Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I appreciate my good friend's comments on this but also his commitment to seeing that we make this happen. As he mentioned, this is a bipartisan effort, but it is an effort that had about a 10-year lag, and we are doing our best to dramatically catch up with what is really an important time in healthcare research.

Mr. BLUNT

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to talk today about a topic that I think is getting more attention now than it has gotten for some time--but still not the attention it deserves--and that is to talk a little bit in May, which is Mental Health Month, about mental health. I was on the floor of the Senate the last day of October 2013, the 50th anniversary of the last bill that President Kennedy signed into law, which was the Community Mental Health Act. Through the Community Mental Health Act, you saw the facilities that were about to be closed, but the anticipated alternatives, in so many ways, never really developed. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, approximately one in five adults experiences mental illness in a given year, and one in five young people between the ages of 13 and 18 will experience severe mental illness sometime during their lifetime. The National Institutes of Health says that one in four adult Americans has a diagnosable, and almost always treatable, mental health disorder, a mental behavioral health issue, and that one in nine adult Americans has behavioral health illness that impacts how they live every single day. So whether it is the statistic that relates to one in four or one in five or one in nine, this is an issue that affects the lives of lots of people. Half of the children in that age group, 13 to 18, rarely get the help they need, and even fewer adults do. About 40 percent of adults who have behavioral health issues receive the treatment they need for that issue. I think we are beginning to make great strides on this. Certainly, the discussion has changed. The opportunity to treat mental health like all other health has changed. In the 113th Congress, just a few years ago, Senator Stabenow from Michigan and I worked to get a bill passed; it was called the Excellence in Mental Health Act, and we now have eight States that have projects going on. In those eight States--in significant areas of all of those States--behavioral health is being treated like all other health. The idea is really built on the federally qualified health centers idea, the reimbursement model, where anybody can go, and if you are covered by a government program, that is taken into consideration. If you are covered by private insurance, that is taken into consideration. If you are paying cash, there is a significant and rapidly declining amount of cash that you have to pay because your income gets smaller. But everybody in these States would have access to mental health care, just as they currently have access to other kinds of healthcare. At the community mental health centers that meet 24/7 standards, that are available, that have the staffing needs, and in other places that have the staff the law requires and the access the law requires, people can go to those facilities, and those providers will know they are going to be reimbursed for treating mental health like all other health. I am certainly glad that my State of Missouri is one of the eight pilot States in that demonstration program. In our State, we have been--I think by any standard--forward-leaning on this issue for a long time, but not nearly as forward-leaning as we should be or as people who look at the pervasive character of behavioral health issues understand we should be. When we passed the bill a couple of years ago, we really weren't sure how much interest we would get from States. There was some sense that, well, eight States would be all the States that would even want to do this, if every State that wanted to apply and could go through the application process did so. But, in fact, everybody in the mental health world was encouraged to see 24 States, which represented half of the population in the country, apply to be part of that pilot program-- certainly, leading by example here, figuring out what happens. Frankly, if you treat behavioral health like all other health, I think what many of these States will find--and they may all find--is that the other health costs are much more easily dealt with and, obviously, that not only is treating behavioral health like all other health the right thing to do, but it actually may save money to spend this money. People who have other health problems but who are seeing their doctor because their behavioral health issue is under control may be seeing two doctors. They are taking the medicine they need for behavioral health--if they need medicine for that--but because they are eating better, sleeping better, feeling better about themselves, they are also taking the medicine and getting to the appointments for any other health issue they have. Early studies indicate that, actually, you save money by doing the right thing and understanding that mental health isn't a topic we don't talk about, but mental health is just another health issue we need to deal with. We need to be sure that we have providers going forward. We don't have enough doctors in Missouri--or in other States--who are able to treat the increasing number of people who seek treatment. And as doctors retire in these fields, we are going to have an even greater shortage if we don't do something to encourage people to go into this field. There is a particular shortage in care providers who deal with children. Children and youth who are in need of mental health services and who don't receive them run a greater risk of all kinds of other problems, including dropping out of school, not doing well in school, ending up in the criminal justice system--things that needlessly happen because we haven't stepped forward and viewed their behavioral health problem as we would if they had some other problems. I was glad Senator Reed from Rhode Island and I were recently able to reintroduce a bill called the Ensuring Children's Access to Specialty Care Act. Pediatric medicine doesn't pay as well as other medicine for lots of reasons. One is that children don't have a lot of their own money to pay with, and often their parents don't have it either. This bill that Senator Reed and I introduced would allow physicians who want to specialize in, among other things, child and adolescent psychiatry to be eligible for the National Health Service Corps student loan repayment program. That program is generally not available now to doctors who go on and specialize on the theory that if you specialize, you are going to have more income than the general practice doctor might have. Those programs have always been focused on the general practice doctor, but if you specialize in children's health--whether it is, frankly, psychiatry or any other area of children's health--you are much less likely to financially benefit from deciding to do that. So this would allow those doctors to pursue that program as part of how they help get their loans paid back. Whether it is physical or behavioral health, children have a unique set of health needs and often a lack of ability on their own to do what needs to be done. Medical residents who practice pediatric medicine require additional training. One of the barriers they cite for not getting that additional training is that they are going to have to have these additional student loans. Hopefully, we can allow ways for them to get into programs that other doctors get into, to see that they continue to be encouraged to be part of pediatric medicine and pediatric specialties. Also, we are looking at another bill, the Advancing Care for Exceptional Kids Act, commonly referred to as ACE Kids. What ACE Kids does is treat kids who have serious medical problems as exactly that-- to have a way to look at health needs and medically complex kids whom you wouldn't look at otherwise, seeing that these particular patients don't have to go through all kinds of barriers to find a doctor, fee for service. Medically complex kids really need help, and I think we could easily design a new and different way to deal with them. Finally, talking about kids, I want to say one other thing, and that is just to mention that this particular week is Teacher Appreciation Week. I was a teacher after I got out of college, before I had a chance later to be a university president. I think teachers are always inclined to be teachers and try to tell the stories we need to hear. But when we are talking about mental health and teachers, healthcare, mental health, first aid are things that don't allow teachers to become child psychiatrists or mental health professionals but do allow teachers, as they are watching the students whom they get to know so well, to identify what students need help and what students don't. Often teachers get the first chance outside the child's home to see that they are clearly challenged or may be challenged in ways that are easily dealt with, if they are dealt with, and are really troublesome if they are not dealt with at all. So while we celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week at the very end of school and Mental Health Month, I hope we commit ourselves to look at these mental health issues for what they are. They are health issues. They need to be talked about. The right thing to do is to deal with them. I think we are seeing new and better things happen there, but we are not nearly where we should be yet. As I said earlier, when Senator Stabenow and I could go to the Floor on the 50th anniversary of the last bill President Kennedy signed and 50 years later talk about how few of the goals set in that bill have been met in five decades by society, we really have a lot of catching up to do. I believe and hope we are catching up, and I hope this is a month where people really think about telemedicine, contacts, opportunities, and excellence in mental health in ways we haven't before. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I will speak in a few minutes about the business before the Senate today, but first I wish to speak about what is happening at the White House today. President Trump is expected to sign an Executive order to protect religious freedom. Many times during the last year, the President has talked about his commitment and our commitment as a nation to religious freedom, but I expect that today he will lay down, specifically, by Executive order the policy of this administration to protect and to vigorously promote religious liberty--not to vigorously promote religion but to vigorously promote religious liberty. Reports are that the President will tell the IRS that we can't challenge churches and what they say, as well as challenge their not- for-profit status, simply because of what that pastor or that rabbi or that imam believes in the place where they deliver their message and how they live out their faith. It also tells Federal agencies to stop forcing religious organizations to pay fines if they don't want to cover certain healthcare items that conflict with their faith views. In fact, just this week, Senator Strange and I sent a letter to the Attorney General after we saw that in the Fifth Circuit the Attorney General's office had said that they want 60 more days for all of these pending cases on this very matter. In the letter that Senator Strange and I sent to our former colleague, the Attorney General, we just pointed out to him that the President repeatedly said, as a candidate for President, that this sort of continued action of taking religious organizations to court that simply want the ability to practice their faith is going to stop, and we hope it stops and we hope it stops now. Lastly, I think this order has the potential to be either more specific or to really instruct the Attorney General to look throughout the agencies of government and issue guidance, so that in all of those agencies, as they go about the work that they do, one of the things they want to be sure they are doing is promoting religious liberty; so that religious organizations that have traditionally or are hoping in the future to be delivery services for adoption, delivery services for addiction, delivery services for other problems that people face, would continue to have the ability to be competing to provide those services. We know this hasn't happened over the last several months. Religious groups that have had contracts for a long time and the availability to provide those services, even when they scored the highest on the scoring of the competitive bids for these contracts, were not given the contracts because they were faith-based. Well, if there is any country in the world that has understood the importance of religious liberty, it has been the United States. Religious freedom is the first freedom in the First Amendment to the Constitution, the first right in the Bill of Rights, and I don't believe that is by accident. No other country in the history of the world ever committed itself to religious freedom as our country did from the very first weeks of the government under the Constitution. No country ever held this as a principled tenet of what they would stand for as a country prior to the United States doing that. We might recall how we come to the place today where the President has to issue an Executive order protecting religious freedom. In 1993, President Clinton signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That act really affirmed that the Federal Government shouldn't infringe on individual religious beliefs unless there was an overriding public purpose to do so. If, in fact, it was found to be necessary to infringe on somebody's religious beliefs because of that overriding public purpose--if there was justification that there was one--then we should really only interfere with it in the least intrusive way and we should do the minimum necessary to meet whatever that greater public need might be. It is unbelievable to me that in recent years, groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor, Christian colleges, or other groups that are traditionally providing services are suddenly finding themselves in court defending who they are and who they hope to be. The order issued today would finally provide that relief in a case like the Little Sisters of the Poor. I looked a few months ago at their stated purpose and it is, for the Little Sisters of the Poor, to receive older people without means, regardless of their faith, and treat them like they were Jesus Christ. Now, that doesn't sound like a group that the Federal Government would have to crack down on. But the Federal Government, in recent years, decided that, in fact, they should force this group to do things that violate its faith principles. There is no possible greater good to be accomplished by that. Hopefully, this Executive order makes it clear today that harassment of religious groups is going to stop and that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act principles are still principles in our country and, more importantly, that the First Amendment is still a founding principle in our country. There is no question in the mind of any American, I think, that the U.S. Government should do everything in its power to defend and protect religious freedom. Whether you are a person of faith or a person of no faith at all, you should be able to pursue those beliefs. When Jefferson was asked in the last year of his Presidency which freedom is most important, he said that the right of conscience is the freedom that we should most vigorously defend--the right to believe what we believe and pursue what we believe. That has been further defined over the years by this: If there are times when that creates a true hazard to others, others have a right to come in and explain that, and the government has a right to see what can be done about that and still maintain in every way possible the essence of belief that people have. So I commend the President for the action that he is reported to be taking later today. I continue to be not only supportive of the President's view that religious freedom is a critical tenet of who we are, but also I look forward to working with his administration as they further put this Executive order into place throughout the agencies of government. Mr. President, I also wish to speak for a few minutes while I am here about the bill before the Senate today. I think the fact that we are moving forward with an update on how we spend our money and a prioritization of how we spend our money is incredibly important. I would have been and would be, if somehow we failed to do our job today, very disappointed if we think that the priorities of a year ago have to be the exact same priorities today. Now, many of them will be the same, but many of them will not. So all of these appropriating committees have worked together, House and Senate, and have come to a process where we will have 12 bills--not debated on the floor as intensively as I would have liked to have seen them debated--that should be our goal for this year--but 12 bills where House Members and Senate Members, Republicans and Democrats, came together and decided what our priorities should be. The subcommittee that I chair--the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee--dollar-wise, after we take Defense off the table, that is the biggest of the committees and, in some ways, it has the most challenging debates as to where we wind up in these areas, but I think we have made good choices that hopefully can be improved on next year, but I am absolutely confident they are better than last year. It is really important for the people we work for to understand that we had to make choices. There is very little difference in the money that will be spent this year and the money that was spent last year, but there is a difference in priorities. I think in the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, we have either eliminated or consolidated in a dramatic way 28 programs so that we could find that money and use it for what we now believe to be a better purpose. One of those better purposes would be an increase for the second year in a row, and the second year in the last 14 years, in health research at the National Institutes of Health. There were 12 years with no increase at all, and now, for 2 back-to-back years, we are trying to get us back to the research buying power we were at 12 years ago. Again, as to the programs that weren't performing, many of them wound up with zero appropriations in both of these last 2 years so that the NIH appropriation could increase. At a time when we are looking at precision medicine, when we are looking at immunotherapy, when we no longer look at cancer as just cancer and throw everything at it we want to throw at it, in fact, we look at the individual cancer, and we are at that moment because we understand now what we didn't understand a decade ago. We can look at the individual cancer and the individual patient and figure out how that patient has a unique potential to fight that cancer in their body. We looked at things that may not be required for people with cancer and other diseases, and if we can figure out which people need this procedure and which people don't, not only do you not pay for the procedure for people who don't need it, but also people don't go through the physical challenge of procedures they don't need. As to Alzheimer's, one of the growing concerns in American families today--right up there now with cancer as one of the things that people worry about most as they look to the future--if we could reduce the onset of Alzheimer's by an average of 5 years, we would be spending almost 50 percent less in 2050 than we will be otherwise. In 2050, spending of tax dollars on Alzheimer's care will overwhelm the budget, but research commitments can do something about that. The Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee bill puts us back, for the school year that begins next fall, where we will be back to year- round Pell. What does that mean? What is year-round Pell as opposed to what we have now? Right now, we have two semesters where you can qualify for the Pell grant. A Pell grant is given based on income and need. If you qualify for a full Pell--I believe, in the Acting President pro tempore's State and, I know, in my State--there is no community college where full Pell doesn't pay for all tuition, all books, all fees. If you are at the level of need where you qualify for the full Pell grant, you have other things you have to worry about to sustain yourself, but paying for school is not one of them. As an adult going back to school and someone paying for your own school with your own effort, if you are the first person in your family to hope to graduate from school, anything that disrupts whatever pattern you are in minimizes the chances to achieve your goal. So if you have things working in the fall and the spring and you can also stay in a summer term, not only do you get done quicker, but you don't disrupt the pattern you found yourself in. For 8 years now we haven't had year-round Pell. This vote we will take today allows that to happen, and it will make a big difference. It will also make a difference when you are in a program where you are being prepared to do a job that is uniquely available or available in your community. It is pretty hard to explain why we can do this and we have ways to pay for it through the fall and spring, but by the summer we just have to take a break. That is not a very easy thing to explain to an employer who has come to the community because you have that training potential in your community. The third major allocation of money that had to come from somewhere else is opioid abuse. This bill will increase by 430 percent our commitment on this issue. It is not because we had 650 million new dollars to spend on opioid abuse. It is because in many places in our country today and in many States in our country, more people die from opioid overdoses than die from car accidents. It is because many families are destroyed by addiction to prescription drugs that leads to other drugs when those prescription drugs can't be available and, frankly, the abuse of prescription drugs, in some cases, where they are available. So we are looking at new ways to deal with pain and looking at new ways to deal with this growing problem. In 2014 and 2015, each year more than 1,000 people in Missouri died of drug overdoses. In my State and most States, a fire department that also has a first responders unit is three times more likely to respond to a drug overdose than the average fire department to a fire. So there is a third area where this bill prioritizes what needs to be done. In the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, title I, charter schools, all those things have a new focus as this bill passes. The mental health initiatives, rural healthcare, and Head Start are all benefited by a reprioritization of what happens here, as are veterans workforce issues and Job Corps issues. I think this bill is far from perfect, but it is better than the way we are spending our money today and better than we were spending our money a year and a half ago. Hopefully, it will not be quite as good as the way we spend our money starting October 1. So we need to get this work done and get started immediately doing the business of setting priorities, making difficult choices, and spending people's money in a way that has a long-term plan to benefit them, their families, and our growing economy. I look forward to that vote later today, and then to have, I would hope--as I know the majority leader hopes--a greater effort this year than ever before to get these bills on the floor and to have them fully debated. The best possible thing would be to pass them one at a time and put them on the President's desk one at a time. But the next best thing is to look at the bills and reach individual conclusions about these individual bills. That is what the bill before us today does, and I urge its passage. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President: This year, Northwest Missouri State University set a record when it became the first Division II school to win the men's basketball and football championships in the same season. It also became the first Division I or II school in the past decade to win titles in both those sports in the same year. Located in Maryville, about one hundred miles north of Kansas City, Northwest Missouri State University was established in 1905. With five NCAA championships already under their belt, Bearcats football began their 2016 season with the goal of adding another title to their great program. Under head Coach Adam Dorrel, they finished their record-setting year with a victory over the University of North Alabama in the brutally cold Division II championship game last December. The Bearcats have now gone 55-2 over four seasons, and their 30 straight victories over the last two years is the longest current win streak in all of NCAA football. But the men's basketball team gave Bearcats fans plenty more to cheer about. After a very successful regular season, the Bearcats entered the Division II tournament with a 29-1 record. And on March 25, they defeated Fairmont State in the NCAA Division II championship game, a first in the program's history. Finishing the year with a near perfect record, Coach Ben McCollum earned his third MIAA Coach of the Year honor. And the Bearcats' guard, Justin Pitts, earned several honors and was named the DII Bulletin Player of the Year. Congratulations to Northwest Missouri State University on a phenomenal year. Fans across the state are excited for another great year as the Bearcats spend the off-season preparing to defend their hard fought championship titles.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I have 7 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the majority and minority leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: committee on armed services The Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, April 27, 2017, at 9:30 a.m. committee on banking, housing, and urban affairs The Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, April 27, 2017, at 10 a.m. to conduct a hearing entitled ``Countering Russia: Further Assessing Options for Sanctions.'' committee on energy and natural resources The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate in order to hold a hearing on Thursday, April 27, 2017, at 10 a.m. in Room 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. committee on health, education, labor, and pensions The Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is authorized to meet in executive session during the session of the Senate on Thursday, April 27, 2017, at 10 a.m. in SD-419. committee on aging The Special Committee on Aging is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, April 27, 2017, in room 430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building beginning at 9:45 a.m. committee on intelligence The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is authorized to meet during the session of the 115th Congress of the U.S. Senate on Thursday, April 27, 2017 from 2 p.m., in room SH-219 of the Senate Hart Office Building. subcommittee on cybersecurity The Subcommittee on Cybersecurity of the Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, April 27, 2017, at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to follow up on the remarks that have just been made by our friend from South Dakota. During his first 100 days in office, President Trump has wasted no time in fulfilling one of his key promises and one of those promises that is hard to appreciate because, if bad things do not happen to you, it is hard to realize they did not happen. Yet there were many bad things in store for the American people and frankly a lot of bad things that have happened through the very kinds of regulations, over the last years, that Senator Rounds was talking about. Over the last 8 years, any time I had been traveling in Missouri, one of the top-of-mind issues with group after group had always been a different and more troublesome and more burdensome recent regulation by the Federal Government. I had heard about healthcare, but often I had heard about healthcare with regard to the irrational regulations that were being put out as part of the bill, and I had heard about taxes. Yet I would say that the No. 1 issue I had heard about for the whole 8 years was that of out-of-control regulators who were clearly also not responsive to anybody and did not need to be. Frankly, in the second 4 years of that Presidency, the regulators were even less responsive than they were in the first 4 years, and I think that is something that happens way too often. I hear from families, farmers, and job creators who tell me that the biggest barrier to job creation and economic growth is exactly what we are hearing about here this morning; that people do not think out the real consequences of the regulations. According to regulations.gov, Federal agencies finalized more than 4,000 new regulations in 2016 alone. That was an average of 11 new regulations a day in the final year of the Obama Presidency. Let's think about that. Every one of those 4,000 regulations was a regulation that the country had lived without for the entire history of the country and that the Obama administration had lived without for 7 years. A number of those regulations had been done so late that we had had a chance to look at them through the Congressional Review Act because they were still available to the new Congress. That is how late they happened. One of them went into effect on January 18, and the Obama administration was over at noon on January 20. They handed down a record-breaking 600 major new regulations that imposed more than $700 billion in costs on our economy. Senator Rounds just mentioned the estimated total annual compliance costs for regulations of $1.9 billion--almost $2 trillion. Imagine. If half of those regulations are either duplicative or unnecessary, talk about a stimulus, if somehow we go back and figure out how to eliminate the half that does not need to be done so one can really focus on the half that needs to be done. I am for every regulation that we absolutely have to have, but I am not for regulations that we do not absolutely have to have. What is worse is that the completely unnecessary aim of these regulations is frankly the amount of effort some of them require. There is a $12.3 billion regulation on efficiency standards for central air conditioners. Now, one has to find a lot of efficiency to find $12.3 billion in savings. That is a lot of efficiency. There is a $4.4 billion regulation that sets standards for ceiling fans. I like ceiling fans as much as the next person, but when you add $4.4 billion to standards, that has to be paid for by somebody just like the $3.6 billion in regulations of the control of commercial vehicle operators. What the regulators so often do not seem to understand is that ultimately the consumers have to pay for the costs of these regulations. The cost of regulations is not really a reflection of the government's cost of being the regulator, it is the economic cost of having the regulations. That is why I have been particularly encouraged to see President Trump taking the steps he has taken to roll back many of the late efforts by the Obama administration. Since taking office, President Trump has signed 13 Congressional Review Act resolutions which, according to the administration, will save $10 billion in regulatory costs over a 10-year period of time. With regard to the Congressional Review Act, the Congress's passing a rejection of the rule and the President's agreeing to it happened exactly one time in 25 years prior to this administration. It has happened 13 times this year. It will happen, I am confident, a few more times, and it will have a real impact. When you look at the regulations that have been delayed or repealed by CRAs and Executive orders--Congressional Review Act resolutions or Executive orders--the American Action Forum estimates that $18.8 billion would be saved annually. Now, the President is not going to get much credit for that, and the Congress is not either, but if in the last few weeks we figured out how to take an $18.8 billion burden off of people by not moving forward with regulations that the country had not had prior to just a few weeks ago, in some cases, that is a good thing. Many of the Missourians from whom I have heard are particularly relieved that the President is also moving back from a couple of rules--the power rule and the waters of the United States rule--that Federal courts, fortunately, up until now, had said to President Obama's administration they did not have the authority to do what they were trying to do in either of these rules. The rules would have had devastating impacts on job opportunities and on families in our State. The power rule would have doubled the utility bills in 10 or 12 years. I have been reminding Missourians over the last several months that if you do not think that is going to impact you when you pay your electric bill the next time, just write it right out of your checkbook one more time--write it--because that is what you would be doing sometime in the next decade and see what impact that has on the kinds of things you and your family would have been doing with the money that you would have been spending on twice your utility bill. A week ago, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was in our State, at the Thomas Hill powerplant, to talk about how these rules would have affected the State and how one can still fulfill the mission of the EPA for clean air and clean water and a better environment without having rules that devastate families as well as deal with problems, many of which have now been on the priority list for 10 years and longer and have never been dealt with, while the EPA has been coming up with something else to do. They would have driven up the cost of groceries. They would have driven up the cost of the utility bill itself. Of course, when the utility bill goes up, the utility bill work goes up, too, and work might not be there at double the utility bill. The combined cost savings is estimated to be as high as $67.3 billion over the very foreseeable future of the Congressional Review Act, the President's Executive orders, the announced decisions that they have made about things like the clean power rule and the waters of the United States rule. Even in Washington, $67.3 billion is a lot of money, not to mention the 52 million hours of paperwork that will be needed to comply with rules that were not necessary to be there and that Senator Rounds mentioned. Our economy cannot grow and thrive with billions of dollars' worth of regulations dragging it down. Let me say again that I am for every regulation that we absolutely have to have--there is no argument about that--but we need to have a process by which we know whether we have to have them. That is why, in the next few weeks, I plan to reintroduce the bipartisan Regulatory Improvement Act, which the Congress looked at last year. This bill would create a Regulatory Improvement Commission that would review outdated regulations with the goal of bringing the list back to the Congress and saying that we think that these can all be eliminated. I have also cosponsored an act called the REINS Act, which would give me and the rest of the Congress the obligation to vote on any regulation that has more than $100 million of impact on the economy so that if we need it, we are going to go home and justify it, and the American people--where I live and the Presiding Officer lives--can get their hands on us if we cannot explain why we thought it was a good idea to do that. I believe the government should work for the American people, not the other way around, and I believe the President and the Congress have taken advantage of this historic opportunity to drive that peg a little deeper in the ground. I look forward to continuing to work on these issues. I think we need to take more responsibility for these issues. I know some of our colleagues have said: Well, why did we repeal these late regulations? Well, they were late regulations for a reason, and the country had done just fine without them up until now. So I look forward to working with the Presiding Officer and others to continue working on this effort to have regulations that make sense when we need them and not to have regulations when we don't need them.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, Missouri has lost a true crusader of the civil rights movement. Ina Boon passed away Monday, February 27, in St. Louis, at the age of 90 after dedicating her life to fighting and advocating for justice and equality through her long tenure at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP. Ina Boon started as a volunteer for the St. Louis Branch of the NAACP. She quickly demonstrated her tenacity and strong leadership skills to work her way up in the organization. Ms. Boon's work included a position at the NAACP headquarters in New York, but she is best known for the work she did as the region IV director of the national NAACP office. In that role, she became the national office's longest serving regional director. Over the years, she became a fearless advocate and organizer, helping to address racial inequities in the workplace. Even in the face of adversity, she was not deterred. When her counterpart Medgar Evers was killed in 1963, Ina Boon sent her children to live with family members in Wisconsin, while she continued to push for changes. For over 50 years, Ina Boon worked in various roles for the NAACP, never ceasing and always full of energy, even up to her retirement in her late 70s. As a true civil servant, Ina Boon continued to give back after her retirement through her work on many St. Louis area boards such as the Myrtle Hilliard Davis Comprehensive Health Center, the St. Louis Black Roundtable, and the Eastern Star Missionary Baptist Church. She even provided her expertise to help the local St. Louis County NAACP, where she volunteered to serve as their branch president. Ina Boon is survived by her son Gentry Trotter, founder of Heat-Up St. Louis/Cool Down St. Louis. Like his mother, Gentry Trotter saw the needs in the community and stepped up to address them. His organization focuses on regional energy assistance to help as a safety net to prevent low-income families, seniors, and people with disabilities from losing their heat or air-conditioning in times of freezing temperatures or the excessive summer heat. The organization also offers energy: efficiency education and advocates for public engagement regarding utility rates, health, and safety issues. Ina Boon leaves behind nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and seven great- and great-great- grandchildren. She will be missed by many, but her work and efforts will never be forgotten.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to talk about what we are doing today and how important it is, how unique it is in the history of the country. Since 1789, 112 people have served on the Supreme Court. It is hard not to be reminded today, as we vote for the replacement for Justice Scalia, that he served on the Court for 26 years after Ronald Reagan, who appointed him, left the White House and 13 years after President Reagan died. Clearly, the impact of a Supreme Court nomination by the President and confirmation by the Senate is one of those things that has the potential to last long beyond either the service of those in the Senate at the time or beyond those of the President at the time. It is a significant decision. A Federal Court appointment, generally an appointment for life, is different than an appointment for someone who serves during the tenure of the President. I think almost all of us look at judicial appointments differently than we look at Cabinet appointments and other appointments that are concurrent with the President's term. This is an appointment that lasts as long as the judge is willing to serve and able to serve. At 49 years old, Judge Gorsuch, who has already been a judge for 10 years, should know whether he likes being a judge. It would appear, and we would hope, he will have a long and healthy life to use his skills on the Court. I think those skills are very obvious in the over 2,000 decisions he has been part of, of the 800 decisions he has written as a circuit judge, the appeals judge above other Federal judges and right below the Supreme Court. So he is someone who comes to this job understanding the job, with a significant body of work that the Senate has had plenty of time to look at and the President had time to look at before this nomination was made. In those 800 opinions Judge Gorsuch has written, he has been overturned by the Court he will now sit on, the U.S. Supreme Court, exactly 1 time. That is an incredible average of decisionmaking if 1 of 800 times is the only time a court that is the court of appeals for you, the Supreme Court in this case, decides that your decision did not meet their view. Now, that does not mean that your decision did not meet your view of the law, if you are Judge Gorsuch, or your view of the Constitution. Of course, both of those things, after today--his view of the law, his view of how you apply the law--will go to the Court with him. At the White House event where his nomination was announced, Judge Gorsuch said that a good judge is not always happy with his opinions. Now, what would that mean? I thought that was very reassuring in the sense that his job as a judge is to read the law, to look at the Constitution, and to determine how the facts of the case meet the reality of the law. One of the things that makes this a great country to live in, a great country to work in, and a great country to take a chance in is the one thing you can rely on, hopefully--the rule of law. The one thing you can rely on, when good lawyers read the law, is that they all understand it to mean the same thing, and you move forward with whatever decision you make on that. What Judge Gorsuch was saying was that personal opinions are not always satisfied by reading the law. What he also, I think, reflects is a view that the law is what the law was intended to mean at the time. There are ways to change the law. If the country has changed, if the world has changed, if circumstances have changed, there are ways to change the law, and that is our job. That is not the job of any Federal judges anywhere, including on the Supreme Court. Their job is to determine what the law was intended to mean when it was written, and their job is to determine what the Constitution was intended to mean when it was written. Everything the Constitution intended was not what we would want to live with today, and that is why we have that long list of amendments, starting with the Bill of Rights. Even immediately, the people who wrote the Constitution said that we have to add some things to this because this does not mean what we really want it to mean as it is applied. So you get the Bill of Rights. Yet that is not the job of the Court. It is the job of the Congress to pass laws, the President to do his job of vetoing and sending those laws back or of signing them into law. The Court's job is what Judge Gorsuch understands it to be. He said in his hearings: I have one client, and that client is the law. That client is not either party appearing before the Court. That client is not the government. That client is the law. I think he also said that judges are not politicians in robes. We have a job to do that is different than the job of the Court, and I think, as we send Judge Gorsuch to the Court today--to be the 113th person in the history of the country to serve on the Court--we send a person who has an understanding of what a judge should do. Most Americans, when they think about what the Court is supposed to do, would clearly understand that is the job of the Court. There are other jobs to be done, and they are to be done in other places. I think he will be a great addition to the Court with his 10 years of experience as a judge and as the judge that other Federal judges' cases are appealed to. What great training he has had to get ready for the Court. Then, of course, to get this job done, we had to return to the traditional standard that has always been the standard in the country, until the last few years, as to how Presidential nominations are dealt with. It is easy to confuse, I think, the unique role of the Senate in its having some barriers that the House does not have with regard to advancing legislation. Since, basically, 1789, that has been applied to legislation. The Senate has always seen its job as wanting to be sure the minority is heard before we move forward. Yet, starting in 1789, there was never a supermajority for Presidential nominations, whether it was to the Cabinet or the Court. It is impossible to find, even before 1968, any case in which the Senate came together and said: We are officially going to decide that we are not going to have a vote on this judge. Now, not every judge got a vote, but when every judge got a vote, a majority of Senators determined whether that judge would go on the Court or not. Two members of the Court today did not get 60 votes. Clarence Thomas got 52 votes, and I think Judge Alito got 58 votes. Two members did not get 60 votes, but nobody thought they needed 60 votes because that had never been part of the structure of how judges got on the Court. I think what we have done this week is return the Senate to, essentially, the practice on Presidential nominees that for 214 years was the way nominees were always dealt with. In 2013, the Senate was controlled by our friends on the other side of the aisle. With the roughly 1,250 to 1,300 Presidential nominations, they decided that every nomination that was available to them--for every judge where there was a vacancy, for every person where the President might have had a vacancy to fill--would be determined by a simple majority. From that moment on, everybody, I think, should not have been surprised, when we eventually had a Supreme Court vacancy-- and this is the first one since that happened--that whoever was in charge would extend that same majority to the Supreme Court. Now all Presidential nominees are back to where they had been for 214 years. I heard the minority leader--I heard my friend Mr. Schumer--talk about the importance of our recommitting ourselves to the protections for the minority in passing legislation. I think we can do that. Frankly, this exercise of refreshing our minds as to how legislation has always been handled in that way, I believe, has probably created a greater commitment to that--to the legislative supermajority to move forward with debate--than we have had for a while. I think the leader of our friends on the other side and certainly the leader on our side have both said nobody is willing to back down on the challenges the Senate faces when we are required to come together to get things done. The Senate is unique. Essentially, it takes 6 years for every Senator to run for election. After some new sense of the direction of the country occurs, voters basically have to say again and again and maybe a third time: No, we really want to change the way the country has run up until now. Quick decisions are not necessarily the best decisions in a democracy, and in our democracy, this institution--the Senate--is the legislative institution that determines that there is a necessary either coming together of the people who are here at the time or for voters to say at another time: No, you did not get it the first time, and we are sending different people because we really want to make this change. I think the vote today and the traditions of the country send that 113th person into the history of America to serve a lifetime term on the Court. I am confident the President's nominee and the Senate's decision to send that nominee to the Court sends a good person to the Court with a good understanding of what the Supreme Court of the United States is supposed to be. His job is not to look at the law and try to determine what it should have said or to look at the Constitution and determine what it should have said but rather to look at the law and the Constitution and determine what they say. Judge Gorsuch, as well as any person who has ever appeared before the Senate to stand available for that job, understands that principle, will take that principle to the Court, will work with his colleagues, as he has on the Tenth Circuit, in order to rally around what the law says and what people can rely on in a country where our freedoms should be secure and where we should know that the courts are there to determine what is right in any given case, not what the judges think would be their ideas of what would be right. I look forward to the vote later this morning and to seeing Judge Gorsuch be sworn in as a member of the Court sometime in the very near future. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I certainly agree with the comments just made by our friend from Oklahoma in looking back at the history of the Court. The 200 years of giving judges a vote really is an important thing for us to understand, as hopefully enough Members of the Senate decide between now and sometime next week that the up-or-down vote-- where they get to vote however they want to--is totally appropriate. I would like to speak about one other topic that we are dealing with this week. I was here yesterday to talk about Judge Gorsuch. I will likely be back again before this debate is over because it is critically important that he be confirmed. Mr. President, I want to speak for just a minute about what we are also doing this week under the Congressional Review Act. One of the reasons the Court matters is that the Court gets to decide on occasion whether an agency has the legal ability to make a rule, but just because they may have the legal ability to make a rule doesn't mean they should make a rule that stands if the Congress doesn't agree. The Congressional Review Act, under the late rulemaking of President Obama, has had a real opportunity to work for, I would say, the first time, but the truth is, it has worked one other time in 2001. In the 25-or-so-year history of the Congressional Review Act until the last few days, the last few weeks, it has been utilized only because it is really only practically available to the Senate and to the House if there are midnight rules, rules that come up at the last minute. As of today, the Senate has already passed 11 resolutions that have disapproved those late rules that came in the final days of President Obama's administration. By the time we finish this process, I think we will be toward a total of maybe 15 rules that would have had a real impact on our economy, that would have had a real impact on job creation, that would have had a real impact on families. Those rules are not going to happen because of the Congressional Review Act. I have been an opponent of many of these rules and many of the regulations we have seen over the last 8 years, but they have often been able to become law anyway because the Congress, frankly, couldn't do anything about it. Title X Program In particular, I would like to commend Senator Joni Ernst for her work on the resolution of disapproval we expect to consider tomorrow. Senator Ernst's resolution would simply restore the ability of States to set their own criteria for grant recipients under the title X program. I would like to remind my colleagues that this rule was issued on December 19, 2016. It took effect January 18, 2017, 2 days before the end of President Obama's administration. So for 7 years and 363 days, the Obama administration didn't need this rule, but they issued it on the way out the door. Overturning this rule would not reduce a single dollar of funding that is available under title X. Again, all we are doing is simply giving back to the States the flexibility they had until the last 48 hours of the Obama administration to determine which health providers were in the best position to provide the particular set of healthcare services before the rule took effect. This rule is another example of overreach. This is another example of out-of-control regulators. I certainly am pleased to see Senator Ernst bring it to the floor. The determination of how the rules should be made and who should make them and who should do something about it is something that this Congress, in the next few weeks, has to take a stronger stand on. I hope we find a way where we have to vote on every rule that has any significant economic impact. That bill has passed the House of Representatives already. I see the Senator from Wyoming here, so I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I come today to talk about the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Once again, throughout the hearings last week, Judge Gorsuch proved that he has the knowledge, he has the temperament, and he has the experience to serve on our Nation's highest Court. He laid out a clear judicial philosophy that adheres to what I think most Americans want to see happen today on the Court and what clearly the Framers of the Constitution thought would happen. In his own words, Judge Gorsuch said: ``I have one client, it's the law.'' That is the way the Founders saw the Supreme Court. They didn't see it as a legislative body. All good judges had to do was to read the law. They didn't have to be happy with the law. They didn't have to approve the law. They didn't have to determine that the law and the Constitution met their exact standard. They just had to determine what the law and the Constitution said. In fact, the first Supreme Court had six judges. There was no thought that it was a legislative body that had to have a tie-breaking judge so you could legislate. They thought six judges were plenty. By the way, they thought they needed six circuits. Each of those judges rode a circuit. So even when there was an appeal to the Supreme Court, one of the judges had already heard the case at the lower level. That judge heard the case again and then listened to see if that judge heard anything new, something that might change their mind. The other five of them were sitting there with the appeal of one of their colleagues, and nobody saw that as a problem because the Court wasn't about legislating. The Court was about determining what the law should say. Again, Judge Gorsuch said: ``I have one client, it's the law.'' It is not the little guy. It is not the big guy. It is not the medium-size guy: It is the law. He was asked over and over: Are you going to find for the little guy or the big guy? Well, that is not the judge's job. The judge's job is to read the law so both the little guy and the big guy know when they are in court that this is a country where the rule of law matters. They know, when they enter into a contract, that if you and your lawyer have read the law right, there shouldn't, at the end of the day, be very much gray space about what that contract said. Throughout his career, Judge Gorsuch has demonstrated his commitment to interpret the Constitution as it is written, applying the rule of law and not legislating from the bench. ``Judges are not politicians in robes.'' I think that may be another Gorsuch comment: ``Judges are not politicians in robes.'' If he didn't say it, his career as a judge shows that he believes it. Unfortunately, some of my colleagues have shown that their deference to the Constitution is not the same when it comes to the Senate's role to advise and consent. I am particularly dismayed by the Democratic leader's intention to filibuster Judge Gorsuch's nomination. Republicans have never filibustered a Democratic nominee, yet colleagues across the aisle appear willing to do just that. Such a maneuver would only be an affront to our national norms. I don't know in the history of the country--I think there was one filibuster led by Democrats against a nomination by a Democrat President when Lyndon Johnson nominated Abe Fortas to move from Associate Justice to the Chief Justice's role. It didn't happen in 1968 because it was a Presidential year and Justices don't get confirmed in the Supreme Court in a Presidential year in vacancies that hadn't even occurred yet. No. 2, it was led by Democrats in a Senate that had an overwhelming Democratic majority. There has never been a partisan filibuster effort involving any Justice on the Supreme Court until right now--until right now--and I am disappointed that that is what the Democratic leader of the Senate says he wants to do. According to Robert David Johnson, a Brooklyn College history professor, ``The chances of success'' of a partisan filibuster ``are basically zero.'' So my thought would be: Why pursue it? Kim Strassel recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal: ``Never in U.S. history have we had a successful partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee.'' In the last half century, only three Supreme Court Justices have even faced a filibuster. The most recent, Justice Alito, was ultimately confirmed when 19 Democrats refused to back the filibuster of his nomination. He had the full vote, and he got a majority vote. One would think that if Senate Democrats are willing to upend Senate tradition to block this nomination, they would have an unassailable reason to block it. They would be saying this judge is not qualified. This judge hasn't served his time. We don't know what he would do as a judge. He has been on the circuit court of appeals for a decade, and when looking at case after case, appeal after appeal, we see his unbelievably fine record as a judge. In announcing his intention to mount this filibuster, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate said that Judge Gorsuch ``was unable to sufficiently convince me that he'd be an independent check'' on the executive branch. The American Bar Association unanimously gave Judge Gorsuch's nomination their highest rating. They disagree. As they explained, ``based on writings, interviews, and analyses we scrutinized to reach our rating, we discerned that Judge Gorsuch believes strongly in the independence of the judicial branch of government, and we predict that he will be a strong but respectful voice in protecting it.'' This is from the American Bar Association, which many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have said over and over again is the ultimate test of qualification for the Court. When I met with the judge last month, he left no doubt in my mind that he would uphold the judiciary's unique constitutional role in our system of checks and balances. Let me go back to the other quote here for a minute. What was it that the Senator from New York said? ``Judge Gorsuch was unable to sufficiently convince me that he'd be an independent check'' on the executive branch. I am not even sure I know where in the Constitution that is the job of the judge. The job of the judge is to read the law and look at the Constitution. The job of the Congress is to pass the law. The job of the President is to sign the law. Unless there is some constitutional problem with that law, it is not the judge's job to decide whether the law is right or not, unless there is a constitutional reason to do that. Last week, I mentioned Judge Gorsuch's qualifications for the bench, but I think they bear repeating as we enter the next few days. As a graduate of Columbia University, a graduate of Harvard Law and Oxford University, his academic credentials are at the highest level. Judge Gorsuch has served his country admirably as a Supreme Court clerk, first for a Democrat on the Court, Byron White, who had been appointed by President Kennedy, and for a Republican appointee, Anthony Kennedy, appointed by President Reagan. He has been the principal Deputy Associate Attorney General of the United States at the Department of Justice, and in 2006, George W. Bush nominated him to serve on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Senate unanimously confirmed his position at that time. Every single Democrat--12 of them now serving in the Senate who were in office, supported his nomination in 2006. In the decade that he served on the Tenth Circuit Court, he has shown independence, integrity, and he has shown a mainstream judicial philosophy. He has demonstrated a legal capacity that makes him a worthy successor to Justice Scalia on the Court. There is no precedent for requiring a 60-vote threshold to confirm a Supreme Court Justice, and Judge Gorsuch has given this body no reason to demand one now. I look forward to supporting his nomination. It will reach the Senate floor, I believe, after the Judiciary Committee deals with it early next week. I hope by the time we leave here a week from Friday that Judge Gorsuch is on his way to join the Supreme Court as an Associate Justice. By the way, if he does that, he will be the first Associate Justice ever to serve on the Court with a Justice for whom he clerked two decades or more ago. When he and Justice Kennedy get a chance to serve together--I look forward to seeing that happen.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am here today to discuss the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. So far this year, we have heard that it is too early to do everything, that the process of putting the President's Cabinet in place, which took longer than any administration since George Washington and is still not completed, was somehow too early. We heard that every single nominee was being handled too quickly, even though every previous President since the first President has managed to have a Cabinet confirmed by the Senate quicker than this one. Clearly the process going on right now--hours of questioning beginning today for Judge Gorsuch, who has a 10-year record as an appeals judge on the Tenth Circuit, where all of the other judges in the district courts under the Tenth Circuit's jurisdiction see their cases go to be appealed. The Supreme Court is ``distinctly American in concept and function,'' according to Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and there is, frankly, nothing quite like it in any other constitutional government. It is a Court that was supposed to be part of this very unique at the time idea of a government that was so finely balanced that it would run itself, a machine that was so finely balanced that it didn't take a King, it didn't take the intervention of somebody to decide who would be the one person who would run the country. The Supreme Court--the only Court mentioned in the Constitution--is a uniquely American court. In the history of the country, only 112 people have had the honor to serve on the Supreme Court. On the last day of January, President Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit to be one of those unique individuals who get to serve on this Court, to be an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Since his nomination, he has visited individually with a significant majority of Members of the Senate. I think he has had 70 visits with Members of the Senate in their offices. Many of my colleagues on the other side--several of whom I will mention in a minute--voted for Judge Gorsuch to have the job he currently has. Many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle left their meetings with Judge Gorsuch impressed by his character, by his intellect. Here is what just a couple of our colleagues on the other side said: ``He did a very good job in the meeting with me. He presents himself very well.'' Another one of our colleagues said: ``He's a very caring person, and he's obviously legally very smart. . . . I think we are dealing with someone who is impressive.'' Another one of our colleagues said they ``had a thorough conversation about the importance of the rule of law and of a judiciary that is independent of the executive and legislative branches of government.'' As more Senators had a chance to meet Judge Gorsuch, they came to see him as an independent-minded judge who has a deep appreciation for the law and a real understanding of what a judge should do. It was mentioned earlier that the judge should be required to talk about how he would rule on individual cases. Of course not. In fact, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is on the Court now, was very strident before the committee in pointing out that it would be wrong for a judge to explain how they would judge an individual case. She said that if a judge did that, a judge would actually have to recuse themselves, in her opinion, from the case, and others on the Court today have all said similar things when asked the kinds of questions that the minority leader just said that Judge Gorsuch would have to answer if he was going to be confirmed to the Court. If that was the test, there would be nobody on the Court today, and if that was the test, none of the 112 people who have served on the Court would have, in all likelihood, passed that test. When I had a chance to visit with Judge Gorsuch, it was clear that he understood the proper role of a judge. The role of a judge--the job is to adhere to the Constitution, to apply the rule of law, and not to legislate from the bench. When he was nominated by President Trump, Judge Gorsuch said: It is for Congress and not the courts to write new laws. It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people's representatives. A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge, stretching for results he prefers, rather than those the law demands. What does that mean? How would a person reach a conclusion they didn't like and that is what makes them a good judge? Well, a good judge reads the law, reads the Constitution, and applies the law. A good judge doesn't try to determine what the Constitution and the law should say but only has the job of determining what the Constitution and the law do say. Justice Scalia--the vacancy Judge Gorsuch will fill--according to Justice Scalia, setting aside personal views is ``one of the primary qualifications for a judge''--not determining what you would like to happen but determining what the law and the Constitution say has to happen. I think Judge Gorsuch understands that. He comes to the Court very well prepared. He is a graduate of Columbia University, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University. His academic credentials are unrivalled in preparation for this job. He served his country admirably as a Supreme Court Justice clerk for Justice Byron White, who was appointed to the Court by President Kennedy and confirmed by the Senate, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was appointed to the Court by President Reagan. Judge Gorsuch served as the Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General, and then in 2006, President George W. Bush nominated him to serve on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Senate confirmed his nomination unanimously by a voice vote. There are 12 Democrats currently serving in the Senate who were then in office and supported Judge Gorsuch's nomination 10 years ago to the job he has today. In the decade Judge Gorsuch has served as a circuit court judge, reviewing the work of other Federal judges on appeal, he has demonstrated the integrity, professional qualifications, and judicial temperament to serve on the Nation's highest Court. Judge Gorsuch said recently that judges are not politicians in robes. It is not the job of a judge to determine what the law is or should be; it is the job of a judge to determine what the law is. The job of a judge is to determine what the Framers intended the Constitution to say. Judge Gorsuch received high praise from legal experts across party lines. He has gotten the highest level of recommendation from the American Bar Association, unanimously rating him as ``well qualified,'' its highest rating. He is respected by people who know him in his community. He has really dedicated himself to a lifetime of service that prepares him for this job. The Supreme Court is one of the foundational institutions of our country. It is designed to protect our democracy and is designed to really understand and apply the Constitution and the law so that the rule of law is uniquely dependable in the United States of America. If you are a citizen and you read the law and you understand what the law says, that should get you a long way toward success before the courts and ensures that in this country, the rule of law matters. The ultimate determiner of what the law says is the Supreme Court. I think Judge Gorsuch will serve well and I hope long on the Court. I believe that in the next couple of weeks, he will join the Justices, one of whom he clerked for. If that happens, he will be the first person in the history of the country to be sitting as an Associate Justice with another Associate Justice who decades earlier he was the law clerk for when he and Associate Justice Kennedy had an opportunity to serve together. With that, I notice my colleague from Iowa is here, and I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I wish to honor two individuals from Missouri that have selflessly dedicated their lives to the military and public service. Dewey and Virginia Riehn have both held significant leadership roles within the veterans' community, and their decision to turn over that role to the next generation will be felt by the numerous lives they have impacted. Dewey Riehn is a retired chief warrant officer of the U.S. Army, originally from Jackson, MO. He married his beloved wife, Virginia, on August 24, 1958. Enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1956, Dewey transitioned to the Army, where he served as a counterintelligence agent, seeing multiple tours in Vietnam. He and Virginia were stationed overseas on multiple occasions. After retiring from the Army, he transitioned to the Missouri Department of Social Services, where he successfully completed a 24-year career as a child abuse investigator. From the time Dewey retired from military service, he and Virginia have both been pinnacle figures within the Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, and Vietnam Veterans of America. Dewey has testified on numerous occasions before the Missouri Legislature, ultimately helping legislators shape State and national policy. Dewey was paramount in helping secure funding for the Veterans Commission's Capital Improvement Trust Fund through gaming entrance fees. In addition, he was instrumental in the establishment of veterans treatment courts throughout Missouri. His extreme proficiency and vast dedication to veterans' issues resulted in his selection as the national legislative chairman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Mrs. Riehn has enjoyed a successful career as a nurse, while also maintaining strong roles within the veterans' community. She was previously the legislative chairman of VFW Post 280 Ladies Auxiliary. Dewey and Virginia have five children and currently live in Ashland, MO. As Dewey and Virginia relinquish their roles from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, I would like to pause and reflect on their lifelong commitments of profound service. I extend my heartfelt thanks to him and his wife and wish them the very best as they transition to a new chapter after decades of service to veterans and public service.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I thank the Senator from Wyoming for his efforts on this topic from the time we were both explaining why we thought President Obama's plan wouldn't work. What I see and I think what you mentioned you see is that people who have coverage often don't have access. It doesn't matter if you have coverage if there is nowhere to go or you feel like there is nowhere to go. I continually hear that from people who have the high-deductible policies. That means they are discouraged from spending the first $6,000 or $8,000 that is out-of-pocket spending. Many people I talk to say they have not only more expensive coverage than they had before but less coverage than they had before and are reluctant to spend the out-of-pocket dollars that used to be covered by the insurance that didn't meet the new standards but met their family needs. I am wondering if the Senator is seeing that same thing.

Mr. BLUNT. It is. Mr. President, I think you are seeing that too. The critical needs hospitals, the critical access hospitals--the only hospitals available--are often also hospitals that disproportionately have people who are not insured or people who are of low income who aren't on any government program. What has happened in those hospitals and in the ones that have been able to stay open is that they have often had to go outside the traditional community support they had and associate with a bigger hospital. That may turn out to have been a good thing, but one of the basics of the President's healthcare plan was--which we now know is a highly unlikely result--that everybody will have coverage. In a world where everybody has coverage, you don't have the disproportionate share of problems that inner-city hospitals, like the Truman Hospital in Kansas City, MO, have, or rural hospitals, like the dozen-plus that we have in our State that are critical needs hospitals. Those things don't happen. If this had worked the way the President thought it would work--and Democrats, when they, all on their own, passed this bill 7 years ago-- we wouldn't be having the problems we see now: the havoc in our healthcare system--leaving Missourians, people from Alabama, people from Wyoming, people from all over the country with higher costs, with fewer options, and with more uncertainty. How many times did the President say, when he was supporting this just after the election and during his election 8 years ago--President Obama kept making the case--that Americans would be able to keep the plans they like. They would be able to keep the doctors they like. Now we act as if those pledges--well, everybody knows--couldn't happen. When the bill was passed, everybody said that was what would happen. Remember this: If you have a doctor you like, you will be able to keep the doctor you like, period. If you have an insurance plan you like, you will be able to keep the insurance plan you like, period. The period should have at least been a question mark. As it turned out, it was not true. People didn't get to do that. According to the advocates of the law we have now, there would be more choices, there would be more competition, and there would be lower costs, and none of those things happened. Those things just did not happen. In Missouri, several insurers have totally pulled out of the individual market. We have 115 counties. Last year, they all had at least two companies willing to offer insurance. This year, we have 97 counties where only one company is willing to offer insurance. I have always thought we needed to expand that insurance marketplace, not reduce it--and buying across State lines and buying an insurance product you thought met the needs of you and your family, rather than the needs somebody at the Department of Health and Human Services thought they knew was better for your family, rather than what you would know was better for your family. But instead, we have done just the opposite. Instead of expanding the marketplace, expanding choices-- somehow ObamaCare was designed in a way that actually prevents this-- instead of being able to buy across State lines, now you can't buy across county lines. We have 97 of our 115 counties where only one insurance company is willing to be part of the process on the individual market. That one insurance company, rightly, was able to go and say: Here is what we are going to charge. If you don't want to accept that, State insurance regulator, we won't offer the product. Families one year to the next are often facing 40 percent increases. I think the average is a 25-percent increase year over year. Many people are paying more than 100 percent, double what they paid when this started. The rate hikes have gone up and the coverage has gone down. The average deductible in the bronze plan, the third plan down, is $6,000 for an individual and $12,000 for a family. That is before anybody helps you at all. So you have insurance that you are paying for every month, but if you get sick, you have to pay $6,000 for each individual and more than twice that if two people in your family have healthcare problems before anybody does anything. For most families in our country, and certainly most families in Missouri, that is like not having insurance at all. Even in the silver plan, the average deductible is $3,500. That is an increase of 15 percent of the deductible over last year. Every year, the price goes up and the deductible goes up. All of us hear from families, individuals, and businesses who say: We can't continue to do this. Mark from Blue Springs told me: ``There is nothing affordable'' about the Affordable Care Act. When it comes to what he and his family are facing, he said that before ObamaCare, they paid $246 a month to cover five people with coverage they thought met their needs. Now the premium is $800 a month. There are only three people. Only one child and he and his wife are still at home. For five people, they were paying $246 a month. Now they are paying $800 a month. He says: These days, when we go to the doctor, nothing is covered. We still have to pay for that visit 100 percent out of pocket. In other words, we pay $800 per month only to be told that none of the office visit or procedure is covered until the $8,000 deductible is met. He says: Really, what are we going to do? They have taken insurance away from us, and the promise that was made over and over was never kept. Dave, a small business owner in Columbia, says his premiums have more than doubled at the same time that his business has been forced to continually raise deductibles and seriously reduce benefits so that people could continue to have insurance at work. As he puts it, President Obama's healthcare plan ``is far from affordable.'' Let's see. That is exactly what Mark said: There is nothing affordable about the Affordable Care Act. And Dave's increase this year over last year was 40 percent. At some point, Dave and lots of other employers are deciding that this isn't working. We have a group in our State that many other States have, the Older Adults Transportation Service. It is a nonprofit that provides transportation services for older adults. The title is actually pretty descriptive of what they do. The cost has gone up over half a million dollars. The paperwork is ``so complex and so cumbersome,'' the executive director told me, that they have to spend additional money to hire a consultant just to fill out the forms to have the insurance they used to have. Then the insurance doesn't keep up with what they need and what their drivers need. They have to begin to cut services back to have insurance that even begins to resemble what they had before the Affordable Care Act. Talk about people being left out. There are older adults in Missouri who don't have the same access to transportation they had before the Affordable Care Act. President Trump, in his address to the Congress just a few days ago, reiterated his commitment to step-by-step healthcare reforms ``that expand choice, increase access, lower costs, and, at the same time, provide better healthcare.'' I was encouraged that he decided to back the expansion of health savings accounts. That allows everybody in the country to put more of their pretax dollars into portable health savings accounts that go with them wherever they go from job to job. You still have that health savings account. The plan that the House of Representatives is debating right now expands the way you can use that health savings account, as well as expands how much money you can put into that account. Most importantly, the President reaffirmed the need to ensure coverage for all preexisting conditions. I have always supported providing insurance options for people who have preexisting conditions. I sponsored the legislation that allowed young people to stay on their parents' healthcare until they were 25. The people drafting the Affordable Care Act put exactly that language in the bill and raised the age to 26. Three million people every year have access to insurance because of a simple choice like that. I think that bill was four pages, with lots of white space, and 3 million people get insurance every year who wouldn't have insurance otherwise, or at least traditionally hadn't had insurance otherwise at no cost to taxpayers. Frankly, there is not much cost to anybody because those young, healthy people are just establishing themselves, just leaving home, just going off mom and dad's insurance, and they thought they could get by without it for a while. In all likelihood, they were right. They are not a hard group to insure. That is the kind of thing we ought to think about, where we figure out how to increase access to coverage without taxpayers having to bear the load for somebody else's healthcare, if there is another way to do it. We want to be sure that, whether it is keeping them on your family insurance, staying on your family insurance longer, or having no lifetime cap--that was a legitimate problem that many people faced-- they would have their insurance. They would pay for it forever, and then when they faced a catastrophic situation, at some point the insurance companies in earlier times were able to say: You reached your lifetime cap; so we are now canceling your policy. That wouldn't happen under the plan we are discussing. The landscape for healthcare--and what families and individuals have to deal with--has dramatically changed. Because of that, it is going to be more challenging to go forward than it would have if we had done the same half-dozen commonsense things just a few years ago. This is no 2,700-page response or substitute for the 2,700-page ObamaCare bill. This is an easily understood way to go forward that eliminates taxes that everybody is now paying on their healthcare. There is a medical device tax. There is an over-the-counter medication tax for things you don't have a prescription for. There is a special tax on those over- the-counter medicines in the current law. Those will be repealed. The medical device tax would be gone, would be phased out. The over-the- counter tax on medicines would be phased out and the tax on prescription drugs. If you buy over the counter, you pay a tax, but if you get a prescription, you also pay a tax. There may be a place in here where you pay a tax for just paying a tax. But the medical device tax is gone. The over-the-counter medication tax is gone. The tax on prescription drugs would be gone. The tax on health insurance policies would be gone. When you get health insurance, there is a tax to be paid under ObamaCare on that, as well. The Medicare tax increase would be gone. The tanning bed tax would be gone. The net investment tax would be gone. The health insurance tax would be gone. It is about a trillion dollars in taxes that were added back into the system. By the way, if you have some kind of coverage for a medical device, you are paying for the coverage. You are paying a tax on the coverage, if you are lucky enough that the medical device is covered, if your insurance company pays that. Of course, they pay the tax on that, and, then, you have paid it in the premium that you had to pay to cover the tax. We have to step back here and try to do the right thing. My friend from Illinois earlier mentioned that there traditionally were five different community ratings of people of different ages based on the healthcare costs that they might have, but the ObamaCare bill said: No, you can only have three ratings. The oldest, sickest, most likely to use health coverage can't pay more than three times what the youngest, healthiest people pay, which is another reason, if you are young and healthy, not to get insurance. Things that were put into this raised costs for so many people. Then what happens? Then people say: Well, why is it that we don't have enough people covered? They say: The real problem with ObamaCare is that there weren't enough young, healthy people who bought coverage on their own. It was designed into the plan to make it very unattractive, if you are young and healthy, to buy coverage because suddenly coverage for that population was in relationship to all other people being covered, higher than it had ever been before. With the bill the House is debating now, we would restore the disproportionate share payments to inner-city hospitals, to rural hospitals, where you have to treat more people who are either on a government program that doesn't pay very well or more people who don't have any coverage at all. That was eliminated in ObamaCare. We now realize that world is a world that doesn't exist, a world in which everybody who goes to the hospital, everybody who goes to see the doctor, everybody who seeks healthcare has insurance coverage. Who takes care of that? This bill, being debated right now in the House, looks at that again and says: Let's get back to where we are actually helping those institutions that are particularly focused on underserved populations, that are particularly focused on doing that. We have an opportunity here, basically in three different steps, to do what needs to be done. The first two steps are critical. One is to set an end date for the chaotic situation we are in now, to do as much as we can with budget tools to set a framework for how we move on and get out of these incredibly devastating budget situations for both the Federal Government and for families. The second is to let the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was confirmed by the Senate just a few weeks ago, look at the over 1,400 times in ObamaCare where that Department can create regulations that either make it harder or make it easier for people to comply with the law. One of the most important decisions, if you are an insurance company and you are offering a healthcare product, is deciding what classifies as an acceptable product, what is the basic criteria you can offer people and still be offering healthcare insurance. So we are at an important moment. There is no doubt that the current situation is collapsing, that healthcare providers are providing healthcare to people who don't have coverage, who are not protected by programs they were previously protected by. The people who used to have a lot of choices in insurance, in many cases, now have only one choice, and it is not a choice they can afford, and when they do pay for it, they feel like they are living without insurance at all. So we are doing what needs to be done. We have to do what we can to get back to where people can buy the insurance they think meets their needs, insurance they can afford and enables them to see the doctor they want to see. A patient-centered system, instead of a government- centered system, is the answer here. We have to get this job done, and I believe we will. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk about the Affordable Care Act and its failures, as well as the American Health Care Act and what differences I think it makes. I am going to be joined on the floor by at least one of my colleagues soon, and we may even, with permission, have a colloquy. I know Senator Barrasso is on a limited time schedule and has been one of our great leaders on this issue. I think I will turn to him first and then come back when he has had a chance to make his comments.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am glad to yield my friend 5 minutes to start the day.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk a few minutes about the challenges so many of our Cabinet members face trying to restore our infrastructure, to maintain our park system, and to create the public- private partnerships the President mentioned earlier this week in his vision for infrastructure reform. Certainly Governor Perry, whose nomination we are debating right now, will have many opportunities in Energy to do that, in the research components of Energy and the partnership components that can be there. We just confirmed a new Secretary of Interior, Ryan Zinke. One of our great assets as a nation is the Federal park system. We are now entering the second hundred years of that Federal park system, and that second hundred years is going to be defined by partnerships in ways the first hundred years weren't. The park system is a great way to enjoy the blessings we have and the rich geography, the scenic beauty--some of these parks really reflect the great challenges people faced as they settled the country--and also there are historic parks that reflect the history. Sometimes our parks do both of those things. I think all of my colleagues are aware of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, one of the most visited national parks, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial there celebrating President Jefferson, celebrating the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and really celebrating that long movement as people moved west--eventually really west and really northwest, Mr. President, where you live in Alaska. But the Gateway Arch is visited often. It opened in 1967, and so now we are 50 years into that particular part of our system. The original park itself needed a lot of restoration, but 50 years later, you look at that park and you look at how it has been used and decide how it could be better used. What most of my colleagues probably aren't aware of is that right now, it is the biggest investment the National Park Service is making in the system at this moment, trying to connect the Gateway Arch to the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, the Federal courthouse where the Dred Scott case was tried--they are trying to connect that park to the rest of the city in ways that--when it was built, it was separated by an interstate highway, so you would go see the park, but you wouldn't get to the rest of the national park side there very often. Rethinking that is important, but what is maybe even more important is this is the biggest park project in the history of the country where private donors provided more of the money than the government did. This is not easily done. If for 100 years you have been doing something one way, it is not easy to immediately begin to say: We are going to do it another way from now on. If you are in charge, like Secretary Jewell was put in charge of this project--and by the way, I think she has done a good job, as has her regional director, understanding that if you are going to do things differently, they have to be different. It would be great if the city and private donors--the city even voted a tax just for this project, to provide millions of dollars that the project would be spending. Of course, I think initially the Park Service would think: Isn't that great? We now get this money from private donors, and we now get this money from a city tax, in addition to a portion of the money we are still getting appropriated by the Congress, and we will just spend it the way we have always spent it, as if we had no partners. But that didn't work out very well at all. The partners in the project actually wanted to be partners in the project. As we look at the next hundred years of this great National Park System, I think we have to understand that for that to work and for that to work in a new way, we have to treat it differently. We are seeing that in St. Louis. We are seeing the three different groups come together in ways that have provided the funding. But, frankly, they also need to be at the table when you talk about how you are going to spend the funding. We changed the law in Congress just a couple of years ago so that private money, if it is being held by the Federal Government, as it has been on that project, if there is any interest to be earned, if there is any benefit from that money, it also goes to the project rather than going into general revenue. The goal here would be to do everything we can, if we are going to have a different park system for the next hundred years, to really encourage the next group of people to step up and say: We want to provide--as in the case in St. Louis, MO--more than half of the money, but we would like to have some input on how that is going to be used and how this is going to meet the needs of the community. But also everybody who visits there, as they connect with the community uniquely in that St. Louis park--Missouri has a great park system. I think we are rated as one of the top four park systems in the country, our State system. In fact, right now we are looking at one of those State parks at Ste. Genevieve, which was a part of our State that was first settled by French settlers. The number of buildings there dating right back to the turn of the 19th century--1801, 1804--is reflective of how French settlers built buildings, which is different from how other settlers did. There is a lot to learn about how we come together as a people in so many of our parks, as well. So when Secretary Zinke takes that job, one of the new opportunities is to build on what is already started in places like St. Louis and figure out how we can have those kinds of partnerships when the President talks about infrastructure expansion and how we are going to look for new ways to do that. As you look at new ways to do that, you have to really be willing to think of how you approach this in a way that encourages partners to be part of it. Clearly, infrastructure--one of the great benefits of where we are located is where we are located. We have an ocean on two sides. We have a river that runs up the middle of the country, that connects the country in unique ways to all the water travel of the world. We have these coasts on each side that are beneficial to this if we connect ourselves in the right ways. So the President's view that the road system, the airport system, the port system all need to work in a way that links us up to be better competitors and links us up in a way that allows us to create economic opportunities and better jobs for families is important. So that kind of partnership, the partnership the park system is in--I think we are seeing the mold established, the model established for how that would work in St. Louis right now at the Arch. In the next couple of years, that project will be completed. It will be different than it was 50 years ago because people want to see things differently than they did 50 years ago. With Secretary Perry, who should be confirmed today--I think clearly will be confirmed today--his opportunities at Energy to look for partners who add to what we can do there in ways we haven't thought of before--just like we use research money now, take that research money in health research and research money in ag research to bring other people into this discussion that creates opportunities for who we can be. As we move slowly and in a way that has really made it difficult to take advantage of this new administration, we are apparently going to be able to confirm two nominees to the Cabinet today. But we are still way behind, by any measure, the history of the country in working with a new administration to let them take responsibility. There are going to be 500, 1,000 nominees--I think there are about 1,000 Deputy Secretaries and Under Secretaries who come once we are done with the Cabinet. I hope we can all find a way to get this done, with an understanding that whether or not you agree with the election, the election was held and the new administration has the responsibility for government. It is the job of the Senate and the Senate alone to be sure that those Cabinet officers and the people who support those Cabinet officers and departments are put in place early, as well. Looking at the park system, looking at partnership, and looking at how important it is that we are willing to do things in a different way is something we ought to be thinking about in this week that we confirm the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Interior, and, later today, the Secretary of Energy. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, every day we continue to set new records for how long it takes for the new President to get his Cabinet in power--in office--and the responsibility to carry out the things that the President said that he wanted to do when he was elected. In the great history of confirming people, from the Garfield administration in the 1880s until Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, the entire Cabinet in that whole period of time was confirmed on the first day. Now we are in the longest period in the history of the country since George Washington was President to try to get a Cabinet in place, not to mention all of the other jobs that go along with confirming the Cabinet. It is a good thing and no wonder that a few years ago the Senate looked at the numbers of people we had taken responsibility to confirm and said: Now, which of those do we really have to confirm and which of those would we only confirm if someone in the Senate believes we have to have a hearing on that level of person and that agency at that time? We tried to streamline a process that we all know needs to be streamlined, but with only a couple of exceptions, every nominee so far has been the most dangerous nominee of all time for whatever job it is. There must be fill-in-the-blank speeches back there somewhere that go from one to the next: This would be the worst person who could ever possibly hold this job. In the case of Congressman Mulvaney, it appears to be because he wants to try to do things that allow our entitlement programs to survive; he wants to do things that allow the deficit at some point to be eliminated. And no matter what point that is, that point would be too early for some of our friends on the other side. Interestingly, as we talk about the Affordable Care Act, which has turned out to be very unaffordable for almost any family on the individual market and many families who had insurance that worked for them before--the Affordable Care Act cut Medicare in the plan by $500 billion over 10 years. We hear speaker after speaker on the other side say: We would never do anything to cut Medicare. I argued vigorously against those cuts when they occurred. As we move forward, I think we ought to be very thoughtful that we restore the cuts in areas where clearly it is not working the way people thought the Affordable Care Act would work. The person in charge of the numbers, the person in charge of the balance sheet, the person who calculates the costs should be someone with the capacity to do that. The President has decided, and the Senate, when finally allowed to vote, will determine that person is Mr. Mulvaney.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, we are coming to the conclusion of weeks now of debate on the nominee to be the Attorney General of the United States, and we still have other debates to have on other people before this process ends. In fact, somebody observed this week that you have to go back to the very founding of the government, to the first administration of George Washington, to find a time when it has taken longer to put a Cabinet in place, and George Washington only had to find four people in a government that was just trying to establish itself. But we are taking a maximum amount of time on a Cabinet and a Presidential nomination that usually happen quickly. There has traditionally been an understanding in our country that when the President is elected--the importance of the President being able to put his stamp on the government as quickly as possible. And eventually we will be able to say his or her stamp on the government. But up until now, Presidents have had that opportunity. I read somewhere that from President Garfield right after the Civil War through Franklin Roosevelt, that Cabinets--those were put in place in the first days of every one of those administrations, often even the very first day. What we have seen in this debate is also the questioning of people's motives, not just their decisions. I don't quote Vice President Biden often, but one of the quotes I have heard him give often and one I have agreed with in all my time here is that it is appropriate to question somebody else's decisions in public debate, particularly when you are debating your colleagues, who have also been elected to these jobs as well, but it is frankly not appropriate to question their motives. When we start doing that, that is always a mistake. When I was the whip in the House, I used to tell freshman Members of the House: You are going to enjoy this opportunity and be better at it while you are here if you can vigorously fight for what you are for but if you will also believe that in virtually 100 percent of the cases, the person on the other side of that debate is as well motivated and as genuine as you are. You can be wrong and not be evil. You can be wrong and not be badly motivated. You know, elections do have consequences. Every person we are talking with on this floor in this debate was elected to the Senate. I think Senator Sessions will be confirmed Attorney General, so sometime later this week, one of our number will have been appointed to this job. But these are people who come to this process as the Constitution determines, and they serve here as representatives of both the State they represent and the Constitution and what it stands for. In the case of Senator Sessions, we have a colleague who has been here for 20 years. Anybody who has been here less than that served every day of their time in the Senate with Senator Sessions. People who have been here longer than that have served all 20 years with Senator Sessions. I don't know how you can do that and not see the quality he brings to that job every day. He and I have not always voted the same. In fact, there is probably no Member here with whom I have always voted the same. But he comes with a background of integrity. He started as an Eagle Scout. I think he was a Distinguished Eagle Scout. I am not even sure I know the difference between an Eagle Scout and a Distinguished Eagle Scout; I thought all Eagle Scouts were distinguished. But starting even then, Jeff Sessions has always stood out a little above the crowd. He has four decades of public service. In 1975, he became an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District in Alabama. Half a dozen years after that, he became the U.S. attorney in that district. He held that job for 12 years until he became the attorney general of Alabama. People trusted him to take that those responsibilities. In 1997, as I said, he came to the Senate. He has been a senior member of the Judiciary Committee for some time now. He has worked across party lines, and he has done that in fights for justice and fights on behalf of the victims of crime and, frankly, on more than one occasion, fights to be sure that those accused of crimes also had their day in court, and after they had their day in court, it was Senator Sessions who was instrumental in leading the fight for the Fair Sentencing Act. Senator Sessions was very involved in the Paul Coverdell act for forensic sciences to be sure that the evidence that was in court would be unassailable to every extent possible. He has been vigorous in wanting to be sure those accused of crimes had justice, as well as those who were the victims of crime. When I came to the Senate, Senator Coons and I--a Democrat from Delaware and a good friend of mine. I am thinking about him in this week that his father passed away. When we came to the Senate 6 years ago, we formed the Law Enforcement Caucus. Senator Sessions was a great supporter of that effort. When we were able to reauthorize in the last Congress the Victims of Child Abuse Act--this is a law that provides Federal assistance to locations in virtually every State--22 in the State of Missouri--where kids who have been the victims of crime or a witness to crime have a place to go and get the information out of their lives that needs to get away from them so they can get on to the next thing that happens, a law that protects our most vulnerable children and is designed to hold the perpetrators of crimes on those children or crimes those children witness--allows that to be dealt with in the right way. Senator Sessions was a great advocate for that. He has been endorsed by the major law enforcement associations of the country, as well as many of his colleagues. The law enforcement associations that say Jeff Sessions would be a good Attorney General are the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Sheriffs' Association, the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the Major Counties Sheriffs' Association, and the list goes on. Then you get to the victims of crime groups who have endorsed Senator Sessions. Five former U.S. Attorney Generals and one former FBI Director are on that list. They are saying that Jeff Sessions would be a good person-- in the case of five of them--to hold the jobs they held, and they know more about that job than any of us do: Michael Mukasey, Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Bill Barr, Ed Meese III. All, along with FBI Director Louis Freeh, have endorsed Jeff Sessions for this job. There has been some discussions of his relationship with African Americans. We have African-American endorsements from his State but also from the former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice; our colleague Tim Scott, who will be here later this afternoon, and I intend to be here for his remarks; and Larry Thompson, the former Deputy Attorney General. These are people who know Jeff Sessions and know what he has to offer to that job. It is a job of great responsibility. Seldom will we as Senators have an opportunity to confirm someone to that job or any other job that we know as well as Senator Sessions. We know his family. We know his recent addition of twin grandchildren to his family just a little over a year ago. We know how much he cares about them. We know the moments that he has reached out to each of us as we have had challenges or things we needed help with. I think he will do a great job as Attorney General. I believe that will happen later today. I think the country and the Attorney General's office will be in good hands late today when Jeff Sessions undoubtedly, I am confident, becomes the Attorney General. I look forward to that vote later today and then getting on to the next nominee, Dr. Price, whom I served with in the House. Any discussion that there have not been ideas that were alternatives to the Affordable Care Act--people just have not been paying attention to Dr. Tom Price all the time he has been in the Congress or as budget director and haven't paid attention to him as a practicing physician. He is another great nominee at a time when we really need to set a new course. We are going to see that happen in both the Attorney General's office and at HHS, and I look forward to what we do as those move forward. I also look forward to what may not be the official maiden speech but what I think will be the first speech on the floor for our new colleague, John Kennedy. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am proud to have a chance to speak in support of your fellow Coloradan, Neil Gorsuch, President Trump's nominee to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Clearly, we all understand this is an important decision and an important institution. The Supreme Court is the only Court specified in the Constitution and often the final arbiter of how the Constitution and the law is to be applied. In the history of the Court, in the history of the country, only 112 individuals have had the honor to serve on the Supreme Court. As we debate the qualifications and qualities of the person who has been nominated, and I hope to see confirmed as the 113th person to serve as an Associate Justice or a Justice on the Court, it is really vital we understand that we have a nominee who has a deep understanding and appreciation of the role of the Court and the role the Court plays in our democracy. Judge Gorsuch embodies these principles through a lifetime of service, and he has really prepared himself in many unique ways for this moment. He graduated from Columbia University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and earned his law degree from Harvard Law School. After law school, Judge Gorsuch served as a Supreme Court clerk to two different Justices, Justice Byron White and Justice Anthony Kennedy. It has been pointed out that if Judge Gorsuch is confirmed to serve on the Court, he will be the first person ever to serve with someone for whom he clerked, and hopefully he and Justice Kennedy will have an opportunity to serve together. After clerking on the Court, he went on to a successful career in private law practice, spending 10 years litigating a broad range of complex trials and appeals. In 2004, just in case his Harvard law degree wasn't enough, as a Marshall scholar, he received a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University. At every point in his preparation, it has been understood he was at the top of that preparatory activity. He has served his country in the Justice Department, working as the Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General. In 2006, 10 years ago, President George W. Bush nominated him to serve on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. At the time of his nomination, the American Bar Association gave him a unanimous ``well qualified'' rating, the highest rating. The Senate then confirmed his nomination unanimously by a voice vote. Today I believe the Senate has 11 Democrats serving with us who were part of that unanimous process. In his decade on the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals bench, Judge Gorsuch has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to upholding the rule of law and interpreting the Constitution as its authors intended. I am confident he will continue to adhere to the Constitution, apply the rule of law, and not legislate from the bench. I think he understands, as Justice Scalia did, that the job of a Justice of the Supreme Court is not to decide what the law should be or what the Constitution, in their opinion, should say but decide what the law is and what the Constitution does say. His keen intellect and devotion to law are very well understood and appreciated throughout the legal profession. He has the integrity, the professional qualifications, and the judicial temperament to serve on the Nation's highest Court. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an editorial from earlier this week.

Mr. BLUNT. I wish to share a little of that editorial where the Denver Post says: We are not afraid of a judge who strictly interprets the Constitution based solely on the language and intent of our nation's founders, as long as he is willing to be consistent even when those rulings conflict with his own beliefs. As Denver Attorney Jason Dunn, who considers himself a longtime fan of Gorsuch, explains, his views stem ``from a belief in a separation of powers and in a judicial modesty that it is not in the role of the courts to make law. Justice Scalia would put it: If you like every one of your rulings, you're probably doing it wrong.'' That is similar to what you and I heard Judge Gorsuch say last night; that a good judge doesn't rule based on what a judge likes to have happen but what the law and the Constitution insists does happen. Going back and continuing just one more paragraph from that Denver Post editorial: A Justice who does his best to interpret the Constitution or statute and apply the law of the land without prejudice could go far to restore the faith in the highest court of the land. That faith has wavered under the manufactured and false rhetoric from critics that the high court has become a corrupt body stacked with liberals. And while Democrats will surely be tempted to criticize the nomination of anyone Trump appoints, they'd be wise to take the high road and look at qualifications and legal consistency rather than political leanings. That is in the middle of that editorial that is now in the Record. The Supreme Court is one of the most important legacies this President is likely to leave. I think he made a very well-considered and right choice in selecting Judge Gorsuch to begin shaping the long- term view of the Court. I look forward to hearing more from the judge as this confirmation process moves forward and to seeing him confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. I yield the floor.