Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to join my colleague from West Virginia, as well as our friend from South Dakota, to say how much I appreciate the effort that Senator Crapo has made to put this bill together. It is exactly how the Congress is supposed to work and how the Senate is supposed to work--a bipartisan bill. Frankly, I am sure it is a bill that everyone who will vote for it would have changed at least one thing in it, but if we were to change all of those things that all of us would have changed, suddenly we wouldn't have a bill that could pass, a bill that would do what this bill does, a bill that will roll back the Dodd-Frank regulations, which are one more attempt by the Federal Government to make one size fit all. If you have ever tried on any one-size-fits-all things, you know that one size almost never fits anybody, and that has been the case that we have seen now. Credit unions and community banks provide critical financial services for families and for small businesses across Missouri and across the country. When the Dodd-Frank bill became law, small and medium-sized banks and credit unions were faced with huge regulatory burdens. Big banks got bigger, and small banks got bought and went out of business way too often. There was negative impact on their ability to maintain service on Main Street in a small community. You couldn't put together a group that would just be the compliance group, and if you did, that had to come out of their ability to do the kind of business that you wanted to do and always had been doing. According to the Independent Community Bankers of America, despite holding less than 20 percent of the Nation's banking assets, community banks fund more than 60 percent of small business loans and more than 80 percent of U.S. agricultural loans--all in that 20 percent of the banking assets of the country. Furthermore, they operate in many areas where other banks don't, where they are the only physical banking presence, frankly. One out of every five U.S. counties has only one bank, and that one bank is a community bank, a small bank. The more time, the more money, the more staff that community lenders have to dedicate to complying with needless regulations, the less ability they have to provide the kind of service they would like to provide. In talking about the bill that I am pleased to be a cosponsor of, the president of the Missouri Bankers Association, Max Cook, said: ``This common-sense legislation will allow banks to better serve the needs of customers and businesses in our communities.'' He went on to say ``that financial regulatory reform will unleash America's economic potential.'' That is the end of his quote, but I think you could add to it that lots of good things are happening in our economy right now--the tax bill, the regulatory, commonsense regulations that are overcoming regulations that didn't make much sense. Access to capital is a critically important part of what you have to have to have a growing economy--access to capital in small communities, as well as access in big communities. That means you have to have banks that can serve the communities those banks are in. This bill contains a number of bipartisan priorities. One of the priorities in here is a bill that I sponsored, the Family Self- Sufficiency Act. Senator Rounds mentioned part of what that means to rural Americans, but it also means a lot to Americans who are living under public housing programs of one kind or another. This was a bill that I introduced. It was cosponsored by Senator Reed from Rhode Island, Senator Scott from South Carolina, Senator Menendez from New Jersey, and it is another bipartisan statement that this bill will make when we pass it. It simply makes commonsense changes in the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Family Self-sufficiency Program. That program happens to be under the Banking Committee, so it fits right in this bill. What this addition to the bill would do--and it is in the bill to start with now--is expand the ability of people, under the new way to define these programs, to improve their education, to save money for the future, to reach their goal of becoming more financially independent. The first thing the legislation does is streamline two public housing family self-sufficiency programs into one. There is no reason to have two family self-sufficiency programs, no reason to have two definitions, no reason to have one category of people in those programs who qualify for things and a second category who don't, just because they happen to qualify under the definitions of a needlessly duplicative program. So it eliminates that. This bill expands the scope of support services. It allows people who are in these programs to attain a GED if they don't have one, to pursue a postsecondary degree or a postsecondary certification, and it gives training for financial literacy. Lastly, this bill would expand the reach of the Family Self- Sufficiency Program to families that may otherwise be technically excluded from the program today. I would like to share some of the statements from housing organizations in my State and around the country, such as a group called Beyond Housing, which is interested in more than just a place to live, but how you use that as a way to improve your life. Beyond Housing in St. Louis, which provides more than 400 affordable housing rental units for families throughout the St. Louis region, endorsed the bill because they said it would ``empower families across the country to achieve self-sufficiency.'' The Missouri chapter of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials supports the change this bill has because they say ``it provides the Tool Box the residents can use to better life for them as individuals and as a family.'' The National NeighborWorks Association says that the legislation would ``improve the existing self-sufficiency program to help more individuals and families achieve more in life for themselves and their families.'' Providing families in need with affordable housing is critical, but it is also important that we figure out ways to move them beyond government support to self-sufficiency. These changes in this bill help make that happen. A companion bill of that part of the bill in the House passed in January by a vote of 412 to 5, so I hope it is a helpful addition to the bill. I know it is going to be helpful to the families that it opens new doors for. I am glad to be here supporting this bill and to have Senator Rounds, Senator Capito, Senator Enzi, and Senator Fischer here, as well, to talk about the importance of this bipartisan piece of legislation. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. In that article, George W. Bush talked about the impact Billy Graham had on his life. My favorite line from that article talked about when George W. Bush's father was President, and his father was gone, and he and his mother Barbara were having dinner at the White House. They began to argue a little bit about what it took to get to Heaven. So Mrs. Bush just decided, well, we will call Billy Graham and ask him what it takes to get to Heaven. If anybody would know, Billy Graham would know. According to President Bush, here is what Billy Graham said to them: Barbara and George, I believe what is written in the New Testament. But don't play God. He decides who goes to heaven, not you. We spend a lot of time arguing about lots of things, but a grace- filled life, a life built on the fundamental principles of the Gospel, is a life that we have benefited from and we uniquely recognize today. I am glad to be here with my colleagues on the floor as we talk about this great life and the impact it had.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to spend a few minutes talking about your fellow North Carolinian, Billy Graham. It is very appropriate that you are in the Chair as I do this--and some of my colleagues are going to follow--as we honor the life and legacy of Billy Graham. He was sometimes called America's Preacher, and sometimes called America's Pastor, but he went to Heaven last week. And what a 99 years he had while he was here. He lies in honor today. You and I were over there earlier today in the Rotunda of the Capitol. Only three private citizens prior to today have been granted that honor: civil rights champion Rosa Parks in 2005 and two U.S. Capitol police officers who died in the line of duty in 1998, Officer Jacob Chestnut, Jr., and Detective John Gibson. Somebody observed this morning while we were in the Rotunda of the Capitol that he is surrounded there by friends he made during his life. President Eisenhower, President Ford, President Reagan, Dr. Martin Luther King all are memorialized with statues and a bust in the Capitol. So Billy Graham is right at home today with people he made friends with during his life, gave advice to during his life, but never really saw as uniquely his ministry. His ministry was for people everywhere. I might mention that President Truman--and I stand right here behind one of the desks he used when he was a Senator from Missouri. He was the first President that Billy Graham met with, in 1950. President Truman, like lots of us midwesterners, closely held with his faith. When Billy Graham, at the end of their meeting, said ``Can we pray?'' President Truman said ``I guess it wouldn't hurt anything.'' That was the first opportunity Billy Graham had to pray with the many Presidents he prayed with and, I am sure, prayed for after that. Billy Graham's mom and dad were dairy farmers like mine. He was born in Charlotte, NC. President Trump said this morning that there was a prayer meeting in 1934 on the Graham farm. Billy Graham's father made the place available to have a prayer meeting. The focus of that prayer group of leaders from the Charlotte, NC, area was to pray that God would send a leader who would take the Gospel around the world. Probably nobody at that prayer group had any sense how close they were to somebody who was just about to begin the process to do that. That was the year Billy Graham became a Christian. From that point on, he would say: ``My one purpose in life is to help people find a personal relationship with God, which, I believe, comes through knowing Christ.'' That is the end of a quote on his view. For so many times and in so many different ways, that was a simple statement that defined his life. Five years after that, in 1939, he was ordained and became a pastor. He was pastoring at a church in Illinois while he went to college at Wheaton College. His Wheaton College education was important, but I am sure he would say that the best thing that happened there was that he met his wife, Ruth Bell. They were married for 64 years. It was a partnership. As one person went all over the world, the other person raised their five children and took care of things at home and on rare occasions was able to go with him. Her mom and dad were missionaries. This was clearly a committed life that she understood. All five of their children were in the Rotunda of the Capitol today and in their own way, in each case, have pursued the work their parents thought was so important. Reverend Graham didn't just preach the Gospel from inside the four walls of the church; in fact, I think it was a rare occasion when he preached in a church as opposed to the places that he preached all over the world. In 1949, he spoke to 350,000 people over 8 weeks in Los Angeles. He began to call those efforts crusades, and eventually over 200 million people would hear the message from him directly, in person. Millions more would hear the message from television, print, and movies. By the way, I read recently that Billy Graham--a young, handsome guy--was offered a movie contract not too long after that 1949 Los Angeles crusade. He said that was not his job and that he wouldn't do it for $1 million a day. His work was clearly understood by him. He shared Christianity with more people directly than any other person in the history of the world. He led his first crusade in St. Louis, MO, in our State, in 1953. He returned in 1973 for another St. Louis crusade and to celebrate his 55th birthday. The Post-Dispatch reported that the revival's opening night had 20,000 people, and 4,000 people were in the choir most of the nights at that revival in St. Louis. He made several trips to Kansas City. In 1967, the Heart of America crusade in Kansas City drew 364,000 people. The then-mayor of Kansas City, Ilus Davis, made Reverend Graham an honorary citizen and gave him a key to the city. He returned to Kansas City, MO, many times doing that work. In 1959, he came to my hometown of Springfield, MO. I was pleased to read just recently that he said that the Ozarks reminded him of his native North Carolina. In 1982, he spoke to a crowd at Evangel University--and this was inside--of 2,200 people. For seven decades, Billy Graham brought the Gospel to nearly 215 million people. Despite his widespread recognition, he was always known for his humility. Whether speaking with a person on the street or the President, his main purpose was for them to share his sense of the importance of knowing his Lord, Jesus Christ. He had a message of grace, not justice; that God could forgive anything, God would forgive anything; and that nobody gets to Heaven based on their works, they get to Heaven based on their understanding of the grace of God. He defended civil rights for African Americans. He insisted from the early 1950s on--actually, from the beginning of his crusades--that they would be integrated. He was a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King's. In 1957, he invited Dr. King to speak at one of his revival meetings. He later bailed Dr. King out of jail. Dr. King said: ``Had it not been for the ministry of my good friend Dr. Billy Graham, my work in the civil rights movement would not have been as successful as it has been.'' Reverend Graham spoke about critical issues. His faith inspired him to build bridges for decades. He was included in the Gallup organization's 10 most admired men in the world 61 times--more than anyone else in the history of that poll. He led a remarkable, faith- filled life. He touched many lives. I ask unanimous consent that the February 23 Wall Street Journal article be printed in the Record.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am pleased to come and talk today. This is a week where we had all anticipated a return to the Senate, where ideas are widely debated. I was standing by the majority leader last week when he was talking about this, and he said that we will let a thousand flowers bloom. It didn't sound like something Senator McConnell would normally use as a reference, but he did, and I am thinking, well, that would be a good thing, to see a thousand different ideas widely debated on the Senate floor. So far this week, there has not been any debate because we can't seem to agree on who votes on what first. I think that is a particular level of dysfunction that we should all be concerned about. For the Senate to do its work, we have to be willing to vote and we have to be willing to take some hard votes. My sense of politics today is, whether you have taken the vote or not, someone is going to accuse you of taking that vote. So you might as well not worry about the vote you take; just worry about the work we get done and whatever votes are necessary to be taken to get that done. On this topic, it does seem to me that we have two issues here that should be solved, two issues on which there is broad agreement. I have said for a long time that there are really three questions in the immigration debate that need to be answered: No. 1, how do we secure the border; No. 2, what are the legitimate workforce needs of the country; and No. 3, what do we do with people who came and stayed illegally? As we think about securing the border, by the way, half the people who are in the country illegally came legally and just stayed. So it is not all a border issue, but it clearly is partly and significantly a border issue. One of the things that people expect a government to be able to do is to secure its own borders. Often, when we hear a story of a country somewhere in the world in which the government has disintegrated and is no longer in control of the country, one of the first things that are mentioned by people talking about that dysfunctional government is that they don't control their own borders. It truly is a legitimate expectation of a functioning government that you control your own borders. It is also a legitimate expectation of government that you look at your economy and you look at what workforce needs you have that aren't being met and figure out the best way to meet those workforce needs. In this debate, because we haven't controlled our borders and because we haven't kept track of people who legally crossed our borders and as a result, we have some number of people--usually the estimate is about 11 million people in the country--who are not here legally, what do we do with those people? My view has always been that if the government met its primary responsibility, which is an immigration system that works, the American people would be very forward-leaning about those other two issues, because nobody really argues that if we don't have people here to do the work that needs to be done, whether it is highly skilled or not highly skilled, we ought to be thinking about what we need to do to get people here who can do that work. Also, what do we need to do to keep people here who came here to get training to do highly skilled jobs and graduated from colleges and universities or other skill-enhancing things that happened while they were here. If they want to stay, my view is that if they didn't do anything that got them in trouble while they were here, we should almost always want them to stay. If we don't have that skill set in our economy, why wouldn't we come up with ways to reach out and get it? Those who are not here legally, generally, I think if people thought the problem was solved, if they thought that the government had truly met its responsibility to operationally control the borders and that the government had met its responsibility to keep track of who comes in legally and know if they have left or not--I mean, there is no retail store in America that doesn't have a better sense of its inventory than we do of whether people who have legally come into the country and checked in with a Customs officer--we don't know if they have left. We couldn't tell you in weeks, perhaps, whether somebody is still here, even if they did everything exactly the way they were supposed to do it. This debate is largely driven by the most sympathetic of all of those groups: that group of people who came here and were brought here by someone else who entered the country illegally--often by their own parents--but have grown up in America. My first response, and I think the response of most Americans when they think about that, is that kids who grew up here, kids who went to school here, kids who haven't gotten in bad trouble while they were here, kids who have no real memory or connection with the country they were brought from--of course we want them to stay; of course we want them to be part of our economy. Because they are an even younger society than we would be without them, why wouldn't we want that to happen? In some respects, we have two separate issues here. People who were raised here, who have done everything that anybody else would do to acclimate as an American in all ways, who went to school here, who did everything else here--70 or 80 percent of the American people, and I occasionally see a number even higher than that, believe they should be allowed to stay. More and more, as people think about that, they also believe that after they have been here, like any other immigrant who came to the country legally, they would eventually be able to take the test and go through the process to become a citizen. That is a widely accepted premise that this debate should be built on. Another widely accepted premise that this debate should be built on is that 70 percent or so of the American people--and it would be a higher percentage if people really knew the facts--believe the government has not met its responsibility to secure our own borders. Let's assume that number is 70. We have two 70 percent issues. We would assume that a working Congress could take two 70 percent issues and come up with a solution that makes its way to the President's desk and solves both of these problems. We are not going to solve these problems by saying: OK, we are going to solve the problem for people who are already here, but we are not going to do anything to make it harder for others to be brought here illegally by someone who has control of them. We are not going to solve that? Of course that is not going to work. I don't think whether you signed up for DACA should be a determiner, and apparently the President agrees. If you are here and in the category of those who were brought here and grew up here, whether you signed up as a DACA kid, you could still be part of that overall discussion of how to stay, and you still get to stay if we can come up with a solution for you to do that. But we are not going to solve that problem and say: We will have a study of the other problem to see what is wrong. If by now we largely don't know what is wrong with the other problem, we are never going to figure out what is wrong with the other problem. In 1986, long before the Presiding Officer or I came to Congress and maybe long before some of us graduated from high school, we were going to solve this problem. Everybody who was here illegally could stay if they wanted to, and the borders would be made secure. Here we are, over three decades later, still debating the same thing. We need to solve both of these problems. If we can solve other problems while we are doing it, that is fine, too, but we need to come up with a solution. There are a number of ideas out there as to how the Senate should move forward. On the DACA issue, it is important to remember that President Trump said: I am going to give the Congress 6 more months to solve this problem--until March 5. It is also important to know that the courts have allowed people to continue to sign up, so really the deadline is somewhere beyond March 5. But the President said: I am going to give Congress 6 more months. President Obama didn't do anything about this for years--not because he didn't want to, I believe, but because he said he didn't have the ability to. President Obama repeatedly said: The President cannot solve this problem; Congress has to solve the problem. In spite of 6 or 7 years of saying that he couldn't solve this problem on his own, he ultimately decided to try to do it with an Executive order. The truth is, that Executive order was never going to do the job. I think President Obama knew that. When President Trump did his own order, he probably also knew he didn't have the ability to do that any more than President Obama had to do what he did. But both of these Presidents in their own way have tried to drive the Congress toward making a decision that comes up with a plan that works--a plan that works for kids who were brought here with no choice in the matter and a plan for seeing to it that kids can't still be easily brought here with no choice. We need to let young people come here because we need them here as part of our workforce, as part of our country. Legal immigration is what made America great. The rule of law is also what makes our country what it is. We can't continue to let immigration be an area where we have decided there are laws that we will not enforce. The challenge for the Congress right now is to come up with a solution so that this problem is not going to continue to be the same problem it is today, but as far as the problem today, we are going to solve it. We are going to solve it in a way that lets kids who grew up here become part of the solution. I continue to be committed to strengthening our borders. I continue to be committed to stemming the tide of illegal immigration. Frankly, I continue to be committed to the idea of legal immigration as part of continually reinforcing and re-enthusing who we are. But I am also committed to finding a permanent solution for young people in that category who were brought here, grew up here, haven't gotten in trouble while here, and have every reason to want to be part of the American dream and part of the American people whom they have been part of up until now. I hope we can find common ground on a bill that does that. I hope we can pass a bill from the Senate that the House will also pass. If Senators think they have done their job by passing a bill that can't possibly pass the House, that is just kicking the can down the road. We need to find a solution that really resolves this problem, and we solve this problem by putting a bill on the President's desk. To do that, we are going to have to vote. We can't do that by just having a quorum call or a vacancy here on the Senate floor. We have to be willing to vote. There are some things that I will enthusiastically vote for and some things I will reluctantly not be able to vote for. But that doesn't mean that I should say: If I can't be for whatever is brought to the Senate floor, then I don't want to vote on it or debate it. We can't continue to tune in to a vacant screen of the Senate floor. This is the week that we have all committed to having a real debate about solving as many problems as we can that relate to kids who were brought here and grew up here and solving that problem so other kids in these numbers are not likely to face that problem in the future. As I yield, I hope the floor is filled over the next couple of days with a vigorous debate about the best way to solve the problem before us in a way that the people we work for will feel good about it and the people who are most impacted by our decision will feel equally the concern, the warmth, and the desire of our country to have a vibrant economy that has people who want to be part of it, able to be part of it, and particularly people who grew up in the United States of America to be part of it. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law in December, we heard a lot about what was going to immediately happen. This was going to be a tax cut for the rich. Corporations were going to use their money to buy back their stock and not share it with the people who work for them. The Senate was as divided on a partisan basis as the Senate could be. Every person in the majority voted for the tax bill. Every person in the minority voted against the tax bill. We heard from some of the leaders of the other side that it would be Armageddon. We heard from President Obama's Treasury Secretary that 10,000 people would die every year if the tax bill was signed into law. We heard that the average family would only get crumbs and scraps from the tax bill. It is turning out that this is not what appears to be happening at all. Companies have stepped up to show that in a growing economy--in an economy they believe is going to grow--they value the people they work with and they value the employees of their company in a way we wouldn't have anticipated. I thought this would happen as we saw the economy take off from the tax bill. It didn't occur to most of us that companies would step up on day one and say: We are going to value and show our value to the people who work for us. Over 3.8 million people now have received over $4 billion in bonuses. A lot of those happened in my State of Missouri. The Central Bank of St. Louis, which employs over 2,000 people, gave a $1,000 bonus to all full-time employees, and the 246 part-time employees will get a $500 bonus. Charter Communications announced, as many people have, that they are going to increase their own minimum wage. Whatever their minimum salaries have been in the past, those are now going to be higher. The best kind of minimum wage increase is because you believe that is the fair thing to do for your employees and also because you believe it is what you need to do to keep good employees in a rising economy. I think we had gotten so used to the stagnant economy of the last 8 or so years that people had forgotten what happens when the economy begins to grow. So Charter Communications is now increasing their minimum wage to $15 an hour. Commerce Bancshares, in Kansas City, has more than 2,300 employees in Missouri, and they gave a $1,000 bonus to all of their full-time employees and a $250 bonus to their part-time employees. Mid-Am Metal Forming in southwest Missouri gave all 140 of their employees a cash bonus. This is not just about big companies. This is about little companies looking at how they want to grow and knowing that to grow, they need to keep a workforce that can be part of that growth. Great Southern Bank, in my hometown of Springfield, has over 800 Missouri employees. They gave a $1,000 bonus to full-time employees and a $500 bonus to part-time employees. Walmart announced that the 25,700 Missourians who work for them are not only getting bonuses, but they are raising the starting wage for full-time employees to just under $14 an hour--substantially higher than the wage otherwise. That doesn't sound like crumbs to the people who are getting those bonuses. They see what they can do with it. Solomon Essex, a warehouse worker at Dynamic Fastener, in Raytown, told us he was using his $1,000 bonus to help his daughter buy a car. Mary Beth Hartman, who owns a construction company in Springfield, said: ``I've been able to offer my long tenured employees a week of vacation'' that they didn't have before. ``They're getting plenty of overtime; they have job security.'' She is also creating new jobs in her business. It is a good start, but I think there are even more announcements and more good opportunities ahead. Senator Capito and I were on the floor talking about this before the bill passed. I said several times that there are two ways to increase your take-home pay. One is for the government to take less out of it, and another one is for you to get a better job to start with. We are already beginning to see both of those things happen. When you double the standard deduction, when you double the child tax credit, and when you lower the rates, the new code allows you to have more money. Our friends on the other side said people wouldn't get a tax cut. But 90 percent of the workers in the country who have income tax deducted from their paycheck are going to have less income tax deducted on the same pay in February than they would have had in December. What does that mean? I will mention here that the University of Missouri just beat Kentucky in basketball for the first time since we got into the SEC, a handful of years ago. We didn't want to let that go unmentioned. The Boone County clerk announced that he had run the payroll for the first time for all 485 county employees, and the average county employee was getting $150.54 a month more than they were getting on that same salary last year. Many of those employees have two people in their house working. This is just the one salary--an average of $150.54. That is about $1,800 a year. A brand-new deputy sheriff in Boone County who earns $45,905 will have an extra $1,929 this year that they didn't have if they started that same job in November or December of last year. Now, $1,900 does a lot of things. Two hundred dollars a month only seems like a lot if you don't have it. In Boone County, that payroll for 485 people calculates right at $945,000 a year that those employees will have that in the past they would have sent to the Federal Government. Some of it will be saved. Some of it will be spent. When I was flying back from Kansas City on Sunday, a guy behind me on the plane, as we were getting off, tapped me on the shoulder and said: Thanks for the tax cut. My wife and I just got our first checks with the new tax rates, and we are going to have $5,000 more this year than we had last year. We are going to put every penny of it in our kids' college savings account and we are really happy about it. We are really happy about it. We don't often hear people say: We are really happy about something you have done for us because it is going to make a difference for the future of our family. But this tax bill will. For a single parent with one child in Missouri who makes $41,000 a year, their taxes are going to go down 75 percent. That single parent with one child will have $1,400 more this year than they had last year--over $100 every single month. A family of four who makes about $75,000 will have $2,000 more. That is a 50 percent tax cut for that family. For most people, that is 2 months' worth of groceries. It is gasoline. It is an electric bill. If you get your electricity from a privately owned electric company, like many people do in 47 States, some of the electric companies are going to be reducing their rates. Now, if you have a rural electric coop, like my farm in Strafford has, or a public utility, like my house in Springfield has, you will not get that tax cut, but lots of Missourians get their electric from somebody that pays taxes. If you pay taxes, you are going to be reducing your electric bill because that 35 percent rate was figured into what you are allowed to charge. Now you are paying 20 percent. That is money you are going to be giving back to the families and businesses you serve. Helping families means ensuring that they have more opportunities in the future. Being part of a growing economy means you are going to have more opportunities in the future. We are seeing all those things happen, and I think we are going to continue to see them happen--not just in businesses like AT&T, Boeing, and Apple, which, by the way, just brought all of the money they had earned outside the country back home. They just announced that they are bringing 100 percent of everything back, which they would have not brought back at a 35-percent rate. But they are glad to bring it back at the rate in this tax bill. We are glad to see all those companies in a more competitive marketplace, just like small businesses are. So even though the law went into effect just a little over a month ago, I think we are seeing the kind of reaction we would have hoped for. Families are beginning to see that what they were told about the tax bill wasn't true. You should never want to say something that is not true, but surely you should not want to do it when in 60 days you are going to be proven not true in the one thing that everybody looks at--which is a bigger paycheck than they had 60 days ago. In spite of what was said, 9 out of 10 workers are going to have a bigger paycheck, and those are hard-working families. The people who don't benefit from the tax cut are the people at the richest end of the tax scale, not the other end of the tax scale. So I think we are off to a good start. I think we ought to be talking about a growing economy. All of us ought to be watching, after a decade of not seeing the economy grow, what has happened over the last few months and what really happens now as we move to a better place for families, a better place for jobs, and a better place for competition because of the tax bill we passed in December and the President signed into law. With that, I think other colleagues of mine are here. Senator Capito and I have been on the floor a number of times talking about this together, and I know she is here to follow me now.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I join Senator Grassley and my colleagues in supporting the bill before us today. As we debate this issue, it always seems to be such a defining issue in terms of who we are and whom we hope to be. No country in Europe allows a pregnancy to be ended this late in the pregnancy. No country in Africa allows a pregnancy to be ended this late in the pregnancy. Only six other countries in the world allow pregnancies to be ended at any time. As I have listened to the debate today, the debate about 20 weeks, it sounds to me like it wouldn't matter to the opponents of the bill if it were at 30 weeks, certainly, or at 21 weeks or at 20. There is no week one can pass here. The other bill we should vote on, which the House has passed, is the born-alive bill. There are people in the country today who actually oppose the born-alive bill. When a baby during an abortion process is born alive, my understanding is, you can't step in and take the life of that living child, but you can all step back from the table, on which that baby lies in front of you, and let the baby die. Obviously, there is a point at which we are not going to be able to talk to each other in a way that apparently will persuade anybody. Maybe hearts will not change, and maybe minds will not change in the Senate today, but as many of my colleagues have pointed out, they are changing in the country. People realize there is a time when that child has every opportunity, with a little help, to live independently. That, surely, would be too late to end that life in the minds of most people. In the minds of younger people? It is more of the view of older people that life should be saved, but 63 percent of all Americans say we shouldn't continue to allow this to happen. Senator Grassley just said and others have said a majority of women, a majority of Democrats, a majority of Republicans, a majority of young people all believe this is not an acceptable place for us to be. Why would we want to be one of seven countries in the world that would allow abortion at any time? Why would we want to be one of four countries in the world that would allow abortions at a time when it is widely accepted that the child being aborted--the life being taken--is a child who can feel pain? As we come to this point today--and while a majority of Senators, I think, will vote for this, though not a big enough majority to put it on the President's desk--I think, once again, we have to ask ourselves: At what point do our friends on the other side, who clearly disagree with us on this issue, feel a life is clearly a life that should be saved? Would you vote for the born-alive bill? Would you vote for this bill if it were at 25 weeks? Would you vote for this bill if it were at 28 weeks? I don't hear any of that in the debate. It is just: This is not the government's business. At some point, it is the government's business. Protecting life is at some point the government's business. When the Presiding Officer and at least one other person and I served in the House, we changed the law. It was Laci and Conner's Law. When a homicide is committed and the woman is pregnant and the child is lost also, that is considered in law as a double homicide--two lives having been taken at that point, two lives at 20 weeks or at 12 weeks or at 15 weeks. I am not sure where that threshold begins, but I do know we have decided this is not just one crime; that it is two crimes when that happens. We have an opportunity today to define something that is pretty clearly and significantly defining as to who we are as a nation. Otherwise, virtually every country in the world wouldn't have stopped doing this, if it ever had allowed it to happen in the first place. I urge my colleagues to join in passing this bill--in standing up for those who cannot defend themselves--and to understand that harm is done, and when harm is done in this way, our society is harmed by that harm. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I wish to thank Senator Barrasso and Senator Carper for their bipartisan work to get this nomination to the floor. I have known R.D. James for a long time. He understands the projects involved, the work involved, and the challenges involved. He is a civil engineer and brings a lot of experience to this job. The work of Senator Carper and Senator Barrasso is deeply appreciated. I think it will be appreciated by the Corps and the Department of Defense.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, one of the unusual things about the moment we find ourselves in is that we are debating on virtually all fronts on topics that 70 percent of the Senators agree on. When you look at the appropriating bill, at least 70 Senators are for the Children's Health Insurance Program--maybe 90, maybe more than that. It is a widely supported program. Nobody really believes that the Obama taxes and ObamaCare on medical device taxes ever made any sense, or the so-called Cadillac tax, where if you have worked hard and, in many cases, worked and negotiated an insurance coverage package, now the government says it is better than it should be and you should pay taxes on that, or that everybody should pay an individual tax on their healthcare. Nobody is for that. Surely everybody wants the government's doors to stay open and so, on that front, one of the major criticisms of stopping the continuing resolution from going on is that nobody is opposed to it. So they are using that totally as leverage on an issue that we, also, almost all agree on. As to these kids who came here as kids--and I have met a number of them as the Presiding Officer has--one of the first questions I often ask is, Well, how old were you when your parents brought you here? The answer is often 18 months, 2, 3, followed by something like: Now I work at an architectural firm, or I just graduated from college-- or whatever else they might say about what they are doing now. They clearly grew up in this country; we all get that. This is not a hard problem to solve, I don't believe. But leverage has somehow become the big issue here. First of all, we let the appropriations process collapse, where only a few people have anything to say about how we spend our money, and then we have decided we will let the whole legislating process collapse and have spent way too much time on confirming people who there is no opposition to. And then our friends on the other side, like the Democratic leader, insist on 30 hours of debate or 8 hours of debate where there is no debate. All you do is use up that time so nothing else can happen. He says: Why can't we debate this issue? We could debate this issue if we hadn't just spent an entire week confirming four district judges. These are not four Supreme Court Justices and they are not four circuit judges who will handle appeals from the district court. We spent an entire week last week doing nothing but that. And these judges were all confirmed. On Monday, we all knew they were going to be confirmed. They were all confirmed by the end of the week, but we spent the whole week doing that. The same people who insisted on that wonder why we don't have time to debate the issues we would all like to debate. I would like to have seen the children's health insurance bill debated, but we ran out of time. We are now beyond the time when the bill expired. States are beginning to have stress on that. I would have loved to have seen a debate there, and I would love to see that debate include expanding excellence in mental health to a few more States. I would have loved to have seen that debate include the expansion we need in community health centers. But we didn't have time for that. We were spending needless time confirming people who were ultimately going to be confirmed. Remember, the rules on this are 30 hours of debate on the floor if anybody insists on it. For a circuit judge, we had 30 hours of debate. There are only so many hours in a week, and we are wasting those hours. That rule has to change, and if we can't change it one way, my guess is eventually the frustration will become so great, we will change it another way. We find ourselves here in a government shutdown with no disagreement on what we are talking about. This is just to show who is running the Senate. The majority, at the end of the day, is going to run the Senate. That is what always happens. If our friends on the other side want to run the Senate, they need to get in the majority, but this will not be the way they get there. My good friend the Senator from Hawaii and I have a common health issue with kidney cancer. We both lost a kidney, and that is a binding sort of thing. So when I say I care about her a lot, I do. But she said: How dare people talk about kids who were brought here illegally as people who came here illegally. I think a great disservice was done to the DACA kids when the other side decided they wanted to make them a focal point on a debate that has nothing to do with them. Don't act surprised that other people are going to come to a conclusion that the weakest point in the argument for DACA kids is that every one of them came to the country illegally. They were brought here illegally, but every one of them came to the country illegally. And we need them. They grew up here. They went to school here. We need that vital, strong population that is part of a growing the economy. Seventy percent of the country, if not 80 percent, agrees with that. This is an issue that could be solved, but we see the further deterioration of how we spend our money. The appropriations process, for a decade now, has come down to one big bill at the end that almost nobody had anything to say about. It certainly has strengthened leadership on both sides. It has weakened membership on both sides. I don't think the leaders want the power that they have gotten through this wrecked process. For 200 years, we appropriated our money by bringing bills to the floor. I imagine that initially there may have been one bill. In recent years, there have been a dozen--one or two at a time--on the floor. Every Member of the House and every Member of the Senate could propose any amendment they wanted to as long as it was about spending and didn't add any money. We haven't seen this enough times in recent years. People can hardly remember the process in the Senate, although the House has rediscovered it. A bill comes to the floor, and you say ``I think we ought to spend $1 million more here than we are spending, and I propose we do that by cutting this other category by $1 million,'' and then all the Members vote. We are never going to have that debate this year. The Speaker saw that debate on the other side. We will never have that debate here because starting a decade ago, roughly, the Democratic leader of the Senate decided that we were not going to bring those bills to the floor unless they are unamendable. Four or five years ago, when--I think my math is right--Barbara Mikulski, the great Senator from Maryland, an incredible legislator, had become chairman of the Appropriations Committee for the only 2 years in her career, she aggressively argued with the leadership on her side all the time: Let's bring these bills to the floor and debate the bills. Let's not have one big bill at the end of the year or, even worse, one big bill 4, 5, 6 months into the next year. We have to figure out how to recapture the process of our responsibility. This works. It includes the Members and the people they work for in a way that we are not now included. The debate on how we spend our money becomes public in ways that are not now public. We can't bring an appropriations bill to the floor in the Senate without 60 Members being willing to debate the bill. One way we could do this is just figure out how to change it to where an appropriations bill--maybe all bills--don't need 60 Members just to debate the bill. I am a believer that once you got these bills started and once you started debating them and once Members got to see that their own amendment wasn't nearly as popular as they thought it would be, that we would then get to the final vote, and we would then pass a bill or maybe a package of a couple of bills. The House would do the same. We would have a conference. They would go to the President's desk. He would sign those bills, and that part of the government would be funded for the next year. Year after year, this has been brought down to where virtually nothing is funded on September 30 for the October 1 fiscal year. Here we are, January 21. To still be talking about work that should have been completed in September is unacceptable. If we can't see this moment where we are debating two big issues that everybody agrees on--the component parts of both of those big issues-- if we can't see this as a moment where we need to fundamentally change how we get this work done, we may have lost the constitutional responsibility that the Congress has to set our priorities based on how we spend our money. The one thing I know for sure is how we are deciding to spend our money now is not the best way to do it. It has now led to where it is now a late-year fight about, well--and I think defense is the principal reason for the Federal Government to exist. The No. 1 priority of the Federal Government is to support the common defense. But we have gone beyond ``I want more money for defense, but before I do that, I would like to have more money for something else, as well'' to--it is not even about the appropriations bill. We are not even going to give you a number to appropriate to on the appropriations bill. We don't want to fund the government now until we do something that has nothing to do with funding the government. Maybe that is the logical conclusion of years of bad behavior. Maybe that is the logical conclusion of thinking you can hide the work of the Congress behind a massive bill that nobody understands, that everybody says: Well, I want to be in that massive bill that nobody understands either. I believe one of the issues that was debated the last few hours was, we want to put our bill that would help DACA kids on a bill that must pass. We are not going to be happy unless our bill is guaranteed to get on another bill that would have a better chance of passing than our bill. What we need is a DACA bill that can pass on its own. Surely you can take a 70-percent or 80-percent issue and combine it with another 70- percent issue of people who believe we ought to do a better job securing the border and managing people who have come into the country in other ways, as well--surely you can take those two issues and find a way to put them together in a bill that winds up on the President's desk. But there appears to be little confidence in that and frankly little confidence in the way we appropriate money. This is an outrageous place to be in. You and I, Mr. President, and other Members of the Senate and Members of the House need to figure out what we can do to convince enough of our colleagues that either the rules need to change or the behavior needs to change so that everybody has an opportunity to talk about the priorities of the government, how those are funded, and so that we also have time to get to the important debates that we would all like to be part of. I hope we can reach a conclusion quickly. People deserve for their government to be open. People deserve the very opening of the government not to be held hostage to things that have nothing to do with appropriating money but everything to do with a Congress that no longer works the way the American people deserve to see it work. I hope we find a conclusion quickly and let the doors of the government be open to the people the government is supposed to serve, rather than those very doors to be used as a leverage because legislators couldn't figure out how to legislate. I yield my time.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I think the pain-capable bill was passed by the House in October. We have thousands of Americans coming this week, focusing on tomorrow, to talk about this issue. These two bills are two of their priorities, but of course their priority is to honor life. The March for Life is designed to do exactly that. Clearly, the March for Life--now in its 45th year--is not a celebration. It is not an anniversary or a celebration; rather, it is a time to remember that there is a lot that we still need to do to ensure that our society is a society that values every human life no matter how small, no matter how vulnerable, no matter how little capacity that life has to protect itself. And the way that society, I think, has decided to deal with this is looking at things like partial-birth abortion, the description of which was every bit as bad as the dismembering abortions, but Congress stepped forward on that topic. Some people who performed that particular act didn't stop doing it, but they are in trouble when you find out they have done it. So thousands of people from all over the country--in fact, tens of thousands of people; it is a number that I believe is always underreported. Based on looking at the March for Life crowd and any other crowds we see here, I guarantee that the final number--if you take any of those crowds and look at them, I believe there is a willingness to ignore the thousands of people who come in buses from all over the country, in the worst possible weather more years than not, to stand up and say: We don't want this to happen. I think young people are increasingly more and more defensive of the idea of life and more and more offended about the places where we have chosen not to draw the line. How can you possibly justify a baby who is born alive and the process that Senator Lankford just described where you can't take that life but you can step back and not do anything to save that life, or the uniquely troubled countries we are involved in that allow developed children--boys and girls, 10 fingers, 10 toes, the ability to feel pain--to inflict that pain on those children at that time. The American people don't support this. Almost nobody who understands what is going on supports it. But if you are asked in polling, I think, as I said earlier, 63 percent--more than 6 out of 10 Americans--say: How can we be continuing to let that happen? So supporting those who come here, responding to those who understand this--and certainly the two Senators on the floor here--the Senator from Iowa and the Senator from Oklahoma are among the best advocates for life, among the best advocates for getting information out about life, about adoption, about what happens and what our laws allow and the laws of other countries don't allow. Certainly I will be welcoming the March for Life this year in Missouri and other States. The Vice President last year became the first Vice President in the history of the country to speak to March for Life and made it clear where his views were and where the administration stands. The missing component here to do the right thing is in Congress itself. We have an opportunity to step up and do that. We need to have this debate on the floor because people, once they enter into this debate, realize it is not a debate that they want to be in, because the wrong side of this is the side where slightly more than a handful of countries allow it to happen, what we allow to happen. I am pleased to be here on the floor with Senator Lankford and Senator Ernst. I yield to the Senator from Iowa.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am here with the Senator from Oklahoma-- and we are about to be joined by the Senator from Iowa--to talk about the topic Senator Lankford just said is difficult to talk about. When you actually stand up and explain what is going on, it is hard to imagine that we still let these things happen. I would suggest to the Senator from Oklahoma that we could talk about the fact that the minds of people have changed on this issue. Almost all change their minds once we explain the two things the Congress is focused on this year. Polling on this shows that I believe 63 percent of all Americans now believe that these late-term abortions should not be allowed to occur. As Senator Lankford pointed out so well, the countries that allow this to happen are not the countries whose social policies we would want to be aligned with, including China and North Korea, which have a stated purpose of eliminating children for no other reason than just population control, and they wind up eliminating more female children than male children in that process because apparently their belief is that the male child has more economic value going forward. Why would we want to be aligned with countries that look at these issues that way or just simply think the pain should be allowed? The House has passed the pain-capable bill. Where are we now in the House on the born-alive bill? Is it to be voted on this week, or has it been voted on already?

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am here today with my colleague Senator Capito to talk about something that is getting a lot of attention but needs even more attention from this Congress, which is the opioid epidemic--the epidemic the President has rightly called a crisis, and he then turned to Congress and said: Find the money to solve the problem. We have been doing a substantial amount of that, but I think we see a clear desire here and in all of our States to find a better solution. This is an issue that has hit every town in America, small and large, I believe. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 40,000 people died from an opioid overdose. This is a fraction of the people who had an opioid overdose. These are the people who died from an opioid overdose in 2016, 40,000 people; over 90 Americans every single day. It was a 28-percent increase over 2015 and a dramatic increase over where we were just 10 years before. Opioid overdoses now surpass car accidents as the No. 1 accidental cause of death in the country. Both of our States and our surrounding States, I think almost every one of them, have had more overdose deaths in 2016--and an increased number, I think, in 2017--than car accident deaths. The Centers for Disease Control estimates the economic burden of this epidemic is almost $80 billion a year. We have just gone through a tax discussion, an economic growth discussion. When we were talking about billions of dollars, seldom were we talking about $80 billion to do something with or to stop doing something with, but the economic cost of all of this--lost productivity, addiction, the crime related to that addiction--the CDC says $78.5 billion a year is now the cost. We are both appropriators. The members of the Appropriations Committee have looked at this carefully. Our colleagues have had a chance to confront this issue in our committee head-on. We brought bills to the floor that have passed and made a big difference in a short period of time. Over the past 2 years, not counting what we hope to do this year, the committee has increased opioid funding by over $900 million, nearly a 200-percent increase for the Department of Health and Human Services--more money for justice, more money for the Department of Veterans Affairs. This funding is focused on developing alternatives for pain management, giving our State, Federal, and local law enforcement partners the tools they need to combat opioid trafficking, ensuring first responders we are working to see that there are better ways to respond with opioid reversal. One of the things we have seen recently is that opioids of all kinds are now laced with new drugs like fentanyl, and you don't even know what you are taking. Narcan, the former way to deal with this and still the most effective way to deal with this--you think you have dealt with a problem, and the dose is so strong, the same person in just a few minutes lapses back into another seizure, attack, that has often been fatal. Even though people are there and the traditional way to respond is there, it isn't enough for what is going on now. One thing you would have to tell anybody doing this is, it is unlikely you have any real idea what you are putting into your system. What you think was a narcotic high the day before could easily kill you the next day. We have been looking for better ways to monitor programs so prescriptions in West Virginia and Missouri--they are both States where, in some counties, the number of prescriptions people have been walking into the pharmacist with are just ridiculous. The committee that funds the Department of Health and Human Services--that is the committee we are both on--in the last 2 years, we have increased funding by 1,300 percent, $745 million--13 times more than we were spending just 2 years ago. We have given grants to States, in ways we haven't before, to look at specific State needs and ideas they have to deal with this and then share. We have looked at increasing Federal surveillance on how prescriptions are being written, how drug stores are becoming the conduit, and how many substances are coming through the mail to find new ways to determine whether this is reasonable in the area these drugs are going into. We have looked at ways to increase the tools necessary to communities and first responders. We are talking right now to the National Institutes of Health about what they can do on a number of fronts. One is to work with the pharmaceutical companies themselves to develop alternatives to the kind of pain management we have had. Also, let me say on that front, we have gone through a period where doctors and hospitals were too often graded on whether people had any pain or not as opposed to whether they had pain they didn't understand, pain that was unacceptable. More and more people ought to be saying, as opposed to taking this potentially addictive drug, give me a dose that is not as addictive, and maybe I am still more achy than I would be otherwise, more pain than I would have otherwise, but I understand it and am aware of it, and I am not in some cloud of no pain but not much of anything else in terms of real quality of life. We are looking at how we can work with these companies for pain management. I have talked to the pharmaceutical companies. I think it is time for them to step up, maybe in partnership with NIH, so there is some Federal money to encourage more private sector money to find alternatives that are less addictive and better understood, to find more effective and affordable ways to respond. Just the amount of money in the first responders' kits around the country, and local governments paying for the Narcan, the more expensive injectable treatment--we need to look for ways where that can be more available and in a way that local governments have a better way to deal with this. This needs to be dealt with locally. The first responder is going to be a local person. If you are a fire department that also has first responders, your department is three times more likely to go on an overdose call than they are to go to a fire. That is where we are in this situation today. In trying to figure out what the impact really is at home--as we all are trying to do--I had a meeting not too long ago with medical professionals, with State officials, with emergency responders, in Springfield, MO, to talk about how we deal with prevention, treatment, and recovery. We talked about the critical partnership between local, State, and Federal law enforcement and the dangers the first responders themselves face. Sometimes what people are putting into their system is so powerful and so addictive that walking into the room or touching the clothing becomes a potentially great danger for the person who is there to help you. I talked to doctors and hospitals about the challenges they face in prescribing less habit-forming pain medications and how patients are still not fully aware of the danger of dealing with pain if you overdo it as you are dealing with pain. I talked to one person who talked about his daughter who had just gone to the dentist and got pain medicine and had no sense that the pain medicine could be addictive and she should stop taking it when it had done its job, whether or not it was when the last pill was gone. Then, of course, there is a new issue of underprescribing. Nobody likes to go back to the pharmacy twice to get the same prescription they just got a few days ago, but giving people more pills than they need to take themselves or have them sit in the medicine cabinet doesn't make any sense. In our State, there are large urban areas, but it also has a lot of small and remote communities and, frankly, rural communities have been hit particularly hard by this crisis. Certainly, West Virginia is a State that understands this. There has been no more vigorous advocate for funding and new ways to solve this problem than Senator Capito. I am glad to be here with her today as we talk about this issue. I can assure the people we work for that this is a top priority. It has been a top priority for over 3 years now. The first 2 years showed dramatic increases in the willingness we had to deal with this and the breadth of how we deal with it, and that is one reason we need to move on and get this funding bill, which should have been done by October 1, done right now. As we get a new number to deal with, one of our priorities will be the opioid epidemic, and one of the leaders in that discussion will be the Senator from West Virginia, Mrs. Capito.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I have two topics I want to speak about today; one is Iran. There is no question that Iran is the principal state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Both the Obama administration and the Trump administration have without hesitation made that point. The Iranian regime provides money and it provides material support for groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah and a host of other terrorist groups. They have threatened to wipe out Israel, one of our closest allies. Their threat is to frankly wipe Israel off the map. And they have systematically trampled on the fundamental freedoms that all people everywhere would want to have. They have done that by taking those freedoms away from their own citizens and those human rights away from their own citizens. In recent days, we have seen what happens after a decade of that kind of corruption and oppression. Protesters began a week ago to protest. It was, by all accounts, unexpected by the previous protest groups, by the military, or by the government. It spread to at least 50 cities, where brave people wanting to stand up--and in the streets began standing up by the thousands--to protest a government that denies them their rights, a government that has impoverished their country while it funnels billions of dollars to terrorists across the Middle East and across the world. Where did those dollars come from? Unfortunately, too many of those dollars came from us. I came to the floor, to this spot, nearly 2 years ago to ask that same question about where that money came from, after the Obama administration paid Iran what amounted to $1.7 billion in what appeared to be a ransom for the release of five American hostages. At the time it was explained: Well, this is just money that we have had for a long time, which was part of an economic agreement, a foreign military sale that we have held on to. It turned out that the story was not true. We later learned that $400 million of that payment was delivered in pallets of cash that came off an airplane. The pallets were stacked high with cash. And, on top of the $100 billion in sanction relief, we had another stack of billions of dollars in just straight cash--the sanctions relief, under the terribly thought-out Iranian nuclear deal, and the cash to apparently grease the skids so that agreement and others could happen. We have heard of other things in recent days where the administration turned its back on bad things that were happening in order to see that the Iranian deal was going to go through. Now, if the Iranian deal had been a good deal, that would have been one thing, but to turn your back on bad things so that another bad thing can happen is even worse. So where is this money going? Protesters have seen that the money that we delivered to them and the sanctions relief that we delivered to them didn't go to them and didn't go to their economy. It continued to finance terror around the world and war in other countries. The State Department, once again, in their assessment said: Iran remained the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in 2016 as groups supported by Iran maintained their capability to threaten U.S. interests and allies. The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps--Qods Force, along with Iranian partners, allies, and proxies, continued to play a destabilizing role in military conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Those assessments always come about a year late, after you have had time to assess the previous year. I have no doubt that the same assessment for 2016 will also be the assessment for the year we just ended--2017. Frankly, the Iranian people are tired of it. They are angry. They are putting their lives on the line to protest. The response of the Iranian Government has been predictable. First of all, they blame others for creating these problems. They said that we were agitating those freedom fighters in their country, those freedom protesters. They censored access to the social media. They have cracked down by arresting hundreds of people. The reports are that at least 20 people have been killed. It is clear that their behavior hasn't changed; the hope that the Iranian deal would somehow bring the long sought-after moderates in the current government to the forefront has not happened. We should support the Iranian people. I join the administration in expressing my support for the men and women, young and old, and the courage that they have demonstrated as they stand up and try to achieve the greatness of that country, with its long heritage and its incredible assets in location and in resources, which they should be able to achieve; they just have not been allowed to do that. The last time this happened, our country was very quiet. This time, our government is speaking up. Hopefully, others will join in. The European countries have more economic impact in Iran than we do, and there is a good reason for that. We have been very thoughtful of wanting to support this regime. They have not. It is time for them to speak up as well. So I join the administration, I join the President, and I encourage friends of freedom around the world to not let this moment pass again-- to not, one more time, act as if nothing has happened, and that, somehow, this is exactly what the Iranian Government says it is, because it is almost never what the Iranian Government says it is. We wish for those who care about freedom to stand up and defend and encourage those who are seeking a greater freedom.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, we are quickly approaching the end of this year, and I think it is a good time to reflect on what has been done this year. Certainly, the Senate and the Trump administration have been able to do a number of things that are really going to have a significant impact on hard-working families. Yesterday, we sent the most significant tax reform legislation in more than three decades to the President's desk, and we had a chance to hear the President and others respond to that. The President, at the end of that ceremony at the White House, turned to the Congress and said: ``This is the work that you have done.'' I think the Members of Congress appreciated that. That showed a President who is constantly learning and constantly understanding how important relationships are here. I thought it was interesting that we heard Chairman Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, say that there are three important dates about to occur for America's economy and America's families. One is January 1, when the new tax bill goes into effect, and as to the wages people are earning, people are going to be allowed more of those wages to stay in their billfold rather than go to the government's billfold. It doesn't stay very long in the government's billfold; that is for sure. January 1 is important. As for February 1, by then, that is the time by which we hope all of the new information is out to employers, and people are going to see in their February check more money than they saw in that same-sized check this year going home with them. This is about who is a better person to spend your money--you or the government. It is also about a debate about whether the government is better off with higher taxes or more taxpayers and, of course, it is better off with more taxpayers. Chairman Brady said that the other date is April 15, because that is the last time in the foreseeable future that families are going to have to deal with a Tax Code that they don't understand, that they believe to be unfair, that they believe does not treat everybody equitably in how that Tax Code is applied. Many of the special provisions are going to be out of the Tax Code. Next April 15, probably 9 out of 10 taxpayers would have filled out an income tax form on a card about this big and, for 9 out of 10 taxpayers, they are going to look at double the personal exemption from this year--that is $24,000, if you are a married couple, that you just subtract immediately from your income-- and double the child tax credit, up to $2,000. Somebody said to me just yesterday: You mean my son with his three children is going to be able to take $6,000 off of whatever their tax bill would be at the bottom of that form, and the answer is yes. If they didn't have a tax bill, at the bottom of that form that totals $6,000, those families get a credit that allows them to take money for other taxes they have paid and take that home with them. So this is after a decade of historically low growth, a decade that defies virtually the entire history of the country going back to 1789, where 3 percent growth has been the normal growth. Less than 2 percent growth has been the normal growth for 9 of the last 10 years. The 1 year that is going to be an exception is this year. It looks like we are going to get close to and maybe even exceed 3 percent and get back to where the economy should be growing. I think with the new tax bill, we may exceed that and most of people's concerns about a lot of the things in this bill will go away when the economy starts growing again. Buying power is almost 3 percent lower this year than it was in the 1990s. Now, their wages may have gone up between now and the 1990s, but prices have gone up more, and it is time to get our economy growing again and let families have more of the money they have earned to spend on their family. If you are a family of four earning about $73,000 this year and $73,000 next year, next year, your tax is going to be $2,000 less than it is this year. If you are a single parent with one child earning $41,000, next year your tax will be $1,300 less than it is this year. Now, some will say--as a matter of fact, I have heard it on the floor of the Senate--a few hundred dollars a month will not matter. Well, now that is clearly somebody who doesn't know how much a few hundred dollars a month or a few hundred dollars a year does matter. This bill will give us ways to compete that we don't have now. The bill also will provide Missouri families and other families more jobs and more opportunities because we are going to be more competitive. We will have moved our corporate tax rate. It will not be the lowest in the world, but it will no longer be the highest in the world. It will be in the very middle. Twenty-one percent is right in the middle of the countries we compete with. At the time that 35 percent was our rate in 1986, it was the middle, too, but every other country that we compete with has figured out that that gives you a competitive disadvantage, and they have all lowered their taxes as our corporate tax stayed the same. We are restoring our competitive position. We are hoping and actually going to go ahead and tax the money that is trapped overseas, whether it comes back or not. So I think it is safe to assume that somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 trillion will come back into our economy. There is more U.S. money overseas that would like to come home--but wasn't going to come home if we took 35 percent out of it--than at any time before. There is more U.S. capital in this country on the sidelines than at any time before. You put that money into the economy, and you put that 2 trillion or so dollars into the economy. You make us the best, safest, and most predictable place in the world to invest money. Foreign investment in our economy--not in their economy but in our economy--will increase, and it is time for that to happen. This Tax Code will increase take-home pay immediately, and it will make us more competitive, and we will have jobs that pay more in the future. The rolling back of redtape is one of the reasons that the economy in our country is already growing faster than it has in a decade. People saw the regulatory overreach. Most importantly, President Trump saw the regulatory overreach. The House and the Senate saw the regulatory overreach. We were able to block 15 regulations before they went into effect. Other regulations, like the totally ridiculous power rule that was proposed, which in my State would have doubled the utility bill in less than 12 years, is not going to happen now. The waters of the United States, which would have suddenly put the EPA in charge of anything involving water, is not going to happen now. The $52 million increase in just the cost of getting something where you could start, which was the anticipated cost of the waters of the United States, is not going to happen now. Chairman Isakson of the Veterans' Affairs Committee was on the floor earlier, talking about what we have done with his leadership for veterans, and that list is long. The Veterans Choice Act continues to give veterans more opportunity to get the care where they want it rather than to be stuck in a system that didn't seem to always care that much whether veterans got care or not. It was more about the Veterans' Administration than the veterans, and competition and choice is in the process of ending that with good leadership at the VA administration and being sure that happens. We were able to pass a bill that I sponsored, the HIRE Vets Act. It is being implemented right now to recognize companies that hire vets, that promote vets, and that give vets credit for the skills they learned in the military. The Department of Labor has worked hard to put that on fast-forward and get it done. In the military, the Military Family Stability Act means that families, for the first time, have the opportunity that they have always hoped to have for the family to move a little earlier or stay a little longer, if that works for education purposes or the spouse's education or career purposes. This is a dramatic step, appreciating the fact that the strength of the military is in military families. We recruit, generally in the military, single adults, and we retire from the military adults with spouses and children, and this looks at that. There is a lot to talk about as we end this session. It is never perfect, but that is why we come back for the next session. There are going to be things that could have been done better, but so many things have happened that haven't happened in a generation. I know that I am eager to go home and talk about those, as I was on the radio this morning and yesterday morning doing that already. I know that my colleagues are too. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I have 12 request for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry The Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 9:30 a.m. in room SR-328A to conduct a hearing. Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation The Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 10 a.m. in room SH-216 to conduct a hearing. Committee on Environment and Public Works The Committee on Environment and Public Works is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 9:50 a.m. in room SD-406 to consider the nomination R. D. James, of Missouri, to be an Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, Department of Defense. Committee on Environment and Public Works The Committee on Environment and Public Works is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 10 a.m. in room SD-406 to conduct a hearing entitled ``Oversight of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission''. Committee on Foreign Relations The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 9:30 a.m. to conduct a hearing entitled ``Using Force: Strategic, Political, and Legal Considerations''. Committee on Foreign Relations The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 2:30 a.m. to conduct a hearing entitled ``Treaties''. Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions The Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 10 a.m. in room SD-430 to conduct a hearing entitled ``Implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act: Responding to Mental Health Needs''. Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions The Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, in room S-216 to conduct a hearing on the following nominations: Johnny Collett, of Kentucky, to be Assistant Secretary for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, Mitchell Zais, of South Carolina, to be Deputy Secretary, and James Blew, of California, to be Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, all of the Department of Education, William Beach, of Kansas, to be Commissioner of Labor Statistics, Kate S. O'Scannlain, of Maryland, to be Solicitor, and Scott A. Mugno, of Pennsylvania, and Preston Rutledge, of the District of Columbia, both to be an Assistant Secretary, all of the Department of Labor, and other pending nominations. Committee on the Judiciary The Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 10 a.m. in room SD-226 to conduct a hearing on the following confirmation: Elizabeth L. Branch, of Georgia, to be United States Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit, R. Stan Baker, to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of Georgia, Charles Barnes Goodwin, to be United States District Judge for the Western District of Oklahoma, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, to be United States District Judge for the Northern District of Texas, Matthew Spencer Petersen, of Virginia, to be United States District Judge for the District of Columbia, and Eli Jeremy Richardson, to be United States District Judge for the Middle District of Tennessee. Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities The Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities of the Committee on Armed Service is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 10 a.m. to conduct a closed hearing. Subcommittee on Personnel The Subcommittee on Personnel of the Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 10 a.m. in room SR-253 to conduct a hearing research, diagnosis, and treatment for traumatic brain injury/ concussion in servicemembers. Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights The Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, December 13, 2017, at 2 p.m. in room SD-226 to conduct a hearing entitled ``The Consumer Welfare Standard in Antitrust: Outdated or a Harbor in Sea of Doubt?''.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the good news about the tax bill that I believe we will pass over the next few days is that it will go into effect on the first day of January and people will quickly see, no matter how loud others are talking, the exact facts. For work done in January, people who get that check in January or February or whenever they get paid for their January work--there is going to be a substantial tax decrease for working families at all levels. Our friends want to talk about what happens after 2025 or 2027, but surely the Congress can do its job between now and then. This is a pro-growth policy. There are two ways to increase people's take-home pay, and we are going to pursue both of them. One is to take less out of your pay right now. That will happen not a year from now and not a year and a half from now; that will happen next month. So next month, when people get their paychecks, it will be clear to them who had the facts and who didn't have the facts on this. The second way it will increase people's pay is by having better jobs to start with. Hundreds of economists who have looked at this bill say that it will make the United States of America the best place to invest money and create jobs, and I think we will know sooner rather than later that that happens. So good tax policy, commonsense regulation, and judges--another thing we are working on this week--make a difference in how people look at the economy that they want to invest in and an economy that they want to grow. Why would judges make a difference? Judges make a difference because judges create a sense of fairness in the court. They create a sense of an ability to get your case heard. And they create a sense that what the law says hopefully is what the judge will decide rather than what the judge thinks the law should say. We are making great progress in all of those areas if we add good tax policy to what has been happening. Right now, Mr. President, we are talking about judges, and President Trump has a unique opportunity to shape the long-term view of the judiciary. This week we are going to confirm three circuit judges, and I wish to speak in just a little while about what that means. At the start of President Trump's term, 12 percent of all of the Federal judiciary seats were vacant. No President has had that kind of opportunity since President Clinton had that opportunity now almost 25 years ago when he started his first year. And the President will have the opportunity--and is making the most of it--to fill those vacancies. I believe President Trump made the right choice when he selected Justice Gorsuch to serve on the Supreme Court. There was a record as a circuit judge; you can look at what he had decided. The Presiding Officer and I and other Members of the Senate can look at what he has decided and anticipate, after 10 years of that record, what his record would look like. It makes a difference. I have no doubt that President Trump will continue to nominate judges who will rule as did Justice Scalia, whose unfortunate death created the most recent vacancy. Justice Scalia, by the way, served on the Supreme Court for 26 years after the person who nominated him left the White House and 13 years after President Reagan died. So the legacy of what happens here is important. Justice Scalia was profound in his sense that the work of the Court was not to decide what the legislature should have done; the work of the Court was to decide what the law and the Constitution said. There are ways to change the law, and there are ways to amend the Constitution, but a person on the Court needs to look at what the Constitution and the laws say. While Supreme Court vacancies tend to get a lot of attention, it is just as important that the Senate nominate and confirm the jobs the President and the Senate share. It is our responsibility too. The Constitution could have said: Will report to the Senate, and, unless there is some big objection, that person becomes a judge. That is not what it says. It says: The Senate will confirm. As of this morning, there are slightly more than 140 lifetime vacancies on the courts to be filled. So far this year, we have confirmed 10 circuit court judges. By the time we leave this week, I think we will have confirmed 12 circuit judges this year. That will be close to a post-World War II record. It has been a long time since World War II, and it has been a long time since a President has had the opportunity to do that. Why do we need to do that? First of all, the people of this country have a right to seek justice and to believe that the rule of law will prevail. The Supreme Court hears about 100 to maybe 150 cases in a year, but the 12 circuit courts--where you appeal a lower Federal court ruling to--hear many cases, and about 7,000 of those cases are appealed to the Supreme Court; the Supreme Court deals with 100 to 150 of them. So the judges in the 12 circuits often write what, in our structure, is essentially final law; the final rule of any court is at the circuit level. The Federal Bar Association says that the ``number of federal judicial vacancies throughout the federal court system is straining the capacity of the federal courts to [do their job].'' In cooperation with the President, we have a job to do here. The capacity to hear these cases is important. Justice delayed is justice denied. Filling these vacancies is also critical to ensuring that the balance of the Constitution is in place. This was a brandnew idea when James Madison and others thought of putting a machine together. They sometimes referred to the Constitution as the instrument that would be the guideline for a machine--a machine that was so finely balanced that it would govern itself. The courts--the judiciary--the legislative branch, and the executive branch all have unique powers, and those unique powers were designed to keep the government in check. This concept, new in 1787, has worked well for us, but it doesn't work if one of the groups is allowed to become out of balance. So filling these vacancies matters. The leadership of the majority leader and the leadership of Chairman Grassley in his committee make a difference. As we move forward with the confirmation process for three more nominees this week, we are advancing our goal of restoring the courts to judges who will determine what the law says, not what they think it should say. I urge my colleagues to support these well-qualified nominees. But I also urge my colleagues on the other side to stop using the process to frustrate the other work of the government. There is a right to 30 hours of debate, which is what we are in right now; we are in 30 hours of debate on a circuit judge, but nobody is talking about that circuit judge. Other bills could have been brought to the floor, and other issues that could have been dealt with aren't being dealt with because the minority has decided to abuse their power--to say that we are going to have 30 hours of debate about this judicial nominee, and then have no debate about the judicial nominee. It doesn't mean we don't need to confirm the judges, but it does mean, if we did so in a way that made sense for the people we work for, we would be doing other business now, and these three judges would have already been confirmed. They will be confirmed this week. My belief is that if the rules designed to protect the minority in the Senate are abused, they will not last forever. Eventually, you have to say: OK, facts are facts. This rule isn't being used this way, and the Senate has to do the people's work. If rules have to be changed to do that, I am for changing those rules. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding rule XXII, at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, December 13, there be 30 minutes of postcloture time remaining on the Willett nomination, equally divided between the leaders or their designees; that following the use or yielding back of that time, the Senate vote on the confirmation of the Willett nomination; and that, if confirmed, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, last week I came to the floor to talk about why we needed to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. I am proud to say that the Senate has passed that bill. I expect the Senate to move to conference with the House this week, and I am confident that the final bill will be an even better bill than the bill passed by either the House or Senate. More importantly, I am confident that it will get us on track for real tax relief for working families, and we will have this bill on the President's desk by the end of this year. Last week when the bill passed, I said that it isn't just about changing the trajectory of our economy, it is about changing the future we hand to our kids and our grandkids. I really think that is what this bill will do. There is a lot of talk in Washington about things that, frankly, will never turn out to be the facts--maybe they are the alternative facts-- but one thing I think will happen is that working families will see, in one of their first paychecks next year, that this tax bill and these tax cuts really affect them. Whatever your paycheck is--reflected in what you start getting paid on January 1--in virtually every case, working families are going to have more take-home pay, and those numbers are pretty big. A few weeks ago, I was at Patriot Machine in St. Charles, MO, and spoke to the employees who work there. The one thing they were concerned about was, what does this mean to me? What does this mean to my family? What is my take-home pay going to look like next year? Mr. President, you and I said many times during this debate that the two things we were committed to were more take-home pay immediately by taking less out of it and even more take-home pay in the future by doing things that make our economy more competitive and make that paycheck bigger to start with. Middle-class families, working-class families, and this country have lost a lot of ground with the slow growth we have had and the almost no growth in some years we have had in the past 10 years. We need better jobs, we need higher wages, and we need the government to let people take home more of what they earn. This bill will allow them to do that. It will double the standard deduction. That is the deduction that is about $6,000, and suddenly it is $12,000, and for a couple, it is $24,000. You start the tax process on something the size of a postcard by deducting that $12,000 or that $24,000 off what your W-2 forms say. The Senate bill doubles the child tax credit, so you go from a thousand to another thousand, and you take that credit off your tax obligation. Ninety percent of the people are going to fill out their taxes just that way. It is a form that you may not even have to turn over to sign the bottom and say, here is what I need to send back; here is what my tax obligation is. Helping families has been and continues to be at the heart of what this whole debate should be about--at one end, more take-home pay, and at another end, more competition that allows us to have better jobs to start with. I am absolutely convinced that the United States of America has more money on the sidelines right now than ever before in the history of the country and more money overseas because of our barriers to bringing money back, because our Tax Code didn't really anticipate international competition in the way that it has developed. It has more money that wants to come back than ever before. Those things are going to make a difference to the security that our country has and the access to the world marketplace. We couldn't be better located to compete all over the world than we are now. Those things, along with what has happened in the effort to stop the regulatory overreach and the effort to put people on judicial benches who are going to rule based on what the law says--this tax bill on top of that, with capital coming in to our economy, is going to make a big difference. It will help mainstream businesses that want to reinvest, innovate, expand, create jobs. That is going to happen with this bill. This bill came through the regular order process. It came through a committee that knew how to defend it. Every Senator had the opportunity to offer any amendment they wanted to offer to improve the final product. American families have been stuck with a broken tax code for the last couple of decades, and that is going to end when the President signs this bill into law. We shouldn't have to wait any longer. We need to get this done this year, and we can. Funding Our Military Mr. President, I want to talk a little bit about another bill that we passed for the 56th consecutive time. There are a lot of things that Congress doesn't manage to get to every year, but the No. 1 priority of the Federal Government is to defend the country, and we show that in how we prioritize that authorization bill that gives those who serve in uniform the very best possible opportunity to serve us and serve us safely. Senator McCain would be the first to say that we have fallen behind in the last 8 years in what we need to be doing to maintain the advantage that we always want our troops to have, and, of course, he is right. He and Senator Reed brought a bill to the floor, and that bill was passed into law. That will make a big difference in our obligation to provide for the common defense. When we send men and women in uniform into harm's way, we never want that to be a fair fight. We want to give every possible advantage--a training advantage, an equipment advantage, an intelligence advantage-- to the people we have asked to defend us. In the next few weeks, as we appropriate the money to do what the authorization bill calls for, we are going to see a step-up in a way that has not happened in 8 years now and will happen, I am convinced, this year. This bill meets that responsibility. I want to talk about a provision in that bill that I think particularly is reflective of the families who serve. The strength of our military is in the families of our military. Somebody said to me not too long ago: We generally in the military recruit single young adults, and we retire men and women with families. Those families who become part of this process--soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, during the time they serve--provide the real backbone of our military strength. They have a million responsibilities when somebody in that family deploys. They look at the holidays we are now in the middle of different from the way most other families look at the holidays. The person who is there keeping the family together when somebody deploys often--more and more of the time now--has their own career. They are paying the bills. They are keeping the kids in school. They are facing, for the most part, the challenges that so many single parents face today, but these are single parents based on one of the two partners in that team being deployed somewhere else. They have to do these things while they are worried about the person they care so much about who is in harm's way. Then when that part of their life is over, they become a family supporting a veteran and whatever challenges that veteran has from their service. So the bill we passed this year demonstrates our appreciation for our military families by including the Military Family Stability Act. This is a bill I introduced with Senator Gillibrand. That act provides for more flexibility for military families. It allows military families, for the first time, to meet one of the challenges they have when every 2 or 3 years they get a new assignment. If you are trying to stay because your spouse needs to finish a job or your kids need to finish a school year, that is really not part of the process anymore, but it now can be. We have a provision in law now that allows families to meet the challenges of a child finishing or starting a school year when their family thinks they should or a spouse completing a job or starting a job based on their schedule rather than the military's schedule. This will help people stay in the military. It rewards the support that families give to the military. It allows the family to either move early or to remain at their current duty station for up to 6 months while their spouse begins a new assignment or while their spouse stays a little longer behind to complete that assignment. The spouse has to assume the responsibility for how they take care of themselves in that interim, but the money follows the family or stays with the family. Right now, we have said to the family who wants to deal with that timing in a different way: Well, you can move early, but you have to pay to move early, or you can stay later, but you have to pay to stay later. I have talked to so many people in the military, who have had a career in the military, who have stories to tell about the reasons they have left or the reasons they have almost left--because we just didn't have this reasonable ability for a work purpose or an education purpose or kids or spouses, either one--one woman we had in as a witness on this was finishing her Ph.D., and she needed to go a little earlier to get the semester started. Teaching as a graduate assistant, she needed to get there a little early to get the semester started. I think she was told at the time: Well, if you get a divorce from your husband, we will see that you relocate, but as long as you are married, you are going to have to go when he goes. And he didn't go at the time they were told he was going to go. All those things can be much easier dealt with now, and fortunately that is now part of our law. I want to once again thank Chairman McCain particularly and Samantha Clark on his staff, who worked so hard to finalize this provision. Tribute to Captain Sam Burke Mr. President, I also would like to recognize an individual who has been absolutely vital to my work on the National Defense Authorization Act, my work on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and really the overall national security issues we deal with. Capt. Sam Burke, our military detailee, has been with us for the last year. I think this has been a benefit for him, but I know it has been a benefit for us. Sam is a proud Missourian. I have had a number of military detailees. He is the first Missourian we have had. He is a military detailee who has been absolutely instrumental in the Military Family Stability Act and has brought his experience to our office. Sam was instrumental in helping us finish that act. Sam has been with us a year. His parents still live in Charleston, MO. His father, Jim Burke, is a fourth-generation farmer in Mississippi County. His mother, Jeanne, is a special education teacher who retired recently. Sam's brother, Evin, is carrying on the farming tradition and works with his father as a fifth-generation farmer. As you would imagine, Sam was raised the right way, with strong Missouri values, but those Missouri values were, I am sure, definitely enhanced by the effect of the U.S. Naval Academy, where Sam went to school and graduated in 2010. He has deployed to Okinawa, Japan, been in support of multiple exercises throughout Southeast Asia, including Cambodia and Thailand. He has been a real resource for us. He has provided an important perspective on a number of foreign policy issues, ranging from Colombia, to Australia, to Russia, to the Balkans. He has been a great help on veterans issues and a tremendous asset to our office from day one. I wish Captain Burke all the best in the next chapter of his military career. I thank his fiancee, Sarah, and all his family and friends who support him for the sacrifices he has made serving the country and will continue to make. He is a first-class marine, a consummate professional, and an exceptional individual. We are going to miss him, but the country is going to continue to benefit from his service. For Sam Burke and all those who serve, we are grateful. For the hard- working families in America, I think we are taking a right step with the tax act, just as we took the right step for military families with the Military Family Stability Act. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a military fellow in my office, Capt. Sam Burke, be granted floor privileges for the duration of my remarks.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues who are on the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Budget Committee for getting us to the point we are at today. I think we are approaching a vote to move to a full debate on the tax bill, which is absolutely amendable with every idea that has anything to do with taxes and raising money, so people will have every right to be heard. It has been a process that has gone on for a long time. But what we have seen happen over the last three decades--after an incredible effort in 1986 to simplify the Tax Code, to bring it up-to-date and make it competitive, what we have seen is a tax code that gradually has become more and more complicated. There are too many loopholes that don't seem to be fair to everyone involved. Sometimes, it is not as much the tax rate you are paying, as your understanding that somebody else has figured out--in a competitive business or not even the same business--how to find that tax loophole, which meant they weren't paying their fair share of taxes. Our Tax Code depends on a sense of fairness. It depends on a sense of equity. The out-of-date Tax Code means that some of the rates-- particularly in international competition that might have been just fine 30 years ago--simply aren't fine today. Other countries have continued to reduce their taxes. They understand, as many of our States do in this country, that a tax policy that works means an economy that grows. Many of our competitors have figured that out. Right now, we have a chance to join them and figure it out as well. There is a chance here to make a generational change that will last, I would hope, at least for a generation, as the structure. We can do that by lowering corporate rates. In 1986, 35 percent was kind of in the middle of the countries we compete with. In 2017, it is at the very top of the tax structure of the countries we compete with. Even though they are well below us now in terms of the tax burden they put on companies that compete with us, they are lowering their corporate rate already. Even the middle will soon be the top, as it turned out to be in the last three decades. At least this gets us back to the middle. We will shift to a territorial system where, if you make money in another country, there is no penalty to bring it back here. There is no doubt that we will bring hundreds of billions of dollars back to the U.S. economy if we pass this bill. Some of the estimates say that we may bring $2 trillion back. We have had a stimulus plan in the past decade in which every family got $100 or something like that and thought that was a big stimulus. So a $1 trillion stimulus or $2 trillion stimulus is unbelievable. That money has been sitting someplace else; companies have wanted to invest it here but weren't going to bring it back under the old tax system. If they had brought it back, their shareholders would probably have removed them from leadership in the company because it simply would not have been good business. It will be good business to bring that money back if we pass this bill. We are also going to allow immediate expensing that says: I am going to spend the money now and get credit for it now. Those kinds of things grow the economy. It will make us more competitive worldwide. It will grow investments. When those two things happen, higher paying jobs have always followed and will follow here. We have been stuck for 8 or 9 years now with no growth in family income for hard-working families. The way to change that, No. 1, is to take some of the tax burden away right now, and we are doing that in this bill. But, No. 2, we need to be sure we create more competition for the hard work and skills that workers take to the workplace every day. We know that growth stemming from tax reform will have a positive impact on voters, and they will see a share of what is happening in the economy that, frankly, they haven't seen in the past. Families in your State and families in my State need this kind of opportunity, and job creators need this kind of relief. Just last month, the Council of Economic Advisers estimated that the average household income would increase by $4,000 annually, based on reducing the corporate rate to 20 percent. The economy, of course, will grow in response to that. Another study by a Harvard professor and former Reagan adviser, Martin Feldstein, found a 20-percent corporate tax rate would deliver a wage boost of about $3,500. So whether it is $3,500 by one estimate or $4,000 by another estimate, that makes a real difference to families who haven't seen an increase in their pay in a long time. This bill is supported by a majority of small businesses--the real engine that drives the economy. There is a section called 179 expensing. Any time you start talking like a CPA, you are in trouble. But that 179 expensing for small- and medium-size businesses, family farms, and others, lets you expense immediately when you have added to investment--when you have bought a piece of farm equipment, something like that. All of that is enhanced in this bill. I don't think accounting is the most exciting thing to talk about in the world, but this allows for the kinds of accounting measures that businesses say they need to really simplify how they report and how they do business. And that is right here. There are some specific Missouri examples, just as there are in every one of our States. Jim Sheldon owns a business called DT Engineering, which is a manufacturing company in Lebanon, MO. They produce industrial automation systems. When Jim was interviewed by the National Association of Manufacturers and asked what tax reform would mean to his company in terms of investment, hiring, and growing his business, he said: More business! Bringing work back to the [United States] will increase order rates, inventory, and development. This will create growth for DT Engineering. Jim also said that benefits from tax reform will allow him to ``reinvest to reinvent.'' Spending more money in what they are doing and figuring out ways to do it better is how to compete. Mike DeCola, who owns a business called HBM Holdings in St. Louis, was interviewed by NAM. Remember, this is the National Association of Manufacturers; these are people who make things, and any time we get into that economy and strengthen that economy, we strengthen take-home pay. But he was interviewed by NAM. He was asked what this tax reform would mean to his business, and he said: ``Tax reform will unleash investment not just for us, but for our customers.'' That is where his quote ends, but that is a really important point to understand. When everybody is doing better, whatever you are doing is likely to get better as well. Not only does the business get better for you, but, suddenly, the people to whom you sell things are more interested in also innovating, investing, and improving. The Senate bill also recognizes a couple of tools that really help us go in and revitalize areas that are not doing so well. One is called new market tax credits. New market tax credits have provided an effective incentive for the private sector to invest in communities outside the economic mainstream. These are usually communities that already have the water system, the electrical system, the sewer system, and the sidewalks, but they have buildings that no longer serve the purpose they used to serve, and the new market tax credits look at those buildings and other areas. In our State of Missouri, the new market tax credits have financed a sauce manufacturer in Hazelwood; a heating system manufacturer in Cuba, MO; a plumbing fixture manufacturer in Kansas City; a training center for sheet metal workers in St. Louis; the first grocery store in more than a generation in Pagedale, MO; and a lot more things beyond that. This bill recognizes that. It also acknowledges the importance of historic tax credits. I was talking with Patt Lilly from St. Joseph about that. He made the point that St. Joseph is an older community, a historic community. The western movement and the wagon trains outfitted there 150 and 175 years ago. The Pony Express started there. The stockyards thrived after the Civil War. Those old buildings--many magnificent buildings--didn't have the kind of uses they used to have, but over the past 10 years, historic tax credits have leveraged almost $100 million in redevelopment in those older buildings. Housing developed there. Businesses developed there. They restored and revitalized distressed areas of the city. A recent example is the restoration of the German American Building by Mosaic Life Care in the St. Joseph downtown area. That is a building that wouldn't have been able to be saved without some special assistance, which was made available because of historic tax credits. Again, not only was the historic building saved, but all of the services that were already there and served that building that wasn't being used now serve a building that is being used, and they don't have to be replaced. The bottom line is that this is a bill that will create a better future for American families and a better future for American jobs. This is an opportunity to do something that is hard to do, and it only gets done once every 25 to 30 years. This is the moment. It is time to do this. We will have a debate on the floor that allows everybody to make every reasonable amendment. I don't mean reasonable in that it might be reasonable to do it, but reasonable in that it deals with taxes and you figure out some way to pay for it. So you do something here, and you add something there. That is what this debate will be. We have talked about this topic now for years and intensely for months. It is time to get this job done. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, for 8 years, working families have seen their wages stay pretty much exactly where they were and, in some cases, they have seen their wages go down and their income go down. I will say again that the goal of this tax proposal should be to immediately do what we can to see an increase in take-home pay for those families and to do everything we can in the Tax Code to make us more competitive, to see that they have better jobs to start with and more competition for the good work they do. Our Tax Code clearly is broken. It is taking money out of the pockets of hard-working families and standing in the way of stronger economic growth, and we can and should and must do something about that. That is why the Senate is moving toward the passage of a bill that will address that Tax Code from both ends--more take-home pay now, better jobs with more pay to start with, and more take-home pay later. According to the Tax Foundation, under the Senate's proposal, middle- income families in Missouri will see an estimated increase of about $2,400 in their aftertax income. When we consider the fact that nearly 6 in 10 Americans say they don't have enough savings to cover a $500 emergency or a $1,000 emergency, $200 a month really matters. There may be people talking about how the Tax Code doesn't do enough of this and enough of that, and at the higher end we should do more or we should do less, but no family who is working hard every day in the middle range of income in our country doesn't think that $200 a month makes a difference to them. At another level--at the $50,000 level--I think for that family, it is about $1,100 a year, so $100 a month makes a difference as well. This proposal would make our Tax Code simpler and easier to understand by just simply cutting out all of the deductions that only a few people are able to take advantage of so everybody looks at the Tax Code and has more reason to believe that everybody is not only going to be treated fairly, but everybody is being treated the same. There are deductions in this bill we should keep where they are. There are deductions like the child tax credit that we should increase. In fact, the Senate proposal that that committee will start, with the opportunity to amend further tomorrow--the Senate proposal doubles the child tax credit to $2,000 per child. Senator Klobuchar, my friend from Minnesota and the cochairman of the adoption caucus, and I were on the floor yesterday, pleased to be talking about tax credits, and certainly I am pleased to see that the adoption tax credit continues to be in this bill. The new mark also reduces individual rates. The current rate of 22.5 goes lower. The 25-percent rate goes to 24 percent, and the 32.5 goes to 32 percent. What does that mean? That is all very complicated, but what people know, or at least their accountant knows, is that everybody sort of pays the same percentage on the first amount of income and then they pay a little higher percentage if they make it into the second bracket and a little higher if they make it into the third bracket. When all of those percentages go down, the total tax benefit for taxpayers is impacted by that. There are direct benefits in this bill but also benefits that continue to encourage small business. The estimation for small business is that 97 percent of all business in Missouri are small businesses, and the average tax cut for those businesses would be about $3,000 a year. These small businesses are the engines that drive the economy. They are the engines that drive growth. This bill understands that. This bill understands working families who haven't had a break in their paycheck in 8 years now, and it is time for them to be able to take home more of the money they earn. It is also time for us to do everything we can to see that they are going to have more competition for the good work they do in the future. More competition and more ability to compete with other countries and other companies mean better jobs. That is what this is about. It is a tax bill about families and jobs. I look forward to everyone in the Senate having a chance to amend the bill on the floor and to watch what I think has been a significant improvement in the bill as the Finance Committee has had a chance to look at it. They will have a chance to amend it. Then we have a chance--those of us not on that committee--to look at what they have done and see what we can do to make it even better before we go to conference with the House and put a bill on the President's desk. We will do that. I am confident we will be successful here, and successful this year, in a way that matters to working families. I see my colleague from Colorado is here. I yield the floor.