Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, this is a classic example of everything has been said but not everybody has said it yet. One of the great traditions of the Senate is to be sure everybody says it. We are going to say it now, and we will continue to say it until the House finally has that vote. It has been pointed out that this agreement was signed well over a year ago. It has been pointed out that our two biggest trading partners are Mexico and Canada, in that order. It has been pointed out that there is lots of focus on agriculture. Every State is an agriculture State. Every State has that as a significant part of their economy. Nobody in the world does that part of the economy more efficiently or more effectively than we do. So that is important. It is important to realize that lots of other things are in trade, as well, but agriculture has to be mentioned a lot until we get this done. Whether I was at the Missouri State Fair in August or the roundtable meetings I was at in our State in October, cost comes up--$88 billion is the agricultural economy in Missouri. We are about the same amount. I think Senator Hoeven said his State is in the top 10. Ours is too. We export about $4 billion worth of ag products. We also export pickup trucks and airplanes and lots of technology from our State. We export our fair share of beer cans and other things that go all over the world. We are going to continue to make that happen. Opening markets make a big difference. It also makes a big difference in how you look at the world. If you have strong trading relationships, you are pretty careful with how you deal with all those other relationships. We need to do that. We need to have this vote. The votes are in the House. The votes are in the Senate. It is up to the Speaker to bring this up. I think the U.S. Trade Representative is working as hard with Democrats in the House as he could possibly be expected to do to maybe look at those last few things that might make this a better deal. Senator Portman did a great job talking about why the choice here is if you want to continue to have NAFTA--which has been great for all three partners, Canada, Mexico, and us--or do you want to have USMCA, which in area after area has the 20-year update it needs. We need to get on with this. We need to get on with the activities of the day. Remembering Ted Stevens Mr. President, I am going to start off by saying one of the things we are going to do today is accept the official portrait of Ted Stevens, President pro tempore of the Senate--the highest office that the Senate can possibly give to anybody. It is the highest office in the Senate. He was the chairman one time of the Commerce Committee, chairman of the appropriating committee, and a guy who flew those tough planes in the toughest areas in World War II. He was a person who always did his best to try to figure out the Senate and then be sure that the Senate worked for America and the Senate worked for Alaska. When it came to both of those things, it was hard to beat Ted Stevens' best. He knew how to make this place work. He would be disappointed in the dysfunction we see right now, but he would be optimistic that in the greatest country in the world, we will figure this out. All of us who had a chance to serve with him--I had a great relationship with him when I was a House Member. I learned a lot. I think of him often. I miss the way he represented his State and our country so uniquely and so dynamically and so effectively. I look forward to not only the recognition here on the floor that he will receive today but the permanent recognition he will receive as we today hang his portrait in the U.S. Capitol. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the next vote, the vote we will take in less than an hour, is a vote that would exercise the Congressional Review Act, of which I am a supporter. The idea that we should use the Congressional Review Act is a good thing for us to look at what any administration does and determine if that is the right way to go. Today, I certainly intend to vote to maintain the position that the administration has had on the affordable clean energy rule. This is a rule that will have a very positive impact on our State, just like the rule that it replaces would have a very negative impact. We are in the top five coal-using States for energy in our State. With the Obama administration's rule, the massive energy regulations would have imposed billions of dollars in compliance costs that would have been passed along every single time that someone harvests a crop, flips on a light switch, shops for groceries, or walks into the door at work. Under the Obama-era rules, families in Missouri would have faced double-digit utility price increases; in fact, the average Missourian's average utility rate would have doubled in approximately a decade. A vote for this Congress review act would put that rule into effect, as opposed to the rule that replaces it. These rules always have good titles. The current rule that the Trump administration has put into place, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, would replace the clean power rule. That is significant. They both propose to do the same thing. One rule states they will have clean power; the other rule states it will have clean energy. The difference in the title is actually the difference in effect, which is one proposes affordable clean energy. It doesn't seem like a very tough decision: You either want affordable clean energy or clean energy that, in my view, is clearly not affordable. What the new rule would do would be to look at individual sources of energy and decide from a selection of things that can be done, what can be done at those individual sources. I was on this floor many times talking about this rule prior to the 2016 elections. It had been held in abeyance by courts that said, no, it went too far. The administration didn't have the ability to do what they were trying to do. When I was on the floor all those times talking about what this rule would do to our State and our economy and similar things all over the country, what I said was, the next time you write your utility check, just write it out of your checkbook again because, within a decade, you would be paying twice as much in Missouri for utilities as you are paying right now. The cost would have gone up, and it would have happened quickly. Thankfully, President Trump and the administration--with the support, frankly, I believe, today, of Senate Republicans--will have charted a new course resulting in huge strides toward American energy independence. We are doing that on other fronts. In fact, September and August were the first 2 months in 37 years that we have been a net exporter of energy, not an importer of energy. Energy self-sufficiency is important, particularly when there is an all-of-the-above strategy with oil, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar as a part of the portfolio of energy that needs to grow, but doesn't need to grow in a way that cripples American families when they try to pay their bills or when they try to get a job. To become a net exporter of energy, we have done all those things while we were still cutting emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions in the power industry are down 28 percent since 2005, without the Clean Power Plan ever having gone into effect. The EPA's Affordable Clean Energy Rule strikes exactly the right balance--in my view and, I believe, today in the view of a majority of my colleagues--between reducing emissions and ensuring that Americans can still continue to have access to reliable, affordable energy. For many families, the cost of energy is one of the biggest items to think about when they think about their budget. In fact, for many families, there is not much to think about. You pay whatever you are paying for your housing, then you pay your utility bill, and you see what is left over. The luxury of having a technical budget with how you are going to do all the things your family would like to do doesn't happen all too often now. It would happen much less often if the utility bills are twice what they are today. The action we take here today, supporting the affordable energy rule and walking away from the clean power rule, will make a difference for those families. It makes a difference in the utility bill at home, and it makes a difference in the utility bill at work. Lots of jobs simply just don't work at twice the cost of today's utility bills. It is a foolish rule and has been properly replaced with a rule that makes sense. I urge my colleagues to maintain the rule we are headed to, rather than the one we are running away from. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk about a very different topic, and that is the Stanley Cup. Yesterday at the White House, the St. Louis Blues were warmly welcomed by the President in a ceremony celebrating their Stanley Cup victory. On June 12, the Blues made history when they defeated the Boston Bruins in game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final. It was hard to imagine at the beginning of this season that the Blues could have done this. They were the lowest ranked team in the National Hockey League. I think there was a time in the month of January when the odds that the Blues would win the Stanley Cup were 150 to 1. I am not particularly a betting man, but knowing what I know now, we wouldn't have had to put much money on that bet to have won a significant amount of money. As it turned out, however, as you and I know in what we do here and what we have done in our lives, the odds are not really what count; what counts is how you play the season. Just like we often say in politics, candidates matter. In hockey, in sports, the players matter. How they come together as a team matters. Whether or not that team really becomes a team matters, and this one did. It was a season for the Blues that was filled with record-breaking achievements. Jordan Binnington became the first and only rookie goalie to win 16 games in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Ryan O'Reilly set a franchise record with 23 points in the playoffs and was named the postseason most valuable player. Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final was the most watched NHL game in 36 years. For the first time in franchise history, the Blues brought the Stanley Cup trophy to Missouri to celebrate their achievement as the best sports fans in Missouri stepped out. Five hundred thousand people were there when the Stanley Cup parade was in St. Louis for the first time. Five hundred thousand people--in several States represented on the floor, that would be everybody in the State. Five hundred thousand is a pretty big crowd anywhere, as it was in St. Louis that day. Today, the Stanley Cup trophy will be on display on Capitol Hill so that Blues fans in the area can get a chance to see this legendary trophy in person. The Stanley Cup has already traveled all over the world since the Blues won the Stanley Cup. Ryan O'Reilly brought the Cup to Ontario to share it with his 99-year-old grandmother, who is probably one of the oldest people to see the Stanley Cup. But for sure the youngest baby to be put in the Stanley Cup--the record was broken when the trophy was brought to a mother and her newborn child at Mercy Hospital in St. Louis, the baby barely born, right there in the Stanley Cup, setting the new Stanley Cup ``youngest baby in the Cup'' record. We will never forget the image of Laila Anderson. Laila, a young girl battling a life-threatening disease, in many ways became the No. 1 fan of the team. Laila, by the way, was at the White House in the Rose Garden yesterday, and she was called up to stand by the President and the Stanley Cup, with the team surrounding both of them. The night they won, she was on the ice with the players celebrating as the Stanley Cup was passed around at the end of game 7. The day after the Blues received their championship rings, two players visited Laila to personally deliver her very own ring. I saw those rings yesterday, and they are just about as big as Laila's hand. They were big rings. Her name was inscribed on the diamond-studded championship ring that was given to her, which also included the words ``Play Gloria,'' which became the theme song, fight song, inspirational song for the Blues at the end of the season. Blues fans have plenty to be excited about this season. The majority of the names of the players that are now etched on the Stanley Cup are back this year. The roster is even better with the addition of defenseman Justin Faulk. We are also proud to say that St. Louis will host the 2020 NHL All- Star Game in January. That game, of course, brings together the most talented players in professional hockey. I know St. Louis is ready to welcome them, and we will all be excited to further solidify St. Louis's place as one of the great sports cities in America. It has been a great year for Blues fans, and I hope the team will once again have the opportunity to visit the White House next year. This will be the first year of many years where those of us in the Missouri delegation will get to host the Stanley Cup in the Capitol. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, in accordance with rule 23 of the Rules of Procedure of the Committee on Rules and Administration and pursuant to Public Law 115-364, on September 25, 2019, the Committee adopted the U.S. Senate Disabled Veteran Leave Regulations.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, later in the day--certainly today or tomorrow--we will have a vote on whether we want to move forward on this year's appropriations process. The vote would allow us to move forward. Frankly, it would and should allow every Member to make any amendment they want and to debate this bill on the floor, as bills should be debated. If they don't like the House bill that we will take up--and many of us would not like the House bill--they have a chance to substitute that with another bill or make amendments on that bill. I would like to see this process get started. A significant part of the House bill was the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education portion. I chair that bill in the Senate. It is after the Defense bill, which would also be part of this bill, which, by the way, has the biggest pay increase for those who defend us, in a decade in it. After the Defense bill, the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education bill is about 30 percent of all the money left. So just those two bills together is a significant amount of all Federal spending. It would be great if we could get this done on time again this year, as we did for 70 percent of the spending last year. I am disappointed in the bill that we actually made public as part of an alternative today. For the first time in 4 years, we weren't able to work with our friends on the other side and have a bipartisan bill. This was a bill that was designed not to bring a lot of controversial legislating into the appropriating process but to do the appropriating, to leave the language in the bills that had been there before that may have been controversial at one time but has long become part of the bill but not add new things. We agreed to and the President signed a bipartisan agreement that reiterated that principle and set a total amount of money to be spent. In retrospect, it might have been better if we had also allocated that money between the 12 committees. We didn't do that. We basically allocated the defense part and the nondefense part. Because of that, we were not able to reach an agreement with the minority to mark up this bill the way I would have liked to and I think, frankly, they would have liked to. Certainly, the ranking member and her staff have been an important part of this discussion. This bill--the bill that would be our alternative today--includes funding that they would like and I like. There is a new suicide initiative. It increases early childhood care and education programs. There are new mental health workforce programs involved here. We invest in homeless youth education in the way that I think the Senate ultimately will. Those are all things that we have tried to move forward on in a way that I am confident the minority is not opposed to. I think they will find little to criticize, frankly, in the bill. We didn't engage in a lot of new language. Some of the Republicans Members, including me, would like to see some further defining language in the bill, but that really gets to authorizing and not appropriating. That gets to passing legislation that should go through other committees and not just deciding how much money we are going to spend on those activities that the Federal Government has to participate in, is authorized to participate in, starting with the Constitution itself, the principal authorization to defend the country. In the Labor-HHS bill, we moved forward with things we have worked together on now for 4 years--a $3 billion increase in our Federal investment in NIH, the National Institutes of Health; opioid treatment and recovery that follows on our earlier commitments and moves that number to $3.9 billion. We strengthened the workforce in this bill, particularly the apprenticeships, with the idea that sooner rather than later, people should get a sense of the kind of job they would like to do and understand the pathway to work, which for some people involves a college education and for lots of people does not. I think 50 percent of the people who graduated from college are working at jobs that don't have anything to do with their college degrees. That doesn't mean the college degree was bad; it just means it is not the universal pathway that I think for almost a generation now we have talked about--how that was going to lead to better incomes and stronger families and all of that. What leads to better incomes and stronger families is a good job. It is doing things. You get out of high school and get a job and get married. If you can do it in that order, you are much more likely to not have concerns about poverty than if you try to skip any of those or do it some other way. For a long time, this bill has been one of the most difficult bills to negotiate. It has many of the hot-button issues that the country and the Congress deal with. Again, for the last 3 years--and that was for the first time in a decade--we have had a bipartisan bill. I think at the end of the day, we will have a bipartisan agreement again, but unfortunately our friends on the minority have--I think in their frustration about the allocation of money--decided: Well, even though we have agreed not to fight about new issues--adding things to the appropriations bill that haven't been there before--we are going to fight about that. We are going to say what the President can do about this, and we are going to say what doctors can do about that. That is not what this bill does or is designed to do. As I mentioned earlier, one of the things we have done is one of my top priorities as chairman, which is to move forward at this unbelievably important time with health research. I can't help but point out that 4 years ago, NIH hadn't had a penny increase, not an inflationary increase, not any increase for 12 years. This was basically the same 12 years in which we began to figure out how important it was that we now understood the human genome. This was the same 12 years that cancer researchers were looking at immunotherapy. This was the same 12 years that people were beginning to talk about, well, maybe you can do some editing with CRISPR technology that will prevent a future thing from occurring, that you could look at that genetic makeup and know it is going to occur. There was not a penny increase. Four years ago, the research community said they were 22 percent below--in research buying power--where they had been 12 years earlier. We caught up on that. If we are able to move forward with the $3 billion increase, we will have had a 40-percent increase over five budgets. Now we are probably talking about really new money beyond where NIH was a dozen years ago. This 40-percent increase matters. The House and Senate have worked together. Congresswoman DeLauro and Congressman Cole have worked together with Senator Murray and me to make this a priority. I think we want to do that again. I think the facts will show that. Why should it be a priority? The most expensive disease in America right now is Alzheimer's. The cost to treat Alzheimer's patients is anticipated to rise to $1.1 trillion by 2050 if we don't find some way to get what is happening headed in a different direction. And $1.1 trillion, by the way, is essentially double the defense budget. I don't know about you--I don't have a very good sense of how much $1.1 trillion is, but I have a good sense of what we spend all over the world, as Americans, to defend the country and help defend the world. We will be spending twice that amount in today's dollars--taxpayers--on Alzheimer's and dementia treatment in 2050 if we don't find a solution. So I think quadrupling the amount of money that we spend in this area would make more sense. We are spending a little more than 2 percent on research, of the tax dollars we are spending on treatment right now, and, again, that only gets to be a bigger problem. Further, the bill increases funding for the BRAIN Initiative, to map the human brain, to $500 million. I had somebody in my office this morning saying that pediatric brain cancer is now a bigger threat to kids than leukemia. We made a real effort on leukemia. We are now moving to another area that is now attacking the lives and ending the lives, perhaps, of more juveniles than leukemia has. We have an investment for the first time in new ways of helping caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's. The anticipation is that for every government dollar spent--and today that would be about $600 billion a year--for every government dollar spent, there are two private dollars spent, almost never insured. A lot of that is somebody deciding in their family that they are going to give up part or all of their work to take care of somebody they care about. We are fully funding the administration's request to end the HIV epidemic in the next 10 years. We have confidence in NIH that this is possible. We have that in sight. If we could end that as a life- threatening epidemic, it would be a big thing. We are moving forward with combating the opioid epidemic. Our committee was a little bit ahead of the authorizers in realizing this is a huge problem for so many people in the country today. We are making an additional $100 million national commitment in mental health. NIH says that one in four or one in five adult Americans has a diagnosable and almost always treatable behavioral health issue. Those are just some of the many things this bill does. There is $5 million requested by the minority to train professionals to provide mental health and substance abuse counseling. If you didn't have a behavioral health issue before you got addicted, you will definitely have a behavioral health issue once you have been addicted. This doesn't just end by saying we can give you something to get you off the opioid or the drug addiction you have; you have to mentally get away from that addiction as well. We also focus on education. There are workforce initiatives to prepare younger people for jobs that are out there and prepare our entire workforce for the jobs that come next. We shouldn't be in the business of defending just any job; we want to defend viable jobs that are going to be viable today and hopefully part of the future. We want to ensure that workers are ready for the next job. It maintains funding for campus-based student aid for people who are likely the first people in their families to ever attend college--I was the first person in my family to graduate from college--and the TRIO Programs, to get high school kids thinking about the fact that they can go to college as one of their options and what it would mean to them if they do that, to do things that help people stay in college and do things that get people ready for real jobs that are out there. One of the things I have noticed in the last year is how many people in their late twenties are still trying to decide what to do. I call it the lost decade. I have had so many conversations that went something like this: Well, I went to college for a semester or a year, and then I was an Uber driver for a while, and I did some landscaping. I was in retail at the lowest level. I was a bartender. Finally, it just occurred to me that this is not working. I have no retirement plan. I have no benefits. I don't make enough money to have the kind of family I would like to have. If you missed that decade, you are lucky to ever get it back. A few people can somehow recover from that economically and replace that lost decade. But the quicker you become part of an economy that you want to be part of, the better off you will be. In this bill, we are increasing elementary and secondary education support programs, like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and there is a Pell increase for the third year in a row for people who have Pell assistance when they go to school. We prioritized programs that benefit the country. We tried hard not to do that in a partisan way. I believe that at the end of the day, if Democrats look at this bill, they might argue about the amount of money available, but I think they would have a hard time arguing that it is not a bill that tries to really meet the challenges we face as a country. I would like to see us move with this bill and all four of the House bills in the package we vote on today and hope to see that happen when that vote occurs. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I join my two colleagues who were just here and spoke while I was here--my friend from Montana and my friend from Oklahoma--to talk about, really, the uniqueness of the government we have and of the unbelievable coming together of ideas in Philadelphia in 1787. They were ideas, frankly, that nobody had ever thought of in quite the same way before, starting with the first three words. This was the only document that had ever been devised up until that time that had suggested that the source of government was the source of government that the Constitution recognizes immediately. When the Magna Carta talked about the relationship between the King and the barons of England, that was even a big step in a new direction because, up until then, under monarchies, there was only one source of government, which was God. God's ordained, chosen Monarch was viewed by country, after country, after country as the way this should be done, and there would be a succession, and it would be understood. It had, really, nothing to do with you or me or anybody else. It was all some greater plan that was left up to somebody else. The Articles of Confederation that Mr. Lankford mentioned was a weak form of government that just simply, after a little more than a decade, had been proven not to work. It was just not a workable structure. Yet it looked to the States. It was sort of ``we the States of the United States enter into this agreement as States.'' Yet it was this brand new concept in the Constitution that was put on paper at least for the first time--that of ``we the people.'' In 1787-- in reality, when the Constitution was adopted and the government was formed in 1789--the people became the source of government. The people became the responsible party. The people became the party by which, if the government weren't doing what you wanted it to do, it was up to you to do something about it because the government was only there because of you. Now, is ``we the people'' a totally inclusive, perfect document or was it even a perfect idea in 1787? Not at all. In fact, the Constitution goes on to read that we are doing this to form a more perfect union. It doesn't even suggest the forming of a perfect Union. It just suggests forming a more perfect Union with the understanding of a range of vision of what might happen. There were people who were advocating for women to be able to vote as Abigail Adams had advocated during the Revolution itself. There were people advocating that slavery be ended. There were many things that were evidenced in that room as part of the debate that didn't happen, but they didn't wait to have a perfect Union. They said they were going to form a more perfect Union, and you have to believe they assumed it would get more perfect as time went on. Here we are 200-some years later. Is it perfect yet? No, but it is, hopefully, more perfect than it has been and is less perfect than it will be because we the people are going to come together in this Convention and then, later, adopt it in a bigger setting to form a more perfect Union. That more perfect Union would include ideas that nobody had ever thought about before. If the people are forming the government, what kind of controls do you put on the government? Not too many controls. I remember, with the Bicentennial of the Constitution, Warren Burger was the Chairman of the Bicentennial Commission and the Chief Justice of the United States. He said, when he was a boy, you measured the value of a horse by how little harness you could put it on and still get it to do the work you wanted done. You didn't totally handicap the horse by piling all kinds of harnesses and all kinds of reins and all kinds of bits. A valuable horse was a horse that didn't need to take all kinds of structure but had all the structure it needed. That is what the Constitution tried to put together, not a government that would overwhelm itself but a government that had enough to control itself. They came up with this idea of a balance of power. As all of us would believe, they started describing the most important part of the government in article I. That is why it was article I that set up the Congress--the House and the Senate. They then came up with an executive who would execute the will of the article I body--the body that decided how to spend the money and the body that would decide what laws could get on the President's desk and the body that had the ability, if the President didn't sign the law, to override the President's decision not to sign the law. All of that was there in that balance of power. It was where the Congress had strengths, where the executive had strengths, and where even the Court comes in to serve often as a referee between the two. It is sometimes to tell the President what the President can do and what the Congress can't do. Sometimes it is just the opposite and says: No, you can't do this. You can appropriate the money, but you can't appropriate it conditionally. You can't appropriate the money and say, to get the money, the President has to do things that don't have anything to do with the appropriations process. We just want the President to behave differently. We can't do that, and the President shouldn't be able to do it either. The courts are often the group that decides that. Again, in not having too many obligations in the Constitution, what does the Constitution say about the courts? It does not say a lot. It reads there will be a Supreme Court and such other courts as the Congress decides are necessary. That is not a very complex structure. It doesn't say how many people are going to be on the Supreme Court. There have been different numbers over time. It doesn't say how many other courts there will be. Yet the courts are there, and the judges serve for life. Outside of the normal concerns that they might have that one of the other groups would decide whether they could continue to serve or not, that may be their greatest power--that they are there no matter what they decide unless their decisions are so extraordinary that somehow the other power decides to remove them. So here we are. It is a living document. It is amendable. It is a living document through its amendments, not through its interpretation. The Founders and those who believe the Constitution continues to serve a constitutional purpose never thought, well, we will decide later what the Founders would have thought that sentence meant. This has divided our country, by the way, for a while. Many people, along with me, think the Constitution means what it says it means and what you would have thought it would have meant in the context of the time. If you want to change that, there is a process to change it. The amendment process works beyond just the first 10 amendments and the other amendments that Senator Lankford talked about, and it is still there to do that. Here we are, celebrating this unique moment when people came together with ideas that were put on paper and were approved. Even if they had been talked about before, they had never formed the basis for a government before. Yet here we are--well over 200 years beyond 1787 and the first year of the government, 1789. The Constitution has been the model for all kinds of constitutions by all kinds of countries. Interestingly, many of them have almost the same Constitution we have, but they have just not been able to figure out how to live with it or to let the balance of power or the power of people work. Again, the most important part is that of the first three words--the most important in understanding the forming of a more perfect Union. It has not yet been accomplished and maybe never will be accomplished, but it always gives us a goal for things to be better than they have been. In our country, we have the opportunity to live under the Constitution, which provides a unique set of liberties and freedoms that others can only hope for. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, as my friend from Indiana and others have pointed out today, this is a day that Americans remember as a day of unique tragedy. Earlier today, on the Senate floor, we had a moment of silence in the middle of a series of votes. The Senate floor was full of Members who paused to think about what had happened on that day. I think almost every American alive knows where he was that morning. Just like this morning, it was beautiful and clear. If you were too young to remember where you were that morning--and there is a real likelihood that your parents told you where you were--it was a seminal moment. It changed how we look at so many things in our country. We reflect today where we were and the changes that occurred after that. I was working on the other side of the building as a Member of the House 18 years ago, and I shared with the Capitol Police today my appreciation for what they do every day. On this day every year, I remember being one of the last people to leave this building. The Capitol Police were working hard to get people out as there was a sense that a plane was coming here and was going to either hit the White House or the Capitol. I remember walking out the door--I really was among the last to leave the building that day--and I remember looking into the eyes of a Capitol Police Officer who was still at the door and thinking and realizing that I was going to be out. If the building were a target, I was quickly going to be somewhere else, and she was still going to be here until those who work to protect us every day were sure that everybody who could possibly be found and gotten out of the building was already gone. We clearly understand the world is a dangerous place. We just had a foreign policy discussion this week about the country that had served as really the haven for al-Qaida and what would happen if we were to totally leave that country and it were to go back to the Taliban. Would it become a haven again? Almost certainly, I think it would. We really need to think about a number of things. One is that so many people do so much to protect us all the time. We have thousands of Americans who are in uniform and in the intelligence community who spend their time every day being sure that we are as safe as we can be and that our freedoms are secure. They are deployed overseas. They are fighting terrorist groups like ISIS or the remnants of al-Qaida. They are working here to spot homegrown terrorists. They are doing what they can to find what somebody may be talking about or what somebody may be bringing across the border that would be of danger. Senator Capito and I were just at the border last week. Some of the things we talked about were not only the drugs coming over the border but the other things coming over the border that are designed to harm us--who we are and how we live. In St. Louis, MO, and Arnold, MO, we have the second biggest installation of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency constantly looking at the information that is out there. It looks all over the world to see if there is activity in places in which there wouldn't be activity. Yet, if there were activity, it would likely be activity that would be designed to harm us or others in the world. We need to understand that. We also need to understand that in the society in which we live, there is never perfect security and perfect freedom at the same time. We have worked really hard not to allow ourselves to lose the freedoms we cherish in return for the security we would like to have. We also need to remember those people who responded. As for the first responders who ran toward the tragedy on 9/11 as others were able to run away from the tragedy--passing each other--many of those first responders were numbered among the 3,000 Americans who died on that day. Just last month, the President signed into law the National Urban Search and Rescue Parity Act, which allows Federal employees to be active participants on urban search and rescue teams whether the disaster is natural or man-made. The third thing we need to keep in mind is how important it is to honor and care for the victims and heroes among us--those who ran toward the tragedy, those they left behind, and the people who still suffer today because of what happened to them on that day. As likely as not, those people to benefit from the Victim Compensation Fund are the people who stayed behind to help others or who rushed forward to help others. We don't want to become afraid to be the great, diverse society we have become; we don't want to become a society in which we allow the terrorists to win by taking our freedoms away. Yet this is an important time for us to think of those freedoms, of those who defend those freedoms, of those who rush to the scenes of danger when we have danger, and of those who try to do everything they can to minimize that. We grieve, we pray, we remember, and we resolve today that we will continue to be vigilant against attack and unafraid of defending who we are. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the remaining votes in this series be 10 minutes in length.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I have 2 requests 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 Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs The Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, September 10, 2019, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Select Committee on Intelligence The Select Committee on Intelligence is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, September 10, 2019, at 2:30 p.m., to conduct a closed briefing.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, over the past several weeks, we have seen numerous attempts by our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to take a serious issue and, frankly, I think, turn it into a political football. It is an issue on which the Presiding Officer and I have spent a lot of time looking at what we need to do, in our having served on the Committee on Intelligence and, in my case, on the Committee on Rules and Administration, to be sure that people have the maximum confidence that what happens on election day is exactly reflected in the results. Our friends came to the floor last week and sought unanimous consent to make sweeping changes to the election laws of the country. Then they somehow suggested there was a conspiracy that anybody would say no to that. Unanimous consent means exactly that. It is what we do when we name a post office. It is what we do when we make decisions that are unanimously agreed to. It is usually all it takes to get that issue settled. It is not how we shape the laws that are at the heart of our democracy. It is also not what we do, in my opinion, when we try to make a point about that. In fact, one of the bills on which they sought unanimous consent had passed the House. It had received exactly one Republican vote in the House. So, clearly, it was not unanimously consented to over there and would not be unanimously consented to here. This is about press releases, not policy. In fact, today, the President called for us to pass voter ID laws that would require voter ID in every State and a law that would have a paper trail in every State. Right now, I suppose, if I were to draft that bill and call for unanimous consent under the same standard, I should expect my friends on the other side to say: Oh, that is something that others say would help elections, so I should just be for that and be for that immediately. Of course, that would not be the case. These attempts have all been brought to the floor on the basis of saving democracy--that this is what we need to do to save our elections. This is in the name of election security, but it is really not what it is about at all. Three of the bills were about campaign committees, which are managed by lots of laws and may need to be managed by more, but how you run a campaign committee is not how you secure what happens at the voting place on election day. One of the proposals was for the Federal Government to secure the personal devices of Members of Congress and their employees. As the Presiding Officer and I know, one of the things we do on the Committee on Intelligence is to put a Fitbit, like this one, on the shelf before we go into a meeting. If you have a phone like this one, you put it on a shelf before you go into a meeting. This law would say that the Federal Government should secure those personal devices of mine so there would be absolute security so that if they were to interact with a Federal system, there would be no damage done to that system. I guess it would also mean that if one of my children were to call me on his personal device, whether he lives at home or not--and I would, of course, take that call immediately--he would then have gotten into my personal device. Would the Federal Government need to secure that as well? Even if it were appropriate for the Federal Government to do that for Members and their extended immediate networks, I am not sure it is possible. I am certainly sure that it has nothing to do with election security. It might have something to do with the security of our system here in the Senate. Frankly, I think it might make it less secure, which is why I have chosen not to bring that bill up before our committee until I know more about it. I think it might make it less secure if everybody, without hesitation, thinks, well, somebody has looked at this personal device of mine and has secured it, so I can go into any of the secure systems in the Senate that I want to with this device and not have any sense that I might endanger that Senate system. This doesn't protect the elections. There have been numerous UC attempts we have seen on plenty of other bills that have claimed to secure elections. One included a provision that would take away the authority of the States to determine their own processes for voter registration. I am not for that. I also think it is hard to make the case that it would secure elections. In case you think it would, another one was to require every State to have online voter registration. I am pretty sure that this would make elections less secure. We have talked about all of the infiltration of bad information out there on the internet, and one of these provisions to secure elections would require States to have online registration. One was for there to be automatic voter registration, and another was for there to be same-day registration. In the nonurban part of our State of Missouri, we didn't have voter registration in all elections until 1975 or so. The view was, well, in small towns and school district elections and all, they are going to know everybody, so they really don't need to have registration. Yet, finally, it occurred to somebody that one might just think one knows five people, and the bond issue might be decided by five people, so we would have voter registration. In fact, not only would we have it, but we would have it enough in advance that anybody could look at those voter rolls 28 days in advance and see if there were any question as to whether one were registered or not. Other States have decided to have same-day registration, but one of these bills that would secure our elections would allow anybody to register to vote that day who would walk up to vote. If you think that works in your State, I am not really arguing you shouldn't do it, because if that is what the voters of that State believe to be the case, maybe it does. I am pretty sure it wouldn't work in every State. In revisiting that online voter registration again, I am sure that doesn't secure elections. There was one proposal that was rejected in these bills to secure elections, that being, for every $1 contributed at a certain level, there would be $6 given to that campaign by the Federal Government. That is one of the secure election things that was rejected, that wasn't accepted by unanimous consent. At this point, it does seem to me, if you are not willing to accept all of these things--there was sort of this ``hair on fire'' moment--or are not willing to accept anything somebody else says will secure elections, then somehow you are undermining the elections system. Yet we really undermine the system when we say this kind of thing helps it. Frankly, I have been watching this for a while, and that list of things I gave you has been on every Democratic wish list for about 20 years of what would be of advantage to them in the elections. Never before have they purported that these things have made elections more secure. They have just said it was a better system and more fair. It was obvious to them it would help them, and it was obvious to us it would help them. We haven't done it, and we are probably not going to do it right now. There are people in this building who simply will not accept the fact that there is not a Federal solution to every problem. Sometimes if there is a Federal solution, it is not the best solution. Frankly, I think the diversity of the election system that we have is one of the strengths of the system. I may get back to that later, but that is what President Obama said in October of 2016. In fact, he said that we didn't have a Federal structure and that it made it really more difficult to impact our elections than if we had. I believe everybody here clearly knows that State and local officials faced a significant threat from the Russians, particularly in 2016, that they had not faced before. One could probably add that the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, and the Iranians could do very disruptive things for not much money. There is no question that the Russians affected our elections, but they have been trying to impact elections in Eastern and Western Europe for well over a decade. Why this would be a surprise to us is shocking to me and why, in 2016, we acted like we were totally flatfooted that, oh, the Russians would actually interfere with the elections just because they interfered in elections in a couple handful of countries in the previous decade. The world is pretty small when you get to that internet world we live in now. A critical infrastructure declaration came from the Obama administration in October whereby, frankly, it terrified most State election officials that, suddenly, the Federal Government, with about 2 weeks left before the election, was going to Federalize a system that they were personally responsible for. As for the Intelligence Committee that started this process--the Presiding Officer and I were both on it, and I am still on it--it released some key findings about what the Russians had done. The committee found that the Russians had worked hard to find the seams between which the Federal Government could be helpful to State and local governments. They found that the FBI's and Department of Homeland Security's warnings to local officials came way too late in the process and were not well thought out. It scared the wrong people and confused more people when the FBI and the DHS did what they did. While there is no question that both of those agencies have redoubled their efforts to build trust with the States and deploy resources to help secure elections, we have to remain vigilant to see they continue to do that. Even when the Presiding Officer and I worked on a bill together last year, the local officials continued to have some problems with it. I know I said at the time that I had believed we had been doing everything this bill would do. I am not sure we would still be doing it 10 years from now, so we need to memorialize that. I haven't significantly changed my view on that, but I haven't changed my view, more importantly, that we are doing what we need to do now. Congress needs to be vigilant. We have to insist that State and local officials have the clearance levels they need. Frankly, let me say this too. On that topic, I am not sure you can legislate that. I am not sure you can legislate ``here is what you have to be willing to tell State and local officials.'' I am not sure you can ever put that in writing, but you can ask them what they are telling people. I talked to one of our State election officials just last week. I asked: How is this going? He said: Well, everything we request seems to be one level above the security clearance I have. Too many of the things we ask meet that criteria. We are going to have to insist that this not be the case. While this is not likely to be solved by legislation, I think it can be solved by congressional oversight and inquiry. The Intelligence Committee also found that Russian activities demand renewed attention to vulnerabilities in the U.S. voting infrastructure. I certainly agree with that. We even said in that report we should replace out-of-date machines with improved ways to vote and improved cybersecurity. I think that is happening. Election officials have been taking this threat very seriously. DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, has reported that all 50 States and more than 1,400 local jurisdictions have signed up for the cyber threat information sharing program. We have had reports to the Senate on that, and the Committee on Rules and Administration has had hearings on that. The Committee on Intelligence has asked repeatedly about that. The monitoring sensors that help to detect malicious activity have been deployed to election infrastructure in most States. Remember that, in 2016, we had a cyber defense, but we didn't have a cyber offense. Early in the Trump administration, I remember people being asked in an open hearing: Do you have any direction now to be fighting out there--to have a cyber offense? That was about 5 months into the Trump administration. The person said: No. You would think that, somehow, the old cyber offense had been turned off. In fact, there had been no cyber offense. Sometime in 2017, the cyber fighters were given what they needed, and they are out there helping. They are fighting back too. We had a report on that just recently of which all of the Senators are aware. One of the chief State election officials in terms of that cyber war said that in their system there are about 100,000 attempts every day to scam the voter registration system and see if you could possibly get in. I don't know how many thousands of those might be from foreign actors. I suspect a majority of them are from people who just say: Let's see if I can get into the system. But we should assume all 100,000 are from somebody who wants to do something wrong, and I think the States are getting the help they need to fight that back. We have seen States use equipment that didn't have a backup so that when the election was over, you could count something individually and that the voter would have been able to look at and get their hands on and recount. As a matter of fact, if you ask me, the best proof you can have is a backup, a ballot that could be counted--a ballot where if I vote in Missouri, my voting machine generates something that I look at and then I put that in the ballot box and it is counted at the polling place. But if it ever had to be counted again, if there was any question about that precinct counter, they can go back and open that ballot box and count them again. On election day in 2016, and even in 2018, there were still four States that didn't have that system anywhere in their States. There are a couple of other States that have a partial system and four States that didn't have it. Delaware has it in place for this year's election. Georgia announced just last week that they had awarded a contract to replace their equipment that will be in place for the 2020 elections and have an auditable ballot trail. South Carolina made a similar announcement last month. The fourth State, Louisiana, is working through a contracting bidding process right now. Whether they are in place by 2020 or not in Louisiana I don't know, but I know they will be in as soon as they can reasonably be in and not confuse voters. Congress has to continue to move States to do that. We need to look and see what happened with the States that were given $380 million. In 2018, 49 States took the money immediately. One State, Minnesota, has some glitch with their legislature so they don't have their money yet. But of the $380 million that States have, they have only spent 25 percent of it. So there is still $285 million for which States have to do the kinds of things that the Congress thinks States should be doing. Now, there may be some States that have already spent all of their money and need more. That is something that, in the appropriations process, I am sure we will look at again, just like that $380 million came through the appropriations process. As I recall, the Presiding Officer was pretty involved in that discussion at the time. The Federal Government's role isn't to run elections for the State, but it certainly has a place in trying to be a valued partner, ensuring that the States have all the help they need. In fact, I believe that a larger Federal role requiring a one-size- fits-all approach to the election would be a big mistake. I am not for federalizing the elections. I spent 20 years as an elections official, either as the individual responsible for elections in the third-most populous county in our State or the chief elections official as the secretary of State. In 20 years of doing this, I guarantee you that the person on the ground, generally elected by the voters for whom he or she is trying to secure the election that day, is intensely interested in that election going well and people's having confidence in it. There is very little kicking the buck up to some Federal official in a faraway place and saying: Well, we can't prepare for that because we haven't been told we could prepare for that. Public confidence in elections is fundamental. It is the central thread in the fabric of democracy. Elected officials take it seriously when they are elected to do this job or supervise this job, just like appointed officials and boards of elections or election commissioners do. That system would not be improved if it was directed from Washington, DC, in a one-size-fits-all world. These public servants undertake an important job, and they understand it is an important job. We need to support them. We are supporting them. We need to have oversight. There may be a time when that oversight has produced a system that is so finely honed that we are ready to make it permanent, but every time you put something in law permanently, you reduce a lot of your flexibility to insist that something be done differently that needs to be done right now. Both the Intel Committee report--and both Senator Warner and Senator Burr have done a good job at keeping our committee on a bipartisan, nonpartisan track in this report--and former FBI Director Mueller focused on the insidious efforts to confuse voters. This is a much bigger question than what we could do at the government level about elections security. Let's not confuse that certain fight about bad information that is out there with a fight about whether our elections are secure and what happens on election day. Frankly, much more attention on what we can do about information is out there. Put people on alert. You know, sometimes even your political opponent says things that aren't true, and they don't have to be Russian to do that. People need to be on alert about information that is out there, but they also don't need to be scared to death that somehow we are not taking seriously the important moment of democracy when people decide. I believe we are doing that. I am committed to it. I believe the Senate is committed to it. I think this effort to make everything that might advantage one side on an election security issue is something that people need to be thoughtful about, and it needs to stop. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, first of all, I wanted to talk about everything you could be doing in Missouri in the next month or so with your family, and then I was told I have 5 minutes. That seems to be an impossible restriction for me. So let me see how many things I can talk about here as we end the summer travel season. But there are other people traveling after the summer. Some families still have their summer vacation. Some schools start after Labor Day, some before. I am sure I will be leaving things out that I will be glad to talk about at a later time. Let me first just mention a couple of our national parks. If you leave my hometown of Springfield, MO, and you head west, pretty quickly you get to the Wilson's Creek National Battlefield park. There was a battle in August of 1861. Several thousand people fought who really weren't prepared to fight. They weren't trained. They weren't ready. It was a big battle that made a big difference in what happened in Missouri in the war. Not too far from there, you get to Diamond, MO, where there is the George Washington Carver National Monument. It is a 240-acre park on the farm where George Washington Carver grew up. He was born as a slave but was quickly freed and raised by the older White couple who lived there. He managed to get to school there a little bit and in those years after the Civil War became a leading scientist and spokesman for agriculture in the country. This monument was established in 1943, and it was the first national park dedicated to an African American. I have to circle back a little bit to get to Branson. With 50 theaters in Branson, there are more theater seats than Broadway. It is never too early to find a show you want to see in Branson. In Silver Dollar City, in the summer of last year, their great park was named the No. 1 Christmas venue in America to visit. Now back to my hometown of Springfield, which is the way this comes up on my list. It is the home of Bass Pro Shops. The Wonders of Wildlife National Museum and Aquarium right there by Bass Pro was named ``America's Best Aquarium'' by USA TODAY Travel last year. That museum has 3,000 fish, birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibious animals there. A park we just added to our National Park System--I will pop right up to almost St. Louis, to St. Genevieve, where you have French architecture that dates back to the 1700s. This is the first summer that there has been a full-time park person there. This park is rising out of what the community has preserved so well for so long. There are a number of houses there that reflect that early French architecture along the Mississippi River. South of there, at Perryville, is the full-sized replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. There have been some traveling memorials, and there are a couple of memorials that are miniature in some way, but in Perryville, MO, you can see a full-sized replica on a 47-acre family farm that Jim Eddleman and his family made possible, along with other donations. I was there not too long ago, and I was at the Vietnam Wall here not too long ago. They are in different places, but they are the same wall, exactly the same size, with the same names, and are the same in every way. On the other side of our State, in Kansas City, is the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Just this week, Senator Kaine and I introduced legislation for a memorial coin to benefit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. Congressmen Cleaver and Stivers in the House did the same thing. While you are in Kansas City here at the end of the centennial of World War I, the World War I Museum in Kansas City was the World War I Memorial dedicated in the 1920s. It is the No. 1 place in America to visit and think about the war and the impact of that war in the 100 years that have passed since then. If you want to go north to St. Joseph, you, of course, pass some baseball stadiums and football fields that are good places to visit if you are there at the right time. In St. Joseph, there is the Pony Express Museum. The Pony Express didn't last very long, but it became a very important part of the lore of the West, these young riders--before the telegraph--taking a message as quickly as they could ride and changing from one rider to another to go from St. Joe to California. I wouldn't want to leave out the Mark Twain Boyhood Home in Hannibal. There was a time when Mark Twain was by far the best-read American author anywhere in the world. Hannibal is the setting for the classic American novel ``The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.'' We will circle right back down to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. More than 135 million people have visited the arch since 1963. It just went through a major overhaul and a 60-year renewal of the facility, better connecting it to downtown. It is the first example of what the National Park Service hopes will be the next century of the park, a true public- private partnership. In going to all these places, we drove by lots of lakes and lots of fishing and boating. There are a lot of things to do in our State. Like many States, tourism is our second biggest industry. We look forward to people visiting us this summer and next year and the years after that.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for the Legislative Activities Report of the Committee of Rules and Administration during the 115th Congress be printed into the Congressional Record.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, in accordance with rule 23 of the Rules of Procedure of the Committee on Rules and Administration and pursuant to the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 Reform Act, on July 25, 2019, the committee adopted the U.S. Senate Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 Reform Act Regulations. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this material be printed in the Record.

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, those of us who have had a chance over some time now to work with the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, know that he is a man of ideas and is often thinking well beyond the moment. I had a chance the other day to read a paper that he prepared on President Trump's Moon-Mars Development Project, and I want to borrow heavily from his thinking as I talk about this project today. It is an important time. We just spent significant time remembering, appreciating, and looking back at the 50th anniversary of American astronauts landing on the Moon and returning safely. Fifty years goes more quickly than you might think. But for the first time in that 50 years, we are really at a point where there is a chance that we could cease to be the leading power in space. We decided we were going to become the leading power in space; we became the leading power in space; we have been the leading power in space. But that is not necessarily a given, and you can last only so long living on your past accomplishments. President Trump, on the Fourth of July, made this comment: ``I want you to know that we are going to be back on the moon very soon, and someday soon we will plant an American flag on Mars.'' My guess is that was received with sort of the same amount of skepticism as President Kennedy's challenge was more than 50 years ago. There is no question that the Artemis Project that President Trump is talking about is not the Apollo Project 50 years later. This is no longer an effort just to go somewhere and get back. We know we can do that. It is an effort to look at where we might go next and why we might benefit from that. In May of 1961, President Kennedy challenged the Congress by saying we ``should commit [ourselves] to achieving the goal''--talking about the goal of getting to the Moon--we ``should commit [ourselves] to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.'' There was pretty heavy skepticism. I think 58 percent of the American people polled said they were opposed to doing that. Why would we send somebody to the Moon and worry about whether we could get them there? Of course, if we got them there, we would want to get them back. There was great skepticism. So a little over a year later at Rice University, President Kennedy tried again. He said: ``We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.'' That is one of his famous quotes. If you look back at President Kennedy's challenge to the country, you hear it: We are going not because it is easy, but because it is hard. He went on to say ``because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.'' There is nothing wrong with an America that wants to win. There is nothing wrong with an America that doesn't want to take second place. There is nothing wrong with an America that wants to set a standard that everybody else can hope to achieve. We had been caught a little flat-footed in the midfifties when the Russians put a satellite in space--Sputnik. Americans would go out and see if they could measure when it was passing over because they had put something up there that appeared to be there perpetually. Then there was a cosmonaut in space. President Kennedy said that we don't want to accept anything more than the opportunity to meet big challenges and show what we can do to test ourselves. The Vice President of the United States, Vice President Pence, said at the National Space Council in Huntsville, AL, on March 26 of this year that ``50 years ago, `one small step for man' became `one giant leap for mankind.' '' You really had to be trying to avoid it not to hear that quote last week as it was being repeated over and over again. The Vice President said that now it's come time for us to ``make the next `giant leap' and return American astronauts to the Moon, establish a permanent base there, and develop the technologies to take American astronauts to Mars and beyond.'' That's the next ``giant leap.'' You will note here that the direct connection between Moon development and going to Mars, as the President put it, is there. It is the reason to go back to the Moon. It is the reason to do what we can to understand the Moon. Our goal is not just getting to the Moon. Of course, we have already done that. Our goal is to be there and to do that in a way that works for us. John Marburger, President George W. Bush's science adviser, said in 2006: ``The Moon is the closest source of material that lies far up Earth's gravity well.'' This is the closest place we can go and get material that can be used with 3D printing and all sorts of things that are possible to construct on the Moon that weren't possible to construct anywhere in that same way just a few years ago. The first phase of science on the Moon would be a lot like exploring Antarctica. I haven't been to Antarctica. I would like to go sometime. We don't have people on Antarctica because Antarctica is an easy place to live; we have people staying all the time on Antarctica to see what we could learn by being on the continent of Antarctica all the time. The next phase of the Moon would be like that, with people going to the Moon, staying on the Moon, and looking at opportunities on the parts of the Moon where we believe there is ice. I know the formula for this. If you have ice, you probably have some form of water. If you have water, lots of things can happen that might not happen otherwise. This is a project that will inspire others to want to be part of it, whether it is Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Richard Branson or Paul Allen--who has passed on, but was intrigued by the Moon. They are all people who have great private resources. America was founded on a public-private model. Jamestown, Plimouth Plantation, and the East India Company all had private individuals with government sponsorship trying to make something happen that wouldn't happen otherwise. That, I suggest, can happen on the Moon. In Newt Gingrich's telling of the challenge on the Moon, he repeated that great story of what happened at Wollman Rink and how it might relate to what could happen on the Moon if you are not bound by the normal things that bind a lot of people. Every person thinking about the Moon-Mars project, according to former Speaker Gingrich, should look at what Donald Trump did at the Wollman Rink. The Wollman Rink was a very popular site for ice skating in New York City in 1980 when it broke down. It totally broke down. The city of New York spent 6 years and $13 million trying to fix the ice rink. Fortunately, I guess, for the city of New York and ice skaters who go there, the abandoned ice rink happened to be within sight of President Trump's apartment. He kept complaining about the ice rink and the failure of the city to do anything about the ice rink. Finally, Mayor Koch said to Donald Trump: Why don't you fix it if you think this is so easily done? And he did. He fixed the ice rink in 4 months for $2.25 million. I remember the city had already spent $13 million and failed to fix the ice rink. The first year after the ice rink was fixed, 225,000 people skated on the ice rink. One reason the President was able to do that as a private citizen was that he wasn't bound by the things that bind most people. He wasn't bound by the things that bind the government. The historic project to fix the Wollman Rink achieved the goal at 1/5 the cost and 1/18 the time that the city had used and did not get it done, and ice skaters flourished. The same kinds of things could happen if we looked beyond the normal boundaries of what could happen in this project that the President has talked about. Remember, on the effort to get to the Moon, President Kennedy turned that project over to Vice President Johnson and said: You are going to be in charge of NASA, and you are going to be the point person on the Moon project. So there is a little history there that may be repeating itself when, in March this year in Huntsville, AL, the Vice President outlined the principles we could use to meet the goals that the President had established for our efforts in space. Principle No. 1 was to establish a big goal and then stick to it. Remember, we went to the Moon to start with, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. Establish a big goal, then stick to it. ``Failure to achieve our goal to return an American astronaut to the Moon in the next 5 years is not an option,'' according to the Vice President. Principle No. 2, Be prepared to reach outside the traditional bureaucracy to new, entrepreneurial, private companies if it is necessary to get the job done. He went on to say: [W]e're not committed to any one contractor. If our current contractors can't meet this objective, then we'll find ones that will. If American industry can provide critical commercial services without government development, then we'll buy them. We will buy into that project and share it with them. If commercial rockets are the only way to get American astronauts to the Moon in the next 5 years, then commercial rockets will be the way we return to the Moon. Principle No. 3, Be willing to change the bureaucracy rather than abandon the goal. [W]e will call on NASA not just to adopt new policies but to embrace a new mindset. That begins with setting bold goals and staying on schedule. A new mindset matters. Failure is not an option. The willingness to postpone our goal, as President Kennedy said almost 60 years ago, is not an option. Principle No. 4, Be determined to change the bureaucracy in fundamental ways. NASA must transform itself into a leaner, more accountable, and more agile organization. If NASA is not currently capable of landing American astronauts [men and women] on the Moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission. By the way, as for principle No. 5, I know, in the Presiding Officer's case, it is coming from private business and might be his most important principle. Principle No. 5, Urgency must replace complacency. The hardest thing to achieve in government is just to drive to a result. The fifth principle that the Vice President set out is exactly that. It is not just competition against our adversaries; it is, frankly, competition against our worst enemy--complacency. It is competition against our own willingness to believe that things aren't going to happen that clearly can happen. This is a great goal. It is a step to the Moon and beyond. It is a step outside our solar system to other solar systems. In our lifetimes, we may not see much of that, but this is not about our lifetimes; this is about a step into the future. I applaud the President and the Vice President for their leadership here. I look forward to applying those five principles. By the way, I think almost all of those principles are five principles we could apply to government every day, and we would have a more effective government if we would. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today, I stand to recognize the grand opening of the State Historical Society of Missouri's Center for Missouri Studies on August 10. The Center for Missouri Studies was established in 2014, and this new facility will move the State Historical Society from its home of 100 years to a new, visionary center meant to connect scholars of varied disciplines, showcase artwork by renowned Missourians, and provide state-of-the-art space for educational programming. The State Historical Society of Missouri was founded in 1898 by the Missouri Press Association and has been an integral part of the preservation of Missouri's history ever since. Not only does it support research at centers in Cape Girardeau, Columbia, Kansas City, Rolla, St. Louis, and Springfield, it also houses an extensive collection of manuscripts, newspapers, books, maps, photographs, and art. Thanks to the efforts of dedicated staff over decades, the public can explore the records, myths, and culture that comprise the rich history of our State, The new Center for Missouri Studies will build upon the State Historical Society's mission to ``collect, preserve, publish, exhibit, and make available'' to the public myriad resources and opportunities to learn. The center will feature a large art gallery, multipurpose and classroom space, an expanded research center, and modern conservation lab space. Not only will the public have greater access to historical archives and artwork, expert scholars will be able to study and examine the society's extensive collections in a space designed to facilitate collaboration. The commitment of the State Historical Society of Missouri to preserve our history as we look forward to the beginning of a third century in our State is to be commended. The potential for the public to enjoy our State's unique past with greater ease cannot be undervalued. The dedication of the State Historical Society to drive this project to completion serves as an example to others. I extend my sincere thanks for all they do. Congratulations to Executive Director Gary Kremer and all State Historical Society of Missouri staff on this important occasion.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, something I want to talk about today is something that you and I both care a lot about, and that is farming families and trade. For those of us who grew up on or near farming families, we know that there are a lot of things that are beyond the control of families who farm. For farming and ranching families, the only real certainty is uncertainty. The only thing you know for sure, if your mom or dad is a dairy farmer, like my mom and dad were, is that you don't know anything for sure. You don't know about the weather. You don't know absolutely for sure that all of your equipment is going to work exactly like you need it to and at exactly the time you need it to. In some farming situations, you don't know whether the help you need is going to be available the day you need it. The watermelons can't wait. The strawberries can't wait. The tomatoes can't wait. But you can't have a staff on all the time, ready to pick the watermelon the 2 weeks they need to be picked, or whatever those farmers have to deal with. Uncertainty is part of farming. That is why trade agreements with other countries are so important to America's agriculture. This is a part of our economy that not only feeds our country but goes so far toward feeding the whole world. Trade agreements can provide a little bit of certainty about markets and the opportunities people have to sell the products they are able to grow. In Missouri, agriculture is an $88 billion industry. It employs nearly 400,000 people in our State. Missouri farmers and ranchers export more than $4 billion worth of products every year. Trade deals that lower tariffs that are paid by Missouri farming and ranching families are a good deal now. I could go a long way beyond this, too, because not only does the agricultural sector impact people who make agricultural products but seeds and chemicals that we need fewer and fewer of all the time because people who make and repair machinery get more effective all the time. So both in the seed and chemical area but also people in transportation, people in insurance, people who run the local coffee shop, people whom the school district depends on for those property taxes are all benefited by a strong agricultural sector. We make lots of other things in our State too. We make airplanes. We make pickup trucks. We make cars. We make beer cans. We make all kinds of things that are impacted by trade, but I say to the Presiding Officer, particularly when you and I are out talking in our neighboring States with the communities we deal with in agriculture, trade is a top-of-the-line issue. It is just an important part of the economy of most of our States, frankly. Because of our location, where we live, infrastructure is critical. We are also the hub for products that go all over North America. Integrating that infrastructure--water, rail, cars, and trucks--makes a difference in how we compete. Canada and Mexico are our two biggest trading partners in, I am sure, our State and in the country. In recent months, Mexico has become the biggest trading partner we have. Canada is the next biggest trading partner we have. These are not inconsequential relationships. When the United States signed the North America Free Trade Agreement 25 years ago, it did a lot to open those markets for our products and to not only strengthen our economy but to strengthen the neighborhood. Our exports of food and agricultural products to Canada and Mexico quadrupled under the NAFTA agreement. The treaty also helped to strengthen ties among our countries. You know, a strong Mexico is actually good for us. We have these problems at the border right now that Mexico is trying to help us solve. Almost nobody is coming from Mexico; they are coming through Mexico. And why aren't they coming from Mexico like they did 25 years ago? Because the Mexican economy is an economy that works for people who live there. A strong Canada is good for us. The daily trade over that Canadian-U.S. border--things passing back and forth--is incredible and has been for a long time, but it is also much stronger than it used to be. Keeping these connections strong is essential. Trade increases our economic security, but it also increases our national security. Living in a good neighborhood is what we all want to do, and that is the value we have seen out of this agreement for the last 25 years. The agreement could have been better, and the President has made it better. The USMCA is going to be better than NAFTA. No NAFTA would be a bad thing; NAFTA replaced by USMCA would be a good thing. It is time that we begin to build on what we have learned in those 25 years and move into this century with a new agreement that works for farming families, for ranching families, for workers, for people who make automobiles, airplanes, and other things. This leads to more American jobs, and it leads to great benefit for us economically. But, again, let me repeat, the national security impact of having two neighbors that want to work with us. What we just saw the President negotiate with Mexico, where they are helping secure that much narrower border at the southern tip of Mexico more than we would be able to do at the much bigger northern border, that is helpful. Where they are working to help people stay there as their cases are being heard, that is helpful to our country. It is easier to keep people there and have their cases heard than let them disperse throughout the entire United States. Certainly, we hope to gain from the new USMCA treaty, but we hope our neighbors also benefit from that treaty and know they will. The three countries all signed this agreement in November. Mexico has ratified it already. The Prime Minister of Canada says they stand ready to call their Parliament back into session to ratify it. As soon as it is clear, they are going to. Trade is essential. All three of our countries agree on that. Democrats and Republicans agree on that. Members of the House and Senate agree on that. Now what we need to agree on is how to have a time to vote and approve this deal. Let's give our economy the boost it needs. Let's give our neighborhood the strength we have seen develop over the last 25 years. We hope our friends in the House bring this to the floor. It will be a bipartisan vote. It will be a comfortably passed vote. But you have to decide to have a vote for that to happen, and I hope we are close to that moment. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I have 6 requests 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 Thursday, July 18, 2019, at 10.30 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Armed Services The Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, July 18, 2019, at 9:30 a m., to conduct a hearing pending military nominations. Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs The Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, July 18, 2019, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on the Judiciary The Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, July 18, 2019, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing on the following nominations: Douglas Russell Cole, and Matthew Walden McFarland, both to be a United States District Judge for the Southern District of Ohio, Robert Anthony Molloy, to be Judge for the District Court of the Virgin Islands, and Kea Whetzal Riggs, to be United States District Judge for the District of New Mexico. Select Committee on Intelligence The Select Committee on Intelligence is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, July 18, 2019, at 2 p.m., to conduct a hearing. Subcommittee on Water and Power The Subcommittee on Water and Power of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, July 18, 2019, at 10:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, first of all, let me say that I couldn't agree more with the Senator from Mississippi, Mr. Wicker, than I do. His points are exactly right. A democracy is finding a way forward. It is not finding your way forward necessarily. It is obviously finding as much of your way forward as you can find. But it is finding a way forward. Clearly, a top priority of the Federal Government is to defend the country. It is my top priority. I think I would be safe in suggesting it is Senator Wicker's top priority. And it is an important priority for our friends on the other side, but it may not be quite the same priority on the other side. For this to work, the House and the Senate have to work together and the White House has to work together to come up with just that spending number. Once we have the number that we are going to spend, having the debate on the floor is suddenly possible. I am fully in agreement with that, but I want to talk for a few minutes today about a program that we need to extend for a short period of time to get it extended to the end of this spending year.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk a little bit about a bill we should pass this week--I believe we will pass this week--for the 59th straight year. There are very few things we authorize every year--frankly, there are very few things we need to authorize every year--but the authorizing bill in defense is the opportunity for the country and the Congress to look at what we need to do now that is more appropriate than what we needed to do a year ago to defend the country. Certainly the men and women who serve in the military do that job in a selfless way, and they deserve the best we can do to be sure they are never involved in an unfair fight. We want to be sure they are always involved in a fight in which they have every possible advantage. They put their lives on the line to keep us safe, and it is up to us to be sure they have the equipment, the training, and the authorization they need and the authorities they need to carry out their work. Every year about this time, we move toward the authorizing of what the Congress thinks the military needs. That is followed later by an appropriations bill that is directed in substantial ways by what this bill says should happen. In fact, the only thing the appropriations bill normally does is determine whether it can all be funded and in what segments it is to be funded. We are debating this bill. I hope both Chambers--the House and the Senate--can pass this authorization bill as we move on to our next step in this process of defending the country. I think you can argue about almost anything else the Federal Government does, but the No. 1 priority of the Federal Government is to defend the country--the No. 1 thing that we clearly cannot do by ourselves; the No. 1 thing that State and local government can be a partner in on some occasions, but it is not their responsibility, and they do not have the capacity to do what we need to do to defend the country. So we are here to take this important step in that. This version, the Senate's version for this year, authorizes $750 billion to support the Department of Defense and the nuclear and other defense responsibilities of the Department of Energy. Our adversaries are clearly increasing their military capabilities and their military commitments, and we need to be prepared to do just the same. The burden of defending the country is an important one, and, frankly, it falls on a very small percentage of our population. About one-half of 1 percent of the American people serve in the military. We owe an obligation to that one-half of 1 percent to do our best for them. This bill supports an across-the-board pay increase of 3.1 percent--a little more than inflation. It is the largest increase in nearly a decade at a time when the people who serve see challenges in more areas than we have seen in a while and coming from different directions than we have seen in a while. This bill reforms military housing. Leader after leader in the military will tell us and make the point that the strength of the military is military families. So in military housing, particularly the family housing, there was thought to be a great idea a couple of decades ago to privatize family housing. For a couple of years, it looked like a great idea, but I think it is time we look again at our housing obligations and how they are being met. We need to look at what we can do to be sure that the spouses of those serving have an opportunity, when they are transferred to a new location, to be able to get to work as quickly as possible in the field they are prepared to work in. In Missouri, in January of this year, the first spouse of someone who had been transferred to our State was sworn in immediately to the bar so she could immediately begin practicing law. Like any attorney, there are probably some future legal training requirements during the course of the following months. But to be able to go to work--whether as a medical technician or a doctor or a lawyer or an electrician or a welder--should be a priority of the country. I asked Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson, when she testified before the committee: What is the best thing we can do for military families? I sponsored some legislation a few years ago so that military families can move earlier or stay longer for a job, for work, or for school. That makes a difference to their families. If you need to go 2 months earlier than your serving spouse to get started in the school year at the right time or if you need to stay 2 months later or need up to 6 months of transition time, that is available now. Of course, that is beginning to have an impact on people's decision to stay in the military, if their family is considered as a priority and flexibility is part of that priority. I asked Secretary Wilson for two things that we still need improvement on. One was to be sure to have the best schools possible near those military bases, and two was to be sure that spouses can go to work and that they can go to work, if they want to go to work, in the area they are trained for. So this allows for more effort to be made, to be sure that we are working with the Council of State Governments on a certification program where you could move to a State and quickly be doing that. Reciprocal opportunities for that quick transition is important. There are changes in this bill that support families with special needs and support how you deal with a childcare provider on a military base, and there are things here to enhance suicide prevention and family advocacy programs. These are all critical, not only for people serving but for people wanting to continue to serve. As I said before, the military family is one of our Nation's greatest assets, and the serving spouse is not the only one serving. The serving spouse is not the only one transferred to a new military location. The serving spouse is not the only one who has to be happy with the commitment to decide that you are going to go ahead and reenlist, and we need to be aware of that. This legislation supports military construction projects, including the Army National Guard Readiness Center in Springfield, MO, where I live; the vehicle maintenance facility at Whiteman Air Force Base in our State; and the C-130 flight simulator facility at Rosecrans in St. Joe. They are all included in this authorization project. Projects like these are necessary to ensure that our military is ready to fight and also to support their needs when they are at home. America's defense posture includes what is known as the nuclear triad. This means that we have three ways we can deliver a nuclear warhead. We hope to never have to have that happen. But if our adversaries have this capacity, our capacity has to exceed theirs, and this bill ensures that that continues to be the case. The 509th and the 131st Bomb Wings at Whiteman Air Force Base host one of the legs of that triad. Earlier this year, the Air Force announced that Missouri will host the B-2's replacement. The principal B-2 location at Whiteman Air Force Base will host the B-21 Raider as it becomes available to replace that plane that has served the country for so long. I am proud to support what we need to do to make that transition. There are other aircraft that we need to be sure have a viable part in the country's future. The NDAA bill we are talking about provides an additional 24 F-18 Super Hornets to the Navy and begins the purchase of 8 F-15s for the Air Force. All those planes are made in St. Louis. The bill also includes critical mission support for the A-10 Warthog, a plane that our colleague Senator McSally is pleased to have flown and flown well. By the way, I had a chance to introduce her the other day, and I almost ran out of firsts. She was the first woman to fly in combat and the first woman to command a combat unit in combat. She has 356 combat hours that she herself flew. She is the first person, of 260 senior military officers, to graduate No. 1 in that advanced training class. The Missouri National Guard also flies the A-10. I have been with them when they were flying in Eastern Europe. That A-10 capacity continues to be critical. The NDAA authorizes missile programs between the United States and Israel, where we have actually learned that you can target an incoming missile. Things like the Iron Dome, Arrow 3, David's Sling, have all-- fortunately for Israel, fortunately for our military capacity--been proven to work against incoming missiles. These programs help Israel defend itself. They also increase our capability to do what they need to do. Finally, Senator Hawley from Missouri, Senator Manchin from West Virginia, and I have proposed an amendment to the NDAA to make May 1 Silver Star Service Banner Day. Along with Senator McCaskill, my colleague who just left, I have been doing this annually for some time. We think this would be a great year to make this a permanent recognition of the Silver Star families. I would particularly like to recognize Diana Lynn Newton, the cofounder of Silver Star Families of America, who passed away earlier this year. She and her husband Steve were the driving force behind the organization, and they helped thousands of veterans who were otherwise getting very little recognition for their Silver Star service. We are saddened by that loss. Hopefully, one of the things we will do in this bill to recognize her great commitment is to make the Silver Star recognition day an annual event. There are bipartisan priorities here in this bill that deal with the needs of the military and their families. The pay raise is a significant part of this bill. But being sure that the No. 1 job of the Federal Government--defending the country--continues to be recognized as the No. 1 job makes this unique annual reauthorization of the Defense bill so important. I look forward to seeing this Congress pass this bill this week in the Senate and, hopefully, soon after that, in both the Senate and the House. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to talk about good news for two of our major cities in Missouri. I will start with the sporting news, which would be the July 12 victory of the St. Louis Blues, when they earned their spot in the history books when they defeated the Boston Bruins in game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. For the first time in franchise history, the Blues brought the Stanley Cup trophy to Missouri to celebrate their incredible achievement and to share it with some of the best sports fans in America. Senator Hawley and I look forward to a chance, before too long, to host the Stanley Cup here at the Senate so all my colleagues will get to see the joy we have in seeing that come to our State. It is hard to imagine that just 6 months ago, the Blues were the lowest ranked team in the NHL. I think at the first of the season the odds were 60 to 1 that the Blues would win the Stanley Cup. Those were the highest odds any team faced. As it turned out, the odds aren't always what counts. What counts is how you play the season. So they got off to a rough start, changed their coach in January, and then as the season progressed, at the end of the regular season, they won 11 straight games. A rookie, Jordan Binnington, led the team to an incredibly successful second half. His goalie performance in the second half of the season, and particularly in the Stanley Cup games, was extraordinary, especially in that last game. The Blues eventually moved on to get the third seed in the Western Conference playoffs. They won their series against Winnipeg in four games to two in the first round. They advanced to the second round to defeat the Dallas Stars in a really dramatic double overtime victory in game seven. They continued their historic run, defeating the San Jose Sharks in round three, and then the Blues made it all the way to the Stanley Cup final and ended the season with a decisive 4-to-1 victory in game seven and at Boston. I think, if you look back at the record on this, the Blues had clearly learned to win away from home, and they proved that in the Stanley Cup. They played as one team, they played as one unit, but they had lots of people helping. Ryan O'Reilly set a franchise record with 23 points in the playoffs. He ultimately went on to win the Conn Smythe Award as the postseason MVP. Jordan Binnington, whom I mentioned before, became the first and only rookie goalie to win 16 games in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Patrick Maroon, a Missouri native, scored a heroic goal in the double overtime of game seven against the Dallas Stars. There was another individual who was reflective of just lots of the fans whom the Blues had with them. This superfan, Laila Anderson, 11 years old, didn't let her battle with a rare, life-threatening disease prevent her from cheering on the team she loved. At the beginning of game three in the Stanley finals, she took to the ice before the puck dropped and fired up the team and the nearly 20,000 fans who filled the Enterprise Center. Laila became such an important factor to the Blues' victories that they flew this 11-year-old to Boston to make sure their No. 1 fan would be there to cheer them on in game seven. Shortly after the Blues were presented with the Stanley Cup, she celebrated with the players on the ice as they passed around that iconic trophy. Her inspirational story is just another example of why this was a season right out of the storybooks. The city of St. Louis and our State will never forget the Blues' incredible achievement this year. I would like to congratulate Tom Stillman, the general manager; Doug Armstrong, the head coach; Craig Berube; and all the coaches, the players, the fans, and the staff who brought this incredible victory home to St. Louis. I look forward to hearing our fans sing ``Gloria'' many more times next year when the team defends its title as Stanley Cup champions.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, as the St. Louisans were celebrating the Stanley Cup, people on the other side of our State in Kansas City received some great news--this time great news from the Federal Government, when the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, announced on Thursday that two Federal ag research agencies would be moving their headquarters to the Kansas City region from Washington, DC. The Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture together will bring more than 500 jobs to the Kansas City area. It is fantastic news for our State, for our region, I think also for the workers at those two agencies and their families. The point of the move is to get these important government offices closer to the customers they serve and to save the taxpayers money. Kansas City will be a great place to do both of those things. Missouri is already home to more than 5,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture employees and contractors working for a dozen different Department offices in the Department of Agriculture, but bringing these two agency headquarters to the State will put them right in the middle of some of the most exciting and cutting-edge innovation happening in the ag industry. Talk about being closer to your customers, the farmers of America, and closer to examples of innovation, I think this move and Secretary Purdue's decision is clearly going to show that is the case. Kansas City is close to at least a dozen land-grant universities in our State. Two of those would be the University of Missouri in Columbia and Lincoln University in Jefferson City. These institutions, along with the other land-grant institutions in the region, are preparing for the next generation of ag leaders to meet maybe the greatest challenge of all time as world food demand moves toward doubling between now and 2050 and world food need doubles between now and 2060. A lot more food is going to have to be grown on the same land with fewer inputs, to meet our environmental concerns, our climate concerns, our other concerns, but still feed the world in a way that we are uniquely positioned to be a lead partner in that partnership of feeding the world. The move the USDA has made will give them the opportunity to strengthen partnerships they already have and have even greater impact as they work to improve crop yields and develop risk management strategies. Our State is also a big part of the Kansas City Animal Health Corridor, which extends from Manhattan, KS, to Columbia, MO. That corridor is home to more than 300 animal health companies. It is the largest concentration in the world of that business and includes five of the world's largest animal health companies. Relocating these agencies will save taxpayers a lot of money. Secretary Perdue anticipates that almost $300 million will be saved over the next 15 years and all the moving costs will be earned back within 12 months of the move. It is hard to imagine an investment you make where you have 100 percent payback in 12 months, but that is going to happen with this one. That frees up more resources to go toward grants and research instead of being paid to the Department's landlords. (Mr. SCOTT of Florida assumed the Chair.) I think it will also be a huge upgrade for the lives of people who will be Federal employees living outside of Washington and in the middle of the country. Last month, the average house in Washington cost more than $600,000. In Kansas City, the average price was about a quarter of that. Now, you can find the $600,000 house in Kansas City, but it is not the average house being sold like it is here. I know local banks and mortgage companies are standing ready to help those Federal families as they move to Kansas City. Also--now that we have gone from Madam President to Mr. President, as the Senator from Florida has taken the seat and is in charge of the Senate here for a while--you are making that decision with the current employees in mind, but I think you are also making that decision, more importantly, with future employees. Where will be the best place to recruit? Where will be the best place to encourage people to do graduate work and other things that allow them to do their jobs better? I think there were other choices, but I certainly think the choice of Kansas City was a good one. There is a thriving economy right now, with lots of job opportunities. Like the rest of the country, there are more jobs available than people looking for work. Missouri added 8,200 jobs last year, and we continue to see that happen. Our new neighbors will also find that Kansas City is home to limitless cultural, educational, and recreational opportunities--very appropriate to mention with my native Missouri and now the Senator from Florida here in the Chair. We have major league sports teams, like the Royals, the Chiefs, and Sporting Kansas City. We have a thriving theater culture, a world-class museum at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Science City at Union Station, and that names just a few. The motto of USDA is ``Do Right and Feed Everyone.'' By the way, we were doing research at the Federal level before there was a USDA. In the 1850s, ag research was going on right here in Washington sponsored by the Federal Government. In 1862, when the USDA was formed, one of the principle reasons was research. These two facilities will be an important part of that. When the people at ERS and NIFA join the many USDA colleagues they already have in our State, we think they will find their mission easier and more rewarding than ever. It is a great time to look forward toward the future of agriculture. Certainly Missouri and Kansas City and Kansas and that entire region that hubs around Kansas City, MO, are excited to be a bigger part of that. Congratulations to those employees, and congratulations to the decision Secretary Perdue has made to relocate those two Washington- based organizations to a place where they are going to be closer to the work they do. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to talk a little bit about the border--not the important need to secure the border, which I am for, but I want to talk about the humanitarian crisis we have seen occurring at the border. Frankly, the Senate and the House--the Congress--have been watching that occur for too long. It has been several weeks now since the administration notified Congress that the money that was allocated for what would have been a traditional set of challenges at the border is about to be spent and that there is no money left for some of these issues we have to deal with at the border in a particular way. We have seen the flood of people approaching the border to be not only incredibly different in numbers but incredibly different in context. Probably 20 years ago, 90 percent of the people who came across the border were coming directly from Mexico. By the way, when that happened, the law was changed so that if they came across from Mexico, you could send them right back to Mexico. Hopefully, our neighbors in Mexico are working with us to still have some potential to do that with people who come across the border and come through Mexico--not necessarily Mexican in their nationality but come through Mexico to the border--to go back and wait for what needs to happen for their case to be heard in Mexico rather than here. Most of the people coming today are coming from Central America-- Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. In the last year, I think the principal place that has people coming to our southern border--over 1 percent of the population of all three of those countries has come from those countries collectively. Clearly it is a problem, but it is especially troubling to look at the numbers of children who are coming to the border unaccompanied. Just last month, about 130,000 people came to the border. You can multiply that by 12 pretty quickly and see 1 million people or more coming to our border to come in without the right kinds of documents. Another million, by the way, come into our country through the normal process. We have about 1 million immigrants a year who legally immigrate to the United States. We are not a country that does not want people from other countries to come here; we just want them to come here based on the law and the requirements for everybody else who would like to come to the United States. Of that 130,000 people who came in May, 11,507 of them were children without families. It is really important for us to understand as we discuss this that we are not talking about children who came with their families and were separated from their families once they got here. There are plenty of those children coming right now with families because it is pretty clear that saying you want asylum and saying you have children with you and your family is one of the things that check a couple of boxes that more likely will have you in the United States waiting for your case to be heard sooner rather than later. But these are 11,507 children who came by themselves. About 30 percent of them are under 12, and about 70 percent of them are between 12 and 18. You have 11,000 children coming a month. We think in the calendar year, that will be about 88,000 children--not in the calendar year but in the fiscal year, the spending year, the year that started October 1. We already believe that number is going to approach 88,000. Usually, within 72 hours of those children showing up at the border by themselves, the Department of Homeland Security transfers them to the Department of Health and Human Services, which is much better positioned to take care of them than they otherwise would be. The Department of Health and Human Services enters into agreements with Lutheran charities, Catholic charities, and other groups--almost always not-for-profit--that would provide shelter on a clearly understood basis. This is something where HHS knows the kinds of housing these children are going into, provides shelter, provides medical care, and provides other services, such as education, that are provided by these groups that contract with us. As part of their goal, they also make an effort to find a safe and appropriate place as soon as possible for these kids to be with relatives who are already in the country or an alternative that would be appropriate. Of the 14,000 or so spaces that we have--beds is one way to look at this, places to sleep--people are going into and out of those as soon as we can find somewhere safe for them to go. So, ideally, children would stay a very short time in one of these facilities while the Department of Health and Human Services, working with that security provider--security for the children--finds a sponsor. Again, it is usually a family member. But other people stay a long time. The older teenagers tend to be harder to place, frankly. For some of the Central American countries, they don't have the family connections that immigrants at the border have had in the past, so there is no family to put them with. Some of these older teenagers wind up staying longer than they would want to or that we would hope that they would have to, but it is just the way it is. Of those 11,507 kids who came to the border in the month of May, a few of them may have been in the facility for less than a day. Some of them may still be in the facility they went to because there is nowhere safer than that for them to go right now. The problem is that Health and Human Services is running out of space, and they are also running out of money. In April, Secretary Azar, the head of Health and Human Services, came to Congress and said: I just want to give you a warning. We are going to be out of money on this current pace by sometime in June. By the way, we are now in June, and Congress has not stepped up and done what is necessary to take care of these kids. Let's think about all the alternatives that can happen. One of the alternatives is you just provide less assistance. Maybe the education goes first and the recreation time goes second, and you wait longer to get into the transitional space that we would want you to be in, and you are waiting more than 72 hours. The other alternative is totally unacceptable, which would be what you would do with people who are over 18. You say: OK, if you are 18 or 28 or 38, we will hear your case at some future time. We are going to release you into the United States, and you come back at a future time, and we will hear whether there is merit. We will decide your case at that time. Well, you can't release a 12-, 13-, or 14-year-old boy or girl into the United States and hope that is going to be a good thing for them to have happen to them. With the inadequate funding, they stay in facilities with the Border Patrol longer than anybody would want them to. As I said, the administration estimates that by the end of September--that would be the end of our spending year, the one we have allocated money for--there will be about 88,000 kids who have come across the border by themselves, and the American people would want you to take care of them until you can find a safe place for them to be. No thinking American would say: Well, just let them go back across the border by themselves. Let them out in the United States and see what happens to them. Nobody would think that. That is 88,000. The previous high was 59,000 in 2016. It looks like already we are probably just about to get to that number right now. With the time between now and September 30 left in the spending year, we have already had more kids come than we had in the previous high year. Congress, which appropriated money for what we thought would probably be no more than 59,000 kids during the course of the year, didn't appropriate enough money. So we knew we might not appropriate enough money, so we had a transfer authority, where you could take some money--up to a certain amount--from other accounts, and you could transfer that into the account to take care of more kids than we would have thought. That money is gone too. The Department is being forced to cut back on some of the things they have tried to provide for children who have come into our care through certainly no fault of ours and maybe not much fault of theirs-- redirecting money from programs like refugee programs that are designed to help people who come truly as refugees. That money is now being used for unaccompanied children. Remember, Health and Human Services is legally required to take care of these children but is also legally required not to spend money they don't have. If Congress doesn't act quickly--and we intend to act on this bill within a week--HHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, will have to tell the grantees--these normally not-for-profit organizations--well, if you just keep taking care of these kids, at some point we will give you the money we had agreed to give you to take care of these kids. But between now and then, you spend the money and hope you will be reimbursed. It is kind of like a government shutdown, except just for this one group of people--unaccompanied children. It is a government shutdown. There is going to be no money available. These critical services--you go to the outside groups that have been willing to step forward and provide shelter, and you say: Just keep providing the shelter, and we will pay you if we can. Some of these groups may have all kinds of money and be able to afford to do that. My guess is, not so much so, and not many of them will have. So we need to step up. We need to adapt to this change in circumstances that we didn't anticipate. We anticipate that as many people might come as has ever came before, but we didn't anticipate that maybe 30 percent more people would come in this category than ever came before. In the disaster bill we just passed--by the way, this is a shameful thing to have to say--it took over 8 months for Congress to cover the disasters that Congress has normally covered right away. Health and Human Services has asked for money in an emergency funding situation to take care of this. Congress should take this request seriously and pass this funding before there is no money from any source to take care of even the basic needs that these unaccompanied kids in our country need to have taken care of. Over the weekend and 2 weeks before, the New York Times--which is no advocate, by the way, for the Trump administration--basically said: Give the administration the money. This is a legitimate crisis, and it needs to be treated like that. In their last editorial, they said: ``Unequipped to deal with the crush, border facilities and migrant shelters are dangerously overcrowded, and the staff is overburdened.'' They went on to say: ``Dysfunction, disease, and even death are a growing reality.'' The Washington Post said the same thing. Let's deal with this immediate humanitarian crisis. Let's deal with it like the people whom we work for expect us to deal with this. Let's get this humanitarian crisis taken care of before we see a human catastrophe occur. I hope we can do it, and I hope we can do it quickly. With that, I yield the floor. nomination of rodney smith