Floor Statements

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I wish to say thank you to Senator Manchin, former Governor Manchin, for his willingness to let me slip ahead of him for a few minutes. He is going to talk about the birthday of the State in which both of us were born, West Virginia. I am happy to be here to cheer him on and to applaud all the good work that goes on in my native State and the great work he is doing.

The Presiding Officer has a baseball team up there in Massachusetts, those Red Sox, and every now and then there is a pitcher who telegraphs a pitch. I wish to telegraph a pitch this afternoon.

I was surprised to find out last month from the chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, when I was down at the Mexican border of South Texas, that three out of every five people who come into our country illegally in Texas come not from Mexico, but they come from Central American countries. They come from Guatemala, they come from Honduras, and they come from El Salvador--3 out of 5, 6 out of 10.

For the most part, they don't realize what they are getting into. They don't realize the risks they face on their way to the north to go to the border of Mexico and even when they get across the border into the United States. The dangers they face are of getting robbed,

raped, beaten, drown in the river, and die of starvation and dehydration in the desert. Finally, they get to this country at a time when employers are tightening up in terms of whom they actually hire. They are not hiring those who are here and undocumented.

There is the prospect of detention, not a very pleasant experience, followed shortly thereafter by literally being transported back to their native countries. Most of the people who are trying to get here from those three countries, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, don't know what they are getting into.

They need to know what they are getting into. When I was Governor, as part of the 50-State deal negotiated by the States' attorneys general, you may recall, with the tobacco industry, we created a foundation out of that and called it the American Legacy Foundation. We ran something called a truth campaign. The idea was to convince people, such as these pages, not to start smoking and, if they were smoking, to stop. It was hugely successful.

What we need is something similar to that, particularly in those Central American countries, where the majority of people are now coming from in order to get into Texas and to the United States.

The other thing I would have us keep in mind, we have spent a fair amount of resources in this country trying to help the Mexicans go after the drug lords and to quash the drug trade. What is happening is it is akin to squeezing a balloon. The bad guys in Mexico have worked their way down to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and created mischief there, setting up a drug trade, creating a lot of violence, and making life very unpleasant.

What you have in those countries is not a good situation. One can understand why people want to get out of it: for jobs, hope, and for personal safety. One of the things we have done to help in Mexico--and we are part of the problem. Our country's consumption of illegal drugs has created this problem for Mexico. This deal where drugs come north and guns go south--we are part of that problem, and we need to acknowledge that. But we want to be part of the solution in Mexico, and I think we are playing a constructive role.

We need to be part of the solution in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala and do a similar kind of thing we are doing in Mexico. Part of that is to help a little on their own public safety, the law enforcement efforts in those three countries. Part of it is helping on economic development, job creation, so people don't feel the need to leave those countries and try to flee to our country. The last piece is to actually work with Mexico so they can do a better job of controlling their own borders, to make sure folks don't get, from south of them, into Mexico and eventually work their way into Texas and into the United States.

I will be offering an amendment--not tonight but I suspect tomorrow-- that tries to say: Let's put together a truth campaign, convey what is really facing the people, particularly from those three Central American countries, who are trying to get to the United States and to also see, while we are doing that, if we can't help a little on the economic development and job creation side in those countries and in terms of helping them face lawlessness and crime. We can do a little to help there as well. I call this going after the underlying causes--not just treating the symptoms of the problem but going after the underlying cause--and I think we should do this. So I will offer this tomorrow, and I hope my colleagues will agree.

I want to say again to my fellow native West Virginian, thank you for the chance to go ahead. Thank you most of all for the great job you are doing here and for being here to tell us a little bit of the good coming out of the Mountain State.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, if the Senator will yield, that was wonderful. I am sorry more of us weren't hear to hear those words.

The Senator holds the seat once held for many, many year by Robert Byrd, who until maybe this month was the longest serving person in the history of our country to serve in Congress. I think the record was just eclipsed by John Dingell from Michigan--a most worthy successor.

The Senator from West Virginia knows there is another notable West Virginian who is rising now to national prominence to serve our country as the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget. She grew up in Hinton, WV, graduated from Hinton High School, played on the girls basketball team, and her name is Sylvia Mathews Burwell.

So West Virginia is a State that has produced certainly a lot of coal, a lot of natural resources, but also a lot of good people and a lot of good leaders. And this Senator came to us from West Virginia having been a two-term Governor and chairman of the National Governors Association, and I know he is marked maybe for greatness--maybe for greatness. And I think his wife has a birthday tomorrow; West Virginia has a birthday the day after tomorrow.

The fact is that West Virginia sort of separated itself from Virginia, and about 237 years ago this past Saturday, the State of Delaware gave Pennsylvania its independence. It is quite common to talk about what is Delaware and what is not Delaware--Pennsylvania and Delaware were joined at the hip--but as I said, on June 15, 1776, Delaware gave Pennsylvania its independence and also declared our independence from the tyranny of the British throne. But here we are 5 days later celebrating West Virginia giving Virginia its independence, and now they are on their own and making us all proud.

If I could add, Madam President, every Sunday night I turn on the radio to WNCN to hear simulcast across the country West Virginia Mountain State--it is great music, eclectic music that is wonderful and reminds me of home.

I thank the Senator for enabling us to help him celebrate West Virginia's birthday as well.

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

I wish to start tonight by saluting our Gang of 8. I won't call them by name; you know their names, but four Democrats and four Republicans. I wish to thank them for their tireless efforts to bring this bipartisan legislation to the floor.

I also wish to commend Senator Leahy and the Judiciary Committee that he leads for their efforts to bring the committee together and for bringing to the floor what I think most of us agree is very important legislation.

Delaware celebrated the 375th anniversary of the arrival of the first

Swedes and Finns who came to America and came right through what is now Wilmington, DE. South of that spot, about 5 miles to the south, William Penn first came to America as well.

Those immigrants came to our country all those years ago for a lot of the same reasons people come here today. They came to live what we now call the American dream, the remarkable idea that regardless of our background or station in life, people can still come to this country, work hard, build a better life for themselves and for their families. Today, some 400 years later after those first immigrants settled in my own State, we are blessed to live in a thriving and prosperous Nation in no small part because of millions of immigrants who came together to build this Nation. We can all be proud of that history.

As a Nation of immigrants, we in Congress have a special responsibility to ensure our immigration system is effective and it reflects our values. Those values were what inspired brave, hard- working, and committed people to take great chances to come to this Nation. They are often seeking to escape violence, to lift themselves out of poverty, or to simply live a better life.

These immigrants renew and enrich our communities. They enhance our economy, but we cannot and should not open our doors indiscriminately to everybody who wants to come here. we need an immigration system that is practical, is effective and, in the end, is fair--fair to us, fair to the people who want to be here, and fair to the people who have been in line to become citizens in this country sometime down the road.

Today, however, our immigration system is, by most standards, broken. It is not effective in bringing in the talent we need and maintaining a strong and vibrant economy. Our immigration system does not give employers the assurances that someone they want to hire is actually here legally and eligible to do some work. That system does not always focus our security efforts on the real risks and on those who come here with the intent to do us harm.

Finally, our immigration system does not address in a pragmatic or fair way the fate of 11 million undocumented people living in our country right now, many of whom came here as children and, like us, know no home other than America.

With that said, how do we modernize our immigration laws in a way that is fair, practicable, and makes our Nation more secure, physically and also economically? I have always said the key to immigration reform is border security.

You will recall the last major comprehensive effort this body made to reform our broken immigration system about 6 years ago fell apart because a number of my colleagues here claimed, with some justification, that our borders were not secure enough. Many of my colleagues claim, justly or not, that the border is still too porous, and we would be having the same debate 20 years later because of border control, the lack of it.

People ask themselves are our borders secure enough to ensure we don't end up having this same debate 20 or 30 years down the line. The answer, for many of my colleagues and for a lot of Americans was, no, they are not. That was then; this is now.

Six years later, a number of people will still argue our borders are not secure enough to even try to move forward with these reforms. I disagree. When I hear our colleagues ask are our borders more secure, I am often reminded of a friend who says, when you ask him how he is doing: Compared to what?

Some say our borders won't be secure until we stop every single person who tries to get across illegally. I think it is clear this is not a realistic goal or expectation.

Let's go back a little bit in time. Take, for example, the border between East Germany and West Germany, most famously the Berlin Wall. This was perhaps the most secure border our world has ever seen, with roughly 100 miles of concrete, electrified razor wire, and a 100-yard- wide kill zone guarded by some 30,000 soldiers. Still people made it safely across this highly secured border every year. In fact, a recent report by the Council of Foreign Relations concluded that East Germany only stopped about 95 percent of those who tried to cross the border and enter West Germany. Even a ruthless regime willing to kill its citizens couldn't stop desperate people in search of a better life. I don't think any reasonable person believes we should try to replicate the East German border strategy.

What is the right comparison? I suggest the right comparison is what our borders looked like in 2007. Are our borders more secure today than they were then? Are they a lot more secure or just a little bit? I think they are a lot more secure.

How do I know? I have the privilege of chairing the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. We held a number of hearings this year on border security. Even more importantly I have had the opportunity to visit our borders with Mexico and actually up in Canada, along with Senator John McCain, Congressman Michael McCaul of Texas, Secretary Janet Napolitano, all kinds of local officials, sheriffs, police, mayors, and other folks. About 3 years ago, I visited the California border and earlier this year Arizona and Texas and up in Michigan. My goal was to get a firsthand look at what is working, what is not, and what more we ought to do to secure the border further--and we can.

Based on what I have seen, there is overwhelming success, though, that our borders are more secure than they have been--probably have ever been--and certainly more secure than they were in 2007. I saw parts of our border that were overrun with undocumented immigrants as recently as 2006, when the Border Patrol agents I met with told me they used to arrest more than 1,000 people every single day trying to get into this country illegally. Think about that, 1,000 people a day. Today those same agents told me they have a busy day if they arrest as many as 50 people. Is 50 too many? Yes, it is, but it is not 1,000 people a day.

In fact, arrests at the border have reached their lowest levels since the early 1970s. With our putting massive investments in personnel and technology along the border, we are arresting significantly fewer people, and it is not because we are not on the lookout or trying to get those who are coming here.

I have a slide of our southern border, from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico; from California into Arizona, to parts of New Mexico and Texas, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. So four States are divided into about nine different quadrants. We have some interesting numbers. If we look at 1992, the number of people who were arrested was about 565,000 just south of San Diego. In 2000, in the El Centro area of California, we had about 238,000. Initially, the numbers here in the West were huge. In the Navy, I used to be stationed in San Diego. These numbers were huge. It has sort of drifted this way. I used to go across the border south of San Diego into Mexico, but it is remarkably secure. The challenge now lies way over here and other places as well, but really it lies over here. We have not just Mexicans trying to get across. Maybe the majority of people trying to get across in South Texas today are from Central American countries--Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

In 2005, a year or two before we debated the last immigration reform proposal, Border Patrol was arresting, in this Yuma section right here, 138,000 people. Today, the number is 6,500. Think about that, from 138,000 down to 6,500.

Let's look at the Tucson sector. In the year 2000, we were arresting over 600,000, today about 120,000. In the El Paso sector in 1993 we were arresting close to 300,000; now it is right around 10,000, and it is not because we are not trying. It is not because we don't have a lot more people there, a lot better technology. It is just that the number of folks coming across has just significantly diminished.

Over here in Texas though, in 1997, there were about one-quarter million coming across and getting arrested and today still about 97,000. So there is still a good number--too high a number trying to get across--and we are arresting a number of those.

But the change in these numbers--the dramatic reductions from 1997 to today--is not an accident. This precipitous drop in arrests is the direct result

of the unprecedented investments we have made in securing our borders over the past decade.

You don't have to take my word for it. Here is what several of our border officials and residents who are true experts have to say about the progress we have made in securing our borders. I will just quote a few. I talked to a whole lot more. Some of my colleagues have been down there and talked to a bunch of local officials in those States too. Here is what the mayor of San Antonio said earlier this year before the House Judiciary Committee. Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio said:

In Texas, we know firsthand that this administration has

put more boots on the ground along the border than at any

other time in our history, which has led to unprecedented

success in removing dangerous individuals with criminal

records.

The mayor of Nogales, AZ, one of the places we visited earlier this year with Secretary Napolitano, said:

We used to have street chases all the time. . . . Now all

those things are gone, something you don't even hear about.

That was about 2 or 3 months ago.

A woman named Veronica Escobar, a county judge in El Paso, said this near the end of 2011:

Those of us who actually live along the border know

otherwise. El Paso, the largest city along the United States-

Mexico border, is also one of the country's safest cities and

the heart of a vibrant bi-national community.

So the truth is we spend more on border security each year--about $18 billion--according to a recent Migration Policy Institute report--about $18 billion a year--than we spend on the rest of Federal law enforcement activities combined. Think about that for a moment. We spend more on border enforcement, border security, than we spend on the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals combined-- combined.

Since 2000, the Border Patrol alone has more than doubled in size. Its funding has almost quadrupled. We have built 650 miles more of fencing along the border. That is roughly one-third of our Mexican border. To better secure parts of our border where a fence might not be as effective, we deployed a number of what I like to call force multipliers, and I will talk about some of those later on.

When I am talking about technology that will help the Border Patrol do their job more effectively, in some parts of the border it might be radar, it might be drones, in others it might be cameras, towers or hand-held systems. For example, in the past couple of years, we have deployed roughly 350 land-based towers, vehicle-based towers with advanced cameras and radar. We fly more than 270 aircraft and helicopters to monitor a 2,000-mile border, and we are also using drones and the lighter-than-air assets--blimps.

But you don't have to take my word for it. I think a picture is worth a thousand words, and I have a couple of pictures here of some slides I wish to show to take a look at what the border looked like 7 years ago, in 2006, and what it looks like today.

This is one of my favorite pictures. It is a picture of a ranch. I believe this is a ranch in Arizona. Look at this. It looks almost like a junkyard, almost like a place where people come to drop their trash, and that is what happened, because every day hundreds of people would come through here, through this ranch, to cross the border, and this is what they left behind. Here is the same place today.

This is not because the folks trying to get into our country have somehow gotten an environmental conscience and they do not litter as much. That is not what is going on here. They are not coming through as much. So if you ever hear: Is our border more secure? Does it make a difference? I would say go to that ranch and take a look. We have spent a lot of money on infrastructure.

This is Douglas, AZ. We were there, along the southern border of Arizona, and this is a before shot. This is the same landscape and what we see today. Actually, it looks like we have a couple of fences, a road in between, and all kinds of detectors. This is what it looked like before. So we have made huge investments for miles and miles and miles.

We have something from the Yuma sector in Arizona. The Yuma sector was out of control. Border-wise, I think we had the most illegal border crossings than at any stretch of the border in 2006. Starting in 2006, they built more than 100 miles of fencing, just in this one sector alone--in the Yuma sector--where it made a lot of sense. There is an access road so the Border Patrol agents can get where they need to go quickly. We have deployed a bunch of cameras as well. Today, Yuma is the most controlled part of our border, as I reported those numbers earlier. There is a dramatic reduction in the numbers of folks coming through.

This is another place in Arizona, in Nogales. We met with a bunch of local officials there as well. This is a lovely piece of landscape right here. This may not be as lovely, but what is different here is an access road. We can't put a Border Patrol agent every 100 feet along the border, but what we can do is get them where they need to go more quickly. One of the ways to do that is with access roads, and this is one of those near Nogales, AZ.

This is another shot. This is Deming, NM. What it shows is what the area looked like in 2007 along the border. It doesn't look too hard to get across, and it wasn't. This is what it looks like today: lighting, the walls, ways for the Border Patrol to move quickly if they need to. It is just a different place today, and the numbers will demonstrate that has made a difference.

Here we are in Del Rio, TX. There is a lot of water here. In 2008, there was literally no infrastructure whatsoever in Del Rio, TX. That was about 2008, and this is a couple of years later. You could literally walk across the border and you didn't know it. You didn't know if you were in the United States or Mexico. Today you know it, and we built significant fencing and all those all-important access roads and now have a far more secure border.

This is a place called Marfa, TX. This is a border in the western part of Texas, actually near Big Bend National Park. In 2006, the border was wide open. This is lovely, isn't it? There were some people, particularly some of the locals, who were opposed to fencing. The reason why is because this now looks like this. But the problem with this is people were able to literally walk across, wade across, in substantial numbers. They do not do that anymore. We gave up some scenic beauty, but at the same time we have a whole lot of security we never had before.

Here is Harlingen, TX. We were there a month or two ago. This is the eastern part of Texas, closer to the Gulf of Mexico, but we see a part of the border that as recently as 4 years ago, right here, you could literally walk across it and you wouldn't know it. You could walk right across, and a lot of people walked right across it. This is what it looks like now, with fencing and access roads. They don't walk across it without them knowing it and, frankly, oftentimes without us knowing it.

This is one of my favorite pictures. This is a fence, and this is a fence, in this case, that at least stopped this vehicle. A friend of mine likes to say let me build a 20-foot fence and someone will come along and build a 21-foot ladder. Someone tried to be very clever and find a way to get this vehicle over this fence. I don't know if that is a Jeep, but they tried to get it across and they didn't quite make it. So people trying to get across are pretty ingenious, and they will try to build that 21-foot ladder or in this case a different type of ladder. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. In this case it worked to stop them.

I also wish to show some of the force multipliers that are helping to enhance security efforts at our borders and ports of entry. These are pictures of just a small sample of the massive improvements we have made along the southern border from California to Texas. It shows what any fairminded person who has been to the border in recent years can tell us; that is, the investments we have made are actually paying off. I hope so. As much money as we have spent, I would hate to think we spent it without getting any kind of result.

One of the investments we have made are the drones. We don't have a huge number, but I think we have four of them in Arizona, a couple in Texas, and I think they have a couple up along the northern border, maybe North Dakota, and a couple over in Florida. But we will talk a little more about these.

Let me just say, if you put up a drone and you put a VADER system on it, they can fly at high altitudes, they can fly day or night, they can see in the rain, they can see in the dark, they can see when the Sun is shining. They are an incredibly effective asset when they fly. We will talk later about the problem that they don't always fly. They do not fly when the wind is more than 15 knots. We have four of these in Arizona, with only one that has a VADER system. Of the four we have, only about two of them are flying most of the time. They only fly 5 days a week. So one of the keys, if we are going to use the drones, let's make sure we have VADER on all of them and let's make sure they are able to fly more than 5 days a week, more than 16 hours a day, and let's properly resource these aircraft.

Old technology. The drone is pretty new. This is old technology. Blimps and dirigibles have been around forever. Some of you may recall seeing a video of blimps such as this from Kabul, Afghanistan. I talked on the phone this week with a fellow who is now Ambassador to Mexico. His name is Tony Wayne. He used to be the No. 2 guy in our Embassy in Afghanistan.

I asked him: How do we use blimps in Kabul? We use them in Kabul very effectively. He said: The great thing about blimps is you can put them up in bad weather, when it is windy. You can't fly more than 15 knots, but these stay up and don't run out of gas. You can have more surveillance systems with pods on these than you can on a lot of the other aircraft we are flying. We use them with great effect in Kabul, Kandahar, Afghanistan, and other places, and we ought to be able to do better with them on the border with Mexico. They can be a great force multiplier as well.

This is a little plane called a Cessna C-206, and it has enough room to carry two people. I think we have about 17 of them. We saw one in Arizona, and we saw a bunch more in Texas. It is really not cutting- edge technology; it is just cost-effective. You can put these planes out for a while, and they don't use much gas. They are a good platform for surveillance.

Unfortunately, out of the 16 or 17 that we have, only 1 of them has a surveillance system that enables us to look down and find out what is going on on the ground. It is sort of like sending out an airplane doing maritime surveillance when occasionally we do search and rescue missions over the vast ocean with binoculars, looking for somebody in a little skiff or in a life preserver. It is like looking for a needle in the haystack. When we fly these planes, we ought to have them fully resourced with modern surveillance equipment and people operating them.

We have boats, and we have helicopters. We have boats that go fast along the Rio Grande River. We need boats that go fast. We need the same thing off the coast of California. Fortunately, we have them.

We don't have enough helicopters. We talked to some folks in East Texas. They basically are flying three different kinds of helicopters-- one is fairly modern, and a couple others are not. The only one the Border Patrol is really interested in is the one that is fairly modern. It is reliable, has good surveillance equipment.

What we were told by some people is this: If you are going to send us the older, less reliable helicopters without the technology, don't send them. What we need to have is more of the successful helicopters, the ones in demand, where it will actually be a real force multiplier.

I thought this was an interesting slide. This is with night vision goggles. We also have the ability to use the VADERS, the systems we put in our drones. In the C-206s we fly, our ground-mounted cameras are along the border. This is nighttime, but this is what we can see today, and it is pretty easy to pick people up. If we are going to ever be able to figure out how many are getting across, not getting across, we need this; we don't need this. Fortunately we have this, and it is a force multiplier. We need to make sure we use it well.

This shows a different series. Some are cameras, some are radar, but they are ground-based. In this case they have an operator. Again, this is one that is mounted on a truck bed. It can be moved around. Some are more permanent. Here is one that is more permanent. You have the Border Patrol here right at the fence and the ability to look north, south, east, and west.

These are just a couple examples of force multipliers. We have all these men and women on the border. We have basically doubled the border patrol. How do we make them more effective without just adding more and more bodies between the ports of entry? We can do it with this kind of technology. We can do it effectively, and I think we can do it in a cost-effective way. That is what we ought to do.

The bill we are going to be debating over the next couple of weeks sets aside an additional $6.5 billion for border security on top of the $18 billion we already spend today, every year. The $6.5 billion in the bill will be used to add another 3,500 officers--not between the ports of entry, these big ports. We are not talking about water ports. We are talking about land-based ports of entry where a lot of commerce--cars, trucks, pedestrians--is getting in, and big commerce is going through those ports of entry as well.

But the legislation wisely could use some of that extra $6.5 billion to hire another 3,500 officers to work in our ports of entry, to build new infrastructure at the ports of entry and make them better, to secure new surveillance systems, and for the aerial support for the Border Patrol.

For the first time in our Nation's history, we have set a statutory goal for the Border Patrol in this legislation to arrest or turn back to Mexico some 90 percent of all those trying to get across illegally. So if we have 100 people trying to get in on a given day at a particular spot, the idea is to know how many are actually trying to get in and how many are either detained or actually turned back. The idea is to make sure we are going to have at least a 90-percent success rate. It is a tough law, and it ensures accountability.

Do you remember what I said about Germany? In Germany, with all the hundreds of miles of concrete and 30,000 soldiers, their effective rate was 95 percent. We are talking about something very close to that--90 percent--without doing the kinds of stuff they did in East Germany.

Lastly, the bill that is before us calls for achieving persistent surveillance over the entire border so we can know with a high degree of certainty how many people are trying to cross it illegally. Given the length of our borders and how rugged and how varied it is, this goal will be a challenge--and a costly one--to achieve, but it is not impossible.

As I learned from my trips to the border, there is simply no one- size-fits-all solution for securing our border. It really depends on the terrain, which varies widely along the border region. That is why we need to systemically identify the best technology to allow us to use our frontline agents--the Border Patrol--more effectively and give them the tools they tell us they need to be successful.

One specific thing I have seen on my trips along the border with the C-206--and just think about it. You have an airplane. You put it up to fly for 3 or 4 hours, and you can send it out with one person looking through binoculars or a surveillance system with lights out. That works in the day or the night, rain or not, and it gives us great images and a great capability.

We also need to make sure the Department of Homeland Security has the flexibility to deploy resources when and where it makes sense. For example, as we talked earlier about the blimps that are tethered, they have proven to be enormously successful in northern Afghanistan. And for anybody who doubts that, I urge you to give our Ambassador to Mexico a call, who was our No. 2 guy in Afghanistan the last time I was there a couple of years ago. As I said earlier, the blimps are old in terms of the technology, but they can handle a lot of surveillance stuff and equipment, and they do great work. In some places, they will make a lot of sense; in other cases, maybe not so much.

But the Department of Homeland Security needs to be able to swiftly put in place innovative tools like blimps when factors on the ground change or when they see the need for a new approach to securing certain portions of our border. I don't think we ought to be hamstringing them with mandates

that make them less effective in carrying out their missions, including requiring additional fences in areas where the fencing doesn't make much sense. In a lot of places, it does. There are 600 miles or so where it does, and there are more places that it does. But there are also some places where it makes more sense to resource a drone, to have land-based radar and cameras, where it makes more sense to fly the 206s, to have helicopters with the right kind of surveillance equipment on them and be able to move people along.

I want to mention some other cost-effective technology. We saw some really interesting hand-held devices that allow the border agents to see in the dark. I also saw something at one of the ports of entry. It was actually about the size of my Blackberry. I remember standing at the ports of entry where they have literally thousands of cars and trucks and vehicles and pedestrians coming across a day. But before the truck or vehicle ever got to the border, the officer had a device that would tell her the truck that was coming through, the history of the truck that was coming through, the driver who was in the truck and the history of that driver coming through, what should be in the truck, and what was the cargo in the truck in recent months. This was up in Detroit too. But one of the officers there said this is a game changer.

As I mentioned earlier, this bill we are debating appropriates about $6.5 billion to continue to build on the progress we have made and achieve the ambitious goals it sets for the Department. That is good news. My goal is to make sure that much of this funding is devoted to these force multipliers to help our boots on the ground work smarter and be more effective. I don't think we need to micromanage the process.

We have been joined by the majority leader. I am happy to yield.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Gohar Sedighi, a fellow in my Senate office, and Susan Corbin and Michelle Taylor, detailees to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the first session of the 113th Congress.

Mr. President, picking up where I left off, I don't think we, Congress, need to micromanage this process. We don't need congressional enforcement officers, so to speak. Rather, we need to spell out the goals, the priorities for border and port security which this bill does. We need to give the Department of Homeland Security the tools, skills, resources, and flexibility it needs to get this job done, which this bill also does. Then we need to let DHS do its job while at the same time continuing to provide responsible and robust oversight, not just here from Washington but along the border itself.

That is why now in my Committee on Homeland Security that is what my colleagues and I will want to do to be sure this bill is implemented strongly and effectively.

Still, as strong as our border defenses have become and despite how much stronger this bill will make them, we cannot defend our Nation entirely at the border. One of our witnesses earlier this year noted that we often look to our borders to solve problems that originate elsewhere. In other words, we are so preoccupied with the symptoms we are missing the underlying causes which can make finding a solution all the more difficult. We have to address the root causes that are drawing people to our country illegally in order to fully secure our borders and ensure we are not embroiled in the same debate 20 years from now. I am pleased to say this bipartisan legislation addresses the root causes in a way that I believe is tough, is practical, and is fair.

My friend and former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Jane Holl Lute recently told me we have to strike the right balance between enforcing security policies at our borders and ports of entry, to keep bad actors out while facilitating and while encouraging commerce between the United States and our neighbors to the north and south, two of our biggest trading partners. This bill provides, as I said earlier, for 3,500 additional officers to work the our ports of entry--not ports along the water, actually land-based ports where a lot of traffic moves through, a lot of commerce moves through, and 3,500 additional officers actually will make a big difference. We need them.

We also need to modernize our ports so these additional officers have the resources and tools they need to process legitimate travelers and trade while focusing on bad actors.

Here are some of the examples of what we have done to upgrade our ports of entry. I am not going to use all of these, but we will use a couple of

them. This is a before. This is a shot, probably about 6 years before. We had limited, I think, very limited percentage of traveler queries. We had limited technology and we had minimal signage.

This is today. We have nearly 100 percent traveler queries on land borders, the expansive use of RFID-enabled documents and increased efficiency by 25 percent. We have new READY lanes to encourage our use of RFID documents as well.

Here, it is hard--this is like signage, simple, a lot of printed stuff. Here we have gone electronic. We can just stop.

When trucks are coming, when vehicles are coming, we have the ability to read the license plates before they ever get to the officers. We have the ability, if people are coming across, to use devices that read their passports and give us some idea who actually is coming up to the officer, Customs and Border Patrol officer. We use gamma rays. We are able to look inside trucks. We have detection, the ability to detect radiation on any vehicles that are coming through. It is a massive change. We don't just do it because we want to secure the vehicles and make sure what is supposed to be in them is actually in them and not some contraband or drugs or whatever, but we want to be able to expedite the movement of these vehicles.

We want them to have a better throughput because there are huge economic consequences for us and for Mexico. We want to strengthen our borders. One of the reasons why we are making these investments is it is a tool to make them more secure, to keep bad people and bad stuff out, and do a better job of facilitating trade. It is smart business. It is a smart way to do business with the help of this legislation.

I think that is all we are going to look at in terms of these ports of entry. I could move along. I think properly balancing commerce and security is critical because facilitating trade with our neighbors to the south and also to the north not only strengthens our own economy but also strengthens the economies throughout North, South, and Central America.

Why do we care? We want their economies to be stronger so they don't want to come up here and live with us, come here illegally and try to be a part of this country, although we appreciate their desire to do that. We want to make sure their countries are strong economically too.

For most who live in the United States illegally, though, what draws them to our country and enables them to stay here without legal status, as we know, is jobs. We need, obviously, a system that makes it easier for employers to do the right thing and to verify who is eligible to work. Too often today that is not the case. We also need to hold employers who normally break the law hiring undocumented workers accountable for doing that.

I believe, again, the legislation that is before us comes close to achieving those goals. It requires all employers to use a strong electronic verification system, starting with large employers down to small employers over time, but a strong verification system, designed to give employers quick assurance that the new employees are eligible to work, that they are considering hiring. For many workers these will include photo tools that let the employer verify the person applying for the job is indeed the person who applied for the worker eligibility document. The law increases fines for knowingly hiring undocumented workers and increases them by more than tenfold and includes a significant criminal penalty for those who systematically abuse our workplace laws. These new penalties, including jail sentences of up to 10 years, will provide a strong deterrent to unscrupulous employers who seek to exploit undocumented workers for their own gain.

We also need to convince those who want to come here for a better life that the way to do that is through legal rather than illegal immigration. While we crack down on the bad actors who try to hire undocumented workers, we also need to make sure that employers who are playing by the rules have ample access to the talent they need to keep our economy growing--and encourage people from other nations to come here legally when we do not have the talent here in this country able and willing to do some of the work that needs to be done. This legislation does help by modernizing our outdated visa system to supply sufficient workers when needed, particularly in critical areas such as high-skilled and agricultural employment. These approved legal pathways for workers and their families will shrink the flow of undocumented migrants and help our border forces to concentrate on the most serious threats at the border.

Ultimately, I believe the most effective force multiplier, as much as I like the idea of these drones, fully resourced with the VADER systems on them, as much as I like the idea of the C-2006 aircraft with the right kind of surveillance, and as much as I like having the blimps with all the technology they can carry, as much as I want to have helicopters to move our border surveillance up and down the border and have all kinds of surveillance equipment, as much as I think fencing helps and access routes and all these investments help, I still think maybe the most effective force multiplier for protecting our border is to take away the need for people to come here illegally in the first place.

As we address the root causes, we have to address another challenge and that is the 11 million people who are here without proper documentation, living in the shadows today. Ironically, 40 percent came in on a legal status, on a student visa, a tourist visa, a work visa. They overstayed their welcome and overstayed what the law allows.

Some critics argue that the bill before us grants immediate amnesty to those 11 million undocumented people. I don't think that is true. What they get is not amnesty but, rather, a long, I think a hard path toward possible citizenship, one with many hurdles and no guarantees. It kind of reminds me of the trek a bunch of them took through Mexico just to get to the border, getting across the border without getting caught, trying to escape, in many cases, these coyotes who took advantage of them, robbed them, in some cases raped them, and once they got into this country avoiding getting detained. And a bunch got detained and ended up in the detention centers. That is not an easy path.

I don't think the path this lays out ahead for those undocumented today is an easy path. Just to reach the first step, becoming what is called a registered provisional immigrant, individuals would have to clear multiple background checks, pay back taxes, pay a hefty fine. If they committed any kind of significant crime they are disqualified from pursuing legal status.

Once an applicant has cleared the first hurdle, registered provisional immigrants must remain employed, pay even more taxes and fines, learn English, maintain a clean criminal record, and demonstrate they are living not below the poverty line but above the poverty line; they are gainfully employed. Most importantly, these people have to go to the back of the line, not ahead of people who are waiting to get ahead who have played by the rules, but behind them, at the end of the line--behind the folks who are here legally, who are going to get processed, as they should, first. It is going to take about 10 years before those folks who are undocumented will have a chance to even qualify for a green card.

Three years after getting a green card, these immigrants would finally be able to apply for citizenship. We are not talking about 13 weeks or 13 months, we are talking about 13 years. Once again, they have to pass extensive background checks in order to successfully move forward in that process.

So to our colleagues who are suggesting this bill would immediately begin legalizing the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country right away, I would simply ask: Does that sound like an immediate process to you? It doesn't to me. This is not an easy path, and, frankly, a lot of people won't make it, just as a lot of people who have tried to get into this country have not made it either. I think the process we have laid out over those next 10, 13 years, if you will, is a tough, fair, and practical approach. Call it a lot of things, but I would not call it amnesty.

We also need to make sure the men and women around the world know this Nation is making unprecedented investments to improve and modernize our legal immigration system in addition to making it very difficult for

folks who try to come here illegally. We are dedicating significant resources to detaining and deporting those who try to go around the rules--spending roughly $2 billion a year on this effort. In fact, since President Obama took office, removals have increased from 291,000 people in 2007, or just under 300,000 folks, to more than 400,000 last year, when we returned a record number of people to their home countries.

Our Nation must also work with our neighbors to improve the process and decrease the time it takes to return our detainees to those countries of origin. When we were in Texas recently, I learned we have an agreement with Guatemala where they issue electronic travel documents to their citizens almost as soon as we apprehend them along our border--mostly Texas. This process cuts down on detention times for Guatemalans from 30 days to roughly 7 days.

It has a real positive effect on the Guatemalans we arrest and take into custody because they spend less time in detention--not a pleasant experience. It saves us millions of dollars because we have to hold them, feed them, and give them a place to stay for a shorter period of time. We need to take the Guatemalan model where we dramatically reduce the detention time and see if we cannot replicate their program with our other nations, especially particularly nations such as Mexico.

Finally, I will conclude by admitting this legislation is not perfect. On the other hand, I have not seen a perfect piece of legislation. Even the Constitution we adopted in Delaware on December 7, 1787, to become the first State wasn't perfect either. We amended it again and again. We amended it over 30 times.

While I do believe there is certainly room for constructive criticism and debate about this bill, I am certain this legislation represents an improvement over our current system. I believe we can make it even stronger in the coming weeks, and I hope we will.

I plan to offer some amendments, and my guess is the Presiding Officer will offer amendments as well as our colleagues. We ought to offer them, debate them, and vote them up or down.

We must come to this debate with an understanding that the status quo is unacceptable. If we don't modernize our immigration system to allow employers to fill the jobs our economy needs and our citizens are unwilling or unable to do, we are hurting our children's future while at the same time making our Nation less secure.

As a Nation founded on the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we simply cannot tolerate a shadow economy of 11 million people who are scared to live freely, who generate black markets to produce false identity documents, and who drive down the wages of U.S. citizens.

To my colleagues who are still uneasy with legalization, I ask this: What is the alternative? It is not practical to find and deport 11 million people. Most of the undocumented immigrants in this country have lived here more than 10 years. Many have children who are U.S. citizens. They have deep roots in our society and contribute meaningfully to our national interests.

I think the American people would want us to be tough, but they also want us to be humane and realistic. I believe this legislation offers that path, that balance, and now is the time to take that path.

In closing, I am reminded of something that binds all of us together. If we actually look above where you are sitting, there are some words in Latin. If we look up there, we will see the Latin phrase ``e pluribus unum,'' which means ``out of many, one.'' It is a phrase that adorns our Nation's seal. It suggests that while we all come from many different places, in the end we are one Nation.

With that thought in mind, I will simply say to our colleagues and to those who are following this discussion tonight, we have a choice. We can work together to make this bill better and adopt it in a bipartisan manner or we can remain in gridlock and let the American people down.

I know what I want to do. I know what the people of Delaware want us to do. They want us to legislate, and I want us to legislate as well. I want us to make our immigration system better. I want to show the American people that Congress can come together--Democrats, Republicans, and a couple of Independents--on an issue of great importance to our country's economy and great importance to our national security. We need to get this done, and I am encouraged with the grace of God we will.

Mr. President, you will be glad to know that I am done, but our work remains to be done. I look forward to working with the Presiding Officer and 98 of our colleagues to get the job done for the American people.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, on behalf of Senator Coons, Congressman Carney, and myself, I wish to recognize the Rehoboth Art League, its staff and artist members who on June 21, 2013, will celebrate its founding in 1938 and the 75 subsequent years of cultivating the arts in Sussex County and the State of Delaware.

The Rehoboth Art League was Sussex County's first organized cultural arts center and has been recognized by the State of Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs for its significance and influence that extends far beyond Rehoboth and even the borders of our State. The Rehoboth Art League grew out of the tradition of the Federal Arts Project, which was a subset of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. This tradition of art appreciation, support for working artists, and the concept of enriched community living, inspired the late Mrs. Louise Corkran to organize the Rehoboth Art League, with the help of her husband, COL Wilbur Corkran. Her involvement with the founding of the Delaware Art Museum, as well as her collaboration through the years with such renowned national artists as Howard Pyle, Frank Schoonover, N.C. Wyeth and others from the Brandywine and Hudson Valley Schools, were a significant factor in the Rehoboth Art League's development. Over the years, it has become a place that attracts and nurtures artists from all over the country, and inspires art appreciation through its many educational offerings.

The Rehoboth Art League sits in the small village of Henlopen Acres, DE, on an historic campus overlooking the Lewes-Rehoboth Canal and the Valley of the Swans, and maintains two colonial period buildings, The Paynter Studio, 1791, the Peter Marsh Homestead and Stables, 1743, as well as Louise Corkran's garden, which is one of the only public gardens in Sussex County. The Rehoboth Art League owns and cares for a significant collection of Delaware art and archives, with pieces by Howard Pyle, Jack Lewis, Howard Schroeder, Ethel P. B. Leach, and others. Its collection includes the renowned ``Doors of Fame,'' providing tangible evidence of the legacy and history of the Rehoboth Art League. The tradition of signing doors was prevalent in art colonies around the country in the first half of the twentieth century. The Rehoboth Art League has, since its dedication in 1938, provided three doors for signatures by artists, dignitaries, and national and international visitors. These doors record the persons who have contributed to its success over the years. Today there are nearly 300 signatures, often accompanied by a personal artistic flourish or drawing. These signatures include six Delaware Governors, along with many artists from the State and national pantheon, educators, scientists, musicians, and other notables.

Today, the Rehoboth Art League continues to attract artists and visitors from all over the country. Its members hail from 19 different States. It partners with 13 other organizations from the arts, education, and health and human services across the region to provide a variety of programming, both on the campus and around the county. Works from its collection have been on display at the Biggs Museum, Buena Vista Conference Center, the Governor's mansion, and the Federal offices of Senator Chris Coons. The Rehoboth Art League also collaborates with First State Community Action Agency to take arts education to 600 at-risk students in Sussex County and to many senior citizens in the region as well.

Today we are delighted to recognize the Rehoboth Art League, which for more than 75 years has been a community of artists who share their art, inspire and support one another and enrich the lives of us all.

Mr. President, Senator Coons and I spent a couple of lovely hours together in Michael Beals' synagogue last Saturday as his daughter was going through bat mitzvah. I will never forget that occasion. What a joy for everyone there, people from all over the country. I know it was a source of family pride for the father, the mom, and for the rabbi to be there with their daughter on that special day.

To my colleagues I would say that one of the things I pray for every day is that we will find our way to a two-state solution in the Middle East that provides a homeland for the Palestinians, a capital for the Palestinians, and security for the people of Israel and peace for the people of Israel.

There is a great partnership in our State between Rabbi Beals' synagogue and my church and a number of other churches of different faiths. I just want to mention that here today and thank you for your commitment not just to the least of those in our society and those who need our help but also across the world to a really big trouble spot that needs our attention and our thoughts and our prayers. I thank you very much for being here today. Thank you for your prayer.

I thank the leader for letting me say a few words.

Mr. President, today I wish to pay tribute to Mr. Charles E. Welch, who I have had the privilege of knowing for more than three decades. Known to his many friends as Chuck, he is a World War II veteran, humanitarian, lawyer and leader in the business community in the State of Delaware.

Born in 1925, Chuck is a native of Columbus, OH. He graduated with a B.S. in Business Administration in 1949 from The Ohio State University, 19 years ahead of me, and went on to receive his Juris Doctor in 1951 from the same institution. He served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946 as a rifle platoon leader and later served as a company commander in the Judge Advocate General Corps from 1952 to 1955. During this time, he was also employed by the Ohio Tax Department as Chief Counsel from 1951 to 1958.

Chuck later moved to Delaware to work for the DuPont Company. There, he rose through the ranks and held the position of General Counsel until 1979 when he was appointed by DuPont CEO Irving S. Shapiro to the newly created position of Vice President for External Affairs. After a distinguished 26-year career with DuPont, Chuck retired from the company. He did not retire from an active life as a husband, father, grandfather and community leader. At an age when a lot of people are ready to slow down, Chuck picked up the pace.

Chuck's commitment to the community and State was demonstrated most clearly through his passion for education and helping the disabled. Chuck and his late wife Charma understood the struggles of special needs children and were the driving forces behind the development of The Mary Campbell Center, a remarkable facility for individuals with physical and cognitive disabilities. Chuck and Charma, who themselves were parents of a special needs child, had the shared vision to develop a safe, loving place for children and young adults, and since its opening in 1976, The Mary Campbell Center has touched the lives of literally thousands of people.

Chuck and Charma were the parents of six children: Ed, Patricia, John, Mary Beth, and the late Jeff and Charmie, the inspiration for The Mary Campbell Center. Chuck is now married to Barbara G. Welch.

In addition to his work with The Mary Campbell Center, Chuck was a member of the Mt. Pleasant Board of Education from 1967-1973, Chair of the Vocational Education Task Force in 1986, Chair of the Delaware Compensation Review Commission, Member of the Judicial Nominating Commission, Chair of the Committee to Reorganize Farmers Bank, Head of the Commission to study New Castle County Government, Director of the Wilmington Medical Center, Past President of the Delaware Foundation for Retarded Children and of United Cerebral Palsy, and was appointed by the Governor as President of the State Board of Education in 1986 where he served for 3 years. He was also a member of the committee for the Delaware Justice Center, President of the Rockledge Community Association and Chairman of the Advisory Board of The Mary Campbell Center where he continues to serve to this day.

Over the years, Chuck's guidance to both Democratic and Republican party leaders has proven pivotal to Delaware's success. He served as co-chair of Governor Mike Castle's transition team and a member of my transition team when I was elected Governor. For both Mike and me, Chuck has been an invaluable adviser and a wonderful friend.

Chuck's lifetime of serving others has attracted many prestigious awards and distinctions including The Marvel Cup from the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce, The J. Thompson Brown Award for Family Service, The Good Government Award from the Civic League for New Castle County, the Heart Association's Gilliam Award, an award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the First State Distinguished Service Award from the Delaware State Bar Association.

I am proud to congratulate my longtime friend on a lifetime of achievement. He is a role model for us all. The people of Delaware, and especially the many children and adults who have benefitted from his good work, are certainly fortunate to count Chuck as a fellow Delawarean. The First State is a far better place in which to live and work because of his stewardship and his leadership.

Mr. President, I rise today to express my deep gratitude and best wishes to Ms. Jane Holl Lute for her service as Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, over the past 4 years.

Ms. Lute arrived at DHS in April 2009 with an already impressive public service record that included over 30 years of distinguished service, including time in the U.S. Army during Operation Desert Storm. She served on the National Security Council staff under both President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. Ms. Lute held senior-level positions within the United Nations, UN, where she oversaw logistical and administrative support to UN peacekeeping operations worldwide and coordinated efforts to build sustainable peace in countries emerging from violent conflict. Her record of achievement extends to her academic accomplishments. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and a J.D. from Georgetown University. I would be remiss if I did not mention that she achieved many of

these extraordinary accomplishments as a single mother. Impressive indeed.

As Deputy Secretary of DHS, Ms. Lute has served as the Department's second-highest official and chief operating officer, responsible for the day-to-day business and management of the third largest department in the Federal Government of the United States. Comprised of more than 240,000 employees and operating with an annual budget of over $56 billion, DHS works to secure our Nation, while enhancing Federal, State, and local capabilities to prepare for, respond to, and recover from threats and disasters of all kinds.

Throughout the past 4 years, Ms. Lute has committed herself wholeheartedly to the mission set forth in DHS's Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, QHSR, which is to ensure that our Nation is a safe, secure, and resilient place where the American way of life can thrive. Against a backdrop of continued and evolving threats and hazards of all kinds, Ms. Lute has worked determinedly to fulfill the challenging and wide-ranging mission of the Department.

To that end, Ms. Lute has worked closely with the many partners in both the public and the private sector who play an essential role in keeping our Nation safe. This includes all levels of government, law enforcement, private industry, and most importantly, individuals and communities, who have proven time and time again that they are our greatest allies and the key to our success. This bottom-up approach to homeland security reflects the manner in which Ms. Lute has helped lead DHS during her time at the Department. As I see it, her focus has always closely mirrored two of my core values--to figure out the right thing to do and do it, as well as to focus on excellence in everything we do.

Under Ms. Lute's leadership, DHS also made significant progress in aligning operations with smart and efficient strategy through publication of the QHSR, the Nation's first ever comprehensive review of America's strategy for homeland security, followed by the Bottom-Up Review, which is DHS's effort to align programmatic activities and organizational structure with the mission sets and goals identified in the QHSR.

In her role as Deputy Secretary at DHS, Ms. Lute made it a priority to institute the sound management practices that have helped place DHS on solid financial, programmatic, strategic, and organizational footing. Perhaps most notably, Ms. Lute's efforts helped DHS earn a qualified audit opinion on all Fiscal Year 2012 financial statements, a first for the Department and in record time for such a large and new department. Ms. Lute also helped to implement the framework for Integrated Investment Life Cycle Management to ensure that the DHS budget of nearly $60 billion is spent wisely and efficiently.

Like a true leader, Ms. Lute has the vision to plan ahead and address future challenges. One of Ms. Lute's hallmark achievements at DHS has been her early focus in the area of cybersecurity. As Ms. Lute has said herself, it is impossible to imagine a safe, secure, and resilient Nation without a safe, secure, and resilient cyberspace. In particular, Ms. Lute oversaw all Departmental efforts to strengthen the nation's cybersecurity, including policy, planning, operations, and budget. Through the numerous transitions in the Department's cyber governance structure, Ms. Lute was a steady, reliable, informed, and persistent voice on cyber matters, and she helped ensure that cyberspace would remain civilian space.

In order to ensure our Nation's success in cybersecurity, Ms. Lute personally led the implementation effort to improve the Department's ability to build a world-class cybersecurity workforce and to ensure a strong pipeline of talent for the future. Ms. Lute also helped promote a Continuous Diagnostics and Monitoring capability, which will enable Federal agencies and other organizations to see and respond to day-to- day cyber threats. These efforts and others have contributed directly to a stronger national cyber ecosystem.

Ms. Lute's accomplishments are not limited to domestic operations. Her familiarity with international negotiation was of great value to DHS and her efforts abroad have helped enhance security practices here at home. As the lead negotiator for the U.S. Passenger Name Record Agreement with the European Union, she secured a landmark new data- sharing agreement with the European Union that increased the security of air travel while protecting civil liberties and privacy. In these negotiations, she bridged fundamental differences between how Europeans and Americans view privacy through tenacity and perseverance. These same traits are seen in her approach to the Department's bilateral relations as well. She expanded cooperation with our British and German allies through the Joint Contact Group and Security Cooperation Group, forged stronger ties with India through the Homeland Security Dialogue, and she opened the door to frank discussions with China over cyber and port security.

The commitment to secure our Nation and create a more resilient America is a goal that is shared not only among Members of Congress and the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security, but also among everyday citizens. That security is ensured by the men and women who step forward each day and say ``Send Me.'' Ms. Lute once told me this is the very credo the men and women of DHS embrace in every crisis. So today, I sincerely thank Deputy Secretary Lute for her public service and for her extraordinary service over 3 decades to keep our Nation safe. She leaves behind a strong legacy of ``just get it done'' leadership, paving the path for future leaders and employees at DHS. I, for one, will remember her fondly for her commitment to ensuring American homeland security and for living DHS's ``Send Me'' attitude. Jane Holl Lute is a role model for us all.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum call be vitiated.

Mr. President, I am honored and privileged to stand here today and to say good words on behalf of Ernest Jay Moniz, also known as Dr. Moniz and Ernie Moniz. He is one of my favorite people from the world of academia. I have in my hand a bio of him that I will read out loud. It is not very long, and it is worth listening to.

Dr. Ernest J. Moniz is the Cecil and Ida Green professor of physics and engineering systems at MIT. His research at MIT, where he has served on the faculty since 1973, has focused on energy technology and policy.

Dr. Moniz also serves as the director of MIT's Energy Initiative and the MIT Laboratory for Energy and the Environment.

From 1997 until 2001, Dr. Moniz served as Under Secretary of the Department of Energy. Prior to that time, he served as Associate Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President from 1995 until 1997.

In addition to his work at MIT and the Department of Energy, Dr. Moniz has served on any number of boards and commissions, including the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology from 2009 until today, the Department of Defense Threat Reduction Advisory Committee from 2010 until today, and on the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future from 2010 to 2012.

Dr. Moniz is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Humboldt Foundation, and the American Physical Society. In 1998 he received the Seymour Cray HPCC Recognition Award for vision and leadership in advancing scientific simulation.

Dr. Moniz received a bachelor of science degree summa cum laude in physics from Boston College and a doctorate in theoretical physics from Stanford University.

I have been privileged to know this man for a number of years. Our oldest son was an undergraduate in mechanical engineering at MIT and graduated a few years ago.

I remember holding a field hearing at MIT--gosh, about a half dozen or so years ago--and Dr. Moniz was one of our witnesses. Among the things I liked about him is that he was so approachable. We have all heard the term ``good guy.'' He is a really good guy.

Sometimes we think of somebody as a professor in an ivy tower and kind of out of touch, unable to communicate and connect with people. He could not be more different from that caricature. He is a real person, not to mention a very smart person. As a professor, he is able to explain complex concepts of nuclear energy and clean coal so that even I can understand what he is saying.

He has a wonderful sense of humor. If you happen to be a young person or an older person, Democratic or Republican, he just works so well with everybody. He is smart as a whip. He has a great way about him. He is approachable and has a very can-do attitude. I think the President made a great choice.

I say to Ernie and his family, I appreciate his willingness to serve in a lot of capacities and his willingness now to serve in this capacity. Hopefully, it will be good for him, his life, and his family. I think it certainly is going to be good for our country, so we appreciate that.

I say to my colleagues who have not had a chance to get to know him, I think everyone is going to like him a lot and enjoy working with him. I know I certainly have.

I also wish to discuss something I touched on earlier this week. I stood here just this week talking about the Swiss cheese we have in the executive branch of our Federal Government. There are too many positions that don't have someone confirmed for those positions.

In some cases, the administration has been derelict in terms of sending us nominations because they spend forever vetting nominations because they don't want to send someone to us who has a flaw or a blemish. As a result, I think they spend entirely too much time vetting nominees. In some cases, even when a nominee's name gets here, even if they are really good and well qualified, we delay those nominations further. Whether it is a Democratic or Republican President, we put the nominees through--not torture but something pretty close to it.

We need good people to be willing to serve. When they step up and are willing to serve, we need to process and vet those nominations. We need to scrub them hard, but at the end of the day we need to move them forward.

In the Environment and Public Works Committee, we took a small but important step with the President's nominee Regina McCarthy to be the Administrator for the Environment Protection Agency. She is enormously

well qualified. She has already been confirmed by the Senate for the air pollution side for the EPA and has done a very nice job.

Although she has been nominated by a Democratic President, in the past she served with five Republican Governors. She is smart, hard- working, she has great credentials, and she is approachable. She is somebody who is able to understand and explain things. She will do a great job.

We have had a hard time being able to move her nomination out of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Today we were joined by our Republican colleagues. Unfortunately, none of them voted to report her nomination out of committee. We have reported her out on a straight party-line vote.

My hope is that we will have an opportunity to do what we did a number of years ago--about 7 or 8 years ago. Mike Leavitt, the former Governor of Utah, was nominated to be the head of EPA. There was some delay in his nomination.

We actually had a big markup and business meeting scheduled to consider his nomination, and the Democrats boycotted that meeting. We waited a couple of weeks. At a followup meeting, the Democrats showed up, and we reported him out with Democratic support. Later, we voted for his nomination. It was a big bipartisan vote. I think there were 70 or 80 votes in favor of his nomination.

My hope is that is what we will do with Gina McCarthy. She deserves a vote, and from my perspective she deserves a positive, affirmative vote.

We have Ernie Moniz coming our way later this afternoon in about 40 minutes. I hope my colleagues will join me and give him a big vote so we can send him to work for our country one more time.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, good evening.

The Budget

While I was waiting for a chance to say a few words on the floor, I was on the phone and had a conversation with someone who has run a couple of very successful companies in our country. I do not know if he is a Democrat or a Republican, but it was an interesting conversation. We talked about how the economy is coming along, and we talked about how the companies he is especially interested in are doing. We sort of looked ahead.

One of the things I asked is, what do you think we could be doing here, where we are working in our Nation's Capital in the U.S. Senate?

He pretty much said there are three things we need to do. He said: You need to answer maybe three questions for us. One, can you govern in a divided Washington, a divided Congress? He said: No. 2, can you be-- can we be as a nation--fiscally responsible? And the third thing he said was, can you provide some certainty with respect to the Tax Code to actually know what taxes are going to look like, not just this week or this month or just this year, but how about having some certainty going forward?

I think there is a lot of wisdom in what he said. As some other folks have been talking about here on the floor today, when we were not passing the Water Resources Development Act, a good bipartisan bill, I think a responsible bill, an encouraging step, if you will, but in between we have had other people speak and talking about one side or the other moving forward on a budget. Someone talked about other issues that are in the news these days.

I want to follow up on some of the earlier conversations today with respect to demonstrating that we can govern, that we can be fiscally responsible and we can provide some certainty with respect to the Tax Code. Folks who might be listening in to what is going on in the Senate this afternoon may or may not know the way the budget process works. Obviously this is budget 101.

In my old role as State treasurer and Governor of Delaware--in Delaware we have two budgets. Not one but two budgets. We have an operating budget and we have a capital budget, a brick-and-mortar budget. The brick-and-mortar budget is for schools, K-12, sort of postsecondary education; infrastructure: roads, highways, bridges, prisons, that kind of thing. But we have an operating budget as well. Here we only have one. For, gosh, I want to say about 30--40 years, actually, the way we are supposed to run our finances as a country basically called for the President to submit a budget, usually in February, one budget not two but one budget. The Congress is expected to come in and sort of pivot off of that budget and create what we call a budget resolution. The Senate passes a budget resolution, the House does. The idea is to be able to do that sometime in April, and hopefully by the end of April agree between the House and Senate on that budget resolution.

People think a budget resolution is a budget. But it is not. It is a resolution, a framework for a budget. It is not actually signed by the President. It is something we work out. It provides a foundation on which to pass a number of maybe a dozen or so appropriations bills that cover everything from agriculture to transportation.

The budget resolution provides a framework for any revenue measures we might need to pass as well in order to get us closer to a balanced budget or to meet some kind of responsibilities for running our country. But the idea is for the Senate to pass a budget resolution, the House to pass a budget resolution, and we create a conference committee and work out our differences.

For the last 4 years, our friends in the Republican Party delighted in accusing the Democrats of never passing a budget. What they meant was we never passed a budget resolution, that framework. I think of the budget resolution as a skeleton. The skeleton is the bones, if you will. But we put the meat on the bones when we pass the dozen or so appropriations bills, and whatever revenue measures are needed. That is the meat on the bones. Then eventually we have a full budget.

Right now, as our colleagues know, we passed in the Senate a budget resolution several weeks ago. It called for deficit reduction. It did not balance the budget over the next 10 years, but it further reduced the budget deficit and put us on a path to stabilize our debt, and to get us on a trajectory where debt as a percentage of gross domestic product is starting to come down--not as much as I would like, probably not as much as the Presiding Officer would like, but to get us headed in the right direction. It was a 50/50 deal, 50 percent deficit reduction on the spending side, 50 percent on the revenue side.

Actually, ironically, the last time we had a budget--1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 in the Clinton administration--Erskine Bowles, then the President's Chief of Staff and a woman named Sylvia Matthews, now Sylvia Matthews Burwell who is our new OMB Director, worked along with the Republican House, Republican Senate to come up with a deficit reduction plan in 1997 that led to four balanced budgets in a row.

Their deal, worked out with Republicans, was a 50/50 deal. Fifty percent of the deficit reduction was on the spending side, 50 percent was on the revenue side. Anyway, this year the Senate passed a budget resolution, passed with all Democratic votes, no Republicans. It is a 50/50 deal, half of the deficit reduction on spending, half on the revenue side.

Over in the House, they have a different approach. The Republicans in the House argue, with some justification, that they get more deficit reduction accomplished. You might quibble with some of their assumptions. They assume the repeal of ObamaCare. They also assume that even though they are going to repeal it, the $1 trillion in deficit reduction that CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, says flows from ObamaCare over the next 10 years in the Affordable Care Act--even though they assume repealing ObamaCare, they still assume the $1 trillion in deficit reduction. I do not know if that is entirely consistent, but that is part of their assumption. So they end up with deficit reduction that is dependent solely on the spending side. No revenues, it is all on the spending side.

So they passed their budget resolution. We passed ours. They passed theirs with almost all Republican votes, we passed ours with all Democratic votes. When that happens, the idea is to say, here is the Senate budget resolution, here is the House budget resolution. Why don't we create a conference committee--I used to think of it as a compromise committee--where some of the Senators, Democrat and Republican, gather together and work out the differences between the two budget resolutions. That is what people sent us here to do.

The Presiding Officer knows I like to sometimes ask people who have been married a long time, what is the secret for being married a long time? I usually ask this to people who have been married 50, 60, or 70 years. I get some real funny answers. I got a great answer about a week ago. A couple has been married 55 years. I asked the wife and husband. I said to the wife: What is the secret to being married 55 years?

She looked at her husband, and she said, he will tell you that he can either be right or he can be happy, but he cannot be both. I thought that was pretty funny. He said something to the effect of, when you know you are wrong, admit it. When you know you are right, let it go. That is pretty good advice.

I think the best answer I ever heard to that question of what is the secret to being married a long time--I have heard this from a number of people. The answer is the two Cs, communicate and compromise. Think about that. The two Cs, communicate and compromise. I think that is not only the secret to an enduring union between two people, but I think it is also the secret to a vibrant democracy, communicate and compromise.

It is kind of ironic that our Republican friends, after beating us over the head for 4 years for not supposedly passing a budget--although if you looked at what we put in place, some of the legislation was law; we actually did have a budget. We had spending caps and directions to reduce spending in a lot of different categories. We saved in deficit reduction well over $1 trillion as a result.

But, ironically, the very people who criticized us for not passing a budget have now, here in the Senate, made it impossible for us to create that conference committee, a compromise committee between the House and the Senate, and take the next logical step of reconciling the differences between the Senate-passed budget resolution and the House's.

It is not going to be easy to do that, but we need to get started. If you think about the way we spend money--I want to commend the chair of the Budget Committee. She has had some very sad losses in her family. We extend our sympathy there. I want to commend the Senator and her committee for taking on a tough job, one of many tough jobs she has taken on, and to give us a budget resolution that we can go to conference with. I want to have a chance to do that.

I want to mention this and I will yield. We had a bunch of Realtors in from Delaware. They wanted to talk about the budget and how we are doing. I explained that if you think of the Federal budget, think of it as a pie, think of it like a pizza pie or a chocolate pie, but think of it as a pie. The way I explained this is, over half of that pie is entitlement program spending. That is things we are entitled to by virtue of our age, our station in life, our service, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, some of our veterans' benefits. But over half of the budget of that pie for spending, over half of it is entitlement spending and it is growing.

Another roughly 10 to 15 percent of that pie is interest on the debt. With the debt growing, interest on the debt--thank God the interest rates are low right now or that would go through the roof. Interest on the debt continues to maybe creep up. If you add those two together, it is about 70 percent of the pie we are thinking about.

That leaves another 30 percent. What is in the remaining 30 percent? The rest of the whole Federal Government. About half of that 30 percent is defense. About half of that 30 percent is everything else from agriculture to transportation and everything in between--law enforcement, courts, Federal prisons, the FBI, education, housing, environment. Everything else is in that 15 percent.

The difference between the Senate-passed budget resolution and the House-passed budget resolution is the House would make some changes in entitlement spending. We do some of that as well. We do more to try to reduce spending. But the real difference is what happens with that 15 percent of--we call it domestic discretionary spending. The other 15 percent in discretionary spending is defense.

But they would take, in their budget resolution in the House, that 15 percent over the next 10 years and take it down to roughly 5 percent--5 percent. That is everything in the Federal Government other than defense and entitlements and interest. That is everything else. That includes workforce development, starting with early childhood education programs, Head Start, all the way from kindergarten up to high school; programs especially promoting the education in STEM, science, technology, engineering and math, postsecondary education. It includes infrastructure; roads, highways, bridges, everything broadly defined in infrastructure. It includes investments in research and development that can create products and technologies that can be commercialized and sold all over the world. All of that stuff is the rest of 15 percent and it goes down to about 5 percent.

I do not think that is smart. I do not think that is smart for growing the economic pie because of things--the areas we need to invest in or look for. We need a world-class workforce. No. 2, we need terrific infrastructure, much better than our decaying infrastructure. The third thing we need is to invest in R&D that can be commercialized and turned into products.

In any event, we have a difference in priorities here. The Senate- passed budget resolution is not perfect, but I think it is a very good document and a good starting point. The Republicans have their ideas, some with merit, some not. But the next thing we need to do is we need to meet. We need to create that conference committee and we need to go to work and let the chair of the committee and her counterpart over here, Senator Sessions, do their job, along with their House counterparts. But they cannot do their job until Republicans in the Senate agree to form a conference committee and go to conference. We need that to happen. Rather than just talking about and pointing fingers at one another, we actually need to do that. We need to stop pointing fingers, join hands, and see if we cannot work this out.

I yield the floor again, with my thanks to Senator Murray for the leadership she continues to provide for all of us.

Madam President, would the Senator yield for a moment?

Madam President, I wish to join with the Senator from Georgia. There are issues we disagree on, but this is a subject we agree on--another one we agree on.

I was privileged to be the Governor of Delaware for 8 years, and now I have served with the Senator from Georgia and other colleagues for the last 12 years. Delaware is one of those States that doesn't have a sales tax. I think most of these States that don't have a sales tax are not supportive of this bill. I am. Either I am out of step or maybe not.

We have all these signs when people come into a State that say ``Welcome to,'' whether it is Georgia or Delaware or North Dakota. We had a sign that said, ``Welcome to Delaware, the Small Wonder, the First State'' and they all had the name of the Governor. When I became Governor, I said why don't we take down the name of the Governor and put something else up, and what we put up is ``Home of Tax-Free Shopping.'' That is what we put up: ``Home of Tax-Free Shopping.''

In our little State, we have borders with New Jersey to the east and Pennsylvania to the north and Maryland to the west. They have sales tax. A lot of people in those States come to Delaware to shop, to buy things, and help to fuel our economy, our retail economy, and to help fuel our tourism economy as well. When people say to me: As a former Governor and a Senator from a State that doesn't have a sales tax, why do you support this bill, one, I think it is an equity issue. The brick-and-mortar merchants are there collecting the sales tax in those 45 or so States that have a sales tax to help support the community, help to support the government and the services that are provided locally in States across America. Then we have folks who are selling things over the Internet to people who live in those States without collecting the sales tax, without being part of the solution.

The other thing--and the Senator from Georgia knows as well as I do-- the brick-and-mortar merchants have people come into their stores pretty regularly, and they ask the merchants: How would you like to help support the Little League? How would you like to help support the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts? How would you like to support this festival or this function? They get asked about those things all the time--and they do. Meanwhile, the folks they are competing with--the Internet sales--they are not supporting those kinds of activities. So there is an equity question here.

For me, why I see value in this--a guy who comes from a State who doesn't have a sales tax--is this: I want more people from other States, including the three around us, to come and buy things in my State. If they can buy things over the Internet and not pay a sales tax, then why would they come to Delaware? But if they have to pay a sales tax that is going to be collected by the Internet provider selling to people in those States with sales taxes, they might come to Delaware and shop.

It sure is a States rights issue. I would be remiss if I didn't say this. I know my colleague has to leave. But in my first term as Governor, I had never heard of Mike Enzi. Who is this Mike Enzi guy? It turns out he is a great guy. He is one of our colleagues and a former mayor of Gillette, WY, and he has been pushing this as a Senator forever. Mike Leavitt, who succeeded me as chairman of the NGA, has been pushing this forever, a former Governor of Utah. So I give a shout out to both of them for their leadership. If we don't give up, sometimes we can get stuff done, and Mike Enzi doesn't give up and I know the Senator from Georgia doesn't. So I thank my friend.

Madam President, I would like to speak a bit, if I may, on the nomination of Sylvia Mathews Burwell, whose nomination as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget has come through our Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs as well as through the Budget

Committee. Her nomination was reported out unanimously by voice vote a week or so ago by our committee and unanimously on the same day by the Budget Committee.

The nomination comes at a critical time not just for this administration but I think at a critical time for our country. We are wrestling with this large budget deficit. We know there are management challenges. When a person says OMB, it stands for the Office of Management and Budget, and whoever is confirmed to serve in this position is expected to oversee a great group of people, a good team that will focus on budget issues. The issues include how do we continue to rein in our budget deficit and bring it back to a more sustainable fiscal position for us, also what do we need to do on the management side to help hasten that day.

We have across the Federal Government in this administration, and we had it in the last Bush administration as well, something I call executive branch Swiss cheese. We have too many senior positions in this administration; we had a number of them in the last administration but not to the extent we have them in this administration. We have too many positions that are going wanting. In some cases, the administration has not vetted, nominated, and submitted names to us; in some cases, we are not moving them very quickly once they have, so there is a shared responsibility. The administration--in this case, we haven't had a confirmed Director of OMB for about 1 year, since Jack Lew left to become Chief of Staff, who is now Secretary of the Treasury. We have gone about 1 year without a Senate-confirmed OMB Director. That is not good. Jeff Zients, who has been the Deputy Director and who has basically been responsible for being Acting Director; also, if you will, the ``m'' in OMB, the Management Deputy for OMB. We haven't had anybody running it for a while, which these are the regulations since Cass Sunstein left, who was very good at it.

So the senior leadership team at OMB pretty much has been Jeff Zients, and we are grateful to him for taking on all this responsibility. But he may have other things he wants to do with his life and we need to put somebody in place to head up OMB and to surround that person with a first-rate team and I pledge to do that.

I wish to say to my colleagues, Democratic and Republican in the Senate, on our Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, on the Budget Committee, just a big thank-you for getting this nomination, once we had it in hand, to move it quickly, hearings, through the vetting, staff interviews, and to bring that nomination to the floor. Thanks to the leadership, Democratic and Republican, for helping to make that possible.

Who is this person whom the President has nominated? She used to be a Mathews, with one ``t''--a Mathews with one ``t.'' She is now Sylvia Mathews Burwell. She is a pretty remarkable person for someone who was raised and grew up in Hinton, WV, where I lived when I was 4 years old. I was born in Beckley, WV, not far from where Sylvia grew up. I said to her at our confirmation hearing: What is the likelihood that the President would nominate as the Director of OMB, one of the most powerful positions in any administration, a gal who was born in Hinton, WV, on the New River, close to the Bluestone Dam where I learned to fish as a little boy and she would be before our committee at a hearing chaired by a guy who used to live in Hinton, WV, when he was a 4-year- old kid? Pretty amazing. But she is extraordinary, as the Presiding Officer knows.

Sylvia Burwell grew up in West Virginia. She didn't go off to some fancy private school in another State. She went to Hinton High School. She played on the girls' basketball team there. I was kidding her at her confirmation hearing, and I asked her: What was the mascot? She said: We were the Bobcats. So she is a Bobcat. There were at the confirmation hearing a number of her colleagues from Hinton, who were fellow Bobcats and played on the basketball team with her--just a great celebration. She is a real person. She is just a real person. She has wonderful interpersonal skills.

When the President nominated her, I found out she used to work in the Clinton administration. But I asked her after high school what did she do. I like to say she couldn't get into Delaware or North Dakota University, she had to go to Harvard. From there, she became a Rhodes Scholar over in England. She came back and did some work on the Clinton-Gore campaign, I think, in 1992 and ended up working for the administration. What did she do? She was Chief of Staff to Bob Rubin, one of the leaders of the economic development team in the Clinton administration. She was a Deputy to Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, Deputy Chief of Staff, and I think for the last year or two of the Clinton administration she was Deputy OMB Director and she had a pretty good experience there. She finished there and ended up working for McKinsey & Company, one of the top management consulting firms in the world. She helped stand up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and more recently has helped to run the Wal-Mart Foundation. What great credentials.

I called Erskine Bowles when I found out she worked for and with him, and I said: Tell me about this Sylvia Burwell, who has been nominated to head up the OMB. Here is what he told me. He told me a truly great story. He said: Here is the setting. We are in the Oval Office with the President. Bob Rubin, Sylvia Mathews at the time--for a while--and Erskine, and the President is having a conversation with Bob Rubin, asking him some questions. And Erskine notices Sylvia, who is Rubin's Chief of Staff, slips him a note and Rubin looks at the note, and he answers the President's questions to great effect and very brilliant responses. The President is oohing and aahing at how good that response was, and Erskine says: Mr. President, I have broken the code here on Rubin. He is not that smart. It is Sylvia. She gave him the note to answer the question. If I had Sylvia working for me, people might think I am as smart as they think Rubin is.

Well, she ended up working with Erskine as the Deputy Chief of Staff.

I also talked to Bruce Reed about her. Bruce was President Clinton's former domestic policy adviser. He and I worked with a bunch of other people on welfare reform. He is a great guy. He is Vice President Biden's Chief of Staff today. I asked him to tell me some more about Sylvia.

One of the other things I sensed from both of them is this: She is a real person. She is a good person. We have all heard the term ``good guy.'' I do not know how you say that about a woman--if they are a ``good gal'' or whatever--but if she were a man, you would say ``a really good guy.'' She has a great personality. People like her. Around here, that is actually pretty helpful. The other thing they said is that she is incredibly bright and able to juggle a whole lot of things at the same time.

Somehow along the way, she has gotten married to a lucky guy named Stephen. She said she is lucky too. They have these two young kids, and somehow they have managed to keep all the balls in the air and raise a family while having these careers.

But I asked Erskine and Bruce, what is she really like? Great, just a really good person, with good values. I have talked to her about her values, including the one that involves faith, and it is just the kind of thing you are encouraged to hear. She is very bright.

The other thing they said about her is this: She has a great ability to get things done. We all know people who are a good guy or gal, people who are arguably bright, but they are not able to get things done. Well, we need somebody in this position who is able to lead a team that gets things done. We have a huge deficit, about $800 billion. It is coming down, but it is still too big. We have all kinds of GAO issues that they raise to us on their High Risk List--the things that are problematic because we waste money on ineffective spending. GAO, most recently, has given us a whole big report on duplication in the Federal Government. There is a huge to-do list. And part of it is our jurisdiction in our Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. That is an obligation and responsibility we share with the administration and with other branches of our government. But we need somebody who is very good at multitasking and who can get things done. And I think if we help put the

right team around here, they will get a lot done and we will do this together.

I will close, if I could, with this: I have never met her parents. Obviously, I think she has at least one sibling. But, boy, when I asked her how she turned out this way, Sylvia really gives the credit to her parents. I think most of us probably do if we have had success in life, although we had a great witness before the Finance Committee at yesterday's hearing--Antwone Fisher, a sort of self-made, up-from-the- roots, amazing, successful guy. You never would have imagined he would have enjoyed the success he has, coming up through the foster care system in his home State.

But she gives a lot of credit to her parents. Obviously, they are doing something right at Hinton High School and maybe even at Harvard and over in Oxford, England. But she has had good mentors. She is a very humble person--a very humble person. She is the real deal, and we are lucky she is willing to take this on.

I commend the President for nominating her. I want to thank her husband and her family for their willingness to share her. I hope she gets a unanimous vote here today. She ought to.

The other thing I want to say, if I could, is this: The President took some folks out for dinner last night. I do not know if our Presiding Officer was one of them. My guess is she was. I will talk to her later about what they had and how it went. But I commend the President for reaching out to Republicans and Democrats, Senators and Representatives. It is the kind of thing you have to do. It is the kind of thing you have to do if you want to get things done. As President, you have a million people pulling on you--300 million people pulling on you--and folks from around the world pulling on you, and it is hard to focus on building and rebuilding relationships here. It is absolutely necessary.

I was talking with Angus King the other day. Angus--now our colleague here in the Senate, a great addition--used to be Governor of Maine. We were comparing notes as to his role as Governor of Maine and mine as Governor of Delaware, how we worked with the legislature. I am sure you could find people who were in the legislature when I was Governor who said: Thank God he is gone. But we actually worked pretty well together.

One of the keys--not my idea but an idea that started with, I think, Pete du Pont, when he was Governor a number of years ago; also done by Mike Castle as Governor and Ruth Ann Minner as Governor and by me in between Governor Castle and Governor Minner--every Tuesday when the legislature was in session in Delaware--every Tuesday; they are usually in session on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays most weeks between January and June--I would host a lunch with the legislative leadership of the house and the senate, Democrats and Republicans from the house and the senate. Occasionally, we had somebody in from my administration, my staff. We would have lunch together. Sometimes we would talk about issues; sometimes we would talk about sports or whatever else was the topic of the day. We always had lunch together, and we did it week after week, month after month, year after year. You get to know people and you develop a sense of trust, and in many cases you kind of like each other.

One of the keys to our success in Delaware is we sort of like each other, Democrats and Republicans. We work together, and we govern from the center.

Angus had a similar story, only they did not do lunch together with the legislative leadership. They did breakfast together in Maine. He did it every week, every month, every year for the 8 years or so he was Governor.

The President is doing something like that. He is doing like a DC version of that now. It is just great, and I urge him to keep it up.

It is ironic; this reminds me of our church. Every now and then our minister is going full steam and preaching to our congregation. He says: I know I am preaching to the choir, but even choirs need to be preached to.

In this case, the folks, ironically, on the floor--Senator Warner, Senator Collins, Senator Sessions, and I think myself and Dr. Coburn-- there are probably no Democrats and Republicans more committed to figuring out how do we get better results for less money in everything we do. So even the choir needs to be preached to. We just had a pretty good sermon.

I have a couple of posters here I want to share. I think they might be of some interest and value in this discussion. I like to think of spending, as we are trying to rein it in and get it under control, in three elements. One of those is entitlement spending, which now is over 50 percent of what we spend in the Federal Government. It is growing. We have something called discretionary spending, which includes defense, and the domestic programs which are not entitlements, not Medicare, not Medicaid, not Social Security. Then you have got interest on the debt. That is pretty much it. That is pretty much it. If you look at, again, entitlement spending, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other things that we are entitled to, it is over 50 percent and growing.

As it turns out, the part of our budget that is being squeezed is the discretionary spending. So about half of that is nondefense discretionary spending. That includes everything from transportation to agriculture, to housing, education, to homeland security, and a whole lot of other things as well. Then there is defense.

If you take a look at this chart, we find that this gray line here is actually nondefense discretionary spending. We start out in 1971. It is about 4 percent of spending as a percentage of GDP. Today it is about 4 percent as well. The budget that I believe we received from the House of Representatives actually--where they actually drop their spending is in that money. That includes workforce development, it includes education, it includes infrastructure--roads, highways, bridges, rail, ports, all of the above. It includes investing in R&D, research and development, through the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and creates among other things goods and services and products that we can sell all over the country and all over the world.

Under the House-passed budget, that money, instead of spending about 19 percent of our budget for nondefense discretionary spending, I think we would end up down around 4 percent for all nondefense discretionary spending--4 percent of our budget. That is not consistent with the priorities of many of us, including those on this side of aisle, include our own congressional delegation.

Here we have health care. This is good. Health care as a percentage of GDP. I mentioned Medicare as a percentage of our entitlements, including Medicare as a percentage of our budget, now is up over 50 percent and climbing. If you look at health care as a percentage of GDP in this country, we are the green line. What we see from 1961 down to about 2010, the green line keeps going up and up and up.

Today, health care as a percentage of GDP in this country is about 17, almost 18 percent. I think the next closest country is France. We are way ahead of anybody else. We are almost twice as high as the Japanese, for example. We spend about 17, 18 percent of GDP. They spend about 8 percent. They cover everybody. They get better results.

When you have health care, the big part of Medicaid spending, Medicare spending, in fact all of it, is growing as though it is toxic. Entitlement spending continues to grow. We have got to do something about that. The discretionary spending part of our budget has actually been going down over 40 years by a significant amount of money. Today it is less than one-third of our total spending, if you combine defense and nondefense nondiscretionary spending.

So what do we do about it? What we try to do about it in our side in the budget, created with a lot of input from Senator Warner, a lot of input from Senator Sanders on our side, great leadership by Senator Patty Murray, who is the chair of the committee--they have come up with a budget that is before us today that says: All right, we know we cannot continue to spend as we are doing. We have got to rein in the spending, not only on the entitlement side but also on the discretionary spending side. We need to raise some revenues.

They go back to take a page out of the Clinton playbook from, gosh, 12, 13, 14 years ago, when we had a big deficit--not as big as this. But they adopted a deficit reduction plan engineered by Erskine Bowles, the Chief of Staff. They did a deficit reduction plan in 1997 with bipartisan support that said: For every dollar of spending that we cut, we raise a dollar of revenues.

We ended up with four balanced budgets in a row. The budget that comes out of the Budget Committee is similar in that it is dollar for dollar, a dollar of deficit reduction on the revenue side, a dollar on the spending cuts. But unlike what happened 12 years ago--15 years ago actually--we do not get to a balanced budget. If there is a fault in the budget that has come out of the Budget Committee, while it reduces our publicly held debt as a percentage of GDP from 73 percent, 72 percent down to about 70 percent in 10 years--it stabilizes and starts to bring it down as a percentage of GDP--we still will have a budget deficit of over a half a trillion dollars 10 years from now. Is that good enough? No. We need to do better. In terms of entitlement program spending, we need to find ways to save more money. We need to do it without savaging old people and poor people. We need to do it in a way that preserves these programs for the long haul.

We were in our caucus. We had some good presentations from a few of the smartest people, health economists, doctors and so forth, that have been around. They gave us a whole bunch of good ideas on how to get better health care results for less money. We need to do that and more.

On the discretionary spending side, Senator Collins, who has previously chaired the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee--Senator Coburn and I have the privilege of leading it today. We focus literally every day as an oversight committee, trying to do oversight of the whole Federal Government, which is a whole lot for one committee to do. We do it in conjunction with the GAO. We work off their high-risk list, high-risk ways of saving money. Every few years they give us these great to-do lists for the Federal Government. We work on it in our subcommittee. We work on it with GAO. We work with OMB, Office of Management and Budget, we work with the inspectors general across the agencies of the Federal Government. We work with nonprofit groups such as Citizens Against Government Waste.

Our whole idea is to focus on wasteful spending, as we ratchet down the spending, figuring out where are we going to get good results and where are we not. In the programs where we get the kind of results we want, we fund them more or we reduce them less. If we are not getting the results we need, we close those programs, we reduce those programs. That is the way it ought to be. That is the way it ought to be. That is the way we are trying to do it.

Let me see if I have another chart here that might be relevant. When Bill Clinton was President in the last 4 years of his administration, they negotiated a deficit reduction deal with the Republican House and Senate in 1997, dollar for dollar, a dollar of revenue, a dollar of deficit reduction on the spending side. And for those 4 years we had a balanced budget, revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product. I think it was about 19\1/2\ to 20 percent, right around 20 percent of