to send. That is the problem with CRs versus what we call regular order--to sit down, negotiate appropriations, pass appropriations bills, and give the men and women in uniform, give the government employees, and give the people who rely on our safety net some certainty. That is our job.

That is why I support a bill that Senator Heller is proposing. It is called the No Budget, No Pay Act. I think the Senate Members and the Members of the House should not get a paycheck when they fail to do their job. Doing their job means they pass appropriations bills, they pass a budget, and they actually do the job they swore they would do if they won a race for the Senate or the Congress. I hope that bill gets a debate on the floor. I look forward to supporting it when it does.

Let's go back to the CR. The CR is simple. It is 4 weeks long. All it really does is to make sure that we have funding for our servicemembers. It makes sure we have funding for our veterans. It makes sure we have funding for the CHIP program. It actually authorizes it for several years. It gives certainty to States and to people who need support that it is going to be there. It also provides funding for small business loans and funding for the National Institutes of Health. It does a number of other things, but those are critically important.

We have some Members who are trying to negotiate a deal for the DACA population. DACA is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It is a program that President Obama put into

place in 2012. It is actually something that I have been working on since we filed the bill in August--and long before that--to try to get reasonably minded Members on both sides of the aisle to come up with a solution that makes sense. But now we have people who actually want to shut down the government because we haven't reached a bipartisan agreement that I think is not that far away. The problem that I have with that is that I think it is going to create a toxic environment in Washington, DC, that is not only going to provide all the uncertainty that I talked about on the prior slide, but it is even going to alienate people who are coming to the table trying to negotiate a bipartisan agreement. Now we are at a point where we are trying to figure out if we can fund the government either through a vote sometime tomorrow or if there will be a shutdown tomorrow night.

I have only been here for about 3 years, and I have been in politics for 12 years. I find it interesting how things change overnight, how things that were untenable or awful just a couple of months or a couple of years ago are justified today based on the disagreement we have on the DACA deal, which I am convinced we will get done before the March 5 deadline, and I hope sooner than that because there are a lot of good kids who came to this Nation through no fault of their own, through a decision made by an adult, who deserve a path to citizenship, who deserve the respect of this Nation, and who should be welcome because there are a lot of good kids.

I will keep working on a solution, but now we have people who want to distract us, not only to distract us from trying to negotiate a reasonable outcome for DACA but adding the distraction and creating the toxic environment that shutting down the government will cause.

If we go back, what is amazing to me is that the very people who are now saying we should shut down the government made these kind of statements in the past. This is from former Speaker Pelosi in the House: ``Not too long ago it was an unthinkable tactic to use in a political debate.''

There is a long list of people.

Senator Nelson: ``You don't hold the country hostage.''

But that is exactly what they are proposing today.

Senator King: ``. . . the constant hostage-taking situation to get something in that process that you couldn't get through the normal process.''

It is a hard quote to read, but the point is that now they want to take hostages. Now they want to do exactly what they thought, not long ago, was inappropriate, unkind, unfair, and uncompassionate.

Then we have Senator Heitkamp: ``It is really bullying behavior when the small minority does this.''

I think it will be a minority that will oppose funding the government. So now people who didn't like the bullying behavior are trying to rationalize that somehow that it is OK.

The other issue we have here is that we have been getting close on a funding discussion, and we have been getting close on DACA. I don't know. I can't speak to you all directly, but if I were speaking to the pages, I would ask them whether or not they saw the ``Peanuts'' cartoon. There is a common theme that we talk about with Lucy and the football. The scene is where you are running down the field and you are about to kick the football, and just at about the time that you are going to do it, there is a group of people who want to pull the football away. That is what they are doing again.

Honestly, it gets tiring to see us come so close, to have so many reasonably minded people. Guess what. There are unreasonable people. It is a bipartisan situation we have here. I have friends. They are friends of mine, but on certain issues they become unreasonable. They are not part of the solution. All of a sudden they create these coalitions, and they are the Lucy taking away the football from those of us who actually want to score, want to make progress, want to fund the Government, and want to provide a solution for the DACA population. Now we have another Lucy and the football scenario on both the spending bill and also the DACA bill.

I also have to talk about the CHIP program. The CHIP program is something I wanted to reauthorize in September of last year. September of last year was the month before the program technically expired. However, there was sufficient money in reserves for the States to continue to run the programs. Those States are starting to run out of money, including States like mine, North Carolina. Now we have an opportunity to reauthorize for years, to provide certainty to this child population for years, and we are going to hold it hostage because we have an honest disagreement over things I think we can work out with the DACA Program.

We have seen what people have said in the past. In fact, one of these Senators actually had a countdown on how many days we failed to reauthorize DACA. It may very well be that when we take the vote tonight, that very same Senator will vote against a multiyear reauthorization for the CHIP program. That doesn't make sense. It is irrational. It doesn't solve anything. It creates a bigger problem when it comes to the funding discussion and when it ultimately comes to a reasonable outcome for the DACA population.

Finally, we can talk about the words of the Democratic leader. Again, it is amazing to me how things have changed.

So did you believe what you were saying then? Or is who we see now and what position you are taking now who you really are? People need to come to the floor and let me know. Is this what you meant or is your new position what you meant? You can't have it both ways. In politics, people try to, but you need to say something and stick with it. They need to defend which is their real position. If those are their positions in the past, let's pass the spending bill, let's work hard to get DACA done, and let's stop this theater that is not helping anybody. All this is doing is making people who work and rely on government funding worry, and it is making people who rely on government funding and the DACA population even more worried. Every day they think they are 1 day closer to having an illegal status here.

We see speeches on the floor about the Dreamers, the people who are doing well. Most of them are going to school, working, or serving in the military. I believe every single one of them. There are tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of more examples. That is why I am so motivated to come up with a solution. That is why I am so frustrated with those playing these games when we are so close.

So let's talk about DACA. There is the so-called gang that is putting together a bill. Let me back up and talk about a meeting that I attended in the White House last Tuesday. In the prior meeting I attended the previous Thursday, Republicans met with the President. We said: Mr. President, the way for us to get to a solution is to call Democrats and Republicans into a room, Members of the House and Senate, have us air our differences and then agree to a timeline for negotiating a deal that we can bring to the American people and solve this problem.

The President responded by calling a meeting on that Tuesday. Some people may have seen it. There was about 50 minutes of press coverage. Senator Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who just came in here, was a part of that meeting. We all felt great about it. We aired our differences. We knew there were differences we needed to bridge. We agreed to four different pillars that we would use as a basis for negotiation. Come up with something that the DACA population needs, something compassionate--something very similar or maybe something between the bill that Senator Lankford, Senator Hatch, and I proposed, the SUCCEED Act and the Dream Act--and bridge the differences. We were making progress. We also knew that we had to deal with things like the diversity lottery, border security, and what some of our colleagues call family reunification, which has been abused and needs to be fixed. Others call it chain migration.

At the end of that meeting, we agreed that what we needed to do was to have the leaders, the whips of the House and the Senate--the Democrats and the Republicans--agree to a timeline and a schedule and then get together and work out our differences. I, for one, think those meetings should

be open to the public because then the public would realize, I think, that we are not that far apart. Unfortunately, we are a week and a half later, and the parties have not even reached an agreement on a schedule to begin the negotiations. Now we have another group of people that say: We have something that is pretty close and we may file a bill, or you need to get on to the bill.

Let me tell you the problem I have with that bill or the concept of the bill. No. 1, has it been introduced? No. So it is ``thoughtware.'' None of us can talk about the specific provisions because we don't have something we can score, look at, or understand the benefits and risks and issues associated with it and whether or not we can get the votes.

The question is, Does the bill have the support of the President? Well, I think you saw what was vetted on Thursday, which was not a specific provision, and that meeting last week didn't go too well on several different levels. We don't have an agreement.

The other question is, if you don't have an agreement with the President, you have to understand the process of the Congress. If the President were to veto the bill, and we are struggling to get 60 votes, now we would have to get 67 votes. Does anybody here honestly believe we will get 67 votes to withstand a veto override? So we have to get back to this one, to get the President behind it, because that is not going to happen. Even if that could happen, then we have to go to the House. It is not about a simple majority of the House Members. We have to think about a supermajority of House Members that would override a Presidential veto. Right now, based on the number of Members who are in the House--there are a couple of open seats--that is 288 votes. That isn't going to happen. That is not a very good scorecard. It is not a recipe for success.

I am one of the ones who want checked boxes next to a bill that the President supports, that the Senate will get 60 votes on, and the House will get more than half, so that we can solve the problem for the DACA population.

Things happen quickly here, and, hopefully, this is another example where they will. I hope my Republican colleagues recognize that voting against the funding bill is a bad idea. How do you work out of a shutdown? Almost certainly it will not end well. So I hope my Republican colleagues will vote for the spending bill, and I hope a majority or a good number of my Democratic colleagues will, so that we get the spending issue off the table. Then I hope that same group of people will come together and recognize that the gaps are not that hard to bridge for the DACA solution, that the border security measures are reasonable, that the changes in the elimination of the diversity lottery and a more reasonable way to allow merit-based immigration makes sense. We can deal with underrepresented countries to make absolutely certain that good hard-working people in those countries who want to come and live and work in America can do it. This is not a difficult thing to do.

It is almost as if people are going in the backroom trying to figure out how to make this more difficult than it needs to be.

I am telling and imploring the Members of the Senate, whether you are Republican or Democrat, vote for funding the Government. Vote for our soldiers. Vote for our veterans. Vote for the children who require these programs who are desperately in need of certainty. Then, quickly, get on DACA and vote for the Dreamers who need our support. Vote for border security so we can know who is coming across this border and we can make the Nation safer. These are commonsense, rational, and reasonable expectations, and if we lower the temperature here, if we treat people with respect, and if we actually not let the polar opposites impact what those of us in the center want to do, then we can avoid this crisis and we can do great things for millions of people.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, before the chairman leaves the Chamber, I wish to thank him for his leadership as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He has done an extraordinary job of bringing people together to really come up with a solution to this problem.

This is a problem that has existed for years--almost two decades. The first DREAM Act was filed in 2001, I believe. It has been some 16 years, and they have failed to produce a result. Now, think that through. That was through President Bush, and it was through President Obama. It was actually at a time when, in 2009, not a single Republican vote would have been necessary to pass the DREAM Act. Yet my colleagues on the other side of the aisle could not produce a result. So we know we need to do something different.

There are things in the Dream Act that we need to file and put into a bill. In fact, it was instructed into a bill that I and Senator Lankford and Senator Hatch filed called the SUCCEED Act. It is a way to provide certainty for the DACA population, but it also needs to be paired up with reasonable border security provisions so that we get the broad base of support we need for enduring policy here.

There are some people who are talking about withdrawing from negotiations and trying to threaten a government shutdown to get something slammed into a year-end spending bill. But if you really care about the long-term certainty that we want to provide these young people who qualified under the DACA Program, the last thing you should do is to play politics and get something half baked into a provision that will always be a target of the next year-end spending bill. Why don't we do something crazy and actually sit down, check our Members on the Republican side and the Democratic side who have extreme views on this issue at the door, and solve the problem.

I have taken a lot of criticism after filing the SUCCEED Act because I had a lot of people who said that I was soft on immigration. Well, I respectfully disagree with some of my friends who are themselves Republicans and conservatives, because I don't think they have it right. I think that the young men and women who qualify under the DACA Program, who were brought to this country through the actions of their parents, through no fault of their own, deserve a respectful, compassionate, physically sustainable solution, and certainty. I have been working on it, and I have been taking the criticism ever since I filed the bill. I even had a congressional district in North Carolina censure me, saying, ``shame on you,'' for actually coming up with something that made sense.

One thing that I said, though, when we filed that bill, is that what we did in the SUCCEED Act had to be paired with reasonable, sustainable border security measures and interior enforcement measures--things that are important if we want to make sure that a decade from now, 15 years from now we are not back here again worried about a new DACA population that has come across the borders.

I have had some people insisting that having a secure border is not compassionate, that it is unfair, but I would actually submit to my colleagues that not having a secure border is irresponsible. Talking about not being compassionate, allowing things to occur with an unsecured border--to me, having a secure border is a hallmark of compassion. That is a little bit of what I want to talk about. So let's stipulate to that.

Working with Senator Durbin--and, incidentally, Senator Durbin and I

have been talking about this issue for about a year and a half--I knew that we were going to be here with the DACA Program and that we needed to work on it. So I reached out to Senator Durbin and said that I am willing to try to come up with something that makes sense, but we have to be willing to accept something different from all of the random ideas and come with a compromise. We made progress in terms of how to deal with the DACA population, but some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are unwilling to talk about the reality that we should also put into place, and pair with what we do for the DACA population, border security and interior enforcement that makes sense.

Back in February I spent about a week down along the southern border. I was on patrol boats on the Rio Grande. I was riding horseback in certain areas of the border. I was out in the interior area where enforcement actions are taking place every night. I spent a lot of time down there. One thing that struck me was some of the briefings that we received from border security. I am going to get to what I consider to be the most heartbreaking last.

We want to talk about what is going on. We have people come to this floor--my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--and say: We must do something to address the opioid epidemic in this country. I agree. That is why I voted for the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. I spoke on the floor several times as a first step toward trying to get a handle on something that is poisoning almost 60,000 people a year-- killing them. They are dying from overdoses in this Nation. The reality is that the vast majority--and we will get to a slide in a minute--of those illicit drugs, including heroin and fentanyl and the other kinds of drugs that are extracted from opium and are killing people, are coming across the southern border. We simply don't have the resources at our land ports and in the areas where drug smugglers cross illegally to stop them. The consequence of that in a State like North Carolina is that more people are dying from drug overdoses today than are dying from automobile accidents--about 1,400 a year. It is even worse in a number of other States.

We were at a land port in Laredo, and they were saying that on any given day, millions of doses are probably getting through because they are concealed. They are hidden in trucks. They don't have the capacity to inspect every vehicle. So they are coming across this border ostensibly legally--obviously, through the legal process of entry--but carrying illicit drugs, and we are only capturing a fraction of them. A part of what we are proposing in this bill is additional resources to interdict more of those drugs, to make it less likely that somebody could come across the border by use of a pickup truck or by using backpacks full of poison that will ultimately get into the blood streams of people who will ultimately die--many of them, tens of thousands a year. That is a case--a compassionate case--for border security.

This is the number that I was talking about earlier: 15,469 deaths in 2016 alone related to heroin. A lot of these are coming across the border. But only about 1.5 percent of all of the drugs that are estimated to come across the border are being seized today. How do you actually increase this seizure rate? You put the resources and authorities in place so that the Border Patrol and Customs and immigration resources down on the border can actually find them, and arrest, charge, convict, and incarcerate the people who are poisoning the men and women and boys and girls in this country.

There is also another thing, and this is something that when I was down on the Texas border just stuck with me. I was on a 7,500-acre ranch, which is really, really small in Texas terms. I was talking with the ranch owner, who said that over the last 10 years, they had actually recovered 100 bodies on this ranch alone. If you do the math, that means they are finding a person who has died trying to come to this country illegally about every six weeks on this small ranch. Over the past 20 years, we have had about 10,000 people die crossing the border, and about 1,000 of them are children.

If we had a secure border, at least we would have the knowledge and the situational awareness to know where these people are so that they don't languish somewhere in the middle of nowhere after they cross the border or after they have paid somebody $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000, in some cases, to carry them across the border. Then, they leave them. They take them across the border and then tell them that Houston is just a few miles away. Well, Houston is an hour-and-a-half plane ride away from where they cross the border.

So we need border security for the protection of people who are making the poor decision to come across. If we have a secure border, it is much less likely that any of them will ever attempt to do it, except for the legal ones. Then there is the other thing that is happening on the other side of the border. The 10,000 people who have died over 20 years are those whom we have identified--I am sure there are many more who we didn't--who were found on U.S. soil after crossing the border.

One other thing I learned when I was down in Texas is about the criminal actions and the criminal gangs, basically--they call them plazas and cartels--that basically run every mile of the border. If you pass through one of those plazas and you don't pay the toll, you are likely going to die. In one case, there were 72 people who were murdered because the human smuggler failed to pay the plaza bosses the so-called toll when he was supposed to get them across the border. So they ordered the execution of men, women, and children just to send a message. This is one of the many examples that we have.

So there is no question in my mind that of the 10,000 people who have died over the last 20 years on American soil, there were probably thousands or tens of thousands or more who have died in the hopes that they could get across the border.

If we have a secure border and if we work on our immigration systems, we can get for those parents and people who want to come to this country legally an opportunity to get here without harming themselves or harming their children. If that is not a compassionate case for a secure border, I don't know what is.

Now we are in the final stages of trying to negotiate a deal, and Chairman Grassley did a wonderful job of summarizing what we have proposed as a starting position for negotiation with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I hope they will be willing to come to the table and negotiate in good faith and recognize that their approach over the last 16 years has failed. They promised the Dreamers a solution, and they failed to deliver. They have failed to deliver under a Republican administration. They have failed to deliver under President Obama, when they had supermajorities. We are not going to let them fail this time.

Giving the DACA population certainty, coming up with a solution that makes sense, getting a border that is secure, making sure that the poison that is coming across the border and killing tens of thousands of people a year is reduced, is, in my opinion, the scope that we need to negotiate to get to an agreement. If we have Senator Durbin, Senator Bennet, and others who have negotiated portions of the immigration issue open their eyes to the broader opportunity to come up with a balanced policy that addresses the concerns on both sides of the aisle, we can be the Congress and President Trump can be the President who actually solve this problem and, along the way, make it far less likely that it will be another problem for another Congress to solve 10 or 15 years from now and that, then, may take 10 or 15 years to solve.

This will have an enduring impact. This will have a compassionate impact. This will provide certainty to the DACA population. This will allow me to go home and say: I did something meaningful to secure the border and protect our Nation. But we have to have people come together and negotiate in good faith. It needs to start this week, and we need to continue it until we come to terms.

People need to be willing to compromise and accept something less than perfect, because everybody's perfect conceptions of what we should do here have all one thing in common: They have all been resounding failures. They have been unkept promises.

Along the way, our homeland is not as secure as it can be, and people are dying in the process. Hard-working people who are eligible for the DACA Program are uncertain about their future.

So, again, I want to thank Chairman Grassley for his hard work and his leadership and willingness to engage. I want to thank the President. I was with the President for an hour and a half last week, along with Chairman Grassley and others. We are going to be meeting again in the White House tomorrow. Hopefully, we will be joined by our Democratic colleagues who have been invited to the meeting, and we will negotiate something that makes sense.

Now is the time for us to deliver. The empty promises of the past are insufficient. We need to provide an enduring solution, and an enduring solution is a fair solution for the DACA population and a responsible solution for border security. If we do that, I think we will look at this as something meaningful--something the Presiding Officer and I did when we came in here in 2015.

We got tax reform. That is meaningful.

We have been promising immigration reform forever. This is not all of it. We have more work to do. But this is a big first step, and it requires bipartisanship, compromise, and a genuine commitment to negotiate.

I hope my Democratic colleagues will take the invitation seriously, come to the table, negotiate an agreement we can all be proud of, and we can give the certainty that we should give to the DACA population.

I thank the chairman for the opportunity to speak on this and for his continued leadership on this issue.

Mr. President, when we pursue tax reform, invariably those impacted will voice concerns along the way. I know this from experience, having done tax reform in North Carolina.

Everyone was for tax reform until it came to protecting their individualized interests. However, reform was not about protecting tax benefits for the rich or the like, as some of my colleagues have suggested--understandably, for political purposes.

Tax reform is what we can do as a Congress to help spur economic growth. Without growth, we cannot solve our Nation's problems. Having an uncompetitive tax code hampers the ability of the middle class to grow and prosper.

Through this process, we have fought to ensure that there are appropriate transition rules and protections for various strategic sectors in our economy, and I am proud of the work that both Chambers of Congress have done through the conference process.

When we debated the Senate's tax reform package on the floor, some of my colleagues offered amendments on discrete issues, and I believe that, for many of these issues, we attempted to embrace, as a body, a process that defines problems and works to solve them.

I also believe that the conference committee did a good job working with JCT and the Finance Committee to address issues, without jeopardizing the underlying tax reform measure.

For other issues that were not able to be addressed in theconference report, I believe that legislating is an exercise of continued and systematic work. That means we need to come back next year in a reconciliation process and continue to improve upon this legislation.

As an example of some of the work that we must still do, I do not believe that we should penalize companies for voluntary repatriation and believe that there should be targeted transition rules in place to consider those who have a history of voluntary repatriation and are not simply doing so late in the year as tax reform became a realistic possibility. That said, I understand that some things are not always achievable, and it is tough to treat some companies differently than others when everyone is making sacrifices.

Another area that I think needs to be worked on in future iterations of tax reform are tailored transition rules for different strategic sectors like the energy sector, manufacturing sector, and other industries that have foreign tax credits stranded overseas. Additionally, as we evaluate how the tax treatment for passthrough entities unfolds, we need to ensure that we are appropriately regulating and taxing capital deployers so that we are fully realizing their potential contributions to economic growth.

In its totality, I was happy to see that there was common ground found on issues such as: how JCT scores and evaluates insurance reserves; how the limitations on business interest deductibility affects different sectors, particularly those that rely heavily on debt to operate; ensuring that there is continued parity for pass through entities in the new territorial system by preserving appropriate export incentives in the Tax Code; and many others that are so important to State and local economies.

When I did tax reform in North Carolina as the speaker of the North Carolina State House, I received many of the same criticisms that I have received as we have gone through this current reform process. Our hard work paid off in North Carolina, and I believe that it will pay off for America--as a global competitor and for all Americans.

Thank you. I look forward to supporting this conference report, and I look forward to working with my colleagues in the future as we continue our collective pursuit to make America the most competitive it can be and as we continue to help America achieve its economic potential.

Madam President, I congratulate Andrew Murray on his investiture as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina.

Andrew graduated magna cum laude from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with a bachelor of science in political science and received his juris doctor from the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Throughout his career, Andrew has dedicated himself to public service and leadership. Andrew enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1980 and retired in 2015, serving his country faithfully for 35 years. During his service, he earned a number of decorations, including the Coast Guard Meritorious Service Medal, three Coast Guard Commendation Medals, the Coast Guard Achievement Medal, and the Coast Guard 9/11 Service Medal.

Andrew began his legal career at the Mecklenburg County District Attorney's Office as an assistant district attorney. Later, he worked in private practice before being elected to serve as the district attorney of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina's largest prosecutorial district. During his tenure as district attorney, he led the office with the utmost distinction and is highly respected for his leadership.

I am proud that Andrew is willing to continue serving western North Carolina in a new role as U.S. Attorney. Western North Carolina is lucky to have such an experienced prosecutor and effective leader to command this important office. He is a dedicated public servant whose extensive prosecutorial experience and relationships with law enforcement will bolster the mission of the Department of Justice and promote public safety.

Senator Burr and I proudly recommended Andrew to President Trump, and I know that he will lead the U.S. Attorney's Office with honor.

Mr. President, the tax cuts we passed last week--whether they are in North Carolina or North Dakota, working families are going to benefit from them. Over the course of the next days and weeks that we negotiate with the House on a final package that will go to the President, we are going to hear all kinds of interesting claims made on the Senate floor.

I was presiding, Mr. President, before you relieved me from the Chair, and I heard one of the speeches we are going to hear several times--we passed this tax bill so that we can actually now cut support for people who need the government safety net. That sounds absurd. It sounds absurd on several levels. No. 1, it is not a very kind thing to do. No. 2, it is not a very wise thing do.

Let me put in another claim. I can try to put them together. They are saying that we are passing a tax increase on working families in America. What they forget is the dot, dot, dot--maybe 7 or 8 years from now if we decide to raise taxes. Highly unlikely. But in the here and now and next year, after this tax bill gets passed, working families are going to get a tax cut.

How on Earth can you look at a standard deduction doubling--we are going from $6,000 to $12,000 per individual and $24,000 per family. What does the standard deduction mean? Some people may not understand it. It is pretty simple. That standard deduction means that money isn't going to get taxed. So we are increasing the number of people who will not pay taxes.

One of the brackets we haven't talked about, and I think we should, is the number of people who go to a zero tax bracket under the Senate plan and, to a large extent, under the House plan. Then we talk about the child tax

credit. Now let's talk about a working mother, a single mom with a child. The first $12,000 isn't going to be taxed, and then another $2,000 per child would not be taxed before you would even be subject to tax. That is the reality of this plan. It is not an increase in taxes.

Those who oppose this plan are trying to talk about a hypothetical possibility 7 or 8 years from now that I don't believe is going to happen. One of the reasons why I believe it is highly unlikely to happen is because we are going to have economic growth from this tax plan.

The way you get economic growth--you also have to recognize that in the United States, we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. When people are trying to set up shop today, they don't have to necessarily set up shop in the United States to do business in the United States; they go to the lowest cost jurisdiction. I don't fault a business for doing that. When I am confronted with maybe the desire to set up a business in, say, North Carolina or somewhere else in the United States, if it is going to cost me substantially more, of course I am going to make the business decision to go where I have the most resources necessary to produce the product or service that I want to provide.

By cutting corporate taxes and by cutting what we call the passthrough tax, which is handling all businesses, whether they are a C corporation or a passthrough entity--I won't get into the details, but they are the two different ways businesses set up to pay their taxes. By lowering that tax burden on businesses, we are going to see economic growth.

After the tax cuts are put into place, we are immediately going to see a reduction in the tax burden for working families. That is going to be from the increases in deductions and the lowering of the tax burden. Over time, we are going to see additional money going into the pockets of working families, because I firmly believe that through economic activity, we are going to see an upward increase in wages. We are going to see median incomes go up. We are going to see people lifted out of poverty. The reason I believe that is because we have done it in North Carolina. We were roundly criticized--the same way people did on this floor--when I was serving in the State legislature, and we delivered on a promise we made if we got a majority in the State of North Carolina. We went on to decrease the tax burden on businesses and decrease the tax burden on individuals, and we have seen our income to the State go up--more money, more resources in the State to do good things for people in North Carolina. One of the good things we do is continue to lower the tax burden because our economy is growing at rates it has not seen in decades in North Carolina. That is what is going to happen in the United States.

It also provides us with resources to help those who truly need help. The other argument that suddenly we are going to pay for this tax cut by harming people on Medicare and Medicaid is absurd. All of us here have mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, maybe brothers and sisters who rely on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security as their primary source of income. How anybody can come to this floor and say that I am going to tell my 85-year-old mother--Mom, I am sorry if you are watching this because I know you hate it when I mention your age--who relies on Medicare and relies on Social Security that we are going to come to this Chamber and betray that trust and break that promise that we made to them is absurd.

Are we talking about things we can do so I can make a promise to these pages when they get old someday--I know it is hard for you to imagine you are going to get old someday, but you will. What we are talking about is making sure that we can fulfill that promise for the generations who have not yet relied on Medicare and Social Security. If we don't act, we are going to harm the very people whom other people in this Chamber profess to be helping.

We have a fiscal crisis out there that we have to deal with, but it has no connection to what we are trying to do with tax reform. People say we passed the tax reform bill so that we can harm other people and pay for the tax cuts through cuts to our entitlement programs or safety net programs. It is not happening. We justified this tax package based on what we believe to be economic growth. This tax bill will be funded through economic growth. This tax bill will be funded by more people making higher wages, more businesses being successful and hiring other people, and the United States being more competitive on the global stage. That is how we pay for this tax package.

Again, I speak from a bit of experience because we did tax reform over the last 5 years in North Carolina. It wasn't perfect. That is why we came back and made some changes after we realized there were some unintended consequences, which is the last thing I will talk about.

We are now going into what they call conference. Today, what you are observing is a period of time that we have to pass through in the Chamber before we can vote to go to conference. When we go to conference, it means that the House and the Senate will get together and we will try to work out our differences. One of the things we have to do is work out some things that we have identified that may be unintended consequences of the bill, to make sure that we minimize any negative impact that wasn't thought through until we can begin to work through some of the models. That is going to happen. I think the conferencing process will produce a better bill.

But more than anything else, we need to recognize that it is time to deliver on a promise we made to the American people. We need to be the Congress that, for the first time in over 30 years, actually delivers on the promise of reducing the tax burden and getting the economy back on track--the way it hasn't been for quite some time.

That is why I am proud to have voted for the tax plan. That is why I will be proud to vote for the plan that goes to the President's desk. That is why I will be proud to stand in this Chamber, just a couple of years from now, and demonstrate that the courage we are displaying by moving forward with this bill is going to produce a result for the American people that benefits every single person all across the socioeconomic spectrum.

I appreciate the opportunity to tell the American people again: Don't necessarily believe everything that is going to be said in this Chamber in the next couple of days or couple of weeks. American people, don't be afraid when you hear that one or the other party is working hard so we can harm people who rely on our safety net. Don't believe it. It is not true. Don't believe that we have decided that it was a great political strategy to raise taxes 7 years from now. Don't believe that it is an immediate tax increase, because that is empirically untrue.

Believe that we are doing everything we can to fulfill our promise, and believe that, if we do this, everybody in the United States is going to benefit. We are going to be a stronger nation. We are going to be a more competitive Nation, and we are going to have a point in time in Congress when we actually came here and did what we said we were going to do.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I want to thank Chairman Grassley for his leadership on this issue and for his willingness to sit down and talk to a diverse group of people who think we have a problem that we should solve and that we must solve.

Senator Grassley just did such a good job of describing some of the technical aspects of the SECURE Act and the BRIDGE Act and other legislation that actually came together to create the SECURE Act.

I want to back up and talk a little bit about what we are actually trying to do here. There are two key components to this bill and to efforts that have gone before the point at which we have introduced this bill that I think are very important.

The first one is the DACA Program. That is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The DACA Program is something that was implemented in 2012 by President Obama. What President Obama sought to do was to provide some certainty for young adults and children who were brought across the border--not through their own decisions but through the decisions of their parents or a guardian to cross the border illegally--and find themselves illegally present in the United States. Today, they are still protected because they are still protected under DACA, but the President announced on September 5 that on March 5 that program would end.

Now, you can imagine that there are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who are uncertain about their future status in this country. It is a problem we need to solve. The other side of the equation is something that is also equally important to me and to a number of people in this body. It has to do with our border security and interior enforcement.

Back in late winter, I spent a week down on the southern border. I went to the Rio Grande Sector and the West Texas Sector. I spoke with a lot of people at the land ports that hundreds of thousands of people cross every day. We listened to their concerns about things we need to do to better secure the border.

There are two debates in Congress right now. I don't actually embrace either of the two extremes. There is the one extreme that says build a big, beautiful wall that is 2,000 miles long. It is impractical and not necessary.

There is the other extreme that says we don't need borders; we need bridges. That is impractical and unsafe.

What we need is a solution to border security so that we know who is in this country and so that we have an orderly way to move between countries for someone who is in our country who

wants to come to work or visit the United States and return back in a legal fashion.

The other thing we have to look at in border security that I think is oftentimes overlooked is the humanitarian crisis with an unsecure border. There is one of the numbers that stuck with me. There were so many that we covered when we were down with border security, but this stuck with me--actually, two numbers. This one is most heartbreaking: Over a 20-year period, 10,000 people have died crossing the border unsuccessfully. Ten thousand bodies have been recovered as a result of crossing the border and not finding their way to a safe place. About 1,000 of them were children. Unless we have the people, technology, and infrastructure on the border to know who is trying to cross, we can't protect them. Even if it means we are going to take them into custody and potentially deport them, at least they will be alive.

Another statistic was very important to me, too. It was in a discussion I had with border security agents down in Laredo, one of the big land ports where people cross every day. I am not going to get into a lot of the details, except to say that they confiscate about 400,000 doses of methamphetamine about every 48 hours in this one land port. That is where they confiscate it. By most estimates, it is only a minor percentage of all of the illegal drugs crossing the border. So we obviously need more people, technology, and infrastructure to be able to capture people who are crossing the border in various trucks and cars. They are finding ways to hide these drugs that are poisoning our Nation's youth and, really, people of all ages.

So there is a reason for border security. There is a reason to invest in people, technology, and infrastructure. There is a reason for us to have a productive discussion about how we can provide a compassionate, sustainable solution to the children and young adults who came to this country through not their decision but the decisions of their adult guardians.

That is what this bill, the SECURE Act, is setting forth. We are trying to get a productive discussion going with Democrats and Republicans who will come together and recognize that a balanced bill provides for border security, provides a sustainable solution for the DACA population, and get it done before March 5.

There are some people that want to, I think, play a little bit of brinkmanship. They have already set in their mind how they want this bill to look. What worries me about a bill where you use timing, maybe a year-end budget agreement, or some other device to get the bill done, is that that doesn't necessarily produce a bipartisan outcome that you can be sure of is always going to be on the books. Those types of bills--those types of quick ``gotcha'' sort of actions--are oftentimes the bills somebody will try to come back to and repeal or revise.

We want a sustainable solution. We want a solution that is going to work and give certainty to this DACA population for the rest of their lives. I think the provisions of the BRIDGE Act that are now in the SUCCEED Act do that.

I want to thank Senator Lankford. Senator Lankford and I filed another bill. We are full of acronyms here. I don't know, but sometimes they say we are full of other things, but we are full of acronyms. The SUCCEED Act is another bill, and I think that many of its provisions will be considered as we go through the negotiation process to get a bill to the President's desk. The bill that we sponsored is the called SUCCEED Act. It is the Solution for Undocumented Children through Careers, Employment, Education, and Defending our Nation Act. It is a lot like the BRIDGE Act, in that we go to the DACA population, and we know something about the DACA population that I think is oftentimes overlooked. It is a great group of people. There are a little bit less than 2 million. Many of them are working hard, going to school, and serving in our military. They deserve an opportunity and to be provided a way to be able to recognize they are legally present in this country.

That is what I think we are going to accomplish with this SECURE Act. This is what I hope my Democrat colleagues will do, those who actually endorse the BRIDGE Act. There are many of them. Senator Grassley ran through the list. I will not do it again. Let's sit down and solve this problem. Let's accept that there are people at the far left who are going to stand on one issue at the expense of letting March 5 pass and have the DACA population at risk. Let's also tell the people at the far right who want nothing less than full deportation, that that is not going to happen.

Let the people in the center who want to come up with a sustainable, respectful, compassionate solution that is paired up with solid border security measures and interior enforcement, provide a solution for this population. I think my colleagues who have worked together in the working group that Chairman Grassley has led are committed to working with Democrats to come up with a reasonable solution. I know that I am. I know my colleague, Senator Lankford, is.

I hope that everybody will sit down and recognize that, at the end of the day, this is for our Nation's security and the security and the certainty of the DACA population. If we set out about accomplishing those two goals, then I think we will be very successful. Then we can start building on that dialogue for so many other things we need to talk about when it comes to interior enforcement and immigration reform.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, regular order.

Thank you, Mr. President. I thank the Presiding Officer for his comments just before mine, and thank him for presiding so that I can step down and speak briefly.

I wasn't sure if I was going to speak. I don't have any notes. But I was inspired by some of the comments that were made by the Senator from Vermont as I was presiding.

We heard--actually, for those who are visiting the DC area, if you don't get an opportunity to go to any of the wonderful theaters we have here, such as the Kennedy Center, don't worry because you are seeing a lot of theater down here on the Senate floor.

Anybody who would suggest that we are going to come back and cut my mother's Medicare and my mother's Social Security and that of the mothers and brothers and sisters of other people who are depending on that for their livelihood is somewhat involved in political theater.

Some of you were here and probably heard the challenge to have a Republican come down here on the floor and say: Bernie, you are wrong.

Well, the distinguished Senator from Vermont is wrong.

This bill is about actually providing freedom and tax relief to working families and reducing the tax burden on businesses so that the economy will grow and we will have the resources to pay our bills.

I can understand that maybe it is not intentional theater on the part of some of these folks; it may just be because they simply have never done it before. But if you have ever lived in North Carolina or if you have lived in North Carolina since 2011, you know that we did.

I have seen this theater before--from the dais as speaker of the house in the State of North Carolina when we were one of the highest-- the sixth highest tax State in the Nation, with one of the slowest growing economies. We were having a problem paying our Medicaid bills. We were having a problem paying our bills. We had a $2.5 billion structural deficit. I heard the theater on the floor: If you cut taxes, you are going to drive up the deficit. If you cut taxes, you are going to cut Medicaid. If you cut taxes, you are going to cut social services.

I heard it all. Everybody accused us of that. I hit the gavel, and I ratified the bill for tax reform. Guess what happened. We went from being the sixth most taxed State that today is in the top ten best taxed. We went from one of the worst performing State economies to now one of the best performing State economies. We have reduced the

number of people in poverty, and statistically--I mean, we can prove it to you. We do the counts. The number of people who have been lifted out of poverty has increased over the last 3 years. Median incomes have gone up. Job creation has gone up. Our gross domestic product has gone up over the past 5 or 6 years by $80 billion. We were at about $400 billion, and now we are at $480 billion.

So let me tell you how we are going to pay for these tax cuts. We are not going to pay for them by cutting Medicare for seniors. We are going to pay for them through the economic activity that will absolutely occur if we have the courage to fulfill the promise that we made last year to the American people. We are going to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses. We are going to get our tax policy consistent and competitive with nations that are eating our lunch on locating business expansion and having businesses come offshore--away from the United States to more preferable tax jurisdictions, and we are going to change people's lives.

I am motivated to support this plan because I have been in a position of leadership where I had great people in my caucus who had the courage to fulfill a promise that I made if I became speaker of the house. Now we are at a point in time to do the same thing for America that we did for North Carolina. If we do it, it is going to be extraordinary.

Let me reduce it down to an answer I gave to a little boy yesterday. I think he was in fourth grade. I had a Skype video conference with an English as a second language class in an elementary school down in North Carolina. One of the little boys asked me a great question, and it is a question that has never been asked of me. I have been in politics only for about 12 years. But he said: What piece of legislation are you most proud of? What is the thing you are most proud of since you have been in the legislature?

I thought about it. It was a tough question because I can think of many things I have done. But then I went back to this little boy in the classroom, and I said: You know what, buddy, it was something I did back when I was speaker of the North Carolina House. By the way, if any politician tells you ``I did this,'' they are invariably not telling you the truth because you don't get anything done unless the team commits to it. So I, along with a lot of people in North Carolina, decided that your parents could not afford to pay the bills. They were having a difficult time paying the utility bills, their rent, and their groceries, paying for food. So we decided we were going to do something to make sure that government gave your parents more money to make sure you could go to school, to make sure they could pay their bills, to make sure they could have a better paying job. And, buddy, that is the thing I am most proud of. The thing I am most proud of was tax reform that produced results that are indisputable. I have seen the theater before, and it didn't work out too well because it proved to be fiction in North Carolina.

If we have the courage over the next couple of days to take that same vote here, we are going to see the same results for those working families and those job employers in the United States. So I hope all of the Members of this body recognize that we are not going to fund the tax cuts on the backs of people who need the help the most. That is absurd. It is unfair. It is theater. We are going to take care of them, and we are going to take care of everyone else who is relying on us, this caucus, to fulfill the promise we made, get the economy back on track, and start winning more than losing against our international competition. I am completely convinced that the bill that is going to be before us over the end of this week is going to do just that.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia and my colleague from Colorado for their comments--and the future comments of some of my colleagues who are in the class of 2014.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to talk a little bit about facts and fiction and some of the things we will observe here. In fact, I think probably the Kennedy Center is the only place you can go to see a bigger theatrical performance than what you are going to see on this floor over the next couple of weeks, because they are simply not consistent with what we are trying to do here, and I want to talk a little bit about it. Let's start with some of the fiction.

I was just presiding before I came off the dais about 30 minutes ago, and I heard a 30-minute speech from someone who said that they haven't seen the bill, said that it had been passed in the dark of night, that it is not being discussed in committee. But then they went on to have a 30-minute description of why the bill is bad

How could you not have seen something and have such a definitive position on the provisions of the bill? To me, it is just curious.

Here is something that is even more curious. There are so many Members--many of them friends--on the other side of the aisle who are simply making a false claim that we are somehow going to raise taxes on working families, the middle class. Why would that make sense? What on Earth would the voters of the United States and my voters in North Carolina do to me next year if I came out and declared victory because I raised taxes on middle-income and working families? It doesn't make sense, and it has been proven to be false.

The Washington Post has a rating system they use. They call it the Pinocchio system. One Pinocchio means you are probably stretching the truth a little bit; four Pinocchios means there is not a shred of truth in what you are saying. These claims about raising taxes on working families and middle-income families earned four Pinocchios; they are fiction.

What we are trying to do is provide a tax break to the people who need it the most--to the people who are trying to pay their bills, struggling to go to school, actually struggling just to pay the rent. That is what this tax bill is about. This tax cut is about getting the economy back on track so that we can also drive up wages.

Not only do we want to provide you with more money in your pocketbook and in your wallet at the end of the month by reducing your tax burden, but we also want to make it more likely that you are going to make more money, you are going to get a better job, and you are going to have more income at the end of this process. I firmly believe that it will work.

Let's talk about the facts of this plan. The facts are that we have to have tax relief. We have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. There is no way the greatest economy that has ever existed should

be one of the least welcoming and least hospitable to job growth. That is why we have to reduce the corporate tax rate.

We also have to reduce the tax rate on small businesses. Eighty percent of all jobs created in North Carolina are created by small businesses. The people whom the gentleman from Colorado referred to as ``the rich people'' are small business owners who actually file their taxes through their individual income. So perhaps they have a fair amount of revenue, but a lot of it has to go to pay for the business, and a little bit is left behind for them and their families and their employees. We have to reduce the tax burden on small businesses so that they can create more jobs and, hopefully, some day, become very large businesses--hopefully, corporations--creating more and more jobs and more opportunities for more workers.

At the end of the day, the middle-income tax break is going to be somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000 a year. It will vary a little bit from State to State, but that is a lot of money in these very difficult times. More important than that are the opportunities that will be created through economic growth. That is what I will leave you with. I have seen this happen.

First, I have seen the false claims before. They were waged against me when I was the speaker of the house in North Carolina, and we had the courage in the middle of a fiscal crisis to cut taxes and grow jobs. We had all the liberal media, and we had some of my good friends on the other side of the aisle whom I agreed with on many other issues but who disagreed with us on tax reform. But in North Carolina, no one is complaining about the tax reform results. In fact, we have one of the fastest growing State economies in the United States today, after being in the fourth quartile just 5 or 6 years ago. We have seen our median incomes go up, and we have seen a number of people lifted out of poverty at high levels. I know it works.

It is not easy, but it is a promise we made to the American people last year, and it is a promise we are going to keep--this Congress is going to keep--in the coming weeks. When we do this, then we can start working on an economy that can pay down the debt and make sure that these young people who are pages here and the young people here in the gallery right now--you may not know this, but you owe about $70,000, on average, to the Federal Government. That is your share of the national debt. I don't want you to have to pay it back.

I want an economy that is growing, that can ultimately resolve our debt problem. But you can do it only by producing growth, you can do it only by becoming economically competitive, and you can do it only by lifting the tax burden on businesses and working families so that money can flow back through the private economy and out of the coffers in Washington.

I thank my colleagues for their hard work on this bill. I look forward to voting for the bill. I know it is going to produce a result because I have seen it produce a result in my experience as speaker of the house. It will work for America. It will be one of the great things we are going to do in this Congress.

At this point, again, I thank my colleagues. I am going to pass it off to the Senator from Louisiana, Mr. Kennedy.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all postcloture time be yielded back.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I appreciate the kind words of Senator Hoeven and his affinity toward veterans. I am here to talk about our veterans as well.

I come at it from three different perceptions. I chair the Military Personnel Subcommittee in the Senate Armed Services Committee. We are trying to work on things to make sure that when somebody goes out of Active Duty into veteran status, we make it as productive as it can be, making sure they enter back fully into the workforce, the education opportunities, and all the kinds of opportunities that are afforded them as a result of serving in our armed services.

I also want to take a minute to talk about the person who served but never wore a uniform, and that is the husband or the wife or the children whom, on this Veterans Day, we should also thank.

A lot of times, when I have an opportunity--I live in Charlotte, NC, where we have nearly 800,000 veterans. It is one of the largest populations of any one State--I make a point to get to the airport a little bit early so I can go up to the USO and just spend a moment meeting with people who are there transitioning from Active Duty and veterans to thank them for their service. Oftentimes, I will thank a man or woman, and they will say: I didn't serve; my husband or my wife did. I will say: By virtue of your being a military spouse, you served, as did your children.

On this Veterans Day, let's make sure we expand those thank-yous to include everybody who is affected when somebody is deployed in a dangerous place or even serving in peacetime. It is a great sacrifice, and it is one we should always show our gratitude for.

As I said, in North Carolina, we have about 800,000 veterans. We also have one of the highest military concentrations of any State. It is the home of the Global Response Force at Fort Bragg, with over 65,000 men and women serving and 38 generals. You go down closer to the coast and you get to Jacksonville, NC, where we have Camp Lejeune. There is a debate over the pronunciation so I will pronounce it both ways, but there we have nearly 45 percent of the Marine Corps. Many people don't realize that. Stationed out of North Carolina, we could go to Seymour Johnson, we could go to New River, or go to Cherry Point and see these men and women serving every day--and the ones who served before them who are now part of our veteran population. We should thank them all for their current service or their past service.

I say to the Presiding Officer, the Senator from Arkansas, I want to thank you for your service because you served bravely in combat positions before entering the Senate. That is another amazing thing about the veterans. They continue to serve. If you go to a coffee shop, you may see a huddle of veterans around somebody who is organizing the event. That is probably a veteran making sure veterans are speaking with each other and working through some of the challenges some of them have when they are put in very difficult situations or, if you go into a community center, you will almost always see a veteran there continuing to serve, even after they ended their Active-Duty service.

On Veterans Day, we should make it a point to go to every person we know who is a veteran and thank them. We should make sure that everybody we see in uniform--I will be at the airport probably Thursday evening or Friday. I will make it a point to go to every single person I see in uniform and thank them for their service. We owe that to them for all they do for us.

I think, on the one hand, we need to think about veterans, especially on Veterans Day, but as Senator Hoeven said, we need to think about them every day. As a Senator, the way we do that is not just by thinking but by doing. What more can I do in my capacity on the Veterans' Affairs Committee or in my capacity on the Senate Armed Services Committee to make service easier and safer? After they move out of Active status to veteran status, what more can we do for them? There are a lot of things we can do; one is to make sure they get an opportunity to have a job that, in many cases, will leverage the skills they learned when they were in the military into private sector jobs.

Mr. President, you and I sponsored a bill--the VALOR Act--that will be brought up before the Senate that helps to actually expedite the process of having those who have served in the military to get hired. It makes it easier for employers to put them in apprenticeship positions, where maybe they leverage some of the skills they learned while on Active Duty but get them in good-paying jobs to support themselves and their families.

There are a number of other things we have to do for others who are veterans that I think are particularly important. When we talk about post-traumatic stress or talk about traumatic brain injury, those are, in some cases, invisible wounds of war. We need to make sure and understand why it is that nearly every day 20 veterans take their lives through suicide. To what extent could that be something we just simply didn't know about that veteran? Why are they disproportionately more likely to do it? Many of them, incidentally--the veterans today who have this disproportionately high amount of suicide incidents--are veterans from the Vietnam war. We need to figure out how to reach back to that population--a significant number of whom never seek VA medical services--to provide them with the resources they need to work through these sorts of challenges.

We need to make sure healthcare is available across the map. We need to recognize that challenge in North Carolina is vastly different than the same challenge in, say, South Dakota.

We have a State population of 10 million people--almost approaching 1 million veterans. When you include the spouses and families, it is well above it. We need to make sure they are getting healthcare and services where it is most convenient for them. I think some of that will be providing them with a choice to go to the doctor who makes the most sense for them. A lot of it will be providing a brick-and-mortar presence of the VA so they can be

among other people who are actually dealing with the same sorts of circumstances, and they are actually being served by--about half the population in our veterans hospitals and our healthcare centers are veterans themselves.

This is a very important part of the broader solution we need to provide to our veterans as we continue to build a relationship with them for the rest of their lives. We will never finish all the work we should do. We will keep on making installments into a debt we can never repay, but what we need to do on November 11 is support our veterans by showing our gratitude and our thanks for their service. On this Veterans Day, make an extra effort to thank a veteran. Thank a veteran spouse. Thank the child of a veteran for their service to this great Nation. We will never be able to fully repay the debt we owe them, but we can make a lot of installments as individual citizens and as Members of this Congress. As long as I am in the Senate, that is what I intend to do.

I say to the Presiding Officer, thank you, again, for your service, and thank you to all the men and women who served before.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I fully associate myself with the comments just made by the Senator from the great State of Alaska. We have to get to work here.

Mr. President, today I wish to recognize Robert Higdon, Jr., and congratulate him on his appointment as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina.

Bobby earned both his law degree and undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University and has a decorated career in public service and in private practice. Prior to law school, he worked for then-Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole and for Senator John East. Upon graduating from law school, Bobby served as a law clerk to Judge Eugene H. Phillips on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. After working for several years in private practice, he began a successful career as a Federal prosecutor.

From 1991 until 2015, Bobby served in the U.S. Attorney's Office and the U.S. Department of Justice in a number of roles, including chief of the criminal division in the Eastern District of North Carolina. He has vast experience investigating, prosecuting, and advising on criminal cases, ranging from violent crime and drug trafficking to white collar and public integrity crimes.

Aside from his sterling legal career, Bobby is an active member of his community, inspiring and helping others. He serves his church as a volunteer and a Sunday School teacher, and he has mentored the next generation of lawyers by coaching in various mock trial competitions. His example reminds us that our roles as public servants extend beyond the office.

It was an honor to recommend Bobby Higdon to President Trump. Anyone who works with him knows he is a dedicated professional who has extensive legal knowledge and expertise. In addition, he is widely respected in the law enforcement community, and these relationships will be incredibly valuable as he takes on this important role. Bobby understands the challenges and issues facing North Carolina, and I know that he will continue to lead the U.S. Attorney's Office with dignity and respect.

Mr. President, while Senator Enzi is on the floor, I want to thank him for his leadership in the Budget Committee and taking us through this very important vote today.

I want to talk a little bit in terms that maybe people can understand what is going on here and what will be going on over the next few days.

What we are doing right now is passing a budget. Our budget is no different than your household budget, when you sit down and you figure out, over some period of time, how much money you have and how much money you need to spend, where maybe you need to spend more and maybe you need to spend less. That is all we are doing with this budget.

This budget is not the tax reform bill. That will come after we pass a budget, but if we don't pass this budget, there is no possible way we can actually pass tax reform. That is why I support this budget. That is why I will work to defeat any amendments that will prevent this budget from being passed. Then we can start having an honest discussion about what we need to do around tax reform.

I know the Senator from South Carolina did a great job, as he always does on the floor, talking about why he supports tax reform. He is somebody we should really listen to. He is somebody who came up through truly humble means. You have people come on this floor and they talk about how the people who are supporting tax reform are just doing this for the billionaires and the rich.

I would encourage you to go out to the internet and take a look at Senator Scott's story and tell me if that is somebody predisposed to helping the rich. He is here to help the little guy. He is here to get the economy going so people can get back to work. He is here to actually create opportunities for wages to go up. He is here to actually do what we have been promising for 20 years and haven't done-- almost 30 years.

Over that span of time, America has lost traction as the greatest economy that has ever existed. This tax reform measure, after we pass the budget, is to really get to a point to where States like West Virginia--you heard Senator Capito talk about 95 percent of the jobs created in West Virginia are small businesses. How could anybody sincerely come to this floor and say Senator Capito is only supporting this for the wealthy corporations? They just don't exist in any large number in West Virginia.

In my State, 80 percent of the jobs that are created are small businesses as well. So how anybody could suggest that there are those of us coming to the floor just talking about tax breaks for the rich and for corporations really need to go back and look at our States. Look at who is struggling and whom we are here trying to help. We get to the tax reform bill after we pass the budget. That is why I am going to support the budget.

Now, to some of my colleagues on this side of the aisle, the Founding Fathers did strive to create a more perfect Union, but they created an imperfect democratic process. This is the sausage factory we call democracy. It is not intended to be perfect, nor does it ever produce anything that is perfect legislation--something that is done and you never come back to it.

Those who come to this floor and say: Unless I can have that perfect, I am not willing to support the good, they really need to go back and rethink why they are here. We are here to start fulfilling promises. You don't do it by coming onto this floor and saying: I really want to do tax reform but only if it is my perfect solution. You start by making progress. Then you build on that progress. You start getting the economy to grow, and you use those resources to better fund the most challenged people we have in this Nation, use those resources to grow the economy and give younger people an opportunity to realize the American dream the way I did back in the 1980s.

That is why we have to pass this budget. That is why we have to set aside our personal preferences for something far better than probably will ever come out of this Chamber but something good that begins to fulfill the promises we made to the American people.

When we get past the budget, we are going to do something called vote-arama tomorrow. Vote-arama is an interesting process, mainly because it is a bunch of votes that don't mean anything. There are going to be people who come up here, and they will file a bill. It will go up or down. Even if it goes up, it doesn't have the force of law.

Tomorrow, if you are here, it is a lot like going to good theater. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the final vote, and that is the vote on the budget. That is something every single person in this Chamber should support. Then we need to move on to tax reform that has a meaningful, lasting impact for the poorest, most challenged people in this country. It is not about tax breaks for the rich. It is not about tax breaks for corporations. It is about small businesses in West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina or across this Nation that need help. It is about those employees that, if we do this right, will be making more money. They will have more money to pay their bills. It is about making a conscious decision about how much money we can spend on Medicaid and to be absolutely certain we can fulfill the promise to people challenged by it. It is about fulfilling the promise to people on Social Security and Medicare, to make sure those programs can fulfill the promises we made.

This isn't about absolute cuts to Medicaid. This is about how much it should grow every single year to be absolutely certain those programs are going to be there 10, 15, and 20 years from now. If you have an opportunity to sit up in the Gallery and pay attention to these words, go back and really fact check some of what is being said. Go back and look at the backgrounds of some of the Members on this side of the aisle who support tax reform. They grew up as the little guy. They grew up in challenged situations. They represent States where the vast majority of the people in those States are, themselves, challenged. Anybody who can sincerely come down here and say this is about the rich, this is about the corporations, come spend time in North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, States across this Nation. I come from the Southeast, but they are the ones that come out of my mouth.

I worry about all those little businesses. I worry about all those challenged people. This budget lays the groundwork for us to actually put meaningful policy in place for the first time in about 30 years that is sincerely attempting to fulfill the promises the politicians make in this Chamber every single day.

I hope all of our Members will come down here and accept the fact that perfect doesn't happen, but some good can happen. Good begins by passing this budget, and it continues by passing tax reform that will help the most challenged among us.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak today. Like last week, I didn't plan on speaking on this subject, so my staff is probably wondering once again what their boss is going to say. But I was thinking that maybe we could translate a little bit of what we are trying to do with tax reform, because we talk about tax rates, exemptions, exceptions, and simplification--all this stuff that is important because it gets baked into the bill--but we don't spend a lot of time explaining why we are trying to do what we are doing.

The last time we had real, meaningful, impactful tax reform was back in 1986. That is when Republicans and Democrats came together and decided that the stagnant economy that I grew up in--I graduated from high school in 1978. I didn't immediately go to college. I moved away from home when I was 17 years old, and I was working. It was an economy that was not unlike today's. In many respects, it may have been a little bit worse. The environment was the same. Iran was behaving badly, and Russia was behaving badly. We had sort of the same sort of global environment that we have today. We had the threats that we have to confront every single day, and we had the threat to the future of a generation. I mean, literally, people had no earthly idea, if they were getting an education, whether they would be able to get a job because the job-creation numbers when I was 26 years old were terrible. People were worried about whether they could pay for college.

So why are we doing tax reform? We are doing tax reform because it is time for the American economy to grow back to what it is capable of doing, what it has done in the past.

We need tax reform so we can create economic expansion that lets us pay down our debt, which many people in the military say is the single greatest threat to our national security.

We need tax reform and we need to grow the economy because we owe it to this generation to have the same opportunities that I did.

It can be done, but we have to do it probably through reconciliation because right now, even though many of the proposals that we are putting forward--the tax rate and the kinds of policies we are putting forward have been supported by our colleagues and many of my friends on the other side of the aisle. For some reason, they don't make sense anymore. They made sense back in 1986 when Democrats and Republicans joined together to do tax reform. If you were in your midtwenties then, you saw prosperity unlike anything we have seen right up to today. That was the last time we saw great growth in our economy. We need to get back to providing those same sorts of opportunities.

People will tell you that we are not giving a cut to the little guy or the working man. Well, one thing you don't see when you see the percentage rates that we are talking about on individual tax rates that we are targeting is that there will be tens of thousands of people who will pay zero taxes. There is a actually a zero tax bracket. There are people who, because of the exceptions and exemptions that we are proposing, will actually fall below having a Federal tax liability. We need to talk about that.

We need to recognize that we have to provide relief to the entire spectrum, from the businesses that hire people and create jobs to the working families and the people who don't make enough where we can take any more away from them because they need it to pay their bills. They need to pay their electric bills, their utility bills, their school tuition, and all the other things that working families are struggling to do today, just as I was struggling to do back in 1986.

So I hope this Congress will deliver on the promise we made last year to cut taxes, to get this economy moving again, and to provide the same opportunities for the generation going to school and the people who aren't in school, who are struggling to make a living--the same opportunities that I got when I was that 26-year-old back in 1986. We can do it. I know we can do it because we have done it before. It is a promise we made and a promise we need to keep.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.