Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for bringing up this bill. He and the Republican leader have put on the floor a piece of legislation that affects nearly every American family. This will not have the fireworks some things we do have, because we have a lot of agreement on it, which is one reason it is on the floor. It has gone through the committee. Senator Harkin and Senator Enzi have worked carefully with all of the Republicans, all of the Democrats on the committee, and many other people on a complex piece of legislation for a year, to bring to the floor the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act--a bill that is likely to succeed. We take our medicines for granted. During the Civil War, the Capitol was used as a hospital--this Capitol. Two thousand cots were set up in the House and Senate Chambers and the Rotunda. The first group of wounded arrived from the Second Battle of Bull Run and later from Antietam in September of 1862. Those soldiers did not have the benefit of antibiotics or other modern medicines that we take for granted today, and that contributed to a horrible number of deaths in the Civil War. Still, as the 20th century dawned, disease cast a long shadow over the United States of America. A child born in 1900 could expect to live an average of 47 years. Infectious diseases took many children before they reached their teens. In 1900 pneumonia and influenza were the leading causes of death, followed by tuberculosis and diarrhea. Physicians had few weapons to fight diseases. The medicines at the time included such things as mercury for syphilis and ringworm; digitalis and amyl nitrate for the heart; quinine for malaria; and plant-based purgatives. For most of human history, diabetes meant death, but insulin was introduced in 1923 commercially, and within a few years enough insulin was being produced to meet the needs of diabetes patients around the world. It is hard to remember this, but vaccines began to be commercially produced only during the time of World War I. It was not until the time of World War II that we saw the introduction of widespread and effective antimicrobial therapies with the development and mass production of penicillin. Since then, the sky has seemed to be the limit. Half of Americans take at least one prescription drug every day. One in six takes three or more. Many take over-the-counter medicines. It is a real miracle what has happened in terms of our lives with the introduction of medicines, and we rely upon the Food and Drug Administration to keep those medicines safe and effective, which is what this legislation is about. I would like to renew my compliments to Senator Harkin and Senator Enzi for bringing this bill to the floor in a condition where they have already worked out most of the issues. This bill is complex. It is long. It has 11 titles. It will help safe and effective drugs, medical devices, and biosimilar products get to the market and, more importantly, get them to the market more quickly so people who need help can use these medicines and devices. We are reauthorizing two user fees. These things have absurd names. The Prescription Drug User Fee Act is called PDUFA, and the Medical Device User Fee Modernization Act is called MDUFMA. There are two new ones, which are GDUFA and BSUFA. It is really absurd. I promise to never again use those phrases for these user fee programs. But they are critically important programs that give the Food and Drug Administration needed resources to review new medically necessary products. For example, there is the Better Pharmaceuticals for Children Act. It is a part of what we are doing this week. I cosponsored it with Senators Reed of Rhode Island, Murray, and Roberts. I thank them for the ability to work with them. This makes permanent the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act and the Pediatric Research Equity Act. One is an incentive, and one requires pharmaceutical companies under certain circumstances, when they develop new drugs for adults, to figure out the effect that those drugs will have on children. Too often, we do not know the answer to that, and the drugs are either ineffective or can have bad results. It also reauthorizes the Pediatric Medical Device and Safety and Improvements Act to promote pediatric medical device development. Another critical part of the bill has to do with the medical device approval process. The United States is a world leader in medical devices. In Tennessee we have lots of them, especially in Memphis. We need to improve the regulatory process. There are many who believe the FDA is over-regulating medical devices. That has a negative effect on the industry's ability to raise capital and create jobs. It does not make those devices any safer in the United States than they are in Europe. This will help address those problems. For example, it will allow customization of medical devices for small populations--that means five people or fewer--without going through a very burdensome approval process, and it changes the humanitarian device exemption to encourage and incent the development of devices to treat patients with rare diseases--that would be groups of patients of fewer than 4,000 people. There is another problem that is addressed in this legislation. It is the generation of antibiotics dealing with antibiotic resistance. We know there is a growing problem with antibiotic resistance as bacteria continuously mutate and evolve in their resistance to the drugs and the medicines we develop. While efforts have been made to preserve existing antibiotics, drug development has not kept up with the pace. These changes will provide meaningful market incentives and reduce regulatory burdens. In addition, I am very pleased with the results of our work in dealing with drug shortages. That is a part of this bill. It will give the FDA additional tools to help prevent drug shortages and require FDA to look internally at regulations to see if the FDA is making the problem worse. Senator Casey and I worked together on a review of Federal initiatives to combat prescription drug abuse and to issue a report on those. Tennessee, my State, ranks second in the Nation for prescription drug use. Our Governor, Bill Haslam, and our legislature took action this year to deal with that. We intend to help them. In closing, I would like to commend Senators Harkin and Enzi. I see the Senator from Washington on the floor. I do not want to take much more time because I know she is about to speak. She has been integrally involved in the development of this legislation over the last year, especially the Better Pharmaceuticals and Devices for Children Act. I mentioned that a little earlier. It incentivizes drug manufacturers to study their products and how they affect children, and in return, they get to keep the exclusive use of those products for a little while longer. That means they do not go to generic quite as quickly. That has been tried in this legislation since it was first authorized and reauthorized and reauthorized. It has worked. It has been a very good example of an innovation in legislation that has achieved the desired result. The Pediatric Research Equity Act gives the FDA authority to require pediatric studies in some cases and the Pediatric Medical Device Safety and Improvement Act promotes the development of pediatric medical devices. So the importance of the legislation is it takes a big step forward in making it clear what drugs that are created for adults will do when offered or provided to children. Currently, just under half of the drugs prescribed to children have been studied and labeled for children, but that is a significant improvement over where we were when these programs started fifteen years ago. Children's bodies react very differently to medicines. Children are not just small adults. Sometimes side effects are different. Physicians have to guess what dosages are appropriate, whether a therapy that might be effective for an adult is also effective for a child. Sometimes there are examples of overdosing or previously unknown side effects. In one case in Tennessee in 1999, seven babies were prescribed an antibiotic to treat whooping cough. They became so seriously ill, they needed stomach surgery. The CDC-- Centers for Disease Control--later linked their illness to the antibiotic, which had never been tested in young children. Children differ widely in sizes and growth rates, so for medical devices doctors must either `jerry-rig' devices or be forced to use a more invasive treatment. Prior to the passage of these laws that we are working on today, and reauthorizing, 80 percent of drugs used for children were used off- label; that is, we did not really know how they affected children. Now we can use those drugs--half of our drugs today--safely and effectively because we do know that. The Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act is the carrot that FDA uses to encourage pediatric studies, while the Pediatric Research Equity Act is the stick to mandate studies. Together these two laws have been a success. According to the Institute of Medicine, as of October 2010, the FDA has approved 425 labeling changes as a result of studies or analyses done under these laws. In 1975, only about 20 percent of drugs prescribed to children had been studied and labeled for children, in 2007 that number had risen to about one-third, and today it is roughly half. The Pediatric Medical Device Safety and Improvement Act was enacted in 2007 to encourage manufacturers to bring more pediatric devices to the market and strengthen FDA post-market surveillance of devices used in children. This law allows manufacturers to profit under the humanitarian device exemption for devices specifically designed to meet a pediatric need affecting fewer than 4,000 children per year. In addition to three humanitarian device exemption pediatric products, GAO reports that 15 new devices have been approved for children since 2007. I am happy to come here today to join with Senator Murray, Senator Harkin, Senator Enzi, Senator Reed of Rhode Island, and Senator Roberts to offer what I believe is a piece of legislation that affects nearly every American family. It takes one more step in the dramatic story of how we have gone from a country with almost no medicines to a country in which almost everyone takes some medicine and a situation where the lifetime of the average American has increased from 47 years of age to 78 years--its present level today. I see the Senator from Washington on the floor. I wish to recognize and thank her for her leadership on the legislation. 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. President, at noon the Senate will be voting on two of President Obama's nominees to the Federal Reserve Board. These are important positions. They have long terms. They come at a time when our economy is in trouble and doing its best to recover. In these votes, the Senate will be acting in the way it should, and let me say why I am saying that. On Tuesday of this week, someone most of us know--Marty Paone, who was the Democratic secretary in the Senate for 13 years, until 2008-- wrote an article in the Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper. The headline is ``Senate rule changes come with risk,'' but all I want to refer to today is a description of the Senate that is on our Senate Web site. Marty describes our own Web site in the article and says: . . . [t]he legislative process on the Senate Floor [as] a balance between the rights guaranteed to Senators under the standing rules and the need for Senators to forgo some of these rights in order to expedite business. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article I just referred to following my remarks.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, what is reflected on the Senate Web site is the action the Senate is about to take at noon today. There has been at least one vacancy--and sometimes two--on the Federal Reserve Board since 2006. That is 6 years ago. That is one whole Senate term. The Federal Reserve Board has seven Governors nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. So during that whole 6 year-period, it has had one or two of those seven positions vacant. And this has been during a time--since 2008--of the greatest economic crisis we have had since the Great Depression. The President tried once to nominate someone to that position who wasn't accepted by the Senate. So in January the President took the unusual step of nominating a well-qualified Republican, Jay Powell, as well as a well-qualified Democrat. There is a good deal of unease in the Republican caucus--as I am sure was reflected in some of the comments on the floor--about the response the Federal Reserve Board has taken to the economic crisis since 2008. Senators on this side of the aisle who have those concerns have a perfect right to filibuster, to object, and perhaps to kill these two nominations. But the Republican Senators have realized that if we were to do that to President Obama's nominees today, then if there were a President Romney after the first of the year, the Democrats very likely would say: We will object to President Romney's nominees, and there would still be vacancies on the Federal Reserve Board at a time of economic crisis. Just as the President took a step toward making government work by nominating a well-qualified Republican to one of these two Federal Reserve Governor positions, I want to acknowledge the fact that Republican Senators who feel strongly about this issue have taken a step forward and forgone--in the words of our Senate Web site--some of their rights so that we can move straight to a vote today, up or down, at 60-votes, on each of the two nominees. The article to which I referred said that sometimes in the Senate, even though we all have many rights, we have to forgo some of those rights in order to make the place work. That has been happening more lately. Republican Senators in the minority have been occasionally forgoing some of our rights to slow down a bill coming to the floor or to insist on an amendment that is not relevant. The majority leader has on some occasions forgone his right to block our amendments. We would like for him to do that more often, but it has been happening more lately. I think of the scheduling difficulty Senator Reid and Senator McConnell had on district judges a few weeks ago. Instead of letting that issue blow up the Senate, they met privately and agreed they would proceed at a schedule the two of them determined. As a result, we have been considering and confirming district judges at a regular rate. Their agreement permitted us to move to a jobs bill, which benefitted startup companies, to move ahead. The House Republicans had already passed the bill, then we passed it, and the President of the United States then signed it into law. The Senate moved forward on the FAA authorization bill after many efforts and failed attempts to do so. We have a 2-year highway bill which the Senate has passed and which is now in conference. I would like for it to be a 7-year bill, but we have made progress and passed a 2-year bill. The Senate had a big debate on the Postal Service. I would have liked to have seen a stronger bill come out of the Senate, and I hope the House will send us back a stronger bill. But we had 39 relevant amendments to that bill considered, we worked on it, and we are moving toward dealing with the big debt the Postal Service has. This week we considered an extension of the Ex-Im Bank and took up a bill passed by the Republican House. We offered and voted on five relevant amendments to the Ex-Im Bank bill and disposed of the bill that same day. The majority leader says we have the FDA bill coming up--very important because it affects medicines that Americans everywhere depend on. Senator Enzi and Senator Harkin have worked that bill through the HELP Committee. It has broad support on both sides of the aisle. The majority leader may allow it to come up only with relevant amendments, and we may be able to consider it and pass it. Earlier this year several of us came to the floor and complimented Senator Reid, the majority leader, and Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, for saying that they want to do their best to pass all the appropriations bills this year. That is the basic work of the Senate--paying our bills and doing our oversight. Only twice since the year 2000 has the Senate passed every single appropriations bill. I don't want to make too much of this progress, but it is a little progress, and it is an example of the Senate working the way the Senate is supposed to work. Now, let's be honest about the fact that this is a more partisan country than it was even 10 years ago, and that partisanship is reflected in the Senate. By any definition there is a narrower range of views on the Republican side of the aisle and a narrower range of views on the Democratic side of the aisle. But we still have our job to do. Our job is not just to stand and express our views. If our job was to only stand and express our views, each one of us would always be right and we wouldn't get anything done. The second part of the job is to take our views, put them together, and see if we can get a result. Some people say: Well, you are interested in bipartisanship. I am not so interested in bipartisanship. That interests me very little, to tell you the truth. I am interested in results. I learned in the Maryville city schools how to count, and I can count to 60. I know that if it takes 60 votes to get anything done in this Senate, it is going to have to take some on that side and some on this side to get to 60. And I know the American people are expecting results--results on the debt, results on tax reform, results on fixing No Child Left Behind, results on finding a place to put used nuclear fuel. I want to be a part of getting those results. We have too many problems to solve for us to think we have finished our job simply by announcing our positions, stating our principles, and sitting down. We need to take those principles and put them together and see whether they can mesh and get a result. It is not easy to get elected to the Senate. It is very hard to get here. Most candidates campaign for a long time, and their campaigns are intense for 2 years. They usually have terrific opposition, and people say things about them that they don't like. We end up with some very talented men and women among the hundred in the Senate. It kind of reminds me of country music. A lot of the artists in Nashville I know play in every bar they can find and every State fair they can find for 20 years, and finally they might get invited to join the Grand Ole Opry. Well, being in the Senate for a lot of the last year was like being invited to join the Grand Ole Opry and not being allowed to sing. The majority leader would bring up a bill and block the amendments because he would say the Republicans were keeping him from bringing up bills. Our side would say: Well, we are not going to let you bring it up unless you let us have amendments. So we would be sitting around, twiddling our thumbs, and wasting time when there was a lot to do. That is why I am so glad to see some things changing here in the Senate over the last few weeks. We all have our wishes about what will happen in the November election. I hope that after November we will see President Romney and that we will see more desks on this side of the aisle, a Republican majority. My friends on the other side expect and hope the President will be reelected, and they would like to enlarge their majority on the other side of the aisle. We don't know whether there will be a Republican or a Democratic President. We don't know whether there will be 51 or 52 Republican Senators or 51 or 52 Democratic Senators. We do know pretty well that there probably won't be many more than 51 or 52 or 53 Democratic Senators or 51 or 52 or 53 Republican Senators, and we all can count, and we all know that is not 60. We also know we are going to get to the end of the year and we are going to have taxes to reform, debt to reduce, highways to deal with, nuclear waste to do something about, the payroll tax credit expiration, and the biggest tax increase in history facing us. We know the country's lack of confidence in the future will be greatly relieved if it has more confidence in the ability of Washington, DC, to govern this country. We see what is happening in Europe. We can look at ourselves, and we know we have trillions of dollars sitting on the side lines of the United States. Part of the reason that money is sitting there is to wait to see whether the Senators can do our jobs. Well, doing our jobs may require forgoing some of our rights. That is what it says on our Web site--that we have the rights, that we can insist on them. And sometimes we will. But to get things done in the Senate, sometimes we will forgo some of our minority rights and the majority leader, we hope, will forgo some of his rights. Then we will be able to move to a bill, amend it, vote on it, and get some results. That is what the American people would like for us to do. We are moving today to vote on a Democratic and a Republican nomination by the President. We are doing it without any obstruction by Republicans in the minority, who are very well aware and hope there will be a President Romney after January who will have a number of Federal Reserve appointments to make. And President Romney will hope his nominees are entitled to the same respect President Obama's nominees are. If these two nominees are confirmed today, the Federal Reserve Board will have a full complement of seven for the first time since 2006. The Federal Reserve will have a full Board at a time of great economic crisis for our country and as we come up on the end of the year when we will have a fiscal cliff--according to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board--that will cause Congressional action to take care of. So I am here today only to say that I admire the nominees. I know one of them well, Jay Powell, who was Under Secretary of the Treasury for the first President Bush, an administration in which I served. He has a fine reputation. He should be a fine member. I want to acknowledge the fact that the President chose to break the stalemate by nominating Mr. Powell, a Republican, as well as a Democrat. I want to acknowledge the fact that several of my Republican colleagues, who have deep concerns about the actions of the Federal Reserve Board during this economic crisis over the last few years, have forgone some of their rights and allowed us to have an up-or-down vote at noon. That, taken with the other actions of the last few months, should give a little bit of confidence to the American people that we in the Senate are perfectly able to assert our principles, to stand on our principles, not to give up on our principles. But then, after we have made our speeches, to sit down and come to a result that may not be perfect, it may not be ideal to each of our principles, but will be good for our country. Exhibit 1 [From the Hill, May 15, 2012] Senate Rule Changes Come With Risk (By Martin P. Paone) It's an election year, and the Senate can't agree on how to keep the student loan interest rate from doubling on July 1 from 3.4 percent to 6.8. While both sides agree that it should be done, how to pay for it is the stumbling block. A party-line cloture vote failure has once again brought calls for changing the Senate's rules by majority vote at the beginning of the next Congress, bypassing the two-thirds cloture requirement if there's opposition. The Senate's membership has changed considerably in the last decade, but the Senate rules, with the exception of some changes that were enacted in the Ethics in Government Act, have not undergone any major changes since the Senate went on TV in 1986. While the House has its Rules Committee, which allows the majority to exert its will and control the flow of legislation, the Senate has a tradition of protecting the rights of the minority and of unfettered debate. Its own website describes ``[t]he legislative process on the Senate floor [as] a balance between the rights guaranteed to Senators under the standing rules and the need for senators to forgo some of these rights in order to expedite business.'' The Senate has for centuries functioned by this compact of selectively forgoing one's rights, but now that compact, to some, seems to have broken down--hence the call to enact rules changes at the beginning of the next Congress by majority vote. These calls have come from Democrats, but they are quick to admit that it should apply regardless of who is in the majority at the time. Such changes can certainly quicken the process and allow for the majority to pass legislation and confirm presidential nominees with little hindrance. While the initial rules reforms will probably be limited to restricting debate on a motion to proceed and other less dramatic changes, eventually such majority rules changes at the beginning of a Congress will result in a majority-controlled body similar to the House. Once the Pandora's Box of granting the majority the unfettered ability to change the rules every two years has been opened, having seen how the current situation has escalated, tit for tat over the last 30 years, it is difficult to believe that strict majority rule would not be the ultimate result. Thereafter, a member of the minority in the Senate will be just as impotent as his or her House counterparts. Filibusters and the forcing of a cloture vote have been repeatedly used to stop legislation and nominations and to waste time. This is why the number of successful cloture votes, many on noncontroversial nominations and on motions to proceed to bills, has gone up dramatically in recent years. By requiring the cloture vote and then voting for it, the minority has been able to waste considerable time and thus reduce the amount of time available to act on other items of the president's agenda. The call for changing the Senate's rules by majority vote at the beginning of a Congress is not new; it was attempted without success in 1953 and 1957 and in 1959. When faced with such an effort, then-Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson negotiated a cloture change back down to two-thirds of those present and voting, but as part of the compromise he had to add Paragraph 2 to Senate Rule V, which states ``The rules of the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they are changed as provided in these rules.'' So is it time to ignore the existing rules and change them at the beginning of the next Congress by a majority vote? Perhaps it is time--so many other changes have occurred in our lives in the recent past, why shouldn't the Senate change the way it does business? However, should that occur, one must be prepared to live with the eventual outcome of a Senate where the majority rules and the rights of the minority have been severely curtailed. While I can sympathize with those demanding such changes, it's the manner of their implementation that keeps reminding me of the exchange between Sir Thomas Moore and his son-in- law, William Roper, in the movie ``A Man For All Seasons'': Roper: ``So, now you give the devil the benefit of law!'' Moore: ``Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?'' Roper: ``Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!'' Moore: ``Oh? And when the last law was down, and the devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? . . . Yes, I'd give the devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!''

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

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

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. The Senator from Delaware is not yet on the floor but I know he is coming. Because I know other Senators wish to speak at 2 o'clock, I am going to go ahead with my remarks. When he comes I will let him go ahead with his. Each year, approximately 50,000 foreign students receive advanced degrees from universities in this country in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We call those in shorthand STEM degrees--science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Of those 50,000 students, at least 17,000 go home to other parts of the world. These are some of the brightest men and women in the world. They are attracted to the best universities in the world. I always say our universities, our great research universities especially, are our secret weapons for job growth. Since World War II, many estimates by the National Academy of Sciences suggest that more than half of our new jobs have come from increases in technology. It is very hard to think of any important new innovation in biology or in the sciences that has not had some sort of government-sponsored research over that time. So our research universities are job factories and our advanced degree holders are the ones who come up with the great ideas. As a former president of the University of Tennessee, which is a fine research university, I know that increasingly in the science, technology, engineering, and math programs in those universities many of the students are from other countries. These students line up in India and compete, hoping they will get a chance to come to the United States. They have done the same in China. They do this everywhere in the world. About 17,000 of those 50,000 who come for advanced degrees go home each year. Yesterday, Senator Coons and I introduced legislation that would help those 17,000 students, and we hope more who may come, to come to the United States, get their advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math, and then stay here and create jobs in our country instead of going home and creating them in other countries. I will have to admit there is a value to students who go home. It is probably our best foreign diplomacy, to have someone come from another country, live here, learn our values, go home and explain those at home. But we want the next Google to be created here, not in China. We want the brightest people in the world. If we are going to attract them here and provide education for them, we want to give them every opportunity to come here. And today we make them go home because of our immigration policy. The legislation Senator Coons and I introduced yesterday now has the support already of at least two other Senators, Senator Lugar and Senator Isakson, who have asked to cosponsor. It would, No. 1, create a new student visa for citizens of other nations who want to come here and pursue a master's or doctoral degree in science, technology, engineering, and math. No. 2, once they get that degree, the new visa created in this bill would allow them to remain here for 12 months, to look for a job. And, No. 3, once they are employed, the bill establishes a procedure to allow students to change their immigration status and to receive a green card. Finally, these new green cards would not count toward any existing green card limit. This idea is not new. It has as much support outside of the Senate Chamber as any idea I know about--from companies such as Microsoft, which tells us they have 2,600 jobs available that require computer science degrees that start at $104,000 a year. They would like to have these students work here and create jobs for us. We know from our own experience the importance of these green-card holders. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN, is probably the greatest engineering laboratory in the world. Who runs it? Dr. Jeffrey Wadsworth ran it. He had a green card from the United Kingdom. Dr. Thom Mason, who is there now, had a green card from Canada. Thomas Zacharia, the current Deputy Director at ORNL and the father of supercomputing, has a green card from India. We want them here, not in India, not in the United Kingdom, not in Canada. I greatly appreciate the leadership of Senator Coons of Delaware on this issue. He has worked hard on it. He has been a leader on it. I only have one more thing to say about it before I step aside and let him talk about his ideas. In 2005, we began to work on something called the America COMPETES Act in this body. In 2007 we passed it. It was sponsored by the Democratic leader and the Republican leader. It had 35 Democratic sponsors and 35 Republican sponsors. It passed the House. It was reauthorized last year. We asked the best minds in our Nation to tell us what would be the 20 things we could do as a Congress to make sure we are competitive in the future so that we can keep this high standard of living we have come to enjoy. It is a very high standard of living. We have about 5 percent of all the people in the world. We have about 25 percent of all the wealth in the world that we produce each year. How can we keep doing that? They gave us these 20 ideas and we passed many of them. It is one of the great successes of our Congress over the last several years, working together. One piece of unfinished business from the America COMPETES Act of 2005 and 2007 was to pin a green card on the foreign student who gets a graduate degree in science, math, technology,or engineering. The legislation Senator Coons and I offered yesterday would do that. I greatly value his leadership and his approach. I hope we can work with our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take this idea, turn it into a law, and give our country more of an opportunity to create new jobs as we move forward. I already asked permission for the next 15 minutes that Senator Coons and I would be in a colloquy. I wish to defer to him for his comments at this time.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask consent the Senator from Delaware, Senator Coons, and I could have a colloquy for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Senator Coons is one of the most eloquent speakers we have in the Senate. He did a beautiful job in explaining the bill. I hope it attracts support from both Republicans and Democrats. He mentioned the fact there are other immigration issues--and there are. There are a number of ones I wish to work on and get something done. I was here when we tried to get a comprehensive immigration plan a few years ago. It had strong bipartisan support, but one of the lessons we learned in that effort was that we do not do comprehensive well here in the Senate. Sometimes it is better to go step by step. That has been true for a long time. We remember Henry Clay as the Great Compromiser, but Henry Clay's greatest compromise was not passed by Henry Clay. He failed. It nearly ruined his health and he went to Massachusetts to recover from it. A Senator named Stephen A. Douglas, from Illinois, the home of our assistant Democratic leader, came to the floor and introduced the Clay compromise section by section and each section passed with a different coalition, with Senator Sam Houston being the only Senator who voted for each one of them. So my hope is that with the broad support we have for this very simple idea--pin a green card on the lapel of a gifted graduate of an advanced program in science, technology, engineering, and math, and allow them to stay here and create jobs here instead of forcing them to go home--I hope we have such strong support for this idea that we can go ahead and pass it, and then we can follow that up with the other necessary steps we need to take on immigration, and hopefully we can do that with a coalition that represents Democrats and Republicans as well. This is a great idea. Somebody might say: Well, why don't they just do it the way we do it now? Right now, it is H 1B visas. As everyone who is an employer knows, they are complicated, burdensome, and there are not enough of them. This is simple. It is a new visa. They get it if they are admitted, and they get to stay 12 months while they look for a job. If they get a job, they get a green card, and there is no cap on the number, and that is the idea. I thank Senator Coons for his leadership. I look forward to turning this good idea, this piece of unfinished business in the bipartisan America COMPETES Act, into law.

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

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Well, Mr. President, what I wish to request is-- Senator Coons and I were hoping to introduce a piece of legislation on another matter and talk about it. I think, given the focus on the budget here, I am going to suggest to Senator Coons, who will be coming here at 12:45, that we just mention our bill. If he could have time to do that, and then we would stay focused on the budget, and we will talk about the other matter tomorrow. So what I wish to do, if I may suggest, is ask that I have 5 minutes to speak on the budget and maybe 5 minutes to speak on the other matter, for Senator Coons to be recognized for 5 minutes, and that would take all of the time I would ask for.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I think that is a reasonable request. I wonder if I might ask on behalf of Senator Coons that if he should come to the floor during that period, he be recognized for 1 minute to simply stand up and say he was planning to do this, but we will defer the introduction of our bill until tomorrow out of respect for the budget discussion.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, am I now recognized for 5 minutes?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President. Please let me know when 30 seconds is remaining.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Senator Coons will come to the floor in a few minutes. He and I have been working together on legislation that many Senators on both sides of the aisle support. Very simply, it pins a green card on the lapel of any foreign student who is involved in science, engineering, technology graduate programs who gets a degree and who wants to stay in the United States and work. What we would like for them to do, instead of going home to create the next Google in India or China or some other country, is to stay here and create it here. The legislation has broad support. It is a recommendation of the American Competes Act which I worked on and many others did in 2005 and 2007. We will come to the floor and talk about that tomorrow. But I wanted to salute Senator Coons for his leadership on this issue and recognize it. Now I will turn to the budget with my remaining time. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently said the worst mistake President Obama made was not embracing his own fiscal commission's recommendations to reduce our debt by $4 trillion over the next 10 years. Today, our national debt is more than $15.6 trillion, which is nearly $1.9 trillion higher than it was when the fiscal commission released its recommendations and $6.4 trillion higher than when President Obama was sworn in. In January 2013, the first thing the next President will have to do is to ask the Congress to increase the debt ceiling. The fundamental problem is that Washington does not know how to balance its checkbook. The President has proposed a budget that raises taxes by $1.9 trillion over the next 10 years and still spends more than it takes in every year, instead of endorsing the fiscal commission's recommendations--or any other plan to address our Nation's fiscal crisis. According to the Congressional Budget Office, under the President's budget, interest on our debt will triple over the next 10 years, and by 2022 we will be spending more in interest than we spend on national defense. This is an irresponsible proposal, and instead of playing politics we should be working together on a plan to address the debt, which is the most urgent problem facing our country and, according to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, the biggest threat to our national security. The Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission plan, the Domenici-Rivlin plan, and the Gang of Six proposal all offer bipartisan blueprints for how to address it. Each of these proposals would reform the Tax Code and restructure entitlement spending--the main source of our dangerous Federal debt--so that seniors can count on Medicare and Social Security and taxpayers can afford them. Mandatory entitlement spending, which is 58 percent of the Federal budget, is growing at nearly 3 times inflation and bankrupting our country. Discretionary spending, which funds our national defense, our highways, our national parks, and National Laboratories, is only 36 percent of the Federal budget and is growing at the rate of inflation. Focusing our budget cutting on discretionary spending is just a way for Congress--to use the President's words--to kick the can down the road. The real work is reducing the growth of mandatory spending. Although the Senate is not debating its own budget resolution, going 1,113 days without passing a budget, we are debating several proposals. I do not agree with every one of these, but I do support the House- passed budget because it is a serious proposal to cut out-of-control spending and help solve our fiscal crisis. I will also support the proposal offered by Senator Toomey. Even though it cuts nondefense discretionary spending to 2006 levels, which I believe is too low, it reforms mandatory entitlement spending, it closes tax loopholes, it lowers tax rates, and it would save Medicare for future generations. Senator Toomey and I have also discussed the possibility of allowing States to have the option of choosing per capita caps on their average Medicaid expenditures per beneficiary as an alternative to traditional block grants, and I am encouraged by these discussions. Last August, I supported the Budget Control Act because it was an opportunity to take an important step in the right direction.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President. The House-passed budget and the budget proposed by Senator Toomey are opportunities to take the next step after the Budget Control Act. I look forward to working with them to adopt a responsible budget that grows the economy and reduces our debt. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, this week is the 13th annual National Charter Schools Week. On Tuesday, Senator Landrieu of Louisiana and I joined with 10 other Senators in submitting a resolution praising teachers, administrators, parents, and students who are part of the charter school movement across our country. Let me begin by explaining exactly what a charter school is because sometimes we stand here in the Senate and start talking without explaining the subject. A charter school is the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering. I visited there 4 years ago during spring break. Most of the students in Memphis were somewhere else, but not the students at the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering. These were sophomores studying advanced placement biology. These were children who had been in other schools the year before that were deemed to be low- performing schools. In other words, these were among the students in Memphis considered least likely to succeed. But they were fortunate. They were allowed to go to this charter school. Their parents had chosen this charter school. Here is what was different about the school. The union rules, the State rules, and the Federal rules had been relaxed so that the teachers had the freedom to do what they thought those children needed in that school. In this case, many of these children didn't have as much at home as other children did, so the teachers decided that the school ought to be open 12 hours a day, that it ought to be open on Saturday morning, and that it ought to be open more weeks a year than other schools. And the students were there on spring break studying advanced placement biology, which is not what many sophomores do in many schools in this country. And these children were succeeding. The charter school was able to pay some teachers more than others. It was able to have some classes that were smaller than others. It meant that some scheduled classes were longer than others and some children got special attention that needed it. You may say: Well, that makes so much common sense. Why aren't teachers able to do that in every public school in America? That is a very good question because, in a way, every one of our 100,000 public schools in America should be a charter school in the sense that the real definition of a charter school is one that gives teachers the freedom to use their own good sense and judgment with the children whom parents choose to send to that school. I have a personal interest in charter schools. Twenty years ago, I was the U.S. Secretary of Education. I was in my final year. The last thing I did in 1992 as Secretary was to write a letter to all the school superintendents in America urging them to try what a small number of Minnesota public schools were doing in what they were then calling startup schools. These were the first charter schools in America. Their origin was primarily from those who were part of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party in Minnesota. But at the same time, on the conservative side of the ideological spectrum, there were many who were calling for getting rid of teacher union rules and State rules and regulations that were making it harder for teachers to teach. So there was a happy convergence of support for this idea of startup schools. I remember that Albert Shanker, the late head of the American Federation of Teachers, supported the idea from the beginning. But many of those in the teachers unions opposed him. Many of those in the education establishment didn't like it. They were afraid of what might happen. Well, here is what has happened over the last 20 years. Instead of a handful of schools in Minnesota, we now have about 5,600 charter schools in America today. About 5 percent of all of our public schools are charter schools. The way they work is very simple. They are public schools, and the money the State and local government would ordinarily spend on their district school follows each child to the charter school. So it is just a public school organized in a different way. The first one, as I said, was in 1992--City Academy High School in St. Paul, MN. In 1997, President Clinton called for creating 3,000 charter schools by 2002. This was after the first President Bush had called for creating ``break the mold'' schools in every school district in America--another name for what we call charter schools today. And then in 2002 the second President Bush called for $200 million to support charter schools. Today, 41 States have charter schools, and the schools serve more than 2 million students--about 4 percent of the 50 million students in our public schools today. I am proud to say that our own State of Tennessee has had a strong charter school movement since 2002, and only recently has the State charter law been amended to remove the cap on the number of schools in the State and limitations on student eligibility. We currently have 40 charter schools operating in Tennessee--25 in Memphis and 11 in Nashville--with nearly 10,000 students attending these schools. Our First to the Top plan--Tennessee won the President's Race to the Top plan for education--included $14 million to expand high-performing charter schools. The Achievement School District, which Governor Bill Haslam created, has approved three charter operators to turn around priority schools that are failing, and we can expect more to be approved next year. So the question often is asked, well, are charter schools really helping students? And in some ways the jury is still out. Charter schools are relatively new, and there are many factors that go into the success of a student in a school, the No. 1 factor being what happens at home. But there are good and encouraging indications. A recent study by Stanford University found that two-thirds of the charter schools in Tennessee have been improving student performance in reading or math at a faster rate than competing traditional district public schools. Sixty-seven percent of charter schools in Tennessee have been improving the overall growth of their students for the last 3 years. But that means that 30 percent of the charter schools weren't performing as well or were performing worse. So the fact is, not every charter school is going to be successful. Not every startup business is successful. But we have a model in our country that reminds us of what can happen when we have autonomous institutions where administrators and teachers have the privilege of using their own judgment and common sense to make things happen, and we call that higher education. In the United States of America, we have around 6,000 institutions of higher education. There are all kinds--Yeshiva University, Nashville Auto Diesel College, Vanderbilt University, the University of Tennessee, Notre Dame, or Stanford. There are many different kinds-- for-profit, nonprofit, public, nonpublic. But they are all largely autonomous and the students choose the schools they attend. And what has happened? Everyone in the world agrees that we have not only the best colleges in America, but we have almost all of the very best colleges. So our goal should be to gradually increase the number of charter schools. At the same time, it is important that there should be some accountability. I know that in Tennessee they have a tough review board, and if a charter school is not working, it is closed down. That should be the case in many other places. You might ask: Why would you go through that struggle? Well, we should be doing that with some of the non-charter public schools as well, and we are beginning to that with so-called turnaround schools. Charter schools should be held to the same standards as other public schools. And charter schools shouldn't be allowed to pick and choose; they should be required to enroll all eligible students. If more students want to come than they have room for, there could be some fair method for choosing the students, such as a lottery. That makes a very good case. If charter schools are so popular that more families want their children to go to them, then we need even more charter schools. I am happy to come to the floor today to praise the teachers and the innovators, Presidents of both parties, including President Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who have strongly supported charter schools, just as President Bush and President Clinton and the first President Bush did. This is a movement that has broad bipartisan support. It has grown from a handful of schools in Minnesota 20 years ago to 5 percent of all of our public schools in the country today. What we have found is that when you give teachers more freedom to use good judgment and when you give parents more choices of schools, good things happen. The charter school movement is proving that. This is a week to salute their hard work and to hope that over the next year, 5 years, 10 years, more and more public schools become charter schools, where teachers are free to exercise their judgment and parents are free to choose the schools their children attend. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I enjoyed listening to the Senator from Rhode Island, as I always do. His passion for education is always on his sleeve and always front and center and I admire him for that. There are a couple of things I wish to make clear. If you are a student and you already have a student loan, what we are talking about has nothing to do with your loan. In other words, your rate on that loan is not going up. What we are talking about only affects new loans. So before you think about not going to college next year because of all this talk about student loan rates going up, that is not a problem. We are only talking about new loans. Second, for 60 percent of the students who get new loans, we are not talking about you either. So you don't have to worry about student loan rates going up. Third, for those of you about whom we are talking, the 40 percent who have these subsidized undergraduate student loans, what we are talking about saving you is $7 a month in interest payments over the next 10 years. Now $7 a month can add up, which is why Governor Romney as well as President Obama, Republicans as well as Democrats, wants to keep the interest rate at the rate it is now for new loans, 3.4 percent, for another year. But it is $7 a month in savings. It is important to know that. It is also important to know that there is an easy way to get this done. The House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would keep the interest rate at 3.4 percent for these 40 percent of new loans for one more year. All the majority leader has to do is bring up the House-passed bill and enact it here in the Senate. In other words, we agree on extending the interest rate. We only have a difference of opinion about how to pay for it. I have offered an alternative supported by many Republicans, which is the same as the House bill, which simply says we want to keep the interest rate where it is for another year, 3.4 percent, and we want to do the logical thing to pay for it. We want to give back to students the money that the government is taking from them to help pay for the new health care law. You may think: what in the world does the health care bill have to do with student loans? That is what many of us thought when the health care law was being debated. Because, what our friends on the other side of the aisle did during the health care law debate was take over the whole student loan program and almost turn the U.S. Secretary of Education into the U.S. banking commissioner. He has the job of making more than $100 billion in new student loans every year. Their idea was the government can make these loans better than the banks. Our friends on the other side of the aisle said to the students: The banks are overcharging you. We are going to take it over and we will be doing you a favor. What did the Democrats do? They took it over, but they didn't do the students a favor. According to the Congressional Budget Office, there was $61 billion of savings from taking over the loan program, much of which was money that the students should not have been paying. When the federal government took it over, what did the Democrats do? They spent it on other programs, all except for $10 billion, including $8.7 billion helping to pay for the new health care law. The way the Congressional Budget Office looks at it, $61 billion in savings resulted from--and these are my words--the government borrowing money at 2.8 percent interest and loaning it to students at 6.8 percent interest. We now want to take that profit from overcharging students and give it back to students. That is the way to pay for extending the 3.4 percent interest rate that we are talking about for another year. We are in agreement on this. Republicans as well as Democrats, Governor Romney as well as President Obama, say keep the 3.4 percent rate at 3.4 percent for another year. Students should know that it does not affect anybody who has a loan today and that it will save you $7 a month for a new subsidized loan. We want to do that. But the way we want to pay for it is by giving back the money that the other side of the aisle took from you to help pay for the health care bill. That is the right way to do it, instead of the typical reaction we often hear from the other side, which is we have something we want to do so we will simply raise taxes on people and businesses creating jobs in the middle of a recession. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I can understand the Senator from Iowa's concern about the reduction of the prevention and public health fund, which he put in the health care bill. I know he has a longstanding interest in that subject. But let's be clear about this. It is not just Republicans who think that fund isn't the best use of taxpayer money; it is almost all the Democrats on that side of the aisle. In February, the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act was passed. It was voted on in the Senate, and every Democrat except six voted to take $5 billion out of the prevention and public health fund we are talking about to pay for it. It is not only the Democrats on that side who have supported taking from the fund, it is the President of the United States. President Obama, in his Fiscal Year 2013 budget proposal, proposed taking $4 billion away from the fund, and then in his 2011 deficit reduction package, he proposed taking $3.5 billion from the fund. So it is a bipartisan proposal. We are a government that is borrowing 40 cents of every $1 we spend. If we are going to spend some money, we have to save some money, at the very least. What we are proposing on the Republican side is the same goal the Democrats have, the same goal that both President Obama and Governor Romney have, which is to take this 3.4-percent interest rate for new subsidized loans, for 40 percent of students who take out loans, and extend it at that rate for another year, while we also take a look at what the long-term prospects could be. We agree on that. We agree that 3.4 percent ought to continue to be the rate on new loans for another year. The President agrees. Governor Romney agrees. We don't agree with Senator Reid's proposal on how to pay for it. We have suggested paying for it by reducing spending in the health care law and reducing it in a way that all but six Democratic Senators have supported or at least from the fund they have supported reducing before and from the fund the President has supported reducing before. Why are we suggesting saving from the health care law? There is a reason for that. It is because those who passed the health care law are overcharging students on student loans in order to help pay for it. Here is why I say that. The government is borrowing money, according to the CBO and the way it scores student loan spending today, at 2.8 percent and loaning it to students at 6.8 percent. The truth is, that 6.8 percent is a pretty good interest rate for a student who is maybe unemployed today. My colleague from Tennessee, Senator Corker, was here talking about that earlier. There might be other ways of looking at this spending differently. But the way the Congressional Budget Office scores this spending today, it says the government is borrowing money at 2.8 percent and loaning it at 6.8 percent and that the government is making, in effect, a profit--that is my word--because the CBO says that based on the amount of money the government is receiving from the student loans, it makes a profit or a savings of $61 billion over 10 years. What did our friends on the other side do with that $61 billion? The Senator from Iowa very carefully explained that yesterday. They spent it--all except $10 billion, which they used for deficit reduction. They could not keep their hands off it. They spent $8.7 billion of that excess money from student loans to help pay for the health care law. We are saying that if we are looking for money to keep the interest rate at 3.4 percent, if we are trying to help students, why don't we give back to the students the money we are taking from them to pay for the health care law. We are overcharging students, according to the way the CBO looks at the loans, by $8.7 billion to help pay for the health care law. We propose in our bill to freeze the rate at 3.4 percent, give the students back the money we are overcharging them, and use the excess money--over $6 billion--to reduce the deficit, which we need to do at a time when we are borrowing 40 cents of every $1 we spend. That is what the Interest Rate Reduction Act I have proposed does. It freezes it at 3.4 percent and gives back to students the money the government is overcharging them on student loans to pay for it. That is the same bill the House of Representatives passed. If we can get a vote on that here and pass it in the Senate, we can send it to the President, and he could go around the country saying he has worked with the Congress and has produced a way to help students save money. The President needs to also say a couple more things. It is not much money--$7 a month on average student loans. But this is the political season, and students need to be aware of that. I have talked about tuition going up and student loans going up. But if we do what we have agreed we should do, what the House has already voted to do, and freeze this interest rate on 40 percent of new student loans at 3.4 percent for 1 year, it saves the average student on the average loan $7 a month. That is for 10 years. It adds up eventually to $830, but it is $7 a month. We should talk about the rest of the story too. Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Chair. The rest of the story is about why tuition is going up. As a result, why are loans going up? There are several reasons. The main reason, which every college president and every Governor knows--and the Presiding Officer who was the Governor of West Virginia--college tuition is rising at public universities and community colleges across the country, where three out of four of our students go, is because of Federal Medicaid mandates on States that are soaking up dollars that would otherwise go to the University of West Virginia, the University of Tennessee, the University of Iowa, and other public institutions. Every college President knows that and every Governor knows that. That didn't just start 3 years ago. That was going on when I was Governor 25 or 30 years ago. I even came to Washington and said to President Reagan: You take all of Medicaid and we will take all of kindergarten through the 12th grade education. We want out of this situation every year of having to use State dollars to fund one- third or whatever you think we ought to be paying for Medicaid. If we had made that swap 30 years ago, if the Federal Government had taken over all of Medicaid and the States had taken over all of kindergarten through the 12th grade education, the States would have come out about $4.5 billion ahead. If we made it today, if the Federal Government took all of Medicaid and the States took all of elementary and secondary education, the States would have $92 billion extra to spend. Where would it go? I know that a lot of it would go to education--maybe most of it-- especially to higher education and to public universities. The reason students are fasting and striking in California, when tuition is going up, is because California has reduced spending to its public universities by $1 billion since 2008. What the students don't seem to know is that the reason California has had to reduce spending to its public universities is because Washington has insisted that California, Tennessee, West Virginia, Iowa, and every other State increase their share of spending on Medicaid, and that soaks up the money that would otherwise go to public universities and community colleges. In my own State, last year, Medicaid spending was up 16 percent and higher education spending was down 15 percent. What was the result? Up went tuition 8 percent and up went student loans. So it is a good thing, I suppose, that Democrats and Republicans and Governor Romney and President Obama have all agreed that for 1 year we want to freeze the rate on new subsidized Stafford student loans at 3.4 percent and save the average students who get those new loans $7 a month. What students and families who are struggling to pay for college need to know is that until we repeal this health care law or until we repeal these Medicaid mandates on States, those college tuition rates will be going through the roof. The Kaiser Family Foundation says States, which now spend about 1 out of every 4 State tax dollars on Medicaid, will see a 29-percent increase on average in the next year as the health care law goes into effect. Where do you suppose that 29 percent increase will come from? It will come from the State budgets. The Governor will sit there and choose primarily between spending for community colleges and universities. More of it will go to Medicaid and less to community colleges and universities. So their quality will go down and their tuition will go up. The students will be fasting in California and they will be thinking it is their legislators in California who are the problem, while it is really the legislators in Washington, DC who are the problem because they are the ones imposing the Medicaid mandates on states. I have tried to be fair in saying this problem is not an invention of President Obama's and of the new health care law; this has been a trend for 25 or 30 years. But President Obama and the new health care law have made this problem worse. This debate, while it may save students $7 a month in interest payments and while we think the fairest way to do it is to take the money we are overcharging them and give it back to them, this debate at least highlights the issue I hope I hear the President and Governor Romney talk about this fall, which is about who is responsible for rising college tuition and student loan debt. I believe the main person and main group responsible are those who insist on continuing Medicaid mandates on States that soak up the dollars that should be going to public colleges and universities. I yield the floor and reserve the rest of my time.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments and the courtesies of the chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and I recognize his leadership and his interest in these subjects. The Senator asked the question: who connected health care to student loans? It was the Democrats who connected health care to student loans. Think about this. Here we were debating a new health care law a few years ago, and what happened? The Democrats--the majority--said: While we are at it, while we are supposedly fixing health care, we are going to take over the entire student loan program. We are going to take Arnie Duncan, who is a terrific Secretary of Education, and we are going to make him banker of the year, banker of the century, and we will put him in charge of making more than $100 billion in new loans every year to students all over America. So as a part of the health care law, they got rid of the student loan program, most of which was handled by people you would expect to be making loans--that is, banks--and put it all in the government. They did that on the theory that the banks were making too much money. It reminds me of people who think that if it can be found in the Yellow Pages, the government ought to be doing it. Autos, student loans--just put it all in the government. So if we are going to do that, if we are going to connect the two, student loans and banks--and then the Congressional Budget Office comes along and says: Well, OK, if the government takes over the student loan program, it will save $61 billion, that $61 billion ought to go to the students who are getting the loans. That is my view. That is our view. And the Congressional Budget Office estimates that if we applied that $61 billion savings to student loans, we could have reduced the interest rates to about 5.3 percent and save the average student $2,200 over 10 years. So it wasn't anybody on this side of the aisle who suggested during the health care debate that we ought to suddenly say: While we are at it, let's take over the student loan program. All we are saying today is this: We agree with President Obama, we agree with Governor Romney, and we agree with the House of Representatives that the interest rate for new subsidized Stafford student loans should stay at 3.4 percent for the next 12 months. That will save the average student about $7 a month in interest payments. The only difference we have is how we propose to pay for it. The Democrats want to raise taxes on people and small businesses who are creating jobs while we are still in the midst of the greatest recession since the Great Depression. We say that since the government is borrowing money at 2.8 percent and loaning it to students at 6.8 percent and since the Congressional Budget Office said there was a savings of $61 billion when the Federal Government took over the student loan program and that $8.7 billion of the savings went to pay for the health care law, we ought to take the money the government is overcharging students and use it to pay for keeping this rate lower for another year. That is what we Republicans are saying and is where we have a difference in opinion with the other side. So I hope my colleagues will vote no on the motion to proceed. We have a different proposal that we believe is superior and is the same as the one that passed the House. We would like a chance to offer the Interest Rate Reduction Act and give the students the benefit of our proposal, which will give the overcharged money back to them. We would like to have a vote on that. Therefore, I recommend that we keep the rate at 3.4 percent; that we use the money we recognize as the savings we are taking from students, by overcharging them for student loans, as the best way to pay for it. Hopefully, the majority leader will allow us to consider the Interest Rate Reduction Act that we have proposed. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor. Cloture Motion

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am glad I had an opportunity to hear the distinguished Senator from Iowa, who is my friend and the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. I wish to address the same subject he did, but I want to hasten to summarize it at the beginning to say that we agree. By we, I mean Governor Romney, the likely Republican nominee for President, President Obama, the House Republicans, I, and others agree that for the next year we should keep the interest rate on 40 percent of new student loans at 3.4 percent. There is no difference of opinion on that. What is different is how we propose to pay for it. The distinguished Senator from Iowa has actually outlined the difference of opinion very well. What we are saying, what the Republicans are saying, is that in order to pay for the $6 billion it will cost taxpayers to keep that 3.4 percent interest rate the same for the next year, we want to give to students--give them back their own money, the money the Democrats are overcharging them on their student loans. The Senator from Iowa went through a very careful explanation on that which was largely correct. He pointed out that at the time the majority decided it would make the Secretary of Education the Nation's leading banker and put him in charge of administering what is becoming to be nearly $1 trillion worth of student debt--in other words, take it away from banks and make the government the banker--that there was about $61 billion in ``savings.'' That is from the Congressional Budget Office. Our friends on the other side of the aisle argued those were unnecessary subsidies to banks. Let's say, for the moment, for the sake of argument, they are correct about that. That $61 billion is money students were paying in interest on their student loans. Wouldn't the logical thing to do be to let the students keep the money? If we truly cared about college tuition going up and student loans rising, wouldn't the thing to do be to say: We have done a big favor to you students-- the government has been overcharging you on your student loans, all 18 or 19 million of you who have student loans--so instead of the rate of 6.8 percent, which it is for most students, we are going to lower that rate to 5.3 percent. That is not my number. That is the number the Congressional Budget Office said. We could have that $61 billion our friends on the other side said the government is overcharging students and we could reduce the average loan of about $25,000 to a 5.3-percent rate instead of 6.8 percent and that would save the average student on the average loan about $2,200 over 10 years. But they didn't do that. They spent it on more government; $10 billion to reduce the debt and $8.7 billion to pay for the health care bill. So what we are saying is in order to freeze this rate at 3.4 percent, let's give to students the money they were paying. Instead of paying for the health care bill, let's reduce the student rates. That is the difference of opinion here. Of course, our friends on the other side of the aisle have a better way, in their opinion. Not only do they want the students to continue to pay for other government programs, and some money for the health care bill, they want to raise taxes on job creators in the middle of the longest recession we have had since the Great Depression. Let me go back to the beginning point here. We are talking about something that was reflected very well in the New York Times yesterday. I noticed the Senator from Iowa talked about the New York Times. Here is the national section from yesterday talking about what is going on in California. Angry about tuition increases and cuts in courses and enrollment, a dozen students at California State University have taken their protest beyond marches . . . and declared a hunger strike. The fasting protest was the latest display of anger at the 23 California State University campuses. The system has lost roughly $970 million in state financing since 2008. The University of California is probably the best public university in the world. It has lost nearly $1 billion in State funding since 2008, and the students are fasting. They are upset about the tuition increases. Why is the tuition increasing? Well, the administrators say if we lose $1 billion from the State for our State universities, the money has to come from somewhere to pay for excellence in our universities, so we increased the tuition. That story has been going on all over the country. Why is that happening? The President has put this issue on the table. I think we need to discuss it. Why are they fasting in California, protesting tuition increases? In the last year why did State funding for the University of Tennessee and Tennessee's community colleges and Tennessee Tech go down 15 percent last year? The main reason is the Federal Government's health care policies and its Medicaid mandates on States that are soaking up State dollars on Medicaid that would otherwise go to pay for public universities. President Obama did not start this policy--it has been going on for 30 years--but he is making it much worse with his health care law. And when it takes effect next year, the Kaiser Family Foundation says that States, which already are spending one out of four of their State tax revenues on Medicaid, will see a 29-percent increase in their spending on Medicaid. What will that do? What that will do is force California, Tennessee, Connecticut, and Iowa to look in their State budgets, to take the money that most likely would have gone for the colleges and community colleges and public universities and instead spend it on Medicaid. Those Federal Medicaid mandates are soaking up money that would otherwise go to public colleges and universities, and as a result of that, universities are raising tuition. As a result of that, loans are up, students are fasting, and the President is on the campaign trail promising to fix it. Let's talk about his fix. First, it is the political season, so Senators, and all of us, need to listen very carefully when someone begins to stir the crowd about a popular issue, and surely being able to pay for college is a popular issue. We hope all American students who want to have a college degree will be able to go and afford to go to college. Our Federal Government goes to great efforts to make that possible. Half of the students who go to colleges and universities in America-- there are 6,000 of them--have a Federal grant or loan to help pay for college. We have more than $100 billion in new loans going out this year from the American taxpayer. That is from people out there working and paying taxes--the UAW member, the teacher, their taxes are going to loan more than $100 billion to students this year. The amount of money for Pell grants this year is over $41 billion. The University of Tennessee in Knoxville is a fine campus where the tuition is about $7,400 a year, which is a good bargain at a great university. Almost all the students show up with a $4,000 State scholarship called the HOPE scholarship. For a quarter of the students who are low income, they have Pell grants that carry them above the amount of tuition. State and local governments have made a great effort to try to make it easier for our young people and older people to continue their education, and we want to continue to do that. There is a bipartisan effort on that. Now the specific issue at play here, and the one we are likely to vote on tomorrow, has to do with one type of those student loans, and let's try to put that in perspective. The Democrats have a version and the Republicans have a version. I offered a version which would pay for it by giving back to students the money the government is overcharging them. The Democrats have one that would raise taxes on people who create jobs. But whatever one passes-- if one were to pass--would save average students on new loans about $7 a month in interest payments for the next 10 years. That can add up. That could be $83 in a year, $830 over 10 years. But that is what we are talking about, $7 a month in savings or $7 a month in interest payments on the average loan, and that is for 40 percent of the new loans. So if you have a student loan and it is at 3.4 percent, that is not going to change. There are 40 percent who have student loans today that they took out last year at about 3.4 percent. Most everybody else is at 6.8 percent, which is a good deal lower than you could get with a private loan. A private loan is one where you go to a bank and say: I am going to college and I don't have a job so I need to borrow money. You may get it, but they are going to charge you more because you may not be able to pay it back as well as somebody else. We have agreed on this--at least we agreed on the policy, but not how to pay for it. The President has agreed on it and Governor Romney agreed on it. For the next year we wish to take 40 percent of new loans and keep them at the 3.4 percent rate, and then later in the year-- earlier next year--when we look at our entire budget, how much money we have to spend, the size of the debt, which is of great concern to all of us on both sides of the aisle, we will see what we can afford to do. That is the first question. But I am glad the President has been going to college campuses. I am glad he has raised the issue of student loans and college tuition because as a former Governor of Tennessee who cares deeply about education and as someone who was also U.S. Education Secretary about 20 years ago, I have been trying for 20 or 25 years to get Washington to pay attention to the idea that it is ruining our public colleges and universities where these Medicaid mandates soak up the dollars that ought to go to public colleges and universities. Three-quarters of our students go to public universities such as the University of Tennessee or Iowa or Iowa State or California or the community colleges, which are our secret weapon. And even with the rising tuition, those costs are at least reasonable now. I mean tuition at a community college in Tennessee is about $3,000. Nationally the average tuition for a 4-year public university is about $8,200. It is not easy to find the money for that, but it is still within range. What has happened in the last 25 years? I can tell you what happened in my State. I visited with the retiring president of Tennessee Tech University, a fine engineering school. He said two things: One, over the last 3 years State funding for his university--and for most in Tennessee--has gone down by 30 percent. That is not a 30-percent reduction in the rate of growth, that is a flat-out cut. And why has that been happening? Well, our current Governor, a Republican, and our former one, a Democrat, have said what I know and every Governor knows: when you make up your State budget and you get down toward the end of it, you make a choice between Medicaid and higher education. And because Medicaid is run from Washington with specific mandates on states, the States end up having a stranglehold put on them, and in effect, if they participate in the program, they are forced to make decisions about eligibility and how much they spend, and there goes the money. There goes the money and it doesn't go to the public colleges and universities, resulting in less money, higher tuition, and more loans. The fasting students in California--if I walked up to them today and said: I bet you didn't know that President Obama's health care policies are the reason you are hungry today, they wouldn't believe that. But the fact of the matter is not just the President's policies but the policies over the last number of years have gradually soaked up money that would make the University of California a great university and left it no recourse but to become more efficient, which it should, and to raise tuition, which it is doing. I will give an example of how much difference this makes. In the early 1980s, I was a young Governor and I was making these budgets up. I would say: Well, about this much goes to K 12 education, and the courts are running prisons, so I will have to put that in, and then the gas tax goes to the highways. And you get down to the end of the budget and you make a choice between Medicaid, the Federal program that States pay about 30 percent of, and education. I was trying to restrict funding for Medicaid and increase funding for education. I could see where we were headed over the next several years. I went to see President Reagan. I had made an appointment. I saw him in the Oval Office. I said: Mr. President, let me propose a grand swap. He said: What do you mean, a grand swap? I said: We will take all of K 12 education in the States and you take all of Medicaid. He thought for a moment, and he said that sounds like a pretty good idea. My reasoning was that instead of Medicaid having two masters--one in Washington and the other among all the different Governors--if it had one, it would be managed better. If Washington ran Medicaid, Washington would have to pay for it all and make sure that it could be funded. I thought then, and I still think today, that almost all of the responsibility for kindergarten through the 12th grade belongs as close to the child as possible--first with the family, then with the classroom, and then with the State. I believe that while there has been some important advocacy from Washington over the last 30 years, if we had made that grand swap 30 years ago, the Medicaid Program would be run better today and our public schools would be performing better today. We could argue about that, but the one thing we could not argue about is the difference in money. Back then if we made the swap, the States would have come out ahead by about $4.5 billion. In other words, the Federal Government would have taken over Medicaid and the States would have taken over K 12. The States would have given back to the Federal Government the Federal aid for education and keep their Medicaid money. Four-and-a-half billion dollars was the difference in 1981 or 1982. What would the difference be today if we made such a grand swap? It would be $92 billion. It would be $92 billion of extra money the States would have if today the Federal Government took over all of Medicaid and the States took over all of the responsibility funding for K 12. That would mean in a State such as California where the students are fasting, California would probably have an extra $12 billion or $13 billion. Do you think much of that would go to the University of California to continue its excellence? Sure it would. Would much of it go to Tennessee Tech, the University of Tennessee, and the community colleges? It absolutely would. What happened over the years is that these well-intentioned Federal health care Medicaid mandates have put a stranglehold on Governors, which is why I said when we were debating the health care law that I thought any Senator who voted for it ought to be sentenced to serve as Governor for 8 years and try to implement it. I mentioned that last year Tennessee's State funding for higher education went down 15 percent. Guess what. State funding for Medicaid went up 16 percent. So there is a direct relationship: Medicaid up, State funding for public universities down, tuition and loans go up, and that is the real problem we have today. I am glad the President has put this issue on the table. I am glad he is talking about it, and I hope Governor Romney talks about it. I hope what they agree to do is either to repeal the health care law or to repeal the Medicaid mandates and give States more flexibility. We can't pass a law in Washington, as we did 3 or 4 years ago with the stimulus, and say we are going to give you more Medicaid money, but, Mr. Governor and Ms. Legislator, you can't reduce State funding on Medicaid. Lieutenant Governor Ravitch of New York, a Democrat, wrote an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal. At the time it said: If you tell New York that at a time when we are reducing revenues and say we have to keep spending on Medicaid, we have to cut something else, and the State University of New York gets cut. So New York cuts the State University of New York, tuition goes up, loans go up, and students are protesting. It is not just the student protests that I worry about. We are at a time in our history when we are in a serious brain-power competition around the world. We have a lot of Chinese scholars who go from American universities home to their universities. In a bipartisan way-- and the Senator from Iowa and I were part of it--we passed something called the America Competes Act a few years ago and reauthorized it so we could properly fund science and our innovation. Government-sponsored research has been an important part of our job growth over the last 30 or 40 years. Where is that done? It is done in our national laboratories or our great research universities. Well, at least half of our great research universities are public universities, such as the University of California, the University of Michigan, the University of Tennessee, the University of Connecticut. If we keep cutting government-sponsored research and the quality of those universities, our job growth won't be nearly as good in the future. Here is another example of how much that has changed over the years. Thirty years ago in Tennessee, the State paid 70 percent of the cost of a student to attend a State university and the student paid 30 percent. We had an implicit agreement between the government and the student, and we said: If we increase your tuition, we will increase the State contribution by the same percentage. So we kept it at about 70 and 30, and it made it possible for a lot of students to go to college. What is it today? It is 30 and 70. It is upside down. Thirty percent of the support for colleges and universities comes from the State government and nearly 70 percent comes from the students. Why is that? The main reason is Federal health care mandates that put an unrealistic amount of money on top of States, and it is about to get worse. I mentioned earlier the Kaiser Family Foundation, which estimates that next year States that are already spending $1 out of every $4 for Medicaid will see a 29-percent increase in Medicaid funding. This fast will have to go on a lot longer in California if that is going to happen. We can't cut $1 billion out of the University of California every 3 years and have it remain the best public university in the world. It is just not going to happen. And we can't raise tuition 6 percent or 8 percent every year and make college available to the large number of students that would like to go. So I am glad the President and our friends on the other side in this political year have raised the issue of rising tuition and student loans. We agree on the little issue before us. We would all like to take that 3.4 percent interest rate and extend it for a year. That costs $6 billion. That would affect new loans and only 40 percent of the students. But we agree on that, the President agrees, and Governor Romney agrees. That is not an issue. The issue is, do we raise taxes on job creators or do we give back to students some of the money we are continuing to overcharge them on student loans? That is the issue. The larger question--and one that I hope we all address this year in our debates and that the President and Governor Romney address in their debates--is, What about the future of our public colleges and universities, where three out of four American college students go? How are we going to maintain their quality and maintain the opportunity for access to them if we continue to impose Medicaid mandates on States that soak up the money that ought to be going for excellence in higher education and the greatest amount of opportunity for students by keeping tuition rates low? That is the real issue. While President Obama is not responsible for what went on before he became President, he has made that condition much worse. If he is going to bring this up on the campaign trail, I hope he tells the rest of the story, which is that he and his health care and Medicaid mandate policies are a principal part of the reason and I would say the main cause going back over the years as to the reason California students are fasting, Tennessee students saw an 8-percent increase in tuition, and all across the country college presidents know very well that the reason there have been such reductions is because of Federal Medicaid mandates. I hope we have an opportunity tomorrow to vote not only on the Democratic proposal to keep student loan rates at 3.4 percent but also on the Republican interest rate reduction act that I have proposed, which would also keep the rates at 3.4 percent but pay for it by stopping the overcharging of students to help pay for the health care law. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Would the Chair please let me know when there is 2 minutes left.