Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, as a fellow Commodore, I would like to congratulate the Vanderbilt University baseball team on winning the College World Series and bringing home Vanderbilt's first men's national championship. Tim Corbin, Vanderbilt's outstanding coach who has been named National Coach of the Year by Collegiate Baseball, is to be commended for his exceptional leadership and determination throughout the entire season. This was a hard-fought win, and I am so proud of the perseverance and tenacity of Coach Corbin and these young men. Vanderbilt is a very special university, one that produces student- athletes of exceptional character, integrity, and pride in themselves and their school. It is a privilege to be a home-State alumnus of a university that continues to embrace these values while also encouraging its students to excel in both academics and athletics. I am filled with pride today for my alma mater, and I wish the baseball team and all of Vanderbilt University the best. This achievement would not have been possible without the skill, determination and teamwork of the following outstanding student- athletes: Tyler Beede, Ben Bowden, Walker Buehler, Tyler Campbell, Ro Coleman, Vince Conde, Will Cooper, Jason Delay, Karl Ellison, Tyler Ferguson, Carson Fulmer, Tyler Green, Chris Harvey, Ryan Johnson, John Kilichowski, Aubrey McCarty, Brian Miller, Jared Miller, Penn Murfee, John Norwood, Drake Parker, T.J. Pecorano, Adam Ravenelle, Bryan Reynolds, Steven Rice, Nolan Rogers, Jordan Sheffield, Kyle Smith, Luke Stephenson, Hayden Stone, Dansby Swanson, Xavier Turner, Zander Wiel, and Rhett Wiseman. Go Dores!

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I recently spoke to Senate interns regarding the Financial Aid Simplification and Transparency Act. I ask unanimous consent that my full speech be printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President. I believe it is correct that Senator Corker and I, before morning business begins, have a few minutes to reflect on Senator Baker.

Mr. ALEXANDER. That is correct?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask consent that before morning business begin that Senator Corker and I be permitted to reflect on Senator Baker. Mr. President, I ask consent that we have a few minutes to speak about Senator Baker before morning business begins.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President. I appreciate the courtesy of the Senator from Illinois.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank Senator McConnell from Kentucky for his eloquent remarks. One other thing I said at the funeral was that Senator Baker had an eye for talent. In 1969, when I was a young aide in the Nixon White House, Senator Baker came to me and said: ``You might want to get to know that smart young legislative assistant for Senator Marlow Cook.'' That young legislative assistant was Mitch McConnell. So I did get to know him. I thank Senator McConnell for coming to the funeral. I thank Senator Reid, our majority leader, for being there as well. They were there at the front of that small church in Huntsville, TN. The Vice President came. He sat there, met everybody, showed his respect for both former Senator Baker and his wife, former Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker. We Tennesseans appreciated that courtesy by the Vice President, the majority leader, and the minority leader very much. There were a number of others there. Our Governor was there; Senator Corker and I, of course, were there; Senator Fred Thompson; majority leader Bill Frist, whom Senator Baker had mentored; Senator Pete Domenici, Senator Bill Brock, Senator Elizabeth Dole, and Senator Bennett Johnston were also there; as well as Senator Jack Danforth, who married Howard and Nancy; and our former Governors, Winfield Dunn and Don Sundquist. It was a small church, but along with former Vice President Al Gore and the current Vice President and the majority leader, as well as the minority leader, there was real respect for the former majority leader of the Senate. I will not try to repeat what I said at the funeral, and it was a privilege for me to be asked by the family to speak, but I did want to make two comments briefly, one personal and one about the Senate. The personal one that I said at the funeral was that I had tried to follow the rule in Lamar Alexander's ``Little Plaid Book'' that when invited to speak at a funeral, remember to mention the deceased more often than yourself and to talk more about Howard Baker than my relationship with him, but that was hard to do. I waited until the end of my remarks to try to do that. No one had more influence on my life over the last half century than Howard Baker. I came here with him in 1967 as his only legislative assistant. That is how many legislative assistants Senators had then. They dealt mainly with one another, not through staff members. I came back in 1977 when suddenly he was elected Republican leader on his third try by one vote, and I worked in the office that is now the Republican leader's office for 3 months helping him find a permanent chief of staff until I went back to Tennessee. Throughout my entire public life and private life, no one has had more effect on me by virtue of his effort to encourage me--as well as many other younger people who were working their way up in a variety of ways--and as an example for how to do things. My advice to younger people who want to know how to become involved in politics is to find someone whom you respect and admire, volunteer to go to work for them and do anything legal they ask you to do and learn from them, both the good and the bad. I had the great privilege of working with the best. To give one small example of how closely intertwined our lives have become, I had the same office he had in the Dirksen Office Building. I had the same phone number he had in the Dirksen Office Building. If you open the drawer of this desk, you will find scratched in the drawer the names Baker, Thompson, and my name. I have the same desk on this floor. As far as the Senate, just one story. A remarkably effective presentation at the funeral was made by the Reverend Martha Anne Fairchild, who for 20 years has been the minister of the small Presbyterian church in Huntsville. She told a story about lightbulbs and Senator Baker. He was on the Session, which is the governing body of the church. He was an elder, and he insisted on coming to the meetings. She said that at one of the meetings of the Session the elders, who represent the maybe 70 members of the church, fell into a discussion about new lightbulbs. It was pretty contentious, and eventually they resolved it because Senator Baker insisted that they discuss it all the way through to the end. She talked with him later, and he said: ``Well, I could have pulled out my checkbook and written a check for the new lightbulbs, but I thought it was more important that the elders have a full and long discussion so they all could be comfortable with the decision they made.'' That story about lightbulbs is how Howard Baker saw the U.S. Senate-- as a forum for extended discussion where you have the patience to allow everyone to pretty well have their say in the hopes that you come to a conclusion that most of us are comfortable with and therefore the country is comfortable with it. He understood that you only govern a complex country such as ours by consensus. And whether it was lightbulbs or an 9-week debate on the Panama Canal during which there were nearly 200 contentious amendments and reservations and arguments, you have those discussion all the way through to the end. It is said that these days are much more contentious than the days of Howard Baker. There are some things that are different today that make that sort of discussion more difficult, but we shouldn't kid ourselves--those weren't easy days either. Those were the days when Vietnam veterans came home with Americans spitting on them. Those were the days of Watergate. Those were the days of Social Security going bankrupt and a 9-week contentious debate on the Panama Canal. Those were the days of the Equal Rights Amendment. Those were difficult days too. Senator Baker and Senator Byrd on the Democratic side were able, generally speaking, to allow the Senate to take up those big issues and have an extended discussion all the way through to the end and come to a result. Most of us in this body have the same principles. Those principles all belong to what we call the American character. They include such principles as equal opportunity, liberty, and E pluribus unum. And most of our conflicts, the late Samuel Huntington used to say, are about resolving conflicts among those principles. For example, if we are talking about immigration, we have a conflict between rule of law and equal opportunity, so how do we put those together and how do we come to a conclusion? Howard Baker saw the way to do that as bringing to the floor a subject, hopefully with bipartisan support, and talking it all the way through to the end until most Senators are comfortable with the decision. His aid in that was, as Senator McConnell said, being an eloquent listener. That is why he was admired by Members of both parties. In one poll in the 1980s, he was considered to be the most admired Senator by Democrats and by Republicans. That is why Dan Quayle said: There is Howard Baker ``and then there's the rest of us Senators.'' So I think the memory of Howard Baker, his lesson for us, is that-- without assigning any blame to the Republican side or the Democratic side--we don't need a change of rules to make the Senate function, we need a change of behavior. Howard Baker's behavior is a very good example, whether it was the Panama Canal, whether it was fixing Social Security, whether it was President Reagan's tax cuts, or whether it was resolving whether how to buy new lightbulbs for the First Presbyterian Church of Huntsville, TN. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the remarks of Martha Anne Fairchild, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Huntsville, TN, as well as two other documents, one by Arthur B. Culvahouse, Jr., who was Senator Baker's legislative assistant and President Reagan's counsel. According to Culvahouse, Howard Baker told him that if the President did not truly know about the diversion of Iranian arms sales proceeds to the Contras, he was to help him--if he did not truly know. The other is an article by Keel Hunt from the Tennessean about Senator Baker, and finally the funeral order of worship from the Baker ceremony.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senate for this time, and I yield the floor for my colleague from Tennessee.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, the Senator from Texas is on his way to the floor to talk about Meriam Ibrahim. He has been regularly joined by other Senators, including Senators Ayotte, Rubio, Inhofe, Shaheen, and Coons and many others who share my deep concern. Hundreds of Tennesseans have written and called my office about this situation. I am outraged by this blatant attack on religious freedom, and I join my colleagues in demanding that the President and the State Department act immediately to help Ms. Ibrahim. Meriam found herself in this situation because she was born to a Muslim father and an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian mother. Meriam's father abandoned the family when Meriam was 6 years old, so she was raised as a Christian. Meriam later married Daniel, an American citizen, who is also a Christian. The Sudanese Government considers Meriam a Muslim, even though she is a devout Christian. When Meriam was ordered to renounce her faith, she refused. For that crime, the Sudanese Government condemned her to death. She was convicted and sentenced to receive 100 lashes and then be hanged. To make matters worse, she was pregnant with her daughter when this happened. Her son is less than 2 years old and was forced to live in a women's prison outside Khartoum, where they were held until Monday. Monday we learned Meriam was to be released, but that was a celebration that was short-lived because yesterday she and her family were detained at the airport. President Obama and the State Department should immediately demand that the Sudanese Government follow their own court's orders and release Meriam and her family. The harassment and targeting of this family must stop immediately. The State Department should be prepared to act quickly to help them leave Sudan as soon as possible. Occasionally we wonder if words spoken on this floor matter, but in this case I believe they have. This is an outrageous incident that has seared the conscience of Americans and people all over the world. I know in Tennessee many families care about it. I wish to thank Senator Cruz as well as Senators Ayotte and Rubio and Inhofe and Shaheen and Coons--Senators on both sides of the aisle--who have used this forum, this tribunal, to talk about the case of Meriam Ibrahim and her plight. It is our hope that the attention, the spotlight placed on this matter will help her be released and that our administration will continue its efforts to register our strong concern. I am here to express the feelings of hundreds of Tennesseans but also to congratulate Senator Cruz and the other Senators on both sides of the aisle who have done such an effective job of letting the world know about Meriam Ibrahim and her plight. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, for the next several hours we will be moving to a bill that the Senator from Washington, Mrs. Murray, and the Senator from Georgia, Mr. Isakson, have had the principal role in fashioning. They will have a chance to talk about that. In just a few minutes the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Senator Harkin, will proceed with the bill. But before that happens, I wish to take 3 or 4 minutes to talk about the importance of what is happening here. In 1998 Congress passed a sort of ``GI bill'' for workers. The idea was to do what is at the top of every Governor's agenda in every State right now: How can we help more Americans get the job skills to fit the jobs? When I was home in Granger County last weekend, the concern of Tennesseans was that it is too hard to find a job; it is too hard to keep a house; what can I do to get a job? This legislation we are dealing with today, for the first time since 2003, reauthorizes $9.5 billion in funds that will be spent through local workforce boards, through community colleges, and through State governments to help individuals in North Dakota, in Washington, in Tennessee, in Georgia get the job skills to find a job. This bill will make it easier for them for them to achieve that goal. It has the great advantage of not mandating how they do it from Washington but creating an environment where people can do this for themselves. Our former Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen said to me that when he first became Governor and went to find out about the $145 million of federal workforce development funding that comes to Tennessee, he just threw up his hands. He said: It is too complicated. I cannot do anything with it. So he told his cabinet members: Do the best you can. Well, working together with the House of Representatives, Senator Murray and Senator Isakson and a group of us here have taken this law that was passed 16 years ago and made some dramatic changes to it. They will tell you more about that. They will be talking about how we have taken many of the 47 work-training programs that exist in the Federal Government and simplified them, eliminating 15 programs that were ineffective or duplicative, eliminating 21 Federal mandates, streamlining multiple plans into a single State plan that reduces time spent on paperwork, streamlining reporting requirements, giving Governors more flexibility, giving local workforce boards more flexibility, and most importantly, giving the individuals who need jobs more opportunity to say: This is what I would like to do, and this is what I choose to do. This has been no easy task. Senator Murray and Senator Isakson deserve a lot of credit from all of us because many Congresses have tried to reauthorize this law before. I am going to come back after about an hour and deliver a little more extensive discussion on this, but the 108th Congress, the 109th Congress, and the 112th Congress--all tried to do this but could not get a consensus about how to move forward. Finally, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx produced the SKILLS Act in the House of Representatives. The House passed this bill in March of 2013. It came over here to the Senate. The Senate HELP Committee passed its bill last July. Led by Senator Murray and Senator Isakson, the Senate began working with the House, came up with an agreement, and, working with a number of Senators, we have reduced the number of amendments that actually have to be voted on today to two. So we will have two amendments to be voted on and then will vote on final passage. Then we will send the bill back to the House. Hopefully the President will have a chance to sign it. I would like to say that I hope that in the midst of what is too much dysfunction in the Senate, this will be an example of what can happen when we put our minds to it. The members of the HELP Committee, on which I am the ranking Republican, and Senator Harkin, the ranking Democrat--we have some pretty big philosophical differences. Ideologically, we are not the same. But we have passed 19 bills out of the HELP Committee. 13 have become law this year. That is a record of accomplishment we are proud of. It shows that Senators with different opinions can come to a consensus and come to a resolve. So let me step aside now and let those who have really done the most work on the bill speak--the Senator from Washington and the Senator from Georgia. I will be back in about an hour, and then we will be voting a little later this afternoon. This is good news for the workers of America, for the Governors who felt hamstrung by Washington, for the workforce boards who have been limited in their ability to meet the needs of local employers and workers, and for Senator Coburn, who has been a real leader in pointing out how many duplicative work programs we have. We have gone a long way in the direction he wanted us to go. I congratulate all of those Senators for the result.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to rescind the quorum call.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, while the Senator from Iowa is still on the floor, I wish to compliment him. The committee which he chairs-- of which I am the ranking member--has produced 19 bills this year for this Congress, 10 of which have become law. No other committee has produced as much--this will add one to that--and that is not because we agree on everything. The truth is we disagree on a lot of things, but we have found a way--when there is a chance to get a result--to come together. Senator Harkin has helped to create an environment in which Senator Isakson and Senator Murray, and a group of other Senators, have finally brought this Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to a conclusion, and a lot of other Senators have tried, and it has taken a long time to do it. Our focus today should be on the workers of America and people who need jobs. I think it is important to point out that when the Senate tries to do it this way and allow everybody to have a chance to have a say, we can get a pretty good result. This is $10 billion, and for our State--I say to the Senator from Iowa--it is $145 million for the single biggest issue in our State: How do I get a better job? It is not a matter of Washington telling you how to do that. This is a bill that empowers States to enable people to get the skills they need so they can get a better job. I thank the chairman for the way he has worked on this, and I wanted to say that while he was on the floor. Madam President, I urge my colleagues to support this act today. It is a jobs bill. I was home in Grainger County in East Tennessee this past weekend working with the Clinch-Powell Cooperative. It is a great organization which helps people with home foreclosures and helps them to find a job. The worry they have is that it is too hard to find a job. The worry of the National Federation of Independent Business Leaders--whom I talked with in Knoxville--is that it is too hard to create a job. We all have our reasons for that. On our side of the aisle, we think there are too many taxes, rules, regulations, and mandates from Washington that make it harder for a person who wants to create a job to do that. I had one Tennessee small business man tell me he was looking at new employees as a liability more than an asset. He said: I hate that. I want to think of every one of my employees as an asset. When I hire them, I have to think about this health care cost or this tax cost or this regulatory cost, and all these extra costs, and they become, in my eyes, a liability and that discourages me from hiring anyone. That is one reason why so many Americans are having a hard time finding a job. Another reason is--and the reason we are working together today on this bill--because the skills don't fit the job. We have a very good Governor in Tennessee whose name is Bill Haslam. I think his priority is the same as every other Governor whom I know in the country, which is he is trying to grow and attract jobs. What he hears from every employer is: We have the jobs, but the employees don't have the skills. Our Governor is working hard, for example, to create a program with Bridgestone Corporation--the big tire maker headquartered in Tennessee--at the community college and technical institute level, where the institute would train people with the exact skills that Bridgestone needs. So many of the new jobs today require more skills than they used to. I was Governor when the Nissan plant came to Tennessee, and it was a surprise to a lot of people. Automobile plants used to have 20,000 or 30,000 people, but the Nissan plant only had 3,000 or 4,000 or 5,000 people there. Now it has a few more, but it is the largest automobile plant in North America--and the most efficient. I imagine it is as profitable as any automobile plant. But the jobs at the Nissan plant have a lot higher standards and a lot higher skills for the employees. It is the same today as it was 30 years ago--the biggest challenge they have is finding Tennesseans, or other people, who have the right skills for the right jobs. What can we in Washington do to help with that? Well, we could sit here and in our wisdom write a lot of rules and prescriptions about just how to do that. In fact, that is what has been happening with the Workforce Investment Act. It started out in 1998 as sort of a GI bill for workers. The idea was we would make it easier for people to find jobs. We would create work councils in the States, give Governors flexibility, allow them to make arrangements with community colleges, such as the one I just described with Bridgestone. But then the old Washington disease set in, and you know what it is: I have a good idea, let's make everybody do it. Pretty soon we had 47 workforce programs, and according to a Government Accountability Office report, 45 of them were duplicative. Well, the Senator from Oklahoma, who is retiring this year--which I regret very much--Senator Coburn, has led the charge. He asked for that report, and he pointed out to us that we are wasting money and not helping people when we spent $9.5 or $10 billion through the Workforce Investment Act, which is just a few of those programs, in such a complicated way. I mentioned on the floor of the Senate a while ago what our former Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen said. Governor Bredesen was a very good Governor and businessman. He likes to get results. He took a look at the Workforce Investment Act programs that were coming to Tennessee from the Federal Government through a dozen or more work councils, and he just threw up his hands. He said: I told the commissioner of employment security to just do what you can with it. There were too many well-intentioned rules and regulations from Washington that caused these programs to be such a maze that Governors and work councils could not deal with them. The work councils were massive. There were 50 or 60 people who required someone up here saying: This is who you have to have. There were duplicative proposals. Instead of allowing people who wanted a job to say, I would like to have this kind of job with these kinds of skills, we were telling them what kind of skills they needed to have. This was not working. The House of Representatives passed something called the SKILLS Act, which suited most of us on the Republican side of the Senate better because it eliminated more programs, eliminated more mandates, gave more discretion to Governors, and decentralized the program. The Senate passed a bill through our committee that we didn't like nearly as well because it still had too many Washington rules and mandates in it. Senator Isakson, who is on the floor, and Senator Murray from Washington, led a group of Senators who worked with the House--led by Congressman Klein and Virginia Foxx and others--and we resolved our differences. Basically, what we have done is we moved a long way from where the House of Representatives bill was. I will be specific about what the bill does that I think makes a difference. It eliminates 15 programs that were identified as ineffective or duplicative. It eliminates 21 Federal mandates on State and local workforce board compensation. In other words, we are saying to Tennessee, which I think has 13 workforce boards: OK, we don't think we got a lot smarter flying to Washington this morning. You can decide more about who is on your workforce board because we assume you know more about what is going on. It replaces multiple State plans for multiple Federal programs that have to be submitted to Washington with a streamlined single-State plan that will reduce time spent on paperwork. We are going to spend $10 billion of the taxpayers' money--nearly 10--so we ought to have some accountability, and we ought to know what is happening, but we don't need everybody spending more time filling out forms than they are helping people find jobs. This bill also streamlines reporting requirements, and it focuses on real outcomes, such as job placement, retention, earnings, credentials, and employer earning satisfaction. The second broad thing the bill does is support local and State decisionmaking and flexibility. In that sense it is like a block grant. It reinstates the authority of Governors to reserve up to 15 percent of formula funds for innovative State and local programs. I like that. I used to be a Governor. I used to think that the Governor of our State--and I still do--knows more about how to make job training work in Tennessee than anybody up here because he is there, not here, so let him or her be in charge of a large part of that. It gives local workforce boards the freedom to transfer up to 100 percent of funds between the two largest formula programs serving adults and dislocated workers. In other words, if the money we have allocated doesn't really fit Hohenwald, TN, as well as it does New York City or Madison, WI, or Atlanta, GA, then the local workforce board can transfer money from this program to that program. That just makes common sense. It gives States the ability to incentivize and award performance. It allows people who want a better job, people who want job training, people who are out of a job to choose the career and training service that best meets their needs, and it empowers Governors to recognize or consolidate local areas that are low-performing in order to better meet regional needs. Finally, it tackles the accountability issue which we all care about. It authorizes consistent measures of quality, including a 5-percent reduction in funding for poor-performing programs. It requires the U.S. Department of Labor to conduct independent evaluations of programs at least once every 4 years. This is a good piece of work on the No. 1 subject in this country. Whether one is a Democrat or a Republican, jobs is the issue. It is too hard to find a job. It is too hard to create jobs. We have some differences of opinion about what to do about it, but I think we agree that matching the job skills to the job is a solution for millions of Americans. I believe and I suspect most of us believe that in the Internet age specially, what we should be doing rather than mandating so many answers from here is empowering Governors and empowering local leaders on workforce boards to enable people who want a better job or a job at all to choose what they want to do and to do it. So in Tennessee Governor Haslam will now have much more freedom and $145 million a year to spend on helping Tennesseans get a better job at Bridgestone or at the Nissan plant or start their own work because we are enabling, we are empowering. We are not mandating. We are doing less telling. And from the taxpayers' point of view, we are avoiding the waste of a lot of money by avoiding duplication. I wish to thank Senators on both sides of the aisle for working together so well on this, particularly on our side of the aisle. I know Senator Harkin and Senator Murray worked well with the Democratic Members. We appreciate their patience as we worked through this. We had a number of Republican Senators whom Senator Isakson and I worked with, and I would like to acknowledge their role, starting with Senator Isakson. He was the majority leader of the Georgia--well, I guess he was the minority leader of the Georgia Senate. He was the Republican leader. At that time, they didn't have a majority; they just had a few Senators. But he learned the skills of negotiation and compromise in order to get a result, while still sticking to his conservative principles, and I like to see that skill. So on our side of the aisle he gets most of the credit for the result we are getting. Right up there with him is Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming, who worked on this, Senator Enzi says, for nearly 10 years. Now, that may seem hard to do, but this bill was supposed to be reauthorized after 2003, and this is 2014. So Senator Enzi brought it a long way, and we are grateful to him. In addition, Senator Collins and Senator Murkowski are cosponsors of the bills. Senator Scott from South Carolina played a great role by picking up the SKILLS Act from the House and bringing it over to the Senate and reminding us that we needed to get rid of this maze of regulatory problems and go as far in that direction as we could possibly go. So in his first year in the Senate, Senator Scott has played a major role in the passage of a very important piece of legislation. I have mentioned Senator Coburn before. We all acknowledge there is no one on either side of the aisle who is more relentless in looking for waste, fraud, and duplication than Senator Coburn. Through his work and his staff's work, he put the spotlight on the fact that 44 of our 47 workforce programs were duplicative and wasteful. That is not him saying that; that is the General Accountability Office saying that. Senators Lee and Flake worked with us, and they will be offering amendments today. Senator Portman made significant contributions to the legislation, and we thank him for that. Senator Hatch and Senator McConnell made important contributions, and Senator Toomey and Senator Coats did as well. There are a number of other Senators who did something we would like to see more of around here; that is, they didn't insist on every right they had. We are a body that operates by unanimous consent, so if we all insist on all the rights we have, we don't do anything, which is where we find ourselves sometimes. But there were a number of Senators who had good ideas, who had proposals they would like to see adopted. Many of those we were able to incorporate in the manager's amendment, but then some we just couldn't. So they stepped aside and they thought it was more important that we go ahead and come to a consensus and get a result. In conclusion, let me say this: The other night the Senator from Georgia and I were at the home of the Australian Ambassador to the United States. He was talking about this body. The Australians love the United States--especially Kim Beazley, the Ambassador. He is a Labor Party member. In our country, that would be called a Democrat. But he is a big pro-American former Minister in Australia. He said: You know, we envy the U.S. Senate. It is the greatest tribunal in the world. We all wish we had it. It made us all stop and think. Are we really living up to the respect for this body that people around the world have for the U.S. Senate when it is operating the way it should? Well, today it is operating the way it should, but a lot of the time it does not. How should it operate? The Senate is different because it is the single legislative body in the world that is designed for extended discussion of an important issue until it comes to a consensus, and then we cut off debate and then we get a result, if it is possible. That is how we get a civil rights bill. That is how we get Social Security. That is how we get a workforce investment act. We have extended discussion and debate and amendment and vote on an important issue until we come to a consensus. Why is a consensus needed, which means 60 votes instead of 51 much of the time? Because we govern a complex country by consensus. We don't do it by order or edict or any partisan way. This is a very complicated bill. It brought here today by unanimous consent, but that is only because we have debated it for an extended period of time here in the Senate and we have come to a consensus about it. We have given up on a lot of ideas we had. If we had our way, we would pass the SKILLS Act in a minute--almost every single Republican would--but that is not what the Democrats would do. So we have come to an agreement in the Senate, and we have come to an agreement with the House. That is the consensus. As a result of that, Governors, such as the Bipartisan Policy Center's Governors' Council, have praised this result. I believe our Governor in Tennessee, Governor Haslam, will be delighted with it. I think our former Governor, Governor Bredesen, who threw up his hands when he saw the maze he had to work with a couple of years ago, will welcome what we have done. I thank the Senators on both sides of the aisle who have done this. My hope is that this is a disease that is infectious and that we see a little bit more of this kind of legislating in the Senate. I would like to extend my deep thanks and sincere appreciation to the dedicated staff that worked on this bill to reauthorize the 16 year old Workforce Investment Act for the past several years. Without their hard work and tireless effort we wouldn't have been able to reach the successful conclusion on the passage of this important bipartisan bill. I would like to thank Scott Cheney on Senator Murray's staff, who has been working on this reauthorization effort for many years, as well as Evan Schatz. Senator Isakson's staff worked hard with Senator Murray and our Republican offices throughout the Committee process and in coming to this final agreement, including Tommy Nguyen and Brett Layson. I would also like to thank some former staff who put a lot of time into this reauthorization effort in the 112th Congress, including Glee Smith who worked for Senator Isakson, as well as Beth Buehlmann and Kelly Hastings who worked for Senator Enzi on the HELP Committee. The Chairman of this committee has an outstanding staff that are very capable and dedicated, particularly Crystal Bridgeman, Michael Gamel- McCormick, Lee Perselay, Mildred Otero, and Derek Miller. Our partners in the House of Representative deserve great thanks for their willingness to come to the table and negotiate a pre-conferenced agreement, including Rosemary Lahasky, Brad Thomas, James Bergeron, Amy Jones, Leticia Mederos, Michele Varnhagen, and Jacque Chevalier on the majority and minority staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Many of our Senate Republican offices deserve thanks for their work with the HELP Committee on amendments and other technical fixes to the bill, including Denzel McGuire and Katelyn Conner on Senator McConnell's staff, Christopher Toppings and Natasha Hickman on Senator Burr's staff, Leila Kimbrell and Kate Williams on Senator Murkowski's staff, Laura Pence on Senator Coburn's staff, Kristin Chapman on Senator Enzi's staff, Nick Butterfield and Pam Thiessen on Senator Portman's staff, Christy Knese and Wendy Baig on Senator Lee's staff, Chandler Morse on Senator Flake's staff, Diane Browning and Katie Neal on Senator Hatch's staff, Dimple Gupta on Senator Toomey's staff, Casey Murphy on Senator Coats' staff, and Lizzy Simmons on Senator Scott's staff. We know these bills don't just suddenly appear. The Senate Legislative Counsel staff work long hours on the bill and then on the amendments, so I would like to especially thank Liz King, Amy Gaynor, Chelsea Koester, and Kristin Romero. And we always rely on the experts at the Congressional Research Service to give us good information in a timely manner, so I extend our thanks to David Bradley and Benjamin Collins. Finally, I would like to thank my staff. They have put a lot of time and effort in to make this a process that the Senate and American people can be proud of and I appreciate their efforts and late nights on this bill. So, my thanks go out to Patrick Murray, Bill Knudsen, Peter Oppenheim, David Cleary, Diane Tran, Jim Jeffries, Margaret Atkinson, and Liz Wolgemuth. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor, and I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, let me see if I can say something that contributes to progress, especially while the Senator from Maryland, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, is on the floor. She has really done a terrific job in working with the Republican and Democratic leaders to try to get us back to the business of appropriating. We are not that far away. We have three bills ready to come to the floor. We have consent on the Republican side--which had to be unanimous over here to be able to bring it up in this way. Now we have a difference of opinion between the two leaders about whether all the amendments ought to be 60 votes. I would respectfully suggest that is not the norm. It is true that the Republican leader has said many times that an important amendment ought to be 60 votes. Recently when we were working on the Child Care and Development Block Grant or some other legislation, we would say the norm is 51 votes. But for a nongermane amendment, or if it was an especially controversial amendment, then maybe it would be 60 votes. That was a matter of negotiation. So my hope is that we could move through these appropriations bills in the normal way, which would mean most votes would be 51. Occasionally, there might be a 60-vote vote. That is what we usually have done. That is what we historically have done. The majority party has 55 members last time I checked. It has a President who can veto anything, and it takes 67 to override him. So they have plenty of advantages on their side. Now, let me conclude in this way--and I said it this morning in our Appropriations Committee. Last week I was visiting with some Senators and an Ambassador. We had dinner at the home of an ambassador from a country who greatly admires the United States. He was saying how much he envies this great tribunal--the Senate, and how other countries in the world envy it, and how it is the only tribunal like this anywhere in the world that is set up to have extended debate on important issues until we reach a consensus and stop debate and come to a result. That is the history of the civil rights bill, the Medicare bill, and the student loan bill last year, and bills even more recently than that. What that means in very simple terms is that the majority decides what we are going to talk about, the minority decides what amendments it would like to offer, and we keep talking and keep talking until it is time to cut off debate and try to come to a result. That is what we should be doing. I would respectfully say that this business of not being willing to vote on amendments because it might hurt some individual Senator is not really worthy of the Senate. It is not practical, and it really doesn't make that much difference in campaigns. The idea that only 9 Republican amendments have received votes out of more than 800 amendments offered since last July is probably a record in the Senate. What is even worse is that--according to the Senator from Wyoming, who has counted these--there were only 7 Democratic amendments voted on out of nearly 700 offered since last July. Now, why are we here if we are not here to speak on behalf of our constituents about Benghazi, about the new health care law, about whether we need a college rating system from Washington, DC, about fixing No Child Left Behind? I remember in Senator Byrd's book he talked about the Panama Canal Treaty that he and Senator Baker marshaled through. It took 67 votes--a very divisive issue. He said: We allowed nearly 200 amendments, reservations, and other codicils to the amendments, and we killed them all. We beat them all. But, he said: We never would have gotten the treaty ratified if we hadn't allowed Senators to have their say. So we have gotten to this level of distrust between that side and this side. And most of us are trying over here to say: All we want is an opportunity to have amendments offered in the regular order, a chance to debate them and a chance to vote on them, and if we are defeated, so be it. To impose a gag rule on us imposes a gag rule on the people who sent us here. This morning in the Appropriations Committee, that gag rule moved from the Senate floor to the Appropriations Committee. If the Republicans were in charge of the Senate, the Democrats wouldn't put up with that. I don't know why they are putting up with it today. I know there is distrust on both sides. But we are very close to a situation where we have three major appropriations bills which are on the floor. We have a disagreement only about whether all amendments ought to require 60 votes. That has not been the norm before. We should be able to work that out and use our time to represent the people of the United States so that ambassador, when he has another group of Senators out there, can say: You belong to the tribunal that is unique in the world that every country in the world wishes it had, because it is a forum--the only one in the world of this kind--where you have extended debate on major issues until you get a consensus and come to a result. That is the only way to govern a complex country like the country that is the United States of America. We are getting back toward that, and I hope that our leaders and our Appropriations Committee members can make the next few steps and let us all go to work like we aim to do. We have some pretty talented people here. We have Rhodes Scholars and former Governors and people who have been here a long time and people who have been here a short time. It is not easy to get here, and it is not easy to stay here. So while we are here, we would like to work-- which means we would like to speak, have our say, vote, and, if we can, get a result. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am on the Senate floor, but I should have had the opportunity today to be at an Appropriations Committee meeting. We were scheduled this morning to mark up--that means to consider and vote on--the labor, health and human services bill for the next fiscal year. The labor, health and human services bill is one of the most important pieces of legislation we have. It is the bill that spells out the priorities of the American people as worked out by their elected officials on everything from National Institutes of Health to Pell Grants for college students. Passing an appropriations bill is an appropriate and important check on executive spending. It is one of our most important constitutional responsibilities. It is one we haven't been exercising very well over the last 4 years. Even though the Appropriations Committee has approved most of the bills to go to the floor, the majority leader has not brought most of the bills to the floor for our consideration. In 2 of the last 4 years we considered zero appropriations bills on the floor. One of those years we considered one and another year we considered five. I wasn't at the committee meeting this morning because our markup was indefinitely postponed. I asked why, and I couldn't get a clear answer, but apparently it was because some Senators don't want to vote on difficult or tough amendments. I have repeated a certain line a lot in the past couple of years. I am from Tennessee, so I have said that being in the Senate and not being allowed to vote on amendments is like being asked to join the Grand Ole Opry and not being allowed to sing. That is what we do. I mean, this body, described as the one authentic piece of genius in the constitutional system of the United States, was created to have 100 men and women who come to the Senate and who have the opportunity to have extended debate on important issues until we come to a consensus. Sometimes we do that in a terrific way. Even recently we have done that in important ways; for example, on the student loan agreement that we reached last year which cut nearly in half interest rates on all undergraduate loans, which are 85 percent of student loans. That was the result of an extended debate, working with the Republican House and a Democratic President. The government worked the way it was supposed to. Coming to the Senate floor and having a say, offering a bill, offering amendments, and having a vote is the job of Senators. It is not so important that it is my say or my vote, it is the fact that this is what I was hired to do by my constituents, each one of us was. So we have a right to have our say on the issues--whether it is Iran, student loans, Ukraine, or health care. It is what we are expected to do. So I have objected to the fact that we have fallen into a pattern in this body of not having amendments. Senator Barrasso of Wyoming has actually counted the number of rollcall votes on amendments since last July. He has discovered that Republicans offered only nine amendments that actually had a rollcall vote in that entire period of time. Then he counted what the Democrats have offered. Our friends on the other side of the aisle have offered more than 600 amendments, and they have only had 7 rollcall votes. But today we have reached a new level of obstruction because it seems that our friends in the Democratic majority are moving the gag rule-- which has existed on the floor of the Senate--from the Senate floor to the committee room. They have said we are going to indefinitely postpone a markup of a bill from one of the most important subcommittees in the Senate to decide how to spend more than a hundred billion dollars, apparently, because some Senators don't want to vote on tough amendments. These aren't extraneous amendments. These aren't political exercises. These are relevant amendments critical to the process of setting spending priorities, and well within the scope of the bill. So I have no alternative but to bring my tough amendments--the amendments that I planned to offer this morning at the markup--to the Senate floor, at least to talk about them in the hope that soon I will have a chance to offer them in the committee. I am going to talk about four amendments I had planned to offer this morning--important, relevant amendments, part of what we are supposed to do. Senators shouldn't be afraid to vote on them. If so, we shouldn't be here, because that is what we do. Amendment No. 1. My first amendment would reverse the trend toward a national school board for elementary and secondary education by protecting a State's control over its academic standards and tests. My amendment does this by prohibiting the U.S. Department of Education--where I used to be the Secretary--from exercising any influence over the academic standards States use to define what students should know and be able to do, as well as the test States use to determine whether students have met those standards. It also prohibits the Department from requiring or incentivizing States to adopt common standards and tests as a condition of an award of a Federal grant or a contract, or by providing additional points or a preference in a competitive grant program, or as a condition of approval for waivers of requirements under No Child Left Behind or any Federal law. In other words, this amendment directs the Federal Government to keep its sticky fingers off State standards and not to interfere with the hard work States are doing to raise expectations for our students. This is not a new issue. In 1992, 22 years ago, I was the U.S. Secretary of Education for President George H.W. Bush--who celebrated his 90th birthday today by jumping out of an airplane once again--a remarkable event. Happy birthday, President Bush. Democrats in Congress wrote an education bill in 1992 that would have set Federal standards not only for academic content but also for how that content should be delivered to students. As Education Secretary, I wrote a memo to the President. I advised him to veto the bill if it came to his desk, because, I said then, it: . . . creates at least the beginnings of a national school board that could make day-to-day school decisions on curriculum, discipline, teacher training, textbooks, and classroom materials. . . . A federal recipe dictating how to operate a local school board does not make schools better. I wrote this to President Bush in 1992. The President told the Congress he would veto the bill if it reached his desk. Fortunately, it never did. The amendment that I would like to have offered this morning should not be necessary because Federal law already includes a number of specific limitations on the Federal Government's involvement in education standards and curriculum. For example, section 9527 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act prohibits any employee of the Federal Government from mandating, directing or controlling a State, local school district or school's curriculum, program of instruction or allocation of State and local resources. The Department of Education is prohibited from using any funding, says the law, to endorse, approve or sanction any curriculum of instruction used in the elementary or secondary school. That is the law today. Furthermore, the law today prohibits requiring any State to have academic content or student academic achievement standards approved by the Federal Government in order to receive funding under the law, with the exception of the requirement that States must demonstrate that they have adopted challenging standards in their title I plan. By including these prohibitions Congress has made it clear that it does not want a national school board--that primary responsibility for decisions relating to educating students rest with States and local communities, teachers, and parents. But this administration has used the combination of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and waivers from No Child Left Behind to in effect convert itself into a national school board, making decisions that States and local communities ought to make for themselves-- particularly decisions about standards and tests. Under Race to the Top, the Department gave additional points to States which participated in the development of and adopted the Common Core standards, using the prospect of receiving Federal funds to coerce States into joining the Common Core. Now, the Department might say it didn't write the words ``Common Core'' into their grant application, but Common Core then was the only game in town that could meet the requirements for those points. More recently, the administration has used its waiver authority under No Child Left Behind to impose on States new requirements about standards that are not contemplated in and, I believe, prohibited by Federal law. So this amendment would strictly prohibit that overreach. My second amendment would avoid the creation of a taxpayer-funded popularity contest by preventing the Department of Education from developing a rating system for our Nation's 6,000 colleges and universities. So my first amendment would prevent the Secretary from becoming chairman of a national school board, and my second amendment would prevent the Secretary from claiming the role of national czar of higher education. It is a simple amendment to end what I see as a misguided errand initiated by the President and underway at the Department of Education. That is the rating of our colleges and universities by the Federal Government. This amendment would prohibit the Department of Education from using any Federal funding to develop, refine, publish or implement a college rating system. In August of 2013, President Obama directed the Department of Education to rate each of our Nation's more than 6,000 colleges and universities based on their affordability and outcomes such as graduation rates and earnings. I am all for ensuring that parents and students have the information they need to make good college choices, but picking winners and losers with a rating system is not an appropriate role for the Federal Government in Washington, DC. Here is what an expert in education policy at the Brookings Institution--not exactly a hotbed of rightwing propaganda--had to say: There is a clear case to be made for the federal government using its authority to gather data like these for postsecondary institutions that receive taxpayer funding, but little precedent for the government producing ratings. The Brookings scholar goes on to say: The Securities and Exchange Commission regulates stocks and bonds, but leaves it to private organizations to rate them. The Department of Transportation sets standards for the calculation of cars' gas mileage, but it doesn't opine on whether a Ford is better than a Toyota. The Food and Drug Administration decides which pharmaceuticals can be sold in the U.S., but it does not say whether Advil is better for a headache than Tylenol. In other words, this is not the job of the Federal Government. We don't need the Federal Government making these judgments for 22 million college students. What we need is the information so Americans can make these judgments for ourselves. I also have serious practical concerns about the Department's ability even to begin this effort. I believe it will fall on its face when they try to write it. We already know the Department is struggling. They have had to delay the release of the draft ratings system from the spring to sometime in the fall. If they ever do move forward, I have little confidence in their ability to get it right. The Federal Government simply can't develop ratings that account for the diversity of our higher education system. We have 6,000 institutions of higher education of all kinds Nashville's auto diesel college, Notre Dame, Randolph-Macon, Yeshiva, Berea College, Dyersburg Community College, Harvard. All of these are different. We need information. We don't need the government issuing ratings. My third amendment would rein in the Obama administration's out-of- control National Labor Relations Board by stopping it from requiring employers to give labor unions their employees' personal email addresses and cell phone numbers and from forcing employers to let employees use employer-owned and operated email systems to campaign for a union. Since 1966 the NLRB has required employers to provide a union with a list of names and home addresses of employees eligible to vote in a union representation election. This is called an Excelsior List. In February of this year, the NLRB reproposed expanding the Excelsior List in its ambush elections proposed rule. Now, ambush elections are another Obama administration initiative which would shorten the time from the union's request to call an election to when the election is held to as little as 10 days. But here is the NLRB's Excelsior List proposal: It would require employers to include voter-eligible employees' personal telephone numbers, email addresses, work locations, shift times, and job classifications on the Excelsior List. They rejected a suggestion I made that at least an employee ought to be able to opt out of sharing this information. We have had many examples of unions violating people's privacy and even harassing them. For example, in 2010, agents of Communications Workers of America Local 1103 in Connecticut used personal information they obtained about one woman who did not support the union to sign her up for hundreds of unsolicited and unwanted magazines and consumer products. This NLRB-proposed rule has a lot of opposition. Senator Graham was intending this morning to offer in our markup a similar amendment that would prevent funds from going to implement any of the so-called ambush election rule which this is a part of. As I have said before, the NLRB has become far too politicized under recent administrations. It didn't start with the Obama administration, but it has gotten worse with this administration, as it has moved toward the side of union advocacy with such things as ambush elections and micro-unions and undermining State right-to-work laws. The National Labor Relations Board should be an umpire rather than an advocate. The fourth amendment I would have offered this morning--had our subcommittee markup proceeded as it had been scheduled, and had it not been postponed apparently because some Senators didn't want to take ``tough votes''--would simply require the Obama administration to be straightforward with the public about the Affordable Care Act by reporting basic facts on the Federally-run insurance exchange, which is running the exchange for 36 States--facts such as the number of people signed up and making premium payments. I introduced similar legislation last year. The House of Representatives passed that legislation in January by a bipartisan vote of 259 to 154. A total of 33 House Democrats voted for it. It is very simple, noncontroversial, and shouldn't be considered tough. It would simply require the Obama administration to provide weekly reports during open enrollment--which now runs from November to February--reports to Congress, to States, and to the public about the Federal exchange, including such easily tracked data as the number of individuals who have visited the site, the number who have successfully enrolled, their zip codes, the level of coverage they have obtained, and also at least monthly a list of the navigators and the brokers operating in each State. This is important especially to serve disadvantaged Americans. This isn't complicated. This is the Internet age. Even before the Internet age, McDonald's could tell us how many hamburgers it made each day, and RCA could tell us how many Elvis Presley albums it had left on their shelves. In May Politico reported the administration stopped releasing the barebones reports it had been providing the public every month. This is troubling. Many Americans can continue to sign up for coverage through special enrollment periods, but we won't know how many Americans have continued paying their premiums after the first month of coverage. We will have no way of knowing the final number of confirmed enrollments. So these are the four amendments I had expected I would be offering and debating today in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Instead, I am here late in the afternoon on the Senate floor because some Senators must be more worried about their reelection campaigns than about the process of governing and setting priorities. If we are not willing to do what we are elected to do--no one is making any of us be here. I hope the markup we had planned today will be rescheduled. I plan to offer these amendments then. I hope they will be voted on by the committee, and I hope I will have the opportunity to represent the people of Tennessee who have sent me here to represent their views. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, could the Chair please let me know when I have 3 minutes remaining on my time.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I heard the majority leader's comments about the importance of moving on to the veterans bill, so I have a suggestion: Why don't we send this political stunt on student loans to the Senate education committee, where the Senator from Iowa, Mr. Harkin, and I are busy working in a bipartisan way to reauthorize higher education, and let's move on to the veterans bill immediately. Why should the Senate take a week on a political stunt that everybody here knows won't pass when veterans are standing in line at clinics, waiting for us to act on a bipartisan solution to their problems? It actually goes further in giving veterans more choices in health care than anything Congress has ever done. It actually begins to give veterans more choice in health care in the same way Congress gave them choices in higher education with the passage of the GI bill for veterans in 1944. Back then, Congress said to the veterans: Here is the money. Go choose your college. Moving to and passing the veterans bill, Congress would be saying: If you have to stand in line too long or if you live too far away from a veterans facility, here is the money--go choose your medical care. That is a very important step for millions of veterans. It deals directly with the problems all Senators on both sides of the aisle are chagrined about--veterans standing in line waiting for health care. So I have one question: Why should the Senate spend a week on a political stunt? Why should we go all the way to next Monday before disposing of it? Let's dispose of it today. Let's send it to the committee that is already considering these issues, and let's move on to the veterans bill before noon. We could do that, and the veterans and the people of this country would respect us for it. I thought we had stopped the political stunts on student loans last year when the President, to his credit, worked with the Republican House and a bipartisan group in the Senate, and came to a result--a big result. It affects $100 billion of loans every year. Half the students in America have a grant or loan to help pay for college. Congress stopped this type of political stunt last year. Instead of every election year where someone comes forward offering some preposterous proposal about what we can do in the hope that students might vote for them--Congress stopped that by saying: Let's put a market-based pricing system on new student loans. The effect of that was to stop semi-annual political stunts, while lowering the interest rate on loans for undergraduates nearly in half. Undergraduate students are 85 percent of the students receiving federal loans. So a 19-year-old student can get a loan to go to college at 3.86 percent without any credit rating and in some cases can get a grant of up to $5,645 to go to college. Congress did that last year. This year the Senate education committee has held 10 bipartisan hearings on higher education. This is a committee that knows how to work. Senator Harkin, the Senator from Iowa, and I have big ideological differences in our committee, but that doesn't stop us from working, from doing our job. We passed 19 bills out of our committee, and 10 of them have gone through the Senate and became law. No other committee in the Senate can say that. Right now we are working on this very subject of the political stunt. So why not stop the political stunt and put this where it belongs-- back in the committee that is already working on it in a bipartisan way. Let's focus on the veterans who are standing in line and do what the majority leader said, which is let's deal with that issue. Why do I say this student loan idea is not a serious proposal? It is not out of lack of respect to the sponsor. Of course I have great respect for her and for other Senators who are offering this proposal. But let me outline why I say this is not a serious proposal. And everybody in the Senate knows that. They know it is not going to pass. So why would the Senate waste time on it? No. 1, it does nothing--not one thing--for current or future students. For students who are in college today or will be tomorrow, this does nothing for them. So don't let the rhetoric fool you. No. 2, what does it do for people who used to be in college paying off a student loan? According to data supplied by the Congressional Research Service: It will give them $1 a day. For the typical former student who has old loans, this bill will give them a taxpayer subsidy of $1 a day to help pay their student loans. How big is that loan? For undergraduates--which are 85 percent of all students with loans--it is $21,600. For graduates with a 4-year degree, it is $27,000. So $27,000--probably the best investment a person will ever make. The College Board says that if you have a 4-year degree, your lifetime earnings will be $1 million more. So $27,000 for a student with no credit rating and has a right to borrow that earns you $1 million? I think that is a pretty good deal. In fact, this $27,000, is about the exact amount of the average car loan. So what are we going to do next week? Instead of dealing with lines of veterans at clinics, is somebody going to come on the floor and say: Well, people have a $27,000 car loan, so let's raise taxes and raise the debt and give them $1 a day to pay off their car loan or the mortgage loan or the credit card. This is not a serious proposal. It is not going to help people. College graduates don't need a dollar-a-day tax subsidy to pay off their loan. They need a job. They need a job, and right now they are experiencing the worst situation for finding a job that they have seen in a long time. Now Republicans have plans that would help create more jobs. We would like to do what the President said, which was give the President more trade authority so companies in the nation can sell more things in Europe and Asia, but, no, we cannot bring that up. We would like to approve the Keystone Pipeline, but, no, we cannot bring that up. We would like to repeal ObamaCare and particularly the parts that make it harder to create jobs, but, no, we don't want to talk about that. We would like to at least change the provision about part-time jobs from 30 to 40 hours which affects millions of American workers, but, no, we cannot bring that up either. If the Senate wants to talk about students paying back loans, they don't need a dollar a day, they need a job. But my point is why should the Senate waste a week on this bill when veterans are standing in line waiting for us to take up and deal with a bipartisan proposal that the majority leader just described? What else is wrong with this student loan proposal? It could add up to $420 billion to the Federal debt. It does bring the money with it to eventually pay it off, we hope, but it adds to the debt. The Congressional Budget Office says national debt is rising at such a rate that interest payments will go from around $200 billion up to around $800 billion in 10 years. Taxpayers will be spending more on interest in 10 years than on national defense. It increases individual income taxes $72 billion with what I call a class warfare tax. That tax has been rejected eight times by the United States Senate, seven times on a motion to proceed. There already is a way to lower your payments if you are a student with a loan and your monthly payments are too high. It is in the law. The President talked about it this week. It is called the income based repayment plan. It could lower monthly payments $60 more a month than the Democrat proposal if you are a typical undergraduate and $300 more a month if you are a typical graduate student. Former students can do that today. That is a bigger savings on monthly payments than in the proposal we are debating. In addition to that, if this proposal were to pass the Senate. It could not be sent to the House. It is unconstitutional. We cannot originate a tax in the Senate, according to the Constitution. So why would the Senate pass this if it cannot be sent to the House? Next, it violates the Budget Control Act. We passed a law that said we couldn't spend any more than X. This measure violates that act. So if it gives a dollar a day to pay off a $27,000 loan at a time when a college degree will earn people more than $1 million, if the loans for undergraduates are about the same as a car loan, if it raises the debt by $420 billion, if it raises taxes by $72 billion, if there already is a way in the law to lower monthly payments more than this proposal without raising taxes, without raising the debt, without passing the law that is unconstitutional--so even if it did pass, it cannot be sent to the House--if it violates the Budget Control Act, why would the Senate waste time on it when veterans are standing in line waiting for a bipartisan proposal to give them more choices for medical care? Why would we do that? Right behind the veterans bill are Senator Mikulski from Maryland and Senator Shelby from Alabama with a series of appropriations bills that have bipartisan support. They have been through committee too. We haven't passed appropriations bills in the last 4 years--two of those years we passed zero, one of those years we passed one. They are ready to do the job on both sides of the aisle. Why would we spend time on this if it doesn't deal with the real issue? Students with loans don't need a dollar a day to pay off the loan. They need a job. We have proposals for jobs. The real problems with student loans are complexities and overborrowing. Ninety percent of the loans we read about in the paper that are over $100,000 are loans held by graduate students. But these are only 2 percent of the loans for all students.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Chair. I will reserve 1 minute and I will do it in this way: Vote no. A ``no'' vote means no to a week-long political stunt, no to debt and taxes, and yes to moving today to a bipartisan solution to the problem of veterans standing in line at clinics; yes to appropriations bills that deal with cancer research and national defense and the other urgent needs of our country, also in a bipartisan way; yes to the way the Senate ought to run. It would mean no to the practice of pulling a bill out of your pocket, putting it on the floor, and wasting 1 week with a political stunt while veterans are standing in line at a clinic waiting for us to act. So I would suggest the right thing to do is to vote no, send the bill and the discussion about student loans to the education committee. We can work with the President on a solution just like last year, and let's move on to dealing with a bipartisan solution to veterans who are standing in line waiting for the Senate to act. I yield the floor. Recognition of the Minority Leader

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, how much time do we have remaining?

Mr. ALEXANDER. The question before the Senate is, Shall we spend the next week on a political stunt that gives some students $1 a day to pay off a student loan or shall we move to a bipartisan solution for veterans who are lined up at clinics and hospitals across the country in a way that shocks Senators on both sides of the aisle? That is the issue. The proposal before the Senate is not a serious proposal. There is nothing in it for current or future students. It is a $1 a day subsidy to pay off a $27,000 loan. What are we going to do next week--raise taxes and raise the debt to pay off a $27,000 car loan, which is similar to the average loan debt of a graduate with a 4-year degree? In addition, this could not even be sent to the House if it passed because it is unconstitutional. You can't start a tax in the Senate, and this has a big tax in it. The way we deal with these issues is the way we did it last year. We worked with the President in a bipartisan way and reduced rates for students. What we need to do today is vote no--no to the political stunt, and move immediately to the deal to help veterans standing in line at clinics and hospitals across the country. I urge the Senate to send this to the committee that is already working on it in a bipartisan way, and let's move to help the veterans in a bipartisan way. I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor. cloture motion

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Madam President. Higher Education Act Last year something happened in Washington, DC, that most of us in the Senate and most Americans would like to see more of. The President and the Republican House of Representatives and a bipartisan group here in the Senate worked together to reform the student loan program. It is a lot of money, and it affects a lot of students. Every year the Federal Government loans about $100 billion to students who attend colleges and universities around this country. We have 6,000 of those higher education institutions. In addition to those loans--which, of course, students pay back--the Federal Government grants about $33 or $34 billion each year in Pell grants--up to $5,645--which students don't pay back. Last year we were in this usual pattern that has developed around the Congress where student loans become a semi-annual political stunt. Every 2 years, before an election, one party or the other would show up with a student loan proposal to try to appeal to students, hoping that students and others in America would reward them with their votes. Last year we changed that for new student loans. The President and the Republican House of Representatives and the Democratic Senate in a bipartisan way worked together to reform the student loan program by applying a market-priced system to the $100 billion or so we loan every year, and saying to the students: We will give you the benefit of that. You don't have to wait for Congress to engage in its semi-annual political stunt to know what your loan is. The result was that for loans for undergraduate students, which are 85 percent of all the loans, we were able to cut in half the interest rate on student loans for undergraduate students in America without raising taxes and without raising the debt. That resulted from overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate. It had strong support of the chairman of the Senate education committee, the HELP Committee, Senator Harkin and I supported it, as did many others. It worked the way the Senate is supposed to work. This body is for the purpose of taking an important issue, which student loans are, having an extended debate on it until we come to a consensus, which we did, and then coming to a result the American people could approve. We did that as well. Now this week we are seeing something entirely different. Senate Democrats would interrupt a serious discussion that is going on in the Senate education committee about reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, which was first enacted in 1965. Senator Harkin, the Senator from Iowa, is our chairman. I am the ranking Republican on that committee. We have had 10 hearings. We have been hard at work. We have had terrific testimony, some very good ideas about the student loan program and about a lot of issues affecting higher education. We are doing what we are supposed to do in the Senate: We are trying to come to a conclusion so that we can recommend in a bipartisan way to this full body what to do about higher education for the next several years, including student loans. Yet, all of a sudden, we hear that Senate Democrats want to show up on the floor with a partisan, political stunt that interrupts the work of the Senate education committee, and here is what they would do: They would raise individual income taxes, they would raise the debt, and, based upon data from the Congressional Research Service, they would give some former students with old student loans a $1-a-day Federal subsidy to pay off their loans. Let me go back over the terms of this proposal just so everybody has it in mind. The main issue is $1 a day subsidy. That is the benefit. It doesn't do anything for current or new students. For some former students--according to the Congressional Budget Office, maybe half the loans--the taxpayers will give them $1 a day to help pay off their student loans. Along with that, we increase the Federal debt by up to $420 billion. That debt is out of control to begin with. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that over the next 10 years we are going to go from $200 billion to $800 billion just to pay interest on the debt. In 10 years we will be spending more on interest on our national debt than we will on national defense. Yet for this political stunt we are going to run that up another $420 billion maybe or close to $\1/2\ trillion. That is not all. To pay for all of this, we are going to raise individual income taxes by $72 billion. This is a familiar proposal. This is the class warfare tax increase the Senate has rejected eight times. There is nobody in this Senate who thinks this will pass the Senate the ninth time it is brought up. It is only being brought up and interrupting what we are doing in our committee for a partisan political stunt. We are going to raise the debt and increase taxes for what? Well, to help students pay off their loans. So they get $1 a day to pay off what loan? Well, 85 percent of the student loans--and there are a lot of them. There is over $1 trillion worth of outstanding student loans because we have a lot of students and we are a big country. We have 6,000 colleges and universities. But 85 percent of loans are for undergraduate students and they have $21,600 on average. That is right. We are talking about 1 or 2 years for students who go to community colleges. Some get a 4-year degree. But for 85 percent of the student loans that are undergraduate loans, $21,600 is the average debt. It is not $300,000. It is not $200,000. It is not $100,000. It is $21,600. Of those undergraduate loans, this is the average debt for a Federal student loan. If you attend a 4-year college or university, such as the University of Tennessee or the University of California or Michigan or wherever you are, and you borrowed money to go to school--the average debt is $27,300 for students who graduate with a 4-year college degree. It is about the same for a new car loan. Sometimes students take out a car loan before they take out a student loan. To get a sense of how big a burden this loan is for the average graduate with a 4-year degree, it is the same as a car loan. I suspect that if we are going to have a $1-a-day taxpayer subsidy to pay off a $27,000 student loan, the next thing you know the Democrats are going to show up during the election year and say: Let's have $1 a day to help people pay off their $27,000 car loans. At least we know that the day you drive your car off the lot, it starts depreciating. What do we know about a college education? If you have a 4-year degree, according to the College Board, it is worth $1 million in increased earnings during your lifetime. That is according to the College Board. No one really contradicts that. I saw a very good article by a New York Times economist a couple of weeks ago that had a little different number. They were using a net negative of $\1/2\ million after you deduct the cost of going to college. A person with a college education will have $\1/2\ million to $1 million in increased earnings. Can you think of a better investment than $27,000 to earn $1 million over your lifetime? Well, that is what a college degree does. Our friends on the other side of the aisle are saying we need to raise the debt and taxes so we can help college graduates--who will be earning $1 million more over their lifetime--pay off a $27,000 loan. College students don't need a $1-a-day Federal taxpayer subsidy to pay off a $27,000 student loan, which is the average loan for a 4-year college degree. They need a job, and Republicans are prepared--if this comes to the floor--to offer amendments to help create more new good jobs. We tried several times to do that, but the majority leader doesn't like us to bring up these issues. For example, we would like to offer a bill to increase the hours of the workweek from 30 to 40 hours under the health care law, which has bipartisan support, but it would change the health care law, so we can't offer that amendment. We would like to offer an amendment to build the Keystone Pipeline. Well, that has 60 or so Senators on both sides of the aisle--maybe more than that--who voted for it and say they support it, but the majority leader doesn't want us to bring up that one. We would like to have an amendment to give the President the trade promotion authority that President Obama has asked for. President Obama sees the world. He sees Asia. He is negotiating a treaty with Asia and a trade treaty with Europe. He would like to see more American exports go to Europe and Asia, which would increase jobs at home. He stood right here at the State of the Union and asked Congress to approve that, but the majority leader said: No, we are not going to bring that up. We have a Workforce Investment Act that we hope will come up this week. We would like to repeal the ObamaCare individual mandate. There are a number of provisions we would like to bring up as far as jobs go, but this $1-a-day subsidy is supposed to be the keystone of the Democrats' jobs program. We are ready to talk about jobs, and we will have amendments when this comes to the floor. If the subject is education, we are ready to talk about education. It would certainly be a lot better if we considered bills on the floor that have actually gone through the education committee. I complimented the Senator from Iowa earlier. I have enjoyed working with him. I am the ranking member on the Republican side, and he is the ranking member on the Democrat side. The Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee has been the most productive committee in this Senate. It has a large jurisdiction. We passed 19 bills out in a bipartisan way, and 10 of them have become law. I don't think any other committee can say that. We take our work very seriously, just as we are doing today on the Higher Education Act and just as we did when we tried to fix No Child Left Behind. The HELP Committee spent a good deal of time on No Child Left Behind. We reported a bill to the Senate floor. Republicans and Democrats offered competing proposals. Democrats effectively wanted to double down on what I call a national school board and Republicans wanted to reverse the trend towards a national school board by sending most decisions back to State and local communities. We want to fix No Child Left Behind. We have competing visions of how to do this, but I committed to bring the Democratic bill to the floor so we could have a debate. The House is ready to fix No Child Left Behind, and the Senate education committee is ready to fix No Child Left Behind. We want to have a debate about education this week. Let's bring up a bill that has been considered by the committee--where there are competing proposals--and fix No Child Left Behind. Better schools means higher college graduation rates, and that means better jobs. We are ready to offer our amendments for better jobs. We are ready to offer our amendments for better schools. In addition to our proposal for reversing the trend toward a national school board, I have introduced a proposal to create scholarships for kids. Did you know that if you took 80 Federal education programs that spend about $24 billion a year and gave States authority to do this, they could create $2,100 scholarships that follow 11 million low-income children in America to the public or accredited private school of the parents' choice? We would not impose a school choice plan on any State. We don't believe in mandates. But if a State wanted to use the money to follow the low-income student to their school so they can have an afterschool program or an extra teacher, a Governor could do that under this proposal. Senator Scott of South Carolina has offered a similar proposal for the six million children with disabilities. His proposal says: If you have a child with Down syndrome and find a school that better fits that child's needs, why not allow that Federal disability money to follow the child to the school they attend? Let the parent make that choice. We are ready to offer that amendment. We have a quality charter schools proposal. Six percent of the public schools in America are charter schools. Charter schools are public schools that give parents more choices and teachers more freedom to serve the children who are in that school. They began more than 20 years ago, and they have bipartisan support. President Clinton was in Nashville not along ago announcing his support and raising money for a charter school. I have an amendment to stop the Education Secretary from becoming chairman of a national school board. States are struggling with the unworkable requirements of No Child Left Behind. There is a provision in the law that allows the Secretary of Education to grant waivers to states from certain provisions of No Child Left Behind, but this Secretary, who is a fine man and a great friend, has said: If Oregon or Hawaii or Washington or Tennessee wants a waiver, they must agree to do four or five things that aren't otherwise required in the law. States have to adopt certain standards, implement certain teacher evaluation systems, and set performance targets as conditions for receiving a waiver. I don't think the Secretary of Education has the authority to place these conditions on states. The American people don't want a national school board. If they want to talk about education, we are ready with amendments on education. If they want to introduce a class warfare tax, we are ready to talk about taxes as well. We would like to repeal the medical device tax, and we are looking for an opportunity to offer that. If they are going to put a tax provision on the floor, let's have a tax debate. Let's have a debate about permanent State and local tax deductions. Let's prohibit the individual tax mandate in ObamaCare. Let's make the expensing of Section 179 permanent. Senator Thune has that proposal, and the House is acting on it this week. Let's make the research and development tax credit permanent, which has bipartisan support as well. If the subject is just higher education, we have amendments about that as well. The place for these amendments and this discussion is in our Senate education committee where we are discussing those ideas today. The way to do it this year is the way we did it last year. When the President, to his great credit, saw an opportunity to work with the Republicans in the House, he came over here to a bipartisan group, and we hammered out an agreement on a very big subject that, as I said, nearly cut the interest rate in half on undergraduate student loans. Why in the world do Senate Democrats want to waste a week on a political stunt? We thought we ended that with the student loan bill last year. We have veterans standing in lines at clinics, we have appropriations bills waiting to be considered that deal with cancer research and national defense, and Democrats say: No, let's put that aside. Let's have a political stunt on higher education even though we know it is not going anywhere. We know it is not going anywhere. I am very disappointed by this. The $1-a-day taxpayer subsidy to help some former students with loans pay off a $27,000 debt is an example of how Democrats hope to get some votes. I thought we put that behind us. This is one reason the American people lose confidence in the Senate. This body is described in a book called ``The American Senate,'' written by the late Neil MacNeil and the former Historian of the Senate. It is described as the one piece of authentic genius in the American constitutional system. Why is that? Because there are 100 of us. We operate by unanimous consent. It is a place for extended debate on important issues until we reach consensus. Our Founders were so wise because they thought they had a complicated country, but it was not nearly as complex as it is today. The only way to govern a complex country is through consensus, just as we did last year on new student loans. I would like to see the Senate move back to the place it was a few years ago. It was not that long ago. Many of the Members of the Senate don't know about it because so many Members are new. Did you know that half of the Members of the Senate have been here one term or less? They have not really seen the Senate operate the way it is supposed to operate. The Republican leader said that if Republicans were in charge of the Senate, he would like to operate it the way a former Democratic leader did, Senator Mike Mansfield, which is, No. 1, let bills go through committee the way we do in our education committee, and No. 2, bring them to the floor for a robust debate. Let people put up their ideas. The idea is that the majority has the right to set the agenda and the minority has the right to offer amendments. In the Senate, the idea is to have an extended discussion until a consensus is reached, if you can. I remember Senator Byrd and Senator Baker--I was here as an aide then, not as a Senator--would say to a chairman or a ranking member: Bring me a bill. Today, they would say to Chairman Harkin: Bring me the fix No Child Left Behind bill, if you have the Ranking Members' support. I would say in this case: The bill doesn't have my support, but I support taking it to the floor. I will stand there, he will stand there and we will open it to debate and Republicans will try to amend it. We may win, we may lose, but then we will send it to the House. Then we have a conference and the bill comes back and we come to a consensus. How could we get all that done? The majority leader could stand up on Monday and say: We are going to fix No Child Left Behind this week, and we are going to finish by Saturday, or we are going to finish by 1 week from Saturday. Members may offer all the amendments they want, but they are going to be here Saturday and Sunday. So pretty soon, by about Thursday, many Senators would say: I have a grandchild's soccer game and I might want to go home and it regulates that way. It is never perfect. This is a place where we debate big issues, but the idea that Senators can't offer amendments on important issues is making this Senate into a trivial place instead of a place where it is an authentic piece of genius. The Senator from Wyoming, Mr. Barrasso, did some interesting research. He pointed out that since July, there have only been nine amendments offered by Republicans that received a rollcall vote--nine amendments offered by Republicans since last July that received a rollcall vote. In Tennessee they would say that is akin to being in the Grand Ole Opry and not being allowed to sing. We are supposed to have a say about student loans, about Iran, about Ukraine, and about all of these issues. We might win or lose, but on behalf of our constituents, we are supposed to have a say. That is not nearly as bad as what the Senator from Wyoming discovered when he did a little more research, and this is what he found: While Senate Republicans have had nine amendments since last July, guess how many amendments Senate Democrats have had--seven. According to the Senator from Wyoming, 676 amendments, and the majority leader has allowed 7 rollcall votes since last July. How do we explain that when we go home? How do we explain a political stunt on student loans that everybody knows is a political stunt that will not pass? How do we explain to veterans standing in lines at clinics and to Appropriations Committee members waiting to deal with bills to fund cancer research and national defense that a political stunt is more important? This is not the way the Senate is supposed to operate. Let's go back to this $1-a-day stunt. It is unfair to students, it is unfair to taxpayers, and it is unfair to future generations. It is unfair to students because it treats former students better than it treats current students and new students. This proposal--the Senate Democrats' proposal that is being brought to the floor this week--doesn't do a single thing for a student if he or she is a current student or if they are going to be a student next year or the following year. It just helps some former students with old loans, and it treats them better than it would treat a new student because it will freeze in place an interest rate that 3 years from now will treat former students with old loans better than new students whose rate will be determined by the market and that rate might be a little higher. The Senate Democratic proposal is unfair to taxpayers for two reasons. First, it increases individual income taxes by $72 billion. That is a big number. It has been rejected by the Senate eight times. It is a class warfare tax focused on a few people. Second, my colleagues may have heard that the government profits off of students under the student loan program. In fact, the reverse is true. When we use the accounting system the Congressional Budget Office says we ought to use, the student loan program actually costs taxpayers $88 billion over the next 10 years. Let me repeat that. We will hear it said by the advocates of the $1-a-day subsidy to help students pay off student loans that the government is profiting from the students but not if we use the accounting system the Congressional Budget Office has said we should use. What is the difference? The Congressional Budget Office says the system we are using doesn't take into account the risk that students might not pay back their loans. Today the Congressional Budget Office estimates that less than 10 percent of student loan volume is in default. This proper accounting system is not foreign to the Senate. It was used with the Troubled Asset Relief Program--the so-called bailout-- because the idea of assessing the true cost of the program needed to fully account for risk. The Congressional Budget Office recommends that we use fair value accounting. They consider that a better methodology. They say the student loan program, as it exists under that accounting system, will cost taxpayers $88 billion over the next 10 years. As I said, the main reason is that the fair value system takes into account risk--the risk that students might not pay off some of their loans. For those who might not know about the Congressional Budget Office, we pay this group to tell us the truth. They are nonpartisan. They don't always tell us what we want to hear, and we usually try to ignore it when they don't and say, well, we heard a different point of view. But here is what they said `` . . . under the fair-value approach, estimates are based on market values--market prices when those prices are available or approximations of market prices when directly comparable figures are unavailable--which more fully account for the cost of the risk the government takes on. In particular, the fair-value approach accounts for the cost of the market risk,'' which the other accounting method we currently use does not. The Congressional Budget Office continues in a May 2014 report: The government is exposed to market risk when the economy is weak because borrowers default on their debt obligations more frequently and recoveries from borrowers are lower. That makes sense. When the government extends credit, the associated market risk of those obligations is effectively passed along to taxpayers, who, as investors, would view that risk as having a cost. Therefore, the fair-value approach offers a much more comprehensive estimate of Federal costs. Last year, when the President worked in a bipartisan way with Senators and with the Republican House, we came to a conclusion that didn't raise taxes, that didn't raise the debt, and that still cut rates nearly in half for undergraduates. Finally, the Senate Democratic proposal is unfair to future generations because it could add as much as $420 billion to an already out-of-control national debt. It does this by allowing private loans to be turned into public loans--private debt becomes the government's debt. Recently, as I said, the Congressional Budget Office warned that interest on the debt in the next 10 years will rise from $227 billion to $876 billion, an amount greater than the entire cost of our Nation's national defense. So this $1-a-day subsidy does not justify this unfairness to other students, to taxpayers, and to future generations. Let me conclude by talking about the real problem and the real solutions with student loans. Today the President held a press conference in which he proposed issuing a regulation by Executive order that would extend an income based repayment plan to millions more students. We have some questions about this. We don't know what it will cost and apparently neither does he. We know it doesn't take effect for another year or so because it will take some time to figure it out. I have had a hard time figuring out, reading the law, where the President has the authority to do this. It is based upon the health care law in 2010 which included provisions about student loans and included an income based repayment plan that affects loans issued after July 1, 2014. But the President, both with the Executive order today and his 2011 Executive order on the same subject, includes loans issued before July 1, 2014. So we don't know the cost and it has questionable authority. So here we have a press conference at the White House and a political stunt on the Senate floor dealing with loans. We know better than that. The President knows he could sit down with those of us in the Senate who are working on student loans--and in the House--and say: Here, I have some ideas about income based repayment. We would say: Mr. President, No. 1, we respect what you did last year and would like to work with you again; and, No. 2, you are on the right subject. There are two big problems--real problems--with student loans. One is the complexity of the income based repayment plans. The truth is the Obama administration itself is guilty of causing most of the complexity because the first income based repayment plan was created by law in 2007 and then it was amended in 2010 and then the President issued a regulation expanding the program in 2011 and now there is another regulation to do the same. Basically, it started out that if a student has a student loan to pay back but they are not making much money, then they don't have to pay more than 15 percent of their discretionary income. That is not even total income; it is just part of a person's income. If they can't pay it off over 25 years, the government will forgive it. What the bill did in 2010 was lower the amount to 10 percent of income for borrowers, and if the loan isn't paid off in 20 years, the government will forgive it. Income based repayment plans are available today for students. Let's talk about what is already on the books, even if the President's Order today doesn't go into effect for students. For students who want lower monthly payments on their student loans, there are already provisions in Federal law that allow the typical undergraduate borrower to lower his or her payment by $60 more per month than the $1-a-day plan from Senate Democrats. For the typical graduate student, the existing repayment plans could lower monthly payments by $300 a month more than the Senate Democratic plan. Under current law, as I said, if the loan isn't paid off in 20 or 25 years, the government forgives it. So here is what we have in America today. There are $100 billion in student loans every year, $33 billion in Federal grants, all going out to students at a very low rate. Most of the students don't have any credit history, and they don't need it to get the money. We hear a lot of talk about the expense of a college education, and at some colleges it is very expensive. When I went to school, I had two or three jobs and a couple of scholarships. That is how I was able to go to Vanderbilt University. But for students today who want a less expensive college education, it is important for them to know that the average cost of tuition and fees at a 2-year public college--and there are some excellent ones all over our country--is $3,200. The average cost of tuition and fees at a public 4-year institution--and some of the best 4-year institutions in America are public 4-year institutions, including California, Tennessee, Hawaii, and Washington State; these are very good universities--is $8,900. Three out of four college students go to 2-year public colleges where the tuition and fees is $3,200 or to a 4-year public college where tuition and fees is just under $9,000. In addition, 40 percent of those same students--the three out of four who go to public colleges and universities--40 percent of them have a grant which they don't have to pay back. It is called a Pell grant, and it may be as much as $5,645. So the truth is that for millions of college students going to college today, it is free. Do the math. If a community college is $3,200 and a student gets a $5,645 Pell grant, that student has some extra money, and he or she can still get a loan if they want to and then they have even more extra money. That leads to the other real problem with student loans that we would like to work with the President on; that is, over borrowing. The first real problem is the complexity of the income based repayment plans, and we can change that. Just as we did last year with many of the new loans, we could make the income based repayment plans, working together, much simpler and make it easier for students to take advantage of. But what about overborrowing? We read in the paper about huge student loan debt. It seems as though everybody we read about has a $300,000 loan or a $150,000 loan they will never be able to pay back. I guess a few people do. But according to Mark Kantrowitz, who is a financial aid expert and has studied student debt, more than 90 percent of students who graduate with loans of more than $100,000 are graduate students. Let me say that again. If you read about a student loan that is more than $100,000, more than 90 percent of those are for graduate students. I said a moment ago that undergraduate students can earn more than $1 million more in their lifetime with their 4-year degree. Doctors, lawyers, and other graduate students can earn a lot more than that with their advanced degrees in many cases. But those graduate students with more-than-$100,000 loans are only 6 percent of all graduate students, and that is only 2 percent of all student loans. So 2 percent of all federal student loans in the country are more than $100,000. The average undergraduate loan for a 4-year degree is $27,000, and the average for all undergraduate loans, which are 85 percent of loans, is $21,000. There is some overborrowing even among undergraduates. Young people are--and maybe they are not all young--borrowing more than they can afford to pay back. In our committee, we are considering a number of proposals to deal with this for both graduate and undergraduate loans. For example, we would like to simplify the student loan program so more students can take advantage of it and take advantage of the repayment options that exist in the law today. But we need to know how much that costs the taxpayers. No. 2, we have been talking about eliminating the graduate PLUS Program that provides virtually unlimited loans to graduate students regardless of their credit history. That may be how they took out these loans we occasionally read about of $150,000, $200,000. We want to prohibit part-time students from taking out the same amount of loans that full-time students can. Let's say you are taking a half-time load at a 4-year institution and you take out a full-time loan to pay for that. That means you have some extra money for living expenses or for a car. I am not sure as a matter of national policy that money for expenses other than for education and costs associated with education should be allowed. We would like to give colleges and universities the ability to require additional counseling for students. Did you know that under current law a college is prohibited from requiring additional counseling to an entering student at Vanderbilt or the University of Tennessee who says: Give me my loan. I am entitled to it? I am 18 or 19 years old. I have no credit history, maybe not much experience with money, and the college that hands me the money is prohibited--by federal law--from requiring additional counseling. We may want to limit the amount a student can borrow. We may want to allow colleges to have a role in doing that. We may even--and this has been suggested--require higher education institutions in some instances to have skin in the game to ensure that graduate students and undergraduate students repay their loans. In other words, the higher education institution would share the risk. These are some of the ideas that are being considered today in the Senate education committee. Every Senator has a right to bring on this floor whatever she or he wants. It is up to the majority leader to decide what we focus our precious time on. I am here today to suggest that a $1-a-day subsidy for college graduates to help them pay off a $27,000 loan--which is the average loan for a 4-year college graduate, which is almost exactly the same as the average car loan--is not a worthy subject for our discussion this week when we have veterans standing in lines at clinics and appropriations bills dealing with cancer, and national military defense waiting to come to the floor. That is especially true when we have a President of the United States who has proved he can work with Congress on student debt. He did that last year. He did a good job. He was very helpful with the final result. The Republicans in the House said that, the Senate said that in a bipartisan way, and I think most students who are enjoying the benefit of that would agree with that. So we thought last year we had stopped the political stunts on student loans. We put a market price system on all new loans, at no new cost to the taxpayers, no new debt, so this would not become an election-year football; but apparently it has, at least for a week. So we are going to have to endure going on to the floor and talking about a proposal that every single Senator knows has no chance not only of getting to the House, which will not touch it, but even passing the Senate--no chance whatsoever. Why? Because over in the Senate education committee we are discussing this subject in a bipartisan way and the way we are supposed to do it. So if it comes to the floor we are ready to amend it. We have our proposals for more good jobs. College graduates do not need a $1-a-day subsidy to help pay off a $27,000 loan. They need a good, decent job, and we are ready to help them get one. With the Keystone Pipeline, with the trade authority the President wants, with lower taxes, with changes in ObamaCare, with going from a 30- to a 40-hour workweek, we have a lot of ideas about jobs. If we want to bring up taxes, which this proposal does, we have some taxes we would like to bring up as well; and that includes repealing the medical device tax, which ought to have a good, bipartisan vote here in the Senate. It has before. On education, we have our ideas too, and so do the Democrats, by the way. Some have been through the HELP committee. They have been hashed out. They are ready for the floor. There is a competing vision. Democrats want a national school board. Republicans want to reverse the trend towards a national school board. So on this bill, if we want to talk about education, I would like to have a chance to offer my amendment that says no national school board. Let's send those decisions back to State and local communities. I think there are lots of Senators on both sides of the aisle who would like to vote for that. But what I would really like to see is the President accept our invitation to work with him. That is what we would like to do. We did that last year. We produced a good result. He has put his focus in the right place. I might say respectfully, maybe he is in the right church but the wrong pew. He is talking about income based repayment plans. We think that is one of the big problems left to solve, and we will work with him to simplify and reform the various plans. But we want to make sure the government has clear legislative authority to do it, and we want to know what it costs. Then we would like to work with him on excessive overborrowing. I would suspect he would like to do that too. So why don't we do that? Why don't we send this $1-a-day proposal back to the Senate education committee--actually it never was there-- but let's send it to the Senate education committee and put it in with all the other ideas we are discussing. Let's continue our bipartisan work in the committee to see if we can this year present to the Senate a proposal for reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, and let's use this time for the veterans standing in line or the appropriations bills, which deal with so many issues and which we have not had a chance to consider for the last few years. I am disappointed with today's press conference at the White House and the political stunt that is headed toward the Senate floor. But I am hoping the President will take a look at what he did last year and feel a good deal of satisfaction about it and say: Let me sit down with those same men and women whom I worked with last year and see if we cannot do something about simplifying income based repayment so more students can take advantage of it, and dealing with excessive borrowing and some of the other issues we are working on in higher education. I think we can do that 2 years in a row, and I think the American people would appreciate it if we tried. I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am delighted to be on the floor to hear the distinguished Senator from Indiana, and former Ambassador to Germany, tell the story of Germany, which has gotten itself into what can only be described as an energy mess. He summed it up pretty well. They basically adopted the policies the President seems to be suggesting. Where did they end up? They closed their nuclear plants and they are buying their nuclear power from France. They subsidized wind and solar, and now they are buying natural gas from Russia--of all unreliable people. As a result of all this, they ended up having to build coal plants. I think I was with the Ambassador in Germany, and I said to the Economic Minister: This has produced a situation where you have nearly the highest electricity prices in the European Union. What do you tell a manufacturer when they say they want to come to Germany? The minister said: I tell them to go somewhere else. Well, somewhere else is the United States today, and we want those jobs. I thank the Senator for his experience. I come to the floor on another subject. Tomorrow we will vote on the nomination of Sylvia Matthews Burwell to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. I intend to vote yes on the nomination. Ms. Burwell has a reputation for competence, and she is going to need it. She is being asked to oversee a big mess this administration has created in health care and so far has lacked the leadership to clean up. Republicans know how to clean it up. We want to take our health care system in a different direction, and we need to be able to work with Ms. Burwell to do it. In a few minutes, I am going to spell out two things: first, what Ms. Burwell can do to avoid the mistakes of her predecessor in working with Congress and serving the American people, and second, what Republicans would like to do with our health care system. I have five items to suggest for her to work on with us. No. 1, end the secrecy. Last year I said the NSA could have learned something from Secretary Sebelius because getting information about the ObamaCare exchanges was next to impossible for Members of Congress. The administration owes the American taxpayers and their elected representatives under the Constitution information about how the administration is spending our money. We should not have to rely on anonymous news sources. No. 2, work with Congress. This administration has made at least 22 unilateral changes in the new health care law, many of which should have been made by Congress. At this rate, the President may be invited to speak at the next Republican convention for having done the most to change his own health care law. Our Founders did not want a king. Some Presidents have stepped over the line the Founders intended, but I don't think any President has gone as far as this one. He has appointed more czars than the Romanovs. He made recess appointments when the Senate was in session. He turned his Education Secretary into the chairman of the national school board. This President has swung the furthest from the kind of elected leaders our Founders envisioned, George Washington modeled, and our Constitution prescribed. Will Ms. Burwell follow the President's steps or will she seek to work within the framework of the Constitution? I hope she chooses the latter. No. 3, please don't solicit from companies you regulate. This is pretty simple, but the former Secretary solicited from companies she regulated, and she should not have. This kind of behavior should leave with her. No. 4, be a good steward of taxpayer dollars. Apparently the government is set to spend more than 1 billion Federal tax dollars in technology costs on the ObamaCare Web site. We know that nearly $\1/2\ billion was wasted on four failed State exchanges. This kind of waste makes American taxpayers furious. They earned those dollars, paid those taxes, and don't deserve to see that money flushed down the drain by Washington bureaucrats who didn't care enough to see that things were done right. No. 5, show Americans some respect. That means don't announce major policy changes in blog posts. When Congress asks if you are in trouble, don't pretend everything is fine. If Secretary Sebelius had been upfront about the Web site problems before the rollout, we might have saved Americans precious time and money. Most importantly, recognize that the majority of Americans disapprove of the new health care law and start taking a look at Republican health care proposals as a way to repair the damage done by ObamaCare. At Ms. Burwell's hearing before the Senate HELP Committee, where I am the ranking Republican, I laid out again what Republicans would do if we could--what we would like to do with our health care system. We have been saying this since 2009 when the legislation was first introduced. When I was a boy, my grandfather was a railroad engineer in Newton, KS. He drove a big steam locomotive. He would drive a switch engine into a roundhouse and onto a turntable. It might have been headed to Santa Fe, and then he would turn it around and head it off to another direction, maybe to Denver or Houston. It is hard to turn a big train, so that is what they had the turntables for. Ms. Burwell understands this. She is from a railroad town in West Virginia, as it turns out, and that is what Republicans would like to do with our health care system, we would like to turn it around and head it off in a different direction--not back but in a different direction. We want to repair the damage ObamaCare has done, and we want to prevent future damage as responsibly and rapidly as we can. We would like to move in a different direction to put in place health care proposals that would increase freedom, increase choices, and lower costs. We trust Americans to make those decisions themselves, and we believe that is the American way. Four years ago Congress and the President made what we believe was an historic mistake. Congress passed a 2,700-page bill. Republicans said we don't believe in trying to rewrite the whole health care system. Let's instead go step by step to create more freedom, more choices, and lower costs. Let me take you back for a moment to the health care summit at the Blair House 4 years ago. The President invited three dozen Members of Congress. He spent 6 hours with us, all on national television. I was asked to speak first for the Republicans. I said what I thought was wrong with the President's plan. I said it would increase health care costs, and it has. USA Today reported that health care spending in the first quarter of this year rose at the fastest pace in 35 years. The Hill newspaper reported that insurance executives say premiums in the new exchanges will double or triple in parts of the country the next year. Even with subsidies, many Americans are finding that deductibles, copayments, and out-of-pocket expenses are so high they can't afford health insurance. We said people would lose their choice of doctors, and many have. We said ObamaCare would cancel policies, and it has. At least 2.6 million Americans have had their individual plans outlawed by ObamaCare. I remember that Emilie from Lawrenceburg, TN, had a $52-a-month policy. She has lupus, and her policy fit her needs and her budget. It was canceled. Now she is in the exchange, and it costs about $400 a month. She says it is more coverage than she needs and she can't afford it. Millions more Americans who get their health care through small businesses will find the same thing will happen to them later this year. We said jobs would be lost, and they have. The President of Costa Rica is hosting jobs fairs and welcoming medical device companies that have been driven out of the United States by the onerous 2.3-percent tax on revenues. We said Medicare beneficiaries would be hurt, and they have. The average cut for a Medicare Advantage beneficiary will be $317 between this year and next. We said the only bipartisan thing about the bill would be opposition to it, and it is. A recent Gallup poll says that 54 percent of Americans are opposed to the law. During the debate, I said every Senator who voted for the new health care law ought to be sentenced to go home and serve as Governor in their home State and try to implement it. There are 16 Governors struggling with that today who won't implement the Medicaid expansion because they are worried about costs down the road, and they should. When I was Governor of Tennessee, Medicaid costs were 8 percent of the State budget, and that was in the 1980s. Today it is about 30 percent. These Governors are wondering what costs will be in 10 years. The most important thing we said was what we would do if we could. We said: Let's go step by step in a different direction. Our Democratic friends said: Wait a minute, that is not a comprehensive plan. We said: You are right; we don't believe in comprehensive. If you are expecting Mitch McConnell to wheel in a wheelbarrow with a 2,700-page Republican health care bill on it, you will wait until the Moon turns blue because we are policy skeptics. We don't believe we are wise enough to write a 2,700-page bill that will change the whole system, but we believe we can go step by step in the right direction, and we outlined our steps. Senator Johnson has a proposal that would allow more Americans to keep their insurance plans, as the President promised. Senator McCain has a proposal that allows you to buy insurance in another State if it fits your budget and your needs. Senator Enzi has a proposal for a small business employer so that he or she can combine purchasing power with other employers and offer employees lower cost insurance. Senators Burr, Coburn, and Hatch have a proposal to allow to you buy a major medical plan to ensure you against a catastrophe and a health savings account to pay for everyday expenses. I have a proposal to make it easier, not harder, for employers to reward employees who live a healthy lifestyle. That is what we mean by doing what my grandfather did with that train and turning it around and heading it off in a different and correct direction. As rapidly and responsibly as we can, we would like to repair the damage ObamaCare has done. We would like to prevent future damage. We want to move in a different direction that provides more freedom, more choices, and lower costs. We trust Americans to make decisions for themselves. That is the American way. Since President Obama will still be in office for the next 2 years, if Ms. Burwell is confirmed, as I fully expect she will be by a good vote, we will need her help to accomplish that. I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, the question is not whether but how best to make early childhood education available to the largest number of children. The approach that I am offering is quite different than the Democratic proposal. Last year this time around, the Senate HELP Committee held a markup on another bill which was the Senate Democrats' proposal to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. I said then that over the last decade, the combination of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Obama administration's use of waivers has created a congestion of Federal mandates and rules that amount, in effect, to a national school board for elementary and secondary education. The proposal that the HELP committee approved last year on a partisan vote would have ``doubled down'' on those mandates by setting performance standards, giving the Secretary of Education the authority to tell 100,000 public schools what their standards and tests should look like, how to measure their students' progress, and how to evaluate their teachers. And I said, then too, that if we wanted anyone to serve as chairman of the national school board, Arne Duncan would be a terrific one but Congress has said repeatedly that we don't want a national school board. Unfortunately, the bill that Senate Democrats are proposing today has a familiar ring to it. It would, in effect, create a national school board for 3- and 4-year-olds. It would spend $27 billion in new funding over 5 years with Washington making the decisions about how States should run their preschool programs. For example, it includes a lot of requirements for States that I don't think the Federal Government has ever even attempted with elementary and secondary education, such as: determining teacher salaries--that all preschool teachers be paid at a rate that is comparable to K-12 school teachers; class sizes, student-teacher ratios--class sizes can't be larger than 20 children, the ratio of students to teachers may be no higher than 10 to 1; length of the school day--a minimum of 5 hours or as long as a typical day in the K-12 system. Never before, not even in No Child Left Behind, has the Federal Government told school districts in Maryville or Murfreesboro or Memphis how to run their schools in such detail. The bill also includes requirements that sound a lot like what hasn't worked so well under No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and waivers, such as: that States must ensure that preschool teachers have a bachelor's degree in early childhood education--sounds a lot like the Highly Qualified Teacher provision; that States must establish early learning and development standards and age appropriate standardized tests aligned to the State's academic standards under No Child Left Behind, which for more than 40 States now means Common Core. Furthermore, that these standards, curriculum, and tests must be: developmentally-appropriate; culturally and linguistically appropriate; address all domains of school readiness, including physical well-being, et cetera. Then there are an assortment of vague requirements on States, which will depend on the Department of Education issuing hundreds of pages of regulations and guidance of histories to define and implement, such things as: vision, dental, and health services; mandatory family engagement such as parent conferences; nutritious meals and snack options--what they consist of; physical activity programs that are evidence-based according to guidelines; evidence-based health and safety standards; regular classroom observations and coaching for teachers. Finally, the bill also includes new maintenance of effort standards. We know what happened with those in Medicaid, during the last 5 or 6 years. As State economies tumbled, States were forced to continue to spend more on Medicaid by maintenance of effort requirements. And that resulted in less money for higher education and driving up tuition rates. Washington would pay 90 percent of the program's cost for the first year for the Democratic proposal, but the required share of State spending will increase each year, eventually half the bill to Governors after 8 years. And that also has a familiar ring. Sounds a lot like Medicaid, where the State average is about 43 percent and most of the rules are Federal, even though the States pay nearly half. What has happened with that model? Well, when I was Governor in the 1980s in Tennessee, Medicaid was 8 percent of the State budget. Today it's 30 percent of the State budget. Americans don't want a national school board. We'd like to move in a different direction. I'd like to take, as an example of why we should, the testimony of a witness at a HELP Committee hearing on this issue. Superintendent John White of Louisiana testified that the ``greatest barrier to achieving these conditions that we want in early childhood education--no less than financial resources themselves--is the fragmentation of our country's early childhood education system.'' He went on to say: ``You can't claim to be providing full access and full choice when you have separate centers, separate funding streams, separate sets of regulations that literally require no coordination in the offering of seats, even within the same neighborhood.'' That's the situation in Louisiana, and the Government Accountability Office says it's true around the country. Forty-five different programs support early education and child care. Thirty-three of those permit the use of funds to provide support or related services to children from birth through 5. Twelve programs have the explicit purpose to provide childhood and preschool or child care services. Then there are 5 tax provisions that subsidize private expenditures in the area of early childhood and preschool programs. This year, Congress appropriated roughly $15 billion for the 12 programs explicitly focused on early childhood, Head Start, Race to the Top, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the Child Care and Development Block Grant. And then there's another $3 billion in tax credits. An earlier witness before our committee estimated that when you add up the 33 programs, the total Federal spending in this area is now about $22 billion. So, we believe a better way to give all children the best early learning experience is to provide States with the flexibility to use some or all of the more than $22 billion in Federal money that we already spend and allow States to use it in the way that best suits their needs. Under my proposal, Superintendent White would be able to take Louisiana's share of the $22 billion that the Federal Government spends on early childhood and preschool programs--about $300 million--and do just that. In Tennessee, we'd have about $440 million a year. If we were given this kind of flexibility, we could increase the vouchers for child care from 39,000 to 139,000; or the State-funded voluntary preschool program, from 18,000 4-year-olds to 109,000. Or we could expand Head Start, from 17,000 children to 56,000 or some combination of that. We could create Centers of Excellence and otherwise leave to Tennessee to figure out what works best for Tennesseans. So, the question is not whether, but how best to make early childhood education available to the largest possible number of children. The answer to that question is to not create a national school board for 3- and 4-year-olds to go along with the one we've effectively established for K-12 education. That is why I opposed the Democratic proposal and instead offered a proposal to enable States to take responsibility for developing the early learning systems that best meet their needs and to use up to $22 billion of existing federal dollars to help fund that.