Floor Statements

Mr. President, while I was unable to vote on the motion to concur in the House Amendment to S. 1086, Child Care and Development Block Grant Act of 2014, I would have recorded a vote in opposition to this bill, just as I did when this bill was originally before the Senate in February. I have three reasons to oppose this bill.

First, the Constitution does not permit the Federal Government to operate this program. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution lists all the powers given to the Federal Government, none of which includes funding for and oversight of State and local child care programs.

Second, this bill will increase the authorized size of the Child Care and Development Block Grant, CCDBG, program by over $1 billion without eliminating or reducing a lower priority program elsewhere. At a time when our national debt is over $17 trillion, Congress continues to spend away the future of the next generation. This reauthorization will exacerbate this problem, and our children will deal with the harsh consequences of our Nation's future fiscal insolvency.

Third, this CCDBG reauthorization does not address previously identified duplication and overlap in existing Federal child care programs and tax expenditures. While it does include a provision for the Department of Health and Human Services to study the issue, I do not believe it goes far enough. The Government Accountability Office has already identified 33 programs for which child care is an eligible use of funds. For example, States often transfer billions of dollars in funding from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant program to use in their child care programs. Ultimately, this kind of overlap and duplication underscores Congress' reckless disregard for our future well-being.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

I wish to spend a few minutes talking about a bill that passed the House that has 37 bipartisan cosponsors in the Senate that came out of my committee. It is an important transparency item for the American taxpayers called the Taxpayers Right to Know Act.

What most Americans don't realize is there is only one agency that knows how many programs it has--only one. None of the rest of the Federal agencies know how many Federal programs they are running. They can't put them down, can't list them on a piece of paper.

The GAO has recommended for a long period of time--starting about 3 or 4 years ago--that we should be putting this down when we have the truth in transparency and the truth in accountability act and the transparency act with President Obama. We started this process where the GAO would look for duplication and report it to Congress.

We have a bill that has passed unanimously in the House. It is a bipartisan bill that came with a voice vote out of our committee. All it says is that every agency ought to have to list their programs every year so we can know what they are doing. GAO says that will help immensely in terms of eliminating this $200 billion to $300 billion a year in duplication.

We are going to have some unanimous requests later today, and we will have a bill that is on the floor for which the majority leader has once again filled the tree, which allows no amendments whatsoever on the bill.

This bill should be on the floor, should be standing on its own, and should be passed because nobody can honestly object to the agencies not knowing what programs they run, not having a complete list.

I mean, it is counterintuitive that anybody would vote against it. It makes no sense that we don't know that, and we know we need to have it. It is an easy vote for everybody, and the majority leader isn't going to allow an amendment.

So we are not at a new day yet with this present majority leader. This is something that helps every American--Democrat or Republican. It helps us run our government more efficiently, more effectively. It is a good-government amendment, and yet it is not going to be allowed.

I am disheartened that at the end of the year we could actually do some things together that would actually allow us to accomplish real things for the American people that will make a real difference in the long run, but we won't because we don't want to have what was guaranteed to the minority when the Senate was set up--the right to offer amendments.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I have an inquiry of the Chair. It was my understanding that I had 4 minutes remaining on our side and that Senator Rubio had time granted to him by the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. Is that not correct?

What I would simply do is ask unanimous consent that I have 7 minutes to make a statement.

I can stick to 7 minutes. I will hear the gavel come down and I will quit.

First, I give praise to the chair and the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee for the cooperative nature of the committee this year in terms of inserting good government amendments into appropriations bills. It was a real pleasure to be able to work with them and to put some of the oversight results that we have done over the past few years into appropriations bills.

The bill we have on the floor, even though the chair is supporting the bill, is not her bill. It is a bill that came to her from House Republicans. So any criticism I might have of the bill is certainly not directed toward the chair of the Appropriations Committee. But it is important to be reminded of what the Congress told the American people less than 2 years ago, that we were going to go on a diet, and then 1 year ago when we had the Ryan-Murray agreement.

I will outline where we are with what we are getting ready to vote on, because we are about $47 billion above what we agreed to in the Ryan-Murray budget, and that doesn't include emergency funding.

Appropriators didn't write this bill. This bill came out of the House. We understand the timing of it, we understand the process. But this bill doesn't keep our word to the American public that we said we were going to keep. That is No. 1.

No. 2 is the chair of the Appropriations Committee attempted to put bills on the floor, and she was open to an amendment process. One bill was pulled because there was no agreement to allow any amendments to $3.6 trillion worth of spending--none, zero. That wasn't her desire. She is a fair broker in this body for what needs to be done when it comes to spending.

So I would make the point on the fiscal aspect of this bill.

When criminals in this country hurt other people, judges throughout the country--and Federal judges--impose a penalty, and criminals who are convicted end up paying into a Crime Victims Fund. The Crime Victims Fund isn't Federal tax dollars, it is individual payments by felons to make amens for damage and injury to people upon whom their crime was cast.

In this bill is $20 billion worth of false savings, but the way we calculate it is since we are not going to spend the money that is due to the crime victims, we are going to say that is going to save us money and, so, therefore, we can spend that money somewhere else.

If you did that on your income taxes or if you were a corporation and filed that with the SEC, it wouldn't take long for you to be in jail. But that is what the appropriators in the House did and we just got through doing this last December, the same amount of money on the same fund.

What I want the American people to see is regardless of whether you think we ought to pass this bill, shouldn't there be some clarity about the integrity of our numbers? Shouldn't we, if we can't meet the guidelines, just admit it and say we can't meet it rather than saying we are meeting it and create a false set of numbers? Shouldn't we at least do that? Aren't the American people worth that?

But instead, we have $11.8 billion from the Crime Victims Fund and $6.3 billion from the Children's Health Fund, which are false savings. They are not real savings.

So we are not going to be honest.

Well, I am going to be honest. The American public, the Senate, and the authors of this bill in the House will be lying to you if you believe the numbers in this bill. They are not true.

That is not the chair of the Appropriations Committee who made that decision, it was the House appropriators who made that decision to use false numbers to create a false set of achievements.

Finally, and I think I am about out of time, I would say there is one other aspect that disturbs me about this bill.

We have a mess in the Middle East today. Sitting on the Intelligence Committee and sitting on Homeland Security, I don't disagree we ought to be involved in terms of going after ISIS, but I think we ought to recognize that we created the problem in the first place. We created the vacuum that allowed that to flourish.

I will state my assessment of where we are. We now have recognized this threat and we have a political plan but no real policy plan to confront ISIS.

Having just heard from both the head of the CIA and also the Defense Department in response to the President's plan, what I can tell you is we know that something needs to be done, but your government doesn't yet know what to do.

I know there is authorization for monies in here. We need it. We are going to have to fight it. But let's be very clear, as Members of this body, to ask the important questions so that we don't go down a road that is made even worse. We have the brain power in the Senate, the experience, and the gray hair to do that.

I ask my colleagues to be very careful--not with this; this is going to happen. This CR is going to happen. It is a terrible way to run the government. The appropriations chair doesn't want to run it this way, but let's be very careful on the questions we ask in the future.

I thank the chair of the Appropriations Committee for her kindness in yielding me the time.

I yield the floor.

I thank my colleague.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, let me explain to the people watching what is happening here. We have a bill that everybody agrees to that is not going to get passed because everybody does not agree to another bill that is linked to it. We have offered multiple compromises on the battlefield protection act. We just have a $17.8 trillion deficit.

We are going to have a $599 billion debt this year. Yet this program they want to authorize that will keep this program that the Senator from Arkansas would like to honor our Desert Storm from happening--they refuse to take yes for an answer.

There are 26 critical sites that need to be protected that we know of. We said: Do that. We have said: Do not authorize more than we can afford. We will not do that. We have made compromises so that we can do what the intent of the battlefield protection act is and accomplish the leverage against the bill honoring our Desert Storm veterans. But that is not good enough. So what we have asked for is to quit allowing States and localities to game the system with any kind of pay-fors and do not have the Federal Government pay for the State's share or the local community's share plus the Federal Government's share. We have said some good government stuff.

You can pass this bill today if, in fact, they will take some adjustments to the bill. So what I would offer is rather than object, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from New Jersey modify his request so that my substitute amendment to H.R. 1033, which is at the desk, be agreed to.

If you agree to these simple, straight-forward, good government, financially secure items, you do not get the full basket, but you get the things that are critical to this country in terms of protecting battlefield sites and we will honor our Desert Storm veterans.

I ask that we have that modification be agreed to which is at the desk.

I object.

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

Mr. President, I became a practicing physician over 30 years ago. I delivered well in excess of 4,000 babies. And right now in my Senate career and where the Senate is, I

feel as if I am the father in the waiting room. I keep wondering when we are going to make any progress, when we are actually going to have the delivery of something positive for the country.

What we are seeing this week is really disappointing to me because if you read just the headlines in the last 4 days, here are the headlines about Congress.

Here is today's Politico: ``The Lamest Lame Duck Looms Over Congress.''

``Lame Ducks Will Roost in a Do-Nothing December.''

``December will be the lamest lame-duck session in a long time.''

The Economist: ``Congress is useless.''

America's legislature has become something of a joke in

recent years, a place where good policy ideas go to die and

where decent policy ideas go to be twisted into something

incomprehensible.

It is enough to make one lose faith in representative democracy, I tell you.

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

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

Madam President, this is my 10th year in the Senate. Every time we come to a close of the session for a summer break or for a holiday break all of a sudden we start hearing all these unanimous consent requests--they come to the Senate. For those of you who are listening to this and to my colleagues, these are requests that bills be passed without a vote. I am fine with that, as long as they meet certain characteristics and considerations.

But what the American public does not know is that about 70 percent of the work the Senate does happens by unanimous consent, with no recorded vote on the back of any one Senator. Today is no different. I have heard of five or six requests for unanimous consent. They are fine with a couple of provisions. The first provision is they ought to be within the powers of Congress as enumerated by the Constitution in the enumerated powers. The tendency is: Oh, we have to do this; it has to happen now. For some of the things that is true, but the reason it has to happen now is because we had not done it before now because we failed to do it. We utilize the end of the session to force people to give on positions they would never give on otherwise because they do not want to take the heat for being responsible for stopping something from happening, even though it might not fit within the enumerated powers, it might not be under our constitutional authority.

But the most egregious of all of this is the fact that we are going to be asked today, probably 7 or 10 times, to pass pieces of legislation the very cost of which will fall on the backs of our children and our grandchildren--not us. With over $400 billion in waste per year in the Federal Government--waste, fraud, duplication--to ask us to spend $200 million here or $2 billion here or in the case of the veterans bill, $17 billion, of which $5 billion of it is actually paid for, without doing the hard work of not transferring more debt to our children is not acceptable to me.

So my rights as an individual Senator are going to be utilized today--until we go home--to make sure we do not transfer another penny, if I can stop it, onto the backs of our children. It would be different if we were efficient, if we did not have any waste, if we did not have any fraud, if we did not have any duplication. But you see, it is an excuse to not do the hard work we were sent to do.

So I am putting my colleagues on notice that if they want to pass any bill that is going to go by unanimous consent, they better find some waste somewhere to offset it with or I will object. I do not mind taking the heat, no matter what the issue. I have done it before, I will do it again. Our children and our grandchildren are worth any amount of heat that creates a future opportunity for them that is at least as equal to what we have had.

I wanted to say that before I start talking about the veterans bill. I voted for the veterans bill that went out of the Senate. My background as a physician and businessman--businessman first, a physician second, regrettably a politician third--but I voted for that because I thought in conference we would actually fix it. What is wrong with the VA? Leadership, a culture of corruption, a culture of not caring. That does not apply to all of the VA employees, it does not apply to all of the VA hospitals, but it certainly does apply to a number of them.

How did we get there? I would note for the record that VA spending is up 60 percent since 2009. Let's start in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. It is up 60 percent. Patient demand is up only 17 percent in that same period of time. The number of providers has increased by 40 percent. So it surely cannot be a problem of money.

If we look at the increased utilization of those services over the next progressive 10 years, it will be less than 20 percent. We did some good things in the bill in the Senate, most of which are capped, but we did not do enough. If we are going to manage the VA, we have to give the head of that organization the ability to be able to manage it. Senior Executive Service, the Secretary of the VA is going to have that capability to hire and fire. For a very limited number of title 38 employees--those are hospital managers, physicians--for a very limited number, he will have that as well. But for where we have seen a lot of the problems, he will not be able to fire people who have directly harmed our veterans.

So we have not given him the tools to create the environment and the change that has to happen and a cultural change that has to happen in the veterans organization.

The other thing I would note is that if we look at the requirement for primary care physicians and physician extenders--nurse practitioners and PAs--their load is about one-fourth of the load of private practitioners in this country. That is not true clinic to clinic, but on average that is true. In Oklahoma we have some great physicians who work every night until 10:00 taking care of veterans. We have great caregivers in lots of instances. But we have a lot of stinkers, and on average we are not demanding of them what the private sector routinely does.

One of the good things in the bill is we are going to finally have VA hospitals and clinics reporting outcomes, just as every other hospital in this country has to report. If they take Medicare or Medicaid dollars, they have to report to CMS their outcomes--their readmissions, their death rates, their infection rates, their quality of care. They have to be reported.

Also, physicians have to be credentialed. Not true in the VA. So if they are not credentialed, the VA patient is going to know what their credentials are--if they have lost their medical license.

Those are positive aspects of this bill. What is not positive is the fact that we won't fix the real problem, and we are going to say we did and we are going to spend our grandkids' money

saying we did over a very short period of time, and we are still not going to hold the organization accountable.

It is unconscionable to me, after a 60-percent increase in funding over the last 4 years, that we would borrow against our children's future an additional $12 billion when we have all this waste throughout the Federal Government and in the VA and say that is the best Congress could do. I think that is an incrimination upon Congress, and it is a dereliction of our duty--to our Republic but also our future.

So I will be doing a couple things:

No. 1, I will be raising a point of order against this bill; and No. 2, I will be voting against it.

Let me say a little bit about why I am voting against it. Yesterday I talked to a Vietnam veteran who is 100 percent disabled and presented to the emergency room of a major VA hospital in this country with chest pain. This patient was observed for 2 hours. She had no acute changes on her EKG, but she had--as any doctor would know--unstable angina. Her pain never went away. She was sent home. In less than 48 hours she presented to an emergency room in her local community and an hour after that had three stents placed in her left coronary artery. She was ignored medically. That is happening today as we have had this discussion.

Another wonderful retired veteran in Oklahoma had to have a knee replaced. She was service-connected. She went to the VA and had her knee replaced. It was a failure. She had to have it done again. A couple years later her other knee needed to be replaced. They replaced her knee. It failed. As they replaced the second knee, as can happen, they fractured her femur. Today she has a replaced knee, and she walks with a terrible limp because her left leg is 1\1/2\ inches shorter than her right one. The likelihood of that happening to one individual is about 1 in 10 billion, but the outcomes never get reported. A femur can break while doing a knee prosthesis, there is no question about it. But five major surgeries? That means outcomes don't compare.

When this VA episode started soaking in, as a physician I went to the medical literature and looked at all the studies that have been published on VA care. I did a LexisNexis. I looked at them all. What did they show? VA care is better than anyplace in America. That is what the studies show. Except when we drill down on it, what we find is the way they were cheating on appointments is the way they were cheating on outcomes. In other words, the outcomes weren't accurate. So the culture is one of looking good, protecting those within the VA, and not protecting our veterans. Again, I would say that does not apply to all VA employees. The vast majority of them are great. But the leadership has stunk. We have to have a bill that fixes that. I don't believe this is going to do it.

I also wish to talk about whistleblowers because I have had a multitude of whistleblowers whose complaints I have investigated and found to be truthful. The culture at the VA against whistleblowers has been a channel in the past from whistleblowers back to management. And what happens to them? They get fired. They get demoted. They get harassed. They end up ultimately leaving. These are the people who care, who want to make it better.

There is a big job ahead of Secretary McDonald. He has the capability and he has the experience to fix this but only if we give him the tools. My fear is that we will not give him the tools with this bill.

The final point I would make, and I think we all ought to think about it--every American ought to think about it. Remember, we are an All- Volunteer Army right now. If somebody has served this country in combat, putting their life on the line to protect us, to protect our way of life, to protect the very freedoms we cherish, should that same individual ever be at the back of the line on anything related to health care that is associated with their service? They should be in the front. They should be ahead of every Senator, every President, every doctor. They should get the first care, not the last. They should get the best care, not the worst. That is how it ought to be. It is the veterans VA system, not ours. It is for them. And when they no longer are the object of service by this country, for them, for their sacrifice, then we are in a whole lot more trouble than any of us realize. We have turned things upside down. Union representation at the VA is more important than the VA patient. Benefits for VA managers are more important than the VA patient.

The one critical thing that really needs to happen to clean up the VA is to give veterans the absolute choice to go wherever they want, their freedom to choose whatever care they want based on what they have done for us. By doing that, the VA will either have to become competitive and just as good or they should die. We have not done that in this bill. We need to do that in this bill.

We have centers of excellence in the VA that beat all the private industry, all the private health care. When it comes to prosthetics, when it comes to closed-head injuries, when it comes to traumatic brain injury, when it comes to post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, we are great. The VA is great, but in too many areas it is not. Tell me this bill will change all that, and I will vote for it even if it does sacrifice our children. But it won't.

I won't be here when the results are assessed, but I can predict what they will be--more of the same, too much money and not enough leadership.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, would the Senator from Nevada, the majority leader, consider an amendment that would modify his request that would provide an offset for this bill?

I object.

Mr. President, I would note--everybody should know that the U.N. gets well over $7 billion of money every year from this Congress, the American people, with absolutely no accountability. There is no transparency on how it is spent. There is no accountability. They are not held accountable for how it is spent. The oversight that we have done over the past 6 or 7 years shows that the waste associated with the money that is sent to the U.N. is at least 30 percent--at least 30 percent when you do the actual oversight of it.

So we can talk about specifics. We can take a small portion from everywhere. I do not care. Or I will offer another pay-for. But the fact is, we do not get any accountability of the money this country sends to the U.N. today. Go see if you can find it. You cannot. You will not be able to find it. I want to fund Israel. I want to supply them. I also want to make sure our children have a future. It is not hard to find $225 million out of $4 trillion.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me say, first of all, I voted for the bill when it left here with the hope that we could accomplish something. We did accomplish some things. But it came back with $12 billion unpaid for. Because of that, I raise a point of order against the emergency designation provision contained in section 8803(b) of the conference report for H.R. 3230, the Veterans' Access to Care Through Choice, Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 pursuant to section 403(e)(1) of the fiscal year 2010 budget resolution, S. Con. Res. 13.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I will be very quick.

What our colleagues should know is, since 2009, the VA budget has increased 58.7 percent, a 40-percent increase in the number of providers, with a 17-percent increase in the number of veterans using those providers. The problem is not money at the VA. The problem is management, accountability, and culture. So we are going to borrow $12 billion from our children and reward the poor behavior and charge it to our children.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

What we are talking about is an errant CBO score that doesn't fit with reality or the information given to them by the VA.

I object.

Reserving the right to object----

Senator Rubio has been waiting all day to offer a unanimous consent request on a bill he has. I ask unanimous consent that the 2 minutes that Senator Rubio would like to have be available between Senator Enzi and Senator Merkley.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and my amendment No. 3549 be called up.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, we have before us a bill where unfortunately we do not believe in markets. We are told markets will not work, so we have a terrorism risk insurance bill. That means the Federal Government is going to be the insurer of last resort. There have been some improvements over what we have put forward in the past, and I agree with those improvements if in fact we have to do this. I am not convinced we have to do it, but we are going to do it, and I understand that. I think the work of the committee, of which I am a member, has been very good.

But there is one real problem with this bill, and it is about smoke and mirrors, it is about not being honest with the American people. This bill was designed so it would have no score. It was not designed to do the best we can for America should we have a tragedy, and it was not designed to create the flexibility that would be necessary if we do have a tragedy.

Let me outline this for you. The way this bill is set up is that we could have a significant tragedy, God forbid, in this country from a terrorist attack, and the bill will mandate spikes in casualty and property insurance far above what will need to happen because we passed the bill to pass a CBO score. So what could happen is we would have to collect billions of dollars over an 18-month period through premium increases on everybody in the country, not just where we had the problem--everybody in the country--because we have designed a bill that will in fact mandate that or at least could mandate that.

I have been around this place for 10 years. I know exactly what is going to happen if that comes about through this TRIA bill. The first thing that will happen is the Senate and the House will pass an elimination of this requirement. So what will happen is the American taxpayer will get stuck with all this. They all know that. Everybody agrees they designed the bill to meet CBO. So what I put in was an amendment that would give flexibility to the Treasury so we do not, after one tragedy, create another tragedy with markedly elevated casualty and property rates. We still recoup the money, but we do it over a longer period of time, if it is necessary, and we give the Secretary of the Treasury the ability to do that.

My friend from New York says there is a budget point of order that lies against it. It does according to CBO. I agree, it does. But the difference between this and most budget points of order is my amendment will not increase the deficit one penny--not one penny.

I would also note that my colleague from New York has voted to override budget points of order every time they have been offered this year. So it is going to be curious to me to all of a sudden have a budget point of order raised by someone who has voted to override the budget point of order every time it has been offered in the Senate this session, and it goes to why we should not pass this bill without common sense in terms of how we collect the recoupment.

I understand the constraints of CBO, but I also understand common sense. So we are going to play the game on the constraints, and we are ultimately going to pass on--rather than recoup--we are ultimately going to pass it on to the American taxpayer, which hollows out the whole purpose of the bill.

So this has a billion-dollar score, on which we are going to have a point of order, which I am sure I will lose. But when you vote for this bill, know you are not voting for what the bill says it is going to do because it is going to do something completely different than what it says, if we were to have one of these catastrophies.

The political pressure to not have these massive increases in property and casualty insurance--this place will fall, and so will the House, and we will change this, and we will have the score then. We will have the score then, and ultimately your children will pay for the cost of this terrorism risk insurance, not the people who are owning the property today, not the insurance company. We will just kick the can down the road, just as we have on everything else.

It would seem to me that we would want to do something that works along

the parameters of this bill, and we ought to build in flexibility to this bill so that--it may be 10 years that we get on one of these because the bill is divided up to meet the score so it does not score in any one period. So over an 18-month period we could have to recoup it all and people could not tolerate those kinds of rate increases in their businesses or their homes. They would not be able to tolerate it and we would change it. Just as I am asking for us to change it now and be honest with the American people, we are going to change it if that happens.

We will change this, and we will delay the onset of the collection of this recoupment. Everybody knows that will happen. So why not be honest about it and put it in the bill now and waive the budget point of order because it does not change the deficit one penny. It changes when we collect it, but we still collect it against the risk of not collecting it at all.

That is what I ask my colleagues. I do not expect to win the amendment, but it is another confirmation to the American people that we are not about truth, we are not about doing commonsense things; we are about playing games and we are about satisfying the demands of the industry over which this applies.

Nobody knows what could happen in this country in terms of terrorism, but everybody knows I am right about this issue.

All I am saying is: Fess up. Be honest, colleagues. Let's build the flexibility in this so we do not have to address it, and the Treasury Secretary, no matter whether it is a Democrat or Republican administration, can use common sense to guide about how fast this recoupment will come; otherwise, you have not done anything to improve this bill if, in fact, this is not accepted.

I will be leaving here at the end of the year. Hopefully, we never see another terrorism event in this country. But if we do, it will be a sweet irony when you all say: Oops, time out. We are not going to do what we said we were going to do in that bill because the country cannot take it. What you will do is put one tragic event on top of another. You will not do that. So what will happen? You will change this bill. You will get that score. You will call it an emergency. You will do it anyway.

All I am asking is, be honest about what is going to ultimately happen on this should we have an event and it fall within one of these close parameters, based on what we said in the bill, because we are running the bill according to what CBO says, not as to what common sense is.

I look forward to having a vote on this amendment. I understand my likelihood of being successful. But I also understand the lack of honesty in dealing with the American people if we do not accept this amendment.

I yield the floor.

Terrorist Attacks

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

Madam President, I want to spend a few minutes discussing the effect and the premise of the legislation on which we just decided not to move forward.

I have spent 25 years of my life caring for women. There is not a complication of pregnancy I have not handled. I have seen every aspect of it. I have delivered babies the size of my little finger and watched them move their little arms, not yet far enough along to survive. I have cared for women in the midst of lost pregnancies and the tragedy and trauma and the heartbreak. I have cared for women who have had abortions and the complications that has completed and exacerbated in their own lives from psychological to real physical problems. I have actually performed abortions to save women's lives who had severe congenital heart defects and would have died had their pregnancy continued.

But the premise under which this bill was brought forward is an absolute false premise. You see, I come from Oklahoma. David Green and his family come from Oklahoma. They are the owners of Hobby Lobby. They are one of the finest groups of people I have ever met in my life. They are responsible corporate citizens. But everything they have done in their life is guided by their faith and their ethics. Therefore, they are not open on Sunday because they feel their employees have a right to a restful weekend. They pay a very livable wage. They have always had health insurance.

The Supreme Court decision was about religious freedom and whether I, as a private businessperson, am still entitled to that as I carry on commerce in this country.

What has been described--maybe not specifically but negatively--is that Hobby Lobby and the Green family do not appreciate women or their contributions or their rights or their freedoms. Nothing could be further from the truth. They had a very personal objection to four abortifacients--not birth control pills--four medicines, devices that actually kill a living human being. See, what we do not think about very often--and I think about all the time--is that when an egg and a sperm unite, there is created something that has never been created before: a unique human being. The genetic material will be no different at conception than it is when you are 85 years old. It is unique. It has never before been here; it will never again be here.

So based on these deeply held beliefs and ethics--and what I would say is morals--they chose to supply their entire employee network with 16 different methods of birth control. But the four that actually kill a baby that has been formed--they thought it was their religious right to be able to say they should not have to take money out of their pocket to pay for something that goes against their strongly held moral, ethical, and faith beliefs.

So we have had a reaction. It is political in nature. It does not have much to do with the facts. It has a lot to do with darkness, of saying something is so that is not true, and saying it often enough so we can tell people that here are those terrible Republicans and they want to hurt women.

I dedicated 25 years of my life to helping women in every type of tragedy, every type of disease, whether it is cancer or diabetes or hypertension or pregnancy or miscarriages or just the common cold. Before the Senate forced me to stop delivering babies, I was delivering babies that I delivered; in other words, it was the third generation. That is how crazy the Senate ethics rules are.

So the very undercurrent of what we heard could not be further from the truth. What we heard--the implications were that the Green family is somehow this negative corporate monster who wants to take women's rights away--is absolutely untrue.

The other falsehood we hear is that if you do not have health care, you do not have available birth control. We spend $400 million a year on title 19, most of which is in birth control pills that are given out to women who do not have access. It costs $7 a month to buy birth control pills, and most physicians, like myself, who had women who could not either access title 19 or who did not have $7 a month, gave the pills themselves out of their stocks, their samples.

So there is a reality other than what has been painted in the Senate, and I could not sit by and let this hang out, this terrible untruth. I do not know of a family business, I do not know of a business in America that cares more about its employees than Hobby Lobby, and it is manifested through the employee loyalty and also the success of their brand because they really have a team. And you do not have a team if you do not feel as if you are being cared for--that you are not one of the group.

There are a lot of problems in front of this country. But the one described in this last piece of legislation is not one of them. The Green family does not keep anybody from buying abortifacients if they want them. They are not all that expensive. The morning-after pill is over the counter. But to force a person of faith to pay for an action against what they believe is morally wrong. It is far away from the religious liberties our Constitution guarantees.

I know we can get hyped up on emotion, but the emotion we ought to get hyped on is preserving the rights our Founders guaranteed when they started this country. They were based on the same set of beliefs the Green family inculcates into everything they do with Hobby Lobby. It is pretty ironic to me that we have become so post-modern, so smart, so ``for'' what the government can do and mandate that we are willing to destroy the very freedoms that created this country in the first place.

This bill was a cynical attack on truth. I am glad it is not proceeding. It is time to quit wasting the Senate's time on political games and start addressing the very real problems this country has, such as the fact that Social Security disability will run out of money next month; the fact that one-third of those on disability who are not truly disabled are threatening the livelihood of those who truly are; the fact that Medicare, 17 years from now or 16 years from now, will be out of money; the fact that Social Security will be out of money in 18 years; the fact that we are having corporations leave this country in a mass flood because we

have a Tax Code that is not competitive with the rest of the world; the fact that we are wasting $250 billion a year on duplicative programs that do not accomplish the goals which the Congress set out for them. Yet we have no leadership that says we are going to address the very real problems in front of the country. It is not a great record to be proud of.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I thank my colleague from Wyoming for allowing me to jump in for about 5 minutes.

This became an issue as we faced the greatest recession we have ever had and, at the same time, we had GAO looking at how we are spending our money.

For just a little history so everybody will know, when GAO did their first report we had 47 separate job training programs run by nine different agencies, and that year they looked at we spent $18.5 billion. What we found is only two had metrics on them, and we weren't even paying attention to the metrics to use them.

I applaud the work of the HELP Committee, Senator Enzi, Senator Isakson, Senator Alexander, Senator Murray, and Senator Harkin, for bringing the bill to the floor. It is an improvement over what we are doing, but I wish to offer a couple of points I think the American people ought to know. We are not going anywhere far enough, not anywhere close to where we need to go.

The SKILLS Act coming out of the House markedly changed job training in this country. Now, this is a big modification to the SKILLS Act, but

the SKILLS Act actually paid attention to the Government Accountability Office. What they did is consolidate a lot of programs and put real metrics and real competition into job training.

There are two critical flaws in this bill that I think are a mistake--and I know this bill is going to pass, so it is moving the ball down the road. No. 1, there is no metric in the job training program to say: Did somebody get a job in the area that they were trained for?

So it doesn't matter how many people we train. If there is no job and they got no job for what they trained, we have wasted the money. So that is not anywhere in the bill.

The second thing is the vast majority of money in this country that is spent on job training is Job Corps. When we ask behind the scenes why we didn't have major reform to Job Corps, it is because of all of the parochial people they employ. In Oklahoma, it is over 1,000. Most of the Job Corps programs in Oklahoma are highly inefficient and failing to do what we want them to do, and they are not going to be held accountable with this bill.

So these are two really disastrous things that, had they been added, would have made a real difference. And let me say why I can speak to that. When the GAO put out their report on all the job training programs, I had every one of my staffers in Oklahoma go to every job training, State and Federal, in Oklahoma. Let me tell you what we found.

What we found was the Federal programs were totally failing. We were very good at employing people in job training programs with Federal money, but when we looked for the outcome of whether we gave somebody a skill that gave them an ability to have a life, we failed.

Contrast that to Oklahoma's Career Tech system and their own State- funded training programs, where they were 90-percent effective in giving somebody a life skill.

So I am disappointed that the SKILLS Act didn't come over here and get voted on because that was what was in the SKILLS Act and it is really accomplishing the goal.

My colleagues have been great with me in working on this bill to try to attest to and to accommodate my desires to see some changes. But there are these two critical flaws, and it speaks to the lack of courage in our country today that because we have people employed in Job Corps programs, we are not going to really shake that system up and make it do what it needs to do.

I will never forget. I had a town hall meeting in Guthrie, OK, the largest Job Corps training in Oklahoma, and I wrote a report that was highly critical of it. They all came here, and I faced them down and said: Do you really want Federal Government money spent on your salary that doesn't accomplish the goal of giving somebody a life skill? They couldn't answer yes. They had to answer, no, they really didn't want that.

But that is what Job Corps still is in this bill, and that is by far the biggest job training program we have.

So I applaud the changes that we have made, the movements that have gone forward. But when there is no metrics on whether the skill that was trained for got a job, we don't have any idea what we are going to be measuring after this bill goes through.

No. 2, if we have not fundamentally gutted the present Job Corps system and changed it to where it is responsible to actually accomplish a goal and hold them accountable--like we need to be holding the VA accountable--if we don't do that, we haven't really fixed anything.

This bill has no CBO score on it. It is at least $58 billion over the next 6 years--at least. And we are going to vote on a bill again that doesn't have a score.

So the intentions of my colleagues are pure, but I think they are missing two critical provisions if they really want to fix job training. I thank them for their work. I appreciate their accommodation. I know this bill will pass and it is an improvement, but it is not going to fix the fundamental problems.

I yield the floor.

I thank the chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee for working with Senator McCain to get a bill.

I support Senator Sessions and the budget points of order on this bill. I take exception to some of the statements by my colleague from Vermont.

As reported yesterday, if you look at the patient list for many of the primary care doctors in the VA, they are half of what the average practicing physician outside the VA is. When you drill down on those, many of them have patients that have been deceased for years. About 10 to 15 percent of their patient list has never been to the VA, or they came once from a different State or were transferred from somewhere else. What you actually see is the patient load in the private sector is about 2\1/2\ times what the patient load is in the VA.

I have no doubt we need to increase the number of physicians in the VA, but we also need to increase markedly the amount of output that those physicians perform.

The other thing that is important in this bill is the transparency-- which I don't believe has been mentioned--that will actually allow veterans to know the quality outcomes of where they are being treated and the credentials of those who are treating them. Those are important factors for care.

Our veterans deserve the best care. I agree with the chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee that the vast majority of our VA employees are hard-working employees, but there are some who aren't.

Our lack of oversight and the lack of management expertise at the VA has now exploded into issues that are going to continue to be exploded. We hear every day new whistleblowers coming forward on the problems in the VA.

It is not only scheduling; it is a lack of truthfulness in a lot of other areas. It is a lot of inaccuracy in terms of outcome.

I agree with the chairman. This is just the beginning. But if, in fact, somebody puts their life on the line for us, we certainly, at a minimum, ought to make sure that we don't just have words that say we are going to give you the health care if you are an injured returning war veteran, but that we actually give that care, and that it meets the standard of care we want for anybody in our family. This is just the start.

The other thing that I would say, in agreement with Senator Sessions, there are ways to pay for this bill.

On the clinics, we drill down on one clinic--and I am going to go spend just a minute talking about it. It is a clinic that will triple in size, but with an average expected increase in veteran population of 5 percent and visits of less than 7 percent over the next 20 years. So it is going to go from 50,000 to 190,000 square feet.

We are going to spend $188 million for that facility and pay $40 a square foot per year for it on a rate of increase of 4 percent in part of the lease. We can rent the same space in Tulsa at $15 a foot and spend less money than we pay for the engineering cost for this to have a clinic just as good or better.

So the planning and the management of the VA on these clinics is suspect, and I plan on drilling down on every one of those before this bill comes to conference and give our conferees the information based on that. Because we are going to spend emergency money, as the chairman would like to do on this, we ought to make sure there isn't a penny that is wasted.

So we can do it. We can do it better, we can do it for less money, and we can do it in the confines of what we are actually going to see.

The final thing is I would say again to my colleague from Vermont, I appreciate his willingness to compromise on the issues. His heart is dedicated to veterans, and I understand that. Our philosophies are different on how we get there, but his commitment is nonetheless real and felt, and I thank him.

I yield the floor.