Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I have 10 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 Armed Services The Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at 10 a.m. to conduct hearing on the following nominations: Anthony Kurta, of Montana, to be a Principal Deputy Under Secretary, and James E. McPherson, of Virginia, to be General Counsel of the Department of the Army, both of the Department of Defense, and Gregory E. Maggs, of Virginia, to be a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. Committee on Energy and Natural Resources The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at 9:30 a.m., in SD-366 to conduct a hearing. Committee on Finance The Committee on Finance is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at 9 a.m., in SH-216 to conduct hearing on the bill entitled ``Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.'' Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions The Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at 10 a.m., in SD-430 to conduct hearing entitled ``Gene Editing Technology: Innovation and Impact''. Committee on Foreign Relations The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at 10 a.m. to conduct a hearing on S. 1928 and the following nominations: of Eric M. Ueland, of Oregon, to be an Under Secretary (Management), Lisa A. Johnson, of Washington, to be Ambassador to the Republic of Namibia, Sean P. Lawler, of Maryland, to be Chief of Protocol, and to have the rank of Ambassador during his tenure of service, Irwin Steven Goldstein, of New York, to be Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, Rebecca Eliza Gonzales, of Texas, to be Ambassador to the Kingdom of Lesotho, and routine lists in the Foreign Service, all of the Department of State. Committee on Foreign Relations The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at 10 a.m. to conduct a hearing on the President's Nuclear Authorities. Select Committee on Intelligence The Select Committee on Intelligence is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at 2:30 p.m., in SH-219 to conduct a closed hearing. Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security The Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at 2:30 p.m., in SR-253 to conduct a hearing entitled ``Technology in Agriculture: Data-Driven Farming''. Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy The Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy of the Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at 2:30 p.m. to hold a hearing entitled ``American Leadership in the Asia-Pacific, Part 4: View from Beijing.'' Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety The Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety of the Committee on Environment and Public Works is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at 10 a.m., in SD-406 to conduct hearing on the following legislation: S. 1857, to establish a compliance deadline of May 15, 2023, for Step 2 emissions standards for new residential wood heaters, new residential hydronic heaters, and forced-air furnaces, S. 203, to reaffirm that the Environmental Protection Agency may not regulate vehicles used solely for competition, S. 839, to allow for judicial review of any final rule addressing national emission standards for hazardous air pollutants for brick and structural clay products or for clay ceramics manufacturing before requiring compliance with such rule, and S. 1934, to prevent catastrophic failure or shutdown of remote diesel power engines due to emission control devices.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in recess as under the previous order until 2:15 p.m. today.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, Senator Klobuchar and I are here to talk about National Adoption Month. I think we started a little bit late, so by unanimous consent, I ask that we be allowed to extend our closing time by the same number of minutes.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I thank Senator Klobuchar. We will continue to work on this. We are glad it is so well-received and these are issues our colleagues pay close attention to. Whether it is domestic or international, we are going to continue to find ways to open the doors to more homes and to get access to more tire swings. I look forward to that work. Mr. President, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 331, submitted earlier today.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, it is good for both of us and our colleagues to be thinking this month about National Adoption Month, to recognize the celebration of National Adoption Day, which will occur this Saturday. I have had the great privilege of serving as cochair of the Coalition on Adoption with Senator Klobuchar from Minnesota. It is an opportunity not only for us to work together in a bipartisan way, but at an event we attended just the other day, I was told the adoption caucus in the House and Senate is the biggest caucus of either body and the biggest caucus of the Congress. Of course, it should be. It is built on the idea that kids have the need of a family and that there are families out there who want to adopt kids. Whether that is nationally, domestically, or internationally, we really work hard to try to make that more possible. Our House cochairs have been great to work with. Senator Klobuchar and I are working on several pieces of legislation right now to make it easier for families to adopt and to make sure adopted families have the support they need to stay strong. One piece of legislation we are working on is the Adoption Tax Credit Refundability Act. It is a little bit outside the norm of the discussion of simplifying the Tax Code, but I was pleased the other day to have some important evidence put on the table when the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee--who, by the way, is an adoptive father of two sons and an advocate for adoption and for kids--when the current adoption tax credit was not in the House bill, he said one of the reasons it is not here is so many families who adopt kids don't pay income tax because of the low level of their income. My thought was, well, that is exactly what Senator Klobuchar and I were saying. That should be a refundable credit as well as a credit, but I am glad to see the current credit back in the tax bill that the Finance Committee is looking at now. We want to continue to look at not only the current credit but expanding that. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, one-third of all adopted children live in families with an annual household income at or below 200 percent of the poverty level. It is because of that the tax burden is low. They don't pay income taxes. The adoption tax credit isn't as helpful to those families as it is to families who actually have income tax to credit it against. More than 400,000 children now in the United States are also in the foster care system, and more than 100,000 of those 400,000 kids are ready and waiting for families they can call their own. Lots of other children need to be in families all over the world, but we can be looking carefully at the children in our system now. We both looked-- and others have joined us in that--at the foster care system and ensuring behavioral health screening happens within 30 days of getting into that system. Once you get into the foster care system, often it is because of unavoidable challenges families face, and often it is because of challenges kids should never have to face. So that early evaluation of what is going on there can really make a difference in how foster kids are dealt with in the system and how they get ready--as 100,000 of them now are--to leave the foster care system and be adopted. Before I turn to Senator Klobuchar, I just want to mention some kids right now who are on what is called the Missouri Heart Gallery. More than 1,200 Missouri children are in need of permanent homes. The Missouri Heart Gallery is a place to look, as we approach the end of this year, to see what the stories of some of these kids are. Brandon, for instance, who is 12, loves to play games. LEGO sets are his favorite toy. He likes to smile and give hugs. He probably hasn't gotten enough hugs in his life up until now, but it is possible to try your best to catch up with kids who need hugs. He needs a stable and loving family. He is often playing outside. It would be wonderful if he were playing outside a house or a home that he knew was a permanent home for him. Shaniah and Shanae are sisters who hope to be placed together, and they hope to have a chance to maintain contact with their aunt following placement. Shaniah loves dancing and cheerleading. Her favorite color is green. She hopes to be a scientist one day. Shanae's favorite hobby is singing, and she makes friends really easily between her dancing and singing skills that she shares with her sister. Both of these girls would really bring a lot of life and vitality into what we would hope would be their family forever. Brandon, Shaniah, and Shanae are in need of permanent and loving homes. This is a time when we ought to be thinking not only about the obstacles to adoption, the things that encourage adoption but also how we can make the support system for both adoption and foster care and adoption out of foster care work better. I know my colleagues will be eager to join Senator Klobuchar and me in marking November as National Adoption Month and by passing our resolution today. I turn to my friend from Minnesota Senator Klobuchar.

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, this coming week will mark Veterans Day. It is an important time for us to reflect on what veterans do for us and what their families do for us. The sacrifices of both those who serve and those who support those who serve are incredibly important. We have half a million Missouri veterans, and one of the great privileges of this job is to get to represent them, their values, and the commitment to freedom in our country that they stand for. A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to welcome a group of southwest Missouri veterans who came to Washington with the Honor Flight program. I think the Presiding Officer also does this, but every time I get a chance, if there is an Honor Flight from our State, I try to get down there because it is a great time to see and to talk to and to thank those who have served us. When the Honor Flights started 20 years ago or so, there were still some World War I veterans coming, and then they were almost all World War II veterans. Today we see some World War II veterans, Korea veterans, and Vietnam veterans, all of whom serve in the great tradition of being willing to fight for the freedoms that we enjoy every day. I find it humbling and gratifying to know that those veterans get to come here and enjoy the day with each other. In many cases it is the first time they have ever been to the Capitol, the National World War II Memorial, Arlington, and the other places on the trip that now so many tens of thousands have taken. Many of those veterans whom I saw the other day and whom I have seen through the history of the Honor Flight program were just teenagers when they answered the call to serve--basically, a little more than high school kids who knew that something needed to be done and they were able and willing to do it. They fought difficult battles and, in some cases, often under unbearable conditions. Some of them lost their closest friends in the military. Many of them lost comrades in arms. Some of them lost comrades right beside them. Some of them lost people who went out on another mission and never came back. Some of their families lost a servicemember who never became a veteran. I was down in Perryville, MO, a little town between Cape Girardeau and St. Louis, on the Mississippi River. They are building an exact replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial--the Vietnam wall. We were able to present a flag to the group that raised the money and made the plan to replicate the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall to take it back and become part of the Vietnam memorial at Perryville. Our veterans are an extraordinary group of men and women. They really stand for the best we stand for as a nation. It is important that with not just honor them on Veterans Day but honor them every day--every day that we live in this free and prosperous Nation that they helped defend. Admittedly, it is hard not to take all of the freedoms that we enjoy for granted because generations of Americans have been willing to fight and die to protect those freedoms. Because of that, generations of Americans have benefitted from those freedoms, and it seems to us the way people should be able to live everywhere. Maybe too often we think it is the way people do live everywhere, but in many parts of the world, having the security to walk out the door every morning, to drop your kids off at school, to go to work and earn a living, to worship as you please, and to build a better life is not available to people in other countries the way it is here. That is the debt of gratitude we owe to our veterans. This year, one of the areas of great legislative success has been in the work for veterans. Chairman Isakson of Georgia is going to follow me on the floor in just a few minutes. He is the chairman of that committee. He has a great committee, but they have a great chairman. That committee, with its chairman, and the committee in the House have passed eight bills, at least, that the President of the United States has signed into law that do a number of things for our veterans. We have built on previous progress for improving veterans care. A few years ago, we made the decision that veterans need to have more choices. A veteran shouldn't have to drive by a hospital they would like to go to in order to get to a hospital miles and miles away. They shouldn't have to pass three or four facilities that could do as good a job or better in order to get to a veterans facility. There are some things our veterans facilities should do better than anybody else. They should be better at dealing with post-traumatic stress better than anybody else, although they may not be as accessible. They should be better at dealing with patients who have suffered from IED attacks, eye injuries, people who work with veterans in prosthetics, and those patients who have lost arms and legs in the service of our country. They should be pretty good at that. There is no particular reason they should be good at open heart surgery or kidney dialysis or all the other things you go to the hospital for, if that is where a veteran wants to go. We found out that a lot of veterans would rather go closer to home. A lot of veterans would like to go to the hospital they are more familiar with when they need their own healthcare. They would like to go to the hospital they have been to lots of times with other family members and others. So we really expanded the Veterans Choice Program and expanded the money available for that program. We try to create these opportunities side by side with an existing facility. There has to be some startup money involved, but, eventually, I think our young veterans will find that they can almost always find a hospital they would rather go to or a doctor they would rather see. We have increased compensation for veterans with service-connected disabilities. World War II veterans, such as Arla Harrell from St. Louis, who suffered a lifetime of illness because he was part of a mustard gas experiment, is finally getting both compensation and the recognition that throughout his lifetime his health was impacted by something that happened while he was serving his country. We have continued efforts to address the problems at the Veterans' Administration by passing legislation to modernize the outdated benefits claims appeals process to make it easier for VA employees to be fired for misconduct. We want to protect employees who point out what is wrong. There have been plenty of whistles being blown at the VA over the last decade. While we want to be sure people can blow those whistles, we also want to be sure that the VA can quickly and effectively remove employees who are not doing what they ought to be doing and, in fact, are aggressively doing, in some cases, things they shouldn't be doing. We worked to expand the possibility and the opportunity for education benefits by expanding what can happen under the post-9/11 GI bill, helping to connect veterans with employers who provide benefits and programs. The HIRE Vets Act, a bill I sponsored in the Congress, was part of the first major pieces of legislation the Congress passed this year. I think that, sometime in the next few weeks, the Department of Labor is going to be talking about how we will recognize and evaluate employers who hire veterans, who give veterans credit for skills they learned in the military, and who promote veterans. To every employer who hires veterans, that is a good thing and we should want to do that. The HIRE Vets Act, like the LEED standard for energy, creates a standard so that we can recognize companies that do that in a significant way. I am pleased that Secretary Acosta in the Department of Labor has put that on a fast track so these companies can be recognized for what they do. Our veterans have worked hard and have put themselves in danger to keep us safe. As legislators, we owe them, as we owe those who follow in their footsteps, our continued efforts to ensure that those defending our country have everything they need and to show that we are also grateful to those who have defended our country in the past. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I rise today to congratulate the Missouri Association of Student Financial Aid Personnel, MASFAP, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. MASFAP organized in 1967 with a steering committee of five members. Today the association has grown to over 800 members. The observance of MASFAP's 50th anniversary provides an opportunity to recognize the work of Missouri's student financial aid personnel and the association's partnerships and to raise awareness about the affordability of a postsecondary education. MASFAP is a dynamic association dedicated to serving and advocating for practitioners, users, and providers of student financial aid programs. Most families and students are aware of student financial aid programs because they provide valuable funds to assist in the costs of a postsecondary education, without which many would be unable to achieve their education goals. As a former high school teacher and university president, I know how fortunate it is for Missouri to have so many great post-secondary education options. With the assistance of student financial aid administrators throughout Missouri, students are learning about the resources available to help them attend one of the great schools of their choice. As a result, students are getting the education and training they need to succeed. When I served as Missouri Secretary of State, I had the opportunity to sign the first articles of incorporation for MASFAP. Today I thank the association and all its members for their work and congratulate them on their 50th anniversary.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, this week we are moving to confirm four Federal circuit judges. Because of that, it is a good week to talk about the critical role the judiciary plays and actually about the unique power our Constitution gave the courts to do the job they are supposed to do. They are to provide a check and balance on the other two coequal branches of government--the executive branch and the legislative branch. Most importantly, the Federal judiciary provides Americans with an avenue with which to seek the rule of law, an avenue to know that one is going to be impacted by what the law says and what the Constitution says. It is a fundamental right of how we conduct ourselves, how we seek justice, how people should be able to make decisions about their families and about their businesses and about their financial futures as well as their personal futures. That is why judges who believe in the rule of law and what the law says and what the Constitution says are so important and why it is important to have qualified and well-grounded judges--not just people who are really good lawyers but people who have an appreciation for how important it is that others can absolutely rely on the law and the Constitution. Those can be changed. There is a way to change them, but the way to change them is seldom on the Federal bench. According to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, as of this morning, there are 148 vacancies on the Federal judiciary. That includes two vacancies on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. It includes the circuit judges of whose nominations we have not yet fully complied and approved this week, but there are 148 vacancies--jobs that are to be filled for as long as the people are able to serve. That is why healthy judges, younger judges, and judges who are well grounded can have such an impact for so long. The first major judicial accomplishment this year, in terms of the nominating process, was Judge Gorsuch, who 29 years from now will be younger than three of the judges with whom he is currently serving. These are decisions that will last well beyond a Presidency and well beyond the tenure of the Senators who will vote to confirm, and we have a chance to do that. Of these judicial circuits, the Eighth Circuit is one my State of Missouri is in. As a matter of fact, the most recent data shows that while there are a handful of States in that circuit, one-third of all the cases that had been filed in the Eighth Circuit from September 2015 to September 2016 had come from our State, and I imagine that number will be about the same again this year. Reshaping the judiciary, generally, as well as what happens in the Eighth Circuit are important. At the start of President Trump's term, 12 percent of all of the positions in the Federal judiciary were vacant. The Congressional Research Service found that not since President Clinton took office has a President had the constitutional obligation to fill more judicial vacancies at the start of his term than President Trump. I, certainly, believe he made the right choice when he selected Judge Gorsuch to serve on the Court, and I have been enthusiastic about the other judges whom he has nominated, including the four we have had a chance to talk about and will continue to have a chance to talk about this week. I think President Trump will continue to nominate judges who will, first of all, pay attention to the Constitution and what it says, who will apply the rule of law, and will not legislate from the bench. Those three hallmarks of how this Senate should define, and how this President has so far defined, what a judge is supposed to do not only can happen but can happen at this moment for--or at least as of January 20--12 percent of the judicial positions, and that number will continue to grow as judges, for whatever reason, leave the bench as judges decide to take early retirement. If at the end of the 4 years of this administration we have filled all of the vacancies that will have occurred, we will have filled more than 12 percent of those lifetime appointments. So it is really important that the Senate act to confirm these nominees and fill as many vacancies as are there to be filled. Last month, the Federalist reported: ``Democrats are forcing more cloture votes than any early Presidency and demanding the full 30 hours of floor time per nominee that the Senate rules allow.'' Yesterday, at the press stakeout that we had outside of this room, I said that the Senate was designed to protect the rights of the minority, and that is a good thing. Just the fact that it would take 6 years to replace the entire Senate means that the country has to stay focused on one set of ideas if all of the Senators are going to reflect that one set of ideas much longer than the 2-year opportunity to change everybody in the House. Also, the understanding that the Senate provides that protection for minorities to be heard in a big and diverse democracy like we have is a good thing. In the points that we were making yesterday, I also said that the protections for the minority are always held onto, appreciated, and protected until the minority decides to abuse those protections. When that happens, the minority always loses the protection. What we have had over and over again--47 times this year as compared to 1 time with President Obama for nonjudicial appointments, 5 times in the entire first Obama year up until this time in October, I believe, no times for either President Bush, and 1 time for President Clinton-- is that the minority has taken a judicial nomination or another nomination and said we are going to insist on 30 hours of debate because the rules allow for 30 hours of debate. Well, the rules allow for 30 hours of debate for contentious nominees. The rules allow for 30 hours of debate when there is really going to be a debate. Last week, we had 30 hours of debate on a judge, but 20 minutes were spent talking in support of him while zero minutes were spent in opposing him. The 30 hours that could have been used for other purposes was gone. Frankly, I think that was the reason the 30 hours was demanded--so the other work of the Senate had to be set aside so we could do the equally important work of letting the President put people in vacant positions that needed to be filled. That 30 hours will be changed if the minority continues to abuse it. It has happened in the entire history of the Senate, but that is what happens when you abuse these rules that protect you and give you rights. It will happen again here if this does not change. We see the same thing happening this week. We have had lots of time this week--30 hours of debate, a final vote, and Democrats and Republicans vote. In fact, regarding the judge I mentioned a minute ago, 28 Democrats voted for that judge. There were 30 hours of debate, and not a single critical word was spoken in debate about the judge. A majority of the Democrats and virtually all of the Republicans voted for that judge. That is not an acceptable way to stop the Senate from getting to the other work the Senate needs to do. This is not basketball without a clock, where they used to effectively play the delay game. The delay game got abused, and the clock became part of the system. The clock will run faster here, too, if our colleagues do not begin to see the importance of what we do here.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am here today to join my colleague from Indiana in support of the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to be on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. As we all know, that is the highest court you can serve on, except for the Supreme Court. The circuit court is the court that often makes the final determination of what the law says if the Supreme Court chooses not to act or isn't asked to act. These are important jobs to be filled and carry great responsibility. This week, Amy Coney Barrett, two other women, and one man will come before this Senate to be confirmed to various circuit courts around the country. As others have come to the floor to point out, she is extremely qualified. She should be confirmed by the Senate this week. In letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee, 73 law professors agreed that ``Professor Barrett's qualifications for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit are first rate.'' Her former law school students wrote that they would like to see her on the court. She is a distinguished scholar in areas of law that matter most to the Federal courts. She respects the Constitution. She understands that the job of a judge is to see what the Constitution and the law say, rather than what she thinks they should say. She is known for her careful work, for her fairminded disposition, and for her personal integrity. Similar things have been noted by people who served with her as Supreme Court law clerks. Law clerks, her former students, and lots of other groups that have had reason to know her and evaluate her work over the years have been universal in one thing; that is, that she would be a great addition to a circuit court in the United States and particularly to this court. It is discouraging that during her confirmation hearings, several of my colleagues felt it appropriate to question Professor Barrett's faith. She is not the only one of President Trump's nominees who have been subject to this line of questioning. In fact, in June, one Senator held out the idea that a person who was going to be in the Office of Management and Budget might not be well suited or able to serve in that job not because he didn't have the background, not because he didn't have the preparation, not because he didn't know what the job was all about but because of his answers to questions about his personal view of faith. Even when the United States, in its earlier times, may have quietly discriminated against people of faith, it was never publicly stated. Sometimes it took a long time for the first Jew to serve on the Court and a little time for the first Catholic to serve on the Supreme Court, but there was never a stated question like there has been in this Senate about those topics. It is shocking, in many ways, that it would be something we would be talking about in the United States of America today. The idea that a qualification for public office would require a religious test, in fact, was specifically prohibited not just in the Bill of Rights, in the protections for religion there, but in the Constitution itself. The people who wrote the Constitution did so at a time when a religious test was often the test for service and of fealty to a specific religion or the tradition of fealty to the monarch, who was the head of the church in that country. Many countries had a church where the monarch was clearly understood to be the principal representative of the church in that country. Even in a time when that was still the case and fresh in their minds and when there may have been religious tests in some of the colonies--even then--in the Constitution, article VI says: ``No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.'' So is it even appropriate to ask a religious question? Most questions in America you are free to ask, but are you free to ask that under the determination of the Constitution, as if it matters? In response to this line of questioning, some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee made it clear that it is never appropriate for those questions to be asked, while others asked them. But Professor Barrett, in her own writings, has said that if a person's religious faith or their faith principles ever become an obstacle to determining what the law says, then they should step back and not be a part of that case. They should not, according to her, impose their personal convictions on the law but read what the law says. If they can't do that, they should make way for a judge who can. I think, maybe, that is one of the differences in a judicial nominee who believes that their job is to determine what the law says as opposed to determining what the law should say. So we have somebody here who is well prepared, well written, and who has clearly made the case that her job as a judge--or any judge's job-- would not be to determine what the law should say based on their view of faith or their view in the world but to look at the law and say: What does the law say? The Constitution guides the Congress. The Congress passes the law. As long as that law meets constitutional principles based on what the Constitution says--not what it should say, but what it says--then, the judge looks at what the law says--not what it should say, in his or her opinion, but what the law does say. So there is no real room for a faith determination there. The only job of the judge is to decide what the law says. The second job, if there is a second job, would be to ensure that it also conforms to what the Constitution says the Congress and the President are allowed to do. One thing the Congress and the Constitution are not allowed to do is to establish a religious test for public office. Whether Americans have any faith or no faith at all, they should be concerned if we begin to talk about this differently. Even though it was already in the Constitution, the Founders listed freedom of religion as the first freedom in the First Amendment. No other country has ever set out as one of its foundational principles freedom of religion. President Jefferson--not known to be the most religious of all of our Presidents and maybe to be the most questioning of religion generally-- said in a letter in the last year of his Presidency that of all of the rights that we have, the one we should hold most dear is what we called the right of conscience--the right to believe what your conscience leads you to believe is the right thing to believe. Jefferson said that is the right we should hold most dear. Whether you are Muslim or Jewish or Catholic or Buddhist or any other faith or no faith at all, there is no religious test. For any individual and for all individuals of any faith or all faiths or no faith, religious freedom includes the right of an individual to live, to work, to associate, and, if they choose, to worship in accordance with their beliefs. The belief that a person's religion would in some way disqualify that person from public service has to be strongly and fully rejected. There is no other legitimate question raised about this nominee today. So certainly I am pleased to see many of my colleagues come to the floor to talk about this topic. Professor Barrett did receive some bipartisan support on the cloture vote yesterday. One way to demonstrate that there is clearly no objection to a person of faith, who says that faith should never get in the way of the job they do as a judge, is simply to vote for the judge. I intend to do that today. I urge my colleagues to do that as well. A lifetime appointment to the circuit court of the United States of America is no small obligation. It is no small trust in an individual's capacity to do the job that you ask them to do. All of the nominees-- the four circuit nominees whom we will have before us this week--are prepared for these jobs. I wish them happy service and a long and healthy life as they set out on the task that they have agreed to accept, if and when they are confirmed, and this week the Senate will confirm them to these jobs. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, yesterday in the middle of the day, the Presiding Officer and I and the Senator from Texas and others had a chance to meet with the President and talk about tax relief. It seemed to me very clear that the President and those of us who are advocating tax cuts right now are on the same wavelength, which is, let's have tax cuts for hard-working families, and let's do the other things we need to do in the Tax Code to ensure that those very same families have better jobs. As I said on the floor of the Senate last week, there are two ways to increase take-home pay. One is to start taking less out of the paychecks people are getting now, and another one is to give them an even better paycheck in the future. We need to look at both of those ways to increase the opportunity for working families and working individuals. We are now into the eighth year of almost no economic growth. If there is no economic growth, there is very little incentive for your job to be a better paying job than it was the previous year no matter what has happened to your other costs, and we clearly see that happening. We are into the first year of this new administration. We are looking at 3 percent annual growth after 8 years in which growth didn't exceed 2 percent. Anytime you begin to talk like an economist, people begin to wonder: Well, what does that have to do with me? Let me just say that for taxpayers generally, for working families generally, the more growth you have, one, the more revenue that comes in that takes care of problems like the deficit. The way you take care of those problems--the best way--is to grow the economy. Two, people are much more focused on keeping the workforce they have, getting the best of the workforce that is coming on board as their workforce moves on for retirement or relocates or does other things. Three percent economic growth is not good enough. The post-World War II average--that is more than seven decades now of average--is, I think, almost 3\1/2\ percent. There are very few economic problems in our country that wouldn't be made substantially better, including our own Federal deficit, if we see growth exceed or even get to the 70-year average. There is no reason to believe that can't happen. Yesterday, the President was talking about the two ways to immediately relieve pressures on families. One is more take-home pay, and two is a better job that also increases take-home pay. But the first step we can achieve immediately by the kind of tax relief we need. There have been 8 years of stagnant wages. Half of the families in the country are living paycheck to paycheck. Very few families can face an emergency that is even $500 without having to restructure what they are doing and how they are doing it. We can do a better job at this. We need more jobs. We need higher wages. And the two principal goals of this tax bill should be to do exactly that--create more wages now, more take-home pay now, and create an environment in which we are going to be more competitive. Simplifying the Tax Code is one way to meet that first impact, having a tax code that people understand better, that they think is fairer. A tax code where people think they are being treated fairly is much more likely to be complied with than a tax code where people see that somebody else who makes the same amount of money as they make is paying a lot less taxes than they are paying. The American tax system is probably the greatest voluntary compliance. Sure, there are laws that require people to comply, but most people are never impacted by those laws. They know they could be, but the American people have shown a willingness to pay their fair share if they know that their fair share is, in fact, their fair share. A simpler tax system, a more easily understood tax system, a system that has fewer than the seven different tax brackets that people pay today are things we can and should achieve. Doubling the standard deduction helps a lot when people look at the $12,000 deduction they have now. For a couple, as they look at that deduction and realize that deduction, that standard deduction, has doubled, suddenly, if you are a couple filing jointly, you are not paying any taxes on the first $24,000 you earn. If you are a single individual, you are not paying any taxes on the first $12,000 you earn. Keeping enough of the family-benefiting exemptions helps make the family do what the family would like to do. What if they would like to give to their church and charity? There is no discussion saying we wouldn't keep the standard charitable deduction as a deduction. There is no discussion that we wouldn't keep home mortgage as a deduction so we are encouraging homeownership or looking at how to make the child tax credit bigger rather than smaller. Many of the early analyses of what this Tax Code would do say that for a family of four, they would pay more than they are paying now up to certain income level. Generally, that will turn out not to be the case--certainly, at the middle-income levels and below if you factor in the child tax credit, which hasn't been determined yet. Our tax-writing committee will be looking at that child tax credit as an important addition to the individual exemptions because it costs money to raise kids. The Congress surely should understand that, appreciate that, and factor that into the deductions. Just like we are doubling the deduction for individual earners, we also have to look at what that child tax credit should look like. Tax policies that benefit homeownership, tax policies that encourage contributing to charities and community activities and church and synagogue and mosque--your religious activities--all would continue to be a part of this Tax Code. Also, when talking about sending kids to school, one way to not have student debt is to encourage families to have ways to better prepare for what they, in most cases, would hope would be a goal or an expenditure their family would make. We can do things like expanding the Pell grants for poor families, but for families who don't qualify for that, we can do things that allow the deduction early on for putting money in a fund that prepares people to go to school. Keeping well-paying jobs at home and encouraging more jobs to come here is also an important part of the goal. You can't have the highest corporate rate in the world and expect that you are going to be as competitive as you would be with other countries. A corporate rate of 35 percent, in 1986, was fairly near the middle when that rate was arrived at with President Reagan and others working on it the last time we did a tax rewrite, and right in the middle is about where we should be. However, now the situation is we see that right in the middle is no longer 35 percent; it is about 20 percent. Ireland just revised its 15 percent rate to 8 percent. Great Britain is reducing their rate to a little less than 20 percent. They have been, I think, a little more than 20 percent. We need to be sure the products we make here and the jobs that are created here--that there is a competitive ability to sell that same product anywhere in the world, with the advantage, obviously, of being made by our great workforce but also an advantage where our tax system doesn't work us out of the marketplace, doesn't make us less competitive. A territorial tax system will be one of the things we are going to hear talked about a lot. For most of us, that doesn't seem to have any impact. We earn our money here, we pay our taxes here, but we also want to be sure that if American companies sell products somewhere else and earn money there, that they can, should, and would bring that money back to the United States to reinvest it in the kinds of things that create jobs here. I think this doesn't have to be all that complicated. We need to understand what the core principles are. We need to get to those core principles. We need to get this done this year so people are planning, in the first months of next year, on how to take advantage of a new, simpler, fairer, and more competitive Tax Code. This needs to be job one of this Congress for the next few weeks. We need to get that done so job one for the country, beginning at the end of this debate, is what we can do to create more and better jobs and create more take-home pay for hard-working families. I am joined by some of my colleagues who are going to talk about this same topic, I hope, and others. We need to be focused. I can tell, with the President's comments yesterday, he is focused on this. We are focused on this. This is a job we need to get done. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, let me first agree with the point that the Senator from South Carolina just made about the importance of passing a tax bill this year. He made the point--and if he didn't, I will make it--that if we don't pass a tax bill this year or at least get most of the way there--I hope we get done with this tax process this year. If we don't get that done, I think we won't have another opportunity to pass a tax bill in the next 4 years. On the other hand, if we do pass a tax bill this year, we will have the incentive to take a second look in 2019, maybe 2020, but probably in 2019. The point I am making is, we don't have to do everything that could possibly be done to improve the Tax Code this year to take an important step. But if we don't take that important step, my belief is we are likely not going to have the kind of tax relief that working families need in the next 4 years. So not only is the pressure on the Republican Senate, the Republican House, and a White House that wants to work with us to get this done, but the pressure should be on everyone who cares about hard-working families. And the pressure should be on everyone who wants to see tax relief for those families happen. We need to understand that it needs to happen now. Fights that can't be won in the next few weeks can be won in this Presidential term but only if we take this step successfully right now. As the Senator from South Carolina and others have pointed out, this is an important two-step process. The first step is a budget that allows us to move forward so that we can do this under the budget rules and allow 51 Senators to pass a bill on tax reform. By the way, they don't have to be 51 Republicans. I suspect that is what will happen, but once we get to 51 Republicans, I would love to see Democrats join us. I would love to see them join us before that. This is the kind of help that hard-working families need--families who, for 9 years, were stuck in a situation where their buying power wasn't increasing, their job opportunities weren't increasing. They generally were not seeing that better job out there that was largely available to those very same hard-working families in the past because we aren't as competitive as we need to be. There ought to be a couple of things we focus on. One is, how do you create tax relief for working families right now so that, as soon as possible, they begin to see a check that has more take-home pay? The other way to increase take-home pay is to increase starting pay, to make those jobs better. That is where we need to be looking on the other end of the spectrum. On the end that creates jobs, what do we need to do to make ourselves more competitive? What do we need to do to constantly have the kind of pressure on the working job market that allows people who are working hard for a living to have better opportunities than they would have otherwise because we are more competitive than we would be otherwise? I think the entire focus of this discussion should be, what do we do that improves the opportunities and improves the future for hard- working families? You can do that with a tax cut right now, which we should do. You can do that with policies that make more sense as we try to compete with the people we compete with around the world. You can't have the highest corporate tax in the entire world and assume you are going to be the most competitive country in the entire world. You can't have a tax system that is uniquely different as it relates to products you sell overseas and expect to be more competitive than the countries who don't have that unique system, which penalizes rather than encourages American products to be sold in other places. The Senate will vote later today on a budget resolution that reduces Federal spending by $5 trillion over 10 years, provides a stronger foundation for economic growth, and allows us to move forward in the first, necessary legislative step in the Senate so that we can then move immediately to tax policy. This is a budget that will allow us to reduce taxes by $1.5 trillion over 10 years, a budget that would put more money in the pockets of hard-working families, a budget that would add some opportunity to that struggle where, for almost a decade now, things haven't seemed to be getting better or easier. They seemed to be getting more difficult because we were less competitive and there was less pressure to find the workforce to do the jobs that need to be done. And then this is a tax code that will make it simpler and fairer and more uniformly impactful on everyone who pays taxes. Most people don't mind paying taxes on the income they have until they find out that their neighbor next door with the same income has figured out how not to pay taxes. There is a reason American families and American businesses can't get through April without a bottle of aspirin. There is a reason this Tax Code creates headache after headache. There is one estimate that individuals and businesses complying with the complicated tax system we have costs $267 billion a year. That is half of the defense budget. If people are spending half of the defense budget just to comply with the Tax Code, there has to be something wrong with that, and we can do better. I think the proposals we are talking about will do a better job. Right now, the individual Tax Code has seven different brackets-- seven rates--and you have to figure out how they apply to whatever income you have had. It has 100 different credits, deductions, exclusions, and other provisions that make it extremely difficult to know what you owe or when you are going to owe what you owe. According to the American Action Forum, the IRS currently imposes 8.1 billion hours of paperwork on Americans, which amounts to about 54 hours per taxpayer who is paying taxes. It is more for some, less for some, but a week's worth of work--54 hours of work--for taxpayers who pay their taxes. Every taxpayer gives that week to the Federal Government. We are streamlining the Tax Code, increasing the basic deduction that families can have. If they don't want to go through the complicated Tax Code--here is how many of us there are who live at our house. Here is the basic deduction we get for each of those people living at our house. Here is how much we subtract from the money we make. Here is how much we need to pay. There is no reason that one of the compliance options can't be a postcard or a piece of paper. In fact, when the current income tax was imposed on the American people, the entire set of instructions were on one page--the entire set of instructions for everyone who had to fill out the income tax form--with the assurance that only the richest people would ever pay any income tax, so most Americans would never have had to read that instruction sheet at all. Now most Americans find it almost impossible to read the 100 pages of instructions that just get them to the Tax Code itself. Streamlining the Tax Code, helping families keep more of their money, figuring out a way we can be more competitive so there is opportunity for better jobs in the future, all should be important priorities for this Congress. Passing a budget today will allow us to take the first step, which then allows us to take the next step in tax relief that matters and makes sense to the American people. We will take that step today. We should take that step today. We should then follow up as quickly as possible to win the fights that can be won this year so Americans can start next year understanding that their Tax Code is simpler, the Tax Code is fairer, and their opportunities are likely to be greater. But for hard-working families, their take-home pay will definitely be higher than it is today. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I wish to recognize the 125th anniversary of A.T. Still University's Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, KCOM. KCOM was established in 1892 as the first osteopathic medical school in the world and continues to be recognized for its success as a multidisciplinary healthcare educator. KCOM was founded by Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, whose novel methods of treating patients gave birth to the field of osteopathy. The school's first class included 21 students, five of whom were women. The school and medical practice quickly became a success, providing more than 30,000 osteopathic treatments in 1895. According to the American Osteopathic Association, osteopathic medicine is one of the fastest growing specialties in U.S. healthcare. In fact, the number of doctors of osteopathic medicine has increased 276 percent since 1986. Importantly, more than half of all active doctors of osteopathic practice in primary care specialties, and many of these choose to practice in community-based settings. Students trained by KCOM are uniquely situated to impact communities lacking medical resources, whether they be rural or urban. The focus of the KCOM administration and faculty on community outreach and underserved populations is to be commended. They partner with community health centers around the State to provide services to the most vulnerable individuals and instill a spirit of service in their students. Unique programs such as these that further education and support community health are of great benefit to the people of Missouri and serve as an example to others. Today KCOM continues to make strides in whole person healthcare and works to be a leader in health professions education. I extend my sincere thanks for all they do. Congratulations to A.T. Still University president Craig M. Phelps, A.T. Still University-Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine dean Margaret Wilson, faculty, and all former and current students on this important occasion.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am not aware of any Missouri constituents, for whom I work, who wouldn't like to see a tax code that was simpler, fairer, that did more to create jobs, that was better for individuals, and one that they understood. I don't have anybody come up to me and say: What can we do to complicate the Tax Code further, or what can we do to make us less competitive, or how much more of my money would you like to have to do what you think the government ought to do? I don't have anybody say that to me. We are now at a time when we have the tools available. We have the focus available that will allow us to move in the right direction. For almost a decade now, hard-working families and hard-working individuals have had to deal with a below-average economy and with below-average wage growth in that below-average economy. Surely, we don't want that to be the new normal. I kept hearing the last 3 or 4 years that 2 percent growth is what we should expect now. The growth since World War II has averaged 3.4 percent for over 70 years. Suddenly, we were told: No, 2 percent is the best we can do. I understand that, even counting the Great Depression, growth in the entire 20th century was over 3 percent. What do we need to do to get our economy growing in a way that creates better opportunities and better jobs? Why would it create better jobs? Because you have people who are looking for workers who are more eager to pay and keep a workforce in a growing economy than you do in an economy that is not growing. You have people who understand they can compete better if they have a workforce that is the workforce they want rather than the workforce they just happen to get and that there is competition for that workforce. So our goal here in tax reduction and tax reform should be to help families and individuals keep more of their hard-earned money, to empower people to invest in their own future in ways that we currently are not encouraging or just simply not allowing because we don't let them take enough of their money home from work that they make at work, and to make it easier for families to see a pathway toward success and not to penalize people when they make the right decisions. The tradition has always been this: If you want more of something, you don't tax it. You don't regulate it. You encourage it. We need a tax code that encourages more success, that encourages higher take-home pay and better jobs. Most people don't realize that the individual income tax is still the biggest source of Federal money. More than half of all Federal taxes collected come from the income tax. One of our goals should be how do we get more taxpayers and not how do we make more from the taxpayers we have. Perhaps the greatest voluntary compliance in the history of the world is how Americans have complied with the income tax system. The more Americans think the system is fair and understandable and everybody else is being treated the same way they are being treated, they are much more likely to comply with that system than a system where they hear: Well, some company made a lot of profit, but because of the complexity of the Tax Code, they paid zero taxes, or this neighbor has figured out that and that neighbor has figured out that, and because of the Tax Code, you work just as hard as they did, but the Federal Government somehow got a lot of your money because you hadn't set up your tax planning in the right way. Tax planning doesn't need to be that difficult. Right now the Tax Code has seven individual rates. We are proposing three individual rates, which maybe could go to four, but that would still be barely half the number we have, even if it got to four. There are seven individual rates, and there are more than 100 deductions, credits, and exclusions that people use when they fill out their tax form. American people collectively pay billions and billions of dollars just to figure out how much of their money the Federal Government is going to get. Most people would like to have the certainty of a postcard form that you fill out, but instead they see this system that has gotten increasingly complex, often not indexed for inflation. So you start with something that you think is only going to apply to a few people, and, before you know it, it applies to a whole lot of people. I think that when the alternative minimum tax was added to the Tax Code, there had been 155 wealthy individuals who hadn't paid any income tax. So the Federal Government decided, and Congress decided, that we are going to put the alternative minimal tax in to be sure those 155 people, who are clearly wealthy people, are going to pay income tax. No matter how much they have gamed the tax system, they are still going to pay an alternative minimum tax. This was just a few years ago. By 2015, the 155 had gone to 4.4 million people who paid the alternative minimum tax. It is unbelievably successful if you are trying to collect people's money in a way they don't understand. It is not very successful if all you were trying to do was to prevent 155 wealthy people a couple of decades ago from being able to not pay any tax at all. They took a shot at 155 people and wound up hitting 5 million. That is unacceptable. That is not what the Tax Code is supposed to do. We need to work hard to simplify that. There are 14 pages of instructions that tell you or, more likely, your tax preparer how to comply with the alternative minimum tax guidelines. I don't have the one page with me, but I was handed the one page of instructions for the Tax Code from 1913. By the way, the estimate was that not only not many people would pay it, but nobody would ever pay it because you didn't pay anything unless you made at least $3,000, which in 1913 was a lot of money. But it was one page of instructions. Now we have 1 page of index to the 100 pages of instructions, and 14 of those pages are just for the alternative minimum tax. When you fill the form out, there are 64 different lines that you use to calculate now how almost 5 million people are impacted by a part of the Tax Code that was designed for 155 people. We can do a better job. We can do a better job of being sure that hard-working families get to take home more of the money they have earned with that hard work. We can also do a better job with the rest of the Tax Code to make sure we are creating the kind of opportunity for us to compete as a country, for us to compete as a nation, for us to be more fairly aligned with the other countries in the world that we compete with, and to make sure those hard-working families have better jobs with more take-home pay to start with. If you are working hard for a living--and Americans do; we are a working country--the best of all circumstances is that you have a better job than you used to have and less money comes out of every dollar you make than used to come out of every dollar you make, and that needs to be our goal. Whatever we do on the individual side needs to be focused on that. Whatever we do on the job-creating side needs to be focused on that. If we do that, we will not have the people we work for come in complaining: What have you done? The Tax Code is too simple now. It is too easy to fill out my tax form. I am walking out on Friday with more money than I used to walk away with, and, oh, by the way, they tell me there is a better job about to develop that I can apply for. That is what we ought to do. I hope we keep focused on that and get this tax bill passed this year. I think the Senator from Georgia has come to talk about this same topic, along with Senator Barrasso from Wyoming. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, we are looking at an outline for tax reform that helps working families in ways that those families haven't seen for almost a decade now--a decade of buying power that didn't go up and obligations that did, with more government requirements and less take- home pay. So we are going to be here for the next few weeks talking about what we can do to reverse that situation so that the opportunity for those families is reversed and that eventually we also reverse our competitiveness so that we create better jobs. There are two ways to get more take-home pay. One is for the government to take less out of it--and I am for that--and the other one is to do things in the Tax Code to make us more competitive so that there are better jobs with better pay to start with. If we combine those two things--better jobs and better pay--with the government taking less out of that higher paycheck, that is really where families would like to be. We are going to be here talking about this in a way that drives toward a result. The Senator from West Virginia is here, and she is basically going to start that effort today, as we really now have enough specifics on what the Finance Committee is looking at in the Senate and the Ways and Means Committee in the House and what the White House is looking at. We can begin to explain to American working families why this is the right course for them and for our country. I am pleased to be joined here by Senator Capito.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, when the Senator from West Virginia talked about the 40 percent that can come out of your hard work, the 2 days a week of a regular 5-day workweek--and many families are wishing they could get back to a 5-day workweek because they have really been stagnant in terms of the opportunities for their families for a long time. It is a good way to think about how hard families work just so the government can get more of their money. This is a discussion about how the government can take less of your money. For everybody listening who wonders, ``Well, if the government is going to take less money--I thought the government already had a deficit''--we need to work on that. One way to work on that and the best way to work on that is to have more taxpayers--not higher tax rates but more taxpayers. We are looking at some tax changes here that would allow more taxpayers to share the burden, hopefully paying taxes, as I said earlier this afternoon, on a bigger paycheck to start with. You can take less money out of that paycheck, and the government gets more money because we have more people paying those taxes and more growth. The 70-year average on growth since World War II is 3.4 percent. Every year, the economy was that much bigger than the year before. That ought to be achievable. For 70 years, we achieved that. We should be able to get back to that again if we do the right things. But for the last 8 to 9 years, that growth has been less than 2 percent. Our problem is with jobs that aren't growing as they should in terms of what they pay and the government is not having the money it needs to defend the country and do other things. A lot of that could be solved by an economy that is thriving again. There has been 10 years of not seeing that happen. We combine good tax policy with good regulatory policy, which means the regulatory excesses of the last few years clearly are being brought back under control. The Federal Government is beginning to look at regulation and being sure it is commonsense regulation again. Consumer confidence is growing. Every single month we look at those numbers, and they generally have been better each month than the month before. They certainly have been better the last 7 months than they were in any previous 7-month period of time for some time now. When we have a good tax policy and a good competitive policy, then before you know it, things begin to happen. On stagnant income, you can see a study here that says, well, maybe the income hasn't gone up, but because things are a little less expensive and inflation has been so low and so many of the things families need are less expensive, they really have more money than they used to have. Try to explain that to mothers and fathers who are trying to buy five pairs of tennis shoes for five kids. You as a parent are trying to do something for your family every week or so that is a little bit extraordinary. If you don't have extra money, you cannot do any of that. Over 75 percent of full-time workers in America say, when asked, that they are living paycheck to paycheck. Over 20 percent of Americans say they have zero savings. A much higher number says they have less than $400 or $500 in savings. These are people whose parents and grandparents worked hard to save whatever they could and would like to see that ability happen again. We need lower taxes. We need better jobs. New jobs are impacted in Missouri, where 97 percent of all our businesses are small businesses. Most new job creation is created by small businesses. We ought to be sure that no matter what we do in the Tax Code, we do it in a way that allows small business to compete with big business in an effective way. As for competitiveness, in the last 15 years, I think we are not as competitive as we used to be. Our corporate taxes used to be right in the middle. With corporations competing around the world, we were right in the middle. The middle in 2003 was 30 percent; our tax rate was 35 percent. The middle in 2015 was 22 percent; our tax rate was 35 percent. If you are going to compete, if you are going to create jobs, you are going to have to be sure you know how to compete. Mr. President, you and I were able to see--at least I was able to see--for the first time yesterday, not being on the Finance Committee, the page that is generally agreed to as our starting point. There were lower rates for families, in fact, doubling the individual exemption. Today, if you are a couple, you start paying taxes after the first $12,000 of income. Under this proposal that exemption doubles to $12,000 each, so you would start paying taxes only after you have made the first $24,000. It is sort of a new tax bracket here--the zero tax bracket. It is the tax bracket in which you don't pay income taxes on the first $24,000, and then you start paying in a simpler system after that. People would like the tax system to be simpler. People would like to have that postcard filing opportunity, where you say: This is how much money I made, here is my W-2 form that proves it, here is my standard exemption, and here is whatever else I am going to be allowed to exempt--my contributions to church, other charities, my mortgage payment. Those appear to be exemptions that will be left in the Code, but everyone would understand those. Suddenly, you have about three lines, and maybe, by the time you get to those three lines, your tax obligation goes away. The amount of money people pay to get their taxes figured out in America would be the gross national product of lots of countries. We need a system that is simpler than that. The death tax--you know, if you are a family farm or a small business and someone has stayed on that farm with you from your family or stayed in that business with you from your family, it is very hard to figure out, when the mom or dad dies, who created what wealth as you work side by side to create the wealth. By the way, you don't have any wealth that you haven't paid taxes on already. You don't have anything you have accumulated that you haven't paid taxes on multiple times. There is an opportunity here to say that we are no longer going to go through that after trying to tax family farms and small businesses. The death tax is exactly that, and it doesn't work. We are going to work to make America more competitive, American jobs more competitive. Again, one way to create more take-home pay--the best way to create more take-home pay--is better jobs to start with. We can have those better jobs if we work hard to be focused on competition, on regulation that makes sense, on tax policy that not only is simple but that everybody believes is fair. We have the greatest compliance of any country, I believe, in the history of the world, but people are less likely to comply if they don't think that the tax policy is fair and easily understood and means the same to everyone else. You shouldn't have to have the greatest accountants in the world to figure out what your taxes are or, frankly, to figure out what somebody else's taxes likely are. Fairness is important here, simplicity is important here, and competition and better jobs are important here. (The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore assumed the Chair.) We need better jobs for working families. I think that should be the flag that flies highest as we begin to look at how we reduce the tax burden and increase the opportunity for more people to be paying taxes because we have more people with better jobs. I know two of the leaders here. That guy who just left the Chair, the Senator from North Carolina, and the Senator from Georgia have been real advocates for what we are trying to do now and also advocates for getting it done. We not only need to have this debate; we need to get this done. In my view, this needs to be done this year. It needs to be impacting our economy by the first quarter of next year. I would suggest that nobody in this body understands the importance of competition more than the Senator from Georgia, Mr. Perdue. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I wish to honor the life and contributions of a great man who passed away from complications of Alzheimer's on September 12, 2017, at the age of 81. Charles Knight, or Chuck, as he was known to everyone, might have been born across the river in Illinois and loved a second home in Glen Lake, MI, but he spent his life as a Missourian. In 1973 Chuck Knight joined Emerson. At that time, he became the youngest CEO to head a U.S. billion-dollar corporation. Within 5 years, the business press was hailing the leadership of Chuck Knight, and it was appropriate to do so then, and for the full 27 years, he served as Emerson's CEO. Because he was so well regarded, he was sought out to serve on a number of corporate boards, including Anheuser-Busch, AT&T, IBM, Baxter International, BP, Caterpillar, Morgan Stanley, and the Olin Foundation. Between 1973 and 2000, Emerson grew from a dozen divisions generating total revenues of $1 billion to more than 60 businesses with revenues totaling over $15 billion. International sales grew from 12 percent of the total to almost 40 percent. Emerson's record of increased earnings per share and dividends for each year of Mr. Knight's tenure as CEO was among the longest in U.S. business. Chuck was a passionate leader. In a 1989 cover story, Fortune wrote that his ``intensity level is about 327 on a scale of 1 to 10.'' His intensity, passion, and, most likely, his integrity, inspired commitment and loyalty from his management team, his employees, his competitors, and his friends. Chuck's passion extended to his adopted hometown of St. Louis, MO. He didn't just offer his support; Chuck provided his personal advocacy and leadership to many organizations, including the Matthews-Dickey Boys & Girls Club and the Annie Malone Children and Family Service Center, serving children in the city of St. Louis. He led the major capital campaign for Washington University in St. Louis, and for decades, he worked closely with the Olin Business School, where he helped fund the Charles F. Knight Executive Education Center. His efforts were always to make a real and lasting impact. Chuck married his high school sweetheart in 1957. Their joint philanthropy has resulted in countless benefits to the entire St. Louis area, including the Joanne Knight Breast Health Center at the Siteman Cancer Center and the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the Washington University School of Medicine. Chuck and Joanne have been leading examples of the importance of giving back to one's community. Chuck is survived by his loving wife, Joanne, and his four children and their families. He will be remembered as a loving husband, a caring father, a passionate leader, and a great friend. He made a difference.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk about healthcare and what it means to families and what it means to communities. It is the most personal thing that families deal with. Every family knows that at some point they are going to deal with not one but multiple healthcare issues as life progresses, as things happen in life--at times you don't expect them to happen in life--and nothing is more riveting or focusing than healthcare. Somebody told me one time--and I have said this on the floor of the Senate before because I think it is such a good observation about what happens in healthcare. Somebody told me that when everybody in your family is well, you have lots of problems. When somebody in your family is sick, you have one problem. So it is not like tax policy or energy policy or the intricacies of this or that; it is something that every family and every individual identifies with in a unique way. It is one of the reasons the debate is so passionate, and I think it may be one of the reasons why sometimes we see exaggerated claims about how a plan I may be for is going to cause more people to have healthcare problems than if that plan didn't pass. I certainly wouldn't intend for that to be the case. What we are all looking for is the best plan that addresses this problem in the best way. In the debate we had 6 weeks ago, I remember looking across the Senate floor at one of my colleagues who stood up and said: If the plan passes that many of my colleagues are going to vote for--he may have said the people across the aisle are going to vote for--health insurance rates are going to go up next year by 20 percent. Missourians have already seen a 145-percent increase, under the plan we have now, in 3 years. The rates that were just filed have ranged from a 35- percent increase to a 47-percent increase. So it is a pretty safe prediction by my friend on the other side who said that if the plan I was for passed, health insurance rates would go up 20 percent. The plan he had been for--the plan they were defending--is out of control. There is no argument that what we have now is not working. Families who have coverage don't really have access. So many families with coverage have these high-deductible policies with insurance rates that, first of all, they can't afford the premium. If they are somehow able to scrape the money together to afford the premium--I think the average deductible in the bronze plan was $6,000 per individual, and for almost all of those plans, if you had more than one individual in your family, you had to hit the per individual rate twice if two people got sick. So you were paying maybe $1,000 or more a month, and that was for insurance coverage. Then, if somebody got sick, you had another $12,000 that potentially would kick in before your insurance plan helped at all. Not only was that not real coverage, but it clearly wasn't access. It clearly didn't provide the opportunity to go to the doctor and have the kind of healthcare you need so you don't have a tens of thousands of dollars healthcare crisis that arises needlessly. Some of us will have those problems no matter how well we take care of ourselves, but access to healthcare matters, and healthcare that works where you live matters. Frankly, that is the plan Senators Cassidy and Graham have come up with--a plan that would take the decision making for government-assisted healthcare out of Washington and put it back in the States. When one of my Congressmen from Southwest Missouri was a freshman Congressman, decades ago in the House of Representatives, he was on the committee at the time that wrote the laws and regulations for Washington, DC. Somebody asked him why he thought he was smart enough to write the laws for Washington, DC. His hometown happened to be Sarcoxie, MO. He said: In my hometown, almost everybody knows where Washington, DC, is, but here in Washington, almost nobody knows where Sarcoxie is. Does that mean the people in Sarcoxie are a lot smarter than the people in Washington? Maybe not, but it meant they probably knew what was better for Sarcoxie than the people in Washington did. So what Senators Graham and Cassidy are talking about is looking at taking all the money we are currently spending in this government- assisted healthcare world and divide it up among the States in a more equitable way. Right now, four of the States get about 37 percent of all the money. You don't have to be a math genius to figure out that means the other 46 States must get about 63 percent of all the money. Now, if 37 percent of all people in the country lived in those four States, that might be a reasonable way to divide up the money or even if 37 percent of people with income and health needs that were so significant they needed more help than everybody else lived in those four States, that might be a reasonable way to divide up all the money, but neither of those things are true. What this plan would do would be to look for a new way to more fairly allocate the money we spend on healthcare and then let State governments experiment with what to do about that. Jefferson said, in our system, the States had the unique ability to be laboratories for change because they could try things and see if they worked and then share with the other States what worked, but there was no vision at the time that the Federal Government was the best place to do everything. This is really sort of a debate between are you for federalism or are you for government-run everything. I guess 30 percent of the Democrats in the Senate, just a few days ago, said they were for government-run everything in healthcare. They were for single-payer healthcare. I am not for that. I don't think that is the best way for our system to work or to find the healthcare innovations we need or the access to healthcare people in desperate moments should always have, but I do think we could do a better job serving healthcare needs for people in the 50 States and the territories if, in fact, we gave them more authority to do that. First of all, in all likelihood, you will get your healthcare in the place you live, and you are more likely going to be able to get access to the same healthcare your local State representative gets, where it is not just me arguing for what is good for Missouri or my colleague in the Senate arguing for what is good for our State or the eight people we have in the House. It takes all 163 house members in our State, the 34 senators, and the Governor leading to have a real understanding of where 200 legislative families get their healthcare and where 200 people who are making that decision--who see people at school and the grocery store--that is a lot different than just seeing 10 people, sending them to Washington, and saying: Why don't we adjust the one- size-fits-all system so it serves our State better. If you have ever bought any one-size-fits-all clothes, you are a very unique person if they actually fit you. One-size-fits-all almost never fits anybody. Even in a State, it is hard enough to come up with a plan that fits everybody in the State in the best possible way, but we would be much more likely to do that than we would to suggest what happens in Manhattan and what happens in Marshfield, MO, are the same thing because they are not. People in New York are going to come up with a more likely way to address those issues and figure out what healthcare is there, what they need to do to augment it, what they need to do to be sure it is available to the most people in the most cost-effective way, and in Jefferson City, MO, they are more likely to answer all of those questions for our State than, frankly, they are at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, DC. Even if they want to do that--even if they are all Missourians who take over the Department of Health and Human Services, their goal would not be to figure out what is best for where I live. Their goal would be to come up with one plan that is best for the whole country, and it is just not working very well. First of all, it is not working very well because it is clearly not divided in an equitable way. No matter what formula you put in place, four States having that much of the money spent in their States is not the right kind of system to have. There are ways to adjust for need, there are ways to adjust for location, but those ways are not going to be found in waivers Governors would ask for but are more likely to be found in State capitols than they are here. This is the classic example of why our government has worked as long as it has in so many areas, but every time we try to become responsible for everything at every level, we mess up. Every time we think different regulations have to be passed by city government, county government, State government, Federal Government, that never works very well. This is an opportunity to say to States: We are going to let you be responsible for devising a system for people in your State that meets the needs of people in your State, and we are going to do that in a more effective way than has been done in the past. The growth of healthcare programs has never been allowed to be looked at in a way where you look at all the programs and put them together in a way that really works. So we are going to have an opportunity to make a big decision about the future of healthcare. We are going to be deciding, among other things, do we trust people to make that decision who are closer to the problem or do we think it is better to try to solve the problem further away from the problem. I think the right answer here is, clearly, what we are doing isn't working. Let's take advantage of the Constitution and the Federal system of government, and let's come up with a plan that uniquely can work--in Florida where you live, in Missouri where I live, in Louisiana where Senator Kennedy lives--that has a unique opportunity to serve the families where the No. 1 thing they take most personally is the health and welfare of their family. Everybody has to deal with this. Let's try to create an environment where everybody gets to deal with this where there is the greatest opportunity, greatest sensitivity, greatest availability, and greatest understanding of how, if those things aren't working, to uniquely come up with a solution to the problems in that State that are very likely not the problems that need to be solved in the entire country. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I stand to honor the 100th anniversary of the Mount Airy Missionary Baptist Church, located on Maffitt Avenue in St. Louis, MO. This impressive 100th anniversary milestone speaks volumes about the tremendous impact Mount Airy Church has had on its congregation, community, and the broader St. Louis community. First organized as a prayer band on August 8, 1917, Mount Airy has had many homes throughout its 100-year history. Over its history, while its base home address might have changed, the Mount Airy membership and effect of its faith leadership grew. Today Mount Airy is a thriving house of worship led by pastor Reverend Charles J. Brown, Sr. Pastor Brown received an honorary doctorate degree of divinity from Western Bible College, becoming the first pastor in the history of Mount Airy Missionary Baptist Church to receive an honorary degree. Over the years, the church has expanded its ministries to engage more people and positively influence thousands of lives. Mount Airy Church has been innovative and compassionate in finding ways to reach their congregation and the community. The commitment of Pastor Brown, all of Mount Airy Missionary Baptist Church leadership, and its entire congregation to studying the word of God and faithfully living it sets an incredible example for all Missourians. Congratulations again to all connected with Mount Airy Missionary Baptist Church on its 100-year anniversary.