Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, this week the Senate is voting on five of the President's nominations for membership on the National Labor Relations Board. I expect all five to receive up-or-down votes, as they generally do, and I expect all five to be confirmed. The Board will then have a full complement, with a Democratic majority of three and two Republican members. I would like to review for a moment what has happened and how we got to this spot because it is an important moment in the history of our ability as a country to maintain the checks and balances and certain separations of power among the various branches of government and especially to restrain the Executive, which has been an important part of our country's history. In January 2012 the President nominated two individuals to be members of the National Labor Relations Board using his recess-appointment power. He has that power in the Constitution. The only problem was that the Senate wasn't in recess--at least that was our view. The Senate was in a 3-day pro forma session. A 3-day pro forma session is a device that was employed by Senator Reid, the distinguished majority leader, when Bush was President, and he did it to keep President Bush from using his recess-appointment power when the Senate was in recess. Most of our Presidents have chafed under the restraints we have placed upon our Executive. President Bush didn't like that, but he respected it, and President Bush never made recess appointments while the Senate was in session. But President Obama did--on January 4, 2012. Senate Republicans objected strongly to that. After a great deal of discussion, we decided to support a lawsuit challenging the appointments. That lawsuit went before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with our position and said in effect that the President could not make a recess appointment when the Senate itself had determined it was in session. Since then there have been two other decisions by other federal courts of appeals that have said what the President did on January 4, 2012, was unconstitutional. The case will come before the Supreme Court this next term. No one knows what decision the Supreme Court will make, but my sense would be that the Supreme Court will say to this President or to any President that, Mr. President, you can't use your constitutional power to make a recess appointment at a time when the Senate is not in recess. I said earlier that Presidents have chafed under these restraints on the executive branch. That has been true ever since the days of George Washington. George Washington imposed his own modesty and restraint upon the American character when he resigned his commission after the Revolutionary War, when he stepped down after two terms as President and went back to Mount Vernon, when he asked to be called Mr. President instead of Your Excellency. Ever since then we have had many strong Presidents. They haven't all liked the idea that Washington also helped write a constitution that created a congress and a bill of rights, and the whole purpose of that was to restrain the Executive. After all, our revolution was against a king, and most of our Founders--not all of them, but the majority of the drafters of the Constitution didn't want a king of the United States, they wanted a president of the United States. One of the most important checks upon the power of the Executive is the Senate's power to advise and consent, the power to review. About 1,000 Presidential nominations come to us, and it takes a while to confirm them. Sometimes it takes longer than the nominees think it should. I have repeated many times on this floor that when the first President Bush nominated me to be Education Secretary and the Senator from Ohio held up my nomination for 3 months, I didn't think that was such a good idea, but the Senate had the power to do it because the Constitution restrains the Executive. Unfortunately, this President didn't seem to read that chapter in American history because we have seen during this President's time repeated efforts to circumvent the constitutional checks on the Executive. This administration has appointed more czars than the Romanovs had. That is the way you get around the nomination process. This administration's excellent Education Secretary has used a simple waiver authority in effect to create a national school board. When Congress says we don't want to appropriate money to implement ObamaCare, the Health and Human Services Secretary says: Well, if Congress won't do it, I will do it anyway; I will just go out and raise private money and do it. Then we have recess appointments being made when the Senate is not in recess. That is unconstitutional. If that could happen, the Senate could adjourn for lunch and come back and we would have a new Supreme Court Justice because the President said we were in recess. So what is happening this week with these National Labor Relations Board nominees has a special significance in our constitutional history because not only did Republicans support a lawsuit challenging the appointments, which we are winning and the case has been won in two other Federal courts--but the President, after much discussion, has withdrawn his two unconstitutionally appointed nominees. I suggested that he do this in May when we had a markup of the five nominees the President sent. I voted for three--the Democratic Chairman and the two Republicans--and I voted against the two who were unconstitutionally appointed. They were well-qualified people. That wasn't the issue. The issue was that the Senate needed a way to express its objection to this unconstitutional action by the Executive. I suggested that what the President should do is withdraw those two nominees and send us two new ones in the normal process--people who had not stayed on after a Federal court decided they were unconstitutionally there. These two unconstitutionally appointed nominees have participated in more than 1,000 cases. These cases are all subject to being vacated because there was no constitutional quorum. It leaves quite a mess in our labor laws. But the President withdrew those two and now we are, this week, doing what the Senate normally does. We are considering in the normal process his new nominees. I am voting, as I said, for the two Republicans and the Chairman. The Chairman was not unconstitutionally appointed. He did not continue to serve as an unconstitutionally appointed person, since he was not so appointed, so I voted for him in committee. I do not agree with the Chairman and his view of labor laws, but I will have to take that up during the next election. Elections have consequences, and when we elect the President of the United States, he normally appoints people who agree with him. I am also voting for having an up-or-down vote. We almost always do that with the President's nominees. There have only been a few times in our history when we have not. We have never failed to have an up-or- down vote on a Supreme Court Justice after they have come to the floor. We have never failed to have an up-or-down vote on a district court judge after they have come to the floor; the same in terms of circuit courts. We never did, until Democrats started filibustering President Bush's judges about 10 years ago when I came to the Senate. We all know that story. But normally we have an up-or-down vote, and we will be doing that this week on the President's five nominees. I am voting against two of the nominees when that up-or-down vote comes, and I wish to explain why. One is Mr. Hirozawa and the other is Ms. Schiffer. Both of them have excellent legal backgrounds. But the problem is I am not persuaded--I hope I will be proven wrong--that they will be able to transfer their positions of advocacy to positions of adjudication; that they can be impartial when employers come before them. Employers as well as employees have a right, when they come before the National Labor Relations Board, to expect that all five members, whether Republicans or Democrats, from whatever background they might have, will look at the case and decide it in an impartial way. It may be possible that Mr. Hirozawa and Ms. Schiffer can do that, but I am not persuaded that is true, and so while I am voting that they have up- or-down votes, I am not voting for them. The President has nominated for the Board three different individuals who were employed directly by major labor unions. The first was Craig Becker, who was counsel for two unions, and whose nomination was rejected by a bipartisan vote in 2010. The second was Mr. Griffin. The third is Ms. Schiffer. I asked Ms. Schiffer at her hearing if she could remember other examples of an administration stocking the National Labor Relations Board with organized labor employees and she could not think of examples and I could not either. Over the last several years, the National Labor Relations Board seems to have veered away from impartiality. Instead of preserving a level playing field and protecting the carefully balanced rights of all parties, it has shown favoritism toward organized labor leadership and very little interest in the rights of individual employers or individual employees who want to exercise their rights not to join a union. In fairness, I have to admit this politicization of the National Labor Relations Board has occurred both under Republican and Democratic administrations, but I think appointing a person directly from a high level job within a major labor union is not an example of trying to move away from that trend. The trend is causing confusion. One labor law professor at a nationally recognized law school recently said she cannot even use her labor law textbook anymore. She has to resort to handing out NLRB decisions to explain the law because they are changing it so much. The NLRB has ventured into rulemaking with two new efforts, both of which have been stalled by the Federal courts. In August 2011, the Board issued a new rule requiring employers to post a biased employee rights poster in the workplace and making it an unfair labor practice to fail to do so. Two separate Federal courts have struck down the rule because it exceeded statutory authority. In December 2011, the Board issued a new rule shortening the time in which a union election is held, otherwise known as the ambush elections rule. The DC Circuit Court struck down this rule on the grounds it lacked a quorum, and the NLRB is appealing the decision. So far, this administration's NLRB has sought to change the rules for determining bargaining units, the process for certifying a representation election, the legal obligation of employers to withhold dues from employees' paychecks, even when there is no valid collective bargaining agreement in place, the validity of arbitration provisions in employment contracts, the legality of numerous well-intentioned employee handbook provisions, the rules governing employee discipline when there is no valid collective bargaining agreement in place, the rules governing the confidentiality of employee witness statements given during a legitimate investigation, the policy against forcing nonunion member employees to pay for union lobbying expenses, the rules governing employers' rights to limit access to their property, and attempting to create an entirely new employer obligation and unfair labor practice through the poster requirement struck down by multiple Federal appellate courts. The effect of all of these changes seems to me to tilt the playing field in favor of organized labor instead of impartiality, which is the directive of the statute. So fairness and impartiality is what I am looking for in any NLRB nominee. These two nominees do not pass this test. That is why I plan to oppose their nominations. But the most important message from this week's debate is this: The Senate is saying, not just to this President but to any President, Republican and Democrat, that you may not abuse your constitutional power of recess appointments by making appointments when the Senate itself determines it is not in recess. To do so is an affront to the separation of powers. It undermines checks and balances that were placed upon the Executive at the beginning of our country as a way of preserving our liberties. That is an important step in the history of constitutional law in this country, and I am glad to see it has been done in this way. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the privilege of the floor be granted to the following member of my staff: Chris Jacob.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent that after I speak for about 10 minutes, the Senator from California be recognized for up to 30 minutes, and following her, the Senator from Oregon be recognized, Mr. Merkley.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I think the Senator from Maine, the Independent Senator from Maine, probably said it best when he observed on the floor and in private conversation that if you took four or five of us and said forget that you are elected to public office, here is a problem to be solved, we would have come up with something similar to the solution that the President, the House of Representatives, and the bipartisan proposal on the floor today. This is a very good solution on a very big problem that affects millions of families and about 9 million undergraduate students who are headed to college this year. The bipartisan proposal makes it cheaper, simpler, and fairer for students going to college. It makes their loans more certain, because it locks in a rate for the life of the loan. It ends the political football game which we play every other year, it seems, on student interest rates and solves the problem permanently. It is based upon an idea recommended by President Obama, passed by the House of Representatives, and endorsed by the bipartisan group that has been working on it. I wish all of the major problems that came before us could be solved in this way. As far as cost goes, it is a big difference. Two-thirds of all federal loans are undergraduate loans. There are about 11 million borrowers who will take out about 18 million loans, because students take out more than one loan. For all of the undergraduate loans, about two-thirds of the loans, the rate of the loan will be cut about in half, which means if you get a loan this year at a 3.86-percent rate, that is the rate that is locked in for the entire life of the loan. It is simpler and fairer because there is a single rate for all undergraduates. Before, we had one rate for a subsidized loan and another rate for the unsubsidized loan. That is confusing. It was unfair, because 80 percent of the lower income students who had the subsidized loan also had an unsubsidized loan. So now everybody who shows up at the University of Tennessee and borrows money, if they are undergraduates, all of their loans will have the same rate. It is fair to taxpayers because we asked the Congressional Budget Office to comment on what it costs the government to borrow the money and administer the loan, take into account the cost, and try to come as close to zero as possible to the cost of issuing loans for the taxpayers. They have done that. It is fair to students because we also asked the Congressional Budget Office to do the same thing for students. They said, we are loaning more than $100 billion a year over $1 trillion over 10 years, so help us find a formula that comes as close to zero as practical so we do not overcharge students and make money on the backs of students. They came within seven-tenths of 1 percent in their estimates, which is only an estimate, and for all practical purposes that is a rounding error. That is a good-faith effort to get to zero in terms of fairness to the taxpayers and students. But I would want to say to those who suggest it is not fair to students, let's keep in mind a few things. First, thanks to Senator Harkin and many of the Democratic Members of the Senate, there are caps on the loans. So if rates go up too high, there is a limit on how high they can go. Second, there is, as has been mentioned, the income repayment plan which means that under the existing law today, if you take out a student loan and then you get a job, you only have to pay back about 10 percent of your disposable income. That is not all of your income, that is after you subtract your living expenses and your taxes, about 10 percent of what is left. If that is not enough, after paying it back over 10 or 20 years, depending on whether you have a public or private sector job, the government forgives it. So there is that cap on there as well. Then there is the interest subsidy. About 40 percent of the loans are subsidized for lower income students, which means the government, the taxpayer, pays the interest while you are in college. So if you are a low-income student at the University of Tennessee, you take out a loan, the government will pay your interest the whole time you are in college. Then there is the Pell grant. We spend about $35 billion a year of taxpayer money on Pell grants which go to low-income students. So a student at the University of Tennessee may have a Pell grant of up to about $5,500 or so. They might have a Hope scholarship in the State another $3,000. The tuition at the University of Tennessee is about $8,000 or $9,000. At the community college it is about $3,000 or $4,000. So you can see there is relatively a lot of financial aid out there before students borrow these low-rate student loans that taxpayers are making available to 9 million students at a rate of 3.86 percent for undergraduates. Then there is one other aspect in which this is favorable to students; that is, the accounting system that we use. I have heard some say the government is making money on the backs of students. Let me try to put that in the simplest form I can. All we are doing with the proposal today is resetting the rates, a very simple bill with a few pages. It is on top of a student loan system with a lot of cash going in and out of it, $100 billion going out this year in new loans, maybe about as much coming back in, being repaid from old loans. There are two ways of accounting for that cash back and forth to determine whether it benefits the taxpayers or whether it benefits the students. Under the law, we have something called the Federal Credit Reform Act, which says the taxpayers are benefiting to the tune of about $185 billion over 10 years. That is correct. That is exactly what it says. Not from what we are voting on today but for the underlying system that already exists. But the Congressional Budget Office has said that is not the way they recommend measuring how we count the cost to the government of loaning money. To be specific, the Congressional Budget Office says the Federal Credit Reform Act estimates do not provide a comprehensive measure of what Federal programs actually cost the government, because they do not take into consideration the market risk. CBO says that adopting a fair value approach would provide a more comprehensive way to measure the cost to the Federal credit programs and would permit more level comparisons between those costs and the costs of other forms of Federal assistance. The Congressional Budget Office says: We already use that fair value approach, which includes taking into account the market risk with such things as the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the bailouts, as we called them in 2008. CBO uses those with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In other words, the nonpartisan group we rely on to advise us about money says that if we actually use the right accounting tools, the current student loan system benefits students to the tune of about $95 billion over the next 10 years, not taxpayers. So there is another benefit to students. It is not true that under the recommended form of evaluating the cost to the government that taxpayers come out better than students. One other thing I would like to say--or two other things. One is, I would like to compliment those who have worked on this. My colleague Senator Harkin, who is chairman of the Education Committee here in the Senate, argued forcefully for caps. I congratulate the President for including this idea in the budget and forcefully supporting it. I congratulate the House of Representatives. I suppose it is not lost on anyone the Senate is run by Democrats and the House is run by Republicans. This is a bipartisan proposal. I like the sound of that. I think that shows we can get results done when we keep our eye on the ball. I especially compliment Senator Burr, Senator Coburn, Senator Manchin, Senator King, and Senator Carper for working carefully on this, and Senator Durbin for his leadership in putting this together. As most speakers have said, it is true that we have a larger question before us. Do we need to make some changes in student loans? It is a lot of money--$100 billion a year. That is a lot of money. We need to make sure that it is available in the right way and that students aren't borrowing too much. Right now, if you are 20-year-old and you show up at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and you want $5,500, you get it. The university can't say to you: I am sorry, Lamar, we don't think given your circumstances you are going to be able to pay that back in 10 years. I can say: Give me my money. This is what the law says. Maybe we need to take a look at that and we need to be careful about our facts. The Federal Reserve, for example, says that 70 percent of borrowers with student loans today--we are in the year 2012, in the fourth quarter--have a balance of less than $25,000. Seventy percent of all student loans at the end of last year had a balance of less than $25,000. Forty percent had a balance of less than $10,000. The trend is going in the wrong direction. Some students are borrowing too much money. But the average undergraduate loan debt is about $25,000--that is the average debt--and the undergraduate student can't really borrow more than $31,000, and that is two-thirds of the loans. So while there may be some problems with the student loan program-- and I, for one, think some students borrow more than they should--we have 6,000 institutions out there, from the Nashville Diesel College, to Harvard, to Notre Dame, to the University of Tennessee, and we need to be careful that we understand exactly what the problem is, that we focus in on it, we don't apply a lot of mandates from Washington, and that we work with the colleges and universities. We need to find those universities, such as Tennessee Tech University, where they have a very low level of student loans and others where they may have loan rates that are too high. We need to make sure students don't saddle themselves with too much debt. But when we have a 20-year-old in Knoxville showing up who is entitled to $5,500 in loans for a community college tuition that only costs $3,000 and he or she can put the other $2,500 in his or her pocket and the community college can't say no, well, that is one of the reasons many community colleges have gotten out of the loan business-- because they think that is wrong for the student. If this is the case, then we in the Senate ought to look at that. Senator Harkin and I are committed to looking at student loans in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. For today, if the Senate does what I hope it does, this will be a victory for students. It makes loans cheaper, simpler, fairer, and more certain. It stops this annual business of political football with the student interest rates. It gives students a low interest rate that they can lock in over time and a cap at the top so that if rates spiral through the roof, student loans won't spiral through the roof. It is done in the context of a larger system that includes Pell grants and interest subsidies for low-income students. If it were based upon an accounting system that is recommended by the Congressional Budget Office, it would tilt the whole program to the advantage of students to the tune of an additional $95 billion over the next 10 years. I congratulate all those who have worked on it, from the bipartisan sponsors, to the Republican leadership in the House, to the Democratic President of the United States. I hope that we adopt it by a big vote and that the 9 million students going to college this fall will have the advantage of planning their long-term futures with the lowest possible interest rate on 18 million student loans. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, later today we will vote in the Senate on the question concerning whether the President's nomination of Thomas Perez to be the Secretary of Labor should be confirmed. I will vote no. I will vote against the confirmation of Mr. Perez. I do not believe he is the right man for this job. The Secretary of Labor has immense influence over the lives of workers and the conduct of business in today's economy. Employees, employers, and unions must be able to trust the Secretary to faithfully and impartially execute our Nation's labor laws. At a time when the official unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent-- meaning millions of Americans are looking for work and can't find it-- and at a time when there is a growing gap between our workers' skills and our employers' needs, we need serious leadership on labor policy. We need someone who understands how to create an environment in which the largest number of Americans can find good new jobs. We need leadership that is committed to working in the best interests of the country. Unfortunately, I don't believe Mr. Perez meets that standard. Mr. Perez's life story is one with many worthy accomplishments in public service, a devotion to representing disadvantaged individuals, and I commend him for that. But he has demonstrated throughout his career that he is willing to, in his words, push the envelope to advance his ideology. I believe there are three significant problems with the nomination of Mr. Perez: No. 1, in my view, his record raises troubling questions about his actions while at the Department of Justice and his candor in discussing his actions with this committee. The Department of Justice inspector general recently published a detailed report that discussed problems in the voting rights section. It talked about a politically charged atmosphere of polarization. Mr. Perez has administered that section since 2009. The report talked about the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and about blatantly partisan political commentary. It specifically criticized the management of the Department and Mr. Perez's actions while at the Department. When questioned by members of our Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Mr. Perez's answers were vague and nonresponsive. No. 2, to preserve a favorite legal theory, Mr. Perez orchestrated a quid pro quo arrangement between the Department of Justice and the City of St. Paul in which the Department agreed to drop two cases in exchange for the city withdrawing a case, the Manger case, before the Supreme Court. Mr. Perez's involvement in this whole deal seems to me to be an extraordinary amount of wheeling and dealing outside what should be the normal responsibilities of the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. To obtain his desired results, Mr. Perez reached outside of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice into the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office and into the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This exchange cost American taxpayers the opportunity to potentially recover millions of dollars and, more importantly, violated the trust whistleblowers place in the Federal Government. His testimony has been contradicted by the testimony of other witnesses in contemporaneous documents. In short, it seems to me that Mr. Perez did not discharge the duty he owed to the government to try to collect money owed to taxpayers. He did not discharge the duty to protect the whistleblowers, who were left hanging in the wind. At the same time, he was manipulating the legal process to remove a case from the Supreme Court in a way that is inappropriate for the Assistant Attorney General of the United States. No. 3, Mr. Perez's use of private e-mail accounts to leak nonpublic information is troubling to me. Federal officials in this administration seem to have a penchant for using private e-mails to conduct official business. The Federal Records Act is designed to ensure that the government is held accountable to the American people to prevent the opportunity for a shadow government to operate outside of the normal channels of oversight. Using personal e-mails robs the Nation of the ability to know if the government is behaving appropriately. Since Mr. Perez apparently is going to be confirmed despite my vote, I hope he will pledge to stop using personal e-mails to conduct official business. For these three reasons, I cannot support the Perez confirmation. I will support and have supported the President's right to have an up-or- down vote on his Cabinet members. I always have. So I voted for cloture. But what we have seen over the last several weeks--and I believe the reason the Senate did not come to a screeching halt this week--is that there is a widespread misunderstanding about what Senate Republicans have done with respect to President Obama's nominees for his Cabinet. The reality is that Republicans have respected the right of the President to staff his Cabinet. In fact, never in our Nation's history has the Senate blocked a Cabinet official from confirmation by a filibuster. Let me say that again. The number of Presidential nominees for Cabinet in our Nation's history who have been denied his or her seat by a filibuster, by a failed cloture vote, is zero. The Washington Post and the Congressional Research Service have said that President Obama's Cabinet appointees in his second term are moving through the Senate at about the same rate as President George W. Bush's and President Clinton's. Senators on both sides of the aisle have a long history of using the constitutional authority for advice and consent to ask questions. We have done that in the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions concerning Mr. Perez for the last 122 days. We have a historical right--and we have exercised it in a bipartisan way--to use our right to ask for 60 votes in order to advance our views. That is a part of the character of the Senate. But it is important to know that these fairy tales that have been suggested about Republicans somehow blocking President Obama's nominees are just that. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the end of my remarks an op-ed I wrote for the Washington Times yesterday supporting my remarks. The op-ed points out that most of this week's nuclear option debate about whether Senators should be permitted to filibuster Presidential nominees was not about filibusters, it was instead about whether a majority of Senators should be able to change the rules of the Senate at any time for any purpose. Former Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan once offered the precise trouble with this idea. He said: If a majority of the Senate can change the rules at any time, the Senate has no rules. In other words, all of this fuss was a power grab. In fact, most of the filibustering that has been done to deny Presidents confirmation of their nominees has been done by our friends on the other side. As I mentioned earlier, the number of Cabinet members who have been denied their seats by a filibuster is zero. The number of district judges in the history of the country who have been denied their seats by a filibuster is zero. The number of Supreme Court Justices who have been denied their seats by a filibuster is zero. There was the incident in 1968 when President Johnson engineered an opportunity for Abe Fortas to get a 45-to-43 vote so he could feel better about staying on the Court after a majority of the Senate clearly wasn't going to confirm him for the Supreme Court. But throughout our history, the right to advise and consent has been exercised by a majority vote even in the most controversial cases. The vote on Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court was a majority vote. The vote denying Robert Bork an opportunity to go to the Supreme Court was a majority vote. While there never has been a Supreme Court nominee blocked by a filibuster, about a quarter of all of the Supreme Court nominees have been withdrawn or blocked by majority vote. So elections have consequences, and I respect that whether it is a Republican or a Democratic President. Our tradition was that nominees were not denied their seat by a failed cloture vote. Other than Fortas, the only exception is that in 2003, about the time I came to the Senate, the Democrats, for the first time in history--the first time in history--filibustered 10 of President George W. Bush's nominees. That produced Republicans who wanted to change the rules of the Senate, and fortunately cooler heads prevailed. But five Republican judges--very meritorious people, such as Miguel Estrada; a real tragedy--were denied their seats by a filibuster. So the usual and expected happened. Republicans have since denied two Democratic seats by a filibuster. So my preference is much that Presidents have the opportunity to appoint their Cabinet members, to appoint their Supreme Court Justices, and if we don't like them, we can vote against them. There have been occasions where sub-Cabinet members have been denied their seats. The total number is seven, all since 1994, and there may be more again. A simple objection by Republicans to the motion of the majority leader to cut off debate may simply mean we want more information. In the case of Senator Hagel, the majority leader sought to cut off debate 2 days after his nomination came to the floor, and we voted no. We were not ready to cut off debate. Then, 10 days later, we voted to confirm Senator Hagel. I am glad that this week the Senate regained its equilibrium, so to speak, and stopped this talk of creating the Senate as a body where a majority of the Senate can change the rules at any time, which would make this a Senate without any rules. I hope we do not hear any more about it because that is not appropriate. It is not appropriate in this body. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Senator Reid himself, and others have said that this body is different. It is a place where you have to come to a consensus. We are coming to one, for example, on student loans today. The President made a good recommendation to solve the student loan problem on a permanent basis. The House of Representatives passed something much like the President's, and hopefully we can do that later today. So I believe the President deserves an up-or-down vote on his nomination for the Secretary of Labor and his nominee for any other Cabinet member. But in this case, for the reasons I stated, I am voting no on confirmation. I see the Senator from Georgia is here. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I will wait until the majority leader finishes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for his statement, for the time he has spent. I was looking at the Executive Calendar. But, first, I have spent most of this week working on the student loan issue, as the majority leader knows. And we are coming to an agreement, it looks like, as we have with a number of other things. But I would like to renew to the majority leader the suggestion that we all get together next week and talk this through, as the Senator from Mississippi has suggested. I think it would be a wise thing to do. There are other Senators here who wish to speak, so I will try to be succinct. Let me address just a few of the points the majority leader made. One reason I think it would be wise for us to get together as Democratic and Republican Senators is what he is saying is different from the way I read the facts, and one of us has to be wrong about that. For example, have Republicans used the filibuster to deny President Obama's nominees a position in government? The answer is a fact. I invited the Senate Historian and the Congressional Research Service over to my office. I asked them the question. Here is the answer to the question: In the history of the Senate, no Supreme Court Justice has ever been denied his or her seat by a filibuster. There was a little incident with Justice Fortas that Lyndon Johnson engineered, but that was different. So in the cases of the Supreme Court, zero. How many district judges have been denied their seat by filibuster? The answer is zero. How many Cabinet members have been denied their seat by a failed cloture vote filibuster? The answer, according to the Senate Historian and the Congressional Research Service, is zero. How many circuit judges have been denied their seat by a filibuster? The answer is seven. How did that happen? Democrats, for the first time in history, when President George W. Bush came in, blocked five. And we said: Well, if you are going to change the precedent, then we will change the precedent, so we blocked two. That is what happens around here. But other than that, it is zero. Then the majority leader said there has been some big delay about President Obama's nominees. These are not throwing statistics around. That is either true or it is not true. Here is what the Washington Post says and the Congressional Research Service says. The Washington Post, by Al Kamen, on March 18, 2013: President Obama's second-term Cabinet members are going through the Senate at a rate that ``beats the averages of the last three administrations that had second terms.'' President Obama is being better treated in terms of his Cabinet nominees than the last three Presidents. I asked the Congressional Research Service the same question. They said: As of June 27--last month--his nominees were still moving, on average, from announcement to confirmation, faster than those of President George W. Bush, faster than those of President Clinton. Someone in the Democratic caucus needs to hear this. The number of Cabinet nominees who have been denied a seat by filibuster is zero. President Obama's Cabinet nominees are moving through the Senate faster than his last three predecessors. That is important information. Now, are there a lot of nominees sitting around for too long a period of time? I have the thing we call the Executive Calendar right here. Senator McConnell referred to it. I could go through it quickly. I count 24 people on the calendar. The one who has been on there the longest was reported by committee on February 26 of this year. That is a little over 4 months ago. Let's be very elementary about this. The only way you get on this calendar is to be reported out of committee. The only way you get out of committee is for the Democratic majority to vote you on to this calendar. So we can fill this calendar up any time the Democratic committee majority wants to. Of the people here, there is a brigadier general named Long. The committee has asked that we hold that. There is Jacob Lew to the International Monetary Fund. Bring him up. Bring him up. He will be confirmed. Let's go back to that. The only way you get a name to a vote on the floor is if the majority leader brings his name to the floor. Jacob Lew has been reported from Committee since April 16. Bring him up. Here is an Air Force person. Here is Ms. McCarthy from Massachusetts. She has been reported from the committee. Bring her up. The Republican leader has said she will get cloture. That means she will be confirmed. He said the same thing about the nominee for the Department of Labor. He has been reported since May 16. Mr. President, I am not a very controversial person. I was held up for 88 days by an ill-tempered Democratic Senator, for what I thought was no good reason, relying on article II, section 2 of the Constitution's right to advise and consent. President Reagan's nominee for Attorney General Ed Meese was held up for 1 year, and nobody thought about changing the rules of the Senate because it used its constitutional authority to advise and consent. Former Senator Rudman was held up by his home State Senator until Rudman withdrew his name, and then he ran against that Senator and was elected to the Senate. The advice and consent responsibility of the Senate has gone on since the days this country was founded. If you go down through this list of people, there are only 24 on the list. He could bring them all up. And 24 is not very many. Then it reminds me that right after that are the privileged nominations. What are those? Those are the result of our rules changes which removed a number of people from Presidential confirmation and created a whole new category for several hundred executive positions so they do not go through a more cumbersome process, and that is working very well. So zero filibusters denying nominations, Cabinet members going through the Senate more rapidly than the last three Presidents. So what is the beef? What is going on? There are only three judges on this calendar, an embarrassingly small number for us to deal with. We could clear this calendar in one afternoon. How do we do that? The majority leader brings them up--except for three who are illegally appointed. Now, I will not go into a long thing about the three illegally appointed, except to say they are illegally appointed. Most of the Founders of this country did not want a king. They created a system of checks and balances, and they created a Congress, and they created an ability for us to restrain an imperial Presidency. That is what this advice and consent is supposed to do, and we should exercise that, as former Senator Byrd used to say most eloquently on this floor. It is our opportunity to answer questions. Just because the majority leader seeks to cut off debate does not mean that person is being denied confirmation. I will give you an example: Secretary Hagel. The majority leader tried to cut off debate 2 days after he came to the floor from the committee. We said: We want a little more time to consider this. We will be glad to vote for him for cloture in 10 days. He went ahead with the cloture vote and called that a filibuster. But Secretary Hagel is sitting in his spot as Secretary of Defense today. So you can go down through all of these nominations and really find no evidence--no evidence whatsoever. So we need a meeting of the two caucuses to say: What is going on? Why are you seeking to do this? The last thing I would like to say is, it is appropriate from time to time in the case of subcabinet members to use the cloture to deny a seat. That has happened seven times. John Bolton was one that the Democrats did to President Bush. As I conclude my remarks, I would like to say this: The majority leader said: Well, we have changed the rules 18 times. Never like this. What he is proposing to do is to turn this body into a place where the majority can do whatever it wants to do. That is like the House of Representatives--so the majority can do whatever it wants to do. A freight train can run through the House of Representatives in 1 day, and it could run through here in 1 day if the Majority leader does this. This year it might be a Democratic freight train. In a year and a half it might be the tea party express. There are a lot of people on that side of the aisle who might be very unhappy with the agenda that 51 people who have creative imaginations on this side of the aisle could do if they could do anything they wanted to do with 51 votes. I like to read a lot of history. John Meacham's book about Jefferson has a conversation between Jefferson and Adams at the beginning of our country. They were President and Vice President, I guess, at the time. Jefferson said to Adams he feared for the future of the Republic if it did not have a Senate. ``[N]o republic could ever last which had not a Senate. . . . [T]rusting the popular assembly''--that means the House, that means a majority vote institution--``for the preservation of our liberties. . . . [is] the merest chimera''--or illusion-- ``imaginable.'' One other distinguished public servant said the same thing in his book in 2007. This is what Harry Reid said in his book when he wrote about the nuclear option. He was talking about the then-majority leader Senator Frist. He decided to pursue a rules change that would kill the filibuster for judicial nominations.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I will be through in just a minute. I ask unanimous consent to speak for another minute.

Mr. ALEXANDER. So the leader said: Senator Frist of Tennessee, who was the Majority Leader, had decided to pursue a rules change that would kill the filibuster for judicial nominations. This is Harry Reid writing. And once you opened that Pandora's box-- Said Senator Reid-- it was just a matter of time before a Senate leader who couldn't get his way on something moved to eliminate the filibuster for regular business as well. Senator Reid wrote: And that, simply put, would be the end of the United States Senate. I do not want Senator Reid to have written on his tombstone he presided over the end of the Senate. Yet if he does what he is threatening to do, that would be what he is remembered for in the history of this country. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Utah for his thoughtful remarks. I have been trying to think of a way to put in context what is at stake because the majority leader said in his remarks today: We have changed the rules 18 times. True. We have changed the rules a lot. But we are not talking about changing the rules of the Senate. We are talking about changing the Senate. That is what the proposal is, changing the Senate from an institution that protects minority rights by requiring 60 votes out of 100 on major matters of importance instead of a majority of votes. You know we grow up and we go to first grade and we learn that the majority wins. So we get that ingrained in ourselves as we grow up in America. It is a good principle, the majority wins. It is a way to resolve disputes and work things out. But from the very beginning of our country, our most thoughtful observers and visitors have looked at our country and said: But a democracy needs some protections for the minority, for the people with a minority view. I have mentioned on the floor before that I have been reading Jon Meacham's book about Thomas Jefferson, about the conversation they had after dinner on February 15, 1798. Jefferson wrote about what Adams said to him. Adams said: No Republic could ever last which had not a Senate. Trusting the popular assembly for the preservation of our liberties is unimaginable. ``Trusting a popular assembly for the preservation of our liberties.'' What did he mean by that? What he meant by that is that the passions in our country--and they particularly happen that way today because of the Internet--can suddenly grow very strong. They happened back at that time in France with the French Revolution, where the population got excited and began to behead people in connection with the French Revolution. So popular passions can run strong. Our Founders said: We want a House of Representatives that reflects those popular passions, which is why when you go over to the House, they have a Rules Committee. Whoever wins the House by one vote gets nine of the seats and whoever loses gets four of the seats to make it clear that the party that has four of the seats does not have anything to say about anything, so they can bring it up on Monday and pass it on Tuesday. That is what a popular assembly can do. So Adams was saying to Jefferson: We need another body. We need a Senate that is not so responsive to the popular passions. President Adams and President Jefferson said at the beginning of our country that they did not believe a Republic could stand without such a Senate. That is what they said then. Our most famous visitor to the United States was Alexis de Tocqueville, a young Frenchman who came in the 1830s. He wrote a book, ``Democracy in America,'' which is probably the best book ever written about democracy in America. He said in this that there are two great dangers he saw in our future democracy. This is when it was very young. One was Russia. That was a prescient comment. But the other was the tyranny of the majority. That is what de Tocqueville said. The great danger to our democracy is the tyranny of the majority. That means a majority can run over you with a one-vote margin. What does that mean today? Let's say you care about abortion rights. Let's say you care about gay rights. Let's say you care about climate change. Let's say you didn't support the war in Iraq, you didn't support the war in Afghanistan. Let's say you don't like government snooping, but the majority does. The majority has a view that is different from your view, so they can run over you-- in the Senate they can't because they will have to persuade at least 60. It will take some time to do it, and it doesn't always work. You have to stop and think about any issues. The House can say: No secret ballot in a union election, and they can pass it in a day. It will come to the Senate, and we will say: Let's think about it. We will think about it even if the Democrats are in charge and they are in favor of no secret ballot in a union election because we protect the rights of working men and women across the country who may be in the minority. But we have to stop and think about whether we want to abolish the secret ballot in union elections. What the majority leader is proposing doing next week is not just changing a rule, he is changing this institution so that whoever has a majority of one can do anything they want to do, anytime they want to do it, and can run over any minority. It doesn't make so much difference that you run over a person in the minority in the Senate-- you know, we are just individuals. But what about the views we represent? What about the views of the farmers in North Dakota, mountaineers in Tennessee, or the civil rights workers in Alabama? What about the people in the 1970s who opposed the Vietnam war? The majority? The majority ran over it. People who are accustomed to being in the minority know the advantage and the importance of having protection of minority rights. They know-- and they have studied American history--that the chief defender of minority rights in the history of our country has been the Senate. This is what the majority leader proposes to change. He proposes to make this place like the House, where a freight train can run through it overnight and change abortion rights, change the war attitude, change civil rights, change environmental policy. One vote can do it. Run the train through the House. Run the train through the Senate. Today it might be a Democratic train. Tomorrow it might be the tea party express. Our friends on the other side might wish to think about that. I have some very creative colleagues over here. I will bet they could come up with a pretty good agenda of things we would like to do if we had 51 votes and we could do it anyway. This is not about a rules change. This is about changing the nature of a Senate that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the Founders of our country created to be an alternative to a popular assembly and that every majority leader in our history has, in the end, supported in this way. We should not take this lightly--especially if you are an American person who has an unpopular view. If you feel as though you are in the minority, if you feel that a majority might not agree with you, might even run over you, you do not want the Senate to suddenly be a place where a freight train could run right through it overnight. You may say: Well, we have the President and the White House. You may. You do today. You might not tomorrow. You might not tomorrow. When I came to the Senate 10 years ago one party had both the Senate, the House, and the Presidency. What if we were 10 years ago and we could run a freight train through the House, to the Senate, and send it down to President Bush? We might say that no State in the country-- every State in the country must have a right-to-work law. We believe in right-to-work laws. We might have new rules on public unions. We might have different ideas on abortion. We might have different ideas on climate change. If you are in the minority, you wouldn't be able to stop us. You wouldn't even be able to slow us down for a good conversation. We could just run right through town. Nearly one-half of this body is in its first term. More than half of my Democratic friends have never been in the minority. I have been in the minority in a variety of ways in my lifetime, and I want some protection--more than just from the popular assembly that might run through. That is why I said this morning that I hope very much that the Democratic leader will accept the request from those of us on the Republican side for all of us Senators to meet together in the Old Senate Chamber where we can meet privately, where we can talk face-to- face. We can say: We need to understand how in the world the Democratic side could want to change the character of the Senate in this way when in 2 years they could be on the other side. What would make you so angry that you would want to do that? If you would say to us, you have been filibustering our nominees, we would say to you, I guess you know that none of your nominees have ever been defeated by filibuster. I guess you know that--except for two circuit judges. And you started that because you did five of ours. You will say: Well, you have been delaying our nominations. We will say: I hope you know that the Congressional Research Service and the Washington Post say that President Obama's Cabinet nominees have been moving through the Senate more rapidly than President Bush's did and President Clinton's did in their second terms. I hope you know that. You may say: But you have been holding people up for years. We will reply: I hope you will look at the Executive Calendar. It is on everybody's desk here. This is the list of people who can be confirmed in the Senate. How do they get on the Executive Calendar? They come out of committees. Who controls the committees? Democratic majorities. If there is someone who hasn't been confirmed, put him on the calendar. It is your committee that can do it. Once they get on the calendar, how do they get confirmed? Only one person can manages that schedule--the majority leader. All he has to do is say: I move the nomination of Jacob J. Lew, of New York, to be U.S. Alternate Governor of the International Monetary Fund. He has been on the calendar since April 16, 2013. You may say: There is an objection to that. We will say: So what? The majority leader can bring it up, and under our rules we can ask for a 60-vote vote on Mr. Lew to the International Monetary Fund. He is already in the administration, so that probably wouldn't happen, but let's say it did. The majority leader can bring it up on Monday. We would vote on Wednesday. He would get 60 votes, and then he would be confirmed. That would take one of the 24 people off of this Executive Calendar. You might say: Well, they have been waiting for years. We might say: Wait a minute, I have got it right here. The one who has been waiting the longest came to the floor February 26, 2013. That was 4 months ago. There is no one here who has been waiting longer than 4 months, who has been here waiting for us to do something about it. The only one who could move somebody off this calendar to a vote is the majority leader sitting right over there, so what are you talking about? This is what we would say to you. You must be angry about something else or you wouldn't be thinking about changing the character of the whole Senate because no one has been denied their seat by filibuster except a circuit judge, and you set the precedent for that. There is no one left to confirm except these nominees for the National Labor Relations Board that President Obama made unconstitutionally on January 24, 2012. The Republican leader said: You have a Labor Secretary who is controversial. We all concede that, but the majority leader hasn't moved that we have a vote on him. He has been reported since May; he has been sitting here since May. The majority leader could have been brought him up. There is a lady nominated for the Environmental Protection Agency. Bring up her nomination. Let's vote on it. There are a couple of other controversial nominations, but all we have to do is vote--except on these unconstitutional nominees. What do we do about them? Let's make clear what happened to the National Labor Relations Board. In December of 2011 the President sends us two nominees to the National Labor Relations Board. This is the way it is supposed to happen. Their papers then come over to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Senator Hatch used to chair that. I am on that committee now as a ranking member. Before the papers from the White House even get to the committee, the President recess- appoints them. In other words, he used his power to appoint these persons to the NLRB during a recess when the Senate was in session. How do we know it was in session? It was in session, in a pro forma session, which is a device invented by the majority leader, Senator Reid, when George W. Bush was President to keep President Bush from making recess appointments. President Bush didn't like that, these 3-day pro forma sessions, but he respected it. He said: Our Founders didn't want a king. They created separation of powers. That means checks and balances. I am the President, but I can't do everything. There is Congress over here, and there is a bill of rights over here. President Bush said: I don't like what Senator Reid did. He created these pro forma sessions so I can't make a recess appointment, but I will respect that. Senator Reid has a pro forma session when President Obama is in, and President Obama doesn't respect it and appoints two people. They are still there. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled that unconstitutional, as has the Third Circuit Court of Appeals--two of the highest courts in the land--and they are still there. They are still there making cases unconstitutionally. They have decided 1,031 cases, all of which will be subject to being vacated if the Supreme Court agrees with the Federal courts. We cannot ignore that in the Senate if we wish to preserve the principle of checks and balances in the United States. I mentioned at the beginning that I like to read history. I said this on the Senate floor, and I will read it again and then conclude because I know other Senators are here. I was reading Jon Meacham's book about Thomas Jefferson, which I mentioned, and John Adams and Jefferson and how changing the Senate, not changing the rules--but if you change the Senate rules in this way, that means that the majority, on any day, any year, could come through and do anything it wants do. They might decide: We don't like the gas in North Dakota, or we don't like the corn in Tennessee. So we are going to change the rules so we can have an advantage that 51 of us can do something about. They could do that any day. Do it now; do it then. I mentioned that history. I mentioned de Tocqueville's history. But here is the last piece of history I will mention once more. This is chapter 7 of Senator Reid's book in 2007. Chapter 7 is entitled ``The Nuclear Option.'' I had just come to the Senate. He talks about me in this chapter and gives me some credit for the gang that was formed to preserve the Senate at the time when another majority leader was trying to change the character of the Senate. I see the distinguished majority leader, so I will defer to his comments. Maybe it is appropriate for me to read them. Senator Reid wrote in 2007: Peaceable and productive are not two words I would use to describe Washington in 2005. I just couldn't believe that Bill Frist was going to do this. The storm had been gathering all year, and word from conservative columnists and in conservative circles was that Senator Frist of Tennessee, who was the majority leader, had decided to pursue a rules change that would kill the filibuster for judicial nominations. This is Senator Reid's book. It is an excellent book, and I appreciate being mentioned in it. Senator Reid continues: And once you opened that Pandora's box, it was just a matter of time before a Senate leader who couldn't get his way on something moved to eliminate the filibuster for regular business as well. And that, simply put, would be the end of the United States Senate. I believe that. I believe it would be. It is not a mere rules change. Anytime this body changes its rules in the middle of a session without following the 67-vote rules cloture requirement, anytime it does that, it doesn't matter what it is for, it could do it again for a matter of precedent. If it does it for judicial nominations, the importance of the change is not whether it is a good idea to have an up-or-down vote on judicial nominations, the importance of the change is that with 51 votes you can do anything you want at any time. That, in de Tocqueville's words, in his foresight and his prescience in the 1830s, takes away from the people of the United States their greatest protection of their liberties because it encourages the tyranny of the majority. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, if I may respond to the Senator from West Virginia. First, I wish to congratulate Senators Manchin and Burr for helping the full Senate understand this issue. This is similar to a lot of issues we have to face. They are not simple. I used to be a college president and the U.S. Secretary of Education. I had to re-educate myself on this legislation. I still made some mistakes. I was saying last night, for example, that there were only 2 million subsidized loans. What I was forgetting was the point that the Senator from West Virginia makes, which is that 80 percent of the students who have subsidized loans, the low-income students, also have unsubsidized loans. So when we only take care of these subsidized loans, we are leaving 7 million students with unsubsidized loans out here hanging high and dry, and nobody is taking care of them. So we are hurting both the middle-class families and the low-income families when we have an incomplete solution. The Senator from West Virginia posed a question. Let's say I graduated from the University of Tennessee and I had two loans; I had a subsidized loan, which means the government paid my interest while I was in college. Typically, if I am similar to four out of five students, I also had an unsubsidized loan, so I accrued that interest. Suddenly the interest rates have gone up for me because the country's interest rates have gone up to 10 percent. What I can do is take all my government loans at once and turn them into an 8.25-percent loan. So that is, in effect, a cap on my loan, and then I would have the choice. I would say this to the Senators from West Virginia and North Carolina. I have heard some Senators say that when I consolidate my loan at 8.25 percent, that means the student is going to have to pay a lot of interest because it spreads the loan out over a long period of time. But does not the student have that choice? Isn't it similar to a 15- year mortgage, where you have higher monthly payments, but you pay less interest because you pay it off quicker?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask consent that the Senators from North Carolina and West Virginia and I be permitted to engage in a colloquy for a few minutes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. That is how I understand it. I would say to the Senator from North Carolina,--I would presume a graduate of the University of North Carolina would be smart enough to make that decision for herself or himself?

Mr. ALEXANDER. If I could respond to the Senator who suggested that,--the answer is yes. I think it is fair to say that the consolidation option that a student has in case the rates go up, at 8.25 percent can be called a cap. It is not a hard cap, but it is a cap. And the second cap is the income repayment provision of which the Senator speaks. If you are making $40,000 a year, after they apply the formula you probably are not spending more than about 10 percent of your income--it is something called disposable income--to pay for your student loan. Loan repayment then continues for about 20 years. If at the end of 20 years you have not paid your loan off, the loan is forgiven. Any student who has a loan has that opportunity. They can consolidate at 8.25 percent, and income repayment limits the amount they have to pay each year. So they have that. One of the things I noticed about the Manchin-Burr bill that I would like to ask the Senators to talk about is that you have come up with-- what I am beginning to understand, as I study this more and more--a very significant contribution: the idea that all of the undergraduate student loans--which, as I understand it, are about two out of three of the loans--should have the same interest rate. First, it is confusing the way undergraduate loan interest rates are now, but the other reason is that about 80 percent of the people who have subsidized loans, the low-income students, also have unsubsidized loans. So your contribution is to say: Let's simplify it, provide certainty over a long period of time, and treat all undergraduates the same. Otherwise, it seems to me, you are leaving 7 million middle-income students who have unsubsidized loans high and dry, and the 80 percent of the low-income students who also have these unsubsidized loans, you are not helping them either. I wonder if the Senator could comment on this idea? I notice, without a cap, you are able to get the interest rate for all undergraduate loans down to about 3.66 percent, which is a pretty low rate.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I come to the floor to ask my Democratic colleagues to take another look at the student loan issue that will be before us tomorrow. We are playing with real lives here. These are about 11 million students who are going to college in the fall. They will be taking out 18 million loans for this year. Taxpayers will be loaning them over $100 billion. The only proposal we are going to be voting on tomorrow appears to be one that will leave over 7 million middle-income college students swinging in the wind, paying about twice as much in interest rates as they should be paying. At the same time, we have a proposal that is based upon a recommendation by President Obama that is like legislation already passed by the Republican House of Representatives that is supported by an Independent and two Democratic Senators and three Republican Senators that would lower student loan interest rates on every single one of the 18 million new loans that would be taken out next year and cut nearly in half the interest rates on loans for undergraduate students, which make up two-thirds of the loans. I ask the question, why would we do a 1-year political fix that only helps students taking 40 percent of the loans, when we have before us a bipartisan proposal that is close to the idea of the President and the House that would help every single student, and especially why would we do that when we leave middle-income students twisting in the wind, paying hundreds of millions of dollars more in interest rate than they should be paying over the next 10 years? The student loan issue is becoming like what we call the doc fix, where Congress, for political reasons, every year rushes around and makes a temporary patch. There is no need to do that here, no need whatsoever. I ask my friends on the Democratic side to look at what the President has proposed and the reasoning behind it. It was in his budget. Look at what the House of Representatives has done. They actually passed a bill that lowers rates. Then look at the proposal by Senator Manchin, Senator Carper, Senator King, Senator Burr, Senator Coburn, and myself in the Senate. What our proposal would do is provide a long-term solution: if you are an undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee, instead of your rate being 6.8 percent, it would be 3.66 percent. The Democratic proposal, I repeat, does nothing for over 7 million middle-income students who are going to be paying 6.8 percent when they should be paying, if they are undergraduates, 3.66 percent under our proposal. That is nearly half as much. There is no need for that. This is like other political situations, we have some misinformation going back and forth across the aisle. I hope my colleagues will take a look at the Burr-Manchin proposal. The right thing for us to do is to say to these 10 million students, all of them, every single one of them, that when you go to take out your 18 million loans this year you are going to be paying a rate that is fair to taxpayers and fair to students. It is fair to taxpayers because it will not be costing the government any money and it is fair to students because the government will not be making any money. It will not be reducing the deficit on the back of the students. That is the principle upon which we can agree--fair to taxpayers, fair to students; doesn't cost the taxpayers, doesn't balance the budget on the backs of students. On that basis we can say to students: Take advantage of these low rates. You can get a 10-year loan if you are an undergraduate at 3.66 percent. There is no need to pretend we are helping students when the alternative proposal only addresses 40 percent of the students. These are the subsidized loans. These are the loans for the low-income students, who already get, for the most part, Pell grants, who already have their interest paid while they are in school--that is a big subsidy. It is over $50 billion in the next 10 years. We leave the middle-income students over 7 million of them--over the next 10 years paying hundreds of millions of dollars they shouldn't be paying. I don't know why my friends on the other side want to leave the middle-income students of America twisting in the wind, paying higher interest rates than they should. So let's step back and look at the facts. Let's look at the President's proposal, look at what the House passed, and look at the bipartisan Burr-Manchin proposal. I respectfully urge the majority leader to allow us to vote on that. I urge my colleagues on the other side to coalesce around that idea. Let's say to the students of America: As the Senate, we know a good idea when we see one, and the Burr-Manchin proposal is such an idea.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am glad I stayed to hear the Senator from Washington speak because I think this highlights the issue. That is a terrific political speech, but it bears no resemblance to what is actually happening in the student loan debate. The distinguished Senator from Washington talked about rates going up. Rates are going up for over 7 million--7 million--middle-income students in America who are going to be taking out loans this year, and the Democratic proposal does nothing for them. Their proposal does nothing for them. All the Democrats are trying to do is a political fix for 1 year for students taking out 40 percent of the loans who are already the beneficiary of Pell grants, as she so ably expressed, who have their interest paid while they are in college. These students are borrowing subsidized loans. These students may receive a Pell grant of up to $5,550. They have their interest paid while they are in college. This accounting system used by the Congressional Budget Office is very generous to students as opposed to taxpayers, because it is done under the Federal Credit Reporting Act, which is more generous to students, in this case, than taxpayers. What about the over 7 million middle-income students who are just swinging in the wind under the Democratic proposal? It does nothing for them. On the other hand, we have the President of the United States, a Democrat, and we have the House of Representatives, a majority of Republicans, and they fundamentally agree on one idea: Let's have a permanent solution. Let's figure out what it costs the taxpayer to allow the government to issue loans--the government is lending over $100 billion a year--and loan it to the students at no profit--at no profit--so the students can use it--all of them, not 40 percent of them, not just low-income students but middle-income students as well-- and all of them will have their rates lowered. So what will the effect be? Their proposal would fix at 3.4 percent for 1 year the student loan interest rate on 40 percent of the loans. Our bipartisan proposal would fundamentally--as does the President's proposal and the proposal passed by the House of Representatives--lower the rate to 3.66 percent for all undergraduates. It would be not just for the students borrowing 40 percent of the loans but for all middle- income students and graduate students as well. Their rates would be lower than 6.8 percent. What is good about a short-term political fix that makes middle- income students and graduate students pay hundreds of millions of dollars more over the next 10 years? What is good about that? All it does is provide an opportunity to make a well-rehearsed political speech about student loans. We all want to encourage students to go to college. We are looking for a way to give them some predictability and some certainty so students don't have to worry, when they graduate from Maryville High School in Tennessee where I went, that Congress isn't going to do its job. All the other side is going to do is stand up and make political speeches that have nothing to do with the issue. In this case, the President has done his job by recommending a long- term solution. The Republican House of Representatives has done its job. It passed a long-term solution that lowers rates for everybody. A group of six Senators are doing our jobs. We have introduced a bipartisan proposal that reduces rates for everybody, and it is a long- term solution, while a number of the Democratic Senators are playing political games. They are ignoring reality. They are going to freeze for 10 years higher interest rates on loans for over 7 million--7 million--middle-income students across this country who are headed to college--rates that are nearly twice as high as the bipartisan proposal here, which is fundamentally like the proposal by the President and the proposal by the House of Representatives. What is the wisdom in that? I don't see it, and I don't think the students will see it. As far as balancing the budget on the backs of students, the only people around here who have done that are the Democrats when they passed the health care law. They put in that law a takeover of the Federal student loan program and, according to the CBO, they had an amount of savings of $55 billion, and they used part of it to reduce the debt. So the CBO says these are savings because the Democrats took over student loans and the Democrats said they will use it to reduce the debt, use it for the Pell grant program, and they used it to help pay for the health care law. Every single year for the next several years, students are being overcharged to help pay for the health care law. So if we want to get into a big political discussion about who is overcharging students in order to reduce the deficit or pay for the health care law, we can have that. But that is not what we want to do. We want a result, and we have suggested to the Senate--and I am going to say it one more time: Instead of a 40-percent political fix for 1 year, we have suggested a long-term solution for 100 percent of the students. It reduces their rates. It cuts nearly in half the interest rate for every single undergraduate loan--every single one, which is two-thirds of the loans--and it is based on an idea that was in the President's budget, that has already been passed by the House of Representatives, and that has been introduced by three on that side of the aisle and three on this side of the aisle. A Senate that is interested in a result instead of political gamesmanship would be sitting down and trying to work that out. That is what we want to do. We can play games, too, I suppose. I can go get my statistics and come back to the floor and say those over on the Democratic side, when they passed the health care bill, did it on the backs of students. When they balanced the budget--which they haven't done--they tried to do it on the backs of students. And when they found some money for Pell grants, they overcharged the students to whom they were loaning money. That is true. I could do that, and I could say that, but I didn't come here to spend all my time saying that. I came here to get results. So this is not a game for 11 million students across this country. They are trying to figure out how they are going to pay for college. Just as the Senator from Washington said, it is not easy to do. They expect us to come here with our backgrounds and say: We are going to do the best we can. Instead of making this similar to what we call the doctors fix, where every year we play a little politics and add a little money to pay doctors who work with Medicare patients--that is a terrible thing to do, but we do it every year--and now we are going to treat student loans in the same way. In a Presidential election year, everybody will make a big speech about it. Eleven million students will sit around wondering how they are going to pay for college, waiting for the people in Washington to make a decision about that. We should not be doing that. We have great promise here. We have a President making a long-term solution, the House of Representatives of a different party agreeing with him, and six of us on both sides of the aisle proposing a solution that is a permanent solution for 100 percent for the 11 million people who will be borrowing over $100 billion this year. Why would they on the other side of the aisle insist on a solution that forces 7 million mostly middle-income students to pay 6.8 percent when they could be paying 3.66 percent? Why would you do that? Because you have not thought about it, I think. A lot has been going on. We have had an immigration debate and a number of other things, so maybe Senators have not taken a look at that. I have. I have had a chance to do that. I have been the president of a university. I have been the Education Secretary. I know something about the student loan program. I did not like it when the Federal Government took it over. I admire our U.S. Secretary of Education. I do not think he ought to be the banker of the year. I think we have banks to make loans, but that is not the way it is. The taxpayers now make all the government loans--over $100 billion a year. Students are making their plans. They are going to be arriving at colleges in August and September. We have a bipartisan proposal that will lower interest rates for every single student taking out a student loan. Yet our friends on the other side want to leave middle-income students out of it, force them to pay twice as much as they should be in interest rates for the next 10 years. That makes no sense. We ought not do that. Tomorrow what we ought to do is pass the Burr-Manchin proposal that is supported on both sides of the aisle. To the extent it differs with the President's proposal--which is very slight--and with the proposal of the House of Representatives--which is not much--we should then sit down, work something out over the next 3 days, pass it and send it to the President and go on to the next issue. Instead, we have political speeches about how hard it is to go to college. We all know how hard it is to go to college. It is difficult to do. We all want to help. But if we have a solution, we ought to adopt it. I could play politics too. I know how. Every one of us in this room knows how, otherwise we would not be here. This is not a time for playing politics. This is serious business; 11 million students getting 18 million loans, $100 billion-plus from the American taxpayers. We have a proposal before us that is fair to the taxpayers--it will not cost them any money--it is fair to the students--it does not balance the budget or pay for the health care program or any other thing on the students' backs--and it gives students, many of whom who have no credit rating, no other way to get money, a chance to get several thousand dollars a year at one of the lowest possible rates available in the country. The proposal that is before the Senate that is bipartisan is a permanent solution. It says to the student going to the University of Tennessee or Alaska or Minnesota: If you get a loan this year from the government and you are an undergraduate, the interest rate is 3.66 percent. Your rate on that loan won't change. If you are a middle- income student, the Democrats' plan says it is 6.8 percent, and they say: Wait. Wait for what? Wait for rates to go up? Why don't we establish this program for students at a time when rates are low? That is to their advantage. Let's have a permanent solution at a time when rates are low. They may go up and, therefore, students may pay more, but they will pay a lot less than they would in the private market. They will have a lot more certainty than if we just come around and play politics with this every year to try to gain some advantage with this student group or that student group. So we have an opportunity before us. The immigration bill passed before the recess. It showed a good deal of the ability of people on both sides of the aisle to work together. We did that with the farm bill. We did that with the water resources bill. I would submit this is 100 times easier than any of those bills. When I went home to Tennessee before the Fourth of July recess, I said to somebody who asked me: We are that far apart and we have the President and the Republican House and a bipartisan group of Senators all in about the same place. This ought to be easy to do. It is still easy to do, but I would implore my Senators to look at the facts--those on the other side of the aisle--and realize I do not think they want to go home and explain why they are leaving over 7 million middle-income students twisting in the wind, paying twice as much on interest rates for the next year as the proposal that they are about to vote against tomorrow. I think that will be pretty hard to explain, and I will bet there will be a lot of explaining to do if that is the end result. So I pledge--as I have been working with Secretary Duncan, with the White House, with Democrats and Republicans--to try to get a result here. I think we can still do it in the next few days. I would hope we can have a vote on both proposals tomorrow. My guess would be both would fail at this point, but at least that would show we are seriously working toward a solution, and we can sit down and merge these small differences that exist between the bipartisan group here, the Republican House, and the President of the United States. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I wonder if I might ask, through the Chair, the Senator from Michigan a question. I notice her chart on 7 million students, and I wonder which 7 million students she is talking about. My understanding is there are 11 million students who will take out new student loans this year, I believe that 2 million of them are low- income students who get subsidized loans, and that the Democratic Senator's proposal would help those 2 million students by keeping their rate at 3.4 percent instead of 6.8 percent. So who are the 7 million students the Senator from Michigan is talking about?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Michigan. It could be my numbers are wrong. I think the 7 million student figure is actually a very good billboard for why not to support the Democratic proposal but to support the bipartisan proposal because what the proposal of the Senator from Michigan will do is keep rates high for 7 million middle-income students whom her proposal does not help. There are 11 million students across this country who are going to college this fall. They will take 18 million loans out. They will borrow over $100 billion. What happened on July 1 was that the rate went back up to 6.8 percent for the loans that are for the lower income students--only those. For the loans that go to the middle-income students--and my understanding is there are about 7 million of those-- it stays right where it is: 6.8 percent. Under the bipartisan proposal, their rates would be 3.66 percent. In other words, the bipartisan proposal would not only create a permanent solution, but it would lower rates--it would lower rates almost half-- for the 7 million middle-income students who otherwise would be twisting in the wind for the next 10 years paying higher rates-- hundreds of millions of dollars of higher rates. So the number 7 million, I believe, is correct, I would say to the Senator from Michigan, but that is the number of middle-income students who are going to be paying higher interest rates under her proposal. I am glad she brought up the number. If I am mistaken about that, I need to know it before tomorrow's vote because I believe there are 2 million students with subsidized loans. That is who the Senator seeks to help. There are 7 million students who are undergraduates who have loans that are unsubsidized. Those are middle-income undergraduates. They are going to be paying 6.8 percent under the Senator's proposal. They are going to be paying 3.66 percent under the bipartisan proposal.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I would be happy to, Madam President.

Mr. ALEXANDER. It is a fixed rate for the students who borrow the money this year.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Well, if you are 1 of the 11 million students who borrow money under the bipartisan proposal--let's say you are an undergraduate, and that is two-thirds of the loans--your rate would be 3.66 percent this year, next year, and for the next 10 years. Next year it will be whatever it costs the government to borrow money. The government will loan it to the student, without overcharging the student, in order to reduce the debt to pay for government programs or any other reason. So the formula would be that we would not add any cost to the taxpayers, but we would not overcharge the students to reduce the debt or to pay for a program. Next year the interest rate might be higher. The next year it might be higher. But those would be for new loans. Then, of course, there are already two caps in the law that would be continued under the bipartisan proposal. One says that any student at any time can consolidate his or her loan at 8.25 percent. So the loan cannot go higher than that. The second says while you are paying off your loan, you will not pay more than about 10 percent of your income. If after 20 years or so you have not paid off your loan, it is forgiven. So these are two caps that are already in the law.