Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 27, 2015, at 4 p.m., in room S-207 of the Capitol.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 27, 2015, at 9 a.m., in room SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 27, 2015, at 2 p.m.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 27, 2015, 9 a.m.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 27, 2015, at 9 a.m., in room SD-215 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``The Internal Revenue Service's Response to Committee Recommendations Contained in its August 5, 2015 Report.''

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 27, 2015, at 10 a.m.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, last week I came to the floor to express my support for the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which we are dealing with today. The bipartisan vote of 83 to 14 that happened later that day was an important step in the right direction to deal with this issue. The debate has been encouraging. We need to deal with this threat to our economy. It is a threat to our security, it is a threat to our privacy, and we need to deal with it now. As I and others have said before, if we wait until there is an event that gets people's attention in such a dramatic way that everybody suddenly realizes what is at stake, there is no telling what kind of overreaction Congress will make. This has been a good debate at the time we should have it. Now, of course, we need to move on. There have been a lot of amendments offered. Many amendments have been accepted by the managers of the bill. With almost all certainty, today we will finish the remaining amendments pending on the bill and hopefully finish the bill itself. A lot of these amendments have been very well-intentioned--in fact, I suspect they all have been well- intentioned--but in many cases they fundamentally undermine the core purpose of the bill, which is to have voluntary real-time sharing of cyber threats, to allow that sharing to be between private entities and the Federal Government, and even for private entities to be able to share with each other. This is a bill that creates the liability protections and the anti- trust protections which that particular kind of sharing would allow. Of course, throughout this whole debate, there has been much discussion about how we protect our liberty in an information age. How do we have both security and liberty? Having served for a number of years on both the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, having served on the Armed Services Committee in the last Congress and in this Congress on the Defense Appropriations Committee, there is no argument in any of those committees that one of our great vulnerabilities is cyber security and how we protect ourselves. We saw in the last few days that the head of the CIA had his own personal account hacked into apparently by a teenager who is in the process of sharing that information. If the head of the CIA and the head of Homeland Security do not know how to protect their own personal information, obviously information much more valuable than they might personally share is also in jeopardy. We do need to ensure that we protect people's personal liberties. We need to do that in a way that defends the country. Both of those are primarily responsibilities that we accept when we take these jobs, and it is certainly our responsibility to the Constitution itself. I think Chairman Burr and Vice Chairman Feinstein have done a good job of bringing that balance together. This bill is carefully crafted in a way that creates a number of different layers of efforts to try to do both of those things. First, the bill only encourages sharing; it doesn't require it. It doesn't require anybody to share anything they don't want to share, but it encourages the sharing of cyber threats. It works on the techniques and the malware used by hackers. It specifically does not authorize the sharing of personal information, and in fact the bill explicitly directs the Federal Government to develop and make available to the public guidelines to protect privacy and civil liberties in the course of sharing the information. The Attorney General is required to review these guidelines on a regular basis. The bill mandates reports on the implementation and any privacy impacts by inspectors general and by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, to ensure that these threats to privacy are constantly looked at. Senator Flake's amendment, which we accepted as part of the bill just a few minutes ago, guarantees that this issue has to be revisited. I gave a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, MO, about a month ago at the beginning of the 70th year of the anniversary of Winston Churchill giving the ``Iron Curtain'' speech on that campus and talking about liberty versus security there. I said I thought one of the things we should always do is have a time that forced us as a Congress to revisit any of the laws we have looked at in recent years to be sure we protect ourselves and protect our liberty at the same time. This is a voluntary bill. Maybe that wouldn't have been quite as absolutely necessary here, but I was pleased to see that requirement again added to this bill, as it has been to other bills like this. This is a responsible bill. The people the Presiding Officer and I work for can feel good about the responsible balance it has. It defends our security, but it also protects our liberty. I look forward to its final passage today. The debate would lead me to believe, and the votes would lead me to believe, that is going to happen, but of course we need to continue to work now to put a bill on the President's desk that does that. There still remain things to be done. One of the things I have worked on for the last 3 years--Senator Carper and I have worked together, Senator Warner has been very engaged in this discussion, as has Chairman Thune--is the protection of sensitive personal information as well as how do we protect the systems themselves. Clearly this information sharing will help in that fight. There is no doubt about that. In addition to supporting this bill, I want to continue to work with my colleagues to see that we have a way to notify people in a consistent way when their information has been stolen. There are at least a dozen different State laws that address how you secure personal information, and there are 47 different State laws that address how you tell people if their information has been stolen. That is too much to comply with. We need to find one standard. This patchwork of laws is a nightmare for everybody trying to comply and frankly a nightmare for citizens who get all kinds of different notices in all kinds of different ways. Without a consistent national standard pertaining to securing information, without a consistent national standard pertaining to what happens when you have a data breach and your information is wrongly taken by someone else, we have only done part of this job. So I want us to continue to work to find the solutions there. We need to find a way to establish that standard for both data security and data breach. I am going to continue to work with the Presiding Officer and my other colleagues. Our other committee, the commerce committee, is a critical place to have that happen. I wish we could have done this on this bill. We didn't get it done on this bill, but I would say that now the first step to do what we need to do is dealing with the problem of cyber security in the way this bill does and then finish the job at some later time. So I look forward to seeing this bill passed today. I am certainly urging my colleagues to vote for it. I think it has the protections the people we work for would want to see, and I am grateful to my colleagues for giving me a few moments here to speak. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Delaware. He and I have worked on legislation together to protect data security, to have one standard for notifying people whose information has been accessed by people who shouldn't have it, and we are going to continue to work on that and look for opportunities, whether it is this bill or some other bill, to add that important element to what we are doing here. I come to the floor today, as I am sure many others have, to express support for this bill--for the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act--a bill that gives us tools we don't currently have, and to break down barriers that we do currently have. This is a bill that would allow individuals who see the information they are responsible for being attacked to call others in their same business and say: Here is what is happening to us right now. If you are not seeing it already, you should be looking for it. When they do that, it doesn't violate any competitive sharing of information. What it does is bring everybody into the loop of defense as quickly as possible and allow them to look for help from the government as well. So I express support for this bill. We know that day after day Americans who read, watch, or listen to the news learn of another cyber attack. Some involve attacks of government systems, while others involve the private sector. In 2012 and 2013, hacker groups linked to Iran targeted American bank Web sites and sustained an attack on those Web sites in a way that was designed to disrupt people trying to do business--trying to pay their own personal bills, trying to do things people should expect to be able to easily do. Early in 2014, we learned that cyber criminals had stolen 40 million credit card numbers from a major retailer and had probably compromised an additional 70 million accounts. We also have learned that a lot of times when we hear about these, they seem bad enough at first, but they seem a whole lot worse later when we find out what really happened, when we see how deep these criminals were able to go, how deep these terrorists were able to go, how deep these government-sponsored entities were able to go to get at information they shouldn't have. In September of that same year, September 2014, we learned another major retailer had suffered a data breach. In that case there were 56 million credit card holders. In February of this year, we learned a health insurance provider's system had been hacked, and 80 million customers were affected. This was a data breach that particularly impacted my State--particularly impacted Missourians--and we saw a huge change in the IRS fraud that occurred this year because, we believe at least, because criminals suddenly had all this sensitive personally identifiable information they had stolen. Suddenly somebody besides you was filing your tax return. Only later did the people who really had the income tax return to file find out that somebody had filed it for them. In June of this year--maybe the most surprising to all of us who have heard over and over again that the private sector is struggling, we suddenly found out the U.S. Office of Personnel Management increased a previous estimate of how many people were affected by its own data breach. The files of Federal employees and people related to those files was revised upward to 21.5 million people. Then we found out that also included roughly 5.5 million sets of fingerprints. I am not exactly sure what you could do with somebody's fingerprints on the Internet today. I can only imagine what you might be able to figure out to do with those fingerprints. Remember, your fingerprints don't change, and probably the government entity responsible for that hacking that has those fingerprints is always going to have those fingerprints as they think of new and malicious ways to use them. So we are talking about well over 100 million Americans who already have their personal information in the hands of people it shouldn't be in. The challenge before us is as clear as it is urgent. Virtually every aspect of our society and our economy rely on information technology. It has enabled tremendous economic growth, it has enabled tremendous efficiencies in every sector, but it has put all kinds of information out there in ways that, looking back, we are going to wonder why we made that information so available in so many places and left so unprotected. Federal, State, and local governments rely on that information technology as well. As the technology advances, its widespread adoption has also opened us to new dangers. Modern cyber security threats are sophisticated, they are massive, and they are persistent. This doesn't just happen every day, it happens all the time every day. The culprits of these attacks and intrusions range in terms of their motives and their abilities. We just heard of a teenager who figured out how to get into the personal account of the CIA director--at least that is the public media report--and the homeland security director. This is not a particularly sophisticated individual, but obviously a pretty capable person who gets to two individuals that one would think would be the most cautious. Some of these people are bent on sheer vandalism--just the thrill of cyber vandalism--while others are determined to steal intellectual properties from American companies. The motive there is clear. It is easier to steal intellectual property than it is to go through the hard work of creating it. Suddenly that information is out there, and the people who created it have been robbed. I hear this all the time when I visit companies in my State. We have seen cyber intrusions used for espionage. We have seen one major company attacked for no reason other than to embarrass the company because a foreign government didn't like something the company had done. It is quite a way to have a movie review, that we are just going to destroy as much of your technology as we can by a cyber invasion. A great many more of these people are motivated by greed--pilfering other people's identities, getting access to other people's account information, and selling that information on the black-market. This becomes a real opportunity for them. The more you remove it from the person who initially got it, the harder it is to find out who initially got it and what they did with it. Underneath all this is the implication of more serious attacks that can cause physical harm and can cause mass disruption of critical infrastructure of the country that is very dependent on cyber security. This really begs the question: What are we doing to protect our country and our citizens from these cyber adversaries? I have been in Senate for 5 years. I have had the great opportunity to represent the people of Missouri here for 5 years. And during every one of those 5 years, we have been talking about how important it is that we do something about cyber security. This is the only approach I have seen in those 5 years that has bipartisan support. It has a bicameral consensus. This is something that can happen. This is a problem that it is time to stop talking about. Do we want some other government to have everybody's fingerprints before we do something about it? This is the time to do something about it. As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I am certainly here to support the chairman of that committee and the vice chairman of that committee to finally pass this bill, a bill to enhance the public- private partnerships that can provide the kind of cyber defense we need. We need to do that and we need to encourage lots of sharing. We need to encourage sharing of attacks. We need to encourage early on, as I said, the ability to call somebody else in your same business and to contact them and say: This is happening right now. That is the best time to say it. The other option is to say: This happened to us late last night or happened yesterday, but this is happening to us. Is it happening to you? There is lots of misunderstanding about this concept. Without getting too technical, cyber threats are the malicious codes and algorithms used to infect computer systems and attack networks. They are techniques that use bits and bytes. They are the ones and zeros of the digital age that allow hackers to intrude upon private systems, steal information, perpetrate fraud, or disrupt activities over the Internet. In very dangerous circumstances, these techniques can be used to remotely control critical infrastructure management systems, such as supervisory control and data acquisition systems. I saw something on the news the other day where some hackers, for no intent other than maybe just to see if they could do it, had figured out how to take over one of the cars that was driving itself. Suddenly the car wasn't driving itself; the hacker was driving the car. When a particular company finds itself subjected to some novel new approach, the quicker they can share that, the better. When the government discovers a new method being used to infiltrate information technology systems abroad or here, they need to be able to share that with American companies quickly so they can protect themselves. There are things the private sector sees that the government does not, and there are things the government sees that the private sector does not. This legislation gives the obligation and opportunity to both of them to join together in this important fight. Modern communications networks move at an incredibly rapid pace. We need to be fighting back at that same kind of rapid pace. This bill establishes a strictly voluntary program. Unlike some of the other programs we have talked about to secure ourselves in a post- 9/11 world, this is a strictly voluntary program that leverages American ingenuity to unleash the arsenal of democracy against cyber adversaries. When it comes to the cyber threat, we have to act for a common purpose. Throughout this debate there has been a great deal of discussion about the need to protect liberty in the information age. I truly think liberty and security are not at odds with one another in this legislation. When it comes to this bill, it comes the closest to having the balance we all would like to see. It takes into consideration the importance of liberty, but it also takes into consideration what happens as we protect our security. I would close by saying of all the attacks we have had, and as bad as they have been, none of them have been the sort of catastrophic infrastructure attack that we may see that would impact the grid, that impacts our ability to communicate, impacts our ability to make the water system work, or impacts our ability to make the electrical system work. If that happens, the Congress will not only act, the Congress will overreact. This is the right time to have this debate. Let's put this legislation on the books right now. Let's give the people a law that makes sense at a time when we have the time to debate it, instead of waiting to see the direction we will turn to when we should have debated this and moved in this direction right now. I encourage my colleagues to vote for this bipartisan bill that I think will wind up on the President's desk and become law. Mr. President, I yield to my patient friend from Maine, who has been waiting. He and I serve on the Select Committee on Intelligence together, and I look forward to his comments.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am pleased to come to the floor today to express my support for the final conference report on the National Defense Authorization Act, what we need to do as a Congress to authorize the work that can be done to defend the country. I urge the President to sign this bill. For 54 straight years the Senate has done its job in authorizing the things that need to be done to defend the country. We have passed the bill. This fulfills part of that responsibility to defend the country. It is the first responsibility of the Federal Government to defend the country. This is something that can't be better done somewhere else. It is something that has to be done by us, and two things have to happen for that to be done. We have to authorize the spending in the way this bill does and then we have to appropriate the money once that spending has been authorized. The majority voted several weeks ago to debate the appropriating bill, but we couldn't get even six Democrats to join us to debate that bill. Well, now this bill has passed. So maybe the next move is to pass the bill that funds what has just been authorized. It has passed the House, it has passed the Senate, and the Commander in Chief of the United States is saying he would veto the National Defense Authorization Act? The President apparently believes the defense of the country is a legitimate bargaining chip in how we spend all other money. The President somehow has latched onto this idea that he proposed a few years ago that all spending be equal, that you take all of the discretionary spending in the country and half of that would be for defense and half of that would be for everything else that is discretionary--an increasingly small part of the budget, because mandatory spending is what continues to grow. The discretionary spending, the spending that people think about when they think about the Federal Government, gets smaller every year. But even with that challenge in front of us, the President apparently has the position that no matter how dangerous the world is, no matter what is happening in Ukraine or no matter what is happening in Crimea, no matter what is happening in Syria, no matter what is happening in response to the Iranian agreement, you have to have more money for everything else if you are going to have more money for defense. Somehow more money for the EPA and more money for the IRS are equal to the responsibility that the Federal Government has to defend the country. We saw a little of that, again, just a few weeks ago when the appropriators brought the Defense appropriations bill to the floor with a vote of 23 to 7. That means many Democrats and many Republicans voted for that bill, but when we got it to the floor, we couldn't get the number it took to bring it up. This bill, the authorizing bill, just passed the Senate with 70 votes. It passed the House with 270 votes. This bill fully supports the number the President said we needed to defend the country. This is like not taking yes for an answer. When the President says this is how much money we need to defend the country, the Congress appropriates the money the President says we need to defend the country, and then the President says: Well, but we need a lot of money for a lot of other things too, and I am only going to be for what I was for--this is the President's number--the amount of money I was for to defend the country if I get the amount of money I want to do everything else. That is not a very good formula for either democracy or making the system work. This has the base funding for the Department of Defense. It has the defense funding and the national security funding for the Department of Energy. It has money involved for the overseas contingency fund that was created for when things are happening outside of the country that we didn't anticipate. And surely that is the case. The President was just saying 3 years ago that the Russians weren't a problem. That was a Cold War idea that the Russians could be a problem. He was saying 3 years or 4 years ago that Assad must go. Clearly, things are not working out as we thought. So it is probably time to use the overseas contingency fund, as this does. This provides money for the intelligence-related programs. I am on the Senate committee that the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, and others report to. They are publicly not at all shy about saying that more things are coming at the country from more different directions with more potential danger than ever before and so they need to be funded. The activities have stressed those agencies in a lot of ways, but another way you can stress them is not to let them know whether they are going to have the money necessary to do their job. Our allies are constantly confused by the lack of resolve on our part. In fact, when you are looking at this from some other country and you say that the President got the amount of money he wanted in a defense bill that met the needs that the President proposed, but he doesn't want to sign the authorization bill now because he is not happy with all the other spending, that is a pretty confusing message. It is like the confusing message when the President draws a redline in Syria but it doesn't mean anything. But when you don't enforce the redline, then not just Assad is emboldened but all of our adversaries are determined at that point that there may be new ways to test the United States and its allies they hadn't thought of before. So, before you know it, the Russians are in Crimea, the Russians are in Ukraine, and now the Russians are in Syria. What we are watching unfold in Syria--and I would want to emphasize ``watching unfold'' as if we were spectators in an area of the world that since World War II the United States of America has done what was necessary to see that there wasn't a Russian presence there--is clearly the result of a strategy that is confusing, but it is also pretty darn confusing when the President says he is going to veto the Defense authorization bill. We see China moving in the South China Sea in ways that we wouldn't have anticipated, taking a 5-acre island and turning it into a 3,000- acre military base. We see Iran spreading its bad influence with the new resources that it now has. When the United States leaves a leadership vacuum in the world today, bad things rush to fill that vacuum. And when that happens--when there is less U.S. leadership, when there is less U.S. presence, when there is less positive U.S. encouragement in the world--that almost always produces the wrong kinds of results, and it almost always produces hasty decisions that cost America more in lives and international respect than we would have had otherwise. The President can take a positive step here by just saying: OK. I am going to sign this bill because 70 Senators and 270 House Members voted for this bill. If the President wants to have a fight, there is still a fight to be had. We shouldn't be having a fight about authorizing the money that would then be appropriated, but there is still a fight to be had because, remember, this bill doesn't spend one dime. It just creates the authorization to spend money if that money is appropriated. This is a good bill. It is a responsible bill. It eliminates waste and unnecessary spending. It trims down bloated headquarters and administrative overhead at the highest levels of the military so that more money goes to the places where the fight is and more money goes to the families and the troops that defend us. It contains the most sweeping defense acquisition reforms in a generation. It helps sustain the quality of life for the people who serve and their families. By the way, yesterday I introduced a bill along with Senator Gillibrand--a bill that focuses on family stability. When we were doing that, I was able to quote the recently retired Chief of Staff of the Army, General Odierno, who said the strength of the military is in the families of the military. This bill does things that move in the right direction. It authorizes a pay raise for those people serving below the grade of colonel. It requires the Department of Defense and the Veterans' Administration to establish a joint uniform formulary to ensure our troops have timely access to the medicines they need. The bill authorizes commonsense reforms in a 70-year-old, outdated retirement system. Currently, 83 percent of the people who serve in the military don't benefit from the retirement system. If this bill would pass, servicemembers exiting the military have more choices, resulting in about 80 percent of the people who leave the military getting a retirement benefit instead of 80 percent not getting a retirement benefit. The bill keeps in place restrictions that bring detainees to Guantanamo and keep them there. It prohibits the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to places such as Yemen, Libya, Syria and Somalia. Six and a half years after taking office, the President has never produced a plan to close Guantanamo. The Congress and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services are still waiting to hear what his plan might be. As terrorism spreads across the globe, we also don't appear to have a plan to do what needs to be done with the law of war detainees that are brought under our control and the control of our allies around the country. The challenges faced by the intelligence community are unlike any past challenges we have seen--cyber security, maybe it is more cyber insecurity than cyber security--from defending the critical infrastructure of the country to too much information on too many people in too many places. Previously, people who wanted to get our information had to be pretty close and were likely to be detectable. Now our adversaries can be in the middle of the desert, somewhere in Syria or anywhere around the world, using satellite technology to hack into us--as it turned out recently our U.S. Government personnel records. One has to hope the military, the dot-mil, is more secure than the dot-gov, but that doesn't happen if we don't provide the money. There are a number of priorities in my State that are reflected in this. We have a great training base at St. Joseph, MO, where C-130 aircraft pilots from all over our country and from 16 of our allied countries trained last year. This bill would provide the aircraft upgrades for that C-130 training. It provides the necessary resources for geospatial intelligence activities in the country. The bill includes military construction funding for a new consolidated nuclear stealth and deterrence facility at Whiteman Air Force Base. Missouri is proud to have Whiteman Air Force Base as the home of the B-2 bomber, the stealth bomber system, where dedicated airmen stand by at a moment's notice to let our allies know we can reach anywhere, anytime from that base, and they are unlikely to know we are there until we get there. Finally, this bill includes critical funding to keep the Army ready, equipped, and trained. At Fort Leonard Wood the Army trains approximately 80,000 soldiers every year. While I was disappointed with the announced reductions at Fort Leonard Wood, which are scheduled to occur in 2017, the number of uniformed positions at that installation will still be higher than they were in 2001. The Army's decision to minimize reductions at Fort Leonard Wood was a decision that I think anybody who understands the Fort would agree with. In summary, I want to say to the President of the United States that this bill provides for our common defense. That is his No. 1 responsibility as Commander in Chief. Blocking this bill will keep us less safe and less secure. So Mr. President, sign this bill. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to talk for a few minutes about the discussion we are having about whether to have a discussion. The debate we are having about whether to have a debate is always amazing to me. How far we have moved in such a short period of time from the way the Congress always did its work. The way you set your priorities, both at home and in the government, is how you spend your money. You might think that is not the way you set your priorities, but if you think something is very important to you and your family and you find out you are not investing any money or time in it, it is probably not all that important. It is probably something you have decided is a good thing to say is very important. This is the process we go through in the government to talk about what our priorities are. What could be more significant in our priorities than the bill that I would like to see us take up today, the VA-Military Construction bill, the bill that determines lots of things about not only people who serve in the military but what is available for their families, and what kind of support structure there is, and then with the Veterans' Administration, what is there after they serve, how are we meeting that commitment we made to our veterans that if they serve for the government--and we are grateful, so we should then make sure we are always there to do what the American people have told veterans we would do if they served. We have already had votes not to go to the Defense appropriations bill--a bill that is about the same amount of money the President asked for and what the President said was needed to defend the country, but apparently there is some balance somewhere in the world--that I am not aware of--that no matter how much it costs to defend the country, you have to spend that much money on other things that don't defend the country; that there is a balance between what is happening in Syria today and how many employees the EPA needs or how many employees the IRS needs. Obviously, that is something that doesn't make sense to people. It doesn't make sense to me, but we couldn't get the four additional votes we needed to go to the Defense appropriations bill. I guess in a world where the President said he is also going to veto the Defense authorization bill--not because of what it authorizes but because of the money that eventually the appropriators would have to spend--people have to wonder what is going on. The No. 1 priority of the Federal Government is to defend the country, and following that priority, our obligation is to those who serve in the military and their families. That is what the Military Construction bill would do. It actually spends a little more money than we spent this year. That appears to be everybody's complaint; that somehow the government is not spending enough money, but the Appropriations Committee took the amount of money that the law allows, and the Budget Control Act did a good thing in terms of keeping spending under control. That is one of the few things that has happened in Washington, DC, in a long time that actually did put a lid on spending because it actually put a lid on spending. It actually says in the law how much money we can spend this year on discretionary spending. The Appropriations Committee, with Republicans in charge for the first time in a long time, did the work for the first time in a long time. In fact, this is the first year in 6 years that the Appropriations Committee voted all the bills out of committee, marked up all of the bills, cut places where the committee thought should be cut, increased places where the committee thought should be increased, and this at a level that the law allows, but apparently the law is not good enough for our friends who always want to spend more money. It is not even good enough to debate the bills that come out at the level of the law, to let those be amended, and to let that work be publicly done. This worked pretty well for a long time. I think initially there was probably one spending bill, but I think in the tradition of Congress, that was the one bill that in both the House and the Senate we were able to debate as long as we wanted to, until everybody was worn out, offering their ideas as to how to spend the money better or not spend it at all. The House has continued to do this, except for a couple of years under Speaker Pelosi, on the half dozen big bills of the 12 spending bills we have now, and they traditionally have 200 or 300 amendments on each of those bills on how to spend the money. Some of those suggestions were not to spend it at all. What could be healthier than that? The Senate is not allowed to do that. At the end of the day, we are saying: Let's debate these bills. Let's, of course, debate the bill that defends the country. Let's debate the bill that takes care of those who do defend the country. This bill includes $5.5 billion more than was spent last year. I don't recall hearing a hark and cry--when this bill finally gets passed as part of one big not very appealing package--from anyone saying that we were not spending nearly enough on military construction or veterans programs last year, but even though we are spending $5.5 billion more than we spent last year, some are saying it isn't nearly enough to spend this year. The committee thought it was enough. In fact, this bill was voted out of committee--and remember this committee has Democrats and Republicans on it--with a vote of 27 to 3. Eleven Democrats and all the Republicans said: This is the best way to spend this amount of money--$5.5 billion more for these purposes than we spent last year. Let's vote this bill out so it can be debated on the Senate floor. Here we are months later, still trying to get 60 Senators to agree to have that debate. Actually, I think we are trying to get five Senators to agree to have that debate because all of the Republicans, and one Democrat, appear to be willing to move forward on these defense funding bills, but there is not enough on the other side. If we could get half of the Democrats who voted for the bill in the committee, we would have the votes we need to have this debate and talk about spending money. Eventually the government has to be funded, and we should all understand that if we don't do it this way, the alternative is that it will be funded in absolutely the worst possible way as one big bill with no debate and having to settle on some desperate decision at the end of the year in order to keep the government funded because we do have to defend the country. I am not arguing with the decision that ultimately has to be made to defend the country. I am not arguing with the decision that ultimately has to be made to have the military installations that allow that to happen with military construction. I am not arguing with the decision that has to be made for the veterans affairs part of our government, including veterans' health--mental and physical--behavioral health, and other health, to be funded properly, but why aren't we debating on that today? What would be wrong with debating this bill? If you were not one of the 27 Senators on that committee--so 27 percent of the Senate has already voted on this bill. Let's send it to the Senate floor and vote on it. If you are not one of the 27 Senators who voted for it or one of the 3 who voted against it, bring your ideas to the floor. That is how this process is supposed to work. Your ideas may be better than what is in the bill, but we will never find out if we are not allowed to debate it. This is regrettable for veterans and their families. We see a Veterans' Administration that is not doing what it ought to do. A year ago, the President said the Veterans' Administration was the best funded part of ``his government,'' but now there is not enough money. Suddenly there is not enough money. The President thought there was enough money a year ago, but apparently there is not enough money now. The real issue is that there is not enough commitment to veterans and the Veterans' Administration. We could have that debate here too. Over the last year, we have moved a long way toward giving veterans more choices, more options, and more places to go to get their health care. That system is in its fledgling stages, and it ought to be debated as we talk about how to spend money that would be spent on the Veterans' Administration, but we can't debate and vote on it if people aren't willing to have the vote it takes to have that debate. We ought to be getting back to the way this process works transparently and the way it works constitutionally. We need to have this vote today. We need to get to the Defense appropriations bill. Earlier this week, we had a vote--which I didn't support--to move forward for a few more weeks with last year's spending. Last year's priorities only work for so long. Just a couple of years ago, we had the situation where the Budget Control Act had to go into effect--and it went into effect because Congress didn't do its job and ended up appropriating more money than the law would allow--and that required line-by-line cutting, the sequester, which is not a necessary part of that law at all. It is only a part of the law if the Congress violates the law, and the Congress violated the law. The President signed the bill, and then we had to do the line-by-line cutting. We brought the leaders of our military in to talk about this, and none of them were for line-by-line cutting. Who would be? That is the worst possible way to reduce spending because you are not making any choices, you are just admitting that you can't make any choices, and so everything gets cut everywhere. Every one of them said this is a big problem, but an even bigger problem in almost every case is the sequester. In fact, Admiral McRaven of Special Ops said that an even bigger problem than the sequester is the continuing resolution because we were cutting lines of a budget that might have met the military needs 5 years before, but it hasn't been updated for 5 years. Let's have this debate. Let's move beyond saying that we can't decide how to spend the money to debating how to spend the money. Let's have a defense structure that works for 2015 and 2016, not a defense structure that might have worked for 2010. One of the great frustrations the people we work for have with us today is they believe this is not all that complicated, and they are right. How complicated can it be? We were elected to the Senate so we could take positions and vote, so let's take positions and vote. The debate we should be having is about moving forward on these critical issues. I hope our colleagues will join us today. I hope there are 60 Senators who will say: I am ready to have this debate. I am ready to defend the country. I am ready to take care of those who defend our country and their families and veterans and their survivors. And that is what this budget is all about. How anyone can walk onto the floor and say they don't want to deal with this now and put it off a little while longer is disappointing to me and to lots of people. Let's get our work done. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources' Subcommittee on Public Lands, Forests, and Mining be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 1, 2015, at 2:30 p.m., in room SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate, on October 1, 2015, at 2 p.m., in room SD-226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Oversight of the Administration's FY 2016 Refugee Resettlement Program: Fiscal and Security Implications.''

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 1, 2015, at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 1, 2015, at 10 a.m., in room SR-428A of the Russell Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing entitled ``Examining the Significant Cost and Related Burdens for Small Businesses Resulting from the Gold King Mine Waste Water Spill near Silverton, CO.''

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 1, 2015, at 10 a.m., in room SD- 430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing entitled ``Achieving the Promise of Health Information Technology.''

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 1, 2015, at 2 p.m., to conduct a hearing entitled ``Nominations.''

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 1, 2015, at 10:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing entitled ``Reviewing the Civil Nuclear Agreement with South Korea.''

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 1, 2015, at 10 a.m.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 1, 2015, at 10 a.m., in room SD-215 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Improper Payments in Federal Programs.''

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 1, 2015, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing entitled ``American Crude Oil Export Equality Act.''

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on October 1, 2015, at 9:30 a.m.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am glad I got to be here to hear Senator Scott talk about that family and that hero and those who protect and defend us. In Missouri we have had over the last year a number of challenges on this front. I was recently meeting with a group of African-American pastors, one of whom was a pastor in Ferguson, MO, and talking about the hard work of being in law enforcement. He said: People who protect us, just like me, want to go home at the end of the day. And more than most of us, people who protect us leave every day with them and their families having the No. 1 focus of getting home at the end of the day. Thank God they are willing to step forward and protect us, especially understanding that this is a challenging job at a challenging time. Veterans Health Care I wish to speak for a little while about veterans health care, another challenge we face right now. We just, unfortunately, failed to move to debate on a bill that would fund these programs, a bill that would increase funding for our veterans in areas such as health care and benefit claims and processing claims, medical research, and technology upgrades. For whatever reason, we decided as a Senate--and I don't think for a good reason--that no, we are not going to debate that bill because all of these bills somehow collectively don't spend enough money. But we have talked about that, and I talked about it earlier in the day. Right now I wish to speak for a few minutes about what we do need to be figuring out for our veterans. We learned a year ago that Veterans' Administration wait times were unacceptable. We learned it was likely that a number of lives had been lost and deaths had been caused because our veterans didn't get to see the doctor they should have gotten to see; they didn't get the health care they earned as veterans and deserved. This summer, after a year of working to make this better, we found out that the wait list of people waiting more than 30 days at the VA system to see a doctor was now 50 percent longer than it was last year. I thought about that a little bit and I thought, well, maybe it was just 50 percent longer than it was last year, because one thing they found out was the wait-list wasn't really reflective of the real wait-list. The kind of progress we hoped to have made we don't appear to be making yet. Last year the Congress passed a law to give veterans more choice. It was passed on a broad bipartisan basis. The Senate came together, the Congress came together to allow veterans to receive their health care in non-VA facilities if they couldn't get that first appointment within 30 days or if they were more than 40 miles away from a facility. We tried this legislation this summer to put even more definition to that. Clearly, what the Congress means is 40 miles from a facility that can do what the patient needs to have done. If one needs to have a heart stint put in, just being 40 miles from a facility where they would take your blood pressure isn't good enough. We will continue to work to change veterans health care in a way that gives veterans more choices, I hope. What we found out is that Alaskan care is just not acceptable. We have to continue to keep focused on this. The bill we provided will create more choices. Last week I had one of the best conversations I have ever had with anybody at the Veterans Administration when I talked to the Under Secretary of Health--a new person in that job--Dr. Dave Shulkin, who spent his whole life in health care in the private sector managing hospitals outside of the Federal Government. Dr. Shulkin should know what he is doing, and it certainly sounded to me as if he knew what he was doing. He understood the kinds of things the Congress hopes to see for our veterans and the VA system that need to happen. We talked about the fact that Congress intends for veterans' choice to mean exactly that--not ways for the Veterans Administration to find obstacles to choice but veterans' choice. If you are a Federal Government health care provider, if you take Medicare patients, you ought to be able to take veterans as patients. There shouldn't be some long second process you have to go through to become qualified so that the veteran can see a doctor the veteran wants to see, the veteran can go to a hospital the veteran wants to go to, particularly if the VA can't meet that need. In fact, the conversation I had with Dr. Shulkin was so good that for a little while, I thought maybe I had gotten the wrong number, that possibly I actually had not called the Veterans Administration, because I have never had a conversation like that where somebody at the Veterans Administration not only knew what needed to be done but wasn't afraid to compete to get the health care needs of veterans met. I talked to all our veterans groups in Missouri, or many of them-- certainly the two big veterans groups--at their meeting this summer. I said: Many of you have had great experience with the VA. There are a lot of people at the VA who want to do everything they can to serve veterans in the best possible way. I said: But that is not good enough. All of you need to have had the best possible experience at the VA--not necessarily the best outcome but the best possible outcome. You know, all of our health care outcomes aren't what we would want them to be, but they ought to be everything they possibly should be. Veterans shouldn't have to drive past non-VA facilities that are equally capable of providing their health care or more capable of providing their health care, and we are going to continue to work to see that that happens. Competition is a good thing. The best possible place to go for your health care is a good thing. I want to come back to that briefly in a moment, but before I get there, I received a report on Tuesday from the Veterans Administration's inspector general that frankly just said that the allegations about what was happening at the St. Louis facility, the John Cochran facility, were absolutely true, that a number of files had been changed to indicate that the consultation had been completed before it was ever had. I assume it does a lot for your performance numbers if you check the ``completed'' box before you see the patient, and that appears to be what was happening. We learned that there is not enough oversight there. We learned that at least one psychiatrist had received performance pay based on productivity data. The only thing wrong with the productivity data was that it wasn't correct. I guess it is easy to look good if you are not backing that up with real facts. It is not acceptable. It is inexcusable. Then we have a problem with leadership at these facilities. At the John Cochran hospital in St. Louis--the biggest hospital we have in our State--we have had seven temporary directors in 2 years. No matter how good some of those may have been, having seven temporary directors is a lot like not having any director at all. If you know somebody is going to be there for 14 weeks, or however long they are going to be there, and you know somebody else is coming, that obviously is not going to produce a good result, but that is happening. There are 30 veterans centers that don't have permanent directors today. That is about 20 percent of all the facilities in the country. One in five of our VA medical centers doesn't have a permanent director, and we need to do better. Supposedly the new Administrator of the Veterans Administration came in because he was a great manager. So far, I don't see the results. If he needs more help from the Congress to be a great manager, we ought to figure out a way to give him more help. I believe competition is a good thing. The VA should be good and really better than anybody else at a few things. Nobody should be better than the VA in terms of dealing with post-traumatic stress. Nobody should be better than the Veterans Administration when it comes to dealing with the results of these IED attacks, the improvised explosive device attacks. Because of that, eye injuries should be something the VA deals with very well. And nobody should be better than the VA at dealing with prosthetics or spinal cord injuries. Frankly, the Presiding Officer, as a doctor, would appreciate this. I don't really know why we wouldn't assume the VA would be the best place to specialize in almost anything else. And if it is not the best place to go, it shouldn't be the only place to go. The VA is probably not likely to be any better or as good as anyplace you would drive by to get your heart stint put in, to take care of your cancer problem, to work with your kidneys that are failing, to get even the basic health care of getting your blood pressure checked. Our veterans deserve more choices. There are lots of reasons the Congress should be and is concerned about the way the Veterans Administration is working. It is clearly time for the Veterans Administration to get focused not on what is good for the Veterans Administration but on what is good for veterans. We owe it to our veterans. The report I got this Tuesday unfortunately verifies almost every concern that people have had, and we need to insist that that be better.