Floor Statements

Mr. President, I appreciate the deference of my colleague from Hawaii. I also echo the comments about friendship with our junior Senator from Alaska. This is a matter that is of deep importance to Virginia, and I rise to talk about why we are here on a Sunday in January, the second day of the shutdown of the Federal Government. When I conclude my speech, I will seek unanimous consent for the reopening of the government for 3 days as we find a path forward.

We are in shutdown mode because the Republican majority did not prioritize completing a budget during the first year of the Trump administration. As the party in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House, they have a calendar set forth in law that we are supposed to follow. The President is supposed to present a budget to Congress in February. He didn't. The Houses are supposed to pass budgets in their committees in the spring. They didn't. The authorizing committees are supposed to write bills. Many of them did, but because they didn't have budget numbers to write them to, they were sort of of marginal effect. The appropriations committees are supposed to have funding bills ready and passed to start the fiscal year on October 1. The President was supposed to present a budget, and he didn't. The budget committees, controlled by Republicans, are supposed to pass a budget, and they didn't. The appropriations committees are supposed to have bills that are ready to be in effect on October 1, the fiscal year, and they didn't. Now, that is not unique to this particular Congress, but it explains why we are here.

Why was there a decision to violate the statutory calendar and not, frankly, even get to a serious consideration of the budget until January, the fourth month of the fiscal year? Well, it is because the majority decided that the priority of the budget was a low priority. Instead of working on the budget and appropriations bills, what the majority wanted to work on for the first 9 months of the year was the ineffective and ultimately failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That took us into late September, essentially a week before the start of the fiscal year. The repeal of the Affordable Care Act was more important, was a higher priority than getting a budget done to fund governmental services.

When that effort was done, did the majority then race to do a budget and do appropriations? No. They then took the next 3 months--now into the new fiscal year with no budget--to do tax cuts and eventually before December were able to pass a tax cut bill.

Finally, the majority turned to this issue of the budget and the urgency of the budget in January, the fourth month of the fiscal year, and they are using a gimmick--again, that both parties have used, a continuing resolution--to evade the responsibility of actually doing a budget.

Republicans, when they were focusing on other things and they didn't want to focus on the budget--because it was about tax cuts and repealing the Affordable Care Act--said: We can't do it by October 1; give us until December 8. Then they said: Give us until December 22. Then they said: Give us until January 19. The Democratic minority reluctantly agreed, but it was the Republicans who said: We want to push this budget back, back, back, back, back.

Nearly 2 weeks ago, there was a very important meeting that, frankly, has not occurred in my time in the Senate. It was a request by our Secretary of Defense, Secretary James Mattis, to come and speak to the caucus lunches. I have been here since January of 2013; that has not happened before. He came--I believe it was on the 8th of January, a Tuesday--to speak to both the Democratic and Republican caucuses. I know what he told us, and because I know the honor of Secretary Mattis, I am sure he said the same thing to the Republicans. He said: Don't give me another continuing resolution. He told us, as he has repeatedly testified and as others have testified, that continuing resolutions are destroying the military, they are destroying our readiness, and they are destroying our capacity to meet the threats of today. He said: Don't continue this continuing resolution mania. Give me a full-year budget. Give me a full-year budget.

So when the Republican majority proposed yet another continuing resolution until February 19, with no commitment about actually finding a budget deal, many of us--both Democrats and Republicans--said that we would no longer support the continuing resolution gimmick and that we wanted to move expeditiously toward a full budget deal.

I think this is very important because, again, this is President Trump's Secretary of Defense saying: Do not give me a continuing resolution; let's find a full budget deal.

As my colleague Senator McCain said in a written statement the other night: A shutdown is bad and a continuing resolution is bad. We need to move forward to find a full budget deal.

It was interesting that even as we were here on Thursday night and the House was passing a continuing resolution to put it on the table here, the Department of Defense--the Pentagon's chief spokesperson was tweeting out: Stop. Don't do another continuing resolution. This is wasteful. It is hurting the military. Work toward a full budget deal.

That is the position of the Department of Defense in the Trump administration, that this CR is actually a bad thing.

That is why we are here--because we didn't heed the advice of the Secretary of Defense; we delayed consideration of the budget until well into the fiscal year.

And we are here for another reason. We are here because President Trump announced in September that he is terminating legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Dreamers. It was interesting that the other night, the majority leader repeatedly called these Dreamers illegal immigrants. They are not illegal. They are here protected by a Presidential Executive order that has been upheld in courts. They are legal. President Trump is threatening to take away their legal status and make them illegal. But when the majority leader stands here and calls Dreamers illegal immigrants, it really shows you the contempt with which he holds these young people. To call people who have a legal protection illegal immigrants, as he has done and as the President has done, is deeply offensive.

The President's threat to end their legal status on March 5 creates a huge hardship for them and is a matter of real urgency. When the House passed the continuing resolution Thursday night, we asked the majority for a vote. We said: Let's vote right now to defeat the continuing resolution because the votes aren't here; even Republicans will vote against it. The Pentagon was tweeting out, basically telling us the CR was unacceptable. We asked for that vote Thursday night so we would have the full day of Friday to find a compromise and keep the government open, but the majority wouldn't let us vote Thursday night. They wouldn't let us vote and then use Friday as a full day to find a compromise to keep the government open. Instead, they postponed the vote until 10 o'clock Friday, thinking that would pressure people, but it failed, as we knew that it would.

When my Democratic colleagues stood on the floor twice and asked for the short-term ability to keep the government open to keep negotiating, the majority objected. So the government closed down as the majority objected to those short-term agreements.

Why did the majority object to keeping us open over the weekend while we debated? That is a question for them to answer, but I have a surmise. My surmise is that they are OK with the shutdown.

I am only aware of two people who think shutdown is good. In Virginia, we don't think it is good. Our military doesn't think it is good. Our Federal employees don't think it is good. Those receiving Social Security disability checks don't think it is good. Virginians don't think it is a good thing. But I can find two people who think shutdown is a good thing.

President Trump, in a tweet on May 2, 2017, basically said: Our country needs a good shutdown in September to fix this mess. Well, he didn't get exactly what he wanted. He didn't get a shutdown in September. But can you imagine the mindset of somebody basically saying that a shutdown is a good thing? This President--it is President Trump who uniquely says--and he is the only person I know who has said it-- that a shutdown is a good thing. He actually tweeted out something similar yesterday. He said: On my 1-year anniversary, the shutdown has given me a ``nice anniversary present.'' That is what he tweeted out yesterday. So we have President Trump on the record saying that a shutdown is a good thing and that it is a nice present.

I have found one other person who has said a shutdown is a good thing. I think it was on Friday, actually, that the Republican Director of the Office of Management and Budget was on a radio show hosted by Sean Hannity, and this is a direct quote from Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management and Budget: ``In fact, I found out for the first time last night that the person who technically shuts the government down is me, which is kind of cool.''

``The person who technically shuts the government down is me, which is kind of cool.''

The reason we on this side are referring to this as the Trump shutdown is because it is only President Trump who has said the shutdown is good. It is only his Office of Management and Budget Director who says it is cool to shut down the government. And when we offered to our Republican colleagues to avert the shutdown Friday night, they objected to it. They objected to it. So here we are.

We need to follow the advice of the Secretary of Defense and reopen government and commit to finding not another continuing resolution but a full budget deal--a full budget deal that deals with all of our priorities, whether it be emergency relief in Texas or CHIP reauthorization or education or defense financing. That is what Secretary Mattis has asked us to do, and that is what we need to do. We must also deal with the emergency created by President Trump with his threat to take legal children and deprive them of their legal status on March 5.

For that reason, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 36, which is H.R. 1301; that the Schumer amendment that would provide for a continuing resolution to fund the government through Tuesday, January 23, 2018, which is at the desk, be the only amendment in order to the bill; that there be 1 hour of debate equally divided between the two leaders; that the amendment be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

I do not modify my request. This is a vote that has been noticed for later in the evening, and the colleagues who would be asked to vote on it are not here. So I do not agree to modify my request.

That is correct. Had there not been objection, we would have reopened the government.

It is, Senator. I believe Democrats asked for both a 1-day and a 3-day extension to find a budget. That is true.

That is correct. I think the point the Senator has made about locking up the amendment is important. The bill that came over from the House, we should have been able to debate and potentially make it better and acceptable to Members of both parties, knowing that those votes were needed. But the majority leader decided to make it ``our way or the highway'' and gave us no ability to offer amendments to improve it.

That is correct.

They would not entertain either amendments, nor would they entertain the 1- or 3-day extensions we sought to keep the government open.

The Senator is correct. Again, I would remind the Senator that had we voted down the continuing resolution Thursday, we would have had an entire day Friday to find a bipartisan accord to keep the government open. But the majority leader refused to allow us to do it. He set the vote at the end of the day Friday to basically maximize the chance there would be a shutdown.

I can't understand it, other than we are dealing with a President who said he thought shutdown was good, and his chief budget official thinks the shutdown is cool.

They actually would. My constituents in Virginia view the gimmick use of a CR as essentially a slow-motion shutdown, and they are asking us--Federal employees, troops, Secretary of Defense--let's really do a budget and do it the right way.

That is true. The continuing resolution--they forced us to wait until a 10 p.m. vote Friday night--did not include funding for community health centers.

I thank the Senator.

Madam President, I rise to talk about why we are here, but I will just begin with a definitive statement: There is not one of the 49 Democrats in this Chamber who wants the government to shut down. And I will conclude with this, but I will just state that if the government of the United States shuts down, it is for one reason and one reason only, and that is that the majority leadership does not want to work weekends. I will come back to that in a minute.

Why are we here? We are here debating on a House continuing resolution drafted without Democratic support or consultation at the eleventh hour and sent over to us on the last day of a spending authorization period.

Most folks in the Chamber know--but those watching on television may not--we were supposed to have a budget and an appropriations bill by October 1. That did not happen. So the leadership suggested that we agree to work and find an appropriations bill and a budget by December 8. That didn't happen. Then there was the suggestion that we delay until December 22, and that didn't happen. Then there was a vote on December 22 to delay until January 19--today. Apparently, that is not going to happen.

The request today is that we pass a continuing resolution that would put this matter to the 16th of February, and we would then be in the fifth month of the fiscal year without a budget deal. Why would we want to do that? What we should want to do is not budget by continuing resolution, but actually do a budget deal.

For folks who aren't schooled in the insider phrases we use, a continuing resolution is like driving your car looking in the rearview mirror. We ought to be driving our car looking through the windshield-- look forward with a budget that looks forward--but a continuing resolution is: Well, we are unwilling or unable to make a decision, so let's just do what we did yesterday. That is no way to operate the government of the greatest country on Earth.

What we need to be about is finding a final budget deal. What is wrong with continuing resolutions? I think a pivotal moment in this discussion--as we are sort of looking at how it has developed--occurred about 8 days ago. I am on the Armed Services Committee. I am the father of a U.S. Marine. The Secretary of Defense, General Mattis, came to talk to both the Democratic caucus and the Republican caucus lunches.

I don't know what he said to the Republican lunch, but I know what he said to us. The Secretary looked us in the eye--this was, I think, on January 8--and said: Do not give me another continuing resolution. The pattern of continuing resolutions has hurt the Nation's defense. Do not give me another continuing resolution.

When the Secretary of Defense looks at us and tells us that, I take that seriously.

Yesterday, we had an Armed Services hearing, and four Trump administration nominees for key positions dealing with research, acquisitions, installations, and energy were before us. Because they each have experience working with the DOD or other Federal agencies, I asked each of them: What do you think of continuing resolutions?

To a person, these men and women said: They are horrible. We shouldn't live under continuing resolutions. Don't do them. Do a budget.

When they were done testifying, I said: The interesting thing is that you are actually here on the day when the House is going to be voting on a continuing resolution that is directly contrary to what Secretary Mattis asked of us and what you are testifying to today.

Last night, as we were on the floor awaiting the House message to come over with the continuing resolution, the Pentagon's chief spokesperson tweeted: Continuing resolutions are wasteful, and they hurt the military. Don't do another continuing resolution. We need a full budget for 2018.

This morning, Secretary Mattis spoke, giving a national security speech, and he was asked about this budgetary debate. He said: ``The value of the American military is grossly enhanced by the sense that the American model of government, of the people, by the people, for the people, can function and carry out its governmental responsibilities.'' He continues to say that the right thing for our troops is to do a full budget, not a continuing resolution.

So to hear my colleagues stand up and say that the Democrats want to shut government down: No, we don't. We want to do what the Secretary of Defense said we should do.

We want to do what a veteran told me yesterday in Arlington. I had a veterans' roundtable. I was listening to their concerns about VA and mental health--issues we care about. One veteran said: I am a veteran, but I want to talk to you about being a Federal employee. I am a Federal employee in civilian service. I live in Quantico. Don't make us live under continuing continuations. The uncertainty of it is just too great. Find a final budget deal.

That is the task that is really before us right now, on January 19. Can we find a final budget deal? What should we do? It is not that hard. The deadline tonight is completely artificial. There is nothing magic about January 19.

What we should do is commit, as Senators and House Members, to stay here and get a final budget deal done. There are a series of discrete items. There are the budgetary numbers for defense and other important priorities--healthcare, education, transportation, mental health. There are emergency relief packages for the hurricanes and wildfires of the last few months. Those are important.

There are a number of healthcare priorities like the CHIP program. That is important.

I would argue that a resolution of the issue with Dreamers is important. Why do I say it is important? Because President Trump told us to do it in September. He said: I am going to end the Dreamer program in 6 months. I will end DACA in 6 months. I disagreed with that, but what I did agree with was when he said that this was for Congress to fix. He put a burden on our shoulders to fix it in September.

It is 5 months later, and there is a bipartisan proposal on the table. President Trump said: Send me a proposal, and I am going to sign it. You work it out, and I am going to sign it.

We now have a proposal that I believe is ready to be voted on and, I believe, would pass in both bodies.

What we should do is avoid the short term--avoid the continuing resolutions that the Secretary of Defense has told us not to pass, follow his advice and stay here at the table over the weekend and into next week, and find a final budget deal. That is how we can best serve our constituents.

I think there is only one person who has talked about shutdown with glee and with interest that it happen--the President. This is a tweet from May: ``Our country needs a good `shutdown.'''

I remember the tweet well because I am on the Budget Committee, and we were having budget hearings then. We had a Trump administration nominee before us for a key position--OMB, I believe. I asked him: Do you think there is such a thing as a good shutdown of the U.S. Government? I have been asking that question to many witnesses before the committee. Most say: No, there is in never such a thing as a good shutdown of the U.S. Government. That is what we believe, and I think that is what our Republican colleagues believe. There is no such thing as a good shutdown of the U.S. Government. We all believe that.

In this instance, we don't even need to entertain the thought. If we are willing to stay over the course of the next few days to try to do what Secretary Mattis asked and find a final budget deal, I believe we can find one, especially if the President were to say: Congress, stay at your job. Find a final budget deal. It has to be bipartisan, and I will support it. If the President were to say those things, we could find a deal. That would be the best thing for all concerned.

Instead of kicking it down the road for a month, we might have to say that we are going to kick it down for 3 days or 4 days or 5 days while we negotiate. Let's put the pressure on to negotiate and not do this month-long extension that we have done since October 1, which has gotten us nowhere.

That is what I meant when I said that the only reason this government would shut down over this is if the leadership decides they don't want to work on weekends. Federal employees work on weekends. Go out to Dulles and look at TSA employees doing their jobs as people are traveling around. A whole lot of folks who are my constituents in Virginia, our neighbors in Richmond, work on weekends. I know my Senate colleagues work hard in their districts. We work on weekends.

We can work on weekends here. We can scrap some plans for the weekend. We can commit to finding a final budget deal that would meet what Secretary Mattis asked us to do. We should do that.

No one wants to shut this government down. There is only one person who has been talking about it with glee. But even today, when President Trump asked Senator Schumer to come and have a dialogue, I think that was a tacit admission that he now realizes it would be a bad idea. If it is a bad idea, let's just stay here and get a budget deal done. That is what the folks sent us here to do, and I know we can do it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today on a happy occasion, to discuss a House bill, H.R. 984, the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act. This is a bill with a long history, and we are joined in the Chamber by the chiefs of six Virginia Tribes whose past, present, and certainly future are connected to this bill. I will speak briefly. Then, Senator Warner will speak. Then, the matter will be called up for a voice vote. Various objections have been heard and then cleared, and so we are now ready to move forward with this bill, which passed the House in May.

This is about Virginia Tribes that were here and encountered the English when they arrived at Georgetown in 1607--the Tribes of Pocahontas and so many other wonderful Virginians. They are living, breathing, active Tribes. They have never been recognized by the Federal Government for a series of reasons.

First, they made peace too soon, in a way, and they have been punished for that. They entered into peace treaties with the English in the 1670s.

Second, many of their Tribal records were destroyed in the Civil War. Third, a State official destroyed other records during the 1920s through 1960s. The power of these Tribes having achieved State recognition beginning many years ago--and they have never given up hope that they would be recognized by the U.S. Government, just as they have been recognized for hundreds of years by the Government of England. In fact, last spring, they went to England to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the death of Pocahontas. They were treated as sovereigns, treated with respect, and all they have asked is to be given the same treatment by the country they love.

This bill for Tribal recognition was first introduced by a Virginia Governor, then-Senator George Allen, in the 107th Congress. A House companion bill to the Senate version was passed in May, and that is the third time the House has passed this bill--first in 2007, and the second time was in 2009.

I have had many productive discussions, as has Senator Warner, over the last months about the bill, various questions about the history. We are now in a position where all objections have been cleared, and we are ready to move ahead.

It is such a treat to be joined by the chiefs. It is such a treat to be joined by my colleague, my senior Senator. Senator Warner has worked tremendously hard on this, as have I, from the day he was Governor. I also have to give praise to Congressman Wittman on the House side, who has worked very hard to get to this day.

It is a fundamental issue of respect and fairly acknowledging a historical record and a wonderful story of Tribes who are living, thriving, and surviving and are a rich part of our heritage. This is a happy day to stand upon their behalf.

With that, I wish to yield to the senior Senator.

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

Thank you, Mr. President.

I rise as many of my colleagues have this afternoon, and I have risen on the same topic often to talk about our Dreamers.

Usually, when I have risen in the past, I have told stories about Virginia Dreamers. We have about 13,000 Dreamers in Virginia. I have highlighted stories of Dreamers from Latin America, Africa, Sweden, and Asia. One of the students I talked about, Gloria Oduyoye, just graduated from William & Mary Law School within the last month and thus became the first Dreamer to be a law school graduate in Virginia and one of the few Dreamers who attained a law degree in the United States. I talked about her story.

Today I decided not to talk about stories of individuals again but to try to put it in context, with the message really being that the time is now to make a decision. We don't need more information. We just need the will to act and do what I think is the right and the fair thing to do because we have been at this discussion now--it is hard to believe we have been at this discussion for 16 years.

The American public--Democrats, Republicans, and Independents-- overwhelmingly support a permanent solution for Dreamers. It is not that we need to know anything more to solve this. We have been talking about it for a very long time.

I want to encourage Members of this body and in the House who are involved in the negotiation to come to an agreement and provide permanent protection for the Dreamers before next Friday so that we can protect this community, which is frightened because

they are so worried about being deported or losing their ability to work, to go to school, losing the ability to protect their families. But it is more than just protecting people because they are frightened; it is protecting them because, as I have seen in Virginia and in every State, they so enrich this country.

The first version of the DREAM Act, it is hard to believe, was introduced in 2001. The Senator from Illinois, Mr. Durbin, who has been a champion of this and has my deepest admiration for his persistence in this endeavor, introduced the first version of the DREAM Act together with the senior Senator from Utah, Mr. Hatch.

The bill has evolved since then. It wasn't exactly the same as we are contemplating now, but it was the first version of the bill. It sought to repeal a provision of the 1996 immigration reform that prohibited undocumented immigrants from eligibility for higher education. Instead, what the bill, in its original version, did 17 years ago was to grant permanent resident status to young, undocumented immigrants with a high school degree or equivalent GED who fulfilled certain residence requirements and did not have criminal records. That was the start of this discussion. We are still looking for the permanent answer.

The DREAM Act first almost passed in 2007. It attained more than a majority vote in the Senate, but it didn't get to the 60-vote threshold, so that was insufficient for passage. In 2010, the House passed the DREAM Act, but the Senate again failed to approve it with a 60-vote threshold.

In 2013, just a few months after I came to the Senate, we contemplated, debated, discussed, voted upon comprehensive immigration reform in June. I was kind of proud then. I was a young Senator, had been here a couple of months and stood in my chair and offered a speech on the floor of the Senate in Spanish to describe what was in the bill for the 45 million Americans who get their news every day in the Spanish language. After I was finished describing it, people came up to me and said: Has anybody ever done that before? And I said: Frankly, I don't know.

It turned out that it was the first time in the history of the body that a speech had been given in a language other than English. But what was important about that moment in June of 2013 was not the speech; it was the vote. The package was comprehensive. It included not just the DREAM Act but border security, assistance for employers to determine the immigration bona fides of those applying for work. These are reforms--an approval for people here on temporary protected status from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, and Haiti to become permanent residents and then convert that into a path to citizenship. That comprehensive immigration reform bill, in my view, represents the Senate working at its best: a bipartisan working group, coming through committee, coming to the floor with amendments. It passed this body with 68 votes in favor.

It was evidence of the naivete of a young Senator at the time that I assumed, of course, something was going to happen because it passed here with 68 votes. I knew the House wouldn't do exactly what we did, but I thought they would do something, and we would be conferencing it. But alas, I was naive; that was not to happen.

We are now in a different place, and we have the ability to act.

I supported President Obama's actions in June of 2012 to protect Dreamers--the DACA Program; and then later, the DAPA Program. I felt that those actions were completely in accord with earlier Executive actions Presidents had taken in the area of immigration.

Since June of 2012, 800,000 young people have achieved Dreamer status. Some of them aren't so young anymore. I sometimes refer to them as students and kids, but they are in the military, they are parents, they are teachers, and they are active in their communities. As I said, there are 13,000 in my State. DACA has allowed them to continue their education, to work legally, and to remain in the only country they have ever known.

I will say I was disappointed when President Trump in September announced that he would terminate the program in 6 months--in March. I felt like it was the breaking of a promise to these young people because he had said, even as a candidate and then as President, that Dreamers were good kids and that they wouldn't have anything to worry about from him.

I will say there was one aspect of what the President said--I can't just be critical without pointing out that there was one thing about what he said that I thought was right. He said: And Congress should fix it. I agreed with President Trump on that. I wish he hadn't terminated the program, but he was right that this is something for Congress to fix because anything done by Executive action, even fully within the power of a President to take it, is subject to being changed by another Executive. The lives and futures of these young people are such that we shouldn't be scaring them about whether they are protected or maybe back to being protected depending upon who was the occupant of the White House.

That Presidential announcement in March, although I was disappointed, on that core piece of it, that Congress should fix it, I think President Trump was right and I think he is right. I think this is something that Congress must fix, should fix, can fix, and we have all the information about it to fix it right now.

It has been difficult and a little bit heartbreaking to talk to these young people and their families about the fears they have. I don't live under the fear of deportation. I don't live under the fear of my job being taken away because of my status. I don't live under the fear of my kids not being able to get instate tuition and instead having to pay out-of-state or not being able to afford it at all. It is not a fear I walk around with every day. It is hard to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and experience the fear and even terror they are feeling when you yourself don't have that same exposure.

I have spent a lot of time listening to these young people and their parents in Northern Virginia and Richmond, especially, where I live, and the fear they feel is very palpable, and the panic they feel is very palpable, and I understand why. I think part of our job should not be to increase anxiety and fear; part of our job should be--when we can, when it is the right thing to do, when it is within our grasp--to take action and provide clarity and certainty so people will know what their status is. I think the time for that is now after 16 years.

Maybe the most important thing I am saying is that this is not a new issue. It is not that we need another week or another month or another year to figure out the answer. The first bill was introduced in 2001, and I think January 19, 2018, is ample time for us to now get this right and make it either part of the spending bills that we will do at year-end or part of a stand-alone bill that we could embrace as a body.

I was heartened by some of the comments by the President, as reported yesterday, during the meeting with bipartisan leadership at the White House about this. We can do it, and the time is right to do it now. So I would ask my colleagues and especially urge all those in the negotiations to make this decision and provide these wonderful young people with certainty about their future.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I also rise to advocate the passage of a clean Dream Act now.

I had a youngster say to me--and I am going to tell the stories of a few of the youngsters--at an event in November, a Dreamer in Northern Virginia: ``You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.'' It is a beautiful line, as we know, from the song ``Imagine'' by John Lennon. ``You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.''

There are 800,000 Dreamers in this country--more than 800,000. More than 13,000 of the Dreamers live in Virginia, and they are from all corners of the world. I have met with Dreamers in Virginia who were originally born in Sweden, Nigeria, Latin America, many countries in Asia. They are a rainbow but also a source of strength for our country, and we need to act on their behalf.

I also stand here in the Christmas spirit. We will all, so many of us, hear the retelling of the Christmas story. In the aftermath of the birth of the poor child in a manger, the story goes that he was taken by his parents to another country essentially as a refugee. There were threats of violence against the firstborn children of the land, and so he was spirited across a border into Egypt to be protected.

I know many of these Dreamers, and I know so many like them. I worked as a missionary in Honduras in 1980 and 1981, and I had the opportunity to work with youngsters in a country that was then and still is beset with violence and poverty and where so many parents have to make an agonizing choice. In some instances, they make the choice to try to find a better land for their children, just as Jesus and Mary did as they fled to Egypt at the Christmas season more than 2,000 years ago.

So I stand here in that moment, in that spirit, knowing that hundreds of thousands of Dreamers need our protection and, frankly, deserve it. Are we less compassionate than those societies of old that have found refuge for those who have come fleeing hardship? I

don't believe we are. I know the American public isn't, and I know the Virginia public isn't. The question is, Is Congress as compassionate as we need to be?

We tell the story of some of the Dreamers in Virginia, and I have made many speeches on this floor and told many of their stories.

Juan de la Rosa is a DACA recipient--one of our 13,500. He is a Richmonder. I first came to know Juan when I was the mayor of Richmond. He arrived at age 5. In a comment to me, he said: In one way or another, you have always been an active part of teaching me how being involved in the political process is the key toward positive change.

He started when he arrived here at 5 years old, and he excelled immediately. He went to Manchester High School in Chesterfield County and graduated in 2014. He was a drum major in the marching band, class representative, and a president of several honor societies.

After graduating at the top of his class at this very competitive suburban high school, he continued at Virginia Tech. At Virginia Tech, he started Tech DREAMers, which is a student organization there trying to create a more inclusive environment for the Dreamers on the campus. Through Tech DREAMers, he hosted dialogues around immigration reform and other issues--not just with Hokies but with students all around Virginia and around the country.

This past May, Juan de la Rosa graduated magna cum laude from Virginia Tech, and he continues to be active. He works in the admissions office as a Dreamer, traveling the country and telling students all over this country about the opportunity that was offered by this great university in the Commonwealth. He says: ``All of this would not have been possible, had it not been for the opportunities afforded me because of DACA.''

Juan, like so many other undocumented young people, is the very embodiment of the Virginia Tech motto. The motto of Virginia Tech University is ``Ut Prosim,'' Latin for ``That I May Serve.'' That is what Juan is doing. He wants Congress to pass a clean Dream Act now so there is a permanent solution for him and so many others.

Alejandro Zuniga is the internal president of DREAMers Empowered at Northern Virginia Community College. I sat down with him a few weeks ago at a roundtable I held with these Dreamers. He was from Bolivia. He lived there until he was 7. His parents brought him here. He was not fully aware of what it was to be undocumented until he was ready to go to college, and his parents explained it to him. His favorite thing as a kid growing up in the DC area was to go to the Air and Space Museum. Now he is at Northern Virginia Community College making honor grades, studying to be an aerospace engineer.

Monday, I sat down at the Richmond Public Library with a group of Dreamers from the Richmond area. A few stopped by my office on a day I wasn't there and asked for a meeting. We sat down together. Let me tell you about some of them and some of their parents.

Mateo is a Dreamer and sophomore at VCU. He went to the same high school my daughter went to. My daughter Annella graduated from the Governor's School in Petersburg in 2013. Mateo was a freshman, and he graduated in 2016. He is part of a group called UndocuRams, a student organization whose mission is to foster inclusion for Dreamers on the VCU campus.

Mateo's mom came with him to the meeting to show her support for her son. She is heartbroken seeing him work so hard and so afraid of what might happen to him and so afraid of what might happen to her. She prays that this system may find a just result for her child and for herself.

Finally, at the same meeting, I had Bertha. Bertha is both a Dreamer and a mom. She is a young mother. Her parents brought her here in 1998 from Mexico as a young child. She is an exceptional member of her community. She works in a local Catholic Church, volunteers with the PTA at her children's school, and coaches her children's and other children's soccer teams. Bertha told me she has learned the values of volunteering and helping others from being here in the United States. This is an interesting one. I hadn't heard this before. Bertha told me that where she came from in Mexico, there wasn't a great tradition of volunteer organizations. There was sort of the government, and there were churches. She said, coming to the United States, she has become aware of a whole sector of society that was not familiar to her: volunteer organizations--groups of people who get together to try to tutor other kids to be Big Brothers or Big Sisters.

She said what she has learned from the United States, more than anything else, is this amazing power of volunteerism and the network of social service groups that are run by volunteers. She said: I want to be just like that--and that is what she is doing.

Why would we want to lose a mother, a Dreamer like Bertha from our community? She has explained, as so many have--folks here on the Hill engaged in rallies have explained with tears in their eyes the fear they feel. They had a President, who, though he said some tough things about immigrants during the campaign, he always said about Dreamers: Dreamers will have nothing to worry about in me. These Dreamers are good kids. They were taken by complete surprise when, in September, the President announced he would terminate the DACA Program in 6 months. From that moment, it has been unremitting fear for these young people and for their families.

The only thing in the President's announcement that I think we could probably all agree to is--even though I was a strong supporter of President Obama's Executive action; firmly believed it was within his legal power--a statutory fix is better than an Executive action because an Executive action depends upon the temperament of the particular President; whereas, a statutory fix provides people with some permanence, some confidence, and some security, and that is what we are called to do.

Again, in the spirit of the Christmas season--and because I am seeing this particular Presiding Officer--I am reminded of a beautiful phrase of Pope Francis whom the Presiding Officer and I have talked about before. In a letter he issued on Ash Wednesday in 2015, he called on us to be ``islas de misericordia en el medio de un mar de indiferencia''-- islands of mercy in the middle of a sea of indifference. That is a powerful phrase. Let's be islands of mercy in the middle of a sea of indifference. It was interesting. He didn't say: In the middle of a sea of hatred, in the middle of a sea of prejudice. He could have said all of those things. What he said was: ``in a sea of indifference.''

Surely, as we hear of the virtues and the dreams, the achievements and the accomplishments of these beautiful young people, we can call on our inner spirit to be merciful, rather than indifferent. That is my hope; that this body will do that by passing a clean Dream Act and accepting with open arms the wonderful gifts these young people bring to our communities.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague, the Senator from Oklahoma.

I rise to talk about the tax debate that the Senate is currently having. I wish to highlight some of the reasons why I think this bill is bad and, frankly, focus on the missed opportunity that we are about to embark on when we could have found a much better project.

Let me tell you a story from when I was mayor. I was mayor of Richmond. I know my colleague from Oklahoma was mayor as well. I had a city council colleague who introduced a seemingly benign bill. It was a bill to limit the number of dogs and cats that anybody could have at their residence.

Now, pursuant to the city rules, we had to post this resolution in the newspaper for a couple of weeks so that citizens could read it, and we had a public hearing where any citizen who wanted to speak for or against the resolution had the opportunity to do so. Then, the city council members debated, and then we had a vote. It turned out to be a little more controversial than the council member originally contemplated.

When I was mayor, the minor little debate in the Richmond City Council about the number of pets you could have at your residence received more openness and transparency and discussion and debate than the vote that we

will have within a few hours or days about the entire Tax Code of the United States.

Instead of doing a bill openly and deliberately, with a lot of public input, and ultimately reaching for a bipartisan result, we have moved hastily, in secret, and in a partisan way. In my view, that is the reason why the end product is going to be so discouraging.

We had a vote in the Budget Committee to move this tax bill forward. It was interesting. We actually voted before we discussed it. The bill was on everybody's desk. The chair decided that we would vote, and only later would we talk about it. That would never have been done at a Richmond City Council meeting.

We had a full audience of citizens who wanted to be heard, and they were not given an opportunity. That would not be done at a Richmond City Council meeting. Some of the citizens started to sort of protest and get angry, get mad, and shout. When that happens in a committee meeting, I cringe because it is a violation of the decorum I expect. But what choice do they have? This is only a tax reform that affects the entire American economy, every American family, and every American business, and they feel shut out of the process.

The first version of this bill that was live was released to the public in the Senate on Thursday, November 9. The current version, which is the fifth version of the bill, was only released last Friday night, 4 days ago. So this bill to completely rework the U.S. economy moves from introduction to passage over just 41 days with multiple versions, often with handwriting in them and handed out at the last minute before votes.

The last time this body did comprehensive tax reform in 1986, the Senate had 36 days of public hearings over 10 months. This plan has had zero--zero public hearings. When the Finance Committee refuses to allow a hearing, when the Budget Committee forces a vote before the members even have a chance to express their opinions, is this really what the Senate wants to be known for? The stakes couldn't be higher.

I think in the end it is highly unlikely, but I still hope at the end we might decide to do this the right way and not the wrong way, because when you approach the process the wrong way--quickly, secretively, in a partisan way, without public input or hearings--you get a bad bill. This bill, in my view, is a bad bill.

The benefits in this bill overwhelmingly accrue to folks who are at the top end, who frankly don't need your help. Eighty-three percent of the tax plan's benefits go to the top 1 percent earners in this country because of giveaways like increasing the estate tax threshold and altering the alternative minimum tax.

If you make over $1 million, you will get a collective tax cut of $36.9 billion just in 2019. Those who make over $1 million will see their taxes go down by that much.

Massive tax cuts go to foreign individuals who own stock in American companies. Just in the first year, about $48 billion go to foreign individuals because of their ownership of stock in American companies. To the contrary, millions of middle-class people are hurt.

By 2027, on average, every income group below $75,000 will face a tax increase, and 92 million households--the combined population of probably 20 States--earning under $200,000 will face net tax increases in this bill. That is over half of all households in the country.

The working poor get hurt especially. The working poor who have the most to lose and the least margin will get hurt. By 2025, this bill would reduce the after-tax incomes of households with incomes below $40,000, while it would boost the after-tax incomes of households with incomes over $1 million.

I want to assume in charity that the hurting of the working poor and the helping of folks at the top is a result of haste rather than design. We could take the time and get this right.

These analyses that I just indicated are done by the nonpartisan CBO, whose director is from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which is widely known as a very conservative economics department, and also by the Joint Committee on Taxation, and the Tax Policy Center. All of the analyses come to virtually the same conclusion: The bill dramatically increases the deficit to the tune of $1.4 trillion over of the next 10 years. It will lead to millions of people falling into the ranks of the uninsured. The CBO says 13 million.

For my own Commonwealth, there are a number of provisions that are particularly harmful. We are one of the top five recipients, or claimants, of the deductibility for State and local income taxation. Virginians are going to be hurt because of the reduction of the historic tax credit.

Why couldn't we work together? Why couldn't we work together to try to do something that would be right, as President Reagan and Congress did in 1986?

Now, 16 Democrats and 1 Independent stood up a few weeks ago, and we said: We are ready to work with Republicans on tax reform. You have former Governors who have done bipartisan tax reform. You have former tax commissioners who have worked on tax issues. We said: We are ready to work with you to make this better.

Every one of us in that group has worked on bipartisan tax reform. I have done it as a mayor, and I have done it as a Governor. I know how to do it, and I have ideas, but nobody was interested in a single one.

The late Friday night that we voted here, I put an amendment on the table to show my Republican colleagues our good faith and saying: We will work with you. I stood up, and, of course, I was only given a minute to make an amendment. The process said that even though it is the entire American economy, you only get 1 minute. I stood up, and I said: I can't fix the bill in 1 minute, but I can do a couple of things. I can reduce the deficit impact by $1 trillion, and I can make every middle-class tax cut that is temporary in this bill permanent. I can do those two things--permanent middle-class tax cut and reducing the deficit by $1 trillion--if you will agree with me to do the following: Don't touch the AMT or top individual rates and reduce the corporate tax rate, not to 20 percent but to 25 percent--from 35 to 25.

Thirty-four Democrats voted for tax reform for the reduction of the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25, making middle-class tax cuts permanent, and reducing the deficit by $1 trillion, but not a single Republican--not a single one--would vote to make the middle-class tax cuts permanent and reduce the deficit. We still want to work on it. We could still make it better.

As I conclude, I will just note, again, that it was notable that when President Reagan did tax reform as President in 1986, this didn't get 50 votes or 50 votes plus a tie-breaker--51 votes. In this body, the greatest deliberative body in the world, the Reagan-era tax reform got 97 votes because they took the time to have the hearings and hear from the public, and they took the time to incorporate great ideas no matter the party of those who offered it.

President Reagan said, as he was embarking on that: ``It should not be a partisan debate, for the authors of tax reform come from both parties, and all of us want greater fairness, incentives, and simplicity in taxation.'' He was right then, and that remains true, and yet this is a process that is not incorporated--either the thoughts of the public or the thoughts of the Democratic minority.

I will say this, as I close. The GOP is not measured by who it says its hero is. Most of my GOP friends have posters of President Reagan or pictures of President Reagan. They talk about him as a personal hero, but you really are not measured by who you say your hero is. You are measured by whom you act like. This is not a President Reagan-era tax reform. This is not the way President Reagan would have done tax reform.

This is a President Trump bill. A last-minute change in this bill--a very important last-minute change that only came in at the very end-- would directly benefit President Trump and his family by further exploiting a loophole to give real estate developers more money. This was on top of giving him relief on the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax. At the last minute, there was one last change made that was specifically designed to help President Trump make even more. No, this is not a Reagan-era tax reform

bill. This is purely a product of President Trump.

It follows what he does: Say one thing and do another. Claim to help the middle class but actually hurt them. Say it is not going to help me or wealthy people when it actually does. I am not surprised by the President, but I am surprised at many of my colleagues here because we could have worked on something and not have missed an opportunity that would have been far better for the American economy. It is still my hope that we will.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I rise today to talk about Dreamers in Virginia. Congress is engaged in a discussion about many topics in December, one of which is what to do about the DACA Program. A couple of months ago, President Trump said he was going to terminate the DACA Executive order of President Obama in 6 months. That would be in early March, unless Congress found a resolution.

I am gratified that many of us are having discussions about what that resolution might be. In particular, I want to acknowledge that 35 House Republicans yesterday signed on to a letter that was led by Virginia Representative Scott Taylor, from the Hampton Roads area, saying: We need to fix this, and we need to fix this by the end of the year.

I want these discussions to continue. In Virginia, there are about 13,500 Dreamers. I want to tell a few of their stories and why Virginia is a better State because of them and why, I think, the Nation is a better country because of the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who are contributing to the diverse richness of this country. Let me talk about a few of the Virginia Dreamers I have met in the last few months.

The first is the pretty astounding story of Gloria Oduyoye. Gloria is a child of parents who are Nigerian. She was born in England, and her parents brought her to the United States when she was 1 year old. Her dad is a doctor and came to practice medicine and work on a work visa, but then her dad became ill and could no longer work. As a result, the work visa expired. Gloria then became undocumented when her father's visa expired.

Gloria was not aware that she was undocumented until she was about to start college, and her parents had to tell her the full story. Gloria is a remarkable, remarkable young woman. She went to Wesleyan College on a scholarship and graduated. Then, she enrolled at William & Mary Law School.

Gloria is scheduled to graduate this month. When she does, she will be the first DACA student to get a law degree in Virginia and only the fourth DACA recipient in the United States to get a law degree. She is bound and determined. She said: I am going to be the first undocumented student to get a law degree in Virginia, and I am going to be the first undocumented lawyer in Virginia, and I am going to be the first undocumented judge in Virginia.

She is very, very focused upon her studies. She has been very involved with the National Black Law Students Association, the Immigration Law and Service Society, and the Virginia Intercollegiate Immigrants' Association for the last 3 years.

I have had a chance to meet Gloria. She is a tremendous, tremendous young lady. That is Gloria.

Andreas Magnusson is in Richmond. He has an unusual story. Andreas is Swedish. He is a Swedish-born music producer and mixer. His parents brought him to the United States when he was 2 years old. This is the only home that he has ever known. His career in the music industry has blossomed in the United States, where with his first band he sold over 50,000 records, and he has toured the United States and other countries. Currently, he works out of his house in Richmond, where I live, and he has a recording studio, and he has sold a combined 1.5 million records through the span of his youthful music career.

The United States is his home. Richmond is his home. It is where his career is, and it is where his family lives. His mother, his stepfather, and his two half brothers are all American citizens. Andreas, Swedish born, is a Dreamer.

For fun, he is branching out from music to, I guess, demonstrate the Swedish-Virginian talent for barbecues. Now he is into barbecue competitions in Virginia, and he wants to enter more competitions in the future.

Neither Gloria nor Andreas are the typical snapshot you might think of when you think of a Dreamer; one a Nigerian lawyer and one a Swedish music producer.

Bruna Cardosa, whose friends call her Mel, is from Hampton, VA, in the Tidewater area. She works with children and family services issues. She is a DACA recipient. Her whole goal is to use her education to do social work. She also would like to combine her social work background and degree with a future degree in law to help immigrants like herself. She works for a nonprofit that focuses on mental health needs.

I think we all know how significant mental health needs are in the country and how many people have never been diagnosed or, if they get diagnosed, they don't get treatment. This is an important issue, and the organization she works for helps people to make sure they can find the financial support they need to access the mental healthcare they need.

Before she worked with this family services agency, she formed a coalition called I-CAUSE with other DACA recipients in Hampton Roads to help undocumented students be able to afford higher education. She has received numerous scholarships, honors, and awards that have allowed her to pursue her higher education and, specifically, she was a recipient of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, to get her social work degree.

With her academic success and her passion to help others, Bruna is exactly the kind of Virginian we love to celebrate because she is a person of accomplishment who is taking her own skills and not just benefiting herself but benefiting others. That is as Virginian and American a value as there is.

The fourth student I will mention is somebody I have come to know a little bit, Giancarla Rojas. Giancarla is a DACA recipient here in the Northern Virginia area. She came to America a decade ago to be reunited with her parents, whom she had not seen for 7 years.

In an article in the Washington Post that highlighted her particular story, Giancarla said that she spoke only Spanish when she came here and that the way she and her father perfected their English was by riding in the car and singing Beetles songs and Chicago songs. The Presiding Officer is too young to remember the band Chicago. This is a geezer-style band. Yet it is interesting to think of somebody from Central America coming and deciding, with her dad, that she will listen and sing to geezer rock on the radio as a way of learning English. I don't think the Beetles gave her an English accent, by the way, but it did teach her to speak English quite well.

The article mentioned that when she came to the United States, even the most simple homework assignments were virtually impossible for her. She had to study so hard to succeed--much harder than others--because of the language difficulties, but, very quickly, she was not just doing well, she was in honors classes, and she wanted others to succeed. As in the other stories that I have mentioned, she has made a passion of assisting others to do what she has done--to learn English, to prepare for citizenship tests.

She was prompted to advocate for Dreamers when a school counselor told her: Sorry for you. College is not an option because you will have to pay out-of-State tuition. Her family couldn't afford it. Instead, when the counselor told her that, she decided to join a lawsuit, and the lawsuit led to Virginia's offering instate tuition to those who were living here and paying taxes and succeeding like Giancarla.

She maintained her high GPA. She earned admission to Radford University, a wonderful university in southwestern Virginia. She was the first Dreamer to be accepted at Radford. She was given a full scholarship, and she graduated with a bachelor's degree in international economics in May of 2016. She is determined and committed to serving her community just like the other 13,500 Dreamers in Virginia.

This is a very important issue. After saying that the Dreamers are great kids and that they had ``nothing to worry about with me,'' I was disappointed when the President said: I am going to terminate the program in 6 months. I viewed it as a little bit of a broken promise. Yet there was something in that announcement that, frankly, I think we have to grapple with, which is that no Executive action is as good as a statutory fix. An Executive action can be changed by this

President or that. So, even though I supported President Obama's DACA Executive order, I recognized that it was not the same as a statutory fix.

We do need Congress to act on this. I was proud to have been one of nearly 70 Members of this body in June of 2013 to have voted for a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included the Dream Act--a permanent statutory solution for these Dreamers. We need to find that permanent solution. The dialogue that we are having about the Dream Act is championed by Senator Durbin and is cosponsored by many, including me. It is bipartisan and has the cosponsorship of Lindsey Graham. There is also the BRIDGE Act, which has been proposed by Republican Members, which also tries to solve the Dreamer issue, as well as the letter in the House that I mentioned the other day.

It seems as though we are in the time in which we are having this discussion in seriousness, and we are on the path to finding a permanent solution. We need to do this. These families are law-abiding, tax-paying, hard-working, setting-example kinds of families. You will find them serving in the military and starting businesses and succeeding as these young people are, whom I have described.

This is a season in which we have a lot on our plate. We have budgetary issues, and we have the CHIP insurance program for kids. We have a lot on our plate between now and when we adjourn for the holidays at the end of the month. This is an issue that we can solve, and I am heartened to see the discussion reaching a boil. I am heartened to see bipartisan support for these Dreamers, but I am not surprised because, when you read their stories, you will see why their cases are compelling and why not just Members of this body and the House but also the American public strongly support a permanent resolution.

I encourage my colleagues to do this. Let's do it soon. We will be proud of ourselves if we do, and we will be able to be proud of the accomplishments of the young people like those whom I have described.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, may I ask that amendment No. 1846 be called up?

Thank you, Mr. President.

It is impossible to fix all the problems with this bill in a 1-minute amendment, but my amendment fixes two problems. It makes the middle- class tax cuts permanent, and it takes nearly $1 trillion away from the massive deficit caused by this big giveaway.

How does the amendment do these two things? First, it leaves the AMT where it is under current law instead of scaling it back. Second, while making middle-income tax cuts permanent, it provides no individual tax relief to those Americans currently in the top bracket. Third, it cuts the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25, rather than 20.

If you care about deficit reduction, support this amendment. If you care about permanent middle-class tax cuts, support this amendment. If you believe a reasonable corporate tax cut could help grow the economy, support the amendment. Finally, if you believe tax reform should be bipartisan, support this amendment.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, do I have any remaining time?

Mr. President, I don't need a full minute. I am just here to say that permanent middle-class tax cuts is more important than 25 to 20 percent for corporations.

The problem with the Republican bill is the priority. It prioritizes the corporate tax cuts over individual tax cuts for middle-class people and that is why we oppose it and that is why everyone should support this amendment. People come first.

Mr. President, I am shocked to learn that at 10 after 12 we are actually following a procedure that is a normal budget procedure, but since that has been raised, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the waiver provisions of applicable budget resolutions, I move to waive all applicable sections of that act and applicable budget resolutions for purposes of the pending amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I rise to talk about the Children's Health Insurance Program. We all know that healthcare is the most important thing in any person's life and in their family's life, and there is probably no healthcare issue that is more intense than a parents' concern about the health of their children. I think all of the offices in this building have heard from parents about the health of their kids over the course of the number of months we have been debating what to do about the Affordable Care Act.

I rise today to talk about another critical program, which I hope we will act in a bipartisan way to reauthorize: the Children's Health Program, or CHIP. CHIP builds on Medicaid, and it gives families who earn too much to be eligible for Medicaid an insurance option for their kids. In talking to families who avail themselves of this option--in Virginia, years ago we didn't do a very good job of enrolling kids in CHIP, and we have become an awful lot better at it. It is interesting to hear the way parents talk about it. They will often talk about how important CHIP is to them when their child is sick or when their child is injured, but what is interesting to me is how important it is to them when their child is perfectly fine--not sick, not injured. But if you are a parent, you are going to have anxiety when you go to bed every night if your child doesn't have insurance or coverage: What if something happens tomorrow? This is a program that provides not just healthcare but peace of mind for parents and their kids.

Between Virginia's separate CHIP program and the Family Access to Medical Insurance Security and CHIP-funded Medicaid, the State provides coverage to nearly 193,000 children. CHIP alone--the specific CHIP program--covers 66,000 kids in Virginia and also pregnant moms; 1,100 pregnant moms are covered right now. The coverage is important. It includes doctor visits, hospital care, prescription medicines, eyeglasses--which are critical to being successful in school-- immunizations, and checkups for kids up to age

19, with minimal cost sharing and without premiums.

In Virginia, since 2009, when I was Governor, we extended CHIP to also allow dental coverage. That has been really important to children and their families. The program is one of the success stories in this body because it has been strongly bipartisan in support since its creation in 1997. But as the President knows, this program expired on September 30. Despite bipartisan work on the Finance Committee, we still have not seen a reauthorization bill come to the Senate floor.

The uncertainty surrounding CHIP has already started to have an influence on my constituents and the constituents of every Member of this body. According to our Virginia Department of Medical Assistance Services, the State will be forced to send letters on December 1, 2017, notifying families that there is an impending loss of coverage. If there is not a reauthorization bill done by that time, imagine the anxiety of all these families in the weeks before Christmas getting a letter in the mailbox saying that this CHIP program, which covers 66,000 kids and 1,100 pregnant women, is about to expire. This will, at a minimum, cause a great deal of anxiety and confusion, even if we then come back and fix it. But if we don't fix it, obviously, the anxiety and confusion becomes much more catastrophic for the families.

After we send out letters on December 1 telling families that they have to prepare for the elimination of this program, enrollment will freeze on January 1. No new children can come into the program. By the end of January--and this differs in different States--Virginia will have insufficient funds to continue the program. There are some States that are already experiencing running out of the funds they have for the program. Virginia has a little cushion, but that will take us only through the end of January if we don't reauthorize.

Here is something that makes matters worse in Virginia, and I think it is the case in most States. Our legislature is a part-time legislature. The legislature is not in session. The legislature does not come back in until January, and that will make it really difficult. We can't find time for solutions before then because the legislature is not in session. When the legislature comes back, that would be a lot to face in 2 weeks, which is when this program is going to expire.

Needless to say, the kids who use CHIP in Virginia are in all parts of the State. Just to give you some examples, the Hampton Roads area, the second largest metropolitan area in the State--Virginia Beach, Norfolk, and the Northern Neck--has over 5,000 kids who rely on CHIP. In far southwest Virginia, where my wife's family is from--Appalachia-- nearly 6,000 kids rely on CHIP. It is a high poverty area, and in those parts of the State where poverty is high, CHIP is used in a very important way by families. The Shenandoah Valley, an agricultural area in western Virginia, has about 6,400 kids who rely on CHIP. There is not a county, there is not a city in Virginia where there isn't a child and a pregnant woman who rely on this program.

On September 18--now to the good part of my talk, the positive words from my colleagues--Senators Hatch and Wyden introduced the bipartisan Keeping Kids' Insurance Dependable and Secure Act, which is a bipartisan compromise in the best traditions of this body, to extend the CHIP program for 5 years to give States sufficient time to plan their budgets and make sure that families don't face the uncertainty related to getting notice letters saying that the program may terminate.

I rise today to urge my colleagues to strongly support bringing this bill to the floor and providing certainty to the families and children who rely on CHIP. The possibility of all these families getting letters on December 1 saying that the program is possibly going to expire is just a needless uncertainty, and we should try to avoid that if we can, not just in Virginia but in every State.

My senior Senator, Mr. Warner, is also a strong supporter of the program. I will give him some props. When he was Governor of Virginia-- he preceded me as Governor--he was the one who focused on doing a better job of enrolling kids in the program. I give him credit for that, and I will take credit for my teamwork and for adding dental coverage to CHIP. But he was a great leader. He and I have together sent a letter to the Senate leader, Mr. McConnell, asking if he would bring a bipartisan bill to the floor quickly on behalf of Virginia's children.

This bill was bipartisan in its introduction, and with the number of cosponsors and the historic, bipartisan nature of support for this program, if we can get a floor vote on this bill, I think we can pass it today and send it to the House and do so in a way that we would avoid the need to start sending out termination letters to families, needlessly increasing their anxiety.

I will conclude by saying that if we can bring this to the floor, I think we can get it passed. It is an urgent issue for children across the country--and even more than children in some ways. The children aren't wandering around every day thinking about their healthcare, but their parents are wondering every day, worrying desperately about their healthcare. This would be a bill that would help both children and parents.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise to speak on a topic I have often spoken about on the floor.

We have been at continuous war since September 14, 2001, when Congress passed an Authorization for Use of Military Force to go after the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. That was 16 years, 1 month, and 18 days ago as of today.

The war in Afghanistan is the longest armed conflict in America's history, and it shows no signs of abating, even 6 years after the death of Osama bin Laden. The conflict has been going on for so long that many are somewhat immune to it. I heard a high schooler recently say: War is all I have ever known. It is the status quo. It is the background music to daily life.

Yet only 0.4 percent of the population of the United States serves in the military. That is down from 1.8 percent in 1968 and 8.7 percent in 1945, so it is increasingly unlikely that many of us even know those who are deployed and fighting in this ever-expanding global conflict.

Sadly, last week, for tragic reasons, these issues were brought to the forefront with the death of four brave American servicemembers in Niger: Army SGT La David Johnson, SGT Bryan Black, SGT Jeremiah Johnson, and SGT Dustin Wright.

Two of those killed--the two Sergeants Johnson--were part of a 12-man patrol whose mission is not clear. We know that their trained military occupational specialties--vehicle mechanic and chemical-biological specialist--were outside traditional combat roles.

In a June war powers letter, the Department of Defense described the mission of over 645 military personnel in Niger as ``advise and assist,'' but none of the varying accounts of what took place in early October seem to support that seemingly benign summary of what occurred.

Frustration over this lack of understanding of that mission and the events that transpired were shared by everyone from Secretary Mattis to all the Members here. I can't imagine what the servicemembers on duty and their families must be feeling. We see the strain that an ever- expanding operational commitment is having on our

military, from our servicemembers relying upon foreign countries or contractors to provide critical air support where servicemen are stranded on the battlefield for over a day, to our warships, for which schedules have been so strained that their crews are unable to safely navigate international waters.

Being a Senator from Virginia, a State with one of the largest military presences that is home to tens of thousands of servicemembers and their families, I have a personal responsibility to ensure that these strains don't lead to any more tragic mistakes.

The attack in Niger has also laid bare other issues: how little information is provided to Congress about U.S. troops deployed abroad equipped for combat; how little Congress exercises the authority and oversight of these issues and demands information to debate before the public; and the possible ``mission creep'' and growth of military forces in Africa--an increase by a factor of 17 over the past decade-- in which hundreds of missions are being run daily in over 20 countries where there is no specific authorization for use of military force provided by Congress. The Niger operation really identified a gray area between advising and assisting in combat operations, which keeps some deployments just beyond the tripwire of requiring congressional notification.

SASC held a briefing last week with the Department of Defense to try to understand the scope of the Niger mission, the reason for the escalation of our footprint, and why this surprising attack left our troops without support for so long.

But beyond the immediate tactical answers, we need a strategic and fundamental understanding of how and where this country engages in military operations and if the war on terror has become the ``forever war'' with ever-changing objectives and no end in sight, absolving the need for Congress to weigh in and speak.

Yesterday, in Foreign Relations, we held a much overdue hearing on legal authorization for military force. We heard solid testimony and straightforward answers by Secretaries of State Tillerson and Mattis. I am encouraged that we had the hearing, and I am encouraged that our chair, at the end of the hearing, expressed the desire to move forward to finally, after 16-plus years, engage in a debate and a congressional vote on war authorization.

I was disappointed that the two Secretaries, who were being candid, took the position that the Trump administration needs no more legal authority to do what they are doing. But I have to acknowledge the position they take is actually the position that the Obama administration took, and it is exactly the position that the Bush administration took, so I was not completely surprised. In fact, we shouldn't be surprised when the administration says: We don't need any more authority. But of course, we are not playing ``Mother May I'' on this question. It is Congress's role, pursuant to article I, to declare war.

I disagree with the legal analyses offered by all three administrations. I was tough on President Obama about this, as well, that the 60-word authorization from 2001 covers military action all over the globe. But there is some legal dispute about the question, still.

Beyond the legal question, there are also questions of moral authority, political authority, and the abdication of responsibility in this body. Seventy-five percent of the Members of Congress today were not even here when the 2001 authorization was passed and, thus, have never had to cast a vote on it, even as our men and women risk their lives and, in some instances, are killed in action.

Simply put, the 2001 AUMF has become a golden ticket that justifies U.S. military action against terrorist groups all over the globe without the need for additional congressional approval. I am not surprised the Executive wants to keep it that way. Who wouldn't prefer such flexibility? But we have a job to do.

Here is what we need to do. This is what I think needs to happen. We need to end the legal gymnastics with the 2001 AUMF--a 60-word authorization against the perpetrators of 9/11. Applying that now to the fight against ISIL, Boko Haram, and others is a stretch. The AUMF outlines the focus of military action as follows: ``Nations, organizations, or persons [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.''

There were 19 hijackers for the 9/11 attacks, and we have now used the 2001 AUMF in 37 instances to send forces prepared for combat and engaged in combat to 14 nations, including Libya, Turkey, Georgia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, the Philippines, and Cuba.

Were all of these instances and nations and places really associated with planning or support of the attacks of 9/11? These legal interpretations are in addition to now countless ``train and advise'' missions around the world, to include those that took the lives of the four servicemembers in Niger.

This was not an unforeseen combat environment. I found this interesting. In April of 2014, the U.S. Government--the Department of the Navy--solicited contractual bids for ``Personnel Recovery, Casualty Evacuation, and Search and Rescue,'' aviation support in ``at risk'' environments in the following 14 countries: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Cote D'Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, Togo, Tunisia and as directed by operational requirements. Only 5 of those 14 countries have ever been notified to Congress, pursuant to war powers letters, but we are planning to engage in casualty evacuation in connection with high-risk activities in all of these countries in Africa.

I would like to have a process that informs Congress--and informs the public--that is equal in transparency to what we put in contracting documents to inform military contractors. So Senator Flake and I have introduced an authorization for military force intended to keep the Congress and the American people not only informed of our military operations but also engaged in carrying out our constitutional duty. The intent is to recognize the fluid environment in which our military must operate to implement the counterterrorism campaign.

Terrorist organizations don't necessarily operate in just one country. They don't follow Geneva Conventions. It is a different kind of military action, but the requirement for congressional approval is no less important. We need to make our legal authorities, which are now dated, current and appropriately scoped.

I applaud my Foreign Relations chair, Senator Corker, who, after the hearing yesterday, said that we would move to a markup and clearly, I suspect, an amendment of the proposal Senator Flake and I have put on the table. We have done a lot of work on it. A war authorization should be bipartisan. If anything in this body should be bipartisan, I think a war authorization should be. We don't pretend that we have thought of everything; we don't pretend that the bill cannot be improved.

In conclusion, I want to make a few comments. This week, the New York Times reported that President Trump has approved--without providing Members of Congress any information on why these changes are necessary--changes giving the Department of Defense and the CIA more latitude in pursuing ``counterterrorism drone strikes and commando raids'' against Islamic terrorist groups scattered across the world, all while using the 2001 AUMF as its legal justification. This expansion of war will only continue to magnify and mutate and will do so without public scrutiny, unless and until Congress steps up to provide the oversight and legal authority we are required to do.

I have come to the floor of the Senate since I came here in 2013 to speak about war powers, to speak about a need to revise the War Powers Resolution of 1974, to critique and challenge President Obama around the Libya mission, which had no vote from Congress, and to critique President Obama--who is a personal friend--over the offensive campaign against ISIL without requiring a congressional vote. Since I was clear and repetitive in my critiques of President Obama for using war powers without Congress being involved, I am going to do the same with respect to President Trump.

At the end of the day, my critique is more about this body. An Executive will overreach. An Executive will act, but that does not excuse inaction in this body.

I do worry about a progressive loosening of the rules from the Bush administration to the Obama administration to the Trump administration, which eventually has turned the 2001 AUMF into a golden ticket that allows for action against nonstate terrorist groups anywhere in the world on a Presidential say-so.

We shouldn't take our institutions and, frankly, the fairly radical rebalancing of powers in the Constitution for granted. When Madison and the other drafters put the declaration of war authority in the hands of Congress, they knew they were doing something pretty radical. They knew the world of the day--1787, 230 years ago last month--was a world of Kings, Emperors, Monarchs, Sultans, and Popes. War was primarily for the Executive, but they decided they wanted to do something different. Ten years after the Constitution was done, Thomas Jefferson, as President, was grappling with a nonstate terrorist group in Northern Africa--the Barbary Coast pirates--and what could be done about them? He wrote a letter to James Madison and asked what was behind the war- making powers in the Constitution's article I. Madison described it very well. He said: Our constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that it is the Executive most interested in war and, thus, most prone to war. For this reason, we, with studied care, granted the question of war in the legislature.

They were trying to change human history. They were trying to say that we shouldn't be at war unless there was a legislative, collective judgment--not 116 years ago by 25 percent of the people who were there then, but a legislative, collective judgment expressed in an authorization that we should be in war. We are lacking that now.

It is not hard to imagine a future President, whether it is President Trump in the remainder of his term or Presidents in the future, using the expanding war authorities to increasingly justify initiating war without the permission of Congress.

We asked President Trump for the legal authority justifying the Syrian missile strike on Syria that he made in March, and they have not yet provided an answer about their legal authority. What Congress has done is basically told Presidents: You can do whatever you want. That has a way of creeping and growing, and I think it already has. I think the American people deserve better, but, especially, our troops deserve better.

I have said it before; I will say it again. I can't think of anything more publicly immoral--public, civic immorality--than ordering troops to risk their lives and be killed, as the four were in Niger, while Congress is unwilling to cast a vote because this would be a politically difficult vote: I would rather not vote; I would rather make the President do it and blame the President if it works out badly. A political calculation has caused Congress to abdicate a responsibility while others are shouldering the burdens of responsibility--and even losing their lives in the process.

Finally, Senator Jacob Javits wrote a book in 1973 entitled ``Who Makes War'' after Congress passed the War Powers Resolution during the Vietnam war. He offered a very prescient commentary. I will close here:

Many advocates of presidential prerogative in the field of

war and foreign policy seem to be arguing that the

President's powers as Commander in Chief are what the

President alone defines them to be. The implication that the

Presidency is beyond the range of congressional authority to

check in the exercise of the war powers raises a serious

constitutional danger. If we accept such a view we accept a

situation in which the American people are dependent solely

on the benign intent and good judgment of the incumbent

President. We may not always be fortunate enough to see a

person with such qualities in the White House.

With that, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise to speak about the President's action last week stepping away from certifying Iran's compliance with the nuclear deal that was negotiated between the U.S. allies and the nation of Iran.

National security is about military power, but there is more to it than that. America's strength also comes from the power to use diplomacy.

In October 1945, President Harry Truman, my favorite President, changed the seal of the Office of the President to have the eagle face the olive branches of diplomacy instead of the arrows of war, signifying that America would also prefer that we use diplomacy first. In modern times, our judgments to go to war rather than use diplomacy have been flawed. Under this administration, diplomacy, in my view, is under assault, and that is why I rise today.

We see a decimated State in the USAID budget. We see bellicose rhetoric from the President. We see efforts to undermine, publicly, American diplomats engaged in negotiations. We see the refusal to even nominate key State Department diplomatic appointees.

As of last week, the administration has not put forward a nominee for approximately 52 percent of high-level positions at the State Department that require approval by the Senate. Thirty-two countries do not yet have Ambassadors in place, and that includes no nomination from the White House for Ambassadors to key countries like South Korea, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. No one has been nominated for Assistant Secretary for Arms Control, for Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation, for Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs, or for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

How serious can the administration be about nuclear threats with no Ambassador to South Korea or no ambassadorial nomination for the key State Department official around nonproliferation? And the President has repeatedly undercut his Secretary of State's diplomatic efforts with North Korea.

President Trump's most recent action--his recent attack on diplomacy--is the decision to decertify the Iran deal, and I think this could be the most dangerous yet. By stepping back from a diplomatic deal that the United States made with the global community that is clearly working, the President is publicly undercutting diplomatic negotiations, and he is setting us on a road where military options become increasingly more likely. I will state it bluntly. If you weaken diplomacy, you raise the risk of unnecessary war, and that is what this President is doing.

First, President Trump's refusal to make the Iran certification and his threat to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran recalls the disastrous U.S. entrance into the Iraq war in 2003, where intelligence was politicized, and the administration repeatedly made false claims to justify going to war--a war of choice--to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

The Bush administration insisted that regime change in Iraq was necessary, and it insisted on that because of the claim of Iraq's continuing productions of weapons of mass destruction.

In March of 2003, the IAEA came out and said there was no credible evidence that Iraq had a program of weapons of mass destruction and that there was no evidence they had revived the nuclear program they shelved in the 1990s, but the Bush administration would not accept that claim. It did not fit with the narrative they were selling to the American people about Saddam Hussein so they said the IAEA was wrong. They said we needed to initiate war--one that has proven so costly to Virginians and to Americans in treasure and in regional stability but especially in American lives--to prevent Iraq from obtaining weapons of mass destruction.

We went to war. It turned out the scientists and the technicians and the IAEA were right. Iraq didn't have a program of weapons of mass destruction. The politicians who tried to undermine the credibility of the international agencies were wrong. Of course, the consequences of that decision are significant. Ironically, you

could claim--I believe there is strong evidence--that decision in 2003 has today led to greater Iranian influence in Iraq and the region and a proliferation of extremist groups that didn't exist before.

We are now hearing the Trump administration make similar claims about Iran; that Iran will soon enough have a nuclear weapons program, that the IAEA cannot be trusted, that Iran supports al-Qaida, and from a Republican colleague: ``The policy of the United States should be regime change in Iran,'' and from Secretary of State Tillerson, we need a ``peaceful transition'' of the Iranian Government.

We should stop to think, Is this really about the nuclear deal or is it about beginning a drumbeat from the administration to march the United States toward another preventable war in the Middle East?

Second, while threatening to unilaterally terminate the nuclear deal at any time, President Trump also wants to revisit the terms of the deal to address what he sees as its flaws.

This isn't new. Since the day the deal was announced, some critics have argued that we could get a better deal or push for an alternative. I wasn't then, nor am I now, interested in the world of hypotheticals. I am interested in the world of facts. The fact is, the deal is working, and it is dramatically better than the alternative for at least 15 years or possibly longer.

Additionally, if we want to renegotiate the deal, Iran will seek to do the same. If we take a step back from the deal, Iran will take a step back, and what will they ask for--that they get to now increase centrifuges or get some of their enriched uranium back? I don't want to give Iran one thing back from this deal, but if we step back from a deal that is working and say we want to renegotiate, they will, too, and I don't think we should tolerate that.

Most wars start because of miscalculations. The notion that we can renegotiate the deal just on our side and the other side wouldn't think of renegotiation is magical thinking. The U.S. entrance in World War I 100 years ago started with miscalculations--most nations do. A miscommunication, a misunderstanding, another step, another step, and you are at war. We should be very, very wary.

I and all of us are very willing to go after Iran on the nonnuclear front. It was just 2 months ago that we passed--I think unanimously; maybe there was one ``no'' vote in this body--a set of stiff sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia. We have given the power to the President to impose more sanctions on Iran for bellicose behavior, for activities in other countries, for violations of human rights, and for violating U.N. Security Council resolutions on their missile program. The President should use the sanctions power we just gave him to go after Iran's activities that violate international norms and make America less safe. But when the IAEA, our allies, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State all say that with respect to the nuclear deal, Iran is complying, we should avoid stepping back on that deal, lest we suggest that the United States cannot be trusted in good faith to follow a deal.

Third, I worry about the timing of this effort to step away from the Iran deal with respect to the imminent threat. I hear concerns about the Iran deal and what Iran might be able to do in year 8 or year 10 or year 15. Let me tell you about something I am worrying about this month, and that is the North Korean nuclear program.

We have been in briefings, and we hear the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State say to us and say to the world: The United States will always push for a diplomatic solution. We are never out of diplomatic solutions.

But let's be candid. What are the chances of a diplomatic solution with North Korea that would end or dramatically limit their nuclear weapons ambitions? I don't think the chances are high. I would say they are 20 percent at best. They are not zero, but they are not high, either. But if there is any chance of a diplomatic negotiation and a diplomatic end to this program, don't we owe it to the American public and don't we owe it to our troops to seek to exhaust and explore it? Of course we do. Yet every time Secretary of State Tillerson talks about trying to have some diplomatic outcome to pressure the Chinese to use leverage against North Korea, the President pours cold water on him.

I would argue that stepping back from the Iran deal sends an unmistakable signal to North Korea if I am right, and there is even a small chance of a diplomatic resolution. But the message we send to North Korea is that the United States will back out of a nuclear deal even when it is being complied with. I think we drive the chances of a diplomatic resolution with North Korea down to zero, and we should not do that.

There is significant evidence that while Iran's nonnuclear behavior is worthy of additional sanctions and pressure, the deal on the nuclear program is working. Our closest European allies, U.S. intelligence services, the IAEA, the P5--when I visit Israel and speak to national security and intelligence leaders, such as Gadi Eisenkot, who is essentially the equivalent of the head of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, they say Iran is complying with the deal, and it is making the world safer in the near and medium term. Secretary Dunford and General Mattis have said the same thing.

The deal gives us more intelligence because we have inspections that we didn't have before. We have more inspections, and we know more about their program. In the first paragraph of the deal, on the first page of the deal, Iran pledges to never purchase, acquire, or develop military weapons. That promise, which is in perpetuity, gives us a legal justification, if they ever break it, to take action, including military action, to punish them for violating what they have signed. Do we want to give Iran the ability to step back from that promise they have made by stepping back ourselves when the deal is working?

Finally, the deal gives us a coalition. Our partners around the world who have signed on to the deal, who have been witness to the Iranian pledge, who know that Iran will have to permanently comply with the additional protocol of inspections under the deal--if we move away from the deal and Iran moves away from the deal, could we count on the coalition partners being with us to try to put a deal back together when it is we alone among the partners who have walked away from the table? What coalition could we expect if we are the ones who walk away from the table, if we say we are not interested in diplomacy? Then, later, if we need to take military action against Iran after we walked away from a deal, could we expect a coalition to support us in that?

I would like to conclude in this way: I think the President's decision to step back from this diplomatic deal poses a real challenge for this Congress. The President has done some things I agree with. He has done a number of things I disagree with. He has done only one thing that scares me, and it is this. I think that, together with defunding the State Department and pouring cold water on diplomacy and not filling key posts, this leads us closer to an unnecessary war. When you reject diplomacy or weaken it, you run the risk of an unnecessary war.

I have had to cast two war votes in the Senate, both as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I have been a city councilman, a mayor, a Lieutenant Governor, and a Governor, and casting a war vote is different from any vote you ever have to cast--any vote you ever have to cast. I have a son in the military, and that makes that vote different from any vote I have cast in 23 years in public life. As a Member of Congress, I may have to cast other votes to go to war against other nations, whether against nonstate terrorist groups or against a nation like North Korea or even Iran if they break for nuclear weapons. If I have to cast that vote, if I have to contemplate putting Congress on record that we should go to war, I want to be able to look American troops in the face and say: I exhausted every diplomatic option before I cast this vote. I think that is an obligation we owe to the public and to our troops. We have to exhaust diplomacy.

There may come a time when that eagle just cannot face the olive branches of diplomacy, but we have to insist on military strength to keep order in the world and protect Americans. But if we turn to those arrows of

war, we should be able to look at our public and look at our troops and say we exhausted diplomacy.

Stepping away from a diplomatic deal that is working is exactly the wrong thing for us to do at this time. It is my hope that Congress will not dignify what the President is doing in this regard and that we will insist, yes, upon strict compliance and also insist upon sanctions against Iran for nonnuclear behavior. But let's not be a nation that refuses to keep its diplomatic commitments. The stakes are just too high.

Mr. President I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1249.

The amendment is a simple amendment, folks. It is about transparency. Two years ago, the Senate passed a budget that added a laudatory requirement to have a Congressional Budget Office score for reconciliation legislation 28 hours in advance of voting on the legislation. There are obvious benefits to the Members who are voting and obvious benefits to the American public.

The budget resolution before us from committee repeals that requirement. The majority has argued that it is unnecessary because the requirement has never been triggered. But I remember that just a couple of months ago, the Senate was debating healthcare legislation that hadn't seen the light of day and didn't have a CBO score.

Do we really believe the answer to our problem is to make it easier to pass legislation without knowing the cost? I think the 28-hour requirement is worthy, it should be continued, and I think it should be extended to include amendments in the nature of a substitute.

I ask all my colleagues to support transparency and not embarrass the institution by enabling us to more easily pass important legislation without the public knowing the score.

Mr. President, I also rise to speak about the budget. I find many points of agreement with my colleague from Utah.

Just to sort of jump into it, normally we wouldn't be having this budget discussion in the fall. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 suggests that the President would give us a budget in February, that we would pass a budget by April, and that budget would then set top-line numbers that would be given to the committees, that would then write their authorizing bills with those budgetary numbers. Then it would be handed over, and the appropriators would ultimately fashion appropriations bills that were responsive to the budget and the authorizing bills. We are into a new fiscal year, and the many of the authorizing committees have already done their jobs.

I am on the Armed Services Committee. Probably the biggest piece of legislation we do every year is the NDAA. We have already written it without having a budget. We didn't have a budget top-line number this year. We have gone ahead and written the bill, and the appropriators are already working.

I think what everybody on this floor understands is that this really isn't a budget debate; it is an effort to set up a set of instructions around which to do tax reform via budget reconciliation. In my view, this budgetary document fails as a budget, and it also fails as a good- faith beginning to a tax reform discussion.

I want to talk about each of these: why this document fails as a budget--I voted against it in committee, and I am going to vote against it on the floor--and why it fails as an effort to initiate the necessary process for reforming the Tax Code for the first time since 1986.

If you look at this document, the budget that is on the floor has a whole set of priorities that are either wrong or completely unrealistic. As an example, the budget proposes over $5 trillion in spending cuts, $470-plus billion cut to Medicare, and an over $1 trillion cut to Medicaid. That would not only be a bad idea, but it is completely unrealistic and unlikely to occur. These cuts are not going to happen, and so it is just artificial.

Second, the budget does not address the primary budgetary reality--a dangerous reality we are living under--of sequestration and budget caps. It continues to gut domestic discretionary programs, to the tune of over $600 billion over the decade.

Finally, just a particular item that I think is very important: The budget proposes a fast track, a 50-vote process, to open up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That is really not a budgetary matter; it is shoehorned into the budget because we like to assume we are going to get a big chunk of revenue by drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But this is a fundamental matter of environmental policy that shouldn't be squirreled away in a tiny detail on the budget.

I opposed drilling in the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge when it was last on the floor in the mid-2000s. We were dealing with high oil prices and overreliance on Middle Eastern oil. The energy situation has completely changed.

We are moving to low- and no-carbon energy sources, and oil prices are significantly lower. We are not relying on Middle Eastern oil. I would also argue that the cost-benefit calculation now makes drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a particularly poor idea. I went to the Refuge two summers ago and saw the environmental damage that would be caused by drilling there, and I opposed it.

So the budget--from the unrealistic expense cuts to Medicaid and Medicare that would really hurt people, to other cuts--is unrealistic. The fact that it was being done after the authorizers and appropriators were generally done with their work demonstrates that the budget isn't that serious. What this is really about is coming up with an instruction to begin the process of tax reform.

Tax reform done through the reconciliation process is a bad idea for at least two reasons. First, it begins as completely partisan. If you are going to do tax reform for the first time since 1986, you ought to try to get the best ideas of both parties. But that is not what is done with reconciliation. When you say ``We are going to do it through reconciliation,'' you are saying ``We, the majority, have 52 votes. All we need is 50 plus a tiebreaker. We are not going to listen to Democrats. We are not going to meaningfully entertain the ideas you have. We are going to do it on our own.''

I would venture to say that the same outcome as was achieved with the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act via reconciliation is going to be the end result here. Trying to do something this important all on your own, without meaningfully including the public and the minority, almost destines it for failure.

The second reason it is a bad idea to do tax reform via reconciliation is this: Matters in reconciliation are temporary, not permanent.

I went to the Chamber of Commerce in Northern Virginia with Senator Warner a couple of weeks back. We talked about tax reform. We talked about the fact that it was needed to grow the economy, that it hadn't been done for a long time. But what my business leaders want is tax reform that is permanent. They don't want a tax reform bill where the provisions expire, and because of the rules of reconciliation, that is what happens. So to do tax reform via reconciliation is a mistake.

But let's go further and look at the tax reform ideas that have been discussed by the administration and others that we will likely embark upon if this budget passes. The budget sets up a mechanism for partisan and temporary tax cuts that would increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion. The first page of the GOP's own budget talks about the challenges of deficits:

``Continual overspending and its resulting deficits will

expand the Federal debt. During the next 10 years, debt held

by the public is slated to rise from 77 percent of GDP ($15

trillion) to 91 percent of GDP ($26 trillion).''

Why would we propose to increase the debt by $1.5 trillion in a partisan, temporary tax reconciliation bill? If folks--especially the GOP--are so focused on the deficit and debt, and we should be, why are we including a mechanism in this instruction to raise the debt by $1.5 trillion? I think, again, the answer is that this is not a serious proposal, and it is only the vehicle for partisan and temporary tax cuts.

The initial analyses I have seen of this tax proposal suggests a couple of things. First, the tax benefits would overwhelmingly be for folks at the top, the wealthiest, the folks who least need a break in taxes. To give an example, the Republican proposal calls for the elimination of the estate tax. That would cost more than $270 billion over 10 years. The estate tax has high thresholds already. It affects an extremely limited number of Virginians and a limited number of folks in virtually every State. Giving up $270 billion to get rid of the estate tax is enough to provide every child from a low- or moderate- income family with access to free preschool. That is about 7 million kids. You would still have enough money left over to take every student off Head Start waiting lists. Which would you rather do--cut the estate tax $270 billion for a few families or provide access to free preschool to every low- and moderate-income kid in this country and take every child on a Head Start waiting list off the list?

Second, the proposal has some gimmicks and special quirks that I think need to be brought to attention. I hope we will bring it to attention on the floor. Here is an example: The budget that is before us repeals a rule that is currently in place that requires the CBO to issue scores on legislation coming out of reconciliation at least 28 hours in advance of a vote. Now, 28 hours isn't that long, but at least it is enough time for a Senator and staff to read a bill and understand the consequences of the bill before voting. This Republican budget repeals the transparency rule that forces the CBO to issue a score. I have an amendment to not repeal the rule but to restore it and make it stronger. There should be a CBO score to let every Senator and especially the public know what we are voting on with respect to these matters.

I will conclude and say this: Tax reform is important. Let's not sugarcoat this. We are not really debating a budget on the floor. If we were really going to debate a budget, we would have done it last spring. This is all about setting the stage for tax reform. We haven't done it for a long time. It is important. We should promote tax reform that makes the Tax Code simpler and fair and that focuses on middle- class working families and makes it easier to start businesses and grow them. We shouldn't be doing tax reform that is partisan, that is temporary, that increases the deficit, and that produces the overwhelming benefit of a tax reform package to those at the top of the income scale who don't need it.

It is my hope that we will have that debate in earnest on the floor of the Senate. I would love to join my colleagues in a good-faith effort to reform the Tax Code. Reconciliation and this particular proposal is not the way to do that.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, this bill authorizes additions to two existing wilderness areas within the George Washington National Forest in Virginia; the Rich Hole and Rough Mountain Wilderness Areas. It's a relatively simple bill, and it provides only a small window into the volume of work done by Virginians to manage a vast swath of Federal land in this region collaboratively and responsibly.

America's Federal lands are some of our most precious assets. We may hike or bike them; derive energy, minerals, or goods from them; or sometimes just leave them to nature. There is a long history of conflict among stakeholders who disagree on which Federal lands are best suited to which purposes.

Many years ago, forest users with different views and interests formed the George Washington National Forest Stakeholder Collaborative. Through hard work and consensus, the Collaborative agreed upon a number of recommendations for forest management and protection. Everyone got some of what they wanted and gave some ground. Preservation advocates consented to timber harvest and other active forest restoration and management in certain areas. The forest products industry consented to wilderness and lightly-managed areas elsewhere. The U.S. Forest Service's 2014 revised GW Forest Management Plan reflected many of these agreements.

Subsequently, the Forest Service convened the Lower Cowpasture Restoration and Management Project, bringing more stakeholders to the table, earlier in the process, to negotiate out how to manage this particular part of the Forest, located in the lower portion of the Cowpasture River watershed, in ways that work for everyone. Within this process, further compromises were made to achieve a mutually satisfactory project that could gather broad support. All members of the Stakeholder Collaborative now support the wilderness additions identified in this bill.

I am proud to partner on this with my colleague Senator Mark Warner, and we are following in the path blazed by Senator John Warner and Representative Rick Boucher, who were instrumental in passing the original Virginia Wilderness Act in 1984.

Taking care of our Nation's outdoor resources is good for our economy and good for our environment. Land disputes may sometimes be difficult, but the example of the GW Forest Stakeholder Collaborative proves they don't have to be. When everyone comes to the table and invests the necessary time, we can find common ground. I hope this will be a lesson for us in other tough policy challenges, and I encourage the Senate to support this bill.

Mr. President, this bill authorizes additions to two existing wilderness areas within the George Washington National Forest in Virginia; the Rich Hole and Rough Mountain Wilderness Areas. It's a relatively simple bill, and it provides only a small window into the volume of work done by Virginians to manage a vast swath of Federal land in this region collaboratively and responsibly.

America's Federal lands are some of our most precious assets. We may hike or bike them; derive energy, minerals, or goods from them; or sometimes just leave them to nature. There is a long history of conflict among stakeholders who disagree on which Federal lands are best suited to which purposes.

Many years ago, forest users with different views and interests formed the George Washington National Forest Stakeholder Collaborative. Through hard work and consensus, the Collaborative agreed upon a number of recommendations for forest management and protection. Everyone got some of what they wanted and gave some ground. Preservation advocates consented to timber harvest and other active forest restoration and management in certain areas. The forest products industry consented to wilderness and lightly-managed areas elsewhere. The U.S. Forest Service's 2014 revised GW Forest Management Plan reflected many of these agreements.

Subsequently, the Forest Service convened the Lower Cowpasture Restoration and Management Project, bringing more stakeholders to the table, earlier in the process, to negotiate out how to manage this particular part of the Forest, located in the lower portion of the Cowpasture River watershed, in ways that work for everyone. Within this process, further compromises were made to achieve a mutually satisfactory project that could gather broad support. All members of the Stakeholder Collaborative now support the wilderness additions identified in this bill.

I am proud to partner on this with my colleague Senator Mark Warner, and we are following in the path blazed by Senator John Warner and Representative Rick Boucher, who were instrumental in passing the original Virginia Wilderness Act in 1984.

Taking care of our Nation's outdoor resources is good for our economy and good for our environment. Land disputes may sometimes be difficult, but the example of the GW Forest Stakeholder Collaborative proves they don't have to be. When everyone comes to the table and invests the necessary time, we can find common ground. I hope this will be a lesson for us in other tough policy challenges, and I encourage the Senate to support this bill.

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

Mr. President, I rise to speak about the debate this week over the Graham-Cassidy proposal with respect to healthcare that is being considered by the body. I have high regard for both of these colleagues. I serve with each of them on different committees. I oppose the bill and want to talk a little bit about why I do but more specifically about an aspect of the bill that I find puzzling.

It is no surprise to me that there are many in this body who would like to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. When the Democrats were in the majority for my first 2 years in the Senate, I often sat in the chair where the Presiding Officer sits. I heard a lot of people giving speeches on the floor. I was in the Chair during an all-night sort of filibuster by the Senator from Texas about the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act. I get that there are arguments about it. While I support the Affordable Care Act--I strongly did in 2010 and still do--I do want to work with my colleagues to find solutions to improve healthcare. There are differences of opinion about it.

One thing I never heard during all of the speeches that I heard, either as a presider or paying attention on the floor, was Members getting up and saying they wanted to dramatically cut Medicaid. That is not anything that anybody has filibustered about. That is not anything that people speak about.

When President Trump campaigned, he said: I am unique on the forum right now of all these candidates in that I will not cut the Medicaid Program. When the Senate started to consider versions of the ObamaCare repeal and replacement over the summer, after the House acted, what interested me was not the portions of the bill that attempted to replace the Affordable Care Act but the significant changes to the Medicaid Program that were never advertised. There was never this discussion: We are going to repeal ObamaCare, and we want to cut Medicaid. It was always about ObamaCare.

I am puzzled, standing here today, considering a Graham-Cassidy proposal that not only would be a fundamental change of repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act but also contains a very significant revision of Medicaid that would hurt my State and would hurt a lot of people I care about. That never seems to be acknowledged, and I am puzzled about why.

As to the Graham-Cassidy proposal, again, I respect my colleagues, and I think they are putting it on the table because they think it would be preferable to the current system. I don't question their motives. I was a Governor, and the notion of block grants and discretion and dollars back to the State can be a good thing. Quickly, before I get to the Medicaid piece, the problem is if you take the Graham-Cassidy proposal, it takes the dollars that are currently being delivered to the States through the Affordable Care Act, shrinks them by about $240 billion over 10 years, and then eliminates them. Even with the shuffling of the deck on a block grant that might benefit one State over another, you can't take $240 billion out of the system, in my view, without making people's premiums go up.

The money that is being delivered to States is largely delivered to help people either get a tax credit premium or pay out-of-pocket costs. If you take that much out of the system over 10 years, people's premiums are going to go up. That breaks a promise of President Trump's, who said that nobody is

going to lose coverage and nobody is going to pay more. People will pay more, if Graham-Cassidy passes, in the short term, over the next 10 years. Then, when all of the money expires after 10 years, they will pay a lot more. I oppose that.

Second, I also oppose the way this bill treats preexisting conditions. By allowing States to waive essential health benefits, it might be technically true to say that you could get a policy even if you had a preexisting condition, but the insurance company could say to you: I will write you a policy, but you are a diabetic; so the policy will not cover insulin. Or I will write you a policy, but you are a woman of childbearing age; the policy will not cover maternity care.

If the policy doesn't cover your preexisting condition, then preexisting conditions are not protected. To my read of the 141-page bill--which has been revised a little bit, or so I hear, since I got the most recent version Friday to read it over the weekend--that is exactly what States can do. Because 43 of 50 States did not protect people with preexisting conditions before the Affordable Care Act, handing this power back to the States and allowing them to waive these benefits, I think, would jeopardize the tens of millions of Americans who do have preexisting conditions.

Finally, I don't like the fact that the current bill, as I understand it, ends funding for Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood doesn't have a line item in the budget. To the extent that Planned Parenthood gets funding, it gets funding for this reason: It provides primary medical care to women who are Medicaid-eligible, and they get services at Planned Parenthood that are Medicaid-eligible to be reimbursed.

Since Federal funding cannot be used for abortion services, the defunding of Planned Parenthood basically says that if you serve a woman who chooses to go to you for her primary healthcare and she is Medicaid eligible, we will not pay you for that service. That seems, to me, to be wrong. If women are choosing to go to Planned Parenthood, and they think that is the best place to go for primary care, why would we disable them and force them to go elsewhere by disabling Planned Parenthood from reimbursement?

All right. Those are some challenges I have, but I want to get to the real guts of my concern, which is the effort to go after Medicaid.

The Graham-Cassidy bill--and it is similar to the skinny repeal bill and other bills that were on the table that the Senate considered--goes into the Medicaid Program that was passed in 1965, which was long before the Affordable Care Act--long before it--and it puts caps on the program to restrict the growth of Medicaid spending. The estimate is that over the next 10 years, it will take $1.2 billion out of Medicaid. Yet no description of Graham-Cassidy that I have ever heard a sponsor mention and no description of any of the bills that have been pending on the Senate floor say we are going to repeal ObamaCare and that we want to go into the Medicaid Act of 1965 and dramatically cut Medicaid.

Why is that never made plain as it is a core feature of these bills? I would argue, it is sort of the core within the Trojan horse of the repeal of the Affordable Care Act to go in and change Medicaid. Yet it is never advertised that way, and it is never explained. You could have put a bill on the table to repeal the Affordable Care Act and could have left Medicaid alone. You would have touched the Medicaid expansion that was part of the Affordable Care Act, certainly, but you could have left the core Medicaid Program alone. Why was there an effort to both repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut Medicaid but not to say we are cutting Medicaid?

Maybe it is because, if you were to say that, you would directly counter a promise the President made, ``I am not going to cut Medicaid.'' Maybe there is a concern about, boy, we are taking $1.2 billion out of Medicaid, and we are about to come up with a big tax proposal that might give tax breaks for the wealthiest. We do not want to take money away from a program that is for the poor, elderly, disabled, or children and then immediately turn right around and increase the deficit by a tax cut.

I find this to be the big mystery of this entire debate, in that every proposal that is on the floor makes massive cuts to the core Medicaid Program even though it has nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act. Nobody ever acknowledges it, and nobody ever explains it, but I am here to both say it is real and to challenge it.

Who are Medicaid recipients? I think there tends to be a little bit of a misconception about who gets Medicaid in this country.

In Virginia, 50 percent of Medicaid recipients are children. The proposal, under Graham-Cassidy, calls for a $1.2 billion cut in Medicaid in Virginia over the next 10 years and a $120 billion cut in Medicaid nationally. In Virginia, 50 percent of Medicaid recipients are kids. One in three births in Virginia--one in three births every year-- is compensated by Medicaid. Two in three nursing home residents are supported by Medicaid. There are a lot of people with disabilities in Virginia who are supported by Medicaid. The home and community-based waiver programs, under the core Medicaid bill, support nearly 50,000 Virginians in community settings of their own choosing. Medicaid is also the primary payer for behavioral health services--mental health treatment, substance abuse prevention treatment.

That is what this bill goes after even though that Medicaid funding has nothing to do with ObamaCare, nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act. So reducing Medicaid spending by the $120 billion-plus over 10 years or more in the out-years would not hand more power to States. No, it would dramatically limit the States' ability to provide the kinds of services that are needed by our most vulnerable--kids, seniors in nursing homes, and people with disabilities.

Later today, I am going to have a meeting in my office with folks who have communicated with me over the course of this debate--really since January when I was added to the HELP Committee. They are coming in to tell me how frightened they are about what will happen if Graham- Cassidy passes.

Samantha and Justin McGovern are parents. They have a girl, Josephine, who is 1\1/2\ years old. They are from Springfield, which is right here in Northern Virginia. Josephine is about 18 months old, and she was very premature--24 weeks gestation. She was 1 pound 12 ounces when she was born. That is the size of six sticks of butter. That is how tiny this little girl was. She was hospitalized, after her premature birth, for 407 days, across three units, in two hospitals, in two States. She is home and thriving now, but she is supported by a ventilator 24/7 via a tracheostomy, and she is fed primarily through a gastrointestinal tube.

Her mother Samantha writes:

We are fortunate that we get to focus on her health rather

than medical crippling bills. We estimate that her hospital

stay would have exceeded $4 million, and the cost for her

monthly medical expenses (baseline . . . not sick) is about

$26,000 a month (if we didn't have insurance or Medicaid

coverage).

Here is what she writes:

We are fortunate we have amazing private insurance through

our employer. However, if it were legal to have annual or

lifetime caps, I don't know what would happen to us. Part of

our Medicaid covers private duty nursing so that we can sleep

and go to work. Without nursing, one of us would have to

leave their job, and there would be no way we could continue

to live in our house [or pay our insurance]. If there are

caps and we lost our insurance, we would depend on Medicaid

even more than we do now, and we would have less coverage

than we currently have, making it virtually impossible for

Josephine to continue to be followed by the doctors who saved

her life.

Basically, if [this bill] passes, life as we know it could

fall apart. I don't know how we would be able to support our

daughter, how we could keep her home and not in an

institution. She deserves to be home. She deserves to have

every opportunity to thrive.

I met Rebecca Wood at a forum in Charlottesville. She has a 5-year- old daughter, Charlie. I met them in July.

Charlie's mom says:

Charlie . . . is five-years-old and loves playing outdoors,

live music, things with numbers, and anything with animals.

Charlie was born more than three months early and, as a

result, is developmentally delayed. Currently, Charlie

requires physical therapy (PT), occupational therapy (OT),

and speech therapy. She has a . . . (feeding tube) and wears

orthotics. Affordable care is the difference between

independence as an adult or a permanent disability. Due to

a three month NICU stay [when she was born], Charlie would

have exceeded her lifetime cap before she ever came home

for the first time.

Then, she would have been uninsurable due to her birth

being a preexisting condition. Also, Institutional

Medicaid paid for a large portion of her NICU stay. Upon

discharge, a Medicaid waiver helps with out of pocket

costs and provides services that [our private] insurance

doesn't cover. She would not be where she is without any

of these things. The changes in the proposed healthcare

bill would cause Charlie to drastically lose access to

these services. Receiving healthcare services is her

chance to leave a life-limiting disability behind.

The last story I will tell is of Eric Young, from Norfolk, on behalf of his son, Ethan.

Eric has major concerns about Graham-Cassidy. His son, Ethan, has what is called heterotaxy syndrome, which is an incredibly complex congenital heart defect. There are seven defects that are combined in this brave and thriving youngster. Eric said that Ethan has had two open heart surgeries and is having his third in November.

Eric writes:

I anticipate his healthcare charges to surpass the $1M mark

before the end of the year. It's not an ``if'' for Ethan--

it's when. ``He'' will have spent more on healthcare in his

first 2 years of life than most people will during their

entire lives. He's the outlier. But he's exactly the type of

kid that needs protecting.

Dealing with such a critical issue when your baby is first

born is overwhelming--having to worry about whether or not

your decisions to save your child will affect whether he . .

. [can] even obtain health insurance when he gets to be an

adult is just wrong.

Eric writes about the ACA, as Eric works in the healthcare industry:

The ACA is not perfect--it needs to be changed. I work in

healthcare--so I have the perspective of seeing it from my

job and as a parent. But, we need a real bill that is well

thought out, not something just for the sake of passing.

I wanted to come and really just talk about these youngsters. One out of every three children born in Virginia is able to be born in a hospital because of Medicaid, and 50 percent of Medicaid recipients are kids. If you were a child and you needed a wheelchair, your private insurance likely would not cover it. If you get a wheelchair, it is usually Medicaid that pays for it. If you go to school and then you get an individualized education plan and your public school system provides you some services, it is Medicaid that is usually paying the school system to reimburse it for the services that are provided.

My wife used to be a juvenile court judge, and this was the situation she would face all the time with kids in the court. It would be a heartbreaking situation, but there was an answer. You would have teenagers who were working so hard to be successful--not in court because of violating the law, not in court because of trouble but in court because their families were so dysfunctional nobody could take care of them. As a judge, my wife would have to grapple with this: Where is this child going to live? Who is going to help this child get to school? This kid is trying to succeed. Do I have to put the child in a group home or institutionalize the child because there is no family support there?

What my wife could do as a juvenile court judge--and this happens all over Virginia every day and all over the country every day--is say: OK. The child is capable of success, but the family is dysfunctional. May I send a counselor to the home? May I find an aunt or uncle, and maybe with some support of counseling, provide some stability so this child does not have to be institutionalized and can be successful? When my wife would order that, it was Medicaid that was paying for it.

Medicaid pays for your birth, Medicaid pays for your wheelchair, and Medicaid pays for the services a local school system will provide so you can have a life of independence. If your whole world is falling apart around you and you are doing everything you can to succeed, Medicaid can actually pay for counseling so you can keep it together and graduate from high school and go on and go to college and be successful.

Medicaid is advancing these challenged kids toward lives of independence and success. Yet the bill that is on the floor before us would cut, by the most recent estimate, $120 billion out of Medicaid over the next 10 years and more beyond. Why? Why is that not acknowledged? Why would you use the bill to cut Medicaid when all of the rhetoric about it is that we have to repeal the Affordable Care Act?

I think the right answer to this question is just staring us in the face, and it was what we gave Senator McCain a standing ovation for in July when he came back after getting his tough diagnosis. He came back, and he said: Look, healthcare is just too important. It is just too important. It is the most important expenditure anybody ever makes. It is the biggest sector of the American economy. It is the kind of thing that keeps parents up at night, worrying about what is going to happen to their children tomorrow or in 20 years, when the parents are deceased, and they want to know the children can have independent lives.

We just cannot afford to get this wrong, and the answer about getting it right is staring us right in the face. Let the HELP Committee, on which I serve--the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee-- and let the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid and Medicare, take up everybody's ideas: the Graham-Cassidy bill and Bernie Sanders' bill. I have a bill about reinsurance, but it is so wonky it is never going to be on a bumper sticker. I think it would be a good bill, but I have not been able to have a hearing on it.

Let the committees that are of a Republican majority but with Democrats who know some things about healthcare take up these bills, hear from the parents, hear from the hospitals, hear from the doctors, and come up with a bipartisan set of solutions that will make healthcare better, not worse.

We were on the verge of doing that in the HELP Committee. We had 4 hearings with about 20 witnesses. We not only had committee members involved, but Chairman Lamar Alexander and Ranking Member Patty Murray did a good thing--they opened up a coffee before every hearing and said: Hey, if you are not on the committee but you want to meet these witnesses and hear what they have to say, come and talk and ask them questions. We had over 50 Senators participate. We were working on a bipartisan bill and basically had a handshake deal last week to stabilize the individual insurance market for a couple of years. In a deliberate way, in a careful way, we considered Republican and Democratic ideas for improving health insurance.

Then, last Wednesday, the President tweeted out, in working with the Speaker and the majority leader, that they did not want the bipartisan effort to go forward. No. We have to push the Graham-Cassidy bill--the bill that is about the repeal of ObamaCare but that also has within the Trojan horse these massive cuts to Medicaid that will hurt kids.

I don't know why we had to set aside the bipartisan effort. I don't know why we had to submarine the good-faith work of the committee under the leadership of a great chair and a great ranking member. It is my hope that at the end of the week, we will have defeated the Graham- Cassidy bill and that we will go back to being the Senate we should be.

I will just say what I have said a couple of times on this floor. This is one we cannot afford to get wrong. The parents of these kids already have enough to worry about. Why would we make it harder on them? We do not have to. We can be better than that. That is what I ask we do.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.