Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rarely rise three times in the same day to give a speech. This is a special day for me and maybe for the Senate. But I want to assure my colleagues that the concerns many of us have been expressing about the current chaos at the Environmental Protection Agency and the nomination of Andrew Wheeler--the person who could predictably replace the EPA Administrator--are not ours alone. Editorial boards around the country, including those from newspapers in Republican-leaning States, are expressing concerns regarding EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's recent slew of ethical lapses--it would be charitable to call them lapses. It is these failings by Mr. Pruitt that Andrew Wheeler will be expected to address if he is confirmed by the Senate.

I can assure the citizens of all these States, the editorial boards of all these papers, and all my colleagues that the Environment and Public Works Committee has not considered the nomination of Andrew Wheeler with these ethical failings in mind. Mr. Wheeler has been nominated to serve as the individual who will oversee day-to-day operations of an EPA currently in chaos. We have had no opportunity to ask Mr. Wheeler about the Administrator's questionable behavior, nor have we had a chance to ask him how he plans to right a ship that has so clearly lost its way.

I am sobered but not shocked to read what people who have their fingers on

the pulse in their communities have to say about the current leadership in the Environmental Protection Agency. It is truly maddening and deeply sad to see the indictments on an agency that we in Congress have vested with the responsibility of protecting our children, supporting our elders, and ensuring a world in which we and all the life around us can thrive.

What are newspapers around the country saying about the leadership of the Environmental Protection Agency these days?

As a kid growing up in Virginia, I never read the Virginian-Pilot in Danville and Roanoke. This is what they said in Virginia through a newspaper called the Virginian-Pilot on April 6, 2018, about a week ago. The headline of the editorial is ``EPA's Pruitt a terrible choice.''

They said:

Short of nominating an actual oil derrick or a landfill to

the post, President Donald Trump couldn't have done worse

than tapping Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental

Protection Agency.

They went on to say:

And yet, it's unlikely that his sinister approach to

managing the EPA will be Pruitt's undoing. Rather, it's

almost certain to be a comparatively banal brand of

corruption that is infuriatingly commonplace in the highest

echelons of the Trump administration.

The editorial goes on to say:

Having a director of the Environmental Protection Agency

wholly uninterested in protecting the environment is a

national embarrassment, and Americans deserve much better

than the worst option available.

The next quote comes from Charleston, WV, and it is from the West Virginia Gazette-Mail. It is focused more on a favorite Presidential theme.

Donald Trump campaign crowds loved to chant ``Drain the

swamp!'' But if ever there was a political swamp creature,

it's Scott Pruitt, the man Trump picked to head the U.S.

Environmental Protection Agency.

On the issue of favoring his fellow Oklahomans on the EPA staff, the Charleston Gazette-Mail editorial continued:

Despite the White House telling him not to give large

raises to two employees--

I think one raise was $29,000 and another was $56,000 per year--

--who followed him from Oklahoma, Pruitt did it anyway. He

used a loophole in the Safe Drinking Water Act that's

supposed to let the EPA hire experts quickly in an emergency,

not give taxpayer-funded raises to political lackeys.

Nor did the Administrator's security concerns pass muster. The Charleston Gazette-Mail went on:

Pruitt is clearly very worried about his security; he has

tripled the size of his security detail, and is the first EPA

administration to have 24/7 security--again, at taxpayer

expense. That security detail includes some EPA agents who

would otherwise be investigating environmental crimes, rather

than protecting their snowflake boss.

Those are the newspaper's words, not mine.

The editorial goes on to say:

Pruitt's predecessors, Gina McCarthy and Lisa Jackson--who

were demonized repeatedly by West Virginia politicians, among

others--flew coach, with a much smaller security presence.

The Charleston Gazette-Mail editorial concludes:

There are many reasons why Scott Pruitt shouldn't be

leading the EPA, primarily that he doesn't seem to believe in

science and is more interested in helping big business,

than, you know, protecting the environment. But his

obvious belief that taxpayer money and resources are given

to him for his personal benefit is a big reason, as well.

Let's go down to Texas. The Houston Chronicle weighed in on this. I don't know if we have a poster on this one, but here we go. This is what they said at the Houston Chronicle on April 6, this month. The headline of the editorial is ``The time has come for EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to resign.''

It reads in part:

On the next episode of the Trump administration's reality

show, the latest character the President needs to vote off

the island is Environmental Protection Agency Administrator

Scott Pruitt.

Indeed, it's hard to figure out how Pruitt has survived so

far into this season. The host of this show says he wants to

drain the swamp, but the EPA boss is so deep in the muck, he

could play the creature from the Black Lagoon.

The Houston Chronicle concluded:

So Pruitt seems destined to become the next character cut

from Trump's chaotic reality show. Dropping this bad actor

can't happen fast enough.

Even in Mr. Pruitt's home State, some people are fed up with his antics. The Tulsa World editorialized in this way--this was on April 6. The title is ``With a controversial agenda, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt must live above suspicion.''

In part, the editorial reads:

Some of the latest accusations are embarrassing. He should

have known better, and he may pay a heavy consequence for

them.

The paper goes on:

From his first day in office, Pruitt has been under the

microscope of scrutiny from those who disagree with the

president's thinking on environmental issues. If that's not

entirely fair, it also should have been obvious to Pruitt

that he would have to live a life that was above suspicion.

In ways that have nothing to do with money, he couldn't

afford to fly first class.

The second Oklahoma newspaper, the Edmund Sun, had more particular advice for the President, along these lines:

Donald Trump has never needed help miring himself in

controversy, and that was true before he ever moved into the

White House. But he could do himself a favor, and gain some

begrudging respect from detractors, by drop-kicking Scott

Pruitt to the curb.

The fact that he defied a White House decision should by

itself make Pruitt ripe for termination. Staffers and Cabinet

members far more ethical than Pruitt have been shown the

door. Trump should cut him loose, and get rid of the rope and

the scissors he used to make the snip.

Under the best of circumstances and even in the most accountable administrations, consideration of a nominee to serve as EPA Deputy Administrator is a huge responsibility for this body. As the Miami Herald rightly points out, this is no normal circumstance and surely not a normal EPA that Mr. Wheeler would enter. He would have to be ready for a job that none of us can say at this time that he is ready to tackle--cleaning up a huge mess at EPA.

The Miami Herald notes:

The flurry of ethical questions surrounding Environmental

Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is now a

blizzard. The emerging picture is of a chief environmental

officer not only fighting a war on science as he promotes oil

and gas interests but also arrogantly betraying the public

trust.

The Miami Herald concludes:

Time and again, Trump has accepted arrogance and

incompetence on his staff as long as loyalty remains beyond

question.

Meanwhile, in Akron, OH, in its editorial entitled ``Deep in the Swamp at the EPA,'' on April 8, the Akron Beacon Journal notes that some folks in the White House knew just how bad Scott Pruitt was.

John Kelly showed the right instinct.

John Kelly is the Chief of Staff.

According to news accounts, the White House chief of staff

advised President Trump that Scott Pruitt, the administrator

of the Environmental Protection Agency, needed to step down

in view of his ethical misdeeds and spending excesses.

The Beacon Journal concludes:

Scott Pruitt should go. This isn't about policymaking,

dismaying and damaging as the direction of the agency has

been. The problem is his conduct in office. Pruitt has abused

the public trust, in the way he has spent taxpayer dollars,

in the perception he invites.

Apparently, Mr. Pruitt is not showing folks in the Show Me State what they want to see in an EPA Administrator either. In an editorial on April 7, 2018, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said:

There are many good reasons why President Donald Trump

should fire Scott Pruitt as administrator of the

Environmental Protection Agency. Top on our list are his

multiple failures to do his job protecting the environment.

He's gone so far as to say that if global warming is real, it

might be a good thing.

Do you know what. I wholeheartedly agree with the St. Louis Post- Dispatch.

In conclusion, I share these editorials because I think they illustrate the situation that Mr. Wheeler will face should he be confirmed, and that is a very difficult situation. As the No. 2 person at EPA, Mr. Wheeler will be responsible for fullfilling the Agency's mission and doing so in a way that earns, once again, the public's trust. There is a long way to go to regain that trust, and Mr. Wheeler will have a Herculean task in front of him to help the Administrator do so, should he be confirmed today.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak about title XI of divisions S of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018, H.R. 1625. Title XI of Division S, the Fair Agricultural Reporting Methods Act, or the FARM Act is identical to the text of S. 2421, which was introduced on February 13, 2018, and which was referred to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, where I serve as ranking member. I am proud to be an original cosponsor of S. 2421.

The Environment and Public Works Committee held two legislative hearings on the text of S. 2421. The first was on S. 2421 as introduced, in the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Superfund, Waste Management, and Regulatory Oversight on March 8, 2018. The second

hearing was held by the full committee on March 14, 2018, on a committee draft of legislation, the ``Agriculture Creates Real Employment (ACRE) Act.'' The text of S. 2421 was included in the committee draft of the ACRE Act, as section 3.

S. 2421 exempts most farms from the hazardous substance release reporting requirements under section 103 of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, CERCLA, for air emissions from animal waste, but leaves intact reporting requirements under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, EPCRA. The FARM Act also preserves reporting requirements and enforcement authority under State and local laws, as neither CERCLA nor EPCRA would preempt such requirements.

As I said during those hearings, I believe our country's environmental laws serve our entire Nation, including our farmers, quite well, but I recognize that sometimes environmental requirements can be complex and confusing to those who farm, especially when these rules suddenly change.

This is what happened in April 2017 when the DC Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated an EPA rule from 2008, which exempted all farms in the Nation from reporting requirements for hazardous air emissions from animal waste under CERCLA.

That same rule also exempted many farms from reporting requirements under section 304 of EPCRA, but left in place reporting requirements for large concentrated animal feeding operations, known as CAFOs. This is because EPA received numerous comments from local officials and the public in support of having farms report these emissions. Since January 2009, EPA has required large CAFOs to report their emissions of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide from animal waste under section 304 of EPCRA.

With the court's decision to vacate the 2008 rule, all farms that exceeded releases of 100 pounds in a 24-hour period of ammonia or hydrogen sulfide were now subject to reporting requirements under section 103 of CERCLA and under section 304 of EPCRA. Farms had no experience with CERCLA reporting, because the 2008 rule exempted all farms from reporting under section 103 of that statute. The FARM Act provides a statutory exemption to the reporting requirements under section 103 because the DC Circuit found that EPA did not have the authority to exempt farms from these releases. This restores the CERCLA reporting exemption under which farmers have operated since 2009.

Reporting requirements under EPCRA have been quite different. As I noted before, the Bush administration chose to only exempt some farms from reporting releases of extremely hazardous substances from animal waste under section 304 of EPCRA, and since 2009, large CAFOs have been successfully reporting these releases to their State emergency response commissions and to their local emergency planning committees. The DC Circuit vacated the rule that exempted farms that weren't large CAFOs from EPCRA reporting requirements under section 304.

One thing I worked hard on with Senators Fischer and Barrasso as we were developing the FARM Act was to ensure that, at the same time we exempted farms from hazardous substance reporting requirements under section 103 of CERCLA, we chose to make no changes to how extremely hazardous substances should be reported under EPCRA. We heard testimony from multiple witnesses during both of our hearings on this point, namely that this legislation did not change reporting requirements for releases of extremely hazardous substances under EPCRA. We also heard testimony from a local government official about the ways that he and his constituents would use the information in these reports.

Another important aspect of the FARM Act is that it in no way modifies any of EPA's response or remedial authorities under CERCLA, nor does it in any way limit or reduce liability associated with a release from any facility, which of course includes farms. This fact is made explicit in section 3 of S. 2421 and in section 1103 of H.R. 1625, division S, title XI.

I want to thank Senators Fischer and Barrasso for working with me and agreeing to not amend EPCRA in S. 2421, and similarly in title XI of division S of H.R. 1625. That was critical for many Members on the Democratic side who have repeatedly heard concerns from State and local officials, the public health experts, and other members of these communities who have the right to know about what is in their air.

Finally, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a Congressional Research Service memorandum titled ``Supplemental Analysis: Fair Agricultural Reporting Method Act/FARM Act (S. 2421).'' As I have already noted, the text of the FARM Act in division S, title XI, of the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 1625, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018, is identical to S. 2421. Therefore, the analysis contained in the CRS memo on S. 2421 applies equally to the language in the omnibus. There is additional analysis on the FARM Act by CRS that is part of the hearing records on S. 2421 and on the ACRE Act.

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

Mr. President, we are here today to discuss what we call an omnibus bill. I know that ``omnibus'' is another funny-sounding word that we use sometimes here in Washington, but it simply means a bill that covers a lot of topics.

There are provisions in the omnibus legislation that deal with everything from homeland security to the environment to veterans and science, just to name a few. It is particularly fitting that we are discussing an appropriations bill that covers such a wide range of topics, as I come to the floor to recognize the service of a member of our staff who has worked on most of the policies covered in the omnibus legislation--maybe all of them.

Gabrielle Batkin, seated to my left, will probably wish that I wasn't doing this right now, but there is no doubt that she deserves to be recognized for her more than 20 years of hard work in the U.S. Senate. For as long as I have known her, Gabrielle has been an incredibly gracious person--kind, easy with praise, making sure that her own staff and the staff across the aisle were appropriately recognized for their efforts. Now I think she deserves some recognition of her own.

To all of the young staff members who may be watching this right now or to those who aspire to be staff members of the Senate someday, I would present Gabrielle Batkin as a shining example of what it means to be an exceptional staffer and a true public servant.

Every now and then we hear the term ``nameless, faceless bureaucrat.'' This is not a nameless, faceless bureaucrat. This is a beautiful public servant. She works tirelessly and really believes in making government work better for the people that it serves.

Gabrielle and I first started working together back in 2014, when she came to lead my team on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee when I served as its chairman. Then, a little over a year ago, she seamlessly transitioned to her current role as staff director for the minority on the Environment and Public Works Committee. This encapsulates just a fraction of her service.

For over a decade, Gabrielle served as an appropriations staff member to former Senator Barbara Mikulski. I think she was the No. 2 person on Barbara's appropriations team. Gabrielle started on the Appropriations Committtee's Subcommittees on Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development and then moved on to the Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee, where she handled everything from NASA to the grasses on the Chesapeake Bay.

Before that, she served in the office of the late Senator from New Jersey, Frank Lautenberg. She also worked on the House side for Congressman Frank Pallone from New Jersey and also served on the Senate Budget Committee.

Gabrielle has worked on everything from blue crabs to the Hubble telescope to cybersecurity and Central America. Those who know her will confirm that few people can shift between issues or committees as gracefully as she does, while also delivering results every step of the way. The day-to-day functions of the Federal Government are possible because there are people like Gabrielle Batkin who toil away behind the scenes making sure the hard work gets done for the American people.

She has been a tenacious and effective leader on my staff, but she also has what I like to call the ``heart of a servant.'' Even as the boss, Gabrielle is in the trenches when things get tough or hectic around here, and she always takes time to make sure that those who work hard for her are doing OK. Her incredible work ethic, combined with her humility, means that she can be briefing Members of Congress on complex policies one minute and helping an overwhelmed junior staffer staple packets the next. That is just who Gabrielle is.

No matter how stressful her high-pressure career in the Senate was, Gabrielle never let it take her away from her most important job; that is, being the mother to three young men who are up in the Galleries tonight:

Henry, Will, and Charlie. She has always said to me: ``My most important job is being a mom,'' and she is a darn good one. All of her family are up in the Galleries--not all of them, but some of the most important ones--her three sons and her husband Josh of 20 years and her sister Erin, who is, I understand, not just a sister but a great friend, a great aunt, and just a wonderful support system for Gabrielle during the times she has needed it.

I want to thank the three boys and Josh for sharing your mom and your wife with all of the people of our country, and I want to thank Erin for being just a terrific sister and supporter.

A few years back, Gabrielle brought her oldest son Henry to our staff holiday party at the Buena Vista in New Castle, DE. At the time I was talking with Henry, I think he was 12, and I asked him to tell us one thing his mom taught him. Henry told us that his mom tells him all the time that as long as they try to do their best in everything he and his brother do, that is always good enough for her. Think about that. As long as he and his brother do their best, that is always good enough for their mom. She just wants to make sure they do their best.

She has always given us her best for all these years--20 years and counting. I am immensely grateful to Gabrielle for her service to this institution, for her service to the American people, and for her indispensable counsel to me over the past 4 years that I have been fortunate enough to work with her--I like to say ``to work for her.'' She is a great boss and a wonderful friend. I have learned a lot from her and treasure her and her friendship.

While we are sad to see her go, I am excited for her new adventures to come, and I wish her and her family--her husband Josh, and her boys, Henry, Will, and Charlie--all the best in this next chapter of their lives. I know her boys are her biggest fans and are so proud of the work she has done here in the Senate. I promise you, she is going to keep making you guys proud.

I will close with this. Every now and then throughout our lives, we meet people and sometimes are even fortunate enough to work with them-- people who are just a joy to be with, people who make our days brighter and our workload lighter. I know I speak for so many people when I say that Gabrielle is just that kind of person.

We had breakfast today in the Senate Dining Room. When we walked out, going through the Capitol Building back to our offices in the Hart Building and the Dirksen Building, we passed so many people she knew, people who knew her by name. I am the only person who calls her Gabrielle, which is her real name. Everybody else calls her Gabby. The janitors, custodians, people running the elevators, the pages--she is Gabby to them.

Sometimes people rise to senior and leadership positions, whether they happen to be elected or members of our staff, and maybe forget where they came from, or maybe they are not the same person they were when they started. She is probably smarter. She started out really smart, but she has gotten even better informed and just a more knowledgeable member of our team as time has gone by.

I will go back to when I interviewed her for the position of staff director on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee when I was chairman. We talked about growing up, going to college, and her influences as a young woman. As it turned out, she went to school in the Midwest, Bradley in Peoria.

I said: Did you ever work while you were going to school?

I worked a couple jobs while I was going to Ohio State. ROTC. Midshipman. I had some help from the Navy. As it turned out, she worked full time while she was going to school at Bradley--not that she volunteered this, but I found out later on that she worked full-time for several of those years that she was an undergraduate--I think at the Social Security Administration--and carried a full load and a straight 4.0 average. I think that is amazing. As soon as she said that, I thought, I should be working for you, sister. But she has let me work with her, and we have had a great time and a great run.

I know I speak for the other members of the Environment and Public Works Committee who have an opportunity to see staff--Democrats and Republicans--and a chance to see her handiwork and the magic she brought to the committee. She had a good 1-plus years as a staff director when I was privileged to chair Homeland Security, and everybody--Tom Coburn, my colleague from Oklahoma, and a whole bunch of other people--certainly know her work and salute her.

In the Navy, when people do an especially great job, we have two words that we say: Bravo Zulu. I certainly say those words this evening to Gabrielle. We also have a saying when people are ready to weigh anchor and sail off into the sunrise and go on to their next challenge or next assignment. We always like to say: Fair winds and following seas. I say those words this evening somewhat reluctantly but with a great deal of affection and respect.

Gabrielle, we love you, we will miss you, and we will leave the light on.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, it is with great pleasure that I rise on behalf of the Delaware delegation to honor the exemplary service of Tony Pratt, administrator of the Shoreline and Waterway Management section within the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. Tony has devoted his life's work to preserving our coastal communities and documenting its beauty through his talented photography.

Tony, sometimes known affectionately around Delaware as the Sand Man, is an expert on natural coastal infrastructure including beaches, dunes, and wetlands. He has ensured that Delaware has safe, clean, and broad beaches for its nearly 3 million visitors a year to enjoy. As a leader of the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association, he has an understanding of the complexities facing the coastal resources not just in Delaware, but around our great Nation. He is so well respected in his field that, in February 2017, he testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works on the value of beaches, dunes, wetlands, and other natural coastal infrastructure.

Tony has been a key figure in turning around Delaware's beaches from being in a state of chronic erosion in the 1990s, to today serving as a top tourist destination and providing protection during the strongest of storms. These storms have continuously battered the coastline and back bays; however, Delaware coastal communities have fared better than most due to beach renourishment projects and mitigation work in the back bays. Tony has led these efforts not only to try and prepare for the next superstorm, but learn from past storms in order to keep our roads, bridges, homes, businesses, and animal habitats safe from rising waters.

You would be hard pressed to find him behind a desk, especially during a storm. You are more likely to find him standing in the water, investigating the environment, and possibly even taking photos of the beautiful land and sea. He is there for Delaware any time of the day and night, on weekends and holidays. He is personally vested in his work and has somehow maintained that same level of passion for nearly four decades.

On behalf of Delaware Senator Chris Coons and our Congresswoman, Lisa Blunt Rochester, I wholeheartedly thank Tony Pratt for his service to Delaware. His model leadership and dedication has served to improve our coastal communities and Delawareans' quality of life. We offer Tony our sincere congratulations on a job well done and wish him well as he embarks on the next chapter of his career.

When people in the Navy accomplish extraordinary things in their lives, we say, ``Bravo Zulu!'' Today we are in your debt, and we are deeply grateful, as well, to your family for sharing with the people of Delaware and America for all these years a very good man.

Mr. President, I have come to the floor to talk about the legislation before us, which is the banking legislation that has been reported out of the Banking Committee on a bipartisan vote and awaits our attention here today.

Mr. President, like my colleague from Washington State, I will also speak briefly to the issue that is being raised in States across America and in schools across America, where students are demonstrating their support and their solidarity with the folks in Parkland, FL, where 17 kids were lost earlier this year.

My dad was a hunter, grew up in West Virginia. I was born in West Virginia and grew up in Virginia. I bought my first BB gun when I was 10 years old, and I still have the shotgun that my grandfather gave me just before he died, when I was just a pup of a teenager. In my family, we are big believers in Second Amendment rights--to own and bear arms. We are also big advocates of using common sense with respect to weapons.

My dad was not only a hunter, he was also a gun collector. He would buy and sell guns to other people whom he knew. From the time my sister and I were little kids, my dad would always say to us, ``Just use some common sense.'' He said it a lot to us when we were growing up. We must not have had much of it because he said it very often. My dad said that it didn't make common sense for somebody who had serious mental health problems or a felony record to be able to go to a gun show and buy a weapon. It also doesn't make a lot of sense for people who can't fly on airplanes because they are on a terrorist watch list to be able to buy guns. My dad would have said that didn't make a lot of sense.

What is happening across the country is that the kids are leading us. In a verse in the Bible, it reads that the ``child shall lead them.'' I think that is really what is going on here, and I think States are already starting to address this issue in a more constructive way than we have done thus far.

My hope is that the children will lead us and that the States will lead us as well. Maybe we will be able to come to agreement on some of these issues that are respectful of our Second Amendment rights in the Constitution but that are also consistent with the kind of common sense that my dad always talked about with respect to everything, including the buying and selling of weapons.

Mr. President, I remember standing on this floor--I think it was about 8 years ago--when we debated the Affordable Care Act. That was at a time when we were spending about 18 percent of the GDP for healthcare in this country--18 percent. The Japanese were spending 8 percent. They had better results in Japan for their healthcare than we had, and they covered everybody. Think about that. We had been spending 18 percent, and they had been spending 8 percent. They had gotten better results in healthcare--in life longevity for adults and in lower rates of infant mortality. They covered everybody. When people went to bed in this country at that time, 40 million people went to bed without having any healthcare coverage. I think most of us realized at the time that that was not a good thing. I used to say that the Japanese can't be that smart and we can't be that dumb.

We passed the Affordable Care Act. There was a lot of debate and a lot of amendments offered in committees, including in the Finance Committee on which I served, Republican amendments and Democratic amendments. As we know, the final vote here on the floor was not a bipartisan vote. It was a huge issue that we were trying to address-- delivering healthcare to 300 million Americans.

For those who supported the legislation, even they realized that it was not perfect and that we were going to have

to come back at some point in time and make changes to it. The Democrats felt that way. The Republicans and Independents felt that way as well. We ended up not coming back and offering modest amendments or making tweaks to the legislation. At the end of the day, we ended up with a battle here, initially over the repeal of the ACA and later over repealing and replacing it.

I felt proud of the work we had done on the ACA. In my knowing it was not perfect, I always looked forward to coming back shortly after we had adopted it, actually, and making some tweaks. I felt the same way about Dodd-Frank, the banking legislation that we passed after the great recession about 7 or 8 years ago.

I will just remind everybody, especially our young pages here today, who were probably about 7 or 8 years old at the time, that we didn't fall into a burning ring of fire--we fell off a cliff. The unemployment rate shot up to 10 percent, and banks stopped lending money to send kids to school or to allow people to buy a car or a house. Credit was shut off for businesses as well. The unemployment rate skyrocketed. Our economy was locked up, and we felt that we had to do something.

What we tried to do was to figure out how we ended up in that mess in the first place. What had gone on is that the people who wanted to buy houses, who were not creditworthy, ended up being loaned money by banks across the country to buy houses. In many cases, the appraisals for the houses were not worth the paper they were written on. The creditworthiness of the buyers was not worth the paper it was written on as well. We had unqualified people who were trying to buy property. They were unable, realistically, to repay their loans. It all worked just fine until we went into a slump. As the unemployment rate started to go up, people found it more and more difficult to make their payments.

In the olden days, I remember the first house I lived in when I was a kid. My parents borrowed money from a bank for a mortgage, and then they paid it off to that bank. I remember, when they paid off the mortgage to the house they owned in Danville, VA, it was a big deal. My dad actually took the mortgage and burned it up outside, not inside our house.

Yet, 7 or 8 years ago, for a lot of people, after they borrowed money from banks, the banks sold those mortgages to somebody else, oftentimes to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would package those mortgages into mortgage-backed securities--into a security that could be sold to investors in this country and to investors around the world. As long as housing prices continued to rise, everything worked fine. When they stopped rising and started falling, a number of those mortgage-backed securities were riddled--almost like Swiss cheese--with bad mortgages. As more and more people failed to be able to pay their mortgages, the mortgage-backed securities lost their value. Those investors around the world who had invested seriously in mortgage- backed securities got scared, and it started to spiral down from there.

That was not really the only reason we got into a burning ring of fire all those years ago, but it was a big reason. Part of what we decided to do with Dodd-Frank was to make sure that didn't happen again. We would make other mistakes, but we were not going to make that mistake again.

The legislation was passed. Again, not everybody was for it. I voted for it and helped to write some of the provisions in the bill. I knew at the time, as I think we all did, that anything that big--a massive change in our banking regulatory approach in this country--was going to have to be tweaked and revisited just like the Affordable Care Act. It has taken a while.

For the most part, our Republican friends--not all and probably not including the Presiding Officer--were interested in repealing Dodd- Frank. I and, I think, the majority of folks on our side were interested in fixing the provisions that needed to be fixed but not in throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The legislation before us today was reported out of the Banking Committee but not unanimously. It was reported out, I think, last fall, by the chairman of the committee, Mike Crapo from Idaho, whose name is on the bill. I am going to spend some time here today talking about what it does and what it doesn't do.

If the bipartisan bill before us becomes law, 90 percent of Dodd- Frank will remain unchanged. Let me say that again. If the banking bill before us today becomes law, 90 percent of Dodd-Frank will remain unchanged.

The legislation that has been authored by Senator Crapo and others does not touch some of Dodd-Frank's most important reforms. Some of those most important reforms include the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It remains. The Financial Stability Oversight Council remains. It is affectionately known as FSOC, and it works to identify and to address overarching threats to the financial system. The regulations that crack down on risky derivative trading remain, and the ability of the FDIC to wind down failing complex institutions through an orderly liquidation authority remains.

Under this legislation, the Federal Reserve would retain the authority to apply enhanced standards to any bank with over $100 billion in assets. In addition, banks with over $100 billion would still be subject to numerous regulatory requirements. Those requirements include, one, meaningful stress tests; two, increased capital requirements to provide a cushion in tough times and bad times; and, third, vital international reforms to leverage in liquidity standards.

I have a number of charts. I have more charts today than I think I have ever brought to the Senate floor. I promise we will be done by sundown. It will seem that long, but in reality it will not be.

Let me start off, if I could, with a couple of claims made about the bill and, then, talk about the reality.

One of the claims is that this bill would gut Wall Street reform that was passed after the financial crisis to prevent another global meltdown.

That is the claim. Here is the reality. This bipartisan bill makes targeted, commonsense fixes that will provide tangible relief to community banks and credit unions, while leaving in place the rules and regulations that will keep Wall Street accountable.

Before we look at the next claim, like the Presiding Officer, I do customer calls all over my State. The Presiding Officer has a big State, and I have a little State. I visit businesses, schools, hospitals--you name it. I do customer calls literally every week, including the credit unions and small community banks. Sometimes they come to see me, and oftentimes I go to see them. For years, during those customer calls, visiting credit unions and community banks, especially in the central and southern part of our State, they would say to us: We didn't create the financial meltdown that led us to the great recession. Yet we bear the burden of the regulatory reform for that meltdown.

It wasn't their fault. We need a lot of the regulation that is adopted in Dodd-Frank, but keep in mind that credit unions and community banks didn't cause the problem but yet they bear a big part of the burden of fixing it.

Another claim is that this bill rolls back stress test requirements for all big banks. I will say it again. This bill rolls back stress test requirements for all big banks. That is the claim.

Here is the reality. This bill continues to require stress tests for all banks over $100 billion in assets. That would be the largest financial institutions. That is the reality.

The claim is that this bill does nothing to protect consumers. That is the claim--that the bill does nothing to protect consumers.

Here is the reality. This bill actually creates new protections. It provides free credit freezes and allows year-long fraud reports. It allows parents to turn credit reporting on and off for minors. It provides free credit monitoring for all Active-Duty servicemembers.

I am a retired Navy captain. Our Presiding Officer is a colonel--Navy salute.

It was one of the things that Senator Coons and I insisted on in order to support this legislation, and that was to provide free credit monitoring for all Active-Duty servicemembers as part of the bill.

Another reality in terms of new protections is that it encourages banks to report suspicious behavior they become aware of.

That is a little bit of the claims and the reality. I can go on with that, but I will not. I will actually turn to the words of other people, starting off with questions from Senator Jon Tester of Montana, a senior member of the Banking Committee. The first question he asked last November was to a fellow who had been nominated to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jay Powell, who was confirmed on this floor with 80 or 90 votes--a big bipartisan vote.

Senator Tester asked Mr. Powell, who was a Governor, if I am not mistaken, at the time within the Federal Reserve System. He asked:

Part of that bill--

The bill before us today--

is eliminating the Volcker Rule compliance for community

banks that have less than $10 billion, as long as they have

less than 5 percent, trading assets and liabilities. Any

concerns there?

The witness, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell, said: ``None.''

Senator Tester went on to ask the Federal Reserve Chairman--I think this was in February of last year. Senator Tester, my colleague, is a farmer out in Montana. He asked Jay Powell, who was not yet the Chairman of the Federal Reserve:

But I'm a dirt farmer, OK? I just, kind of, read things as

they are and don't read a lot of extra stuff into it. You're

the--you're the man on the Fed and so I need to know your

opinion. Does 2155 require the Federal Reserve to weaken any

of the Dodd-Frank enhanced prudential standards for . . .

[foreign banks] such as Deutsche Bank, UBS or Barclays?

This was the response of Chairman Jay Powell of the Federal Reserve:

It does not, according to my reading of the text.

I will just add that this is the text of the bill.

Senator Crapo, the chairman of the Banking Committee, has put together this bipartisan legislation, with a lot of help from Jon Tester and others. In a hearing last July, he questioned the woman who was then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen. I think she did a very good job. She stepped down, and I thank her for her service and leadership.

Senator Crapo said:

There appears to be growing consensus that Congress should

consider changing the $50 billion SIFI threshold [for big

banks]; also, changing the Volcker rule, exempting certain

institutions from company-run stress testing requirements and

reducing the burdens on community banks and credit unions.

He went on to ask:

Do you agree that it would be appropriate for Congress to

act in each of those areas?

He asked: Do you believe it would be appropriate for Congress to act in each of those areas--changing the SIFI threshold, changing the Volcker rule, exempting certain institutions from stress test requirements, reducing the burdens on community banks and credit unions.

Do you agree that it would be appropriate for Congress to

act in each of those areas?

She said four words: ``I do--I do.''

Again, in February of last year, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen, on the Volcker rule, said:

So, yes, let me reiterate what I said there. It's important

to look for every way we can to mitigate the regulatory

burden. What we've suggested previously and I would reiterate

with respect to Dodd-Frank is that Congress might want to

consider exempting community banks from the Volcker rule. . .

.

That is what she said last February, a year ago.

Then, former Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo spoke. I think his position is held now by Andy Cohen. Last year, Daniel Tarullo said:

We have found that the $50 billion in assets threshold

established in the Dodd-Frank Act for banks to be

``systemically important,'' and thus subject to a range of

stricter regulations, was set too low. . . .

He went on to say:

The fact that community banks are subject at all to some of

the Dodd-Frank Act rules seems unnecessary. . . .

I will say it again.

The fact that community banks are subject at all to some of

the Dodd-Frank Act rules seems unnecessary to protect safety

and soundness, and quite burdensome on the very limited

compliance capabilities of small banks.

Dan Tarullo said that last April.

Here are the words of former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, whom I got to know and work with when I was in the House of Representatives. He was Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and I was on the Banking Committee. He was a giant then and still is--literally and figuratively.

Here are his words in February of this year. He said:

I am pleased that the Senate Banking Committee has forged

ahead with meaningful bipartisan financial reform to ease the

unnecessary regulatory strain on small banks, helping them to

flourish as an engine of economic prosperity. . . .

He goes on to say that he doesn't agree with every single word of the legislation before us today, but he concluded by saying:

I thank you for the opportunity to comment on this

important piece of legislation and look forward to its swift

passage.

This is in a letter to Senator Brown, I believe. It doesn't mean he agrees with every single sentence and paragraph, but he looks forward to it.

Former Congressman and former Banking Committee chairman and my colleague Barney Frank, spoke on whether Dodd-Frank needs reforms in a CNBC interview last February. He was asked if Dodd-Frank needed reforms, and he said: ``Of course.''

On the $50 billion SIFI threshold, he said: ``I think it should be changed,'' and he went on to say: ``It's too low, I believe it is.''

Again, former Congressman Barney Frank on November 27 of last year said:

If this bill became law tomorrow, well over 90 percent of

the Wall Street reform bill would be unchanged. . . . The

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; the strict regulation

of derivative trading; the orderly liquidation authority; the

risk retention requirements on securitizations and most other

provisions would remain in full force. . . .

In full force.

We are almost done here. I thank my colleague from Vermont for his patience.

This is former Congressman Barney Frank on relief for community banks. These words are from the CNBC interview last February, a year ago.

With regard to banks under $10 billion, some of them are

spending more money than they should complying with

provisions that were never really intended to apply to them

and I understand that. The Volcker Rule which says that large

banks should do more lending and less derivative trading,

which I think is a wholly good thing, a number of small banks

which never did much derivative trading are overdoing the

effort to show [that] they aren't there. I would exempt some

of the banks under $10 billion from some of those rules and I

would agree to raise the $50 billion threshold.

Last but not least, a couple of comments more--one from the Bipartisan Policy Center recently; the words of two of the folks from there:

As U.S. politics descends ever further into partisanship,

there are still signs that old-fashioned legislating is not

dead. This week, the Senate Banking Committee will mark up

one of the first significant pieces of financial regulatory

legislation in years with real bipartisan support. . . .

These are not major changes. Yet taken together, they are

constructive and should provide greater incentives to extend

credit, particularly to Main Street small businesses, without

undermining the progress made since the crisis in making the

financial system safer.

This statement is from the president and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America:

The markup of S. 2155 is a rare opening for real, impactful

relief that will strengthen economic growth, job creation,

and consumer protection. It is the culmination of years of

collaborative effort to achieve consensus among Members of

Congress across the spectrum and community bankers in their

home States and districts. Community bankers urge all members

of the Senate Banking Committee to vote YES on S. 2155.

This is from the president and CEO of the Credit Union National Association, or CUNA:

This bill includes credit union-specific provisions that

provide meaningful regulatory relief, a sign that

policymakers are praying close attention to the needs of

credit union members. We thank Senator Crapo and his

colleagues for working across party lines to advance

regulatory relief legislation that benefits community

financial institutions, and look forward to continuing to

work closely with them as the bill moves through the

legislative process.

I hope we will keep these words in mind in the hours and days ahead as we take up this important legislation.

I have no interest in undoing Dodd-Frank. I am a strong supporter of Dodd-Frank. I helped to write some of the provisions in Dodd-Frank, and I have no interest in pulling the plug on Dodd-Frank.

Can we make some reasonable changes? Yes, we can. I felt the same way about the Affordable Care Act.

With that, I yield the floor to my friend from Vermont, and I thank him for his patience.

Mr. President, I am Tom Carper, and I approved this message.

I have had the privilege of serving on the Environment and Public Works Committee for--oh, my gosh--17 years and now serve as the senior Democrat on the committee. I have had the opportunity of serving with Sheldon Whitehouse for more than half of those years. He is a senior member of our committee, a good friend, and, I think, someone who is respected by Democrats and Republicans and Independents alike here in the Senate. He is the junior Senator from Rhode Island, but he casts a long shadow on a lot of issues, none less than the issue we are discussing here today.

I join my friend Senator Coons in thanking Sheldon sincerely for his passion and for his persistence in highlighting what the vast majority of the world recognizes as the greatest environmental challenge of our time, and that is climate change.

Our friend from Rhode Island is a well-known climate champion, but what some may not know is that Sheldon has spent over 500 hours here on the Senate floor in reminding all of us that it is long past time to wake up, that it is time to wake up and get serious about addressing this ever-growing threat. I learned early on in the Senate that if we want to get anything done, we have to be persistent, and we have to stay on message. He has been staying on that message through 200 floor speeches, and the theme has always been ``time to wake up.'' For nearly 6 years now, Sheldon Whitehouse has reiterated what his constituents in the Ocean State and what constituents in our State, the First State, see every day--climate change is real, human beings are making it worse, and it is threatening our economy and our way of life. Those of us living in coastal States also know all too well that we can no longer ignore the issue or wait to take real action.

While our friend from Rhode Island is--what they like to say in Rhode Island--wicked smart, you don't have to

take his word for it that climate change is a growing threat, for leading scientists in our country and around the world have been saying this not just for a couple of years but for decades. Scientists and medical professionals have also linked climate change to increased air pollution, deadly high temperatures, and more pests in our food and water--all of which negatively impact our health and disproportionately affect the most vulnerable among us.

These days, you don't need a degree in science or medicine to see the disastrous effect of climate change on the world in which we live. Rising sea levels and extreme weather events from climate change are the new norm. In 2017 alone, we had multiple category 5 hurricanes--I think maybe for the first time in history. We had the second hottest year on record, catastrophic fires in the West, and severe flooding in the East. These events place extreme burdens on the American people, on our economy, and on our budget, having cost our Federal Government literally hundreds of billions of dollars not over the last 10 years but last year--in 1 year.

The effects of rising sea levels are even more harmful in low-lying, coastal States, like Delaware. Senator Coons explained that Delaware is the lowest lying State in America, where the highest piece of land in our State is a bridge. There is a combination of things going on in coastal States like ours. In our State, the land is sinking, and the sea is rising. That is not a good combination for Delaware or any other place, and our friends from Rhode Island know of what I speak.

I am delighted that Senator Whitehouse is a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee with many of us because, whether we are discussing environmental policy or infrastructure investments, the Senator from Rhode Island never fails to remind our colleagues of the unique and significant challenges that coastal States face as a result of climate change.

Many people may not know this, but as I said before, you can go to Delaware, the lowest lying State. You can come with me and drive south on State Highway 1, past Dover Air Force Base, make a left turn on Prime Hook Road, drive to the edge of Delaware Bay, and look across toward New Jersey. There is a concrete bunker--I don't know--maybe 500 feet out in the water, poking up out of the water. What used to be there at the water's edge was a parking lot, where people used to park their trucks and launch their boats and go out and fish or whatever. That concrete bunker out in the ocean, out in Delaware Bay, used to sit 500 feet west of the dune line. It is now out in the ocean and is largely covered when we have high tide.

I invite my colleagues who deny climate change to visit our State. Come to Delaware and see firsthand what I just described at Prime Hook Beach. Come with us to a place called Southbridge, which is just at the southern edge of Wilmington, DE, or to the roads that are washing out in Odessa, which is about 30 miles south of Wilmington, where the strongest storms have ravaged our beaches and the sea level has risen, as I mentioned earlier, at Prime Hook Beach.

One colleague who has been to Delaware more than a few times is Sheldon Whitehouse. I like to call him affectionately ``the Whitehouse.'' A few years back, Senator Whitehouse came to the First State to see a spectacular natural event that Delaware is lucky to host every year--the arrival of the red knots. They fly for literally thousands and thousands of miles, from south to north and north to south. They stop for lunch in Delaware. They eat the eggs of our horseshoe crabs, and they refuel for their journey. Imagine it. They are not this big. They are maybe half the size of the birds that are right here, but they can fly literally thousands of miles--almost 10,000--before stopping to refuel.

Each year, Delaware Bay hosts tens of thousands of tiny but tough birds--the red knots. The red knot regularly migrates some 19,000 miles, it turns out, each year from the southern tip of South America all the way up to the Arctic Circle. It stops in Delaware to feed on horseshoe crab eggs and refuel for the rest of its journey. It is an incredible journey for such a small shorebird. Its arrival on our shores is a must-see event, as our friend from Rhode Island can attest.

You might think that a bird as hearty as the red knot, which flies across the globe every year, might be able to escape the effects of climate change, but warming temperatures, ocean acidification, and sea level rise are threatening their food supply and their nesting grounds all along their journey. If nothing else, we should be working together to ensure that our children and our grandchildren will be able to experience natural phenomena like the arrival of the red knots for years, for decades, for centuries to come. We should also recognize that we share a home with these creatures. It is not just our planet; it is their planet too. If we allow climate change to determine their fate, it will undoubtedly determine ours eventually.

I will close with this. I know that fighting climate change is a personal matter for me. I also know that the same is true for our friend from Rhode Island. We are fighting for our constituents' way of life, and our Senator from Rhode Island and I will continue to speak truth to power.

To the climate science deniers who are still out there, I borrow the fitting words of our Ocean State colleague: It is really time to wake up. Climate change is no longer in the distant future; it is here, it is now, and we need to meet that challenge head-on.

I yield to the Senator from Hawaii.

Mr. President, I am grateful to my colleague from Tennessee for yielding to me.

One of the reasons Howard Baker was one of the great leaders in this place is he had good staff, and one of those folks, who was maybe the senior member of his staff lo those many years ago, was Lamar Alexander, now Senator Alexander. Howard Baker would be very proud of the kind of Senator he has become--a great Governor, Secretary of Education. He is someone who speaks, more often than not, with great wisdom. He and I agree on not everything but pretty much everything.

I am mister glass half full. My wife says to me that I need to be more of a realist. She says I am too much of an optimist. I am not an optimist today. I feel like we leave here--get on a train, go home-- feeling like we have not done our job.

The Senator from Tennessee has said that the President did his job, but I just don't agree. I just don't agree. He served as Governor; I served as Governor. if we had an impasse on a difficult issue in Delaware--we are lucky; we are a small state--we can pull people together to resolve just about anything and figure out what we call the four c's. One of those is close to Delaware. No. 1 is communicate. No. 2 is compromise. No. 3 is collaborate. No. 4 is civility. Those are the four c's. That is the reason why we had some success in our State.

I am not sure we really demonstrated enough of those today. I am not sure the President did as much as he could have done and should have done. We have a Bible study that meets here on Thursdays, as the Senator from Tennessee knows. Seven or eight of us that need the most help meet with the Chaplain of the Senate, Barry Black, retired rear admiral and chief of chaplains for the Navy and Marine Corps.

Today in our Bible study, he mentioned the golden rules: Treat people the way we want to be treated. Love

thy neighbor as thyself. And ask the question: Who is our neighbor? He told the parable about the Good Samaritan. Oftentimes, he mentioned Matthew 25, which deals with the least of these. When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me? When I was thirsty, did you give me a drink? When I was sick and in prison, did you visit me? When I was a stranger in your land, did you welcome me?

I think there is a moral imperative here. In the case where young people were brought here when they were very young from another country by their parents, have grown up here, were educated here, and are working here in all kinds of jobs--jobs that need to be filled--to say by our actions today that sometime in March--maybe March 5--a lot of them will be facing the prospect of being rounded up and sent back to where they were born, I think, there is a moral imperative that says that is not right.

In Delaware State University, we have any number of Dreamers who are students there. They are the most impressive young people I have met in my life. They are smart. They work hard. They are good students. They are going to go off and be great employees. They are going to start businesses of their own. For us to say that there is a good chance that you will be sent back to where you were born, doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I think it is morally wrong.

I think it is also economically wrong. Today, a bunch of folks in the landscaping business came to see me. They wanted to talk about the problems they have getting people to come to work for their firms, to work for their companies, and to do landscaping work. It is not easy work. It is hard to find people to do it. In many cases, the folks that will do it come day after day--a day's work for a day's pay. They are people who have come here from other countries. The landscapers today-- I don't know if they are Democrats or Republicans--are frustrated because they have a good business and customers need their work to be done, and they have a hard time getting Americans born and raised here to do the work.

Earlier this week, on Monday, I was in Georgetown, DE. We raise more chickens in Sussex County, DE, than anywhere in America. There are 400 chickens for every person who lives in my State. Poultry is a big business. We met with folks from the Delmarva Peninsula who are very much involved in the poultry industry. They said basically the same thing we heard today from the landscapers: We have a hard time finding people who will work in poultry plants. We have done a lot of things we can to enhance the pay and the benefits. We have wellness centers. We provide incentives for people who want to improve themselves, go on, and have a chance to move up the ladder of success.

But there was one lady who said that she is from a major poultry company. I think it was Perdue. She said: We are trying to fill positions. We have 100 people who offer to come in for an interview. She said that out of the 100, they actually have 20 that reach the second step because they can pass the blood test and meet other challenges they have, or obstacles, in order to reach the next rung on the ladder for an interview. They start with 100 and are down to 20 almost like that. Out of those 20, she said, eventually 5 will be able to pass the drug test and have the work experience and the willingness to work. She said they end up with five to hire. Out of those five they hire, a number of them stop coming to work a month later. She said that is what they face; that is reality. And then she said: Please help us. In fact, all the poultry industry people we met on Monday said: Please help us with this.

As it turns out, it is not just landscaping businesses that need people to work. It is not just food processors--poultry in this case. When we received the monthly jobs report earlier this month for the month of January, we were told that the unemployment rate is about 4.1 percent--steady where it was. We are still under way with the longest running economic expansion. I think we are past 8 years now. When people went to work today, there were about 2 to 3 million jobs that were not filled. When folks went to work in this country today across America, for about 2 to 3 million jobs, nobody showed up to do the job. It makes no sense to me that we face the prospect of 700,000, 800,000 people who were raised here, were educated here, work here, want to work here, and want to contribute, could do those jobs, and they may not get a chance to do them.

Employers have risen up with one voice, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, and the Farm Bureau--you name it--to say: We have a problem on the human resources side with getting people to come to work.

I think it is economic insanity for us to say that for 700,000 or 800,000 people and maybe a couple hundred thousand people that came here from El Salvador: We are going to send you home.

It makes no sense.

I hope my friend is right. I hope we leave here, come back in a week or so, and say: How do we get to an agreement?

The last thing I will say is this. Border security is really important. I was chairman of the Homeland Security Committee for a while. I am still the senior Democrat on the committee. If you compare border security in this country today to what it was 10, 20 years ago, it is a more secure border. It should be. We spent a fortune. We have 20,000 people down in border security. We are doing a lot of smarter things.

I will conclude with this point. Included in the proposal today that, I think, got the most votes--54 votes--was the Collins, King, et al. Included in that package were a number of what I call force multipliers. They would actually make the border more secure. There is someplace along the border where a wall makes sense, like in San Diego. I was stationed in the Navy in San Diego. There are some places there, and there are other places where a wall makes sense. I heard more than a few times: If you build a 15-foot wall, someone will come along with an 18-foot ladder, or come along with a tunnel to go under it.

There are a lot of things we can do to assist the 20,000 Border Patrol men and women we have. We are having a hard time filling those 20,000 positions. We have hundreds of those jobs vacant today.

Do you know where we could put people to work on the border? At ports of entry, where hundreds of millions of dollars of commerce are coming through every week--coming up from Mexico and going down into Mexico. There is a crying need for 3,000 people to work as Customs officers at the ports of entry.

My colleague talks, as he should, about concern about drugs coming into our country. Right now, the biggest threat is from China. They are coming over here ordered by the internet. There is stuff coming in by the mail service. Senator Portman and I are working to do a much tighter job in that regard to stop the importation of fentanyl through the Postal Service.

There are a bunch of things that we can do on the border that were included in the bipartisan proposal today. I will mention a couple of them. It is not just enough to have drones. You have to have drones that you can fly. You have to have good surveillance systems. You have to have people who maintain them. And they don't just fly 8 hours out of every 24. They are able to be up in the sky throughout the day and throughout the week with the kind of surveillance systems that are needed.

It is not just enough to have a couple of helicopters that can fly every day, but they have to be able to go 24/7 and have the same kind of surveillance systems that are good. With fixed-wing aircraft, the same is true. I was a naval flight officer of a P-3 air mission command. We did a lot of surface surveillance and chased submarines all over the world. They would send us out in the ocean to look for somebody's ship that had sunken or a sailboat that had sunken. Sometimes all we would have in the middle of the ocean was a pair of binoculars--good luck finding anybody.

We don't have to just use binoculars on the border, with drones, fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, fixed-wing towers, or mobile towers. We have surveillance systems that can enable us to see 15, 20, 25 miles into Mexico. We should use them and make sure they are maintained and that people are trained to operate them.

When you have hundreds of miles of river, building a wall there doesn't

make sense. Boats do and boat ramps make sense. In places where the wall may not make sense, a fence may make sense. Roads along the fence may make sense. In some places, Border Patrol on horses makes sense. In some places, we have high grasses. Put a Border Patrol officer up on a horse and he can see for miles and miles. That makes sense.

This and more was included in the proposal that drew 54 votes. It is the kind of thing we ought to do. It doesn't cost $25 billion, but it will be cost-effective and make our border more secure.

I have great affection for our colleague from Tennessee. I appreciate his encouraging tone that this is not the end. What did Churchill say when he got bounced out of office at end of World War II? He was asked 6 months after the war, when he really carried Britain through on his back. The war is over. He gets beaten. He is asked by a reporter after he lost: For you, Mr. Churchill, is this the end?

He said: It is not the end. It is not the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning.

I hope this is the end of the beginning--maybe with the help of God and maybe with a little bit better leadership from the folks down at 1600.

The last thing is this. The Department of Homeland Security--which I worked for years to strengthen, to make something we can all be proud of--apparently has put out a statement today. I asked to read it. I am told by all kinds of people that it is riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods. I am going to read it tonight on the way going home. I hope that is not true. What we need to operate here is the truth.

I will close with the words of Thomas Jefferson: If the people know the truth, we will not make a mistake. I heard that what the Department of Homeland Security put out today was not truthful. It is hard, with that kind of information, to do the right thing.

I wish to thank my colleague for giving me this much time and for being so patient with me. We will be back here in 10 days or so, and we will have a chance to reconnect and see if we can pull a victory out of the jaws of defeat.

I thank the Senator for yielding.

Mr. President, I don't want to get in the way of a disagreement between two of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I would just say to Senator Grassley that there was a hearing today before the Environment and Public Works Committee, on which I serve as the senior Democrat. The subject of the Renewable Fuel Standard actually came up in the discussion. We had a number of folks from the agriculture community from across the country--one, the current secretary of agriculture from the State of Delaware. We talked about the Renewal Fuel Standard and its effect on the economy.

One of the reasons we encourage farms through our Federal Government policies--the reason we encourage farmers to raise, say, corn is that we can use it, and we frankly use a lot of other substances that they raise to create energy, to fuel us. Not only can our farmers feed us, they can also fuel us. This really got underway with the George W. Bush administration trying to do a better job of getting farmers involved to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by creating biofuels, advanced biofuels, ethanol, and corn ethanol.

I will mention one of the things we talked about today, and then I will talk about what I am really supposed to be here to talk about, which is DREAMers and the economic security of this country.

In the State of Delaware, we have only three counties: New Castle County, Kent County, and Sussex County, the third largest county in America. I think we raise more chickens there than any county in America. The last time I checked, we raise more soybeans there. We raise more lima beans there. Agriculture is a big deal for us. We also have great beaches in Delaware. We have Rehoboth Beach, Dewey Beach, Bethany Beach, and others. And there are a lot of interesting people who live close to the beach and not so close to the beach in Sussex County, so there is pressure from development. Sometimes we have the interests of farmers and that community coming up against the interests of developers.

One of the ways we decided to ensure that we still have farmland and don't overdevelop our counties and our State is to make sure that farmers can make money and support themselves. One of the ways they can do that is through the ability to not only feed us with the commodities they raise but also to fuel us.

There is something called RINs, or renewable identification numbers, a commodity traded on the market. The value of the RINs should literally be measured in pennies. Over the last year or so, it has been measured in more than a dollar for RINs. The refinery that has been discussed, which is up in Philadelphia, spent a lot of money on purchasing RINs in the last year or so. That shouldn't be the case. Our committee has been reaching out to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in order to get them involved to say: How do we make this RINs market less volatile? How do we bring down the price of RINs? How do we enable us to do both, for our ag community and farmers to feed us, as a nation and a world, and also to fuel us?

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

Mr. President, today I rise to address an issue that probably is not of great concern to the citizens of Arizona, but, certainly, it is of a lot of concern for people who happen to live on the east coast and the west coast of our Nation.

I join my colleagues on both coasts in opposition to the Trump administration's recent proposal to open up parts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Gulf of Mexico to more oil and gas drilling. For a long time, I have advocated for an ``all of the above'' strategy to meet our country's energy needs, as we move our country toward greater energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy and to energy independence. In my view, the administration's recent proposal to expand drilling off of our coasts into new areas is not necessary at this time. It is unnecessary at this time.

Just 8 years ago, we saw very clearly with the Deepwater Horizon disaster that oilspills do not respect State boundaries and that severe environmental and financial costs of oilspills last, in some cases, not just for years or decades but for generations. A spill anywhere along the east coast could easily affect the pristine beaches of Delaware and the vibrant coastal communities that rely on fishing, tourism, and recreational activities to drive their local economy.

Delaware's coast isn't all that long. It is about 25, 30 miles, from the Maryland line to just north of Lewes, DE. Each year, Delaware's coasts generate almost $7 billion. Our beach communities in places like Rehoboth Beach, Dewey Beach, and surrounding areas support nearly 60,000 jobs in a little State with not quite 1 million people. It supports $711 million in tax revenues. Again, the State budget is right around $4 billion. Delaware may be a small State--I like to say we are the 49th largest State--but we have a lot of coast-related activities, and they are a big business for a little State, providing more than 10 percent of the First State's total employment, taxes, and business production. Jeopardizing the environmental and economic health of the entire Atlantic coast is the wrong move, and we simply think it is not worth the risk.

You don't just have to take my word for it. Experts, scientists, and residents living in communities along the coast that will be most impacted by this decision agree, especially since the threat of climate change continues to grow.

Delawareans are similarly concerned about the dangers posed by oil and gas exploration activities, including the use of seismic-testing air guns to search for offshore oil and gas deposits. In August 2016, roughly 18 months ago, over 40 State and local elected officials in Delaware sent a letter to the Department of Interior--this was in the last administration--expressing their opposition to proposed seismic surveys.

Their concerns, in my view, are well-founded. The negative impact of the oil and gas industry's seismic testing on ocean ecosystems and the life they support--from plankton at the base of the ocean food chain and all the way to whales at the top--is well documented. Despite the widespread opposition and proof of harmful consequences, proponents of increased drilling for oil would argue that oil and gas development could represent economic benefit in selected areas along our coast. But these areas are already the beneficiary of remarkable economic benefits derived from and contingent on a healthy, vital, and sustainable ocean environment off of our shores. As a result, these communities do not take the prospect of compromising these natural resources lightly, nor should we.

Do you know who also recognizes that coastal communities could be negatively impacted if their natural resources were compromised? The answer is our Interior Secretary, Mr. Ryan Zinke. In fact, that was the exact justification that Secretary Zinke used to carve Florida's gulf coast out of the Trump administration's proposal. Secretary Zinke pointed out that other States--like Louisiana, for example--are ``working coasts'' that are ``very much different than a recreation- centric coast that's in Florida.''

It seems to me that maybe, just maybe, the only real difference between Florida and every other coastal State--including Delaware and up on north to Maine--that was not lucky enough to get an exemption from Secretary Zinke is that President Trump happens to have beach- front property in Florida. Believe me, I understand that a potential oilspill off of the Florida coast would be bad for business at Mar-a- Lago and that the President's guests probably don't want the view from the resort obstructed by offshore oil rigs. I understand that because an overwhelming majority of Delawareans feel the same way, and their voices deserve to be heard too.

It is not just the Delawareans or even Democrats who acknowledge that increased oil drilling off of our coasts is the wrong move. Republican Governors and lawmakers from States such as Georgia and South Carolina--and all the way up to Massachusetts and New Hampshire--have publicly stated their opposition to the Trump administration's plan because the risks are simply not worth the potential reward.

If the administration insists on proceeding with this proposal, then, it should carve out the cherished Delaware coast and similar areas along the Atlantic from any efforts to increase drilling. As we have heard said many times, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. In Florida, Secretary Zinke has clearly established the standard that should apply to any coastal area that would be part of an offshore leasing plan. If it is an area in which coastal activities and industries yield greater economic value and where local communities are solidly opposed, then those areas should get the same exemption that has been awarded to the Sunshine State of Florida.

This President is a businessman, and the numbers are clear. Increased drilling does not make economic sense. I urge President Trump to rethink this shortsighted proposal and to side with coastal residents from Maine to Miami.

Mr. President, I yield back.

We have been joined by my colleagues from Florida and Oregon, and I yield to one of them.

To whom shall I yield?

I am happy to yield to the ranking member of the Finance Committee.

Mr. President, as a native West Virginian, I want to say how proud I am of our colleague, Mr. Manchin.

Perhaps you have heard the old saying: I am Tom Carper or I am so- and-so, and I approve this message. We do a lot of that on political campaigns. Well, I approve of much of what Joe says, and today is no exception.

My wife and I like to go to movies. We don't get to see much of them, but over the holidays we had a chance to see a couple of them. One of the best movies of this past year was a movie about World War II Britain, ``Churchill.'' I am reminded, as we wander through this impasse, of two things Churchill said. About democracy, he said, ``Democracy is the worst form of government [devised by man] except for all the [rest].''

Think about that. This is a hard way to govern, and we have proved it again. A lot of democracies around the world prove it again year after year after year.

Churchill knew we saved their behinds over in Britain in World War II. We came to the rescue and helped turn the tide. He was always grateful for that, but he used to like to poke fun at our country. Another great Churchill quote was about America. He said this about America: ``You can always count on America to do the right thing in the end, after trying everything else.''

Think about that. This situation we are in right now with the shutdown--a lot of people are calling it the Trump shutdown--whatever you call it, I think it cries out for leadership.

I just want to quote comments of one person at the time, someone who was not in elective office, but he said these words talking about leadership during an earlier shutdown. This individual said:

Well, if you say who gets fired it always has to be the

top. I mean, problems start from the top and they have to get

solved from the top and the president's the leader. And he's

got to get everybody in a room and he's got to lead.

This person went on to say:

When they talk about the government shutdown, they're going

to be talking about the president of the United States, who

the president was at that time.

This individual goes on:

They're not going to be talking about who was head of the

House, the head of the Senate, who's running things in

Washington. So, I really think the pressure is on the

president.

The President will do what it takes to lead. Those comments were given in 2013 during an earlier shutdown. Those are the words of Donald Trump, criticizing then-President Barack Obama.

Think about those words then and think about those words today. The President has ``got to get everybody in a room and he's got to lead''-- has got to get everybody in a room, and he has to lead. This was true 5 years ago, 4 years ago, and it is true today. With this President, we find a willingness on the part of Senator Schumer, Senator McConnell, Speaker Ryan, and Leader Pelosi responding to an invitation to go to the President even tonight, go to the White House even tonight, and sit down and try to hammer things out. It ain't going to be easy, but, frankly, there is a lot of consensus here on what we ought to do, in terms of the budget priorities, defense spending, and nondefense. There is a lot more agreement than disagreement. We heard discussion about that between Senator Manchin and our colleague from Alaska.

I think there is a fair amount of agreement, in terms of extending coverage--maybe not permanent but extending the Children's Health Insurance Program 6 to 10 years. The State and Federal partnership covers about 9 million kids. There is a lot of agreement on that.

There is a lot of agreement on the Federal community health centers. They provide a cost-effective, affordable approach to healthcare coverage for primary care for people who don't have coverage, maybe don't have any money, and they can get coverage and have access to primary care, in many cases, in their own community. They are important in Alaska, they are important in West Virginia, they are important in Delaware, and they are important to the speaker from Missouri who is going to succeed me. There is a lot of agreement there.

Frankly, you have a lot of agreement on what should happen to the Dreamers, these young people who were brought here by their parents, in many cases years ago. They grew up here and were educated here. In many cases, they are working here. In a lot of cases, they are serving in the military. They are teachers and police officers, and they are doing all kinds of things.

It is a time in this country where we have roughly 3 million jobs that are going unfilled because the folks who would like to do those jobs in many cases don't have the education, the experience, the interest in doing those jobs, the willingness. They don't have the work ethics. In many cases, they can't pass a drug test.

It is a time where we are in the eighth year of the longest running economic expansion in the history of the country. Barack Obama and Joe Biden took office in 2009, at the bottom of the worst recession since the Great Depression. They handed off to this administration a year ago today the longest running economic expansion in the history of the country, and for the past year, that expansion has continued.

One of the keys to making sure our economy expands is to make sure the workforce our employers need is being provided by our schools--high schools, public schools, colleges, universities, community colleges. And at the very time when employers are saying, ``Look, when we open our doors for business on Monday, there are going to be 3 million jobs that we don't have anybody to come to work to fill,'' are we serious about saying that, rather than enabling 800,000 or so Dreamers who have the skills, who have the education, who have the work ethic, who want to do the job--rather than letting you do those jobs, fill those jobs, we are going to send you back to the country where you were born? And by the way, we will send about 200,000 Salvadorans who came here at a time of crisis in their country 10 or 20 years ago--we are going to send them with you. Does that make sense?

As a former Governor who for 8 years led the State of Delaware to actually cut taxes 7 out of 8 years, balance our budget 8 years in a row, pay down debt, earn AAA credit ratings, and saw more jobs created in 8 years than any 8-year period in the history of the State of Delaware--I didn't create one of those jobs, but we sure know something in Delaware about creating a nurturing environment for job creation. That is what we do in our jobs. We don't create

jobs; we help create that nurturing environment.

Basically sending close to 1 million people who are able to do jobs that aren't getting done and wouldn't get done, sending them back to the country where they were born--that makes no sense, no sense at all.

The last thing I will say is this about my little State. Delaware was the first State to ratify the Constitution. I am very proud of that. We were the first State to ratify the Constitution--on December 7, 1787. For 1 whole week, Delaware was the entire United States of America. We opened up. We let in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the rest, and I think for the most part it has turned out pretty well. We are struggling a little bit with it right now, but we will get through this.

One of the keys in Delaware more often than not is working pretty well--Democrats and Republicans working together, which is what is needed here. We have had a whole bunch of Governors who did lead; who were humble, not haughty; who had the heart of a servant; who believed that Governors unite, not divide; who build bridges, not walls; who don't try to tear other people down to build themselves up; who are aspirational and appeal to our better angels. We had a couple of good Republicans who did that--Michael Castle, Pete du Pont, and others. So it will be done on a bipartisan basis.

Here are four reasons why Delaware continues to enjoy success, has enjoyed success. There has been able leadership--and not just Governors but legislators, Democrats and Republicans.

We have something we call the Delaware Way. To the amazement of a lot of people, 2 days after the election every other year, winners and losers get together in Georgetown, DE. In Sussex County, DE, the southernmost county, the county seat, Georgetown--we have a big brunch hosted by our community college in Georgetown. Democrats and Republicans are there--the folks who ran against each other--and their families and supporters are there.

When the brunch is over, we go outside and we get in these horse- drawn carriages, and winners and losers ride together, side by side, with their families. There is a big parade, and thousands of people come. Schools are closed. When the parade is over, we all gather in the circle in the middle of Georgetown, and we have some speeches, some inspiring patriotic music, and some prayers. Then the political leaders of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and maybe the Libertarian Party stand in front of the masses of people. They have what looks like a big glass aquarium, and it is half full of sand. They take an ax, and the party leaders lower this ax into the aquarium. They fill it up with sand from Rehoboth Beach or Bethany or one of our five- star beaches. And then we go off, and people open up their houses, and Democrats and Republicans spend time together. We lick our wounds and sort of get to like each other again, and we go on to govern our State.

We use the four c's in Delaware.

This is my last point, and I will yield to Senator McCaskill, who is ready to roll behind me.

There are four c's. We communicate. We talk to one another in my State.

Last night when we were on the floor, there was a lot of communication going on. That is important. We need to continue that communication. But for God's sake, the President needs to invite our four leaders--two from the House, two from the Senate; two Democrats, two Republicans--and have real communication. He needs to provide air cover for the Republicans in the House who are willing to take up a reasonable compromise that I think we are willing to pass here in the Senate. The President has to provide that air cover.

First of all, the first ``c'' is communication. Next is compromise.

In a compromise, nobody wins everything they want. Senator Schumer was willing to put on the table what Donald Trump has been talking about for years; that is, a wall, actually authorizing the construction of a wall--not on every single inch or mile of the border with Mexico but a good deal of it. That is what Donald Trump is talking about more in terms of border security than anything else. Do I think that is a great idea? No, I don't. In some places, a wall makes some sense, and in a lot of places, it doesn't. There are a lot of other more cost- effective options. There are other things that could be more cost- effective that would enable our 20,000 Border Patrol folks to do their jobs. But Chuck Schumer put on the table the authorization for building the wall. That is a pretty good compromise, and that shows we are willing to compromise.

So the second ``c'' is compromise. The third ``c'' is collaboration, to actually work together on this stuff. The last ``c'' is civility, to treat one another the way we would want to be treated. Communicate, compromise, collaborate, civility--it doesn't work just in Delaware; it works in States all over this country. It used to work in this place, in this body, and we could use it again.

The quote that I used from Donald Trump from 4 or 5 years ago talking about the leadership that Barack Obama needed to show--I think he did. Sometimes we need to listen to our own words, look at ourselves in the mirror and remember our own words. Mr. President, we would do well to do just that.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, it is with great pleasure that, on behalf of Delaware's congressional delegation, I wish to honor the exemplary service of educator and Delaware State Education Association leader Frederika S. Jenner. She has served Delaware as a teacher and education advocate since 1972, and during that time, she worked to effectively improve our education system and shape thousands of young children's lives. Frederika has now retired after more than four decades of serving in Delaware's schools and advocating on behalf of its students and teachers. She is a selfless education advocate and adviser, as well as a devoted wife and mother. Delaware's education system and countless Delawareans will benefit from her life's work for decades to come.

Frederika is a graduate of A.I. DuPont High School in Wilmington, DE. She earned her bachelor's degree in education from Goucher College in Baltimore and then returned to Delaware where she taught elementary school for 39 years. She had such a dedication to education that she furthered her own while she was teaching and ultimately received her master's in instruction from the University of Delaware. Although she started as an English and reading specialist, Frederika took a leap to become a science teacher along the way, teaching herself and earning her certification all in the first year in her new position. From then on, science remained an intense passion of hers, as well as a focus of much of her work both in and out of the classroom. Throughout her career, Frederika also encouraged a love of reading among her students and took great pride in her voluminous classroom library, with over 2,000 books on its shelves.

Throughout her many years in the classroom, Frederika became a trusted voice among her fellow educators. From day one, she was involved as a building representative for the Delaware State Education Association, and her activism grew from there. Later, she would serve as president of the 1,200-member Red Clay Education Association and then went on to serve as an executive board member of the Delaware State Education Association for 3 years. In 2011, Frederika was elected president of the Delaware State Education Association. In that role, she emerged as a strong and fair leader, working to shape education policy decisionmaking. For many years, she served as the bridge between DSEA members and public officials as the State worked to create and implement

new educational standards that we use today and to chart a course to reach them.

Frederika also took on the task of improving science education in Delaware. She worked for 5 years as a Coalition science specialist and helped school districts all over Delaware integrate new State science standards and innovative teaching practices, including the Smithsonian Kits Programs. She regularly traveled the State, training teachers and delivering necessary supplies--everything from magnets and batteries to live crayfish, all in the interest of ensuring that students receiving hands-on science training. In 2010, Delaware Governor Jack Markell recognized her immense capabilities and appointed Frederika to the State Employee Advisory Committee.

There is a reason why, as Governor of Delaware, I was laser-focused on education and strengthening families. I believe these are two areas where we can make a lasting difference in the trajectory of a young person's life. Frederika shares this belief and dedicated her career to the young people of Delaware. On behalf of both U.S. Senator Chris Coons and U.S. Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, I want to thank Frederika S. Jenner for her service to the people of Delaware. Her love of children, along with her leadership and dedication to the notion that all children can learn, have improved the quality of education for countless Delawareans who were fortunate enough to be in her classroom and many who were not. However, all Delawareans have benefitted from the educational system she has worked so hard to help improve.

We are delighted to offer today our heartfelt congratulations to Frederika Jenner on a job well done, and we want to convey our thanks as well to her husband, Charles, and their sons Andrew and Nick for sharing with the children of Delaware a remarkable woman and educator.

Mr. President, it is a pleasure to be on the floor tonight with my friend the Senator from Alaska. The Navy salutes the Marine Corps and salutes him for his service before.

Now I just want to follow up on a couple of things that he mentioned. He need not stay on the floor if he doesn't want to, but he is more than welcome to as he spent a little bit of time criticizing the individual mandate.

Harry Truman used to say that the only thing new in the world is the history that we forgot and never learned. So I just want to take a minute and talk about the history of the individual mandate.

The individual mandate was not invented by Barack Obama. ObamaCare was never invented by Barack Obama--the idea for exchanges in all 50 States and the sliding scale tax credit to buy down the cost of healthcare in those exchanges. The idea to have an individual mandate so that everybody has to buy healthcare and that if you are not eligible for Medicaid or Medicare, you need to get healthcare and that, if you don't, there is a fine was not Barack Obama's idea. The idea that employers of a certain size and with a certain number of employees have to provide healthcare coverage for their folks was not a Barack Obama idea. The notion that the insurance companies could not deny coverage to folks who had preexisting conditions was not an idea that was invented by Barack Obama.

ObamaCare with those five provisions--exchanges in every State, a sliding scale tax credit to buy down the cost of the care, the individual mandate to make sure that everybody is getting coverage, the employer mandate by which the employer has to cover the employees, the prohibition against insurance companies in their not providing coverage for those with preexisting conditions--had its origin from right here in the U.S. Senate in 1993--right here in 1993.

The legislation was introduced by a Republican Senator from Rhode Island, Chafee. It was cosponsored by 22 other Republican Senators, including the chairman of the Finance Committee--one of the people I most admire here in this body.

Those five ideas didn't go anywhere in 1993, but do you know who took them? A Governor of Massachusetts took those five ideas and said: Maybe we could use those five ideas to cover everybody in the State of Massachusetts. Governor Mitt Romney created RomneyCare. Do you know what? For the most part, it worked. It covered just about everybody there. Initially, it had problems with affordability, but it has done better over time.

When we worked on the Affordable Care Act, we took that Republican Senate proposal from 1993. We took RomneyCare from 2006, and we included it in the Affordable Care Act because it was a market-based approach to making sure that everybody who didn't get coverage from their employers and who were not eligible for Medicaid and were not eligible for Medicare could get coverage.

We see in this legislation before us tonight not just changes to the Tax Code but also a further effort to destabilize the exchanges, which is something that the current administration spends a lot of time trying to do. It is a Republican idea. It is a market-based approach. They happen to be good ideas. They happen to work in Massachusetts, and they could work in the 49 other States if we didn't have an administration and my colleagues here in this body and in the House who were trying to destabilize the exchanges.

I hope that when this legislation passes and we repeal the individual mandate that we will not just repeal it. Why do we have it in the first place? It is to make sure that young, healthy Americans are going to be getting coverage in the exchanges. You can't just have sick and elderly people in the exchanges. You have to have some young, healthy people in there too. That is why we have the individual mandate. If we are going to get rid of it, we need to replace it with something that works at least as effectively. That is one of the things that we need to work on in our going forward between now and 2019 when the individual mandate is repealed under this legislation.

I had the privilege of serving as the Governor of my State of Delaware for 8 years. During those 8 years, we cut taxes in 7 out of the 8 years. We also balanced our budgets for 8 years in a row. We paid down some of our debt. We earned AAA credit ratings for the first time in the State's history. We still have them. For those 8 years, we had a general assembly whose majority was Republican in the House and whose majority was Democrat in the Senate. Do you know what we did? We actually worked together. We worked together in that we used sound budgeting practices, and we used sound economic analyses and forecasts. We worked together, but neither side got everything it wanted.

In Delaware, we have something that we call the Delaware Way. I describe it with the letter C--four Cs--communicate, compromise, collaborate, civility. That is it. That is the Delaware Way-- communicate, compromise, collaborate, and use some civility. We don't do much of that around here, and we are the worse for it.

During those years that I was privileged to be Governor and we cut taxes for 7 out of the 8 years, I would read each tax proposal with four questions. One, is it fair? Two, does it foster economic growth or impede it? Three, does it simplify the Tax Code or make it more complex? Four, what does it do to the deficit? Do we end up with a deficit? Do we end up with a balanced budget? Do we end up with a surplus? I asked those four questions.

Twenty years later, as we took up tax reform here in the U.S. Senate, I asked the same four questions. Is it fair? Does it foster economic growth? Does it simplify the Tax Code? What does it do to the budget or to the deficit situation that we face? Those are the four questions.

Others have already talked about fairness. Let me just say that when you look at what is going to happen in the first couple years after the passage of this legislation, lower income folks, families, are going to get a tax cut too. It is not just the wealthy; low-income families will get a tax cut, too, for a couple of years. Families making $30,000 will benefit. They will end up lowering taxes for the first 2 years after the implementation of this legislation. After 3 or 4 years, families making $40,000 or less will be on the losing side. After 5 years, families making $50,000 will be on the losing side. After 8 or 9 years, families making as much as $75,000 will not be paying less taxes, they will actually be paying more taxes.

Meanwhile, folks whose income is half a million, $1 million, or more, for the most part will realize very substantial reductions in their taxes--very substantial reductions--and as that income goes up, the greater those reductions will be in their tax obligation. Some people ask: Is that fair? It depends on whom you ask. If you happen to ask people who are making $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 a year, maybe not. It is fair for a while but not for long enough.

I mentioned the 8 years I served as Governor of our State and how we balanced our budget to pay down debt and got an AAA credit rating. More jobs were created in those 8 years than any 8 years in the history of the State of Delaware. I did not create any of them. I did not create one of them. I helped create a nurturing environment for job creation in our State so that little businesses could get started and grow into bigger businesses and bigger businesses could make a profit and hire more people. The Tax Code is an important ingredient in nurturing an environment for job creation and job preservation--not the only ingredient but an important ingredient.

Senator Cardin stood right in front of me a little while ago and talked about how important it is to have certainty and predictability. That is almost as important as the tax rates, to actually know what we are going to face and not face, the uncertainty of rates going up or down and the rules changing in the years to come. But I would like to run through a short list of other ingredients needed in the nurturing environment that I don't believe we are addressing in these changes to the Tax Code.

One is commonsense regulations, regulations that protect us, protect our

health, our environment, and do so in a way that is cost-effective.

Another way to create a nurturing environment is to make sure that we are producing, out of our high schools, colleges, universities, and community colleges, people who can read, write, think, use math and have technology skills in science and engineering. The inability to come out of these schools and go to work in the millions of jobs that are going unfilled these days is because the skill sets that are demanded by employers for these millions of jobs are not met by the people who are looking for work, for the most part, except for about 800,000 people--the DACA folks who fill 800,000 of those 3 or 4 million jobs that are unfilled.

What is another ingredient? Access to capital, the ability of a business to get money, to raise money to be able to invest in plant and equipment and in employees in the workforce.

Another is access to foreign markets to be able to sell the products or the services we provide to other countries around the world, get into those markets.

Another is energy costs. My colleague from Alaska said in his comments that one of the things we ought to be in America is the superpower of energy. Who invented nuclear energy? We did. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal. We are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. We create, as far as I know, as much electricity from wind and solar as I think any nation on Earth, and we need to do a whole lot more, and we can.

With regard to healthcare costs, we pay way too much money for healthcare in this country. Actually, we have a pretty good idea of how to bring it down. One of those good ideas is the exchanges, and if we stop undermining them and degrading them and destabilizing them, they would actually work like they do in Massachusetts and a bunch of other States.

Public safety is a key ingredient among the forces and factors that are helpful in creating that nurturing environment.

Investing in research and development that could be commercialized in terms of jobs and economic opportunity is hugely important.

There is also protecting intellectual property, protecting against cyber attacks, transportation, infrastructure. Earlier this year, the Nation's Society of Civil Engineers evaluated our transportation infrastructure in this country, and again this year, D--``d'' as in dog--because our roads, highways, and bridges are in deplorable shape in many parts of this country. Did we invest any money in that in this tax bill? If I had $1 trillion to invest in this country to strengthen our economy, I would put it in infrastructure, roads, highways, bridges, ports, airports, broadband, just deploying broadband in vast areas of the country and rural areas of the country where we don't have access to the internet. That is what I would do. We don't do any of that in this legislation.

In terms of economic growth and job creation, what we are told by most economists is, sadly, a lot of companies will make extra money from--realize greater profits from the changes in the Tax Code, the majority of them. According not to me but to economists who are a lot smarter than I, a good deal of that money is not going to further investments in plant and equipment, not into their workforce, it will be turned into dividends and stock buybacks and not to create the kind of economic growth we all want.

Let me talk a minute about the third question I always ask about tax reform proposals; that is, does it simplify the Tax Code or make it more complex?

During our markup, our vote, and debate in the Finance Committee on the proposals, one of my colleagues--I think it was Senator McCaskill-- had a stack about this tall of the Federal Tax Code. One of our expert witnesses from the Joint Tax Committee was asked: Will this legislation that is before us tonight actually make that stack of books that make up the Tax Code--is it going to make it smaller?

He said: No, quite the opposite--it is going to make it larger. Now, the idea of doubling the standard deduction, enabling more people to not have to itemize their taxes--that makes the Tax Code simpler. That is a good idea. But overall, when you look at all the other changes in this legislation, that stack which represents the Tax Code is not going to go down; ultimately it is going to go up.

Those are not my words but the testimony from the Joint Tax Committee.

Lastly, what is going to be the effect of these tax changes? What is going to be the effect on the budget deficit? And here is where I think we really missed the boat. When Bill Clinton became President in 1993, we were in a deficit. We were in a recession, and he became President. Eight years later, when he turned the reins over to George W. Bush--in those 8 years, more jobs were created than in any 8-year period in the history of the United States. On top of that, in the last 4 years of that administration--1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001--we had a balanced budget and a surplus. When the reins of leadership were turned over to the next administration, George W. Bush's, I think CBO was forecasting a budget surplus of at least $5 billion, probably more. There was a concern that we were actually growing the surplus too fast.

Well, it didn't take too long for the surpluses to be eliminated, and when that administration came to an end, we were in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. We called it the great recession. We went from 4 years of surpluses to the worst economy since 1930. That is what Barack Obama and Joe Biden and a new Congress in 2009 inherited.

I know some of my colleagues think that there has not been any kind of economic recovery. Just look at where we were in 2008 and 2009. For the last 8 years, we have had economic growth and job creation for 8 consecutive years. I don't think we have ever seen that kind of sustained economic growth in the history of our country.

Instead of paying down debt after 8 years of economic growth and job creation, we actually, last year, increased the deficit by $666 billion. With this legislation, we are going to add another roughly $2 trillion to our debt over the next 10 years.

This is a missed opportunity, folks. It doesn't have to be this way. There are good ideas in this legislation. The corporate tax rate is too high. Let's bring it down. I am for that. The standard deduction ought to be doubled. I think Democrats are for that. The child tax credit ought to be increased, maybe doubled, made refundable to help lower income families too. I am for that. The capital gains rate maintained where it is--I am for that. The repatriation of overseas profits--I am for that. There are a lot of things I think could actually serve as a foundation on which we could come to an agreement on bipartisan legislation. As far as I am concerned, we never really had a fair chance.

I will close with an African proverb. My friend Senator Scott is about to follow me, and he has heard me say this before. The old African proverb says: If you want to go fast, travel alone. If you want to go far, travel together.

If you want to go fast, travel alone. If you want to go far, travel together. We should have traveled this road together. If we had, we would have maybe some short-term pain but long-term gain. But I fear that with this legislation, it will be just the opposite. There will be some short-term gain but I figure, in the long run, long-term pain.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor and will pass it on to my friend from South Carolina.

Mr. HATCH addressed the Chair.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I rise today to speak about the confirmation of Susan Bodine to lead the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

For those who may not know, that is a big job. This is an incredibly important job. The EPA's enforcement office protects the health of our citizens and our environment by ensuring that everyone is playing by the same rules. When bad actors don't follow the rules that we have put in place to maintain a clean and healthy environment for all Americans, it is EPA's enforcement office that holds them accountable.

In the past, the actions taken by this office at EPA have led to reductions in toxic air pollution, as well as to the cleanup of contaminated lands and waterways across our country. In fact, last year alone, EPA's enforcement work required companies to invest some $13.7 billion in similar cleanup efforts.

From the time that she was nominated, Susan Bodine's resume suggests, not just to me but to almost all of us, that she can play a very constructive role if she were confirmed to serve as head of EPA's enforcement office. Ms. Bodine has served as a staff member in both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate for over a decade. She also spent time working in the administration of George W. Bush. Given that breadth of experience, I believe she has a good understanding of the relationship that should exist between the separate but equal branches of our government and the critical role that EPA's enforcement office plays.

When she was nominated for this position, Ms. Bodine was kind enough to come to my office and spend a considerable amount of time with me and with my staff to discuss the job and her qualifications, which I appreciated very much. She spoke of the work she had done for Senators Inhofe and Barrasso, both of whom have taken seriously their oversight roles on the EPW Committee.

From the day Ms. Bodine and my staff and I met in my office, I have made explicitly clear to Ms. Bodine that while I think she is well qualified for this job, I also take seriously the oversight role that we play on the Environment and Public Works Committee.

From the day of that meeting with Ms. Bodine until now, my request has been consistent, yet fairly simple: The EPA should provide complete, adequate, and timely responses to the committee that oversees the work of that Agency. Absent a serious commitment to do so, I have consistently said that I would be unable to support moving forward almost any EPA nominees.

I have also said from the very beginning that I do not make such statements lightly or with any sense of joy, but I believe firmly that this body and its Members have a constitutional duty to perform rigorous oversight and that we must protect that responsibility regardless of which party happens to be in power. Over 200 days is far too long to wait for responses to serious inquiries, such as those about the toxic pesticides that this EPA has deemed safe after the previous administration proposed banning them. I know that no matter who is in charge, we can do better than that.

As my Democratic colleagues and I know all too well, we are not the majority party. We don't control the Senate or its activities or who is confirmed here or who is debated on the floor. For instance, despite my many objections and those of my colleagues, Bill Wehrum was confirmed to head up the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation. So my repeated requests have just been that--an ask with the hope that all of us, as Members of this body, could agree that certain responsibilities are more important than political wins. Some of my Republican colleagues have supported me in this, and I am grateful for that support.

As of late, I see that EPA is making a good-faith effort to begin to respond to our requests--requests of the minority within the Environment and Public Works Committee. I am now satisfied with many of these responses--not all but many of these responses--that they have sent so far, and I am pleased that we are seeing some real progress. I am hopeful--and I think I speak for the Democratic Members of the Environment and Public Works Committee and the Democratic Members of the Senate--that this progress will continue.

I have been privileged to serve in this body for some 17 years now. I think my colleagues know me fairly well, and I think they know that I try to be fair. I have voted for President Trump's nominees and for the nominees of past Republican Presidents. I do not have and have never had an interest in delay for the sake of delay. In fact, I said just last week that if a subset of the letters that were due back from EPA were completed in short order and were truly responsive, we could make progress in nominations. The Agency has done its part, and now we are here today with Ms. Bodine set to be confirmed by this body--not next week, not next month, today. I hope that this is the beginning of a new chapter and that EPA's responses to our oversight requests will be more timely going forward.

Having said that, my sincere congratulations to Susan Bodine and her family, as well as thanks to her family for sharing with us a good woman. I look forward to continuing working with her in her new role. I think I speak again for my colleagues--Democratic and Republican--on the committee and in the Senate. We look forward to continuing to work with her in this new role she will play, if she is confirmed here in a few seconds. We want to make sure that in that role, she will ensure that EPA's enforcement office remains an indispensable and credible cop on the beat.

With that, Mr. President, I yield back my time.

Mr. President, we just concluded a few minutes ago the confirmation of the President's nominee for the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

As it turns out, the Presiding Officer is the chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, which has jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security. I have the privilege of being the immediate past chairman of the committee. The Presiding Officer and I have worked together on a wide range of issues that actually pertain to the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security.

I don't want to speak out of turn, but I believe both the Presiding Officer, who is as well the chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and I believe that one of the most important ingredients of success of any organization--I don't care whether it is a football team, a body such as the U.S. Senate, a hospital, a school, a State, a country--the key is always leadership. The key is leaders who are always interested in figuring out what is the right thing to do; people who believe in the Golden Rule, treating other people the way they want to be treated; and leaders who focus on excellence in everything they do. They surround themselves with the best people they can find. They embrace the idea that if a program or whatever is not perfect, let's make it better. The best leaders with whom I have been privileged to serve are those who just don't give up. When they are sure they are right, they just don't give up.

We have had a series of leaders, and I have been privileged to know every Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security since the very beginning of time, when I served as Governor and when I served in the Congress. I served with the first Secretary we had and others who have succeeded him--most recently, John Kelly, retired Marine four-star general who came from his command in SOUTHCOM to become Secretary of Homeland Security. He is now at the White House serving as the Chief of Staff to the President. We are grateful to him for his service.

Since he has moved on to that post, it has left a vacancy to lead the Department of Homeland Security. I think Elaine Duke is filling in quite nicely as the Acting Secretary. She was previously Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. Now that Kirstjen Nielsen has been confirmed, we will see whether Elaine Duke will step back and be the Deputy. I think a number of us hope that she will, but that is not our decision to make.

The vote today in favor of Kirstjen Nielsen's confirmation was, I believe, 62 ayes and 37 nays. Every now and then, we have the opportunity to vote and it is a close call. Not all of our votes are easy; some are more difficult than others. But for a number of us, this was a close call.

I think Kirstjen Nielsen is arguably bright. She is well-spoken. She has appeared before our committee and taken any number of questions. She was asked and has answered hundreds of questions from committee members and questions for the record. She has been good enough to meet with me not once but twice. I said to her yesterday when we met that I think she is a person with a good heart and good values--again, well- spoken and bright. She is especially strong with respect to cyber security.

The real question mark for me--one of the question marks for me, among others--was, for someone who has at best only led organizations with maybe a couple dozen people to now be thrust into--or selected to serve in this position, where she will be leading 240,000 people at the Department of Homeland Security, spread out all over the world, is a daunting challenge. As someone who has been privileged to spend 23 years of my life in the Navy as a naval flight officer, then as a treasurer, a Congressman, a Governor, a Senator, and I led the National Governors Association--for me, leading an organization of that size would be daunting. I would expect that the same is true for Kirstjen Nielsen.

John Kelly, who for 6 months was our Secretary, has a lot of confidence in her, and I have a lot of confidence in John Kelly. John McCain and I introduced him as the ranking member and the chairman when General Kelly was nominated to be Secretary. John McCain sat on one side of the nominee, and I sat on the other. I think we have taken his recommendation to heart, and that was maybe the tie-breaker for some of us.

When I spoke with Kirstjen yesterday, we talked about her core values and what guides her in making decisions. I think some of it is faith- based, which I find encouraging; the idea of treating other people the way we want to be treated; the willingness to welcome people to our home, our country, who are strangers.

So we will see how it plays out. I think it is critically important that--just as I try to surround myself with people who have strength and fill in for my weaknesses, my hope is that is exactly what will happen when she assumes the responsibility to lead the Department of Homeland Security.

So I would say to Kirstjen Nielsen: Congratulations on your confirmation, and we look forward to working with you, hopefully agreeing a lot more often than we disagree. Good luck and God bless.

Next, Mr. President, I have a couple of charts here. I don't know whether the Presiding Officer can see them from where he is sitting. I can barely see them from right here.

The first chart we are going to take a look at deals with the--on this side over here, we have median household income for Americans since 1987. Over on this side, we have corporate profits in the billions of dollars.

When we come back here to 1987, we look at the orange line here, and that is median household income in 2016 dollars. The median household income in 1987 was just a shade over $50,000. All of these years later, in 2017, it is just a little bit higher. It has gone up a little bit but not a whole lot--maybe close to $60,000, but I don't know that it is any higher than that. It has gone up a little bit, really, over the last few years.

The green line here on our chart is corporate profits. When we go back to 1987, corporate profits were equal to about--it looks like $30,000 billion, and if I am not mistaken, that would be maybe $30 trillion. I hope I have that right. That was 1987. If you look at what has happened, it has gone up and down. This is during the great recession when we fell off the cliff and almost fell off the world. In 2007, 2008, we started to climb back out of it. Today, the corporate profits have roughly doubled in this country since 1987--roughly doubled--while median household income is growing a tiny bit but actually not that much.

Let's look at the next chart, and then I will not speak from the charts. I guess the lesson here again is that corporate profits have gone up rather nicely. There were some ups and downs because of the great recession, but they are on an uptick now.

This is a look at the national deficit and debt. I know the Presiding Officer has a great concern about this.

I came to the House I guess in 1983. I had been State treasurer for a State

that had the worst deficit in the country. The State of Delaware tied with Puerto Rico. We were a mess.

Finally, Pete du Pont, a Republican, did a wonderful job for 8 years as Governor. I had the opportunity to serve with him in the State treasury and later on to become the Governor of the State of Delaware, when we went to a triple A credit rating for the first time in State history.

I came here in 1983 as a Congressman who was concerned about debts and deficits. My sense is that here in the Senate and the House, we don't have a lot of deficit hawks these days. If we do, their voices are not heard very loudly. We are on a course that is unsustainable in terms of our accumulation of more debt.

This is an interesting chart because it goes back to really the beginning of World War II, the war my dad was in and my uncle served in. There is a lot of red ink here, and it shows the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product, and it reached about 30 percent right in the middle of World War II. After the war, we have the green down here where we actually had some surpluses in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. We actually had a surplus in 1968. Then we went from 1968 to about 1998 and never balanced the budget, all of those years at one time. The last 4 years of the Clinton administration, we balanced our budget four times. It was a bipartisan deal.

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, if I am not mistaken, was a Republican from Ohio, John Kasich, who is now the Governor of Ohio. John and I came to the House together in 1983. He came as a deficit hawk as well. He and the Clinton administration obviously did a nice job to help to balance four budgets. We haven't done so well since then. Since then, we have shown, right from here up to the present, which would be right around there, one deficit after the other-- deficits that peaked out over the last year of George W. Bush's administration, when we were again falling into the great recession, and we have spent a lot of money in stimulus to try to get us out of recession.

The debt dropped from about $1.4 trillion per year down to about one- third that much, and now it is starting to go up again. The debt last year--the year that ended on September 30--the deficit had bounced back up to $666 billion again in 1 year--a lot of money. The prospect going forward is not encouraging; it is actually discouraging.

The tax cut bill that was passed in this Chamber just a few days ago--last Saturday morning, in the middle of the night--called for tax breaks, some for individuals for a while, some for corporations that tend to be more permanent in nature. But for me, maybe the most troubling aspect of the tax bill that was enacted last Saturday morning, aside from the way it was pushed through, is the idea that we got, right here on the Senate floor, I think sometime around the middle of the evening last Friday night, a 400-page amendment, over 400 pages that we had never read, never seen, with scribbling on the side of the pages. The idea was that somehow we were supposed to read that and understand it and then vote it up or down in an amendment in like 4 or 5 hours. Good luck. That just doesn't happen. That would be the triumph of man's hope over experience.

I always ask these four questions when people ask about what we should do in tax reform. I say, No. 1, it ought to be fair. What we have actually passed is something where most of the benefits, the lion's share, go to people who are, frankly, very wealthy. Folks who are lower and lower middle income may realize some benefits in the first few years following the implementation of the new tax cut, but over time--say, by 2025--families with incomes up to $75,000 per family are going to be realizing not a net gain from the tax cut but actually a net loss, which is not good.

I always ask: Is it fair? I think it is not fair when you look at the numbers and see how middle-income folks fare and those who happen to be wealthier fare.

The second question I always ask is this: Will it foster economic growth or diminish it? I focus a lot of my time and energy on economic growth, job creation, and job preservation. Senators, Presidents, and Governors don't create jobs. We create a nurturing environment for job creation, job preservation, and workforce, transportation infrastructure, protection of intellectual property rights, public safety, access to water and wastewater. There are a lot of things that contribute to economic growth and so forth. Tax policy is important. Commonsense regulation is important as well.

But my second question is this: Does the tax reform bill that we passed foster economic growth? Not really. To a modest extent, some, but not really. One of the things it does is it suggests uncertainty and the lack of predictability going forth, which I don't think businesses really care for.

One area where we, frankly, decided not to spend any money this time is the area where we could actually get the biggest bang for our buck in terms of growing GDP. We have a transportation infrastructure that is woefully inadequate these days, in terrible shape--roads, highways, bridges, rail, ports, and airports. We have many broad areas in the country that don't have access to the internet.

We just passed a tax bill that is going to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion. Unfortunately, none of that goes to pay for or to make investments in things that would grow GDP by a lot and would provide employment opportunities--not just for a couple hundred thousand people but for millions of people, over the next decade or so. None of that is there.

The third question I always look at in terms of tax reform is this: Does it simplify the Tax Code or make it more complex? The new provision that was adopted is going to increase by this much the thickness of the Tax Code, or by about another 15 or 20 percent--not making it simpler or easier to understand, but actually more difficult.

The last piece I consider is this: What is the effect on the deficit? Pumping up the deficit by another $1.5 trillion is making the situation even worse.

We are going to go to conference now, the House and Senate. My hope is that it will be more bipartisan than what we saw here in the Senate. It needs to be. I quoted last week and I quoted again today an old African-American proverb: If you want to go fast, travel alone. If you want to go far, travel together. Our Republican friends, at least on this side of the Congress, for the most part have chosen to go fast and to go alone. That is unfortunate. The last time we did tax reform, we did it together. It took 3 years, but it was a more lasting and, I think, a better outcome.

I want to pivot for just a moment, Mr. President, and talk about workforce. Most people, when they think of Dreamers and DACA, think of young people who were born in other countries and maybe at a very early age were brought here by their parents and maybe have no recollection of the countries they grew up in. But they have been here now. They came here, were raised here, and were educated here, many of them in our public schools. A number of them had the opportunity to go to college.

Delaware State University is a historically Black university in Dover and is the home of the Hornets. It is a wonderful land grant school that I have been heavily invested in as Governor and even now to make sure they rise and continue to improve. I am very proud of all of the progress that has been made there. I was invited by their president, Harry Williams, to come to their campus a couple of months ago. We met with Dreamers, ``DACAs,'' students born in other countries who were brought here by their parents years ago.

I have met a lot of college students in my day. I have been joined on the floor here by Senator Durbin from Illinois. He has probably met at least as many as I have--probably more, because he is from a bigger State.

I don't think I have ever been more impressed by a group of college students in my life than the young men and women I met that day. We literally happened to be there at 11 in the morning that day, when the President's administration announced that the time for the Dreamers was going to expire in 6 months, unless Congress was somehow able to put together an agreement and pass legislation--which is hard to do without the support of the administration.

I was there with young people that day. I will never forget what a young man said. I think he was born in Central America--either Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador. This was right on the heels of the problem of recognizing these young people and celebrating their promise and potential. Right in the middle, we got an announcement, learning that the administration had just announced about sending these folks home in 6 months--not really home, because their home is here, but back to the places where they were born.

There were about five or six students, all undergrads--freshmen, sophomores. One young man had come here maybe from Guatemala, and he stood up and said: As a young person, I honestly don't remember ever living in my native country. The only country I remember is this country.

I grew up in public schools. Every day, we would start our school day in class, in home room, by standing, putting our hands over our hearts, and pledging allegiance to the United States of America.

He said: This is my home. This is my country. This is the only home I have ever really known.

He then went on to tell about his aspirations.

Those kids are smart and have parents who are engaged in their education and have high expectations for their children. A number of the students are working not one but two jobs to help support themselves through school. As a Navy ROTC midshipman at Ohio State, I worked two jobs to help pay the bills. These students are too. They are taking courses that include math, science, and physics. They want to do the kind of work that, frankly, a lot of people in this country--some want to serve in the military, some want to be in public safety, some want to be educators, some want to be scientists. They want to do all kinds of things. This is a time when we have across the country some 4 million to 5 million jobs that are literally going unfilled today, and people who maybe would like to do those jobs don't have the requisite skills to do them, maybe they don't have the interest in doing the jobs, or maybe they can't pass a drug test. But at a time when we have 3 million or 4 million jobs that are vacant, unfilled, and employers are pleading for qualified applicants, that somehow we are going to send 700,000 or 800,000 Dreamers back to wherever they were born makes no sense.

One of the loudest voices we have heard in this debate is that it is not just a fairness argument for the Dreamers, in terms of turning our backs on their aspirations and hopes, but that it is in our self- interest as a nation, in terms of a stronger economy, to keep them here.

Why would we educate them here and they learn values here, and then we ship them off to another country to compete with us, to start businesses of their own, instead of doing that here?

I suggest that we listen to the employers of this country. We don't always agree with everything that the U.S. Chambers of Commerce or State Chambers of Commerce say, but in this case they are absolutely right.

I have a 3-minute statement that I would like to read, if I could, from one of our Dreamers. Could I do that, I ask the Senator, our Whip, from Illinois?

This is about a woman living in Wilmington, DE, which is where my wife and I live. Her name is Kay-Dean Hayden. This is a portion of a short email she recently sent to me:

My name Kay-Dean, a community builder who happens to be a

DACA recipient. I was born in Jamaica but I have lived in the

U.S. since I was 7 or 8 years old. I grew up in Delaware and

moved to New York in 2012 and moved back [to Delaware]

recently after 5\1/2\ years [in New York].

I am approaching 30 years old on March 1st, so I've been

here [in the United States] for almost 22-23 years.

My grandmother raised myself and two of my cousins. I grew

up not really understanding my immigration status or the

implications it would have on my reality and dreams. I missed

out on opportunities, but I assumed it was due to our

financial lack. My grandmother worked hard but she couldn't

read or write so this limited her.

After unjustly gaining a juvenile record because of poor

representation and ignorance of my rights, I decided I would

become a lawyer, not fully understanding that my immigration

status would potentially bar me from obtaining that dream.

After that summer, I gained a better understanding of my

status and why I couldn't really get a summer job or travel.

In order to truly cope, I determined that if I worked hard

enough, surely I could attain all my hopes and dreams.

I told my guidance counselor what I understood about my

immigration status and heard nothing but disappointment, I

was discouraged but I remained determined. I believed God

would reward my hard-work and faithfulness. So I saw [a]

different guidance counselor my 12th grade year, in tears,

pleading for help. She looked at my records (grades, SAT

score and activities) and by the grace of God she connected

me with a family member who worked with international

students at the local community college. With God's grace I

had the privilege of attending Delaware Technical and

Community College on a full scholarship.

In 2009, I graduated with my Associates in Business

Administration [with Concentrations in] Marketing Management.

Upon graduating, God opened the door and I was accepted to

Goldey-Beacom College with scholarship assistance . . . I

completed my degrees in 2011, and graduated in 2012 with my

Bachelors in Business Administration [with Concentrations in]

Financial Management.

After graduating from school and living and working in New York, Kay- Dean moved back to Delaware. She wrote:

I currently work with a program that provides mentorship

opportunity for minorities and under-served youth who are

interested in working in the medical field. I have been

absolutely blessed to walk through the doors I have though

they were not the ones I originally pictured. I have had the

pleasure of helping and building up others, especially young

people.

I thought for sure DACA would begin to allow me the chance

to finally not only build up others, but myself as well.

But with Mr. Trump as President and his ending of the DACA

Program and whispers of immigration raids, I fight to hold on

to my dreams. My DACA status ends in March and with it all I

have worked so hard to build over the last 4 years.

I wrote this long email to simply ask that you fight for

people like me. We didn't choose to be here but we are

grateful to be here.

It is here where we've grown, cried, dreamed and worked

hard for our American Dream. Here is where those we hold dear

reside.

It is my prayer that you will fight for me and others like

me. It is my prayer that you will be our voice in congress.

It is my prayer that you will humanize us to politicians who

have marginalized and demonized us. It is my prayer that you

would fight for us as if we were yours because truth be told,