Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I join my colleague Senator Thune in talking about the Defense Authorization Act, which is the bill that is before the Senate right now. The preamble to the Constitution says that one of the purposes of the founding of the government was to ``provide for the common defense.'' I believe that the No. 1 priority of the Federal Government is to do that job. There have been lots of arguments about what level of government can better do lots of other things, but I do not hear many arguments about what the job of defending the country is all about or who has to do that job. When we send our troops into harm's way, it is our job to ensure that they have the tools they need and that they have the resources they need to carry out their missions. That is what Chairman McCain has done in this authorization bill that is before the Senate today. Senate passage of this bill would mark the 56th year in a row that Congress has passed the National Defense Authorization Act. It should give one some indication of how serious that job is. There are very few things the Congress manages to do every year, but as for the authorization of how we do what we do, this authorization bill provides the authorities that the military needs for it to defend the Nation. The world is a rapidly changing place. Our responsibility to defend freedom in that world and the freedom of Americans is something that, every year, needs to be carefully looked at and recalculated and recalibrated, which is what Chairman McCain and his committee have done with this bill. I support the bill, and I want to talk about some of the key provisions in the bill. First of all, Senator Thune just mentioned a pay raise of 2.1 percent for our troops. It is a pay raise they rightfully deserve. It is a pay raise because of the demands on the military today--the time spent and what we expect our military to do with fewer resources and fewer people. We expect them to do a bigger job, and I want to talk about that a little later. A 2.1-percent pay raise is a pay raise that is richly deserved by those who defend us. The bill enhances the capability of our military to defeat ISIS, to defeat al-Qaida, and to defeat other enemies. Even though this is 16 years after 9/11, we still have a hard time fully understanding the emerging threat of these enemies--the nontraditional threat, the nontraditional combatant. These are things we need to continue to look at carefully, to adjust to, to understand their prowess on social media and other places and to understand what could happen there. This bill focuses on terrorism, cyber warfare, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery. By the way, on cyber, the Missouri National Guard has one of the leading cyber defense units anywhere in the country. As I have said about this program before, this is a place at which the Reserves and National Guard can particularly do a great job because they go in and out of a different environment every day--going to work defending the utility grid, defending the financial grid--and know what those attacks are like as they step up and do their work as reservists or guardsmen. This bill ensures that our men and women in uniform have the equipment they need to succeed, including looking at the growing capacity of our enemies. We never want people who are defending us to be in a fair fight. We always want them to be in an unfair fight, and we want any advantage that could possibly be given to be on the side of those who defend our country and defend freedom. I am glad that this bill projects some of the vital things that happen in our State and, of course, in the Presiding Officer's State. Lots of things happen in Alaska, as they do in Missouri. This bill further advances the need to replace the national geospatial facility in St. Louis, where 30-plus percent of the people work who monitor our defense posture from the air. They are looking to see what is happening, when it is happening, and how it is happening. It is fully redundant with the facility in Springfield, VA. If one of those does not work for whatever reason, the other one becomes the 100- percent provider of our geospatial activity that goes on all of the time. There is a new hospital at Fort Leonard Wood in this bill. It has been the No. 1 medical priority for the Defense Department for about a decade. This funds the first phase of the replacement of that facility. There is an Air National Guard training facility at Rosecrans in St. Joseph where our NATO allies go to learn. In recent times, 19 countries have come and learned the lift capacity--how to use those C-130s in the most effective and efficient way. That is recognized in this bill. The AVCRAD, which is the aviation repair facility in Springfield, MO, is where a $34 million investment would return $62 million in the first year. They are saving about $111 million at that facility every year now, but phase 3 in that facility would return $62 million the first year. I do not know that I have ever talked about a government investment before from which in the first 6 months you get all of the money back in a week or so. The bill also provides robust funding for A-10 maintenance. That A-10 Reserve unit at Whiteman is where the Secretary of the Air Force just was, and when you are talking to troops on the ground, they would always like the A-10 in the air, supporting them on the ground. There is money here for Super Hornets to go on our aircraft carriers. It does not matter how many aircraft carriers you have if you do not have the planes to put on the aircraft carriers, and this bill recognizes that. Something that I have worked for for some time--and I know the Presiding Officer understands so well--is the Military Family Stability Act. It is in this bill, and it was in the Senate bill last year. It was not able to be in the final bill, but it will be in the final bill that the House and Senate pass this year, I am confident. The Secretary of Defense supports it; all of the Joint Chiefs support it; and our House colleagues have supported it. This is the bill that I filed with Senator Gillibrand about 3 years ago, which simply provides more flexibility for our military families. The strength of the military is in the military family structure. This allows the family to either move early or stay longer at these assignments. Normally, they are 2-year to 3-year assignments. Lots can happen in 2 or 3 years, but not everything else perfectly works out in 2 or 3 years. So for employment reasons or for education reasons, if a family decides it is to their advantage to use the family support the military provides, with housing and other benefits, and they stay another 2 months to finish school, for a teaching contract to end, or for some other spouse activity to come to a reasonable conclusion or, frankly, to do just the opposite--to go to the new assignment that you know you already have, but to do that just a little bit earlier so that it works better for the family--to start school on time, to start a job on time, a job that just has to start when that job has to start--they can do that. As we have more dual-career families in the military, this is one of the things we can do. So this allows up to 6 months for the person in the service to determine where they would like their family benefit to be used, and then they become responsible for their own upkeep while they have either gone early or stayed late. But usually that is available. Bachelor officers' quarters are available at barracks on the base. Because of that, there is no cost to the Defense Department in doing the right thing. I want to thank Chairman McCain for the work he has done on this particular addition to the bill, as well as Samantha Clark on his staff, who has worked hard to see to it that this could be not only workable but easily understandable by the military. I also want to thank Congressman Joe Wilson and Congresswoman Susan Davis, who were key to including these provisions in the House National Defense Authorization Act. So families will see something--an opportunity here for them that they haven't seen in the past. This year's Defense authorization takes the steps necessary to rebuild our military, but we still have more work ahead of us. Sadly, this summer, we lost more than 40 servicemembers in accidents related to readiness challenges that are impacting the military. Sailors were killed aboard the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John S. McCain. Marines were killed after a C-130 aircraft crashed in Mississippi and an MV-22 Osprey crashed off the coast of Australia. Soldiers have been lost in helicopter accidents in Hawaii and Yemen. Just last week, Mackenzie Eaglen with AEI wrote: ``Troops are now more likely to die in `peacetime' incidents than active hostilities or combat.'' That is absolutely and totally unacceptable. Total casualties in Afghanistan, for example, in 2015 were 22, in 2016 were 14, and in 2017 were 11. They were all respected, and it is regrettable that those lives were lost. In those same years, the Department of the Navy lost 28 people, 22 people, and this year--not even over yet--43 people in accidents. We cannot let this continue. We have asked the military to do too much with too little for too long, and this bill addresses that. So there are numerous threats to our Nation, and it is critical that we not waste any more time in working to resolve our budget issues. We need to pass this legislation and come up with the appropriations that then support the authorizing bill and go back to the No. 1 priority of the Federal Government, which is to defend the country. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I come to you after we have been able to pass out of the Appropriations Committee the bill to fund the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education. I want to talk particularly about what happened in that funding, which is now out of committee and ready for the full Senate to act on it and then the Congress to act on it, as it relates to healthcare research. We were able in our committee to have a bipartisan bill. I had a chance to begin to chair that committee 3 years ago. Senator Murray from Washington State is the leading Democrat on that committee. For the previous 6 years--the previous 5 years plus that first budget for which I was the chair--we weren't able to have a bipartisan bill. But the last 2 years, we have decided that we could figure out how to come together with this committee that actually appropriates about 30 percent of all the appropriated dollars that the Congress deals with and find a way to move forward in a bipartisan way. Certainly, Senator Murray is an important part of that partnership, and we were able to take our bill to the committee today. Maybe the thing that we did that will have the most long-term significance in that bill was that, for the third year in a row, we were able to increase healthcare research at the National Institutes of Health. Now, for the 12 years that ended 3 years ago, there had been zero increase in healthcare research in this country. Research, whether it is ag research or health research or other research, is one of the things that the government has done for a long time and can really commit itself to in ways that the private sector cannot. So when you begin to hold back the healthcare research here, not only do people not have the same potential they have to have their health challenges met and their family health challenges met, but we also hold back our ability to move forward with lifesaving cures and lifesaving practices in an economy where that makes a difference and in a world where these things are changing quickly. So just 3 years ago, the people who run the National Institutes of Health and researchers around the country said that, having had no increase in a dozen years, they were basically 22 percent behind where they had been 12 years earlier in just research buying power. Young researchers were leaving the field of research because they were really disadvantaged in a world where research dollars were effectively going down and people who had had successful research before had a much better chance to know how to get and then to be awarded a grant that young researchers weren't getting. So 2 years ago, last year, and again today--2 years ago and last year, successfully--the Congress said: Now we are going to make a substantial increase to healthcare research. It was $2 billion each of those 2 years, which was about a 6.6-percent increase in healthcare research. Today we proposed another $2 billion, and just like the previous 2 years, we really had no new money. So we had to figure out how to prioritize, eliminating programs. I think over the 3 years we have now eliminated over 30 programs that just simply weren't performing well or performing well enough to be a priority. As the Presiding Officer and I have talked about before, when everything is a priority, nothing is really a priority. So we decided this is one of our priorities, and probably, we can safely suggest, a top priority for this committee now over the last 3 years. So we have gone from a 22-percent decline to where we are almost caught up to where the country was 15 years ago, in terms of buying power, with about a 20-percent increase in this one account in three budgets. Again, I think it is important for us and the taxpayers to understand we did that because other things were carefully looked at and either had their amounts reduced or had their programs eliminated so we could look at the health research. In that 12-year period of time, there had been such a decline in commitment to health research that often the health research projects that were funded weren't funded in a way that allowed them to have success. At some Institutes at NIH, the success ratio was as low as 9 percent, and even when you are looking at everything, 9 percent is, frankly, too low. I hope we are going to see some real breakthroughs as a part of that research. One of the areas that has been a part of that research has been the investment in Alzheimer's research. Every 68 seconds, someone in America develops Alzheimer's, and this is a disease that not only impacts in a dramatic way the person who has it but arguably impacts, in at least as dramatic a way, the people who care about them and do all they can to care for them. It is the most expensive disease in America. As our population gets older, more and more people get into that age realm where if something doesn't change, they are going to have Alzheimer's too. Right now we are spending right at 250 billion tax dollars every year on Alzheimer's-related care. That is about half the defense budget. The estimate for 2050 is that if something doesn't change, we will be spending $1.1 trillion of today's dollars on Alzheimer's-related care. We talk about big numbers here, and it is easy to get confused. That is a lot or that is half of that--what does that really mean? Well, $1.1 trillion is twice the defense budget. If you can get in your mind all we spend all over the world to defend the country, if we don't do something to change what is happening with Alzheimer's, we are going to be spending twice everything we spend to defend the country just on taxpayer-related Alzheimer's care. The estimate on Alzheimer's, by the way, is that for every tax dollar spent on Alzheimer's, there are two private dollars spent and almost never covered by insurance. It has a dramatic impact on people, dramatic impact on their families, and a dramatic impact on taxpayers. We are spending about $1 on Alzheimer's research right now for every $125 we spend on Medicare and Medicaid. The biggest expenditure in those two funds of any disease is what we spend on Alzheimer's. Hopefully, we will see changes in that and begin to see things develop there. Also, on the BRAIN Initiative, there has been nearly a 54-percent boost over last year's level in the BRAIN Initiative. The BRAIN Initiative, as part of the 21st Century Cures legislation we voted for, is really developing a more complete understanding of brain function. It has the possibility of helping millions of people who suffer from a wide variety of neurological challenges, psychiatric and behavioral disorders, diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and traumatic brain injuries in addition to that. It is all part of what we can look at as part of the BRAIN Initiative for psychiatric disorders. Remember, the estimate is that one out of every four adult Americans has a diagnosable and almost always treatable behavioral health issue. If you know that issue, if you know how the brain works in a better way, the treatment may be easier, better, more effective, and more long-term than it is now. The National Cancer Institute is looking at the Precision Medicine Initiative. This is where we utilize all we know now about the human genome and about environmental and lifestyle data to see if we can come up with solutions. Genomically, we didn't know any of this a generation ago, but with the human genome, now that we know what we know, we can look at how we individually are different than everybody else. There is a great feeling that in many cancers, there is a unique cancer-fighting agent for that unique cancer in you, but what you need to do is amp up that cancer-fighting agent. The Federal Drug Administration just last week approved the first T cell-amping treatment that would do that. Senator Toomey and I went 2 years ago to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and saw the work that Dr. Carl June was doing, the groundbreaking work on leukemia. Again, he was amping up that fighting cell in patients whom everybody else had given up on and had great success and caused great optimism about what can happen there. Dr. Tim Eberlein, director of the Siteman Cancer Center in St. Louis, testified before our subcommittee on the critical role of Federal support for looking at these kinds of things and seeing what can happen to make a difference. He shared a story of one of his colleagues, Dr. Lukas Wartman, an oncologist and leukemia survivor, who had a relapse while, fortunately for him, he was a fellow at Washington University. Research performed a detailed analysis of Dr. Wartman's cancer genome profile. They identified an existing drug typically used to treat a different kind of cancer, but it targeted the kinds of genetic structures that Dr. Wartman had, and he is in remission. It enabled him to undergo a stem cell transplant. He is now continuing his work on behalf of other cancer patients. Whether it is immunology--again, amping up of what you have to fight that unique challenge that you have, whether it is looking at the BRAIN Initiative, these are things that make a difference to families, they make a difference to taxpayers, they make a difference to our economy, and certainly we hope seeing the committee move forward today on what would be the third groundbreaking commitment by the Congress in recent years to make a difference here is an important thing. I hope we get a chance to bring this bill so all the Senators get a chance, as our Members did today, to debate it, to amend it, but no matter what happens on the floor of the Senate, we will have a chance to talk to our colleagues in the House and, hopefully, once again, in the final appropriations bill this year, do what makes a difference. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I am proud to stand to honor Phyllis Schlafly, a woman who was not only an incredible Missourian, but an incredible American. She was a strong conservative, engaged citizen, proud wife and mother, powerful speaker, passionate lawyer, devout Catholic, and good friend of mine. We lost her a year ago, and I take this moment today to pay tribute to her and the impact she had on our Nation. There is no doubt that the name Phyllis Schlafly will be mentioned in the history of conservatism. Upon Phyllis's receiving of the Women of Achievement Award in 1963, publisher of St. Louis Globe-Democrat Richard Amberg stated that ``Phyllis Schlafly stands for everything that has made America great and for those things which will keep it that way.'' Our late President, Ronald Reagan, said to Phyllis Schlafly, ``Eagle Forum has set a high standard of volunteer participation in the political and legislative process. . . . You've been out front on so many of the most important issues of our time. . . . Your work is an example to all those who would struggle for an America that is prosperous and free. . . . Our nation needs the kind of dedicated individual volunteer service you and Eagle Forum have demonstrated over the last 20 years.'' Phyllis was born and raised in St. Louis, MO. She attended college at Washington University and received her master of arts degree at Radcliffe College. She married John Fred Schlafly, Jr., in 1949 and had six children. In 1972, Phyllis established Eagle Forum, and her work to strengthen conservative principles flourished from there. Her voice became the conservative conscience of the GOP, and she was never afraid to let me or any other member of the Republican Party know when she felt we were not true to those ideals. While I wish today to commemorate her upon the anniversary of her death, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that her passing did not end her life's work. Her legacy of strong conservative values continues today through organizations, books, and through the passion she ignited in fellow conservatives. Whether or not one agrees or disagrees with her points of view, one must acknowledge her crucial part in the history of American politics. When she began speaking publicly in the 1960s, Phyllis blazed a trail and encouraged women and mothers everywhere to step into American politics and issues of the day. She wasn't afraid to voice the thoughts she had that others agreed with, yet were too afraid to speak; nor was she afraid to challenge those with whom she disagreed. Phyllis demonstrated to all of us that every voice matters and reminded us that a powerful voice lies not in whoever is talking the loudest but whoever sees potential for change. Phyllis was a pioneer for women in the world of politics, especially for conservative women, and simultaneously encouraged all Americans to get involved in issues bigger than themselves. She advocated tirelessly throughout her life and never retired. She was one of the first conservatives to publicly endorse then-candidate Donald Trump. At her 2016 funeral, President Trump said, ``Her legacy will live on every time some underdog--outmatched and outgunned--defies the odds and delivers a win for the people.'' Phyllis Schlafly lived a life of dedication and perseverance. She continuously served our Nation through her inspiring speeches, encouraging attitude, and passion for the future. We miss her and thank her for all the work she has done. Today we honor her and her legacy and take a moment to recognize the longstanding impact she has had on our Nation.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I wish to pay tribute to Dr. Jerry C. Davis, president of College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, MO. Dr. Davis is the recipient of the prestigious E. Burr Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award, given by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, CASE. The lifetime achievement award honors individuals in higher education who have made a significant and lasting impact in the field of institutional advancement through their professional accomplishments. It also honors those who have earned the deep respect and admiration of their professional colleagues. Dr. Davis is one of the longest sitting college presidents in the entire United States, serving for over 40 years. He became president of Alice Lloyd College in Kentucky in 1977 and served until 1988, when he became president of the College of the Ozarks, where he remains today. Throughout his tenure as president, he has transformed the College of the Ozarks into a unique higher education institution with an endowment over $500 million. Nearly every student graduates debt-free by working at on-campus jobs--a significant achievement at a time when student loans are a major burden for many students and families around the country. Dr. Davis is also responsible for creating the College of the Ozarks Patriotic Travel Program. This program pairs veterans with college students to help instill appreciation for the sacrifices of American servicemen and women by traveling back to the battlefields of our Nation's wars. To date, over 300 students have traveled to Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea with over 150 veterans. Dr. Davis's deep love for his country is also reflected by his work to honor those that have sacrificed for our Nation by building memorials on campus. Under Dr. Davis's leadership, the college built memorials honoring Missouri Vietnam veterans, the heroes of 9/11, and Missouri Gold Star families. In the spring of 2018, the college will dedicate a new memorial honoring the Korean war. Dr. Davis has received many awards and accolades for both his specific institutions and in the realm of higher education. He has been active at multiple levels of both the Southern and North Central Accrediting Agencies, serving on more than 50 accreditation teams and chairing over half of them. Dr. Davis also served two terms as president of the American Association of Presidents of Independent Colleges and Universities. In 2015, Dr. Davis and the College of the Ozarks received the National Freedom Award. This award is the highest honor given by the U.S. Department of Defense to employers for support of National Guard and Reserve Employees. Dr. Davis's leadership has truly transformed the College of the Ozarks, and there is no doubt why he was selected to receive this lifetime achievement award. I know that the students, alumni, local community, and all those connected to the College of the Ozarks are grateful for his leadership, as am I. Thank you.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, August is Rural Broadband Month at the Federal Communications Commission. The Commerce Committee just today put forward nominees for the Commission, and the Commission does matter. But I want to talk today specifically about highlighting the importance of broadband in rural America and rural Missouri. In January of this year, I joined a number of my Senate colleagues on a bipartisan letter to President Trump regarding the importance of broadband and expanding its access to all of the country and, particularly, the parts of our country that are not currently served. As part of any infrastructure legislation that the Congress is talking about, I think we and the administration need to consider policies that advance infrastructure not just solely in terms of roads, bridges, and ports, which are important, particularly where the Presiding Officer and I live, in Arkansas and Missouri. That transportation network means so much to us, but also important is how people are able to communicate and compete. High speed internet access cannot be overlooked as we consider what our infrastructure should look like going forward. Broadband can be delivered by wireless or wireline technology. It can be brought to customers by traditional communications companies in rural areas. Often, now, rural electric co-ops show great interest and capacity to do this, as do others. Following the significant steps that Congress took to deregulate the market as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the broadband industry has really responded. They invested a lot of money. In fact, they invested $1.5 trillion of private money to deploy better and faster networks. If you have access to one of those networks, you know what a difference it makes. In 2015 alone--that is the last number I have access to--the investment by traditional wireline companies, wireless companies, and cable providers was $76 billion. All of that is really good, except that there is a real divide between the rural areas of my State and the rural areas of the country and the other more populated areas. Some people say: Oh, that is just a myth; there is no digital divide. I would have them look at any number of articles. One article in the Wall Street Journal in June made the point that 39 percent of the United States' rural population lacks access to broadband. That sounds like a pretty big divide to me--that 39 percent of the entire rural population of the country doesn't have broadband, and 61 percent of rural Missourians lack access to broadband. These numbers are not acceptable. Most private investment has been directed, as you would assume it would be, toward high populations, highly populated and easily accessed areas, and future customers. This is like the same problem the country had 100 years ago transitioning to telephones. It was hard to get a telephone to a house that was 5 miles away from the nearest house, as opposed to a house that was in the same apartment building to the nearest apartment. It is a lot harder to do that. The government at that time said that there would be a universal service fee on phone bills, and then use that money to ensure that everybody would have equal access to what was obviously seen as a really important way to communicate. The concept of Universal Service was enshrined in the 1996 act. It said that rural households should have the same access to advanced telecommunications enjoyed by their urban counterparts. It is a good goal for a lot of reasons. I saw some figures this week. When looking at the overdose deaths and the opioid problems in the country, they are much greater in rural counties than they are in urban centers. In our State, Kansas City, our biggest city by population and any of the five counties that touched it weren't anywhere close to the top list of other areas in our State that had this problem. It matters when you are not connected. It matters when opportunities that you otherwise would have simply aren't there because somehow a service that is essential to our society today isn't available to you in the same way it is available to others. I am not saying it should be free to some and cost other people something, but it should be available to you in the same way that it is available to others in our society, as the 1996 Telecommunications Act stated. Broadband is necessary to attract and retain business for banks, factories, distribution centers, and small businesses. It is necessary to start and maintain a business, large or small. If business is going to compete outside the local marketplace, there has to be that connectivity. Frankly, in order to compete in the local marketplace and to have the ability to buy at the best price and to get the kind of products needed, the internet really matters. Broadband is always there. We have to have it if we are going to compete in the world economy. Many people in rural America are able to do that in ways that nobody would have dreamed about 10 years ago, but not everybody has that same access. Certainly, it is critical for schools and libraries. Just today, a parent was telling me that students can't do their homework anymore unless they can get internet access somewhere close to where they live. Students depend on the internet for education and opportunity where we live today. A revolution has taken place in agriculture. The great food-producing economy that we have produces more food all the time. It actually produces more food with fewer people. So that creates some displaced people who otherwise would have had those jobs, but it also uses wireless infrastructure, data, and GPS structures to decide what should happen in a field at a given time in that part of the field. There are data centers, autonomous systems, and fiber optics that are a part of agriculture today. If you are linked to broadband and you are in your combine and have a problem, sometimes that problem can be solved in a couple of minutes by quickly accessing your system, seeing where the problem is, resetting what you need to set and moving on, as opposed to the other option, which is calling the repair person, having the technologist come out with their computer, hook it up to your combine, and 5 or 6 hours later, at a time when you are in the critical moments of your annual livelihood, suddenly you are working again, when you could have been working 5 or 6 minutes later if you had been connected like many farmers are today. Broadband is more than just economic opportunity. Rural hospitals and health clinics are able to use telemedicine to bring services at a level that otherwise would not be available. This is particularly important in mental and behavioral healthcare. A lot of people are every bit as comfortable or more comfortable with telehealth than they are with somebody in the room with them. Also, with intensive care, suddenly all of the resources that may be available 100 miles away can be right there at the point where questions are asked and that information is handled. Suddenly, somebody's life is saved because of the capacity to have that kind of communication. For years I have tried to lead when I could, and joined my colleagues when they were leading, with numerous letters to the FCC urging it to reform the Universal Service Program for the digital era. Most people who don't have a line to their phone have a way to get a phone in their hand now, but they don't have a way to get this important way to communicate and to compete. It is frustrating, when we see the limited resources we have--the government resources--to put into something like this to see limited funds go to places where you are just creating another provider and more competition, except that the second provider has government money on its side to compete with the first provider that went in with its own money. There is a big difference between unserved and any level of underserved. If you are unserved, like 69 percent of rural Missourians, the idea that somebody else doesn't have enough competition in the place they live doesn't seem to make very much sense to you. If there is a competitive marketplace and somebody wants to go in there and compete and get the prices down, that is all fine, but I think the government focus should be just like it was with telephones 100 years ago--to see that people had the opportunity to have that phone the same as their neighbors in more densely populated areas. The President recently designated Ajit Pai to be the Chairman of the FCC. We are finally seeing the Commission take actions to address rural broadband. In February, I wrote to the Chairman and urged him to act on the $2 billion available for rural broadband and open this money up to auction so new entrants into the field, like electric co-ops, can competitively bid alongside everybody else. The FCC has decided to do that. Tomorrow the Commission will consider a notice to initiate the pre- auction process for this money to deploy fiber optics in parts of Missouri. This will complement other initiatives underway, as the FCC looks at how to address rural broadband. They have launched a $4.5 billion auction for mobile wireless service in rural areas. They are suspending out-of-date rules that forced small carriers to raise telephone rates. They are launching a proceeding to reduce costs for companies upgrading from copper to fiber optic networks--another FCC initiative. They are launching a broadband advisory committee. These are all steps in the right direction, where you and I live. They will make a difference. I look forward to continuing to work with the Chairman and others on the Commission on this issue. I think rural broadband is particularly leveling in creating the opportunities that we would like to see. The Commission will now be back up to its five-member intention of how many people are supposed to be there, making those decisions. There is still work to be done. We need to reduce the digital divide. Connectivity is critical. We also need policies that support efficient network structures that allow people to not just connect to a network but to connect with a network that really works. Let me talk about one other Missouri issue that relates here. I said earlier that Kansas City is now our biggest city, our most populous city. Still, St. Louis, I think, by region, is the bigger region, but the city of St. Louis is not as big as Kansas City. In Kansas City, they have an internet exchange called KCIX. It is a peering center that offers tremendous benefits to secondary educational institutions, to high schools, to vocational programs, and to others so they really maximize how they communicate with each other and have the availability of resources in one place much more equally available in others, and large amounts of bandwidth can be diverted by using this peering infrastructure. Frankly, what is happening in Kansas City this fall is that the North Kansas City School District will establish connections to KCIX. It is estimated that it may save the district almost $500,000 a year in bandwidth just by looking at peering. If peering helps there, maybe peering is one of the other things we can look at that will help solve the rural broadband challenge as well. We are going to be working on this. There will be legislation. There will be continuing efforts to urge the FCC to stay on point. We need to do what we can to make communities in rural America productive and competitive and as healthy as they can be. By the way, there are a lot of stories here to be told. I hope the next time I come to the floor on this topic that I will come to the floor with some things that are happening in my State that would not have happened if there had not been the access to broadband in not very big communities that are suddenly doing business all over the United States and all over the world. How we do that is by not letting any of our country wither away, where we have existing infrastructure and schools and sidewalks and water systems and by being sure the people who want to live there can live there, just like we are being sure now, as we see a revitalization of some of our downtowns and inner cities. People will want to move back to them and will have reasons and desires to want to do that. We are seeing an upswing there. I think we can see the same kind of thing happen in other parts of the country if we work to be sure we have an equity of opportunity. One of the major things that will provide that will be having access to broadband that works. I hope we can continue to fight that fight and see the progress we have made just in the last 6 months. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Senator Strange is coming, and I will take my time later.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the majority time is 3 minutes?

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, may I inquire, what is the remaining Republican time?

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, we are talking today, obviously, as we move into the final hours of this debate, about the two mandates in the original Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate and the employee mandate--certainly, the individual mandate but both of these mandates. First, I want to talk about the individual mandate. It was unprecedented in Federal law. The idea that the Federal Government could tell somebody they had to buy a product, tell them what that product had to look like, and have very little input on the price or competition is just something the Federal Government had never done before. They didn't just set guidelines, they didn't even just set subsidies but actually a requirement to buy a product or pay a penalty. Now, when this case got to the Supreme Court, the government was still arguing it was a penalty and there was nothing wrong with that penalty, until apparently they figured out the Court wanted to look at this as a tax because a penalty wouldn't have been constitutional. Now, we all know this is a penalty. The Supreme Court can call it a tax, the Obama lawyers could at that moment decide, well, even though we set up the law as a penalty, we really think it must be a tax, and that 5-to-4 decision decided that because it was a tax, not a penalty, that part of the law was upheld. Nobody ever thought this was a tax before that day, nobody has ever seriously thought it was a tax after that day. It was a penalty you pay if you decide you don't want to do something the Federal Government tells you that you have to do. There is no constitutional basis that gives the government the authority to make that kind of decision, and families and individuals have been hurt by that decision. There is only one place to go on the individual market, the exchange. Remember that? We have almost forgotten the total disaster of the exchange. States tried to operate exchanges, almost none of them worked. States spent millions and tens of millions, and I think a time or two maybe even more than that to put an exchange together. It didn't work. That part of the law didn't work so you wind up mostly with one big exchange. Even with one big exchange, you have to think about whether the policies available in the county you live in--most of the debate over the past several years, a lot of the debate has been we ought to expand the marketplace, we ought to buy across State lines, we should have more choices and more places to go. Somehow we managed to define in this law, the law that is currently the law of the land, a marketplace that is about as small as it could possibly be. In our State, in Missouri, we have counties that have a million people. We have a county that has a million people. We have a county that has 4,000 people. The county that has 4,000 people has its own buying unit when it comes to looking at how the marketplace is set up. It just doesn't make sense. The deductibles are so high, the choice is so low. Some defenders of the law will say that costs will go up if the amendment passes. That is possible, but we know the costs will go up if the amendment fails. We know the costs will go up if we stay where we are. Costs, since 2013, have increased an average of over 100 percent in the country--105 percent. This was the law that was going to reduce family costs by $2,500 a year. Families are generally relieved if their insurance didn't increase by $2,500 a year, let alone fail to reduce by $2,100 a year. So a 105-percent increase in 4 years--in Missouri, where I live, 145 percent is the increase. I think at least three States have had an increase of more than 200 percent, and even with an increase of more than 200 percent, nobody wants to sell insurance there. Not only is there no competition, I think about one-third of the counties in America this year don't have more than one company that will even offer a product. Some have had no companies that would offer a product, and 40 percent is the estimate for next year. There are places where no more than one company will offer a product. What kind of competitive marketplace is that? The government, with the mandate, says you have to buy a product and you have to buy it in that marketplace and you have to buy it from that one company at whatever rate some other level of government has finally approved to keep the company there that probably didn't want to be there, but if you don't buy it, you pay a penalty. This is not working. Millions of people have chosen to pay the current penalty, which was $695, rather than to participate in a system that didn't work for them. Families can't continue to pay more and get less. Remember former President Clinton's observation on this: What a crazy system. The costs keep going up and the coverage keeps going down. We have forced people to be in a system that according to President Clinton, the costs keep going up, the coverage keeps going down, and if you don't participate in that, you pay a penalty. We have to move in a different direction. Eliminating these mandates helps to do that. There are some Congressional Budget Office numbers out there that estimate what is about to happen. They certainly totally misestimated the current law. I believe, under the current law, there would be 25 million people, roughly, or some big number like that on the exchange today. There are 10 million instead of 25 million, 22 million, whatever the projection was for this date in 2017. There are about 10 million. CBO is notoriously wild with their projections. They projected, for instance, that 15 million people would drop out of the individual market if one of the many burdens of this bill or these amendments passed. There are only 10 million people in the market. How do 15 million people drop out if there are only 10 million people there? They said that 7 million people who get Medicaid and pay nothing for it wouldn't take that if the government didn't force them to. There must be something wrong with the insurance product and Medicaid both if people don't take it even if it is available to them. The current system isn't working. The other mandate, the employer mandate, is telling employers what they have to do. One of the great benefits of health insurance in this country since World War II has been insurance at work. It was pretty much an accident in 1946. The war was over, and no one wanted to heat up the economy too quickly so it was decided to have wage and price controls. Somebody asked the price control person: If we add insurance at work, does that count toward wages? They wanted to compete for more and better employees they could get coming back into that economy from the war. So they asked, if we add insurance to work, does that count as wages? The wage and price control person said, no, it wouldn't count. So they went to the IRS person and said: If it doesn't count toward the wage, is it taxable if they get it at work? That person said, no, it wouldn't be taxable either. So we have this unique system that developed. We need to figure out how more people can get insurance at work, more people can get insurance as a part of bigger groups. There are things that work and things that don't. The government requiring you to do something and thinking there is a constitutional right to do that just simply doesn't work. In fact, with the employer mandate, there are all kinds of unintended consequences. People with 50 employees didn't want to get more than 50 employees. The 30-hour workweek became a problem. In fact, Ms. Collins, the Senator from Maine, from almost day one has said: Why do we want to enshrine the 30-hour workweek? Let's have a 40-hour workweek. Her amendment was offered and filed over and over again. Companies were reluctant to hire new employees. These are the unintended consequences of the employer mandate. Too many people have two 26-hour jobs now who need a 40-hour job with good benefits instead of two 26-hour jobs with no benefits. More choices and the kind of access to healthcare people need is where we ought to be focused, a solution that provides healthcare and not just coverage. It is great to have insurance coverage. It is great to have even a government insurance coverage like Medicaid, unless no doctor wants to take any new Medicaid patients or if your insurance coverage deductible is so high. The averages on the bronze plan is $6,000 per individual, $12,000 per family. If your deductible is so high you can't go to the doctor, you don't have the kind of access to healthcare you need. You only have access to catastrophic sickness care. This system needs to change, and I believe one of the fundamental flaws in the system from day one was the government believing it could force people to purchase a product that didn't meet their needs and didn't meet what their family could afford to do. I am glad we are having this debate. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the White House started out this week with all kinds of activities on the White House grounds pertaining to things that we make here in America and the importance of manufacturing and, frankly, the kinds of good jobs that have traditionally come with manufacturing. When we have an economy that focuses on making things and growing things, that has always been the strongest economy for working American families--an economy that competes, an economy that produces. Where the Presiding Officer and I live in Louisiana and in Missouri, in the middle of the country and close to that great transportation corridor and close to the resources of the country, we always particularly thrive when we are in an economy that is focused on making things. With all of the other discussions this week, it would be a shame to not think about those products from every State that the President talked about this week, that were on the Capitol grounds, and that are reflective of companies that are almost brandnew and companies that are a century old, where people had figured out how to be competitive enough in what they were doing that they could make a living for themselves and lots of other people, doing just that. In fact, manufacturing employs 12.3 million people in the country today, including more than 260,000 people in my State of Missouri. There is no doubt that we benefit from those kinds of jobs. I was glad that in 2014 we were able to get the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act signed into law. This was a new way, a new opportunity for businesses to link with each other and to link with training facilities, maybe research universities. You have to have that kind of public partner, as well, to see what we could be to be even more competitive than we are. When we looked at Germany and other countries, they were not only doing this sort of thing, but they were doing it in a way that made it really hard for us sometimes to keep up with that level of interaction between innovation and manufacturing, innovation and labor. Businesses are really very much impacted, jobs are very much impacted by the decisions that government ultimately sets the stage for. If you are going to make something in America today, the first two boxes I think you would have to check would be can you pay the utility bill and does the transportation system work with what you are trying to do. If you can't check those two boxes, no matter how great that workforce and that location might be, you are not going to take those jobs there. So government, either as a regulator or as a provider, is going to be very involved in whether you can pay the utility bill. That is why I was really glad to see the new director at the Environmental Protection Agency look at the power rule. The courts fortunately had already said you don't have the authority to do that-- only Congress can do what you want to do here--which is look at the power rule and look at States like many of our States in the middle of the country where, in my State, the so-called clean power rule would have doubled the utility bill for families and the places they work in about 10 or 12 years. By the way, nobody pays the utility bill for you. The utility bill is paid based on how many utilities you use. There is no mythical big government to come in and pay the utility bill unless we are going to have a totally different system than we have now. The utility bill would have doubled. I have often said that in the last three years in this fight to see that this didn't happen to Missouri families--and I said it again on the radio this morning in an interview, thinking that this fortunately had not happened--I said: If you want to test what happens if the utility bill is allowed to double because of some needless government action--and double before it has to because you are doing things before they have to be done--the next time you pay your utility bill, just as you are writing your checks out of your checkbook, pay it one more time and see what you are going to do with the rest of your family's money that month, which suddenly you can't do because you are paying the utility bill twice. There are ways--when we need to transition to some other kind of utility provider if we want to transition in fuels or sources or whatever--there are ways to do that. The way to do that is to say that the next time you have to build something, the next time you have to borrow money that the utility users are going to pay back over 20 or 30 years, once you have paid for what you are doing now that has met all the requirements, you have to do it differently than what that silly rule would have said, because it would have said you have to pay for what you already have, but you have to also be paying for what you immediately had to replace it with. This would have been like if you had the CAFE standards, the miles- per-gallon standards, if that same agency would have said: OK, we are going to have new miles-per-gallon standards and they are effective immediately, and if you have a car that doesn't meet those standards, you of course have to keep paying for your car, but you also have to have a new car. That is what we were about to tell utility users and families. And if you don't think that would have had an impact on jobs, you are just not thinking about jobs. There was a water rule, the waters of the United States, that would have done about the same thing. Both of those have been pushed back by the courts, and hopefully we are walking toward a more reasonable situation where we are thinking about how to accomplish the same goals in a way that lets families accomplish their dreams. Then the second thing, the transportation issue: Does the transportation system work for what you want to make? Can you get the material where you need to get it? Can you get a product in a way that continues to make you competitive? And the State and Federal Government and local governments are very, very much in charge of the decisions that make that environment whatever it is. So when we are thinking about ``Made in America,'' we have to think about those things. Then we have to think, with that infrastructure in place, what is the third and crucial piece of that puzzle coming together? It is a workforce that is competitive and prepared and an education system that is prepared to help with whatever comes next. If we think we know what the average person, or any person, is going to be doing and how they are going to be doing it 20 years from now, I suspect none of us are quite that able to predict what 20 years from now is going to look like. In fact, if we had thought about the way we do most of the work we do now 20 years ago, it would be amazing: Oh, it is just 20 years later, but we didn't have the cell phone, we didn't have an iPad, we didn't have a computer. There was nothing at the factory that did what that machine does right now. We have to have a workforce that is ready, and we have to do all we can to make that workforce ready. On the infrastructure front, we need to look not only at the infrastructure bill that is coming up, but also how many more tools can we put in the tool box. Senator Warner and I reintroduced the BRIDGE Act to provide one more tool to create more incentive for private sector partnerships, to do things differently than we have done them before. If we are going to get different results, we have to do different things. If we do just exactly what we have been doing, we are going to get just exactly what we have been getting. So as the President focuses, I think properly, on the kinds of American jobs that create stronger families and more opportunities, we don't want to lose this week without also thinking about those jobs, thinking about the 12.3 million Americans who work at making things, thinking about the more than a quarter of a million Missourians who do that. Think about the others who work at growing things and how an economy that makes things and grows things is a stronger economy than an economy where people just trade services with each other. There is nothing wrong with trading services, but if you do that on top of a productive economy, it has a much better likelihood for everyone involved to serve the people who provide the services, as well as the people who are out there making things that are competitive in the world to have better opportunities. I appreciate the President and Vice President this week calling attention to that important part of what we do as we move toward transportation and infrastructure and other things.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, it has been nearly 7 months since President Trump took office. He was sworn in on the steps of the Capitol on January 20. Our colleagues across the aisle have had, frankly, more than enough time to come to terms with the election results. Unfortunately, they seem to be channeling their disappointment through the confirmation process by engaging in an unprecedented level of obstruction. We spent all this week when the Senate could do no other business on the executive calendar than to confirm three nominees--three nominees of about 500 that need to be appointed by the President. They are there only because the President would want them there. They come and go as Presidents come and go. Many of them have gone. The problem is that their replacements haven't been there. If there is any doubt as to just how unprecedented this drawn-out confirmation process has been, let's look at how it stacks up against the previous administration. We are only a couple of weeks away from August, and Senate Democrats have only allowed us to confirm 52 of President Trump's 216 nominees. That is 24 percent. By the August recess of President Obama's first term, the Senate had confirmed 313 of his 454 nominations, or 69 percent. So we start out with an incredibly slow start, where previous administrations--both the Bush administration and the Obama administration--by the end of the first week, or often by the end of the first day, had most of their Cabinet confirmed. Getting a Cabinet confirmed is a process that took every minute of time that the Senate rules could possibly be stretched to allow. Then, we look at nominations. The President, as I said, has nominated 216 people. Less than one out of four of them have been confirmed. In President Obama's term, even though he had more nominees by this time, he had a lot more confirmations. The Senate confirmed 69 percent of the Obama nominees. There are currently more than 150 nominations waiting for confirmation, many of them are already out of committee. They are ready to come to the floor, but Senate Democrats have caused this backlog by using every procedural tactic to needlessly delay nominees. But, when they delay the nominees, they also delay our ability to get to the other work. So there are two questions here. Are you going to let the President take over the government, which the Constitution and the Senate have been an active part of? Are you going to get the other work done? If you don't let the President take over the government, how do you effectively get the other work done? It is really a plan that works really well if what you want to do is slow down any changes of where the government was on January 20. A Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this week said: Democratic obstruction against nominees is nearly total, most notably including a demand for cloture filings for every nominee--no matter how minor the position. This means a two-day waiting period, and then another 30 hours of debate. The 30-hour rule means Mr. Trump might not be able to fill all of those 400 positions in four years. In fact, at the rate we are going, it will take more than 11 years to fill all the jobs that the President is supposed to be able to fill. I guess that would put us in the third term of the Trump Presidency before he ever got every job filled the first time, which the President is expected to fill under the laws that have been there, most of them for a long time. The Wall Street Journal editorial talks about these difficult terms, like cloture. What does that mean? That means that you have to get a vote to move forward with the nomination--normally, not done where nominations are concerned. There is a rule that allows you to have vigorous debate on any nominee who really is a problem, but that rule has clearly been abused. Now the cloture vote only takes 51 votes. This is no odd Senate majority or anything like that. A majority of the Senators can vote to move forward with the nominee. But then, if you will not consent to waive any of the other rules, you have to wait 2 days before you can get to that. You can't do anything else during those 2 days. Then you have to have 30 hours of debate. That has happened over and over. As a matter of fact, this happened 30 times. That sounded like about 5 days to me, certainly 3\1/2\ days. That whole process has happened 30 times, only to have many of these nominees get 90 or more votes, to have no debate on the floor about the nominee for whom you are supposed to be insisting on 30 hours of debate and to come to the floor and talk about whatever else you want to talk about. But if you go back and view the tape on whatever has happened during these confirmations, you will find very little discussion of the 30 times that 30 hours of debate was supposedly required before we could get to a final vote. Then, often, in the final vote, in a bipartisan effort to find nominees who are willing to serve, they get more than 90 votes. That just has never happened before. By the first August recess in his administration, President Obama only had eight cloture votes. So what has happened here 30 times under President Trump happened 8 times under President Obama. Three percent of the nominees confirmed under President Obama had a cloture vote between swearing in and August, but 60 percent of the nominees from President Trump have had a cloture vote, but about the same amount of real debate. If we look back at what happened in 2009, the hours of actual debate on nominees were about the same, but the use of the maximum abuse of the rules is different. Let me say this. The rules of the Senate were designed to protect the minority, and that is a good thing. This is a unique body in a democratic country, where the minority has been traditionally protected, and that protection lasts until the minority begins to abuse it. There will be a point here pretty quickly where I think Senators are going to have to wonder if this rule is any longer a rule that should be sustained. We cannot continue to do what we are doing. We don't have 11 years and 4 months to confirm the Trump nominees. Nobody would want the President to have--well, maybe not anybody--an 11-year and 4-month term. But our friends on the other side are acting like that is how long he has to get just this rudimentary part of this job done that largely should have been done in the first 6 months. Only 10 percent of the President's nominees' confirmations have been done by a voice vote. That is another alternative--just bring the nominee, nobody objects to waiving the rules, and you have a voice vote. Ten percent of President Trump's confirmations have been done by voice vote while more than 90 percent of President Obama's confirmations were done by a voice vote. So we have the same percentages there, just totally turned around--10 percent for Trump and 90 percent for President Obama. The contrast is striking. It is not just simply math. It is, again, about the key positions of government that aren't filled. As a member of the Intelligence Committee, I hear all the time that our country faces more threats from more directions than at any time in our history. But we have only been allowed by this strung-out process, insisted on by Senate Democrats, to confirm 6 of the President's 22 nominees for the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense has 22 nominees already made, and only 6 of them are over there doing the jobs, of which the President says: Here are the 22 people I would like to have, and there will be more names to follow. The positions that haven't been confirmed are the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the next job in the Defense Department and the principal deputy under the Secretary of Defense; and the Assistant Secretary of Defense. I don't know about everybody else. I was a little confused by how long these titles are. But if you look at what each of these people do, these are critical to the mission of defending the country and they haven't been filled. These are positions that need to be filled. The President continues to work to improve the safety of our communities and enforce our Nation's laws. We have seen obstruction when it comes to the Justice Department and the 19 people who have been willing to serve--all of whom I think are out of committee or about to be out of committee. If one of them is out of committee, that would be enough. But the President has nominated 19 people to fill these vacancies, and only 3 nominees have been confirmed. Two of the nominees who have been reported out of the committee received votes of 20 to 0 and 19 to 1. We would think that is somebody who could come to the floor with a likely voice vote. My bet is that when they do get voted on, 98 Senators will vote for them. But if we continue to do what we are doing now, only 2 days after a cloture vote, 2 days after the vote, and then almost a day and a half of debate after that, it is a disservice to the people that elected us to do these jobs and even a greater disservice to the people who elected the President to do his job. Once again, these are key positions in Justice--the Solicitor General of the United States, the principal person who argues in court for the United States of America--and it is the middle of July. My colleagues from across the aisle have clearly decided that it is in their best political interests to stand in the way of the President's nominees, but, maybe, more importantly, to stand in the way of the Senate's ability to get its job done. When I talked to Missourians, they want to know what we are doing and why we can't get the work done that they sent us here to do. They also want to know why we can't let the President do the job he was sent here to do. We need to be working on the failures of the current healthcare system, how we make college more affordable, and what we can do to improve our infrastructure. Those are things we need to get to, and we need to allow the President to put his government in place for that to happen. He was sworn in 7 months ago. He has every right to put the government in place. It is time for our friends across the aisle to stop grandstanding, to stop standing in the way. It is time to stop debating the Presidential election, and it is time to start debating the issues of how to run the government and to let the President put his people in those jobs so that process can begin. Mr. President, I see my friend from Wisconsin is here. I will conclude my remarks.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, since the current healthcare bill--the bill usually called ObamaCare--passed, every year Missouri families have had to worry about whether their healthcare plans would be canceled, whether their options and access would be taken away, whether they could have the same doctors next year that they have this year, whether they could go to the same hospital next year that they could go to this year, whether their premiums would be going up, but if they were worried about whether their premiums were going to be going up, that was a worry that everybody else in every State had because premiums went up everywhere. In fact, this situation has gotten so bad that in one-third of America's counties today, only one company in one-third of the counties today will even offer insurance. So the options are to buy from one company or to pay the penalty because your only choice is that one company. That one company gets to file a rate that the State regulator gets to agree to, if the one company is going to stay. In fact, I think this week the State of Iowa that has only one company providing individual insurance for the whole State, that one company said they would stay again next year, and then they filed an increase of over 40 percent on those policies for next year. In Missouri, where I live, 25 counties will not have a provider next year, and it could be higher than that. One company has already said they will not be there next year. Twenty-five of the counties they sold policies in only had one company providing policies. We now know that at least 40 percent of all Missouri counties will not have--I mean, 40 percent of all U.S. counties will not have anybody even willing to offer these plans. This is a significant problem, and it just didn't occur when this President was sworn in or this Congress took over. Premiums in your State, Mr. President, have gone up 123 percent since 2013. In my State, in Missouri, they have gone up 145 percent; in Alabama, 223 percent; in Alaska, 203 percent; in Oklahoma, 201 percent since this plan went into effect, and that was just 2013. This is not 30 years ago. This is 4 years ago. The average increase for American individuals and families for getting policies under ObamaCare is 105 percent. Now, remember, this was the plan that was supposed to ensure that your costs would go down per family at least $2,500. The ``at least $2,500 number'' was close to right, but what was close to right about it is that your plan probably increased at least $2,500 if you had that kind of plan. The status quo just simply will not work. The draft legislation, as it stands right now, preserves access to care for people with preexisting conditions, it strengthens the future of Medicaid, it does not change Medicare in any way, and it gives people more health insurance choices than they otherwise have as States exercise their options under the law. It allows people to stay on their family insurance until they are 26. That, along with preexisting condition coverage, is usually seen as the two most popular things in the law as it stands now. They would still be in the law. Now, Members of both parties--and the reason I say ``as it stands today'' is Members of both parties will have an opportunity to amend this bill. In fact, we will have a vote probably the night before we take the final vote on the bill, where every Member can make amendment after amendment after amendment on this bill. There will be plenty of chances to change this bill on a topic that the Members of the Senate probably know more about, and, by the way, because it is such a big Federal obligation and responsibility, should know more about than virtually anything else we deal with in a level of specificity that is higher than anything else we deal with. Believe me, anybody who wants to read that bill--and I will, you will, and others will, some will not--anybody who wants to read that bill will have plenty of time to read it and plenty of opportunity to amend it, but it will be amended, so we need to be sure we understand the final product might not be exactly what we have before us today. I am going to carefully look at the final legislation. I am going to carefully look at how this addresses problems of Missourians. I think one thing that is absolutely clear is that Missouri families need a more reliable and affordable healthcare system. This bill is an important first step in that direction. The status quo cannot continue to be the status quo. By the way, there were plenty of opportunities over the last 7 years to make the kind of incremental changes that all of our friends on the other side said they would love to make, and they were in charge. We had a bill over here that Senator Collins, I believe, was the principal sponsor of that said: Well, let's change that 30 hour requirement; that if you work 30 hours, you have to have insurance to 40 hours. Now, that is not a very big change, but it is a very big change if you have a 28-hour-a-week job, and the reason that you have that 28-hour-a-week job is the law told your employer, if you hire somebody for 30 hours, you have to provide health insurance for that person. Now, the employers by the way--nobody is better in America today than employers to provide health insurance and there is no better place to get your health insurance than at work, but we have almost forgotten the tragedy of the workplace where because of ObamaCare so many people worked two part-time jobs because the law said you don't have to pay health insurance if they work less than 30 hours. Well, we tried to figure out a way to get more people to work at a full-time job, not a very big change. Our friends on the other side were in control for year after year after year after that bill was introduced. Nobody stepped up and said: Let's do that. Let's make that change. Let's get more people in full-time jobs. These insurance markets were collapsing. I don't think there was any proposal on the other side to do anything about it. One of the difficulties we find ourselves in now is we are trying to save a critically important system--the American healthcare system--while that system is collapsing around us. That means it is not going to look as good as it would have looked if we could have gone back 7 years and done the things you and I wanted to do when we were House Members-- giving more people more chances to buy more policies, having more transparency, being sure, if you didn't pay taxes on insurance you got at work, you also didn't pay taxes on money you spent for insurance if you had to buy it as an individual. There were lots of things that could have been done that were proposed. We can still go back and do that. This is clearly a first step. The Secretary of Health and Human Services has over 1,400 places where that person's two predecessors defined what the law was supposed to mean. So earlier this week, Secretary Tom Price said he was going to look and his staff was going to look at every one of those 1,400-plus places and figure out if there is a way to define the law better so it doesn't have the impact on family economies or family access to healthcare that it currently has. That is an important step too. This first step matters as well. I say to the Presiding Officer, nobody has been a more vigorous advocate of this debate than you have. We have an opportunity to continue this debate over the next several days. I look forward to it, and it will be interesting to try to remove the fact from the fiction when we talk about all the things that supposedly could have happened up until now. The fact is, they didn't happen. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I thank my colleague for yielding. When Senator Coons and I came to the Senate about 6 years ago, it was about the time we formed the Law Enforcement Caucus. Over that 6 years, we have been continually reminded of how those who run toward danger when others run away protect us. They don't know on any given day what they may be dealing with that day, and their family doesn't know either. They are here to protect those who might be the victims of crime. What we saw today was a horrific and cowardly attack at baseball practice--someone who takes a weapon and decides they are going to harm people they don't know for whatever cowardly reason that person had. Of course, we continue to pray for the swift recovery of those who were injured and for the caregivers who are helping them right now. Every day, when I come to the Capitol grounds, the first person I see is almost always a member of the Capitol Police. No matter how late it is when I leave at night, the last person I see is almost always a member of the Capitol Police. They have a hard job to do. They do it with the highest level of professionalism and dedication. Their families see them leave for work at whatever time of the day their assignments have them leaving for work and are hopeful that those they love will come home. That accounts for all of our law enforcement officers all over the country--the law enforcement officers and other first responders--who rush into dangerous situations not knowing what could be there. We were very fortunate today. Our Members of Congress were there-- Members of the House, Members of the Senate--and the people who were volunteering to make that game work the way it needs to work in order to have a bipartisan annual event to look forward to and to use that event to raise money for charity. There were staff who were there, supporting. Fortunately for all of them, Steve Scalise, who is the majority whip in the House, was there, which meant that there were Capitol Police and security people there with him. It is hard to imagine what might have happened if they had not been there. The Alexandria police would have done a great job and gotten there as quickly as they could, but we have these people who are committed to providing for the safety of Members of Congress, people who are visiting the Capitol, and people who are in the area of the Capitol when anything might happen. Over and over again, Senator Coons and I and others have seen the Capitol Police have to step forward. I hope we will all remember to not only be grateful every day for those who are willing to serve but will also continue to pray today for the families of the people who were impacted today--the families who sent their sons and daughters here to be Members of Congress as well as to be staffers in the Congress. The first news they heard this morning was of some senseless attack that appeared to be an attack because people were Members of Congress. No act of violence, no matter how evil or senseless, will ever come close to shaking the foundations of our democracy, but in moments like this, we are always brought back to the important recognition that we are Americans first. That is why our country will always be a beacon of freedom. The things we debate every day are not nearly as big or powerful as the things that unite us every day, and moments like this bring that sense of unity and concern and commitment of maintaining a society that is free and secure and bring a greater appreciation for those who spend all day, every working day, with that as their principal obligation. We owe them a great debt of gratitude. Today, we owe the Capitol Police, followed up by the Alexandria police, because of the countless lives that might have been taken if the Capitol Police had not been there at the instance this cowardly attack started. Once again, Senator Coons and I are reminded of how important it is that the Law Enforcement Caucus really, truly respect those who serve and the families of those who serve. Senator, I am glad to yield back to you for a final comment.

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

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

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am here today to urge support for the act that counters Iran's devastating and destabilizing activities. I am proud to be a cosponsor of the bill. This bill would expand sanctions on individuals who are contributing to Iran's ballistic missile program, supporting international terrorism, or violating the arms embargo against Iran. Iran is one of the key principal state sponsors of terrorism in the world. In fact, the Obama administration said it was the No. 1 sponsor of state terrorism in the world. It is a destabilizing force for its neighbors, and it is a destabilizing force for a more peaceful world. The Iranians provide financial and material support to groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, militias in Iraq, and a host of other terrorist groups. They have threatened to wipe out our closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. They said they would wipe them ``off the map.'' They continue to violate international restrictions by advancing their ballistic missile program. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, when he testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee in February of 2016, said: ``Iran's ballistic missiles are inherently capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction, and Tehran already has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East.'' By one estimate, Iran may have conducted as many as 14 missile tests since the Obama administration's nuclear agreement, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, went into effect. Apparently, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action meant that Iran could take any action it wanted, if you look at what Iran is doing today. They have violated multiple legally binding arms embargoes established by the U.N. Security Council. On a trip to Saudi Arabia in April, Defense Secretary James Mattis noted that Iran continues to violate multiple arms embargoes, saying: ``We see Iranian-supplied missiles being fired by the Houthis into Saudi Arabia.'' I think that, at one point, Secretary Mattis said that anywhere you look in the disrupted Middle East, Iran is there. This action and others directly violate what Iran agreed not to do when they agreed to the behavior that they said would be their future behavior. As to their ongoing support of international terrorist organizations, the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, testified in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in an open hearing on May 11, 2017. Just to double down on what his predecessor said, Director Coats said: ``Iran continues to be the foremost state sponsor of terrorism.'' If Iran is the principal state sponsor of terrorism--the foremost sponsor of state terrorism--certainly, we should take some action. This bill does that. Whether it is action supporting the rebels in Yemen or the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Iran is clearly there and clearly a force for bad, not good. The legislation the Senate is considering this week would go a long way toward holding Iran accountable. The Countering Iran's Destabilizing Activities Act codifies sanctions that are directed at all three categories of illicit activities and behavior that we should condemn from Iran--ballistic missile tests, arms embargo violations, and support of terrorism, as well as Iran's own systemic abuse of human rights in its own country. There is no way to criticize that government without fear of abuse or worse. Specifically, the bill directs the President to impose sanctions on any person who knowingly engages in any activity that materially contributes to the Iranian ballistic missile program activities or to any other program for which a system to deliver weapons of mass destruction is involved or any person who contributes to the transfer of certain arms to or from Iran. The bill also directs the Secretary of State to submit to the appropriate congressional committees a list of people the State Department has determined to be responsible for gross human rights violations against individuals who seek to promote human rights. The bill further provides that the President may block any property these human rights abusers have in the United States. This measure also addresses Iran's continued support for terrorism. Executive order 13224, issued soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, sanctions entities determined to be supporting international terrorism. Let me remind the Presiding Officer that the last two Directors of National Intelligence have both said that the No. 1 supporter of international terrorism is Iran. Several Iran-related entities have already been sanctioned under that order, but not, surprisingly, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This bill makes a finding that that corps is responsible for supporting terrorism and requires that the sanctions of the Executive order that I mentioned be applied. This bill does not violate the nuclear agreement with Iran. As the Obama administration said repeatedly, the nuclear agreement was about providing Iran ``relief from nuclear-related sanctions.'' I may come back to that later, but this nuclear agreement does not require the United States to look the other way as Iran continues to violate international norms on ballistic missile testing and violates the arms embargo. Let me also say that the Iran nuclear agreement was just an agreement between the leaders of the two governments. It isn't a treaty. The President never tried to defend it as a treaty. The Congress didn't approve it as a treaty. It is no more of a binding treaty than anything else that the President on his own would decide they would enter into, hoping that the next President would also agree with their decision. Secretary of State John Kerry, in the final days of his service as Secretary of State said: ``We still have serious differences with the Government of Iran, and will continue to push back on its support of terrorism, disregard for human rights, and destabilizing regional activities.'' This bill delivers the pushback that Secretary of State John Kerry called for. Despite the hopes that the previous administration had for moderation--remember that debate about how, once we entered into this agreement, it would strengthen the forces of moderation in Iran?--Iran has increased its destructive activities since the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Strengthening sanctions on Iran is an appropriate response in Iran's continued aggression. Again, because these sanctions are directed only at actions outside of the nuclear sphere, the legislation in no way violates the letter or spirit of that agreement. The Iran sanctions regime is the best tool we have to hold Iran accountable and one that we should continue to keep at the forefront of our policy. In April, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sent to Congress, as required by the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, the latest certification that Iran is implementing the nuclear agreement. In his message, Secretary Tillerson pointed out that ``Iran remains a leading state sponsor of terror.'' How could we ever have put a leading state sponsor of terror on a path to having a nuclear weapon? All the things we are concerned about in North Korea we have guaranteed in Iran, unless some future President--President Trump or some future President--decides that this is not the direction in which we can continue. Secretary Tillerson also said that President Trump has ordered an interagency review to evaluate whether suspension of sanctions related to Iran, pursuant to the JCPOA agreement, is vital to the national security interests of the United States. He concluded by saying that, when this review is complete, ``the administration looks forward to working with Congress on this issue.'' This is a positive step. That review need not constrain the use of sanctions to hold Iran accountable for its other bad behavior. I would just like to remind everyone that under President Obama's nuclear agreement, Iran has already gained access to more than $100 billion in sanctions relief, some of which is likely to be fueled to terrorists aligned with Iran. Remember the delivery of cash to Iran and where our government said that some of that cash would likely go--what an outrageous thing for us to be a part of. The No. 1 sponsor of terrorism in the world deserves to be sanctioned. Individuals who are part of those activities deserve to be specifically sanctioned. This bill will do that. I urge my colleagues to support the bill and the amendment that was voted on today, and look forward to that action being taken later this week. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I come to the floor today to highlight the importance of travel and tourism in our economy and also to make the point that we are welcoming of people from other countries--and we are welcoming of people in our country, as well--who want to be part, for a short time or a long time, of America. The travel and tourism business is an incredibly important part of the tourism economy. Last month, I, along with my fellow cochairs of the Senate Travel and Tourism Caucus--Senator Amy Klobuchar, Senator Dean Heller, and Senator Brian Schatz--led the Senate in the passage of a resolution recognizing the week of May 7 as National Travel and Tourism Week. There are really good statistics--whether it is Missouri or West Virginia or the country at-large--on this topic. One out of every nine jobs in the United States depends on travel and tourism. It accounts for over 15 million jobs nationwide. International travel to the United States is our single largest export industry. The single largest thing where people bring money into our country is tourism to the United States. It generates a trade surplus of roughly $87 billion. As to that trade surplus with foreign travelers, foreign travelers stay longer, they spend more, and they like us better when they leave--virtually 100 percent of the time--than they did when they got here. Even if they thought they were going to like us a lot, they wind up liking us more. If they questioned whether they were going to like us at all, they almost always wind up on the very positive side of that question. So it is not only a huge economic benefit of $87 billion, but it is also a huge foreign policy benefit--a huge diplomatic benefit. It is just like when students come here and go to school. They have a connection to the United States that is almost always positive. It is so positive that many of them would like to stay, with that bachelor's degree or that engineering certificate and degree, because they have liked what they found when they were here. So $87 billion is the surplus from just international travelers to the United States. But all told, travel and tourism generates nearly $2.3 trillion in annual economic input for our country. In Missouri, it has been estimated that the tourism industry, which is usually right behind agriculture in the list of our top industries, provides more than $15 billion in annual economic impact and directly supports almost 300,000 Missouri jobs. When international tourists come here and spend their money at hotels, restaurants, and shops, they are not only supporting U.S. businesses, but they are contributing to local, State, and Federal tax revenue. We have a great deal to offer when it comes to attracting these international visitors. We also have a lot of things we can do as a Congress to make a difference in how people travel and where they travel. We have a role to play in promoting the United States as a travel destination and in helping our State and local tourism economies be a part of that travel. The Visa Waiver Program is sometimes questioned by some of our colleagues who say anybody can get on a plane in any of these visa waiver countries, and we particularly hear that when something bad has just happened in 1 of those 38 countries--Great Britain, France, or Germany. We hear: Anybody could come here because they don't have to go to the U.S. Embassy and get a visa. Except that is not how it works. That is not how the Visa Waiver Program works at all now. It does enable citizens of the 38 countries that we include to travel here for tourism and business for 90 days or less without the need to obtain a specific visa. By the way, in return, Americans go to those 38 countries without having to go to the Embassy of that country and get a visa and have an interview that allows them to travel there. So that is both ways. Most importantly from our perspective, as to people who are coming here, the program has a lot of security built into it. For all the travelers who come, the Visa Waiver Program is administered by the Department of Homeland Security. It works in consultation with the State Department. Visa waivers use a risk-based, multilayered approach to detect and prevent terrorists, criminals, and other bad actors from traveling here. If you have been in some country lately that we don't think you should have been in, if you have a history of travel back and forth to countries and we have had bad experiences with people who have been in those countries, not only do you not get a waiver but you are in for a much more extensive interview than if we were trying to interview everybody from all of those 38 visa waiver countries who wants to come to the United States. The President announced about 4 months ago that we were going to have a more extensive visa process in countries that need a visa, but that also can be a more extensive visa process in countries that have visa waivers, if someone requires more vetting. If someone does not want to submit to additional vetting, then they don't have to come to the United States of America. Those kinds of questions are easily answered There are comprehensive vetting programs for individuals prior to the time they can get here--as well as when they get here--if they are in that visa waiver structure. So visa waiver works. I think the visa program is working now with more extensive vetting than we have had in the past. The program requires participants to have an electronic passport that has a chip in that passport that makes it virtually impossible to suggest that you are somebody or to try to pretend that you are somebody who you are not. The passport is much more secure than it used to be--both our passports and passports from those countries. In 2015, I worked with a bipartisan group of our colleagues to reform and improve this program and to secure that its robust security protocols would work as intended. We were also able to remove visa waiver eligibility for nationals of participating countries who have visited a country with a terrorism nexus, and for foreigners who participate who are originally from countries that may pose a terrorist threat. There are ways to screen that process that Americans should feel secure about. Frankly, it is a process that is getting better all the time. It is still not absolutely without risk. Travel has some risk. But thousands of people are bringing billions of dollars in tourism revenue to our economy, to see our country, and to pay our taxes. We ought to be sure we are minimizing the risk and maximizing the welcome for people we want to travel here. I also worked with my colleagues twice now to offer a public-private partnership called Brand USA. The United States of America, just a few years ago, was one of the few countries in the world that made no real effort to encourage people in other countries to visit our country. In 2014, Senator Klobuchar and I worked to reauthorize Brand USA through 2020. In a combination of visa waiver fees and private dollars, efforts have been successfully made to encourage people who want to be part of our economy--even for a short period of time, as a tourist. It is estimated that across all markets, each dollar of Brand USA marketing generated more than $30 in visitor spending. Let me repeat: everywhere we spent a dollar of Brand USA--and that is a public-private dollar-- more than $30 came to the United States, it is estimated, because of that. It is important for the Senate to support programs that work. Brand USA is one of those programs. The Visa Waiver Program and many others have significant, positive economic impacts on our country, on individual States, on local communities, and, by the way, on people whose business and travel necessarily take them to other countries. Travel and tourism is one area where we have successfully worked together in a bipartisan manner. I hope we can continue that progress in this Congress. I will keep working with my colleagues to ensure that we have the right policies in place to keep Americans safe, while allowing our travel and tourism industries to continue growing and creating jobs. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, this weekend we will mark the beginning of the Memorial Day remembrances that we do every year. Memorial Day, of course, is on Monday, but many activities will begin even today and tomorrow to honor those who have died in the defense of our country. These men and women had families, they had dreams for the future, and they had their whole lives ahead of them. But they did something extraordinary. I remember that a few years ago I had the opportunity to be at the American cemetery in Normandy. At the end of the tour of that cemetery, the guide had us sit down on a ledge with the English Channel to our back and those 8,000 graves in front of us that we had just looked at and had talked about the sacrifices made. Then he flipped open his computer and, at that exact same spot, on the 20th anniversary of the D-day, General Eisenhower--former President Eisenhower--in 1964 was talking to Walter Cronkite. He said to Walter Cronkite: You know, Walter, my son John graduated from West Point on D-day, and over the last 20 years, I have watched him and his wife raise their family and have the experiences they have had, and, he said, many times I have thought about these young men and the life they didn't get to lead because of what they were asked to do. Particularly, you had the person sitting there 20 years later who ultimately was the person who asked them to do what they were asked to do, and you understand that that is the kind of decision he thought about. It is the kind of sacrifice we should think about as we think about those who didn't get to pursue their dreams and didn't get to see the family they had grown up with or have the family they would have liked to have had because they laid down their lives so that we could take care of our families, so that we could realize our dreams, so that we could enjoy the freedoms that our Nation is truly blessed with and that make us truly extraordinary in our belief and our defense of freedom, not only for ourselves but for people everywhere. We are grateful for all that these people have done, and this is a time of year that we particularly set aside to honor those fallen heroes--the soldiers, the sailors, the airmen, the marines, the people in the National Guard and the Coast Guard and the Reserve--called up and losing their lives in that cause. Also, it is good for us to remember those who served and who were willing to make that sacrifice, if necessary, and often have their own burdens they carry from their service. Maybe that burden was just simply losing those years when others were already at a civilian job that they would only be able to go to later. I am honored to represent nearly 500,000 Missouri veterans. As a member of the bipartisan Congressional Veterans Jobs Caucus, I am committed to helping our veterans find good-paying jobs as civilians. We took an important step in that direction recently when President Trump signed the Honoring Investment in Recruiting and Employing American Military Veterans Act, or the HIRE Vets Act. I believe it may have been the first bill the Senate passed. I was pleased to be the principal sponsor of that bill, and it was the underlying bill on the continuing resolution that funded the government on April 17, and so it became law. It addresses the fact that transferring from military to civilian life represents a number of challenges. It represents challenges for our servicemembers, and that transfer can be a difficult personal decision to make, but it is also difficult to navigate the civilian employment market and to find out who is recognizing the skills and the lessons learned by veterans and who may not be quite at the forefront of that. The HIRE Vets Act helps to facilitate that transition by providing veterans more information on employers that offer benefits and opportunities geared toward hiring veterans. Many employers say they are veteran friendly, and many employers are veteran friendly, but there has really been no standard that anyone could look at to determine whether that was true or not--no standard for what employers aspire to do at their workplace or no standard that future veterans and employees can seek out. This would be much like a LEED standard on energy efficiency. If you have that standard on your building or at your workplace, people know exactly what that means. This bill asks the Department of Labor to establish a similar kind of standard for those who are the best, for those who are nearly as good, and for those who are almost as good as them to see what people are doing--a tiered recognition of employers to see what they are doing to welcome, encourage, recognize, and promote veterans. Some of the criteria that could go into that evaluation would include the percentage of new hires at your company who are veterans, the percentage of the overall workforce that is made up of veterans, what type of training and leadership activities are made available that are designed to maximize what a veteran uniquely has learned as a veteran, and what other benefits and resources are offered--things such as tuition assistance, things that encourage veterans to go ahead and get one other category of training or more. Creating a national standard will help veterans narrow down their employment options and focus their job search efforts on the companies that recognize the value of their military service and what that value will bring to their new workplace, and also companies that will provide a long-term career path where those skills are used and appreciated. So this is a step in the right direction. I have talked to the Secretary of Labor just this week, who said they intend to have this plan up and running by the end of this year, quicker than they were required to do but certainly not quicker than we hoped they would be able to do. So this is going to be a priority at the office of the Secretary of Labor, as veterans should be a priority for our society. Today, we have the most powerful military in the world, but we really need to recognize--and I think we do recognize--that behind that military stands supporting families. Families are the backbone of the military today. They provide the kind of support that servicemembers need. They provide the encouragement for the difficult challenges of going from one post to another and one job to another. I think there are ways we can recognize those families and what they do in a better way. I was able this year again to introduce the Military Family Stability Act. Military families have changed over the years. Our military stays in service longer. The skill levels they acquire are more valuable than might have been the case in the past. As the military gets more technical, having invested the time and training on someone in service is a more significant investment than it may have been at another time. Our policies that affect military families haven't kept pace with our investment in people who are serving. According to a study by the Military Officers Association of America, 90 percent of military spouses who are women are either unemployed or underemployed. More than half of those people cite concerns about their spouse's service as a deterrent to their prospective employers: having to leave quickly without notice, not getting the ability to transfer from one State to another, or when their training or licensing has happened in the State they were living in. Too often, military spouses have to end up sacrificing their own career. I think, in any case, we would understand there is some sacrifice here when you are moving from place to place, but there doesn't need to be a needless sacrifice. So the Military Family Stability Act would allow families to address a problem. I consistently hear from military spouses and people serving in the military who talk about the challenges their spouses face in Missouri and across the Nation. An ill-timed move takes a child needlessly out of school a month early or makes a child start a school year a month late or prevents a husband or wife from being able to commit to a 9-month teaching contract or start a graduate program on time because the move they had anticipated happening is delayed. I have had people come and testify on exactly those two specific things and others that made a big difference in their family and their family's enthusiasm about the service they were jointly giving to the country. For many families, if you make that move early, the family has to absorb the move. I think there is a better way to do this. I think we can increase stability in military families. This bill enables the servicemember or family to either move early or remain at their current duty station for up to 6 months while the spouse or the serving parent begins a new assignment. Now, for that to happen--the spouse moving early to the new assignment--the servicemember moving early or staying a little bit later has to absorb their single serviceperson expenses for staying. But as to the much more significant expenses, the family goes at a reasonable time when it is better for the family to go. I am proud that this bill has garnered widespread support from numerous military family and veteran service organizations, including the National Military Family Association, the Military Officers Association of America, and others. I am also pleased that at this moment, as we reintroduce the bill, Senator Gillibrand and I, Secretary Mattis--a former marine and decorated General, one of our most distinguished officers, who has seen the impact on families as he served--staff members at the Department of Defense, Senator McCain, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and his staff have been working with us to iron out the details on a bill that they all support and agree will help our military men and women and their families. So the HIRE Vets Act and the Military Family Stability Act are bipartisan. They are commonsense measures that really get us closer to our goal of ensuring that we provide the support for servicemembers and veterans who have defended us. We will also continue our oversight on the Veterans' Administration to ensure that those who have served receive more choices and that their healthcare benefits and other benefits they have earned are benefits that they will receive. There is really no reason they can't receive many of those benefits where they would prefer to go as opposed to where the government has previously thought were the only options. Veterans' choice is important. They chose to serve. We can now give them more choice than we have in the past to decide what works for them and their families. So as we approach Memorial Day, I know that all the Members of the Senate are appreciative of those who served and the families who served alongside them. I look forward not only to honoring veterans between now and next Monday but between next Monday and a year from next Monday, continuing to do those things we can to be sure that those who serve and those who have served are fully appreciated for their service. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to follow the comments made by the President pro tempore of the Senate--the Senator from Utah--talking about problems that people have and problems that grow every day with their future look at healthcare and what it may mean for their families. This is a top-of-the-mind issue for families in Utah, or Missouri, where I am from, or Montana, where the Presiding Officer is from, or Massachusetts. Anywhere in the country, anyone who is looking at this system and hoping to have a system they could rely on is finding that it is just not working. This is a plan that clearly has failed. It was a plan that gave all kinds of assurances, virtually none of which have been kept. In our State today, we got some bad news in Missouri about what that health insurance exchange looks like next year. Blue Cross Blue Shield serves 30 counties in our State. Another Blue Cross-related group, Anthem, serves the rest of the State. But today, Blue Cross Blue Shield announced that it is going to pull out of the exchanges next year. Some 31,000 people in 25 counties around Kansas City will have no insurer at this moment who is willing to sell policies on the individual exchange. This is devastating news for those families--maybe they are already on their second or third insurance company in as many years--trying to wade through yet another individual plan that tells them what might or might not be covered. This is certainly a long way from the assurances that you would be able to keep your plan and you would be able to continue to see the doctors you like. It seems a long way from that pledge. Remember that pledge? If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. It didn't turn out to be that way at all. In fact, in the five other counties that Blue Cross is leaving in our State--and I don't say this with any disrespect toward that nonprofit company--they are losing money. This system won't work, and that is why we are down from multiple companies willing to offer insurance in all kinds of counties around the country to now States, like Iowa, having no insurance company at all that will offer an individual policy anywhere. In the five metropolitan counties in the Kansas area, they have three competitors this year in those five counties. Humana announced in February that they would be leaving next year. Blue Cross announced today that they would be leaving. So 5 metropolitan counties at this moment, at least, have only one company that will even offer a policy, and 25 counties have no company that will offer a policy based on that announcement. If you only have one choice, do you really have any choices at all? Under this plan, unless we go in a very different direction, the choice is to buy the policy or pay the penalty. This exchange that was promised where the average family would see their insurance costs go down $2,500 a year--this is as far from that promise as you could possibly get. Not only has your policy likely gone up more than $2,500, but your deductible has gone up in even higher percentages than that. Certainly, 30 percent of the counties in America right now only have one company that will offer insurance. As I said earlier, our neighboring State to the north, Iowa, has no company that will offer insurance to anybody on the individual market. What kind of system is that? In my State, we have 114 counties and the city of St. Louis in addition to those 114 counties. At this moment, 97 of them have only one company that will offer insurance. Unless things change dramatically, in January, 25 of those 97 will have no company that will offer insurance. Now, 77 counties--unless the one company offering insurance decides it can't participate in that market either--would have only one choice. I think it is likely that those 77 counties will see some change in whether they have one choice or no choice. Last week, I came to the floor to talk about Missourians who have problems and who are seeing their out-of-pocket costs skyrocket under this. Let me share another story about one of the several people we heard from this week. Holly is a cancer survivor. She lives in Southeast Missouri. She was forced again this year to switch insurance policies when the insurance company she had left the individual exchange, the ObamaCare exchange. That left Holly with only one choice. Again, people in the vast majority of our counties have the same option--they have one option. Holly had one option, and that carrier didn't cover any of her four cancer doctors. Now, remember, this is a cancer survivor who literally has been in a fight for her life, and now she can't get a policy that allows her to see the doctors in whom, in that fight for her life, she developed confidence. So that means she can't see her oncologist under any policy she can get. She can't see the radiation oncologist, the surgical oncologist, and the reconstructive surgeon. None of those people are now available to her. This is in a world where Holly, you, me--all of us were told: If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Well, she liked all four of her doctors, and she can't keep any of those doctors. We were told: If you like your policy, you can keep your policy. If it weren't so serious, looking back at that promise, it would be like it was some cruel joke that somebody is coming up with that couldn't have been further from the truth. When you are battling cancer and you lose access to the doctors you know and trust, no reasonable person can argue to you that the system we have is working. The status quo is unacceptable. It is clearly unsustainable. There is a lot of discussion about what kind of change we are going to have. The ``why'' here is more important than the ``how.'' The ``why'' here is the most important part of this debate because the reason we have to change is that the system we have is absolutely not working. Americans like Holly and all the families in the Kansas City area who are certain to lose this year's coverage next year may or may not have coverage at all. No company besides this one company that left was willing to be there this year. They deserve better. That is why I am going to continue to work with my Senate colleagues to give families more choices to expand their access to the healthcare providers they want and the kind of insurance coverage they would like to have. This plan simply hasn't worked, it isn't working, and it is going to get worse before it gets better. That is why we are debating how to change it, not debating the effort that has totally failed. Now we need to get in and figure out how to stabilize this marketplace and answer those important questions for families all over this country who not only don't have the coverage they want, but they also don't have access to the healthcare they need. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, there is a reason we are talking about healthcare, and we should be talking about healthcare. We should be looking for the gaps and trying to find those gaps. I had a long conversation this morning about people who have disabilities, adults who have disabilities, and the challenges they have always faced in the insurance marketplace. They are people like Dan and Lidia who have a hard time working or are unable to have a full-time job, who may be covered by insurance through their parents until they are too old, or they may not be covered because their parents aren't covered. But normally, if that has been the case, where you were able to share whatever coverage your parents had--and certainly this is an area we should work on, how we deal with those who are disadvantaged. On the Medicaid front, our goal should be to look at the House bill and make it better. The people who were added to Medicaid under President Obama's healthcare plan, decided by the States--the very group who my friend from Maine said shouldn't be making these kinds of decisions--the States made these decisions because it was left to them to make them. And they weren't children and they weren't old people; they were single adults who traditionally had not been covered by Medicaid. We can talk all we want to about how these cuts are going to affect children and old people, but that is not who would be affected. There is a debate the States have already had. Some States added single adults for the first time, and others didn't. Many States believe they can make those decisions better in their own States, to have a healthcare home where somebody has a doctor they could go to. Having coverage doesn't matter if you can't get access to healthcare. Our debate here should be about access to healthcare, and it should be about people who, because of ObamaCare, are having problems with access to healthcare. President Obama promised that the new plan would bend the cost curve. He said it would bend the cost curve and bring healthcare costs down. I think the topic he was discussing was healthcare coverage costs coming down by $2,500 for the typical family. The cost curve got bent all right, but it didn't get bent down, it got bent up. In our State, just last year in Missouri, 25 percent was the average increase from one year to the next. The individual policies in many of our counties--84 percent have only one insurance company that is willing to offer a plan. That should tell us something right there about whether the exchange idea worked, the way it was put together. It is clearly not working. We can continue to move forward and act as though that doesn't matter, but it matters a lot. We have 114 counties and the city of St. Louis, and our constitution functions as if it were a county. One- hundred and fifteen of those entities, the county-like entities--97 of them have only 1 company willing to offer insurance. In all of them, the average increase statewide was 25 percent 1 year over the next, and that is just 1 year, and it is not even next year. Every estimate says that those individual policies will go up even more next year than they did last year. We can continue to act as though this system is working and not do anything about it, or we can do something about it. When ObamaCare was implemented, I came to the floor almost every week for the first year to share story after story of people and families who were affected, who couldn't have the kind of healthcare or the kind of coverage--either one--they had before, and I could share those same stories now. I will share a couple of them today. They haven't stopped coming in. Many people have just decided: We are never going to have the doctors we used to have. We are never going to have the insurance policy we used to have. The government has failed us. They had a policy on which they were paying maybe a third of what they are paying now and which had higher coverage. But after a while, you quit complaining and understand that your government has actually come up with a system that--for your family, at least--was worse than the system they had. We talk about cancellation notices being sent out by the thousands. Thousands of families and thousands of individuals got cancellation notices. Last year President Clinton, while campaigning for his wife for President, said: What a crazy system. The costs keep going up, and the coverage keeps going down. There is clearly something wrong here. We need to do something about it. We should be working together to do something about it. When I am home and talking to people about this or when people contact our office about this, they just continue to say over and over again that this has gotten worse. Now, we get some calls--and I am glad to get them--where people say: We want to be sure that you understand what happens to individuals like the two people my friend from Maine mentioned. And we are looking for ways to be sure they don't get left out. But let me tell you some of the people who have been left out. Thomas and Kathy, a married couple from Kansas City, told me that their out-of-pocket costs have jumped from $2,700 in 2014--that was the first year of this healthcare plan--to $5,000 in 2017. In addition, their copays have increased--in their case, they appear to be lucky--by only 20 or 30 percent. They are not by themselves. Tony, an insurance broker in Northwest Missouri, recently told me about a client who was shopping for coverage. The client realized that the only plan she could afford would force her to spend, for herself, almost $5,000 a year in insurance premiums on top of having another $5,000 deductible before that insurance she would be paying for every month would do any good. She said she would be spending almost $10,000 without receiving anything, and it made absolutely no sense. Well, her insurance broker couldn't help but agreed with her that in her case it didn't make much sense, and I think all of us can see why it might not. Yesterday at a press event here in the Capitol, I mentioned a farmer who called and said she had a $12,000 deductible for her family and she was paying $16,000 in annual premiums. So in her case, she could pay $28,000 before she had any coverage at all, and that $28,000 was money--she could be paying $12,000 of it just for access to see a doctor because her insurance company didn't help with that. One final story I would like to share is from Rob, a small business owner in St. Joseph who pays half of his employees' medical, and his costs keep going up. His agent walks in every year, he told me, and says: Well, this year it went up 9 percent. He said: That might have been acceptable, except it also went up 9 percent last year and 11 percent the year before that, and it was 9 percent the year before that. Many of the losses in the individual market are being shifted to try to make the insurance market make up for what is happening on the individual side. Year over year, we see premium increases, skyrocketing deductibles, and higher out-of-pocket costs. That is the status quo under what we have now, and it is unacceptable. That is why Republicans have made clear that we are going to move forward to solutions that will address some of the major issues in our healthcare system and look for ways to bring down costs and expand access to quality, affordable coverage, but more importantly, quality, affordable care. I urge my colleagues to work with us and join in this effort to help us find solutions to be sure we don't leave people out who shouldn't be left out but that we also make access to healthcare more possible for more families and more individuals than it is today. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to engage in a colloquy with my colleagues on the floor to talk about Police Week.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I thank Senator Coons. The pieces of legislation to support officers and their families are wide ranging, even legislation to be voted out of the Judiciary Committee today. It was exactly 1 year ago today that President Obama signed the Fallen Heroes Flag Act into law. This is a bill that I introduced along with my colleague that provides that American flags be flown over the U.S. Capitol and given to the families of firefighters, law enforcement officers, and other first responders who lose their lives in the line of duty. As Senator Klobuchar so well pointed out, these are the people who run to danger when the rest of us are able to head the other way. We are grateful to them and grateful for them. Mr. President, I think we will yield the floor with great appreciation for the law enforcement officers who are being recognized this week. There are still too many names that Senator Grassley mentioned who will be added to the over 20,000 officers who have lost their lives in the line of duty since the country was founded.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, before we turn to Senator Cornyn, I want to mention his leadership in the National Criminal Justice Commission Act and also thank Senator Grassley for moving the Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act out of his committee this week. Those are two of the things we clearly can do that will make a difference to people in law enforcement and their families, and there has been no more strident advocate of families or those who serve in law enforcement than the Senator from Texas, Mr. Cornyn.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, during this week, all across the country, people are honoring the men and women who serve as law enforcement officials. Clearly, they deserve and receive recognition every day for what they do, but this is an incredibly difficult job. Last night, I was with some of our officers from Missouri and with family members, and I said: A lot of times, it is easier for you to walk out the door than it is for your family to see you walk out the door, not knowing what you are going to face every day. When Senator Coons and I came to the Senate 7 years ago, we created and cochaired the Senate Law Enforcement Caucus. It is a privilege to be part of that and also to speak today on behalf of those who serve us. This is a week in which we take a moment to recognize the law enforcement officers who have lost their lives in the line of duty. Today, I want to pay tribute to three Missouri law enforcement officers who were killed in the line of duty this past year. Master Sergeant Carl T. Cosper of the Barry County Sheriff's Office was one of those, as were Officer Blake Curtis Snyder of the St. Louis County Police Department and Deputy Sheriff Paul Allen Clark of the St. Francois County Sheriff's Office. Just last month, Master Sergeant Cosper was killed in a vehicle collision while responding to a domestic disturbance call. He had served the Barry County Sheriff's Office for 10 years before that fatal accident. In October of 2016, Officer Blake Snyder was shot and killed while responding to a disturbance. He had served the St. Louis County Police Department for 4 years. He is survived by his wife and their 2-year-old son. I had a chance last night to visit with his wife again. Elizabeth and her brother Justin, also a police officer in St. Louis County, were here earlier this year to talk about police and families and what we need to do to really express our understanding of what those families go through, their strength and their reliance, both humbling and inspiring, and I am sure they are passing along those very values to Blake's 2-year-old son. In July of 2016, Deputy Sheriff Paul Clark died from complications related to injuries he sustained in October of 2015 when he was intentionally struck by a stolen vehicle near Desloge, MO. Deputy Clark had served the St. Francois County Sheriff's Department for 13 years and had previously served with the Park Hills Police Department for 5 years. He is survived by his wife, two children, and by their grandchildren. All of these individuals are heroes, and our prayers remain with their families. Let me now turn to Senator Coons. As I said earlier, he and I founded the Law Enforcement Caucus when we came to the Senate. We try on a regular basis to have opportunities to talk about policing practices, family challenges, and mental health issues that police deal with every day. I turn to Senator Coons for some comments.