Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I have a request for one committee to meet during today's session of the Senate. It has the approval of the Majority and Minority leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committee is authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: Committee on Armed Services The Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, June 24, 2020, at a time to be determined, to conduct a hearing on nominations.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for as much time as I may require.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, the late historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said this: ``Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap.'' The late Samuel Huntington, who was a Harvard professor of U.S. history and politics, wrote, in effect, that most of our politics is about setting great goals for ourselves--we, the American people--and then the struggle we have with the disappointment we feel when we don't reach those high goals, like ``all men are created equal.'' Ben Hooks, who was from Memphis and a well-known citizen of our State and a good friend and once president of the NAACP, used to tell his students at the University of Memphis: Remember that our country, America, is a work in progress. We've come a long way, but we have a long way to go. It is in light of those three comments that I would like to discuss the effort that some people made last night to tear down President Andrew Jackson's statue in Lafayette Square across from the White House. I believe it is always appropriate to review the monuments and the places that we name to see if there is a more appropriate name in the context of today's times. For example, in this Capitol, every State has two statues. From Tennessee, it is Andrew Jackson and John Sevier. Senator Blunt, who is the chairman of our Rules Committee, tells us that, at any given time, some of those statues are in rotation because the State of Mississippi or Tennessee or Oregon or some other State may have decided, instead of those two individuals, we would like to send up another statue. We would like, in the context of today's times, to name somebody else. As we think about statues that are already named for generals in the Confederacy or the Union--a war that was fought a long time ago--it is appropriate, I think, to keep in mind that we have had a lot of wars since then: two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam. We have had a lot of very distinguished generals. We have had courageous Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Maybe in the context of today's times, there is a place for Camp MacArthur or Camp Eisenhower or Alvin C. York, who is a Congressional Medal of Honor winner and hero from Tennessee. It is always appropriate to review the places that are named and the monuments we put up to see if there should be a better name or a better place for a monument in the context of today's times. But what about Andrew Jackson, whose statue is one that the State of Tennessee has sent here, whose statue is of him on a horse outside the White House at Lafayette Square? The similar statue is in Jackson Square in New Orleans. What about Andrew Jackson? Let's make the case for Andrew Jackson. Presidential historians, almost without exception, put him in the top 10 of America's Presidents. They see him as the sophisticated, often subtle political actor that he really was. What they realize--and, unfortunately, what only dedicated students of the American Presidency often realize--is that Jackson was arguably the most important American President between Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln because, much like Lincoln, he preserved the Union. If not for Jackson's devotion to the Union against his own local political interest, the Union might well have fallen apart in 1832 and 1833. Jackson risked everything to keep our Union together instead of siding with South Carolina's U.S. Senator John Calhoun's doctrine of nullification. When a serious conflict of crisis arose, when South Carolina decided that, following Calhoun's doctrine of nullification, it could decide which Federal laws it could follow, it was Jackson who stood up and said: Our Federal Union must be preserved and Jackson who had the political will and the skill to make sure it was preserved. Jackson's decisions as President gave us an additional three decades to form what Lincoln eventually called ``the mystic chords of memory'' in his first inaugural address. Surely--surely that is worth recognition. Andrew Jackson was our first nonaristocratic President. When he was born in 1767, it was not possible or plausible that the young boy, orphaned at 14, could someday rise in an emerging Republic. Jackson wasn't born rich. He wasn't born into privilege. He fought for everything he had, and he rose to our government's highest office through the sheer force of personality and political courage. That is the case for Andrew Jackson. Let us also recognize that Andrew Jackson was not perfect. In fact, he was at the center of the two original sins of this country: slavery and the treatment of Native Americans. But if we are looking for perfection, we are not likely to find it in American history or the history of almost any country or in human nature. The historian Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Jackson and who wrote a biography of Thomas Jefferson, said that when Jefferson wrote the words, ``all men are created equal,'' he was almost certainly writing about all White men. Those were the context of the times for Thomas Jefferson. So what do we do about Jefferson if he was writing that all White men are created equal in the context of those times? What do we do about Jefferson, who--the only slaves that he freed, apparently, were those that he fathered with his slave mistress, Sally Hemings? What do we do about George Washington and Mount Vernon and the slaves that he owned? What do we do about Abraham Lincoln, who some people say was slow to act on emancipation? What about Franklin D. Roosevelt and his internment of American citizens who were Japanese in camps during World War II or, more recently, what do we do about Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which would not be in the context of today's times, if two recent Supreme Court decisions are to be followed, as they will be? Let's not just pick on our Presidents. What are we going to do about the Congress, the Senators, and the Members of the House? They approved the Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson's removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma. The Congress did. And they approved the laws requiring segregation. Congress did. And what about the people who elected the Congress? They approved those Members of Congress who approved of segregation, who approved of the internment of Japanese in camps. What are we going to do about us, the people of the United States? Do we pretend that we didn't exist during that history, when decisions were made that we would not make today or we would not approve of today, some of which would be abhorrent today? Do we try to burn down all the monuments, burn down Mount Vernon, burn down the Jefferson Memorial, Hyde Park, home of Franklin D. Roosevelt? Do we try to erase all of that from our history? That is not what we should do. We should not try to erase our history. We should not try to pretend it doesn't exist. We shouldn't ignore our history. Here is what I think we should do. No. 1, as I said earlier, recognize that it is always appropriate to review the places that we have named or the monuments that we put up--just like the monuments of States in here--to see if there is a more appropriate monument or named place that is appropriate in the context of today's times. Remember, as Ben Hooks said: America is a work in progress. It is always changing, and our monuments or the places we name can change with that. That is an appropriate, healthy exercise to go through. That is No. 1. But, No. 2, with the history that includes things we today abhor, we should try to learn from those things and build a better future. Let me give an example. Each year, I bring onto the floor of the Senate teachers of American history who have been selected to attend the Academy for Teachers of American History that I helped to create when I first came to the Senate. I thought it was important to learn American history so children can grow up knowing what it means to be an American. When they come to the floor, they look for the various desks because the desks of the Senate are what best describe them. They will go to find Daniel Webster's desk, which is still there. They will go to the back over there and find the desk that the three Kennedy brothers used, where they sat. The ones from Tennessee will come here because Howard Baker had my desk and so did Fred Thompson, the desk I now have. They are interested in the desks of Senator McConnell and Senator Schumer because they are the leaders, and they go to Jefferson Davis's desk. Jefferson Davis was a U.S. Senator who had a great deal to do with the building of this Capitol. But he, like many other U.S. Senators in the South, resigned from the Senate and joined the Confederate Army. Jefferson Davis became President of the Confederacy. When I take them to Jefferson Davis's desk, these teachers of American history, this is what I tell them; that there is on that desk what looks like a chop mark. The story that is told is that it was created by a Union soldier who came into this Chamber when the Union soldiers occupied Washington, DC, and began to destroy the desk of a man who was the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, until he was stopped by his commanding officer, who told him: Stop that. We are here to save the Union, not to destroy it. What do we do with Jefferson Davis's desk? I say keep it there. I say to learn from it, to learn from the fact that there was a Civil War; that there was a Confederacy; that Senators left this body; that Union soldiers were here; that one wanted to chop it up and another one would say, his commanding officer: Let's bring a better future. Stop that. We are here not to destroy the Union but to save it. There are lessons in American history. There are lessons that we should learn. The lesson of Ben Hooks: We are a work in progress. We have come a long way. We have a long way to go; the lesson of Samuel Huntington, that most of our politics is about setting high goals for ourselves, that all men are created equal, and then dealing with the disappointment, struggling with the disappointment of not reaching those goals, deciding what to do about it. Do we dishonor Andrew Jackson's effort to keep our country together between Jefferson and Lincoln? Do we dishonor Thomas Jefferson's eloquence? Do we dishonor George Washington's probity in character or Lincoln's courage or FDR's grand leadership during World War II all because they weren't perfect, all because they did things and lived things and said things that today we wouldn't say? I think not. Doing any of this would be a terrible misunderstanding of American history and of human nature. It would be ahistorical. In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln appealed to the better angels of our nature. If there are better angels of our nature, I guess that means there must be worse angels in us as well, not just in Washington and Jefferson and Jackson and Roosevelt and great men or great women but in all of us. There are the better angels, and there are the worst angels. In this country, our goal is to bring out the best in us, which does not mean ignore the worst. We need to be honest about our weaknesses. We need to be proud of our strengths. We need to learn from both to create a better future for the United States of America. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, it is hard to think of much good that has come out of the 3-month experience with COVID-19, but here is one thing: the number of patients who have seen their doctors remotely through the internet, FaceTime, and all of the other remote technologies we have, including the telephone. We call that telehealth. Our Health Committee this morning had a fascinating hearing on telehealth. There was a lot of bipartisan interest from the Senators-- Democrat and Republican Senators. The Senator from Minnesota was the ranking member of the committee today at the request of Senator Murray. My sense at the end of the hearing was that there were a number of things we agreed on. I ask unanimous consent that my opening statement at the hearing today be included in the Record following my remarks. My colleague, the Senator from Tennessee who is presiding today, and I both know Tim Adams, who is the CEO of the Saint Thomas hospital system in Middle Tennessee. He told me on the phone last week that Saint Thomas employs about 800 physicians in its several hospitals. During the month of February, there were 60,000 visits between physicians and patients in the Saint Thomas system. Only 50 of those 60,000 were by telehealth, were remote. But during the 2 months of March and April, Ascension Saint Thomas conducted more than 30,000 telehealth visits. That is 50 to 30,000-- more than 45 percent of all of the visits between patients and doctors during that time. Tim Adams expects that to level off, but there will still be probably 15 to 20 percent of all of Saint Thomas 60,000 visits a month by telehealth. I talked to the CEO of the largest hospital in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and he said that during February, about 5 percent of their visits between doctors and patients were telehealth. He said that was a very high percentage for a hospital. But in March, it was more than half, more than 50 percent. Think about that for just a moment. There were 884 million visits in 2016 between doctors and patients, according to the Centers for Disease Control. If 15 to 20 to 25 percent of those were suddenly by telehealth instead of in-office visits, that would mean hundreds of millions of visits a year would be by telehealth. It is hard for me to imagine that there has been a bigger change in the delivery of healthcare services in recent history or maybe in our country's history than the sudden shift to telehealth in visits between patients and doctors. Telehealth has been around for a long time. Our witnesses testified to that. We had some excellent witnesses. Dr. Rheuban from the University of Virginia; Dr. Kvedar from Harvard, who is the new president of the American Telemedicine Association; Dr. Arora, who is the founder of Project ECHO, which is well known across the country; and Dr. Andrea Willis, who is the chief medical officer of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, which apparently is the first major insurance company to say that it will insure telehealth visits in the same way that it insures other visits. What I recommended following the hearing was that two of the policy changes--which I judge to be the two most important changes in policy that the Federal Government made--be made permanent. The first is that physicians can be reimbursed for a telehealth appointment wherever the patient is, including the patient's home. That would change the originating site rule, as it is called. The second is that Medicare, during COVID-19, has begun to reimburse providers for nearly twice as many types of telehealth services. That rule, those changes, I believe, also should be made permanent. What has happened is that we have had an incredible pilot program on telehealth. We have crammed 10 years of experience into 3 months, and we have a rare opportunity to look at the 3 months of experience and make a decision about what works, what doesn't work, and right the rules of the road for the future. It is not just the Federal Government changing, I think, a total of 31 different policies, all of which we should examine, but States have made some changes too. Those changes involve allowing individuals to cross State lines more easily to get appointments with doctors with whom they need to talk. Then the private sector is beginning to change too. I don't know of other insurance companies that have done what Tennessee Blue Cross Blue Shield did, but I know there will be some who decide on their own to begin to move to cover those services. Senator Braun and Senator Cassidy on our committee brought up the point that we want to watch carefully to see that we are not just adding to the cost of healthcare by telehealth; in fact, we ought to have an opportunity to reduce it. Our goal is always, when delivering healthcare services, to have as an objective a better outcome, a lower cost, and a better patient experience. It may very well be possible that telehealth not only improves the patient experience--we have had very few complaints about the experience of that--and improves the outcomes, but it may also lower costs, which is a major objective of our committee. Last week, 10 days ago, I issued a white paper about the changes I thought we needed to make--Congress needs to make--so that we could be well prepared for the next pandemic after COVID-19, the one we know will surely come. We don't know when, we don't know what the name of the virus will be, but we know it will come, and we need to take a number of steps to be as well prepared for that virus as we can. Whether its accelerating treatments and testing and finding a vaccine or collecting data in a different way or better coordination of Federal officials, all of those things are part of what we need to examine, and we need to do that this year--this year--because our attention spans are short in this country. We move on quickly to the next crisis. While COVID-19 is fresh on our minds, we should do whatever we need to do to get ready for the next crisis. We should do those things this year. Among those things we need to do this year is to make permanent the changes in Federal policy on telehealth that allowed this explosion of doctor and patient meetings by remote visits. People have been trying to think of ways to do this for a long time. Unfortunately, it took a pandemic to cause it to happen. Now, while we can see the result, make sure we don't have unintended consequences that are unfortunate. While we are doing that, we need to make those changes. So I recommend to my colleagues, the testimony from our excellent witnesses this morning. There were 884 million doctor-patient visits in 2016 in the United States, and very few of them were by telehealth. In the future, the estimates are there could be as many as 20, 25, 30 percent of all of them, hundreds of millions of doctor-patient visits, by telehealth. That most likely is the largest change in the delivery of medical services that our country has ever seen

Mr. ALEXANDER. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, there is a reason why 800 conservation organizations, every U.S. Secretary of Interior from Babbitt to Zinke, and the President of the United States, President Trump, support the legislation we are going to be voting on at about noon tomorrow, and that is because, in my view and in the view of many others, it is the most important piece of conservation legislation this country will have passed in at least half a century. And why is that? It is because it takes nearly $14 billion--up to $14 billion--over the next 5 years from energy exploration on our public lands and spends it to cut in half the deferred maintenance backlog in our national parks, our national forests, and our national refuges, and also to rebuild Indian schools. In addition to that, it does something that Congress has been trying to do for 60 years, since the midsixties. It permanently funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which supplies to both the Federal Government and States money to create national parks and routes to fishing access and to other places in the country that we all treasure. In the middle of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the people of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina looked around and said: Why are all the national parks out West? Well, it was because the Federal Government owned a lot of the land out West and carved a bunch of it up to make national parks--Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and other places that we know. So they looked around the United States in the east and said: Where can we have a national park? And they settled on the Great Smoky Mountains. So they created a park that is half in Tennessee and half in North Carolina. It wasn't easy to do in the midst of the Great Depression. Governor Austin Peay of Tennessee brought the legislature--mostly Democrats--to Republican East Tennessee twice by train to see this 500,000 acres of land. The State of Tennessee couldn't come up with enough money to buy it, and neither could North Carolina. Then John D. Rockefeller, Jr., offered $5 million in honor of his mother, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, if anybody would match it. So the State legislatures in both States--Tennessee and North Carolina--appropriated $2 million each, and then the remaining million was raised by public subscription--schoolchildren, teachers. People all over the region raised the money, and that $10 million bought 500,000 acres that today is visited by 12 million Americans every year. It is by far the most visited national park, attracting two, three--four times as many visitors as many of our most popular western parks because it is located in the east and because it has the highest mountains in the east. But here is the problem with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park: The 12 million visitors a year are about to use it up. Too many of the 800-plus miles of trails are worn, so when you walk on them, you stumble. Too many of the roads are potholed. Too many of the roofs leak. There is one campground that I can see from my house almost on Chilhowee Mountain at the edge of the park called the Look Rock Campground that has been closed for 5 or 6 years because the sewage system won't work--5,000 families want to go up there and can't, and the sewage system won't work. Obviously these aren't just Tennessee families; they are from all over the country. We have 6 or 7 million people living in Tennessee. We have 14 million visitors a year. So what this bill does is it says to the Great Smoky Mountains: All right. You have $224 million of deferred maintenance--of potholes, of worn trails, of sewage systems, of leaky roofs--$224 million. Your operating budget is only $20 million a year. This deferred maintenance is 10 to 12 times the amount of your operating budget. It will never get done. It will never get done without a bill like this or this bill, which will say to the Smokies and to the National Mall and to the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center and to the Grand Canyon and to all 419 of our national parks: We are going to cut half of the $12 billion deferred maintenance bill--we are going to cut half of that out over the next 5 years, and we are going to take money from energy exploration on public lands and use some of it for that. Not just our national parks, President Trump agreed--in fact, I talked to him about it on his trip to Tennessee when he came to visit after the tornadoes. I said: Mr. President, the sponsors of our bill, Democrats and Republicans, would like to add to the bill our other public lands. We would like to add the national forests. The Cherokee National Forest, for example, is in Tennessee and North Carolina. It is even bigger than the Smokies. It has 3 million visitors a year. It also has about $27 million of deferred maintenance. It will never be able to do that without this bill or something like it. I said: How about our wildlife refuges, Mr. President? We have the Tennessee Wildlife Refuge. It has $8 million in deferred maintenance. It won't be able to get the boat ramps right so people can go fishing over by Kentucky Lake. The President said: I will support it. Put it in if the Democrats and Republicans cosponsoring the bill want it in there. Because he did, it is in there. It is in there just like the House of Representatives brought the bill out of its committee--it had those public lands in there. We didn't when it came out of our committee. It had the Land and Water Conservation Fund in the House, just as we did when it came out. Let's talk about the Land and Water Conservation Fund for a minute. That was supposed to be $900 million a year from oil and gas revenues that are spent by the Federal Government and by State governments to buy treasured lands. The Senator from Montana, Senator Daines, says that in his State, 80 percent of the fishing accesses have been purchased by the Land and Water Conservation Fund. In my State, the Governor opened a new park, Rocky Fork, a magnificent place in Upper East Tennessee, much of it purchased by Land and Water Conservation Fund money--$221 million into Tennessee since 1964. But that is not as much as it was supposed to be because when this was enacted by Congress in 1964, at the recommendation of the Rockefeller Commission--the first outdoor recreation review commission--it was supposed to be $900 million a year. Environmental burden--that is the oil and gas drilling; environmental benefit--that is the purchase of conservation land. The money gets credited over in the Treasury Department, but it doesn't get spent every year. This changes that. This is not just an idea of the Lawrence Rockefeller Commission in the sixties. In 1985 and 1986, President Reagan appointed the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors. I chaired that Commission, and the No. 1 recommendation of the Commission was permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. So since the midsixties, good people in this body and good people outside of this body have been working to make the Land and Water Conservation Fund permanent and haven't been able to do that, but now we can. Now let's talk about the money for a minute. Senator Portman, a former director of the budget office, points out that we are spending real money to reduce an unpaid debt. This isn't like just adding to the budget, which we do sometimes without paying for it. This is real money. If we don't produce enough oil this year-- and last year we produced about 11.6 billion by selling energy produced on our public lands--if we don't produce the money, we don't spend it. Some have objected that it is mandatory and not paid for. That is a difference of opinion. The Office of Management and Budget has approved it, and the President's budget has approved it. I think it is paid for because it is real money to reduce unpaid debt. For example, we take some of the money from energy exploration, and if you live in Wyoming, you get 50 percent of it right off the top. If you live in Alaska, you get 90 percent right off the top. If you live in Louisiana, you get 27\1/2\ percent, or in any other coastal State, or you might get 37\1/2\ percent from another area. All that money is mandatory in the sense that it has to be paid to those States every year. We are just taking some of that kind of money out of that pot, after the others have been paid, and spending it for this purpose. This would not have happened if it weren't for an unusual group of Senators who worked on this for a long time: Senators Burr and Cantwell; Senators Gardner, Manchin, and Daines on the Land and Water Conservation Fund; and then on the parks, Senator Warner and Senator Portman, who went to work early. Secretary Zinke came to see me in Tennessee 3 years ago and asked me to work on the parks bill, and I was delighted to find, when Senators King and Heinrich and I began working on it, that there were a number of us with the same idea. As I mentioned, President Trump has been behind it from the beginning and behind the expansion of it, and he is the first President that has allowed us to use money from energy exploration for this purpose, and he should deserve credit for that. Senator McConnell deserves credit. He has a lot that he could put on the floor, and he put this bill on the floor for 2 weeks. Only the majority leader can do that, and he did it. I am grateful to Senator Schumer and the Democratic leadership for creating an environment in which we could pass this bill in a bipartisan way. It is said that if you want to pass a big piece of legislation in the U.S. Senate, you need three things. One is that it is an important objective that is good for the country. One is good relationships among the sponsoring Senators. And one is a superior staff. We have had all three of those, and I would like to place into the Record--or I think I will read them--the names of some of the staff members who have been so helpful to us: Curtis Swager and Jennifer Loraine of Senator Gardner's office; Jason Thielman, Joshua Sizemore, and Holly Hinojosa of Senator Daines' office; Lance West, David Brooks, and Renae Black of Senator Manchin's office; Pam Thiessen and Sarah Peery of Senator Portman's office; Elizabeth Falcone and Micah Barbour of Senator Warner's office; David Cleary, Lindsay Garcia, Allison Martin, and Anna Newton of my staff; Chad Metzler, Morgan Cashwell, and Kate Durost of Senator King's office; Amit Ronen of Senator Cantwell's office; Maya Hermann and Virgilio Barrera of Senator Heinrich's office. We thank them for their work. And then there are the advocates. Not many bills have more than 800 groups in its support. It is quite a coalition when you get President Trump and virtually all of the conservation, sportsmen, angler, and environmental groups behind the same bill. We owe all of them thanks for that. Sally Jewell, the former Secretary of the Interior, has been at the forefront of much of that. We hope that once this passes the Senate tomorrow with a big vote, they will carry it across the finish line in the House of Representatives. The Federal Government is not always the most popular entity in the United States, but sometimes we are. When our military keeps our country safe, we are grateful for that. When the National Institutes of Health creates medical miracles, we are grateful for that. We are grateful when the Federal Government creates 419 properties--from the National Mall to Pearl Harbor, to the Grand Canyon, to the Great Smokies--for us to enjoy and preserve. England has its history, Italy has its art, and Egypt has its pyramids. But the United States of America has the great American outdoors. It is an essential part of the American character, and the Great American Outdoors Act is an essential part of being good stewards of what Ken Burns has called our best idea, so that the next generation can enjoy the outdoors as this generation has been privileged to do I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, in the middle of the Great Depression, the people in Tennessee and North Carolina looked around and said: Why are all the national parks out West? So Tennessee contributed $2 million, and North Carolina contributed $2 million, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. said: I will give $5 million in honor of my mother if you can match it. The children of North Carolina and Tennessee in schools raised another million dollars in community efforts, and the Great Smokey Mountain National Park was created and given to the people of the United States. So the people of Tennessee and North Carolina gave that to the United States and, today, more than 12 million Americans visit it. There are a lot more people who visit it than live in Tennessee and North Carolina, and part of the deal was that there would be no entrance fee. The one thing that we wanted or our grandparents wanted at the time was that the American people be good stewards of what we gave to the American people. Today, thanks to the leadership of Senators Warner, Portman, King, Manchin, Heinrich, Daines, and Gardner on the Land and Water Conservation Fund, that has happened. I am proud to be a part of it. This is the most significant piece of conservation legislation in at least a half century, and it represents a recognition by the American people that we can be good stewards of what Ken Burns has called ``our greatest idea,'' our national parks and our remaining public lands.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, yesterday, our Senate Education Committee held a hearing on going back to school safely--a subject on the minds of tens of millions of American families--since today two- thirds of married parents both work outside the home, and they have children. The children are ready to go back to school, and the parents are even more ready for them to go back to school. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record following my remarks this morning my opening statement from that hearing The commissioner of education from Tennessee--and I know that the Presiding Officer, while he is a proud Senator from Florida, also knows a little bit about Tennessee, having lived there--was one of our witnesses there. She said: We want children to do things. We want them to be safe, but we want them to thrive. That is the sense I got from all of the witnesses yesterday, which includes the Denver school superintendent; a national representative of education, Dr. Benjamin; and it included the commissioner of education for the State of Nebraska, who is also the head of the Chief State School Officers. Anyone who looks at the children in America today knows they need to go back to school. They have been out for 5 to 6 months now. This is a time when we are especially concerned in our country, and our attention is focused on racial injustice, on problems that minority families and minority children have. The single best thing we could do to help minority children and minority families is to help them go back to school safely in August and September. Any teacher can tell you and most parents can tell you that emotional, intellectual, and physical damage to children has been caused by being out of school since March, and that will continue to be the case until they reopen in August. Articles have talked about 50 percent learning deficits. We have that every summer when children are away from school. Teachers in the fall know they have to catch back up. It has also shown us the limits, as well as the benefits, of remote learning. My daughter has three young sons, two of them in school. She said they have had it about up to here with remote learning, even though they are in a very good public school system. There are limits as to what you can learn remotely. Teachers aren't trained to teach remotely. In many parts of our country, broadband isn't sufficient to allow students to learn remotely. Teachers haven't made lesson plans to teach remotely, so they have to change the whole way they go about teaching. So much of the children being home affects homeschooling. Homeschooling is a good thing for parents who are able to do that, but homeschooling is hard. It takes a lot of time. If you are in a family, as two-thirds of married families are, where you are both working outside the home, how are you going to do the homeschooling appropriately so that your child doesn't get far behind? For the benefit of the children, for the benefit of the parents, and especially for the benefit of low-income children--many of whom get one or two meals a day at school--we need to go back to school as a country. When we do--when 100,000 public schools and 36,000 private schools, 55 million children go back to school and 20 million students go back to the college--that will be the surest step toward regaining the rhythm of American life that we can have. That would show we are actually going back toward normal. It will be another year before we get to normal. I think we all understand that. We are going at warp speed to find a new vaccine. We are building manufacturing plants for vaccines before we even know that they work. We have never done that before. In fact, there has probably never been a time in our history where we had more scientific brainpower in this world devoted toward a specific target than we do right now at trying to increase the number of fast, rapid, accurate diagnostic tests, the number of treatments to reduce the effects of COVID-19, and a vaccine for COVID-19. We probably have never had so many scientists in the world working on a single project like that. We will probably have good results, but it will take a while. All of the plans that are being made--and we heard about them yesterday--will take a whole year. In the next semester, we will have more tests, we will have more treatments, we will have more contact tracers, and there should be, hopefully, the beginning of vaccines, but our plan should be for a year. How do you make sure the schools are safe? The formula is pretty simple, although it is not as simple in its application. The things that we know work are, No. 1, staying apart some distance; No. 2, washing your hands; and No. 3, wearing a mask. In colleges, that will be easy because colleges have more space. In fact, they are big wasters of space. They usually don't teach in the morning or in the evening or on Saturday or in the summer, and colleges can spread out and create smaller classes. There are more lectures. You can do lectures more easily. You can have a culture of mask-wearing--as President Mitch Daniels of Purdue University testified the week before--at colleges. I think colleges will have an easier time than schools. In addition to that, we know that, unfortunately, COVID-19 affects older people. In Tennessee, for example, 5 percent of the cases of COVID-19 are in nursing homes, and nearly 40 percent of the deaths are in nursing homes. The same is true in other States. COVID-19 affects younger people a lot less. Dr. Fauci has warned us not to be cavalier about that, but the truth is, younger people seem not to be as affected by COVID-19. We have a population that is not as affected. We have a population that is in a smaller, controlled setting. You can shut a school if someone gets infected and keep other schools open. We do that with the flu. We have children, who are more subject to being told what to do. So we have a setting where we should be able to create communities-- there are 100,000 public schools, as I said--little communities that are among the safest in our country. On the other hand, little children may have a difficult time wearing masks. They aren't the best at hygiene. Children go home every day; they may come back and forth bringing germs with them. We have those basics that I talked about--plus, testing. What we know about testing is that we have the capacity to do about 10 million tests a month this month, according to Admiral Giroir, the Assistant Secretary of Health. He says we will have a 40 to 50 million test capacity by the time we go back to school in August, September. That is four to five times as many as we have today. What is going on now is that in Florida and in Tennessee--every State is making its plan for the tests that it needs and sending it to the admiral. They are working on it together. If the State has needs the State can't deal with, the Federal Government helps with that. In our second month of that kind of relationship, that seems to be working pretty well. I know that in Tennessee, which is 11th among all the States in terms of testing per capita, the Governor's motto is, if in doubt, get a test. You can go to the local public health department and get one in 5 minutes. It takes 2, 3 days to get the result, but there are no delays. Anybody who wants it can get it. That has created an environment where everybody feels more comfortable. If they are worried about COVID-19, if they don't want to go home and see their older relatives or their spouse, if they wonder if they are sick, they can go get a test. So tests should be available for the schools. We will have to be careful and recognize that the way schools open will vary by community. There are many counties in Nebraska, the commissioner of Nebraska said yesterday, where there is not a single case of COVID-19. So on his dial of green to red in terms of school opening, they would be very green and wouldn't have to do much in response to the COVID-19 in terms of changing the way they operate. On the other hand, in Omaha, NE, it might be different. In Nashville, it might be different. In New York City or Phoenix, it might be different. The Denver school superintendent talked about perhaps having children come for 2 or 3 days a week on alternate days in order to have smaller classes and about having extra time for disabled children or children from homes where they have less support, more vulnerable children needing more help in our schools. My hope would be that we can find ways for children to come back to as normal a school day as possible. It will take some flexibility. Some of those that will need to be flexible are the States, the Federal Government, and the unions with their rules and regulations. Colleges have a lot of flexibility in rearranging class schedules, class sizes, and class times. Schools have a lot less because they have State rules and union rules that restrict what they can do. They need some flexibility so they can reschedule. Then there is the question of money. Just as we say we want children to be safe, we want them to learn, there are two arguments on behalf of more money from the Federal Government. One would be Federal spending to help them learn. Generally, that is the responsibility of State and local governments. They spend about 90 percent of that. In our first COVID-19 bill, the Federal Government was generous with schools, recognizing that we shut down the economy, and then that shut down the schools, and that caused a lot of expensive problems. The Federal Government supplied $23 billion, and Tennessee got about $260 million for just K-12 schools. There was another slug of money for colleges, and then there was $150 billion for States. As the Presiding Officer knows, a big part of the State budget--30 to 40 percent--goes to education. So my thinking is that a part of that $150 billion--$23 billion we have already allocated for K-12 and the $25 billion that we allocated to testing, which could include contact tracers, some of which could be a part of schools--should help pay for keeping schools safe enough to reopen. If there is more money, we need to be open to that, I think, here in the Federal Government, but not before we see whether it is really needed. The Tennessee commissioner--and I put a lot of stock in her thinking. Because Tennessee is a conservative State, it doesn't spend a lot of money, has no debt, a big rainy day fund, low taxes--a lot like Florida. She estimates that it will cost about $1.5 million per school district, with the average school district being about $3,500, in her words, to provide the things the school districts need to reopen safely. Those are things like more sanitizing equipment, barriers that separate children in the lunchroom or maybe even in class, extra money for busing because when you create a lot of new classes, a lot of new schedules, you may have to change the bus schedules, and that will cost more than most things. So it is about $1.5 million. I will be very interested to see how much of the money we have already appropriated or how much of the money that we have appropriated that is very inflexible and might be made more flexible for Governors to use just for opening schools safely and whether we need to add any more. I think it is in our interest to make sure that principals and school boards know that they will have sufficient funds to open 100,000 public schools safely, because school administrators, with all respect, sometimes are a little bit conservative and reluctant to take risks. If there is the excuse that ``We don't have enough money to open safely,'' they may just say ``Let's keep up with remote learning.'' I think we are about up to here with remote learning in most places in the country. It is especially not good for the youngest children and for children who are from disadvantaged families or low-income families. I think it is important to get the country going. It is good for the children and it is good for the parents to make sure that schools have sufficient funds to reopen safely. It was a very good hearing yesterday. I thank the witnesses for their participation. It was all remote, even for all of the Senators. We will have another hearing next week on telehealth. We have had to cram 10 years of experience into 3 months to learn about telehealth, telework, and telelearning. While this has been a very painful way to learn a lesson, we should take advantage of these lessons because, as we will find out in our hearing next week on telehealth, we have gone from almost none of it to seeing that 40 or 50 percent of the physician-patient visits are done remotely. If that were to turn out to be, over the long term, 15 or 20 percent, that would produce a massive opportunity for change in the way we deliver medical services in the country. The one other thing I would mention is that I heard about liability yesterday. Colleges and the schools I have talked to want to be included in whatever the Federal Government does to make sure that teachers and administrators and schools and universities are appropriately protected from lawsuits as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic. As long as they meet a standard of care that is reasonable, they should not have to worry about being liable if a child who is 8 years old forgets to wear a mask, coughs on another child, and that child goes home and makes Grandma sick and Grandma sues the school. Teachers are always worried about liability. The teachers' unions often use liability insurance as one of the major incentives to join the unions. Many States, like my State, provide tort liability for teachers. I think we need to make sure that here in the Senate, as we consider any additional legislation that has to do with COVID-19, we include colleges and we include schools. We received a letter from all of the colleges from the American Council on Education specifically asking us to do that. Otherwise, we might discourage schools and colleges from opening. If we discourage schools from opening, that leaves children sometimes home alone, sometimes home without being educated, some of them being left with remote learning that doesn't help and developing a learning gap that will leave them at a disadvantage for the rest of their lives. As we look at all of the issues we have to deal with, I hope we include appropriate steps to put limits on liability, at least as a result of the COVID-19 experience

Mr. ALEXANDER. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I want to congratulate my colleague from Louisiana, one of the most diligent Members of the U.S. Senate. He complimented the occupant of the Chair, Senator Gardner from Colorado, for doing a great job for his State. I think Senator Cassidy did a good job advocating for his State. But he left a little bit of perspective out on what he offered, and I would like to add some perspective. As he was speaking, I was thinking about the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This occurred in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, when everyone was worried about a job and everyone was worried about our country, the people of North Carolina and Tennessee appropriated through their State legislatures $2 million each. Then John D. Rockefeller, Jr., heard about the effort, and he said: ``I will give $5 million if the States will match it.'' So you had four--two from North Carolina, two from Tennessee--and then they set out to raise another $1 million. They raised that from schoolchildren. They collected pennies and dimes and quarters in the middle of the Depression to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. At the time they did that, what did the people of Tennessee and North Carolina do? They gave it to the people of the United States of America. They gave it to all of us. They didn't charge for it. In fact, they said: ``The only way we will give it to you is if you will not put an interest fee on it.'' They didn't say: ``Only Tennesseans, only North Carolinians can come.'' They didn't say: ``We don't want anybody from Louisiana coming to the national park and the Great Smokies or from Colorado or from any other State.'' They gave it to the people of this country. And what has happened? There are now 14 million people a year who come to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We only have 6 or 7 million in Tennessee, so we have a lot of people. We have a lot of interlopers, don't we? We have a lot of people who don't live where our park is, who use it. We are happy about that. We are proud of it. We are glad we gave it to the country, and we are glad Ken Burns includes it among one of the great treasures that he calls America's Best Idea. It is a park for the country given by the people of Tennessee and North Carolina and the schoolchildren, and we didn't object to everybody enjoying it. I believe I voted every single time that the coastal States have been decimated by a hurricane. The Senator from Louisiana talked about $685 billion. I didn't say, as a Senator from Tennessee: ``You know, we don't have a coast. We don't have an ocean. It wasn't us. Hurricanes don't come here. Don't charge me.'' We gladly paid our share of the bill because we are part of one country. We are part of one country. That was four people, right? Six hundred and eighty-five billion dollars for people who were hurt, not just paid for by people who live on the coast but by people who live in Colorado and Tennessee and Iowa and places where there is not a coast-- because we are one country. So the idea that we should only favor those items that come just from our State is not a very good argument for coastal resiliency because, if the Senator from Louisiana wants to bring that bill up based on the argument he made, why should anybody who doesn't live on a coast vote for it? I voted for it in committee because I thought it was an important issue, even though we don't have a coast. He is a very skillful advocate, a very diligent Senator. He is doing a good job of talking for his State, but he is missing the point. His other point is, let's add it to this bill. Well, the Senate floor is littered with bills that never made it through here because they got loaded down with too many good ideas. People say: ``Well, there is a train that is likely to get to the station, let's load it up.'' And what happens? It just slows down, and after a while, it stops, and nothing happens. Because people have said: ``If I don't get what I want on the train, I am not for anything.'' That is why the Land and Water Conservation Fund has never been permanently funded. This was an idea Congress passed in 1964, 60 years ago. In 1985 and 1986, I was chairman of President Reagan's Commission on America's Outdoors. It looked at what we should do in the great American outdoors. We didn't say the great Tennessee outdoors or the great Louisiana outdoors or the great Colorado outdoors. We looked at the great American outdoors. We looked at the great American outdoors and said: ``What can we do so our children and grandchildren can enjoy what we have enjoyed?'' The people of Wyoming aren't the only ones who enjoy Yellowstone--or the people of Montana. Three or four million people a year go to a western park like that. They travel from all over the country to go there. When I look at the Great Smokies in football season, when we play LSU, those Tigers arrive on Tuesday. Well, the game is not until Saturday. Why do they come? Because they want to go to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We don't put up a big sign and say: ``Sorry, you didn't pay for it. We gave it to the country. It is not for you.'' They like it, and we like to have them there. So the point, though, was that sometimes you have a good idea, and if you add one more good idea to a piece of legislation, it sinks the whole ship. That would be the case here. The Senator from Louisiana is talking about a very big idea: What do we do about revenue sharing from oil and gas revenues and coastal resiliency and climate change? He didn't say too much about climate change, but if his sea level is rising, it is probably because of climate change, so maybe we ought to think about that too. So if we are going to bring up this whole issue of coastal resiliency, my guess is that some Senators will say: ``All right, let's talk about a moratorium on oil and gas drilling. Let's talk about a fairer share.'' Ninety percent of the drilling in Alaska goes to Alaska. Fifty percent of the drilling in Wyoming goes to Wyoming. Twenty-seven percent of the drilling 3 miles off the coast of Louisiana goes to Louisiana. If it is in the Federal lands beyond 3 miles, 37\1/2\ percent is split up among four States. That is the area where the oil comes from, but that land belongs to all 46 States. So we could have a pretty good debate about that, about the moratorium. Then someone would say: ``What about the oceans? The oceans deserve some of the care that comes from drilling in the oceans, drilling in the water, so let's talk about the oceans.'' If we got into a moratorium on oil and gas drilling, adding the oceans, changing revenue sharing, there is no more difficult issue in the U.S. Senate than to adjust and say: ``Well, Louisiana gets 27 percent, maybe it ought to go to 40. Alaska gets 90, maybe Wyoming should go up to 90.'' There is no more difficult issue than that to deal with. It sunk a lot of bills to bring that up. I remember the member of the congregation who was disappointed because the preacher only preached a verse from the Gospel of Luke. Well, you can't preach the whole Bible in one sermon, and we can't pass every good idea in one bill. In fact, we have two bills together here that are, by themselves, about enough to stop the train before it gets to the station. Everybody here knows that it has been since 1964 that people have tried to pass the Land and Water Conservation Fund funding, even though the idea--money from environmental burden, that is drilling offshore-- for an environmental benefit--that is to let States and the Federal Government buy land that is treasured, as Senator Daines from Montana says, 80 percent of the access good fishing in Montana comes with Land and Water Conservation Fund money. So that bill has been out there a long time. How long have we tried to fix the national parks and the boat ramps and the wildlife refuges and the roads and the national forests and the Indian schools, which are in shambles in many cases? Decades. We have been going and using up our parks and our public lands, and we haven't been maintaining them. Again, you don't just get to go to the public land in Kansas, if you are from Kansas, or to the Great Smokies, if you are from Tennessee or North Carolina, or to Yellowstone, if you are from Wyoming or Montana-- all of us go to that, and we have let them run down. That is about people. That is about people. Here we are in this big COVID-19 crisis. What does everyone want to do today more than anything else? Get outdoors. Get out of the house. Here you are, cooped up with teenagers or Grandma or all of you, just a few people sitting there for 3 months. You want a little space. The people who go to these open spaces are the people who live on the coast. They live in the big cities. They want a little variety in their lives, and we are glad for them to have it. When they go, they don't want a bathroom that doesn't work or a visitors center that is in shambles. They don't want a pothole in the road or a trail that is worn down. They would like to have a place they could enjoy, that is in good shape, and they can go home. I think about the campground on Chilhowee Mountain just outside the Smokies. There might be a few campers from Louisiana who like to come up there whenever we play LSU. I don't know, but probably there are. Well, it has been closed for 2 or 3 years because the sewage system doesn't work. That is at least 500 families who don't get to have the opportunity to do that. I am sympathetic to the Senator from Louisiana. I think he is one of our most able Senators. He is making a very forceful argument for a real problem: coastal resiliency. But I don't buy this idea that just because this bill doesn't fix that problem we should jeopardize this bill. Think about it. We have the President of the United States, who personally is interested in this bill. His Secretary of the Interior came down to Tennessee to see me 2\1/2\ years ago. It is the first administration that said: ``We are going to look at the money we get from energy exploration, and after we give some to Louisiana and after we give some to Wyoming and after we give some to Alaska and the other coastal States, we are going to take half of what is left for 5 years, and we are going to use it to fix all of those things that need to be fixed in our national treasures.'' I said: ``OK, if the President is going to support it and his Office of Management and Budget is going to be the first Office of Management and Budget to allow money to be spent in that way, I am going to get behind it.'' Then I came up here and fell into some pretty good company; the Senator from Colorado, the Senator from Montana, Senator Warner from Virginia, and Senator Portman from Ohio were already working on the subject. Senator King of Maine, Senator Heinrich, Senator Cantwell were involved in the land and water. It became absolutely clear that, if we didn't put these two bills together, none of them--neither of them-- would pass. If they didn't go together, neither of them would pass. We consulted with all of the people in the Senate who were working on this. There wasn't complete agreement. There were a number of Senators who had other amendments that they would have liked to have, Senators whom I greatly respect and whose amendments I would probably support by the one. But as we looked at it and as we consulted with the more than 800 groups--the sportsmen, the anglers, the environmental groups--we all agreed that our only chance to get both bills was to put them together and say to the Senate: ``Let's vote on it; let's send it to the House to see if they will vote on it; and after 60 years of trying, maybe we can get a good result.'' I think that is why we got 80 votes. The first time, this came up on a procedural vote, and 79 the second time it came up. A number of Senators have gone home tonight because this is a late- night vote. The reason we are having a late-night vote is because those who agree with Senator Cassidy have insisted on taking the maximum amount of time. That is their right to do, so we are here. If we succeed tonight, then we will have three votes on Monday, all of which are very important votes. So we are close to getting this train to the station. Senator Cassidy has made an eloquent appeal to add an idea that is good, but an idea that is big and complex and deserves its own day in the Sun, just as it came to our Energy Committee, of which I sit and he sits. I voted for it at that time, but we just can't add it to this bill and get this train to the station. That is the fact of the matter. As much as I respect him and his ideas, I hope that he and others who agree with him would say: ``Look, this is our one chance to get this kind of funding to make our national parks and all the rest of our public lands--the boat ramps, the trails, the roads, the sewage--our one chance to begin to fix the maintenance over a 5-year period of time instead of 10, 15, 25 years, or never. It is our one chance to do that.'' I am sure it is our one chance to get the Land and Water Conservation Fund permanently funded, as Congress agreed to do in 1964 and as President Reagan's Commission on America's Outdoors, which I chaired in 1985 and 1986, recommended as its No. 1 priority. Let's not try to preach the whole Bible in one sermon. We have two good big ideas. Together, they make the most important piece of conservation legislation in a half century. You say: ``Well, Senators are always exaggerating.'' I don't try to exaggerate too much, and I defy anyone to point me another bill that does more. I know we have been working on land and water since 1964. That is more than a half century. I know that this deferred maintenance has been building up for a long, long time. It is the single biggest problem the national parks and our public lands have. I think 95 percent of the American people would wonder why we can't pass it in 5 minutes. The reason is, there are lots of good ideas here, and if you load them all up in the same wheelbarrow or on the same train, the wheelbarrow collapses, and the train doesn't get to the station. That is where we are. That is where we are. I hope that, with respect to the good ideas advocated tonight by the Senator from Louisiana--I know he will keep at it. I am on the same committee he is. I have voted for his idea before. I think it deserves its day in the Sun, and I will help him do that, but I would like to ask him to help us finish the job here on the most important piece of conservation legislation. I want him to know that those LSU Tigers are always welcome in the Great Smoky Mountains, even if we bought it and paid for it and gave it to the whole country. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 12:01 a.m., Friday, June 12; further, that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; finally, that upon the conclusion of morning business, the Senate resume consideration of Calendar No. 75, H.R. 1957.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, while he is on the floor, I congratulate the Senator from West Virginia for his leadership. Sometimes he says too many cooks spoil the pot or whatever the phrase is. There could be too many cooks but not in this case. Senator Manchin, because of his senior leadership on the Energy Committee and on this bill, has been really a bulwark in bringing it to this point. I thank him for that. He has been excellent about including all sorts of us in the bill. We have an unusual assortment of U.S. Senators, outside sportsmen groups, conservation groups, the President of the United States, and all of the former Secretaries of the Department of the Interior from Babbitt to Zinke, someone said, going alphabetically--we all support this bill that came up last night with 80 different votes. Among those who deserve a lot of credit is another Member of the U.S. Senate who is also on the floor right now, Mr. Warner from Virginia. He became interested in this bill as soon as anyone. He may have been the first one to put his toe in the water. He and Senator Portman from Ohio, they formed a very strong team to bring this bill forward. Since then, Senators Daines, Gardner, Heinrich, and King all have joined in, and then Senators Manchin and Gardner, especially, have added the Land and Water Conservation Fund. I thank all of them for their leadership. I will speak just briefly about what we call the Great American Outdoors bill, and I think it helps first to say what we are talking about. We are talking about the Chilhowee campground on Chilhowee Mountain at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. It was closed for 2 or 3 years. Why? Because the sewage system didn't work. So 500 families who normally would use that campground in the summer--go up there and have this majestic view of the highest mountains in the Eastern United States--didn't have that possibility. The Great Smoky Mountains has about 12 million visitors a year. That is three or four times as many as Yellowstone does or any of the western parks because it is in the East. It has $224 million of deferred maintenance like that campground. Its annual budget is $20 million a year. So you don't have to have gone too far in mathematics in the Maryville City School system to understand that it will probably take 15, 20, 25 years, or never to be able to get rid of the deferred maintenance in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, our most visited national park. Now, that is a massive disappointment to people who consider our national parks as our greatest treasures, to go there and find a campground closed, a bathroom that doesn't work, a bridge that is closed, a road with a pothole, a trail that is worn out, and visitor centers that are dilapidated, as they are in some of our centers around the country. This is what we are talking about. This is what we are talking about. We are talking about deferred maintenance, things that are broken and don't work and interfere with the ability of the American people to go outdoors. Of all the times in our recent history when people would like to go outdoors, it would be right now, just to get out of the house and get away. Of all the times when we need some extra jobs, it would be right now, when we have 14 percent of the people in Tennessee out of work. Some of them could go to work on the roads and the bridges and the trails and the potholes and the sewage systems and the other things that need to be fixed, if we had the money. So that is the first thing this bill is about. It is about the deferred maintenance in the national parks--but not just in the national parks. With President Trump's enthusiastic support, we have added to the bill, as it has made its way through the Senate, other public lands; for example, the Fish and Wildlife Service lands, the U.S. Forest Service lands, the Bureau of Land Management lands, and the Bureau of Indian Education schools. There are lots of Indian schools that are rundown and need to be fixed. All of those are part of this bill, which is why, among the 800 organizations--800 outside groups--who have called all of us and asked us to vote last night, among the most enthusiastic are the fishermen and the sportsmen--the Ducks Unlimited, headquartered in Memphis. They are really for this bill because we want to use the public lands. We want them preserved. Fishermen want access to their streams. Tourists want to be able to drive to the top of Newfound Gap in the Great Smoky Mountains or to see the Grand Canyon or to visit Pearl Harbor or to walk on the National Mall. All of these are part of our deferred maintenance problem. So there are two parts to the bill. The first is the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Now, this is a fund that was created in 1964. It was a pretty good idea, I have always thought. You take an environmental burden--drilling offshore for oil and gas--and you create an environmental benefit--take some of the money and use it to buy treasured lands. Senator Daines of Montana points out that 80 percent of the access to good fishing in Montana comes with funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. So for 64 years we have had some money come through Congress for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, but--the problem is--not all of the money that Congress intended, because in 1964 Congress said, Set aside a certain amount of money, about $900 million, for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, put it in the Treasury, and then spend it for this purpose: half to the States for their land acquisition and half to the Federal Government. But Congress didn't ever appropriate all that money. We took that back up in 1985 and 1986 with President Reagan's Commission on Americans Outdoors, which I chaired and Gil Grosvenor from the National Geographic was the cochairman. The No. 1 recommendation for President Reagan's Commission on Americans Outdoors was to permanently fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This bill does that. We permanently authorized it earlier in this Congress. This year we will permanently fund it. The second part is to restore our parks and our public lands. In that case, as I just described, whether it is the national parks or the fishing or the access roads or the bridges or other rundown and worn- out trails or buildings or sewage systems, at the rate we are going, it will take about 15 to 20 years, maybe longer--maybe never--to finish all that deferred maintenance, but, with this bill, we should reduce that substantially. The idea is to take about up to $14 billion over 5 years and use it to pay for deferred maintenance. Now, how do we pay for that? Well, we pay for it with real money. We pay for it with earnings from energy exploration on Federal lands. Now, this is not a new concept. As I mentioned, the Land and Water Conservation Fund put that into law in 1964: environmental burden, environmental benefit. It is also not a new concept for all the coastal States in our country because we take money--I think it is 27 percent of the money we get from drilling just off the coastal States--and we give it to those States. We also take some money from drilling in what we call an area beyond the 3-mile limit for southern States and give them 37 percent of that money. We also take some money from drilling, say, in Wyoming and give Wyoming 50 percent of that money--or in Alaska, 90 percent of that money. The difference is, we do all of that before we give the rest to the Treasury. So the idea that we are spending real money from energy drilling in a new and different way is stretching it a little bit because we already spend a lot of money that we earn from energy exploration on Federal lands by giving it to States before we give the rest of it to the Treasury. The difference here is, after we give the rest of it to the Treasury, we are going to take half of that for 5 years and use it for deferred maintenance. Senator Portman, who used to be Director of the Office of Management and Budget, calls it using real money to reduce an unpaid debt. Now, it is absolutely true that the way the Congressional Budget Office looks at that, it is not offset. But there is a difference of opinion here. President Trump looks at it in a different way. He thinks it is real money for deferred maintenance. The Office of Management and Budget disagrees with the Congressional Budget Office. They approve this spending. The President's budget includes this spending. We are spending, as I said earlier, money that we already--the same kind of money we spend that we give to States before we give it to the Federal Government. So, if I am walking down Broadway in Maryville, TN, where I am from, and I am trying to say to them ``Where does this come from?'' we would say that we use real money. We use money from energy exploration on Federal lands. We are going to use it for 5 years--in the case of everything but the Land and Water Conservation Fund for 5 years. If we don't have the money, we don't spend it. If we do have the money, we do spend it. As a result of that, we are going to be able to fix those broken bridges, those sewage systems, those dilapidated visitor centers, those roads with potholes, those trails that are worn out. Instead of maybe never fixing them or doing them at a rate of 20 or 25 years, we will be able to cut in half that deferred maintenance backlog and reduce substantially the time it takes to make these public lands the kinds of lands that all of us expect when we go to visit. So I am delighted to be in full support of this. I thank Senator Warner, Senator Portman, and all the others who have worked so hard on it. I hope that the vote we had last night, with 80 Senators of both parties in support of moving ahead with the bill, signals that, as we go through the other procedural efforts this week, we will have significant bipartisan support, send it to the House where an identical bill is being introduced, and send it to the President. President Trump is fully in support of it. In fact, without him and his Office of Management and Budget, we wouldn't have a chance to do it. More than 2\1/2\ years ago, Secretary Zinke, a big fellow from Montana who was the Interior Secretary, came down to Tennessee and asked me if I would get involved in this because it was so important. He said that he had talked to Mick Mulvaney, who was then in the Office of Management and Budget, and to the President and they wanted it done. So I got involved. I found myself in pretty good company with Senator Warner and a lot of other folks, and here we are today. So I hope we have great success with this bill. I know the people of Tennessee are looking forward to it. I would be remiss if I didn't point out--I pointed out that, with the Smokies, our backlog is about $224 million, and our annual budget is about $20 million, so we will never get the backlog fixed if we don't pass a bill like this or this bill. The same applies to other public lands in our State. The Cherokee National Forest, which is the largest piece of public land in Tennessee, will get help with their $27 million maintenance backlog to make sure their access roads and trails are kept open for 3 million visitors each year. That is about as many visitors as many of our most popular western parks have. The Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge will get help with their $8.4 million maintenance backlog to make sure the hunters and fishers can safely use the boat ramps and the boat docks I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, U.S. Senator Tim Scott, who is an African-American Republican from South Carolina, once told our Bible study that police in his hometown had stopped him several times for being a ``Black man in the wrong place'' even though, at the time, he was serving as chairman of the Charleston City Council. During these last few days, I have been thinking a lot about what Tim Scott told us, and I wondered how many White Americans know things like that happen--White Americans like me. I wondered how I would feel if I were stopped for being a White man in the wrong place in my hometown, especially if most of the people in the town were Black. Would I feel hurt? Scared? Disillusioned? Angry? Weary? Disappointed? Intimidated? Probably all of those things. One result of George Floyd's killing is that Black Americans are telling more stories like Tim Scott's. A professor of religious studies in Nashville wrote in The Tennessean that he carries a licensed firearm with him when he goes for a run. A columnist remembers that, as a 6- year-old, a White woman outside a Dallas gas station restroom said to him: Now, you don't belong here. Well-educated Black businessmen count the times they have been profiled because of their race. One of my friends in Memphis, who is now vice president of Memphis's largest hospital, told me that when he went to Memphis State in the 1960s, it was clear to him that almost everyone thought that he didn't belong there. During my lifetime, I have seen profound changes in racial attitudes. In 1958, when I enrolled at Vanderbilt University, I had no Black classmates. African Americans couldn't sit at lunch counters in Nashville. Blacks driving across Tennessee couldn't stay in most motels; they couldn't eat at most restaurants; they couldn't ride at the front of most public buses. Then, in 1962, in the spring, the Vanderbilt University Board of Trustees changed its policy and admitted Black undergraduate students. In August of 1963, I remember standing in the back of a huge crowd late that month. I was an intern in the U.S. Department of Justice, and I heard a booming voice--which was Dr. Martin Luther King's voice--say: ``I have a dream.'' In 1968, I was a Senate aide here, and I remember being in the room, which is today the Republican leader's office, where Senators were around a big table, and Senator Everett Dirksen and then-President Lyndon Johnson were writing the Civil Rights bill. During the 1980s, I saw Tennessee adopt a Martin Luther King holiday and swear in its first Black supreme court justice. In the 1980s, the University of Tennessee hired its first two Black vice presidents, and it hired its first Black basketball coach who, as a teenager in Alcoa, once sat in the ``colored'' section at UT football games. I saw the Voting Rights Act help to elect thousands of African- American public officials, including President Barack Obama and Senator Tim Scott. Last week, I asked Senator Scott if I could tell the story that he told us privately in the Bible study. He said: Sure. It happened again just last month. So despite a half century of profound change, an African-American U.S. Senator is stopped again by police for being a Black man in the wrong place in his hometown. So what do we do now? Bringing those who killed George Floyd to justice will help. Dealing firmly with looters who hijack peaceful protests will help. Some new laws and government actions will help, such as criminal justice reform and permanent funding for historically Black colleges that became law in this Congress. It would also help to open schools and colleges in August and to open them safely because a good education is the surest ticket to a better future for minority students, and those students will suffer more from schools being closed. Benjamin Hooks, the former NAACP president from Memphis--he was the national president of the NAACP; he lived in Memphis. He taught students this. Dr. Hooks said: America is a work in progress. We have come a long way, but we have a long way to go. That long way to go, I would say, will not be as easy as passing laws. It will take changing behavior. One way to do that could be last week's peaceful protest organized by Nashville teenagers, which was a textbook example of First Amendment citizenship, and it hopefully will encourage more victims of racism to tell their stories and more White Americans to adjust our attitudes. I am grateful that Tim Scott gave me permission to tell his story. Perhaps a good first step to changing attitudes toward racial discrimination would be for each of us who is White to ask ourselves this question: How would I feel if police in my hometown repeatedly stopped me for being a White man or a White woman in the wrong place, especially if most of the other people in the town were Black? I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I have 12 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs The Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Energy and Natural Resources The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing on nominations. Committee on Energy and Natural Resources The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 10:15 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Finance The Committee on Finance is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 2:30 p.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on the Judiciary The Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Veterans' Affairs The Committee on Veterans' Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 3 p.m., to conduct a hearing. Subcommittee on Airland The Subcommittee on Airland of the Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 11 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Subcommittee on Cybersecurity The Subcommittee on Cybersecurity of the Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 5:30 p.m., to conduct a hearing. Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities The Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities of the Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 9:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Subcommittee on Personnel The Subcommittee on Personnel of the Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 2 p.m., to conduct a hearing. Subcommittee on Seapower The Subcommittee on Seapower of the Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, at 3:30 p.m., to conduct a hearing. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, if I may switch gears to another subject, briefly--on Monday, the Senate will be casting the most important vote on conservation legislation, outdoors legislation, that we have had in 50 years. That is quite a statement to make because we do lots of legislation in the U.S. Senate. I am not exaggerating when I say that. This is a piece of legislation that will do more for our public Federal lands--our national parks, our fish and wildlife lands, our Bureau of Reclamation Lands, the lands that hunters and fishermen use--than any piece of legislation we have passed in at least 60 years. In addition, it will create permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which has been a goal of Congress since it was passed first in 1964 and reaffirmed by Reagan's Commission on American Outdoors, which I chaired in 1985 and 1986. Finally, we are getting around to doing both of those things. This piece of legislation that I am describing has the strong support of President Trump. In fact, it couldn't happen without President Trump because the Office of Management and Budget has to approve the method of funding we are using. They have approved it, and it is in the President's budget. It has the support of 59 cosponsors in this body-- Democrats and Republicans--who are working together on it in a remarkable way. People say that we are divided. Well, we are in lots of ways, but in other ways we are not. Ask Senators Burr, Cantwell, Daines, Gardner, Heinrich, King, Manchin, Portman, and Warner. They are all in the middle of this. They will all take credit for it, and I will give them credit for it. But everyone recognizes it takes all of us. Why are we all in the middle of it? We have more than 800 sportsmen and outdoors groups who have endorsed this bill--more than 800. You tell me the last time you saw President Trump, 800 outdoors environmental groups, and 59 U.S. Senators on both sides of the aisle in favor of a piece of legislation that has a policy of what I believe is the most important piece of outdoors legislation in a half century. Here is what we are talking about. We are talking about leaky roofs. We are talking about access roads with potholes. We are talking about trails that are worn out so you slip and fall down when you go to hike. We are talking about sewage systems that are broken, shutting down whole campgrounds like the Chilhowee Mountain Campground, which was shut for 2 years. Five hundred families usually use it every summer and can't go because the sewage system is shut down. We are talking about dilapidated visitors centers, from Washington, DC, to Pearl Harbor. We are talking about the Mall in Washington, DC. We are talking about our national treasures. We are talking about where we like to go. One of the organizations supporting this--or a group of them-- represents 55 million fishermen and hunters. They would like to have roads in order to get to the fishing holes. They would like not to break the axles on their tires along the way. Families would like to be able to go to Pearl Harbor and see a good visitors' center, and they would like to be able to camp in the Smoky Mountains and find that it is not shut down because the bathrooms don't work. That is what we are talking about here. This isn't exotic stuff, but it is what creates an environment for us to use this great American outdoors that we all love. Now, briefly, exactly how does it do that? Well, one part simply says that we are going to take the 419 national park properties--the national forests, the National Wildlife Refuges, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Indian Education--that is the Indian schools--and we are going to take the deferred maintenance, which is all of those things I talked about that are broken, and over the next 5 years, we are going to pay for half of it. We have about $12 billion in deferred maintenance, and over the next 5 years, we will reduce it to half of that. In the Great Smoky Mountains, for example, which is next to where I live, we have $235 million worth of deferred maintenance, and the park has a $20 million-a-year budget. Now, how long do you think it is going to take, with a $20 million annual budget, to deal with $230 million worth of deferred maintenance? It is never going to happen. It is never going to happen without this piece of legislation or something like it. That is the first part. President Trump, to his credit, said to go ahead and put in the bill the national forests, the National Wildlife Refuges, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Indian Education. We have a lot of Indian schools in this country that are broken down and need to be fixed. He said to put that in there. There are also a lot of Tribal nations and a lot of hunters and fishermen who appreciate that support, which is why we have 800 different outdoor groups that are supporting it. Then there is a second part of the bill--the smaller part--which is the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It is a very simple idea that was recommended by President Johnson's Rockefeller division in 1964. It said this: Let's set aside a certain amount of money every year--$900 million. Half will go to the States, and half will go to the Federal Government and buy land that ought to be protected. It might be a city park or it might be an inholding in a national park. It could be either of those things. This has been going on all that time. Yet what the agreement was in 1964 was that we would get the money from offshore drilling in order to pay for it. We would create an environmental burden--that is, allow offshore drilling--and we would use it for an environmental benefit, which is the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That made a lot of sense. So, every year, Congress has appropriated a certain amount of money for that, but the idea was that the amount would be certain. It would be $900 million every year, and that has never happened. In 1985 and 1986, President Reagan appointed a commission to look at the American outdoors. I was the chairman of it. The principal recommendation was to make the Land and Water Conservation Fund permanent and have permanent funding. So, for 60 years, Presidents and Congresses have been trying to do this, but it hasn't gotten done. Monday is the day to get it done. My hope is that all Members of the U.S. Senate will be back here for votes on Monday. Some of us have been a little delinquent in our attendance on the Monday votes, but we need 60 votes on Monday to advance the bill. Then we will need 60 votes a couple of more times to pass the bill. Then it can go to the House of Representatives where an identical bill has been introduced. To me, it would seem that a bill like this, at a time like this, would be something we would all welcome and want to support. There is nothing any of us wants to do more than to get outside of our homes and get in the fresh air, and these lands are where we go. Some of them are city parks, and some of them are big parks, like Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Great Smokies. Yet they are our treasures, and they are run down. They are run down. The bathrooms leak. The sewage systems have closed camp grounds. In some cases, the visitors' centers are embarrassing. The roads have potholes, and the access roads aren't built for the fishermen. This is a chance for us to take care of that. I look forward to the vote on cloture on Monday. I hope we get a big vote and send a strong signal to the American people that we in Congress have heard them and that, even in a time of crisis like this, we can work together and do important work. There is one more aspect to it. This is an infrastructure bill, and infrastructure means lots of jobs. There are various numbers that have been thrown around--40,000, 100,000--but anytime you spend $14 billion over 5 years on projects that are ready to go in locations all over the country, especially in rural areas, it is going to help a country that has such a high unemployment rate. This is the most important conservation and outdoors legislation in 50 years. In addition to that, it is an infrastructure bill. That sounds like a pretty good vote for Monday. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record after my speech my opening statement from the hearing this morning on Going Back to College Safely as well as the letter from the American Council on Education. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator from Alaska for her eloquent remarks, and I am glad I was here to have a chance to listen to them, both on equal rights, really, for all Americans. It is not possible for us to speak on any subject today without recognizing what is going on in the country. A couple of comments that come to my mind as I think what happened as a result of the incident with George Floyd in Minneapolis were, first, the comment of the leader of the peaceful protest in Nashville. There were more than 1,000 there. She said, the next day, that she was disappointed by the rioters and looters because they dishonored the memory of George Floyd and dishonored the peaceful protest against racial discrimination. I thought she said that well and expressed the feeling of most Tennesseans. The other comment I thought about was that of our colleague Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is one of three African-American Members of the U.S. Senate. He told us a couple of years ago in a private Bible study--and I asked him later if I could mention it--that he was stopped 7 times--an African-American man--in his hometown, Charleston, SC, for being a Black man in the wrong place, even while he was the vice mayor of his hometown. I asked him about that again this week. He said: Yes, it happened again last month. I think most of us don't know that. We don't think about that--those of us who aren't African American, aren't Black. To think about that, I think, helps us begin the process of understanding the feelings that are going on in the country right now, most of which can't be solved by laws. They will have to be changed by attitudes.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to make comments on two other subjects. The first is about a subject that is concerning about 70, 75 million American families; that is, going back to college and going back to school. The question is on the minds of many Americans: Will we be going back to college? Will our children be going back to school? We finished a hearing today--the Presiding Officer was present; the Senator from Alaska was present--on going back to college safely. The question is not whether we are going back to college in the United States of America; the question is how to go back safely. We all understand that when 70, 75 million students go back to college and go back to school, that is the surest sign that American life is regaining its rhythm--not just for the students themselves but, especially with the children, for their parents, most of whom work outside the home. Today's subject was about college. We had excellent witnesses. We had Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University. He was introduced by the Senator from Indiana. We had the president of Brown University, Christina Paxson. We had Logan Hampton, who was president of a small historically Black college in Jackson, TN, Lane College. And we had the President of American Public Health Association, Dr. Benjamin. They talked with us about the various strategies and concerns that existed. I will, in a few minutes, ask consent to put my opening statement in the Record, but if I can summarize it, it would be this. Most of our 6,000 public colleges and universities--some public, some private, some church schools--will be open in August for in-person students but not all of them. The University of California State system has said so far that it expects only to offer online courses. But at Purdue, for example--an institution of 55,000 students--President Daniels has decided, with the approval of his board, and President Paxson of Brown--a different kind of institution in the Northeast, different from Purdue--they both decided it is their obligation to open up and to create a safe environment for the students to come back. There are several reasons for this. There is some health risk in coming back. Of course, wise leadership can address that. But I think, as all of us have looked at our colleges, wise leadership can make colleges among the safest communities to live and work in America over the next year because colleges have certain advantages. In the first place, most of the campus community is young. While we can't be cavalier about the effect of COVID-19 on young people, as Dr. Fauci has warned us, the fact is that COVID-19 seems to hurt the young much less. The second reason it would be easier to go back to college is that there is a lot of space in colleges that isn't used. Colleges are the most notorious wasters of space in our society. It is rare that a class is taught in the early morning or late evening or on Saturdays or in the summers. There is plenty of time and plenty of space to spread out on most college campuses. As we learn more and more about COVID-19, it looks like there are three things we really need to do: Keep 6 feet apart, wash our hands, and wear a mask. Do those three things, and we can probably go back to school, back to work, out to eat, and do most of the things we would like to do. At a college, as President Daniels says, he intends to develop a culture of masks. Vanderbilt University is going to require a mask to be worn in all indoor situations. Then they are taking a number of other steps. Concerts and parties and large gatherings are out. Flu shots and grab-and-go meals are in. There will be systematic testing, and testing will be done in different ways. The president of Brown would like to test every student, she said in an article in the New York Times a few weeks ago. The president of Purdue said: Well, maybe systematic testing. There will be different strategies for testing, but the goal of testing is two things. One is containing the disease; that is, identifying the sick and the exposed so that they can be quarantined so the rest of us don't have to be, and the other is to build confidence. I know that when I took a test last week after I was exposed to COVID-19, I went home for 2 weeks of self-isolation, as the attending physician said I should do. That should have been it, but I went to my local public health department and took a test, which turned out to be negative, for peace of mind. It gave me more confidence to go back home and be with my family. The anticipation is that there will be plenty of testing. Admiral Giroir, the Assistant Secretary of Public Health, has told our committee, we are, in the United States, doing about 10 million tests a month now. States are submitting to the Federal Government a plan each month about their testing needs. The Federal Government is helping fill in any gaps. Over the next 2, 3 months, the number of tests will go from about 10 million a month to 40 or 50 million tests a month. That is a lot of tests. We are already testing more than any country in the world. My guess is that colleges and universities--even though there are 6,000 of them, 127 different institutions in Tennessee--if they will be in touch with their Governor and be a part of the State testing plan, they can have adequate tests, not only to contain the disease and isolate those who should be isolated but to give peace of mind to other students and faculty and members of the community who come onboard. Finally, we talked a little bit about the role of the Federal Government. We have a classic discussion about that here. Some want to say Washington should do it; some want to say the State should do it. Generally, our friends on the Democratic side trust Washington, DC; generally, we on the Republican side trust the States. But there is a role for both. The Federal Government, through the Centers for Disease Control, can provide advice. The Federal Government, as it is doing through the Shark Tank, as we call it, at the National Institutes of Health, can accelerate the number of rapid tests that are available at a low cost for campuses. The Federal Government can provide additional funding for campuses, as we did in the CARES Act. Those are some of the things we can do from here. But the things we ought not to try to do from here are to order California to open its campuses if California doesn't want to or to tell Purdue and Notre Dame and Brown and the University of Tennessee and Vanderbilt that they cannot open their campuses if they do want to and think they can do it safely. We should not be trying to tell each of those campuses exactly how many tests they have, what kind of tests they have, any more than we try to tell them what the faculty ought to be paid or what student admissions policies ought to be or what the curriculum ought to be. While the Federal Government needs to create an umbrella in which individual campuses can go back to school safely, we need to be careful about telling everybody exactly what to do. We had a very big event here 4, 5 years ago when we fixed No Child Left Behind. Everybody wanted it fixed--Democrats, Republicans, labor unions, Governors, teachers. Why? Because after a while, everybody got tired of Washington, DC, telling 100,000 public schools exactly what to do, what teachers to hire, what curriculum to have--all of these things. The same is true with our colleges. Our system of colleges and universities is the best in the world. Everyone concedes that. It has not gotten there by Washington ordering what it should do, and Washington shouldn't order what it should do about this disease. It should advise; it should help; it can help send money. But the autonomy of each campus ought to be respected. One other thing about the colleges and universities have asked for from us is liability protection. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record following my remarks a letter from the American Council on Education, with a number of things in it they ask of Congress. This is the umbrella organization for hiring education, and it includes liability protection.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Next week in our committee we will take a look at going back to school safely, K-12. That is a lot more families--20 million college students, 75 million children in K-12. And in every one of those families, in every one of those homes, I can tell you those families are worried about whether those children can go back to school and whether they can go safely. I believe they can, and all across the country, Governors, classroom teachers, mayors, principals are working, just as we heard today from the college presidents, to make sure they go back safely.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I have 6 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs The Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, June 4, 2020, at 11 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Environment and Public Works The Committee on Environment and Public Works is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, June 4, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Foreign Relations The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, June 4, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing nominations. Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions The Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, June 4, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, June 4, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on the Judiciary The Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, June 4, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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