Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I am pleased to work on this with Senator Donnelly. This is an amendment which, as he said, requires that we categorize fuel types and that we say what works for various types of fuel as opposed to setting some standard that makes it impossible for other resources we have to be used. It says that the technology has to be commercially available. We had the Acting EPA Director before the Appropriations Committee earlier this year. I asked the Acting Director: The rule that you are talking about, is this technology available? Can somebody go out and buy this? And the response was something like: Well, parts of it are out there, but nobody has ever quite put it together yet--which, of course, meant that the rule, for the first time ever, set a standard that couldn't possibly be reached. In States such as ours, Missouri and Indiana, where Senator Donnelly and I are from, we are more than 80 percent dependent on coal. Some of our constituents are 100 percent dependent on coal. If you do things that raise their utility bills, families know it and their community knows it. This amendment simply would force the EPA to use common sense when setting standards for any facility. The new source performance standards, based upon emission limits for powerplants, for refineries, for manufacturing facilities, for whatever else they can cover, simply don't meet that commonsense standard. In fact, last March when the proposed rule went out, there were more than 2 million comments. You have to work pretty hard to find this rule, and you have to really be dedicated to read it, and 2 million comments said this won't work. It is so obvious that it won't work. The rule said that if someone wants to build a coal plant, they have to install carbon capture technology, which according to the rule would add 80 percent to the cost of electricity. It would overstate it a little bit initially, but not very far in the future--if you get your utility bill and multiply it by two, you will be pretty close to what your utility bill would be if the proponents of this rule--if what they say will happen is what happens. What happens if you double the utility bill? How many jobs go away? How many families find themselves in stress? When cap and trade failed, the President--who had said earlier that under his cap-and-trade plan electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket--when it failed, the President said that was only one way of skinning the cat. Obviously, the EPA is looking for the second way to skin this cat and to impact families. It would make it expensive to do what can be otherwise done in the country. Businesses and households would need to make a decision about that. What we need to be doing is looking to use all of our resources in the best possible way. More American energy is critical, and we ought to be doing everything we can to see how we produce more American energy, a more certain supply, easier to transition from one fuel to another, not harder, not putting one electric plant out of business and requiring that you build an entire new electric plant. Do you know how you pay for an electric plant? Somebody gives you the authority to pass all that cost along to the people who are served by it. There is no free electricity out there. It makes a real difference. The most vulnerable families among us are the ones who are most impacted by the higher utility bill. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that nearly 40 million American households earn less than $30,000 a year, and those households spend almost 20 percent of their income on energy. Do you want to make that 30 percent or 40 percent? Surely that is not the answer for vulnerable families. If you read the press reports today, the EPA will come out with a rule tomorrow. I hope this amendment becomes part of the law that would make that rule, frankly, make common sense. The American people want the administration to stop picking winners and losers through regulatory policies. If the Congress wants to have that debate and change the law and do that in the open, that is one way to do it, but I think we all know that American consumers have figured out where this road takes their family, and they don't want to go there. So I urge support for the amendment Senator Donnelly and I are working on--common sense and real cost-benefit analysis. New standards that work are essential, not new standards that you know won't work. I am glad to be a cosponsor of this amendment and urge my colleagues to join Senator Donnelly and me if we get a chance to vote on it as part of this bill. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, as we continue our debate about health care reform, I would like to recognize an organization in Missouri that has been a leader in innovation in driving down the healthcare costs for manufacturers and their employees. The Missouri Association of Manufacturers and their CEO, Rita Needham, have been at the forefront of the debate in my State. She is committed to new strategies to provide affordable health care through consortiums of manufacturers that employ more than 2,100 people. As an educator, human resource manager and administrator, Rita Needham joined the Southwest Area Missouri Association, SAMA, in 1999 as community affairs director. SAMA reached out to support manufacturers in the Springfield, MO area. Needham was elevated to executive director 2 years later and created a health care consortium which provided affordable health care coverage for manufacturers. Rita was the driving force in obtaining a two-year waiver from the Missouri Department of Insurance to enable companies of all sizes to join together in a pilot program to purchase group health insurance. Before the consortium was created, the initial 32 companies who joined the SAMA I Consortium had to buy their health insurance individually, but, under the consortium, they were rated as one policy holder therefore achieving significant savings. Six smaller companies who were part of the consortium were able to access affordable health care for the first time. The consortium members were able to achieve long term rate stability, create large group buying power and reduce claim risk in response to their biggest concern--the rising costs of health care. In 2006, Rita led SAMA's efforts to persuade the Missouri General Assembly to pass House bill 1827, landmark legislation known as the SAMA bill, which allowed manufacturers of all sizes the option of purchasing a group health plan under the consortium. In 2010, the Southwest Area Manufacturers Association became the Missouri Association of Manufacturers, MAM, with 170 member companies across the State representing 14,500 employees. Today, MAM is a strong voice for manufacturing with free market positions on trade, regulation, tax and energy policy, education, health care and the environment. Rita is planning to retire this year, but throughout her career she has been a thoughtful, dedicated leader for Missouri manufacturers. I have always relied on her expertise and common sense to better understand how Federal policy impacts health costs for manufacturers. I wish Rita and her husband Jim a wonderful retirement. There is no doubt that Rita's advocacy and smart leadership have improved the business environment in Missouri.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I rise in support of the effort that my friend Senator Manchin has done to reach a conclusion. I hope we reach that conclusion today. I was a university president for 4 years before coming to the Congress. There are 11 million families--between now and the start of the school year--who will be making decisions on how these programs work, so they are very impacted by what we do. Working together to make this happen is important, and I will be supporting that. I am glad to be a cosponsor of this bill that deals with scholarships, but I wish to talk quickly about one other topic and then I have another topic I came to the floor to talk about. Remembering Officers Chestnut and Gibson

Mr. BLUNT. Fifteen years ago this week, we had two of our Capitol Police officers killed in this building. Officer Jacob Chestnut and Detective John Gibson were killed. An intruder came into the building, and these two people, trying to protect and defend others, were killed. Later today there will be a moment of silence in honor of them and at the same time remembering all of those who do this every day for us. I happened to be working in this building on 9/11. I was one of the last people to leave the building that morning, and I remember the people who were still here when I left were the Capitol Police. I remember one of the policewomen I saw as I was going out the door-- Isabelle said: You need to get out of the building as quick as you can. But she was still here. Officer Gibson actually died in the doorway of an office that was my office for a couple of years in this building. I moved into that office shortly after he and his family both made the sacrifice that all of those who work here to protect us are willing to make. The other thing I would like to say is that in light of all of that, this building was kept open for people who were not only from the United States but from all over the world to come and see. One of the things Congress appropriately never talked about after that tragedy was: What do we do to keep people out of this building? The discussion was: What do we do to let people continue to be in this building, and we will be remembering that day. The Economy

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I rise principally to talk about the fact that today President Obama is pivoting back to jobs and the economy in a series of speeches in Illinois, Florida, and in my State of Missouri. He will be speaking at the University of Central Missouri at Warrensburg today, and I am glad he is. I was there recently. This campus always hosts Girls State and Boys State. It is one of our great schools. Warrensburg is a great community. I am glad he is there, and I am glad the President is going to get to see that. These speeches the President is giving sound an awful lot like the 2012 campaign speeches. I think we need to move beyond that. We need to not just pivot to the economy, but we need to stick with the economy. Missourians and all Americans are concerned about the economy and for good reason. In June, a Gallup poll found Americans continuing to say the economy is the biggest problem facing the country. Certainly, if we look at what we ought to be focused on in our domestic agenda of what we are going to do for America, private sector jobs have to be at the top. The President has pivoted--and I think usually the press and maybe even the administration were pivoting to jobs and the economy--to the economy and has done that a lot over the last several years. It is sort of like he goes to this issue and then he goes away from it. I believe that when he is there, he is talking about the right thing, but he has to talk about the right thing all the time if he wants the right thing to happen. There is an old saying that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The President and the administration's focus seems to be like that. Occasionally, we come around to the right topic, but then we quickly get to other topics. In May of this year, the President pivoted to jobs during his middle- class jobs and opportunity tour. In February, he pivoted to jobs during a State of the Union Message. In June of last year, he pivoted to jobs during a campaign speech in Cleveland, OH. Aides said he was framing the speech but didn't have any new proposals. That was the way that speech was described that day. In September of 2011, President Obama pivoted to jobs during a speech before a joint session of Congress that was held to bring attention to jobs, where he said he wanted to vote on a $447 billion jobs package. In August of 2011, the President pivoted to jobs during a speech at the White House following a Senate debt ceiling vote, and then he had a Midwest bus tour. In January of 2010, he pivoted to jobs amid news that unemployment reached 10 percent in the wake of what I think was clearly a failed stimulus plan. It was a stimulus plan that didn't work. During the speech, he announced there would be more tax credits for clean energy jobs. The December before that, he pivoted to jobs during a White House forum for business leaders. I think I read somewhere this morning that we could count as many as 18 pivots to jobs. We need to pivot to jobs and stay with it. When the President is talking about private sector jobs, he is talking about the right thing, but what he says after pivoting to jobs is what matters. Hopefully, tomorrow the President will still be talking about jobs. Hopefully, the President will talk about jobs every day in the next week and longer until we get this done. We need to stay on the economy until we get it done. Action speaks louder than words, and unfortunately the record is not as good as we would like it to be. We have lagging job creation and devastating manufacturing loss. The economy is now adding jobs again but barely enough to keep up with the numbers of people going into the workforce. Manufacturing has been particularly hard hit, despite the President's goal of adding 1 million new manufacturing jobs by the end of the second term. I would like to see that happen. If the President stays focused on that as the premier domestic topic every day for the next 3\1/2\ years, it might, but it will not if he doesn't. We have too much debt, and that doesn't help in adding jobs. We have added $6 trillion in debt and saw a stimulus plan that added a lot of that debt and didn't appear to create the jobs it was supposed to create. As far as the health care law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates 7 million people will lose their coverage because of the health care law. The Chamber of Commerce said that more than 70 percent of small businesses say the health care law makes it harder and less likely for them to hire new employees. The Congressional Budget Office says the health care law will not reduce the number of uninsured below 30 million Americans, but it is going to cost a lot of money in holding back full-time jobs. I read articles every day in different papers that people are looking at part-time jobs rather than full-time jobs because of the health care law. Surely that is not what we should be doing. There are energy policies that don't make sense: the continued blockage of the Keystone Pipeline that would have added tens of thousands of jobs just to build it. After it is built, more American energy equals more American jobs. The President and administration need to embrace that concept of more American energy. Republicans in the Senate and House are united in calling for progrowth policies such as replacing the President's health care plan with something that will work. Encouraging more American energy of all kinds--from renewables to solar to wind--is important. We need to also understand that traditional sources of energy will be the main source of energy for the foreseeable future and that will grow our economy-- approving things such as the Keystone XL Pipeline, stop overregulating in ways that hold our national energy policy back. Obviously, we need to rein in wasteful government spending, give Americans more economic certainty, and simplify. There is much we can do. We need to simplify the Tax Code. There is a lot we can do. I say to the President, it is time to keep talking about jobs. I hope today is the first of lots of days in a row when we are talking about jobs but also doing the things that help create private sector jobs, doing the things that help create an environment where people want to take the chance to create an opportunity because our society needs to be about that. By the way, it is the private sector jobs that do that. The public sector jobs are fine, and I am glad to have one right here, but public sector jobs don't pay the bill. They are the bill. Private sector jobs are where we need to go, and I encourage the President to stick with the pivot this time. I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I rise to discuss my hold on the nominee whom we will be voting on this afternoon, Gina McCarthy. Gina McCarthy is the President's nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. There is no doubt that there are lots of things to be concerned about with the Environmental Protection Agency. There are 12 States that just sued the EPA over the Agency's sue-and- settle tactics. There are rules and regulations, if they are allowed to go forward, that will raise energy prices. There are lots of issues to debate, and we will continue to debate those. This is about a more targeted area. I have only been in the Senate for a couple of years. What is a hold? A hold is put on a nomination when there is a problem that needs to be solved or for a problem that just can't be solved. Some may object to the nominee or some may object to something that has happened that should permanently disqualify that particular individual from any job. This is a hold on a problem that could be solved. This is one of the things that individual Senators still have the ability to do. This is not intended to stop a nominee but to at least make it more difficult for that nominee to be confirmed. It is one of the things we can do to say: Let's do what we can to solve this problem. It has to be defensible. In my view, it has to be something a Senator is willing to talk about. We did away with the so-called secret holds in the Senate in recent years so we know who has the hold. If anyone wants to know, I suppose they could almost always find out why they have it. In my case, I would like the administration to do something they promised to do in February; that is, to reach an agreement on a set of facts that relate to a longstanding project in my State of Missouri. Let me be clear: I am not asking anybody to spend any money. I am not asking anybody to approve a project. This is about a draft statement that is out there that the government keeps arguing with itself about. There is an old saying that you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. I don't care what opinion any of these agencies have. That is outside of this discussion. What I care about is agreeing on the facts. There is a project in the ``bootheel'' of Missouri. Actually, for anyone who has a map of the United States, you can get pretty close to where the project is located. The bootheel in southeast Missouri is pretty easy to find on any map that identifies the States. Anybody can get very close to this project. The St. Johns Bayou-New Madrid Floodway Project has been mired in bureaucratic infighting and unresolved government disputes for at least 30 years. In fact, 1954 was when the government said they would take care of this levee problem. They said it again in 1986. It is as if every 32 years we need to renew our commitment to do this job. Congress authorized this project. It would add 1,500 feet of levee. It would close a gap in the levee system around the river; 1,500 feet is not a long space. It can be measured by football fields or however else you want to measure it. We are talking about 1,500 feet. We are talking about how that would work. After years of going back and forth over the first environmental impact statement, the Army Corps of Engineers produced a second draft of this statement in July of 2011. What do I mean by agreeing to the facts? One of the facts in dispute in any levee flood is always wetlands. In this case, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said there were 500 acres of wetlands. The Environmental Protection Agency said: No, there are 118,000 acres of wetlands. Obviously, this is a pretty big floodway if 117,500 acres of it could be in dispute as to whether it is wetlands, and that is a pretty big discrepancy. These are two government agencies. There is only one definition for wetland. Is it 500 acres or is it 118,000 acres? I think the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service had some number somewhere in the middle, but that is no way to solve disputes. The facts are the facts. What meets the definition? This draft of the environmental impact statement--people could comment on this draft if it became public. It is not a final statement. I have been asking for a draft statement. It has now been out there for 2 years. In March of 2012, I sent two letters to try to address this problem. One letter went to the Fish & Wildlife Service and one was sent to the EPA. In June of 2012, the Army Corps withdrew the revised statement due to ongoing concerns with these other two agencies. In September of 2012, Congresswoman Emerson--who is from that congressional district in Missouri--and I sent a letter expressing our disappointment about all of this foot dragging. In October of that year, we visited the project to try to figure out what the problem could be for all the farm families and those who would be impacted as well as others who want to be sure they have the right kind of flood protection. In December of 2012, Missouri colleague Senator McCaskill wrote the heads of the EPA and Fish & Wildlife demanding that they reach a resolution in 30 days and that they present this new environmental impact statement in 60 days. So now there is a Republican Senator and Democratic Senator asking the government to quit arguing with itself and come up with an agreement on the facts. This is about the facts, not about opinions. In July of 2013, the Army Corps withdrew its revised draft statement once again and the EPA said: We are going to take this all the way to the White House for review. In February of this year, 2013, Senator McCaskill and I had a meeting in her office with representatives of these agencies. During that meeting in February, all the agencies agreed to reach an agreement surrounding the facts by March 15. They came up with this deadline. Senator McCaskill and I didn't ask them when or how quickly they could do this. They said: We will get this done by March 15. Unfortunately, on March 15 they called and said: We couldn't quite get it done by March 15. So I said: OK. One way I can have some impact is with this nominee for EPA. So the next week, March 18, I placed a hold on her nomination. Frankly, I thought this would be a couple of weeks. After all, 1 month earlier they thought they could do this in 2 weeks. Now I am saying: OK, let's get this done. They can't just promise Members of the Senate that they are going to do something and then decide to ignore it. As a result, nothing has happened yet. The March 15 deadline has come and gone. In May of 2013, I went to the project site again. I met with Gina McCarthy that month to express my concerns over this bureaucratic infighting. I contacted the White House to attempt to get this situation resolved for southeastern Missourians and people in neighboring States who benefit from this floodway as well. Unfortunately, we are still waiting. Ten days ago, the EPA, the Corps, and Fish & Wildlife sent a letter on the status. They said there was a common understanding. I wrote back and said: What does that mean? Does that mean you don't understand how you don't agree with each other? What does it mean? Can we get these facts determined? So far I have heard nothing. I want to know whether the Natural Resource Conservation Service agrees with the new definition. The EPA came up with a new definition of farmable wetlands. No one I know has heard of this before. It is not defined anywhere in law. It is just at the EPA. Finally, has there been an agreement with the Corps, EPA or Fish & Wildlife on whether proposed mitigation actions are both valid and adequate? Of the 471 comments that came out, 115 of them concerned mitigation, and most of them came from EPA. I am referring to internal comments. We have not gotten to a point where a citizen can say: I like this project or I don't like it, and here is what I think is wrong with it. I sent a response to the administration on July 9 with more questions. The most pressing question is: Why can't we manage the government? The administration on this issue said: The government is big and complicated and we can't expect the President to run everything in the administration. Actually, I do expect the President to do that. The Constitution expects the President to do that. Again, as I conclude, let me just say I will vote to not go forward with her nomination, although I may not prevail. This is a reasonable question. I am not asking the Federal Government to spend a dime or to approve construction; I am just asking them to agree to the facts. One wouldn't think that would be hard to do, but in this case it has been pretty hard to do. The government needs to stop arguing with the government. I am going to keep fighting for the people I work for to have a right to know what the facts are and what we should be considering as we decide whether we should move forward with this project. The Federal Government said, in 1954 and again in 1986, here is something we are going to do and here is the authorization to do it. Let's find out if it really works by just putting the facts on record.

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I would like to talk about the Affordable Care Act. I have long been concerned that this is an act that simply won't work. I think the premise the bill was built around is a premise that won't work. I know things like guaranteed insurance sound very popular--that you can get health insurance no matter what your health condition is--but the problem with getting insurance after the fact as one of the potentials is that it discourages getting insurance before the fact. Getting insurance after you are sick is like getting fire insurance after your house is on fire. You could probably get fire insurance after your house is on fire, but it would sure cost a lot more than it would have cost under what we would see as traditional insurance. So I have always thought that premise was a problem. I have always thought the requirements in the bill that depend heavily on young people who are healthy buying insurance at higher rates than young people have ever looked at before--and remember, that is probably the biggest uninsured component in this society because young and healthy people think they are young and healthy, and the truth is that they normally are young and healthy, and they don't need insurance like many members of this body might need insurance because they just simply don't and they know it. Frankly, now that the least likely to be healthy among us can't pay more than three times the most healthy--we have never had that requirement before--doesn't mean the cost of insurance goes down for unhealthy people as much as it means it goes up in cost for people who are healthy. And I think those young healthy people will be smart enough to figure out that it is probably not in their best interests, either their health or their finances, to buy the insurance they don't need rather than to have the ability later to buy insurance if it turns out they need it. It just never made much sense to me. Meanwhile, as we see that happening, from insurers to doctors to employers, people are looking at this law and figuring out if this is a place where they still want to focus their energies. I met with a number of doctors this morning who talked about how doctors are selling their private practices to hospitals and how specialty doctors are not going into specialty medicine because the cost is too high for the reward they might get. I have talked to employer after employer who said: We have done all we could to provide the insurance we have provided, but we can't meet these new benefits and still stay in business. And even more employers have said: We may not let anybody go who is a full-time employee, but in the future we are going to hire more part-time employees because we don't have to cover those part-time employees under the law. Then, as people are leaving health care behind and they are leaving their obligation to help provide health care behind, they keep getting different messages from the Federal Government itself. Not too long ago the supporters of this act--and I have never been one of them, I will admit that right upfront--but the supporters of this act are saying we are going to stick with this, we are going to implement it, we are going to stay fully committed to it. But while we were gone last week, the administration announced that in fact--they did it on a blog post, which I suppose is a way to announce something that is as consequential as this. It certainly got a lot of attention. But the blog posting said the insurance reporting rules and penalties for employers would be delayed for another year. Suddenly, one of the wheels on this bicycle is gone. The employer who was going to have to provide insurance or pay a penalty now does not have to do it. But apparently the individuals who are going to have to buy insurance for themselves, if it is not provided at work, have to. At the same time the administration announced the income verification to have taxpayers help pay for a person's insurance would be waived. Remember, the income verification for any person or family at less than 400 percent of poverty--which is a pretty big number; it is around $90,000 for a family of 4--you get some taxpayer assistance to pay for your insurance. But now you do not even have to verify your income to get that. You can just say here is my income and whatever it is I want to have the taxpayer insurance based on what I believe my level of income would be that I am willing to tell you about. Suddenly the money the Government is spending is going to people who are getting taxpayer-paid insurance. There is no penalty for people who do not provide insurance at work as the law requires. So, for a law I have had problems with all along, I have even more problems with it now. It is like: Never mind the employer mandate. Never mind the individual income verification to get taxpayer assistance. How could you take those two principles out of that law and expect it to be implemented in a fair way? The new plan apparently is let the Government sign up as many new people as they can for government-assisted insurance. I understand why that might be the most popular aspect of this bill. One of the great principles of society and people is when somebody is giving you something you are usually more glad to get it than you are when somebody is taking something away from you. But in this case you are taking money away from taxpayers to give to individuals to pay for their insurance and not fulfilling the rest of the commitments of the bill. The administration obviously believes that paying the bill will make an unpopular piece of legislation more popular. In fact, many of the administration's advocates are talking about how politically smart it is to put off the implementation of this bill for employer-based insurance until after the next election. You can hardly find a story about this without it talking about how shrewd it is, putting this off until people have voted one more time before they find out what is in it. There were no real rules that came out until after the 2012 election, and then suddenly after the 2012 election, between then and the end of the year, there are 20,000 pages of rules, rules that nobody saw before election day, but suddenly the 20,000 pages of rules, 7\1/2\ feet high--7\1/2\ feet of rules that will be challenging to comply with but, more importantly, nobody saw them before the 2012 election--now nobody has to have a penalty as an employer until after the 2014 election. I think I am getting to see a pattern develop here and the pattern is when people find out what is in this law they are not going to like it. If it was believed they were going to like it, I think we would be rushing to implement the law before the 2014 election, not after. I think we would be rushing to have the 20,000 pages of regulations out before the 2012 election, not after it. They had 3 years to get the regulations out before the 2012 election, 3 years, but they all come out after November. Now we are told we do not have time to implement this. It has been 3\1/2\ years since the bill was signed into law. If this is ever going to work, how much time is it going to take to implement it? This is a determined effort to get further and further down what I think may be the wrong road before people find out what has happened to their insurance, before people know what has happened to their doctor, before people know what has happened to their health care. And when they find out, I think they are not going to like it. Since the passage of the bill, the law has had 8 interim final rules, 3 final rules, 20 requests for comment, 21 proposed rules--according to the Wall Street Journal, 1 information collection request, 2 amendments to the interim final rules, 6 requests for information, and 1 frequently-asked-questions document. The administration announced about a year ago that the long-term care provisions of the bill, the so-called CLASS Act, simply wouldn't work. I remember when this was before the committee in the House of Representatives, when it was said: Look, there is no way this can possibly work. The advocates said no, this is actually going to make money. But once the bill was signed into law and was out there for about a year, the Department of Health and Human Services said this long-term care thing was not going to work; even though it is in the law, we are not going to implement it. Then they announced we are not going to have the small business exchange available in January 2015; it will be at least another year for that. The very same week they said we are not going to have income verification, we are not going to have the employer mandate, there is another 606 or so pages of new rules and regulations. The rules and regulations seem to come out, but nobody seems to want to implement the law. There were 3\1/2\ years to get ready. Now they can't get ready until after the next election. If employers should have a delay, so should individuals and so should families. In fact, I think what we should have is a permanent delay while we look for a plan that works, that can be implemented, that makes sense, that is based on good health care and good health care decisionmaking. I hope this Senate and this Congress and this administration will try to find a plan that works instead of constantly saying: You know, we are not ready to make this plan--which has been out there for 3\1/2\ years now--work and work to meet the needs of the American people. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I would ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business.

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I thank you for the time. I want to talk about the hard work my colleagues have put in on this bill. It looks as though it is going to get a number of votes today. It will not be getting mine. I think it is important, as we look at these issues, to understand that once a bill actually gets to the President's desk and gets signed into law, we are probably not going to visit this again for a long time. I think it does not put border security first or it does not address what I have more and more grown to think of as the other border, which is the hiring desk. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the underlying Senate bill would only cut illegal immigration by 25 percent. It does not seem to me that is nearly good enough. I think the estimate was that if this bill did not pass, 10 million people would come into the country in the next 10 years. If it does pass, 7.5 million people would come into the country in the next 10 years illegally. Some of them will come across the border. A lot of them come here now legally and then they just stay. I do not see anything in this bill that does what we could be doing there. I voted against proceeding to the amendment this week, the Hoeven- Corker amendment, because I did not think it really focused--as the Cornyn amendment did that I cosponsored--on granting legal status only after we get the border secured rather than doing it before. In my view, these challenges need to be met. What do we do about the workforce needs of the country? What do we do about people who came here illegally or came here legally and stayed then illegally? But it is important to understand that as long as it has taken to even get to this point, once a bill passes, we are probably not going to go back and say: Gee, I wish we had done this or I wish we had done that. In addition, under the bill, the only requirement before legalization can begin is for the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to simply submit a border security plan to the Congress. There are lots of plans and a lot of them are talked about in this building. Some of them work; some of them do not work. But this does not require any further approval or verification of the plan. The amendment I supported that Senator Corker was the principal sponsor on said you would have to meet some metrics, you would have to have some measures you know you could prove and would be willing to certify. Everybody seems willing to admit that 100-percent awareness of what goes on on the border is possible. So if 100-percent awareness is possible, why isn't it possible--if you know 100 percent of what is going on and can watch the whole border--why isn't it possible to be able to certify a certain number of people are being stopped every year and that the border is not totally and completely and absolutely secure but meets a level of operational control the American people have a right to expect? The $46.3 billion for border security is mandatory funding, but the amendment only requires $8.3 billion of that $46 billion to come from fees, leaving taxpayers on the hook for another $38 billion, again, without the other half of the problem--people who come to our country legally for a short period of time and then stay--being dealt with. If we do not deal with that, we have not dealt with the problem. Mr. President, 20,000 additional border agents and $4.5 billion for additional border technology is not a strategic plan. It seems to me it is throwing a lot of money at a plan and hoping it works. I read lots of people's comments on this who say: Well, we have overdone what needed to be done here, but we have underdone the things you ultimately are going to have to do to fix this problem. This measure also provides $1.5 billion over the next 2 years to provide jobs for Americans between the ages of 16 and 24. While jobs for young workers are a priority, it has nothing to do with immigration reform. I think it had something to do with one of the additional votes. If what I read is true, this is something someone insisted be in this bill. I think we have to understand we would do a lot more to put young Americans to work if we had commonsense regulatory policies and commonsense energy policies. Several editorial boards criticized amendments I cosponsored as poison pills because they considered them too costly to enforce what we were trying to do. One of the amendments I sponsored said we would have 5,000 extra people at the border, and editorial board after editorial board said: Oh, that is too expensive. It is a poison pill that will kill the bill. Those same people are now supportive of the bill that adds 20,000 people working at the border. During the debate I cosponsored other amendments I sought that were defeated. These amendments were in addition to Senator Cornyn's amendment, the RESULTS amendment, requiring DHS to have situational awareness and control of the border. Senator Lee had an amendment requiring congressional approval of the border plan that would come from the Department of Homeland Security. What would be wrong with that: congressional approval, so every year Congress continues to be engaged with the funds it takes to do what needs to be done, as well as the plan it takes? Senator Grassley had an amendment requiring the border would have to be ``effectively'' secured for 6 months before the Department of Homeland Security Secretary could grant the provisional status. Others have pointed out, and I agree, once you begin to grant that provisional status, I do not see any realistic way a Congress ever goes back and says: We know we told you that you could stay, but now you have to leave. Senator Paul had two amendments I supported. One was ``trust but verify,'' much like Senator Lee's amendment, where Congress would have to be sure the integrity of the border was being protected. Another one would protect the integrity of the ballot process from illegal voting. Nobody is here advocating illegal voting. Why we would not get an amendment that did something to ensure it would not happen is surprising to me. Congress has one shot to address immigration reform in the right way. Unfortunately, I cannot vote for this bill because I think it fails to prioritize what needs to be prioritized. I also do not think this bill will be a bill that can pass the House of Representatives. I hope the Senate will now work with the House to find a better solution for long-term immigration reform and we can meet those three criteria of: how do you secure the border, how do you meet the legitimate workforce needs of the country, and what do we do about people who are already here, and in many cases these are people who go to church where we go to church, their kids go to school where our kids go to school. I, frankly, think those last two issues are pretty easily dealt with if the American people ever believe the government has met its responsibility to control our borders. One way to do that is to look at the actual border. Another way to do that is to give employers the kinds of tools they need so we can clearly identify who is in the United States who is eligible to work and who is not. I yield back.

Mr. BLUNT. I am.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I thank the Chair for the opportunity to speak, and I wish to continue discussing what my good friend from Iowa was talking about. There is a reason for the Senate. There are times when it is hard to figure out exactly what that reason is, with the lack of activity we have seen in the last couple of years, but that has very little to do with the rules of the Senate. It has a lot to do with the Senate not following its regular order, its regular procedures. In fact, when we have done that, whether it was the highway bill or the Federal Aviation Act or the farm bill, we have always produced a successful piece of legislation. The Senate works when we let the Senate work. The Senate works when people are allowed to bring differing points of view to the Senate floor. Frankly, one of the reasons to be in the Senate is to have the ability to not only bring those ideas to the floor but to have a vote on those ideas; to let the American people know where we stand and to let the people in the States we represent know where we stand. The idea the Senate is now afraid of the amendment process is a great obstacle to the Senate getting its work done. Another obstacle is constantly talking about changing the Senate rules. The Senate rules have served the Senate well for a long time and served the country well. The Senate rules are what define the Senate in giving individual Senators abilities they wouldn't otherwise have. This is the only body like it in the world where a bare majority can't do whatever it wants to do. If that is the way we want to govern the country, we have one of those bodies already. It is called the House of Representatives, where the majority absolutely rules, where the Rules Committee has nine members representing the majority and four members representing the minority. I was the whip in the House for a long time--the chief vote counter in the House--and I can tell you that nine always beats four. It is not just 2 to 1, it is 2 to 1, plus 1. That is a body where the majority has incredible capacity to do whatever the majority wants to do. That is not the way the Senate is supposed to work. We started off this year trying to agree on how to move the Senate forward in an agreeable and effective way, and now we are right back, every day now, hearing: We are going to have to think about changing the rules. When we hear the majority leader talking about changing the rules, it usually is not a good indication we will be prepared to get anything done. The two leaders, when we started this year, agreed on a plan to make sure the Senate wouldn't unilaterally change the rules; that we would break the rules to change the rules. The thing we would have to do to change the rules is to break the rules, because the rules, once the Senate is constituted, can't be changed by just a majority of Senators. It takes more than that. We created two new ways for the majority leader--not the minority leader but for the majority leader--to expedite Senate action. We gave new powers to the leader. One of these rules changes passed 78 to 16. The other one passed 86 to 9. These changes gave the majority ways to consider nominations and legislation and going to conference. The minority agreed, under certain circumstances, the ability to engage in debate could and would be limited. But now we are back again having the same discussion. The only way the majority leader would be able to get what he apparently wants would be to break the rules. There are enough rules being broken, in my view, in Washington right now. One of the problems we face is that the country, frankly, does not trust their government. When we look across the board, from the IRS to what happened in Benghazi, to what the NSA has said in answering about the retaining of records, we don't need to do yet another thing to convince people there is a reason they should not believe what people in the government say. Let's look at a few things the majority leader said on the Senate floor over the last couple of years. On January of 2011--January 27, to be exact--Mr. Reid said: I agree that the proper way to change the Senate rules is through the procedures established in those rules, and I will oppose any effort in this Congress or the next to change the Senate rules other than through the regular order. That was January of 2011. Mr. McConnell, in January of this year, said on the Senate floor--January 24: I would confirm with the majority leader that the Senate would not consider other resolutions relating to any standing order or rules in this Congress unless they went through the regular order process? That was Senator McConnell's question. In response, Senator Reid said: That is correct. Any other resolutions related to Senate procedure would be subject to a regular order process, including consideration by the Rules Committee. I am on the Rules Committee, and we are not talking about any rules changes in the Rules Committee, which Senator Reid said in January of this year would have to be part of looking at that. Of course, a lot of the discussion is: The nominations are taking too long. But these are important jobs, and there is a reason they take so long. In particular, judicial nominees serve for the rest of their lives. They are going to serve well beyond, in most cases, the President who nominates them. So they have taken a long time for quite a while. I would think the facts are clear the Senate is treating President Obama's judicial nominees fairly and, in some ways, even better than they treated President Bush's nominees. Already in this Congress, the Senate--in this Congress, the one that began in January--the Senate has approved 22 of the President's lifetime appointments. Twenty-two people on the Federal bench for the rest of their lives, that is already happening this year. At a comparable point in President Bush's second term the Senate had approved only five of his judicial nominees. In the last Congress, President Obama had 50 percent more confirmations than President Bush; 171 of his nominees were confirmed. His predecessor had 119 under similar circumstances, a time when the Senate was also dealing with 2 Supreme Court nominees who, by the way, also serve for life. I think in the first term of President Obama the Senate made the kind of progress one would expect the Senate to make on these important jobs. In fact, President Obama has had more district court confirmations than any President in the previous eight Congresses. One would think that would be a pretty good record on the part of the Senate doing its job. The Constitution says the President nominates but, it says, the Senate confirms. In my view, those are equally important jobs. In fact, one could argue that the last job, the one that actually puts the judge on the bench, is even more important than the first job. Overall, the Senate has confirmed 193 lower court judges under President Obama and defeated only 2. The Washington Post cited the Congressional Research Service conclusion that from nomination to confirmation, which is the most relevant indicator, President Obama's circuit court nominees were being processed about 100 days quicker than those of President Bush. President Bush's nominees took about a year, 350 days. President Obama's take about 100 days less than that. Let's look at the other side of nominations. There is a difference in the executive nominations, I believe, because they are only likely to serve during the term of the President and not exceed that. I think that creates a slightly different standard. The process on these nominations has been pretty extraordinary in any view. If anything, the Obama administration has had more nominations considered quicker than the Bush administration. The Secretary of Energy was recently confirmed 97 to 0. The Secretary of the Interior was confirmed 87 to 11; the Secretary of the Treasury, 71 to 26. Those are substantial votes done in a substantial time. The commerce committee that I am on just this week voted out three nominations the President had made with no dissenting votes to report that nomination to the floor. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget was confirmed 96 to 0. The Secretary of State was confirmed 94 to 3, only 7 days after the Secretary of State was nominated. Members of the Senate knew the Secretary of State pretty well. It was easy to look at that in a quick way, but it is pretty hard to imagine a Secretary of State who can be confirmed quicker than 7 days after that person was nominated. The Administrator for the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services was confirmed 91 to 7. The Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission was confirmed by a voice vote. Yet in spite of all of that, we are being told by the White House and by others that somehow the Senate's record on these nominations is worthy of an unprecedented rules change, and that rules change would shut out the rights of the minority to fully review and debate, particularly, lifetime judicial nominations. The very essence of the constitutional obligation of the Senate is to look at these nominations and decide whether these people should go onto the Federal bench for the rest of their lives. I am hopeful that the majority leader will keep his word to the Senate and to the American people and ensure that we move onto this debate that should happen--didn't happen in January--and instead of changing the rules, we do what we are supposed to do and do it in a way that meets our obligations as a Senate and our obligations to the Constitution. Let's not break the rules to change the rules. Let's get on with the important business that is before us rather than going back to the business we have dealt with months ago. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I appreciate my good friend Senator Whitehouse yielding the time for me. Remembering Frank R. Lautenberg

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business.

Mr. BLUNT. I would like to talk for a few minutes about Senator Lautenberg and what he brought to this body and what he brought to public service. I represent Missouri in the Senate, and in the House I represented southwest Missouri. Many times in the last 2\1/2\ years, Senator Lautenberg wanted to talk about going to basic training at Camp Crowder near Neosho, MO, as a young man barely on the edge of his twenties--I am not sure which edge of his twenties it was, but he was serving in World War II, first as a teenager and then as a man barely in his twenties--and what it was like to be surrounded by small communities, all of which were smaller than the camp at which the enlisted men were training, and what it was like when they had some free time and could go to any of these communities where they probably outnumbered the community. He always remembered that part of his training with some pleasure. The story was always different from the story before, but I am sure all the stories happened. But what he was really talking about to me every time was that commitment to service that particularly our World War II veterans brought to this body. And we all know, after the reflections of the last 2 days, that he was the last of the World War II veterans to serve here and likely to be the last of the World War II veterans to ever serve here, and the spirit of service they all brought was reflected in Senator Lautenberg in lots of ways. All you would have to do is look at our voting record to know there were lots of areas at the end of the day we didn't agree on, but somehow we managed to do that and still appreciate the commitment to public service that he reflected, and I think he appreciated that in me. One of the chances I missed here was the opportunity to serve with him on the surface subcommittee in Commerce. He was going to be the chairman of that committee for this Congress, and I was going to be the leading Republican and was looking forward to that because this was one area where I thought we were going to find and would have found a lot of common ground. Senator Lautenberg's understanding of transportation, his understanding beyond most of us of the importance of passenger rail and rail generally and how you need to integrate this system so that it works the best and the most efficiently, was clearly one of the areas where he had spent a lot of time over the years. Remember, Senator Lautenberg was here as a Senator, and then he decided to retire and then called back into public service. At a time when most people would have made that decision and moved on, he came back and served here, as it turned out, for the rest of his life of service. It was an honor for us to get to serve with him. It was an honor for me to get to serve with him. It is a disappointment for me that I didn't get to learn more about this issue he and I were about to join hands on together. But there is a lot we should learn from his service and the service of that World War II generation. I hope that is one of the things we will be reflecting on over the next few days as we reflect on his career of service and that whole generation of service. We really do see that moment pass with Senator Inouye and Senator Lautenberg and others who have served here just in recent years, all gone. But if we could look at the times they could come together in that spirit of World War II to make things happen, we would all learn an important lesson. I join his family and his friends and his colleagues in missing him and missing his service. I am pleased to yield the time back to my good friend Mr. Whitehouse, who gave me the time to say these words.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I would like to respond to my friend Mr. Merkley. This act, which I would think would more properly be called the farmer assurance act, was passed by both the House and the Senate and signed into law by President Obama in March of 2013, March of this year. Many have claimed it was never publicly debated and it was slipped into the bill by the House of Representatives, as my good friend said on the floor a minute ago, and passed the Senate without debate. Now, this was a big bill, I will admit that, and there was a lot of debate. While that would certainly be, I am sure, what Mr. Merkley believes happened, I don't think the facts would bear that out. In fact, this language originated, as he said, and was passed by the House after it was debated in committee, and it was posted for several months. This was not mystery language. In fact, on June 6, 2012, the House publicly posted their resolution that included this in the Agriculture appropriations bill. It was available on the House Web site from that point on. Section 733 of the House bill is identical to the farmer assurance language included in the final fiscal year 2013 appropriations bill that was passed by the Congress. On June 19, 2012, the House Agriculture appropriations bill was passed out of committee. That bill included this exact language. That was June 19, 2012. The continuing resolution, actually, on the AG/FDA--the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration--bill included a coming together of these two bills. The CR--the continuing resolution--included items in the Senate bill that dealt principally with agricultural research that the House didn't have, and there were provisions in the House version like this one that the Senate accepted. The language was publicly available and posted as part of the agreed- to appropriations bill for 9 days before the vote. A week before the vote, Senator Tester filed an amendment which is exactly like the amendment we just heard about today because it would have struck this provision. On that same day, Senator Tester spoke at length on the floor about his amendment. This was a week before the continuing resolution was passed. I don't mind having a debate about the provisions. I do mind the idea that somehow nobody knew about this. Now, I can't watch the debate for every Member of the Senate and say: Here is what you should have been paying attention to that one of our colleagues said, but it was fairly substantial and took some time, and it was a week before we voted. By the way, nobody in the Senate proposed this provision. Nobody put it in the House bill, as some have contended. But I do think this provision, as it turns out, this policy, protects farm families. That is why it was supported by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Council of Farmer Cooperatives, the American Soybean Association, the National Association of Wheat Growers, the Congressional Hunger Center, the National Corn Growers Association, and others. Many have incorrectly claimed that this language gives priority to the needs of a small number of businesses over the rights and needs of the American consumers. I don't think that is true either. This provision doesn't protect any seed company--Monsanto or Pioneer Seed-- or even the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It would help the family who planted a crop that was legal to plant. My mom and dad were dairy farmers. The one thing I do know about the farming cycle is that once you have made a decision to plant a crop, it is usually too late to plant another one, and there are times when it is absolutely too late to plant another crop. So what does your family do that year when the crop the government told you you could plant, some Federal judge decides you can't plant it, only to have maybe another--in the few cases where this has happened--other Federal judges later say that the first Federal judge was wrong and that those crops were legal to be planted and legal to be harvested. Both challenges, by the way, were about what environmental impact this might have if something happened from one property to another. There was never a question in those two cases about the safety of the food. This provision allows the Secretary of Agriculture to create a way for those farm families to sell that crop, but it doesn't require the Secretary do that. Remember, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has already said: This is a crop that we have deregulated. It has heavily regulated these kinds of crops until the Secretary of Agriculture says it is not, and when the Secretary of Agriculture says it is not, then anybody who wants to can plant these crops. This gives the farmers and their families the assurance that a legally planted crop is likely to be able to be harvested. In addition, the authority granted to the USDA in this language was only temporary. It was in the House bill, and it lasts until September 30 of this year. The Secretary of Agriculture said he already had the authority. It didn't seem to me that the return for ag research and other things we had in our bill--that repeating the authority the Secretary of Agriculture said he had and had used was a bad thing. It basically tells the Secretary of Agriculture: If you agree with the court, by the way, and don't think you did your job and you don't intend to appeal the case, you don't have to do anything that allows a crop to be harvested. But if you still think you were right and you are going to appeal that case, you have the authority, if you want to use it, to figure out how to let that crop be harvested for that year and that time. USDA can determine at any time that a biocrop should not be approved, and USDA can pull its approval on a crop that it has approved. FDA also has to approve the food value of these things before they can go into food. This language doesn't require USDA to approve biotech crops. It doesn't prevent individuals from suing the government over a biotech crop approval. Ultimately, this language simply codifies the authority the Secretary believes he had. As recently as May 9 of this year, Secretary Vilsack testified before the Appropriations Agriculture Subcommittee and said this language ``doesn't necessarily do anything I can't already do. We're going to make these decisions based on the science and based on the law, which is the way they ought to be made.'' Unfortunately, if you took a quick search of the Internet, you wouldn't find out these facts. But we have the advantage that we can search actually what the law said, not what somebody else said it might have said. These provisions protect farm families and their livelihoods, and that is why they are supported by some groups I have already mentioned and some I haven't: the American Farm Bureau Federation, National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, National Soybean Association, National Association of Wheat Growers, the Congressional Hunger Center, National Corn Growers Association, National Cotton Council, American Sugarbeet Growers Association, the Agriculture Retailers Association, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the American Seed Trade Association, and many other groups. Facts are stubborn, and the law here is easy to find and read, and it doesn't say anything about protecting anybody because, frankly, you can't sue these companies anyway. They sold you a legal product. The only people protected here are the people who have put the seeds in the ground. A farmer can't put those seeds in the ground in August or September and expect to harvest a crop that year. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I would like to speak as in morning business.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to talk about the tragedy this week in Oklahoma. This is the 2-year anniversary of the Joplin tornado we had 90 miles from my home, a district that I represented for a long time before I came to the Senate and still get to represent now as part of our State. But I want to be sure we take time yet again today to let people in Oklahoma know that our thoughts are with them, our prayers are with them. First responders are continuing to search and rescue. Their recovery efforts are happening. Words clearly cannot describe the loss these communities and the community particularly of Moore, OK, have had in the last few days. I know the Nation is praying for them. I am too--for the people who lost children at the local elementary schools. The thought of sending somebody to school in the morning and them not coming home that day is a tragedy that will affect people's lives forever. The friends who are lost, the family members who are lost will always be part of the ongoing impact that they have on that family and that community. In Joplin, MO, 2 years ago we had 161 people die. The community has come back in incredible ways, but you never want to minimize in any way the loss of those 161 lives. Every one of them had a story to tell, just as every one of the people lost in Moore, OK, and in other places in Oklahoma in recent days has a story to tell. It was a big storm. It affected people. Pretty quickly you figure out that while you regret the property you lost, the property you lost is not really all that important, but the lives that were lost are. In addition to the 161 people killed in Joplin, MO, on May 22, 2011, 7,000 homes were gone. I was there the next day or the day after. They were gone. It was like a nuclear blast. The pictures from Moore, OK, remind me of that. Five hundred businesses were gone. I will say for the people in Joplin, they immediately began to think about Joplin tomorrow instead of Joplin yesterday. Two years later it is still a community dealing with loss, but it is a community that is building new schools and new businesses, and houses are under construction. I talked to someone just yesterday. Their family member was about to get into a house that Habitat helped them build. One of the things I found out that I had never really thought about even though I had a lot of experience with storm loss--never anything like 7,000 homes at one time--the people who are the least likely to have insurance are the people who have their house paid for. In that group, they are the least likely, or the people who may have inherited the house from their parents, because there is no banker to tell them they have to have an insurance policy. Maybe it was just kind of a seamless moving back home or staying home and suddenly that house is gone. By the way, this is something the Federal Government--really probably rightly--does not have a role in. If you do not have insurance, you made that choice not to have insurance. When we talk about Federal aid, we are almost always talking about cleaning up the streets, the water systems, the power facilities, getting the community back in order. There are some programs for public buildings that are available. It is not that we are going to go in and help you rebuild your house if you chose not to have insurance. That is not what happens. But volunteers immediately show up. The first volunteers are your neighbors. The first responders are your neighbors. It happened this week in Oklahoma. It happened 2 years ago in Joplin. As soon as people had brushed themselves off and found their own family members, they began to look up and down the street to see whom they could help, whom they could help dig out of rubble or whom they could help secure something they were concerned about. Those are the first responders. Then your neighbors from not too far away--in fact, Oklahoma is right on the edge of our State. They are our neighbors. There were people from--public officials, fire and water and police from Joplin who were there within 12 hours, and they will be back when they are needed. There is a lot to be done. The one thing I would advise people who want to know what they can personally do to help--there are places to send money, there are charities to help. They are helping. All those things are important and good. My personal advice if you want to help, if you can at all, find out before you go what it is you are going to be doing. The last thing communities in this kind of situation need is a lot of people wandering around, wondering what they can do to help. There are plenty of people wandering around already. But if you come through your church, your civic club, through some organization you have helped in the past, through Habitat for Humanity, through a group you have worked with before that does this--link up with them and go. That is probably the better thing to do. There is a lot to be done. First responders, as I said, are your neighbors. By the way, they are also the last responders. The people still there 2 years later helping build a Habitat for Humanity house are probably at that point your neighbors. They are probably not Habitat for Humanity from 1,000 miles away. They are local people who have finally found another family who needs help, and they are helping them. This disaster, by all recent standards, deserves Federal assistance. FEMA is there, but beyond that, the Federal assistance that we give when a disaster is too big for a community to handle on its own and too big for the community and the State they are in to handle on their own, that is where the Federal Government should step in and does and will. There are people all over the country who want to help, but they also are going to be helping as taxpayers. It appears that the resources to do that are in the current pipeline. As I said, FEMA is there. We are going to be there, I am sure, working in this body with our colleagues, Senator Coburn and Senator Inhofe, to do our best to reach out to our fellow Americans who have a real tragedy, and that is a tragedy where all the American people can step up and help by doing what we do when these disasters strike.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I wish to honor Betsy Broun, the Director of the Smithsonian Art Museum. Betsy will be honored Thursday evening at the Frederic E. Church Award Gala in New York for ``transforming the perception of American Art.'' Betsy and I became friends years ago over--you guessed it--American Art. She has always been more than gracious with her time, her great stories, and her expertise. I am an American History teacher by trade, but Betsy has taught me a great deal about the intersection of American Art and American History. Under Betsy Broun's leadership, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has undergone a $250 million renovation. She has taken the Smithsonian's work far afield through new media, distance learning, and her lectures. And there is nothing better than a walk through a Betsy- curated exhibit. Despite all of her professional and academic success, Betsy has never lost touch with her native Kansas, and she and I have had a lot of fun over the years talking about Thomas Hart Benton, a native Missouri artist and the great nephew of the first Senator from Missouri, and discussing other ``middle America'' artists. My wife Abby and I are so grateful for Betsy's friendship, and we congratulate her on the Frederic E. Church Award--an honor she will no doubt receive Thursday with her typical Midwestern humility, but one we know she deserves.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I wish to join the Columbia College Alumni Association in recognizing one of the college's most prestigious alumni. Colonel Charles McGee is among the most decorated and accomplished Air Force aviators, holding an Air Force record of 409 fighter combat missions flown in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. I am proud to applaud him for his invaluable service and contributions to the Air Force, Kansas City, and to our country. Charles E. McGee was one of the renowned Tuskegee Airmen of World War II and continued his service as a career officer in the U.S. Air Force for 30 years. He was born in Cleveland, OH on December 7, 1919, and as a young man, McGee was a member of the Boy Scouts of America, BSA, achieving the rank of Eagle Scout on August 9, 1940. He later served in district and regional positions in the BSA. At the 2010 National Scout Jamboree, he was recognized with the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award. During the Vietnam War, as a Lieutenant Colonel, McGee flew 172 combat missions in a McDonnell RF-4 photo-reconnaissance aircraft. After a series of other appointments in the United States, Italy and Germany and promotion to Colonel, McGee retired on January 31, 1973. He ended his military career with an impressive 6,308 flying hours. Following his military service, McGee has held many prestigious functional and honorary positions within the field of aviation. In 1978, at the age of 58, he completed his college degree at Columbia College in Kansas City, over 30 years after his initial enrollment at the University of Illinois. Though interrupted by World War II, attaining a college degree had been a lifelong goal. I am honored to have the opportunity to congratulate Colonel McGee for this great achievement and am proud that he chose to complete his studies and continue his impressive career in the great State of Missouri. In his civilian life, McGee served as the director of the Kansas City downtown airport and as a member of the Aviation Advisory Commission. For 30 years, he has been an ambassador of the Tuskegee Airmen, Inc., serving three times as national president. He has shared his story in numerous public addresses and has received many accolades, including the National Aeronautical Association's Elder Statesman of Aviation. In 2005, McGee was part of a group of former Tuskegee Airmen who flew to Balad, Iraq to speak to active duty airmen serving in the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, the current incarnation of the 332nd Fighter Group. McGee has been recognized for his combat and military service with a number of awards including: Distinguished Flying Cross with two Oak Leaf Clusters, Legion of Merit with one Oak Leaf Cluster, Bronze Star, Air Medal with 25 Oak Leaf Clusters, Army Commendation Medal, Presidential Unit Citation, Korean Presidential Unit Citation, Hellenic Republic World War II Commemorative Medal, along with related campaign and service ribbons. In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded him and the surviving Tuskegee Airmen the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the Nation's highest civilian award, and in 2011, he was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, OH. I am honored to join Columbia College in celebrating Colonel Charles McGee's accomplishments and service, from which we have all greatly benefited. I want to thank Colonel McGee for his leadership in the field of aviation, in our military, and in his community.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I thank the chairwoman for her work. As this bill progresses, I will remind my friends on the floor that one of the major bills we passed last year was the highway bill in the last Congress that she and Senator Inhofe worked on. Now she and Senator Vitter are bringing another important bill to the floor that is significant. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I wish to talk a bit about the health care bill. Every time I am home, I hear more and more concerns from more and more families and more and more individuals and more and more employers. In 2009, the President repeatedly said that if you like your health care plan, you can keep it. Notice nobody is saying that anymore. Maybe that is not what the measure should be because that is certainly not going to happen. I think the question is, are you going to have health care and can you afford it. During the Presidential campaign, the President said he liked the term ``ObamaCare.'' So I feel a little more free to use that than I did previously. I do not mean it to be disparaging in any way. I just happen to think it is a plan that will not work. In the 3 years since the Affordable Care Act became law, it has become increasingly clear that this plan will only deliver more broken promises and bad news. Opponents have long warned this overhaul is bad for the economy. There are now over 20,000 pages of new regulations. In talking to the people I work for, they say they were concerned when people did not read the 2,000-page bill. Since the election, there have been 20,000 pages of regulations. There will be at least 159 new bureaucracies, boards, and programs. A number of recent reports have reinforced everybody's concerns, noting that the health care bill will burden Americans with $1 trillion of new taxes over 10 years and penalties. It will stifle job creation. Investors Business Daily noted that retailers are cutting worker hours at a rate not seen in more than three decades, a sudden shift, according to them, that can only be explained by the onset of ObamaCare's employer mandates--only explained by the onset of ObamaCare's employer mandates. In the April job figures, 288,000 people moved from full-time work to part-time work. Almost all of us in the Senate, as we talk to people in the States we represent, have talked to somebody who is figuring out how they can replace full-time employees--when they leave or maybe earlier than they wanted to leave--with part-time employees. The Congressional Budget Office warned that the President's health care plan will slash approximately 800,000 jobs, increase government spending by $1.2 trillion, and force 7 million Americans to lose their employer- sponsored coverage. On that last one, I think that is optimistic. I think it will be more than 7 million people who 2 years from now do not have health insurance, who had some kind of health insurance 2 years ago or even up until today. I think setting the standard that they have to meet that, and if they cannot meet that standard, just pay the penalty and do not provide anything is going to put people in a position they are going to find themselves very troubled to be in. A leading health care advocacy group recently noted that millions of people will be priced out of the health insurance market under ObamaCare thanks to a glitch in the law that hurts people with modest incomes who cannot afford family coverage offered by their employers. Of course, the only thing the employer gets any credit for offering in the new world we are about to move into is individual coverage. In fact, if someone has a family member who is covered in their family policy, the person they work for appears to get no credit for that coverage. An independent study by the Society of Actuaries--these are people who try to calculate benefits and life expectancy and all of that--estimates that insurance companies will have to pay out an average of 32 percent more for medical claims on individual health policies by 2017. Why would that be? Remember, these are health policies that there is a small penalty for not having but the insurance company has to issue to you whenever you decide you want it. I have talked to more than one hospital group that said we will just put the insurance forms in the ambulance. Under the law, as I have read the law, you can fill out the insurance form on the way to the hospital in the ambulance, and the insurance company still has to give the so-called guaranteed issue no matter what your health is. For Missourians, this study shows that medical claims costs could increase by almost 60 percent--the exact amount is 58.8 percent--per person. This actuarial study in my State says insurance claims costs could increase by 58.8 percent, making my State's projected cost increase the eighth highest in the country. At a time when millions of Americans are still searching for jobs, the last thing we should be doing is discouraging job growth, but every single person here has heard somebody that they work for in the State they represent say: We are not going to grow above 50 people or we are not going to hire full-time employees. Next year job creators will be forced to start complying with the law or pay a penalty. This will lead employers to reduce hours for full- time employees to avoid paying those penalties or providing health care--either one. State governments, such as the State of Virginia right across the river from where we are working in the Nation's Capital, said that after July 1 none of their part-time employees will be allowed to work--that is the beginning of their spending year--that after July 1 none of their part-time employees will be able to work more than 29 hours. Why would the entire State of Virginia be saying that? Because the Federal Government says 30 hours is the time when you have to provide a benefit. Once we start saying something as a government that you have to do something, suddenly it seems to be OK to meet the exceptions. Companies that for five decades after World War II have done everything they could to provide benefits for health care at whatever level they thought they could because they thought it was either the competitive thing to do or the right thing to do or both, those same companies are now saying: Well, the exception in the law says I don't really have an obligation to provide you health care, and so I am not going to. As we see people move toward the part-time workforce, I believe we are going to see people having more than one job, but none of those jobs will have benefits. The person who served your breakfast or sells you your coffee in the morning may be the same person you see at a meal later that same day at another place because they are working two jobs, not one, and neither of those has benefits. For those employers who decide it is cost-effective to pay the penalty rather than comply with the law, those people who worked for them obviously will see their plans change or lose their plans altogether. Maybe that is why my friends across the aisle are beginning to say the things they have said about this. Everybody has heard the Senator Baucus comment that warned that implementing this bill will be a ``huge train wreck coming down.'' Senator Wyden said: There is reason to be very concerned about what's going to happen with young people. If their premiums shoot up, I can tell you, that is going to wash up on the Senate in a hurry. The New York Times reported that Senator Ben Cardin told White House officials that he was concerned about big rate increases being sought by insurers in his State, one of the first States to report what the new rates would be. Senator Jeanne Shaheen noted that she is ``hearing from a lot of small businesses in New Hampshire that do not know how to comply with the law.'' Senator Jay Rockefeller said that he is of the belief that the health care act ``is probably the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress.'' He noted, ``It worries me, because it is so complicated. And if it isn't done right the first time, it'll just simply get worse.'' The Secretary of HHS said, ``There may be a higher cost associated with getting into that market.'' As I said, even the top health care official in the country, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, said that there might be a higher cost associated with getting into this market where folks will be moving into a really fully insured product for the first time--or not. What she did say was that this insurance may cost more than what your employer used to think they could afford to provide to you, and now maybe they are not providing anything at all. Maybe they are providing something that meets new standards--not what the person paying the bill thought they could afford but what was the only option available. This isn't like, if you can do some of this, fine, you will just pay part of the penalty. It is not like that at all. In fact, what this really is, if you don't meet the standards that the Federal Government has decided should be the standards for employees of yours whom they have never seen, whom you pay $100 a day if you try to offer insurance that doesn't meet the insurance, per employee--that is, $36,500 a year is the penalty if you don't offer the insurance exactly as the government says it has to be offered at a minimum. If you decide not to offer any insurance at all, it is $2,000 a year. So now we have gotten to the point where the government is so right that it is a $36,500 penalty if you don't offer exactly the insurance they say you have to offer and it is a $2,000 penalty if you don't offer any insurance at all. What kind of parallel universe is this that this has taken us into that we have that kind of ridiculous situation develop? Last week President Obama said there may be ``glitches and bumps'' in the rollout of his massive government overhaul. The Chicago Tribune, one of his hometown newspapers, after he said that, said in an editorial: Give us the choice of ``train wreck'' or ``glitches and bumps,'' we are betting on train wreck. This is his hometown paper that is saying that. This is certainly not what the President and congressional leaders promised us when this became the law. We can all agree that we must fix our health care system. I think the path we are on is the wrong path to take. There are a number of things we could do: medical liability reform, more vigorous competition, buying across State lines, more individual ownership of policies set up, high-risk pools that work. The choice should never have been ``you can do this or we can do nothing at all.'' There were things in the great health care system we had that could have been improved and still had the benefits of that great system. It appears that none of these are being allowed to happen until we see for sure that the new system either will work or won't work. I recently voted for the amendment to defund the program. Let's go back to the drawing board and see what we can do to get started again. I think this is a flawed concept. I think we have to replace this concept with commonsense reforms that put patients and doctors in control of health care, not new bureaucracies in Washington. I thank the Chair.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I would like to talk about an amendment to this bill that could be offered later. I am not offering it at this time. I am being joined in this amendment by my good friend from Florida, Senator Nelson. This amendment would be a suggestion about what we can do to be sure the things we build have a better chance of lasting, construction that meets real stress. In both of our States, in Missouri and Florida, we have some significant experience with weather conditions that are damaging to people and property. On May 22, 2 years ago, 2011, in Joplin, MO, right on the Arkansas and the Oklahoma border, we had an EF5 tornado hit that community. It killed 61 people. It destroyed 7,000 homes, 500 businesses, and damaged others. This was a huge impact on people and the homes they had, the businesses they had. As they rebuilt, the cities tried to focus on rebuilding in a way that would protect lives and save money if something like that happens again by creating structures that can withstand the most severe storms there and in other places in our State. We have had many stories over the years. There are people who literally got in the freezer in the garage or in the utility room or people who got in the bathtub and then pulled a mattress on top of themselves and tried to ride out the storm, and they would just as soon not do that. I think the term that is used that we are going to be talking about is ``resilient construction''--construction that has the potential to substantially reduce property damage and loss of life resulting from natural disasters, homes and businesses that can withstand disasters, that can protect people during storms. As more disaster resilient building is done, there is less to clean up, there is less property damage, and the insurance rates are impacted in not as big a way because not so much has to be rebuilt because not so much was destroyed. Those techniques, those resilient building techniques, can be as simple as just using longer nails or strapping down the roof so it has that one added level of security to the roof before the shingles go on. There are many simple and easy steps builders can take to ensure that a home or a business has the best chance to withstand these disasters. This amendment that we would hope would be offered at the appropriate time later would simply add resilient construction to the list of criteria the National Academy of Sciences and the Government Accountability Office are directed to study. This adds this one thing to it from a commonsense perspective. It is obvious why knowing what building techniques work and what building techniques do not work makes a difference--the ones that minimize damage, that prevent the loss of life, that reduce the government disaster aid that has to be expended in these disasters, that are too big for families and communities and States to handle on their own. While we are unable to predict when and why a storm might occur next, we do know there will be other problems that need to be dealt with. So studying the impact of construction techniques in storm situations is something I believe we should do. I think this would be an added benefit to this bill. At the appropriate time, I look forward to calling the actual amendment up or asking someone else to see that this amendment is called up so that my colleagues have a chance to vote on it. I know my cosponsor, Senator Nelson, is here on the floor.