Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I rise to talk about a piece of legislation I intend to introduce on behalf of Senator Cruz and myself, The Advice and Consent Restoration Act, which responds to last week's decision announced on Friday by a three-judge panel on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, where they unanimously ruled that President Obama violated the Constitution when he made so-called recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. They are so-called recess appointments because the Senate was still in session. The fundamental question is does the President get to decide whether the Senate is in session or does the Senate get to decide whether the Senate is in session. If that question had been debated when the Constitution was being debated, I am sure they would have said: That will never come up; there is no way we are going to develop a system with this separation of powers and the President will decide whether the Senate is in session. This President did decide that, and the court agreed with the argument that a number of Senators, Senator McConnell and I, along with 40 of our colleagues, filed in an amicus brief that clearly made the point the Senate gets to decide when the Senate is in session. We argued that the Constitution does not empower the President to make this decision. The court agreed with that argument, stating that any other interpretation of the Constitution would give the President free rein to appoint his desired nominees anytime he pleases. In a direct quote, the court said it would give ``the President free rein to appoint his desired nominees anytime he pleases, whether that time be a weekend, lunch or even when the Senate is in session and he is merely displeased with its inaction.'' That is the end of the quote from the three-judge panel's decision. The right of the Senate to provide advice and consent is an important check on the risk of this type of Presidential overreach and one the Senate should actively exercise. In fact, the Senate actively and consciously made the decision in January to stay in session to do some of the work that needed to be done during the session and, frankly, to be sure that the President couldn't avoid the constitutional requirement of advice and consent. Allowing the President to determine the Senate's schedule would seriously damage the balance of powers; it would seriously damage the Senate's autonomy. It eliminates an important check on the executive branch. The court invalidated the one ruling that was being appealed. Of course, the Presiding Officer understands this exactly, that the court case would only have appealed one ruling that impacted one company or one employer, and the court said that ruling can't stand. There are more than 200 other actions this same group, which the court said is not legally functioning, had taken, and all 200 or more of those actions are now in question. I believe the answer will be clear. Perhaps all those will have to be appealed in some way so that a court can say, No, just as in the first ruling we made, the people who made these decisions were not constitutionally in place; consequently the ruling they made isn't in place. The work of this agency will not pass constitutional muster and, of course, the President needs to now appoint people who would be confirmed by the Senate. In spite of the three-judge panel's unanimous decision, the National Labor Relations Board recently announced that it intends to ignore the ruling and carry on with business as usual. This is not a very acceptable response. The President first decides he is going to decide whether the Senate is in session. Then the people he appoints in an unconstitutional way decide they are going to ignore the court ruling and continue to do what they have been doing. The President needs to reappoint, and until the President does reappoint, Congress has a responsibility to block this unconstitutional act by terminating the salaries of those who were illegally appointed and by preventing them from conducting any official business until the Senate acts to approve their appointments. Senator Cruz and I urge our colleagues to join us in supporting this effort. The National Labor Relations Board should take down the ``open for business'' sign they put up on Monday after the court ruling on Friday. Frankly, they need to put up a ``help wanted'' sign. The Constitution matters. What the Constitution says matters. The Senate, I hope, will be vigorous in enforcing its constitutional responsibility.

Mr. BLUNT

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

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I rise to talk about a piece of legislation I intend to introduce on behalf of Senator Cruz and myself, The Advice and Consent Restoration Act, which responds to last week's decision announced on Friday by a three-judge panel on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, where they unanimously ruled that President Obama violated the Constitution when he made so-called recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. They are so-called recess appointments because the Senate was still in session. The fundamental question is does the President get to decide whether the Senate is in session or does the Senate get to decide whether the Senate is in session. If that question had been debated when the Constitution was being debated, I am sure they would have said: That will never come up; there is no way we are going to develop a system with this separation of powers and the President will decide whether the Senate is in session. This President did decide that, and the court agreed with the argument that a number of Senators, Senator McConnell and I, along with 40 of our colleagues, filed in an amicus brief that clearly made the point the Senate gets to decide when the Senate is in session. We argued that the Constitution does not empower the President to make this decision. The court agreed with that argument, stating that any other interpretation of the Constitution would give the President free rein to appoint his desired nominees anytime he pleases. In a direct quote, the court said it would give ``the President free rein to appoint his desired nominees anytime he pleases, whether that time be a weekend, lunch or even when the Senate is in session and he is merely displeased with its inaction.'' That is the end of the quote from the three-judge panel's decision. The right of the Senate to provide advice and consent is an important check on the risk of this type of Presidential overreach and one the Senate should actively exercise. In fact, the Senate actively and consciously made the decision in January to stay in session to do some of the work that needed to be done during the session and, frankly, to be sure that the President couldn't avoid the constitutional requirement of advice and consent. Allowing the President to determine the Senate's schedule would seriously damage the balance of powers; it would seriously damage the Senate's autonomy. It eliminates an important check on the executive branch. The court invalidated the one ruling that was being appealed. Of course, the Presiding Officer understands this exactly, that the court case would only have appealed one ruling that impacted one company or one employer, and the court said that ruling can't stand. There are more than 200 other actions this same group, which the court said is not legally functioning, had taken, and all 200 or more of those actions are now in question. I believe the answer will be clear. Perhaps all those will have to be appealed in some way so that a court can say, No, just as in the first ruling we made, the people who made these decisions were not constitutionally in place; consequently the ruling they made isn't in place. The work of this agency will not pass constitutional muster and, of course, the President needs to now appoint people who would be confirmed by the Senate. In spite of the three-judge panel's unanimous decision, the National Labor Relations Board recently announced that it intends to ignore the ruling and carry on with business as usual. This is not a very acceptable response. The President first decides he is going to decide whether the Senate is in session. Then the people he appoints in an unconstitutional way decide they are going to ignore the court ruling and continue to do what they have been doing. The President needs to reappoint, and until the President does reappoint, Congress has a responsibility to block this unconstitutional act by terminating the salaries of those who were illegally appointed and by preventing them from conducting any official business until the Senate acts to approve their appointments. Senator Cruz and I urge our colleagues to join us in supporting this effort. The National Labor Relations Board should take down the ``open for business'' sign they put up on Monday after the court ruling on Friday. Frankly, they need to put up a ``help wanted'' sign. The Constitution matters. What the Constitution says matters. The Senate, I hope, will be vigorous in enforcing its constitutional responsibility.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the period of morning business be extended until 12:30 p.m. today and that all provisions of the previous order remain in effect.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk a little about the bill that is coming over from the House that would require the Senate to-- surprise--have a budget. I know the law already requires the Senate to have a budget, but apparently that law wasn't good enough for us to have a budget for the last 3 years. So I am supportive of the House decision to do that. In fact, I am supportive of almost any discussion that requires us to talk about what we are going to do about spending. You know, if you have been living outside your means, if you can't pay your bills and you go to a credit counselor, the credit counselor is highly unlikely to say: Your problem is you need another credit card. The credit counselor is going to say: You need to figure out how you are going to pay your bills, and that includes things such as having a budget, it includes things such as figuring out what you are spending money on that you can stop spending money on. That is what we need to do, and it is what we need to do with a budget. Somehow in the face of unprecedented spending and record Federal debt, the President and even Senate Democrats for a few years now have been saying that in Washington all we need to do is get another credit card. Our problem, I hear, is not a spending problem, it is a health care problem or it is a whatever kind of problem it is. It is clearly a spending problem. There is no doubt that Washington is living outside its means. The Federal debt has skyrocketed to a record $16.5 trillion. President Obama's first term added almost $6 trillion to that total. There is no reason to believe we have done anything to slow down the spending and debt path we have been on. Meanwhile, it has been 1,360 days since the majority in the Senate and the Senate itself has managed to pass a budget. In fact, I think during that 1,316 days we haven't even had the Budget Committee report a budget out for the Senate to vote on. Last summer Vice President Biden said: Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value. Well, let's find out what we value. Let's find out what the majority in the Senate values. When the Vice President talked about showing the budget, he was talking about the Republican budget, because there actually was one. The Republican House had passed a budget. In fact, the Senate and the House both passed a budget every single year from the passage of the Budget Control Act in the mid-1970s until 2010. In 2010, both the House and the Senate--the House with Speaker Pelosi and the Senate with the current majority--said: We don't care what the law says, we are not going to pass a budget. That lasted 1 year in the House, but it has lasted now 3 years in the Senate. In 2011 and 2012 the House came back and passed a budget. The Republicans have voted for serious budgets that make tough choices, and even those choices were choices that made us go out and explain what we were for. And, of course, that is exactly what the Vice President was talking about when he said: Show me your budget, I will show you your values. There was only one side that had a budget. So that was a pretty harmless position, from the point of view of the Vice President, because he was saying: Let's look at the budget the other guys have put on the table because we don't have one on the table; we have not said what we are for. The Senate Democrats have ignored the law, ignored their legal obligation to pass a budget, while House Republicans have now said the Senate should either pass a budget or not be paid, and I agree with that. It is a fundamental step toward planning. The second step is to vote on appropriations bills. We haven't voted on a single appropriations bill in the Senate in over a year. We don't have a budget, so there is no plan to try to get spending under control; and then we don't vote on how we are going to spend the money in any way other than some big continuing resolution, which basically is a bill that says we are going to continue spending money as we have been spending money, and here are the two or three exceptions. But we are not going to have the debate I think the Senate needs to have. Frankly, I believe our new Appropriations chairman, Barbara Mikulski, is going to be insisting we bring appropriations bills to the floor, and I think that is a good thing. The failure to have a Senate budget has too often been described as a minor procedural matter. Senator Schumer said recently: Well, the Democrats didn't have a budget because there was a budget that came out of the sequester agreement in mid-2011. Never mind the Senate hadn't had a budget that spring or the spring before that or that the Parliamentarian said the sequester deal wasn't a budget, somehow coming up with one number was supposedly good enough to come up with a budget. That is like sitting around the kitchen table to decide how you are going to spend your money, and here is how the discussion would go: OK, I think we ought to spend X amount of money. That is the meeting. We have just decided that is what we are going to do. And somehow that is the budget? Particularly when X amount of money didn't relate at all to the amount of money coming into your family. Nobody believes that would make sense. We will see whether Senator Schumer's words this weekend will produce a budget. The House has acted. The President says he wants the debt ceiling increased. Hopefully, the majority has decided to pass a budget. The new budget chairman, Senator Murray, said yesterday that her committee will draft a budget. Now let's let the Senate produce a budget. Let's have a budget drawn up, let's have a budget debated, and let's figure out what our plans are. Budgets lay out plans. We will see if a budget that a majority in the Senate would vote for will pass the straight-face test with the American people. We will see if this is just another budget that says: OK, here is the amount of money we want to spend; it has no relationship to the amount of money we have, but let's let that be our budget. The people will no longer tolerate, I am convinced, the amount of debt and taxes that that type of spending plan would require. For them to think about that, they have to have a spending plan, and so I am grateful the House passed legislation that says we have to have that plan. When the majority in the Senate--Democrats in the Senate--have a budget, we will see how they feel about continuing to attack the budget the House has been willing to come up with for the last two Congresses. Right now they can talk about the cuts that Republicans in the House want because there are no Senate cuts. There is no Senate budget. So let's have an apples-to-apples comparison. Let's compare what Republicans in the House would do compared to what Democrats in the Senate would do and figure out what our plan needs to be. It is often said that when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Not having a budget is sort of the entry level of failing to plan. We have failed to do the first thing you would do if you were going to have a plan, if you were going to get your spending under control. My Republican colleagues and I in the Senate have--even though there wasn't a Budget Committee product--actually found ways to vote for and support the Republican-passed budget from the House and, of course, we paid the price for that. People were out there saying: Here is what you want to do about this program and here is what you want to do about that program. But we are going to move quickly from where, rather than just attacking one side that has a plan, we are talking about what the two plans are, and we will see what the American people want to do. President Obama and our friends in the Senate should work with Republicans in the Senate to cut spending and to pass a budget in a transparent way. Republicans have been willing to do that. Democrats may be willing to join in that. And if they are, the American people can begin to see more than a last-minute, back-room deal. I am tired of seeing this planned crisis, one right after another, and I have a feeling the people I work for are even more tired of it than I am. A divided government is a good opportunity to make tough choices. The President will never have more political capital than he has right now. Let's take those two things together and let's see what that formula would produce. A divided government--Republicans and Democrats both have to take responsibility--and a President with maximum political capital could equal a good and long-term result. I hope the President and the majority in the Senate get serious about working together and solving the problems we face as a country. I look forward to being part of that, and I am appreciative that the House of Representatives has passed legislation that appears to have forced the Senate to do its job on a budget for the first time in 4 years.

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, first of all, this is the first time I have spoken on the floor when you were in the chair. Welcome to the Senate and welcome to the presiding chair. I want to talk for a few minutes today about a baseball great, a Missouri great, Stan Musial, who passed away on Saturday at the age of 92. Stan Musial was born in November 1920 in Denora, PA. His title was Stan ``The Man.'' He was the youngest of six children. When he wasn't called Stan ``The Man,'' he was just a guy who worked at a company as a young man, whose dad was a Polish immigrant, whose mother was of Czechoslovakian ancestry, and whose dreams were probably not to become a professional baseball player but who was, indeed, a great athlete from the very start. In his remarks, when he presented Stan Musial the Medal of Freedom in 2011, President Obama said the following: Stan matched his hustle with humility. He retired with 17 records--even as he missed a season in his prime to serve his country in the Navy. He was the first player to make--get this-- $100,000. Even more shocking, he asked for a pay cut when he didn't perform up to his own expectations. I don't think that August Busch gave him the pay cut--again, a quote--but I have read the story where Stan Musial was holding out for a pay package somewhere in the mid-90s and August Busch, Jr., who not long before that had bought the Cardinals, called him into the office and said: I'm never going to pay you 90--whatever thousand dollars he was asking for. He said: I'm going to pay you $100,000, and you are going to be the first baseball player to make $100,000. Stan Musial played for the Cardinals from 1941 to 1963, the only Major League team he played for. He entered the majors in 1941 as the fifth youngest player. He ended his career in 1963 as the third oldest player. He had a record of 24 times being named to the Major League Baseball All-Star team. He won seven National League batting titles, three National League Most Valuable Player awards, and he led the Cardinals to three World Series championships in the 1940s. Stan Musial--No. 6--had a batting average of at least .300 in every 1 of his 17 seasons--a .300 hitter for every 1 of his 17 seasons. His lifetime batting average was .331. He batted .330 in the year before he decided to retire. He had 3,630 career hits, hitting 1,815 hits in St. Louis at Sportsman Park and Busch Stadium, and he hit another 1,815 on the road. He played as well at home as he did away from home. He missed the entire 1945 season while he was serving in the Navy. It was a fan at Ebbet's Field--with the Dodgers playing at Ebbet's Field--who groaned as he came to the plate one time in a game--he was always particularly good against the Dodgers. The fan said: Here comes the man. And from that point on, his nickname was Stan ``The Man.'' I had a chance to sit by Tommy Lasorda at a luncheon a few years ago after I had read a biography of Stan Musial. Tommy was sort of the longtime Dodgers manager who was a player when Stan Musial was playing, and he said he thought Stan Musial was the best ballplayer he ever saw play, and he was death on the Dodgers. The Dodgers fans liked him, but it was a real rivalry. Stan was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame the first year he was eligible, in 1969, and he would be one of the great ambassadors to baseball for the rest of his life. When he retired in 1963, Commissioner Ford Frick said: Here stands baseball's perfect warrior. Here stands baseball's perfect knight. Stan Musial became an American icon throughout ballparks and over the radio in the 1940s and 1950s. KMOX, in the 1960s, had a booming signal that went almost all the way to the west coast and covered a lot of the South, and the St. Louis Cardinals were the furthest south of any baseball team and the furthest west of any baseball team. Because of that, Stan Musial played on a club that, in many ways, became America's team at that time. I can remember growing up in southwest Missouri on a dairy farm, and particularly late at night when we were hauling hay--and I can remember this when I was 10 or 12 years old--and whoever was in the truck must have been almost deaf because the driver would have the radio turned as loud as you could turn the radio up, and the St. Louis Cardinals game would be coming out of both windows as we were out there working in the fields or, if we weren't working in the field, we would be sitting on the porch somewhere listening to the Cardinals play, and there was no greater Cardinal than Stan Musial. Bob Gibson, another great Cardinal and Stan's teammate and fellow Hall of Famer, said: Stan Musial is the nicest man I ever met in baseball. And Bob Gibson went on to say he didn't particularly associate nice with baseball, but he associated nice with Stan Musial. Bob Costas had this to say about Stan Musial: Stan Musial didn't hit in 56 straight games. He didn't hit .400 for a season. He didn't get 4,000 hits. He didn't get 500 home runs. He didn't hit a home run in his last at bat, just a single. He didn't marry Marilyn Monroe; he married his high school sweetheart. His excellence was a quiet excellence. ESPN titled Musial the most underrated athlete ever. Only Hank Aaron--thinking about the things Stan Musial didn't do--had more runs than Stan Musial and extra base hits. Only Tris Speaker and Pete Rose had more hits. And only Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds created more runs. But Stan Musial was at the highest levels in all of those areas. Writing in the St. Louis Post Dispatch this week, Bernie Miklasz wrote: Let's celebrate Musial's extraordinary life and be thankful for his enduring presence through the decades. Let's keep it simple in honor of this remarkably uncomplicated man. There has never been a more perfect union, a better relationship between an athlete and a town, than Stan Musial and St. Louis. From the time Stan took his first at-bat as a Cardinal, until his death Saturday at his home in Ladue, he was part of the community's soul for 71 years, 4 months, and 2 days. Many stories about Stan Musial have been told, but I want to mention three that Bernie mentioned in that same article. He talked about when Musial was first inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame--as I said earlier, as soon as you could possibly be inducted. It was an overcast day in Cooperstown. The crowd was quiet, subdued, and a little bit put off by the day. Moments before Musial's official ceremony, the clouds got out of the way and the sunshine emerged, and Dizzy Dean's widow said: ``Stan brought the sun. He always does.'' In the 1960s, a second story emerged of Musial and other Major League stars visiting U.S. troops in Vietnam, and they went to the military hospitals to console the wounded soldiers. One seriously injured soldier looked up at Musial from his hospital bed and said: ``You're the best.'' And Musial's response was: ``No, you are.'' Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Joe Black, an African American, told a story about being racially taunted by players in the St. Louis dugout during a game. Musial, who was batting at the time, and facing Joe Black, stepped out and angrily kicked the dirt to display his disapproval of his own teammates. He waited after the game to tell Black: I'm sorry that happened. But don't you worry about it. You're a great pitcher. You will win a lot of games. Black said Musial's support helped him gain the confidence he needed to become a top pitcher. The fourth and last story Bernie told was of legendary center fielder Willie Mays, who frequently talked about Musial befriending African- American players, relating that at an All-Star game black players were being ignored by the other players. Mays said: We were in the back of the clubhouse playing poker and none of the white guys had come back or said, ``Hi'' or ``How's it going?'' or ``How you guys doing?'' or ``Welcome to the All Star Game.'' Nothing. We're playing poker and all of a sudden I look up and here comes Stan towards us. He grabs a chair, sits down and starts playing cards with us. And Stan didn't know how to play poker! But that was his way of welcoming us, of making us feel a part of it. I never forgot that. We never forgot that. Musial didn't make a lot of fiery speeches. He didn't ``lead'' a movement or try to promote himself as an angelic humanitarian. He just did good things. There is one last story, a love story, between Stan and his wife Lil. This may be the best Musial statistic of all. They were married for 71 years, 4 months, and 2 days until Lil's death on May 3, with Stan following her in January. I listened to KMOX from the hay truck I talked about earlier, like lots of other Cardinals and Musial fans, but I remember the first time I saw Stan Musial play at Sportsman Park. I remember the first time, 30 years later, I actually met him, when I was the Secretary of State in Missouri. Getting to meet Stan Musial was about as good as it got even then. I remember hearing him play ``Take Me Out to the Ball Game'' on his harmonica. Baseball was lucky to have him, Missouri was lucky to have him, and the Cardinals and St. Louis were lucky to have him, and I am pleased to be here today to say how much we appreciate Stan Musial. I am also pleased to be joined by my colleague from Missouri, Senator McCaskill.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to join my colleague, Senator Landrieu from Louisiana, to talk about Russian adoptions and the decision by the Russian Duma and the President, President Putin, to sign a law that includes a provision that bans adoption of Russian children by American families. This ban is going into effect tomorrow--tomorrow. This is a ban which would go into effect tomorrow with four dozen American families in the process of bringing a child home from Russia. My wife Abby and I adopted our son Charlie from Russia a number of years ago now. After visits to Russia and as we were leaving the courthouse the day the court procedures were accomplished, we were in the car with people who had helped us with that adoption who represented an organization here in the United States--in this case, the Gladney organization in Texas--and they got a call that four of their fellow organizations had just been decertified in Russia. They were decertified for some technical reason with their papers. All of the adoptions they had done were reviewed, and at least one error was found in one paper somewhere. Over the course of the next 12 months, as every single agency came up for review--and this was about 6 years ago now--every one of them had a problem that wound up with their being disqualified. At the end of that year, there wasn't a single American organization that could be helpful to an American family with a Russian adoption because that was the policy the government decided at that time. They were going to somehow penalize American families who wanted to adopt Russian kids in ways that made that virtually impossible. At that time, there were families who had met a child, who had bonded with that child, who had taken pictures home, who had talked to doctors in Russia and the United States, and who had done everything a family needed to do, and who had even gotten ready to go to court. I think at that point, if you had gone to court, you probably took your child home with you, but that is not the case right now. But they all were caught in a situation where in some cases it was 2 or 3 more years before that adoption was allowed to be completed, if it was ever allowed to be completed. Now the Russian Government has decided once again to use Russian kids in orphanages as political pawns to help create some international dispute with the United States. This is not behavior that is worthy of the credit that, frankly, we just gave the Russians whenever we entered into a trade agreement that said: We want to accept you further into the relationships we have. By the way, I have talked to parents in the last few days who have adopted children from Russia. These are parents who, like every one of us in this room right now on the floor of the Senate, grew up at a time when the Soviet Union was seen as a great adversary. But suddenly the bonding that occurred between our two countries because of this opportunity for Russian kids to become American kids made a big difference in the way Americans looked at Russians and the way Russians looked at Americans. But this is a difference that somehow the Russian Government wants to do away with as they take offense because we-- appropriately, I think--put in the Russian trade agreement penalties for people who were involved in the imprisonment and death of Russian attorney Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. We were pretty specific about the narrow group to which this applied. And they are very specific about the 110,000 kids in orphanages in Russia today who cannot be adopted by American families because they have decided to use these kids as a political tool. It is the wrong thing to do. Russia and the United States have had a tradition now that goes back to the end of the Cold War of working together to find permanent homes for children without parents in our country. As recently as November 1 of last year, we signed a bilateral agreement to strengthen the procedural safeguards for this process so that families who got involved wouldn't get way down the line or get into the line at all and find out they were not going to let this happen. We have one family in St. Louis who has adopted, they have gone to court, have been to Russia multiple times, and the court has said they are now the adoptive parents--the Russian court--of this child, but under the new requirement, they have to wait another 30 days before they can come back and take this child home. And now the Russian Government says they can never take this child home. That is totally unacceptable. Last week Senator Landrieu and I, along with at least a dozen other Senators, sent a letter to President Putin urging him not to violate the agreement by signing the law. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the letter to his Excellency Vladimir Putin.

Mr. BLUNT. He signed the law anyway. Senator Landrieu and I are going to have a resolution that she is going to talk about, asking not only that this position be reversed but that immediately we do whatever is necessary to unite these families who have already bonded with children who are in orphanages in Russia. I talked to a number of parents just yesterday. Bob and Sandy Davis of St. Louis have been very involved in the efforts for adoptive children from Russia and the Ukraine. I talked to a young man this morning, Sergei Quincy, from Branson, who is 22, who was adopted by the Quincys in Branson when he was 14. At 14, he came to the United States, didn't speak any English, started the ninth grade, learned English, and at 22 he is now happily married with a couple of young children. He told me the moment of his adoption was the moment that made his dreams possible. He had a bad family situation, institutionalized with his brother and his sister in three different orphanages, and his brother was adopted by the same family who didn't know about his sister. I talked to Senator John Lamping of Missouri, who adopted a son who is now 14 who had never gone to school. He was adopted at 8 or 9 years old, and he had never been to school anywhere. I would hope the Senate speaks strongly and that we work as effectively as we can with the Russian representatives in this country to help them right this wrong--the immediate and unbelievable wrong for almost 50 families who know the child they are about to bring into their family and emotionally and psychologically already have. For all the kids in Russia, the country that is No. 3 in foreign adoptions for the United States--all those kids who are likely to spend their growing-up years in an orphanage and at 15 or 16 be put out of that orphanage with no support system there are families in the United States of America who want to make them part of their family. I would like to close by saying I continue to appreciate the great leadership on all these adoption issues that Senator Landrieu has shown and look forward to working with her and others as we try to help right this tragic wrong. I would be glad to yield to my good friend from Louisiana.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, let me first of all join my colleague from Indiana in expressing my concern about where we are on taxes and spending and my hope that we get somewhere and get somewhere quickly. We have certainly brought this down to the last moment. For months, many people on this floor talked about the importance of certainty as it relates to our economy moving forward, of certainty as it relates to family farms and small businesses and whether they can stay in the next generation of that family. So I hope we can achieve those things in the next coming hours as we finish this day and whatever it takes to create that level of certainty at the highest possible levels. How it impacts American individuals and families will be important. The kinds of things we are hearing about the agreement--that we might be able to go forward generally--sound as though, for most Americans, they will solve problems that have been out there now for decades. Temporary tax policies--even tax policies that last for a decade, particularly when they relate to things such as the inheritance tax or the death tax--create problems that can be solved by just simply driving that place in the Tax Code and saying: This is what our policies are going to look like, and here is why they make sense for the American people. And hopefully we get there. (The remarks of Mr. Blunt and Ms. Landrieu are printed in today's Record under ``Submitted Resolutions.'')

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, also on two things that do not relate to my comments about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--I would like to say it is a great honor for me to be able to speak on the floor for the first time with the President pro tempore presiding over the Senate. I know he is going to lead this body well and he has served with great dignity. It is an honor to be here with him on this day, even if it is December 27, 2012, and even though we are, of course, all continuing to think about the former President pro tempore and the services for him that were just completed. Tributes to Departing Senators Danny Akaka I would also like to say I was here when the new Member from Hawaii was sworn in and listened to Mr. Akaka's comments. I have great respect for him and the quiet dignity he brings to everything he does--from weekly demonstrations of his personal faith, which I share with him, to his name being mentioned first in all these quorum calls that have gone on now for, I assume, all the time he has been in the Senate, going back to 1981. But we will miss him, as we will miss his colleague from Hawaii, and we welcome his new colleague today. I get to welcome you personally, Mr. President, with heartfelt appreciation, as the new President pro tempore of the Senate. Following that, I wish to speak on the importance of extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Amendments Act, I think it is called. While I was serving in the House in 2008, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act had lapsed, and we were not doing the things we should be doing. I was able there to work with my good friend Steny Hoyer, who was the majority whip at the time. I was the minority whip at the time. We had held the reverse of those jobs in the previous Congress. I liked my role as majority whip better. But Mr. Hoyer and I were able to work together, particularly with my predecessor from Missouri, Senator Bond, and Senator Rockefeller--Senator Bond was the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee; Senator Rockefeller was the chairman--as we tried to negotiate how we would extend the FISA Amendments Act. My colleagues here today--many of them remember the challenge we faced in getting that bill done. Many of them, including the current chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, know the importance we placed on the work that is done every day under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. At the time in 2008, we had a very concrete set of examples of what would happen without FISA because, frankly, we were effectively without it. For periods of time in 2007 and 2008, the National Security Agency was unable to fully perform its mission in monitoring many of the activities of known terrorists who were overseas and particularly found it impossible to focus in on new targets--and, again, those are known terrorists not in this country. It was wrong that Congress allowed the act to lapse, and it would be dangerously wrong if we let it happen again on December 31 of this year. Five years ago, I sat through many disturbing intelligence briefings. I remember the sense of urgency expressed by the then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell; the then-CIA Director Michael Hayden; and the then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, as they discussed the consequences we would have to deal with if we continued not to move forward and put this act back in place. The agreement we reached balanced the concerns of those who feared the National Security Agency had overreached with the ongoing authority the intelligence community needed to protect the country. That agreement is before us again to be reauthorized for another 5 years. The FISA Amendments Act protects individuals in the United States from so-called reverse targeting. It is one of the concerns people had 5 years ago. This would be a process which, in theory, could be used to monitor the communications of American citizens under the guise of spying on terrorists. It also continues to ensure that any communication originating in the United States caught in the FISA process is minimized. What does that mean? It means it is handled in a way that American communications cannot be examined unless they have further justification. Meanwhile, the bill updated the antiquated way we monitor terrorist communications, ensuring that our intelligence professionals no longer have to spend countless hours trying to figure out whether an overseas terrorist's communications are traveling over fiber optic wires or through a satellite. I am concerned the amendments we are looking at here not only disrupt the delicate balance we struck in 2008 but also they may mean that this act does not get extended. The House has voted on a straight extension. The only thing standing between the continuation of that 2008 hard- fought and I think properly balanced agreement is a Senate vote on what the House has passed. I will be voting against the amendments. I think some of these amendments are well intended and, in fact, if they were not part of this bill, studies and other things that are being proposed might very well be worth doing but not worth doing in a way that would allow FISA to expire in just a few short days. I am pleased to have been able to serve on both the Senate and the House Select Committees on Intelligence and have witnessed firsthand the important role that FISA plays in protecting our country. I am thankful for the intelligence professionals who serve our country, both in the United States and overseas. I hope, as they observe this debate we are having about FISA, they see a Congress that supports them, supports their families, and supports their important work. Unless the world changes--and, hopefully, it will change--we should never allow our ability to track terrorists overseas to go dark again. That is why it is critically important we pass this bill in the next few hours, why we extend FISA for another 5 years, and give our intelligence professionals the tools they need to protect our country and, frankly, give the Congress, the President, and, most importantly, the American people the obligation to look at this authority again in 5 years and see if we still need it. Today, we need to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I hope we do that. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I wish to talk about the disaster supplemental today, but before I do that, I would like to spend a minute talking about the Senator from Hawaii, Mr. Inouye. We were at the service this morning in the Rotunda of the Capitol, where only 31 Americans in the history of the country have been honored by that opportunity for Americans to think about them as they lie in the center of the Capitol on the catafalque that was used by Abraham Lincoln and others. I was able to place the wreath in the Capitol when Rosa Parks was in that same place. I want to say how honored I was to get to serve in the Senate with Mr. Inouye. He not only was a hero in so many ways but I think connected all of us to the ``greatest generation,'' as Tom Brokaw titled that generation, and there was no better example of that quiet, purposeful, heroic dedication to service than the Senator from Hawaii, the President pro tem, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, but most of all just a great American. Last year when school was out, my youngest son Charlie was here for lunch. In the Senate Dining Room, he saw Mr. Inouye, and he had seen Ken Burns' World War II documentary in which the Senator was being recognized. He said: ``I saw him in the documentary on World War II.'' I asked Senator Inouye to come over to speak to Charlie and his friends, and he did. They were so thrilled to meet him. Then, when that was over and the Senator walked away, Charlie then told a story from the documentary, which he had only seen once, and it had been about a month before, and he was 7. But he said that during the war, he captured a German soldier, and the German soldier reached in his pocket, and he thought he was going for a weapon, so he knocked him down, and as he fell down, the German soldier's hand--a bunch of pictures fell out. And at that time, young Daniel Inouye picked up the pictures, and they were of the man's family. And Charlie repeated--he said that he saw the pictures, and he said: ``He is a man just like me.'' The greatness of that moment, his courageous actions later in the war, his leadership have often brought to mind--particularly as I sat in the Appropriations Committee and would look down the table and see him sitting there in the middle of the table--the thought that when that man leaves, there won't be anyone quite like him to take his place. I would say, Madam President, to you and to my colleagues how honored I was to serve with him and how proud I am of the great and dedicated service he gave to the country. I hope we can all learn from his example. Madam President, let me spend a few minutes talking about the current disaster supplemental. I believe when disasters exceed the ability of communities and States to deal with them, the Federal Government should help. That has been something we have done for sometime now. I think there are some problems in the system and the way we respond. Unfortunately, in Missouri, we have had too many opportunities in recent years to have experience with disasters and responses. On occasion, they have been disasters we could deal with. And actually, I have told people where I live: No, this is a disaster that really is a bad thing--the tornado hit, it didn't stay for long--but we can deal with this ourselves. I said that last year at an event we had in Branson, MO. But when we had this devastating tornado in Joplin, MO, following two different floods in the same time period, I said: No, we can't deal with this on our own. We need others to come in and help us, as we will help them when they have a big problem. And that is what this supplemental should be doing. In my view, the $60 billion supplemental is not the best way to deal with this at this time. I would rather see us deal with this when we know more about the money we need to spend. We have a March 27 deadline when the continuing resolution runs out. One of the questions I would have is: How much money do we need between now and then? There are others who might say, and I could possibly be persuaded, well, let's at least go until the end of the fiscal year. How much money do we need between now and September 30? But this goes beyond that. When we had the Katrina disaster a few years ago we did at least three supplementals for Katrina. Eventually, we may spend more than $60.4 billion. But my view would be there are probably better ways to approach this than appropriating that money right now as opposed to appropriating it later when we know what it is for. This bill should not be viewed, either, as an opportunity for Members of Congress to fundamentally alter the disaster funding programs. There is a legislative process to do that. It shouldn't be the disaster funding bill that we use to change the law. We should have that debate at another time, and I hope we will. In the past, and under the Stafford Act, which is the disaster funding act, we have limited what we can do beyond just replacing what the disaster took away, and we have added a little to it. There is an argument one could make: Well, if the disaster destroys this, and there is a way to put it back within reason that makes it harder to destroy, we should do that. In fact, there was a cap. I think it was 7\1/2\ percent was the most we could spend for preventing future things from happening, mitigation. This spends about four times that much, and it changes the law permanently to allow it to spend four times that much. That is not the way this should be done. And my guess is, before we are done, it will not be the way it is done. For too long I think we have not looked at how we spend money on disasters. We have not only worked in recent times within the Budget Control Act, we had, as I said, disasters in Missouri in 2011 where we had two major floods and we had an E5 tornado that devastated the sizable community of Joplin. I was in Joplin last week at one of the temporary middle schools. The high school was destroyed, the vocational school was destroyed, the parochial school was destroyed, and I think six elementary schools. I don't mean they were damaged, I mean they were destroyed. To replace those we were able to figure out how to work within the Budget Control Act. We even put some disaster funding in the regular appropriations bills as it became obvious what was going to be necessary beyond what we immediately knew as a country was necessary. And I think we could do that here. I was so concerned about what happened in 2011 I asked the General Accounting Office to evaluate several things: the disaster declaration process, the standards that FEMA uses to make a declaration, FEMA's management of its disaster relief fund, and the overall costs that were associated with disasters at the State, local, and Federal level. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the GAO report as part of this discussion. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the Conclusions and Recommendations for Executive Action of the GAO Report ``Federal Disaster Assistance.'' (GA0-12-838)

Mr. BLUNT. In the response portion of the report we will file, the GAO said a third of the disasters over the last 8 years cost the Federal Government less than $10 billion. They also said the level of loss necessary to declare a disaster hasn't changed in a couple of decades. My concern was--and the report leveled it out--that when we do have a big disaster, such as Sandy, we have almost always spent all the money because it was pretty easy to have a Governor ask for a disaster and the President to declare it and then the money is gone. FEMA primarily relied on the per-capita damage indicator as the criteria rather than whether the local community had the resources to deal with this on its own. There was no specific criteria at FEMA to decide at what point we paid various percentages up to 100 percent coming from the Federal Government. The FEMA administrative costs from 1989 to 2011 had doubled. It had increased from 9 percent of every disaster to an average of 18 percent of every disaster. So GAO recommended we do several things: that FEMA develop a methodology to more accurately assess what a jurisdiction was able to do; that we develop criteria to know when the Federal Government should accept all of the obligation--100 percent of the adjusted cost--and that we implement new goals to track why these costs of administering disasters were going up so dramatically. Hopefully, we can do that, and we can look at the law at the right time in the right way. I know my colleague Senator Coats has led the way to propose an alternative to the $60 billion supplemental bill. His alternative of about $24 billion would provide the money necessary to be spent by good calculations between now and the end of March. This could be the right step for us to take now. I suspect, as we deal with the House of Representatives, it ultimately will be closer to the step we take. I just think we shouldn't use this bill as a time to change the law so we can spend money in ways the law currently doesn't allow. We shouldn't use this bill to speculate on what costs will be when we will know what those are. At the same time, I understand and appreciate this is a disaster where we should step in. We absolutely should step in and help people and the communities devastated by this disaster get back on their feet. We should do that, and I am going to do everything I can to see we do that. I just hope we do it in the best possible way instead of using this as an opportunity to do things that don't have anything to do with Sandy but may have some other goals that should be achieved in a more appropriate way. With that, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am pleased the Senate is considering a critical bill this week to establish permanent normal trade relations with Russia. I should have borrowed my friend's sign that says ``PTC Creates Jobs,'' which may very well be an accurate equation, but PNTR also will equal jobs. We can compete given the opportunity to compete, and that is what these trade relationships are all about. This legislation overwhelmingly has passed the House. It is going to have strong bipartisan support in the Senate, and I believe it will pass today and needs to pass today. Russia joined the World Trade Organization in August of 2012. Since that time, our exporters--U.S. companies--have not been able to take full advantage of the fact that they have this new way to get to the Russian market because we haven't granted permanent normal trade relationships to Russia. Since all the other major WTO members already have that permanent relationship, they have had a real advantage since August of last year, as they can move forward immediately and compete and make agreements that American companies can't make. American companies are the only companies losing market share after Russia joined the World Trade Organization--and not because they are not as competitive. But until we do what we need to do here today, they will be working at a real disadvantage. In addition to securing a level playing field for American companies, we also need to replace the Jackson-Vanik policy with something that, frankly, has now more real-world potential and real-world understanding. Russia is clearly not the Russia of Soviet days, but we still have reasons to be concerned about individual freedom of expression in Russia. We need to express that concern. That is why I am in support of a portion of this bill that Senator Cardin and Senator Kyl have fought for during this whole discussion and now have in this bill, in the House bill--the portion where we look at the terrible treatment and ultimate death of Sergei Magnitsky. This provision will ensure that those who were complicit in those activities and in his ill-treatment and death don't get a free pass. It sends messages to other countries that while we want to trade with them, we also want to continue to speak strongly for the rights of individuals, no matter where they are, to speak up against their government. Normalizing trade relations with Russia is also an important move to my State and, I assume, all our States. I know in Missouri we exported $86 million to Russia in 2011, and exports are up 6 percent already from that year since we started 2012. Worldwide, Missouri exports more than $12.3 billion in goods and services--or at least we did in 2010-- and almost half of that was exported to countries where we have free- trade agreements. We need to continue to do that. Nearly 300 Missouri companies supported 32,000 jobs that were driven by exports. So 32,000 people in Missouri have jobs because of trade, and a lot of that trade is in our hemisphere. I want to come back to that in a minute. I am concerned on the Russian agreement that Russia has failed to agree to bring its animal health and food safety measures in line with the WTO agreement on the application of sanitary and phyto-sanitary measures, called the SPS agreement. I am going to continue to monitor this situation to ensure that American agricultural exports--and pork would be a good example of this--don't face market access barriers in Russia. Free trade has to be fair trade. Free trade doesn't work if it is not fair trade. If it is fair trade and free trade, American workers and American companies can and do actively and positively compete all over the world. In fact, we have a little bit of trade imbalance these days, and I think we should be concerned that 57 percent of it is in energy. If we become more energy self-sufficient, we could easily reduce our trade imbalance by 50 percent. If we just got North American energy as our focus for energy, we could only be more secure, and we would also have a better trade relationship. This legislation we are dealing with today, the Russia PNTR, builds on the progress we made last year with the passage of the three free- trade amendments. Many of us on this side worked closely with our friends on the other side and the White House to get these long negotiated deals passed. In the 6 months since our free-trade agreement with South Korea took effect, trade between our two countries has increased by over $30 billion--a $30 billion increase in 6 months. As we are trying to figure how to grow our economy, the export world and free trade is one of the places we can have the most speedy application of what we do to grow our economy. Thirty billion dollars in Korea alone. American exports to Columbia have increased 20 percent since that free-trade agreement took effect. The ratification of the Panama Free Trade Agreement just went into effect a few weeks ago, but that enables American firms to fully participate in the economic opportunities that will occur with the expansion of the Panama Canal and the continued growth of that economy. What happens there is critical to us. This agreement, I have said already, has passed the House and I think it will pass the Senate today. There are other things we can and should do. We need to work with the President, and the President should be working with Republicans and Democrats who are friends of trade to do several things. One would be trade promotion authority. We used to call this fast track. This is where the administration can negotiate an agreement, and then the House and Senate either vote yes or no on that agreement. It is the only way to get agreements done in the world we live in today. Right now, the administration has no realistic way of passing trade agreements through the Congress. The President needs to work with Congress so that we will give him the authority. He needs to ask for it, and he needs to want it so we can have these agreements. This gives our trading partners the confidence they need to make the concessions that you make in negotiation and know that the agreement is going to be the agreement. It is either going to be that agreement or no agreement at all. Since the TPA lapsed in 2006, we haven't negotiated a single new free-trade agreement. If that doesn't tell us how important it is that we move back to a way to get these agreements done, I don't know what would. Second, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. These negotiations seem to me to be languishing right now and need senior administration attention in order to gather the steam they need. A strong Trans-Pacific Partnership is the most effective way to consolidate our leadership in that part of the world. At a time when China is aggressively moving into east Asia, we also need to look at the Philippines. Senator Inouye and I have a bill that would strengthen our relationship with the Philippines called the SAVE Act. I would like to see the administration work with the two of us to see what we could get done to have that relationship that has been so strong and has lasted so long become even closer as we figure out how to trade with that economy in a way that makes them more stable and closer friends of the United States. Frankly, we will benefit, our workforce will benefit from that agreement. There is a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement that puts us in a better situation to trade with the European Union. This should be one of the easiest agreements we have ever done because we have two mature economies trying to trade with each other. The normal negotiations about labor and environment and other things that sometimes take so long in these agreements, frankly, shouldn't take long. The Presiding Officer has spent a lot of time with our NATO partners, and they would be the same partners that would be our EU trading partners if we will move forward there. Finally, we need fresh trade policies with the Americas. We now have trade agreements with six countries that were part of the Dominican Republic CAFTA agreement with Mexico, Canada, Panama, Colombia, Chile, and Peru, and we have a trading preferences agreement with Haiti. But we really need to look to see what we can do to trade in this hemisphere, improve our economic relationship with the South American giant country and giant economy of Brazil. Your best trading partners should be your neighbors. Certainly, Canada and Mexico have proved that. When we send Canada $1, they traditionally send us back somewhere in the neighborhood of $1. Right now it is about 91 cents. In our trade with Mexico, Mexico now sends us back, a year ago probably--and this number continues to grow--75 cents. That is why on the energy front, when we deal with them, it makes a difference. So they have proven that your neighbors should be your best trading partners.

Mr. BLUNT. We need to expand the economic partnerships to our neighborhood. The Western Hemisphere needs more attention. Trade makes sense for America. Trade creates jobs. Trade creates opportunity. I am glad we are voting on this trade agreement today. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent for an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, for the last few days the Senate has worked as the Senate should work. We have had amendments. We have had both sides working to find solutions; the Defense Authorization Act, the Russia trade agreement, a bipartisan vote on each of those. In fact, every time we have approached legislation that way this year, we have actually gotten something done. The FAA extension, the Transportation bill, the postal reform bill, the farm bill, and now the Defense bill all came out of committee, all had amendments, all had debate, and they all had a bipartisan vote that passed the bill. That is the way I think the Senate should work. I would like to hope it can work that way as we approach the end of the year and as we try not to go over the fiscal cliff. They call it a cliff for a reason. I think a lot of people are acting as though right below the cliff there must be a fiscal ledge, but I don't see the ledge we are going to fall onto. I think we are actually going to--if we go over the cliff, there will be some harm that is done. If we are going to take a balanced approach focusing on job creation, we have to do the things that get spending under control as well as the things that might produce more revenue. Nobody in the President's party has yet endorsed the $1.6 trillion tax package he has talked about--or I don't think there is a growing demand to have the permanent debt limit increased. I also don't think there is any chance Congress will look at the Constitution and decide the President, on his own, can borrow money. A number of people who have looked at the fiscal cliff all come up with bad conclusions. In July of this year, a study by Ernst & Young warned that raising taxes on the top 2 percent would destroy 700,000 jobs. Nobody has challenged that in any significant way. What if it is 500,000 jobs? What if it is 350,000 jobs or what if it is more than 700,000 jobs? This is not what we should want to do. This study also says that raising those taxes will decrease wages by almost 2 percent and reduce economic growth by 1.3 percent in an economy that is barely growing 1.3 percent. If we go totally off the cliff--that was the proposal of just the tax rates for the so-called top 2 percent. If we go totally off the cliff, the CBO--the Congressional Budget Office--says the consequences will be even much worse than that. In fact, they say we definitely would put the country into a recession. Just last month, the Congressional Budget Office warned that with the population aging and health care costs per person likely to keep growing faster than the economy, the United States cannot sustain the Federal spending programs that are now in place. That is why a lot of people are talking about entitlement reform and think we need to look where the money is and figure out how to reform these programs so we can be sure these programs last. Programs that are based on how the population looks have to change as the population changes. Medicare was put in place in 1965. The average person who reaches 65 lives 5 years longer now than they did in 1965. That, of course, has a big impact on all the projections as to how this program would work in 1965 that was put in place, and we need to look at that. That is why Erskine Bowles, the former Chief of Staff of President Clinton, said just last week: Democrats must move on entitlements in cliff deal. . . . We are going to have to reduce the cost of entitlement programs. Senator Conrad, the chairman of the Budget Committee, said, we ``absolutely need'' to enact ``fundamental reform'' in our entitlement programs. He was warning that Social Security is ``headed for insolvency.'' Senator Durbin said ignoring entitlement reform is not a ``responsible approach.'' We do not want to eliminate these programs, but we want to be sure they last, and this is a good time to look at both revenue and spending. Surely, if this Senate works as the Senate should work, we can find out how to do both those things. My friend from Wyoming just talked about the death tax, the estate tax. For all the reasons he mentioned, this is another tax we need to look at doing something about before it goes back to the taxable levels of 10 years ago. There are 2 million family farms or farms and ranches in the United States--2 million--and 98 percent of them--almost 2 million--are owned by individuals, family partnerships, and family corporations. To any extent this is corporate agriculture, it is only corporate agriculture because a family decided that was the best way to structure what they owned as a family--98 percent of those 2 million farms. Cropland prices have gone up more than most things over the last few years, though nobody's bank account, if a person is a family farmer, reflects that. A person's financial statement might reflect that, but their bank account doesn't reflect that unless that person decided they were going to sell part of the farm. What we don't want to do is make people sell the farm or ranch or continue to have a little piece of the farm or ranch and more likely sell a piece of it and that multigeneration of family farms, in most cases, the person who dies and their family is impacted by the death tax, can very likely become the last farming generation. At a time when we need to focus on job creation, the Joint Tax Committee estimates that the increase in the estate tax would cost the country over 1 million jobs. Senator Barrasso talked about the State of Wyoming. In the State of Missouri, we have the second highest number of farms in the Nation. They are not the second biggest in many cases but the second highest number. We have over 100,000 individual farms. The American Farm Bureau says that right now, with the tax that is in place, 1,100 of those farms would be subject to the estate tax or the death tax--1,100. If we go back to the 2000 levels of $1 million, which would be taking us over the cliff--as going over the cliff would have us do--15,000 Missouri families would be affected at some point in the future by the estate tax. The difference in 1,100 and 15,000 is 13 times as many families would have to worry about this tax, and it becomes the motivating factor of how they run their farm rather than how they can pass their farm or ranch along to the next generation. I don't have the number in front of me, but when I looked at those numbers earlier in the year, I think it was about nine times as many small businesses in my State would be affected by the 2000 levels as would be affected if that same estate was taxed at today's levels. We have people stepping forward on this from both sides of the aisle. I recently discussed this issue with the chairman of the Finance Committee, Senator Baucus from Montana, who has spoken out about protecting farmers and ranchers in his State who want to pass their property along to their children. I told him I would do anything I could to help him maintain the estate tax levels we have now, though both he and I are in support of legislation that would eliminate the estate tax. That would be my preference. But very often in a democracy we don't get our preference. We try to figure out what we might be able to accomplish that is not quite all we would want to accomplish. Keeping this year's level would be important. Senator Landrieu from Louisiana called the estate tax at this year's levels of estate tax ``a make or break issue'' and called it ``inherently unfair.'' Senator Pryor from Arkansas has stressed the need for ``stability'' so families can plan. Whatever we do with these tax policies, as much as possible, we need to do them in a permanent way. This business of going 1 year at a time or 2 years at a time on the estate tax--if someone's family has a taxable estate event this year, it is not a big deal; if they have it in January, it is devastating. We don't need to continue to have that. This shouldn't be a partisan issue. It is about protecting families and the things they have put together, often working side by side as a family. We need to work across the aisle on this issue and other issues. Rules Changes One of the issues that right now is making that harder than it needs to be is this discussion of the rules changes. Some people want to change the historic role of the Senate which is designed to foster compromise and debate as we had this week on the Defense bill, or like we had as the Russian trade bill came to the floor. Instead of reaching across the aisle, this kind of discussion about a rules change is an attempt to build a wall. Now, every time this discussion happens, the minority always appears to say the same thing. Senator Reid, the majority leader, pledged, in December 2006, ``to run the Senate with respect for the rules and for the minority rights the rules protect'' when he became the leader. He said: The Senate was established to make sure that minorities are protected . . . and I am going to do everything I can to preserve the traditions and rules of this institution that I love. In 2005, then-Senator Obama said: If the majority chooses to end the filibuster . . . then the fighting and bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse. In that same year, 2005, Senator Schumer said breaking the rules would ``change the whole balance of power and checks and balances in this great Senate and great country.'' And Senator Durbin warned in 2005 that what was then called the nuclear option would ``really destroy our system of checks and balances.'' Everyone will rush and say: Well, the Republicans talked about doing this then. That is why these people were making these comments. But the point is, the Republicans did not do it. The Republicans did talk about it in the majority, and they listened to the minority. They listened to the arguments about the Constitution, and they did not do it. What you talk about may be important, but what you do is really important. Hopefully, Democrats will look at this again and decide they do not want to do it. The Senate rules say it takes 67 Senators to change the rules. I believe that is what the Parliamentarian will rule in the next Senate if this comes up. Then, if you are going to do it with less than that, you have to immediately vote to overrule the Parliamentarian and break the rules to change the rules. It does not sound like, to me, that is the way to solve problems or to work together, particularly in a Congress where the Senate is controlled by one party and the House is controlled by the other. What good does it do to force things through our system that cannot possibly get to the President's desk? The Senate operates differently from the House of Representatives for a reason. I was in the House. I liked the House. The House is run by the majority. That is the way the Constitution intended it. They have 2-year terms, and every year after the election, it was envisioned that the House of Representatives would be more responsive to what voters thought they wanted to do that day. But it was also envisioned that the Senate would serve as the reason you had to think for a while about this. It would not just be one election, but usually in the Senate it takes a couple of elections where people have verified: No, we want to change course. And changing course in a country as great and as big and as diverse as ours is a big decision. The Constitution works that way for a reason. This is a hornet's nest that I do not think we need to kick over. Our Nation's Founders knew what they were doing. Let's let the House be the House and the Senate be the Senate. Let's continue to have a reason for two different legislative bodies. If all we are having is a House that works like the House and a Senate that works like the House, we have significantly minimized the great genius of the Constitution. Allowing the minority party to exercise its rights to debate and amend legislation should be the rule, not the exception. I hope the Senate, which is led by Democrats today, and will be next year, will stop this debate and start figuring out what we can do together to solve problems, just like we have done this week with the Defense bill and the trade bill; just like we have done in this Congress with, as I said to start, with FAA and Transportation and postal reform and the farm bill--all of which came out of committee, were open to wide- ranging amendments, had a bipartisan vote, and reached the kind of legislative conclusion that the Constitution envisioned and the people we work for have every right to expect. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my defense fellow, MAJ Mark O'Neill, be allowed access to the Senate floor as long as the Defense authorization bill be considered, and I ask unanimous consent request on behalf of Senator Cochran that Karen Courington and Mike Hansen, legislative fellows detailed to the Committee on Appropriations, and Taylor Lam, a fellow in Senator Cochran's office, be granted the privilege of the floor during consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2013.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I wish to honor Dr. Duane Meyer, historian, educator, author, former university president and my friend. Fittingly, the Greene County Historical Society honored Dr. Meyer in October with its Life Time Achievement Award for his body of work enriching Missouri's educational, historical and cultural life. Dr. Meyer, through his dedication, is recognized as one of Missouri's most distinguished historians. Dr. Meyer served as a teacher for 18 years and as an administrator for 22 years (1971-1983 as president of what is today Missouri State University). He arrived in Springfield in 1955 with a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Dr. Meyer began his career as an assistant professor of history and later became a full professor of history. By 1961 he was dean of facilities for what was then Southwest Missouri State College. Ten years later Dr. Meyer was selected as the sixth president of Southwest Missouri State College, which earned university status in 1972. During his 12 years at the helm of Southwest Missouri State University, enrollment increased to an all-time high (62 percent), making it the second largest 4-year public institution of higher learning in Missouri. Southwest Missouri State University was transformed with the creation of an academic master plan, including a new business school, construction of a student event center and elevation of the athletic program to NCAA Division I competition. Academic achievements included new specialist degrees for graduate programs, new associate degrees for undergraduate students and cooperative education. Students were also given the opportunity to have learning experiences abroad. Faculty research was encouraged and research and service centers took form at Southwest Missouri State University during Dr. Meyer's tenure as president. As the academic landscape changed, so did the look of the campus. The campus expanded to 125 acres, the first public-private building-- Hammons Student Center--was constructed along with three new classroom buildings and four new residence halls. During that period, Southwest Missouri State University added the State Fruit Experiment Station in Mountain Grove and a new campus in West Plains, Missouri. In recognition of his contributions, Southwest Missouri State University honored Dr. Meyer by naming the school's new library after him. After leaving the president's office, Dr. Meyer continued to teach as a professor emeritus of history. He also served as a member on the Missouri Council of Public Higher Education Board and on the Missouri Humanities Council. Dr. Meyer's research has produced two text books, including The Heritage of Missouri: A History, which serves as a valuable reference for students learning about Missouri history. Dr. Meyer's leadership and dedication to excellence have reshaped one of the region's great universities and benefited countless students who have passed through its halls. Congratulations to Dr. Meyer for enhancing our understanding of Missouri history and making it available for future generations.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I would like to take a few moments to share a rare piece of good news related to international religious freedom. On October 11 of last year I submitted for the Record the story of a Christian pastor in Iran who had been charged with apostasy and sentenced to death. Earlier this month, after almost 3 years of imprisonment, Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani has been released and is at home with his family. The good news for Pastor Youcef comes after years of struggle, and we can only imagine the joy his own family feels after a long, difficult fight for his freedom. Many organizations and individuals, often risking their own lives, deserve thanks for their enduring commitment to Pastor Youcef's cause. Pastor Youcef's enduring faith in God saw him through this trying time and his experience is an inspiration to people of faith everywhere. This moment of relief and thanksgiving comes as a reminder that the liberties we enjoy as Americans come at a high price to those who have fought and continue to fight for our freedoms. And too many people in countries like Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Pakistan, to name a few, still do not enjoy the basic human rights you and I have here at home. The persecution of religious minorities and Christians like Pastor Youcef abroad is unfortunately nothing new. That's why I introduced the Near East and South Central Asia Religious Freedom Act in June of last year. The bill came out of coordination with U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf in the House and my colleague, U.S. Senator Carl Levin. It creates a special envoy on religious freedom in the State Department to monitor the status of religious minorities in these particularly vulnerable regions. We can and we must do more to advance religious freedom abroad. I am sincerely committed to this effort and believe that it is essential to promoting the God-given right to liberty around the world. My colleagues and I are hopeful that the Senate can soon join the House in passing this important legislation.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the No. 1 job of this Congress domestically should have been more private sector jobs. The President's long-held view of redistribution as a goal for the government is not going to accomplish that. What is going to accomplish that is more opportunity, more independence, as my friend from Arkansas just said, more certainty, more American energy. These problems are big, but they are not necessarily that complicated. We just have to have the willpower to deal with them. This Congress has not done that. This Senate, more importantly, has not done that. The House has passed bills. The House has passed a budget. The House has passed appropriations bills. The House has passed bills to get regulation under control. The Senate has not. I hope when we get back here--we should stay and do those things, but when we get back, we need to be focused on the No. 1 job for the country today, which is more American jobs.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am on the Senate floor today to honor Alvin Rohrs for his 30 years of leadership and dedication to SIFE, Students in Free Enterprise. SIFE brings together today's business leaders and thinkers with enterprising college students on every continent who develop small businesses to solve local problems and create wealth and hope where there was little of either. SIFE is a hands-on business leadership opportunity, and Rohrs directs this unique business gospel toward those who want to live a financially, personally, and environmentally sustainable life. While Rohrs has carried the title of president and CEO of SIFE, he has also been known as the enabler, chief cheerleader, and director of SIFE over these many years. Alvin Rohrs is an educator, motivator, guidance counselor, spiritual leader and the wizard behind the curtain at SIFE, working with other captains of business and industry to bring new opportunities to campuses around the globe. The list of American and international corporate titans that have brought their energy, insight and resources to SIFE is extraordinary. Even the United States State Department recognizes the value of SIFE in developing ``more effective, socially responsible business leaders.'' SIFE has been a key sponsor of sustainable business practices on every continent for three decades. SIFE educates students about the virtues of the risk-reward system known as free enterprise. SIFE applies free enterprise principles to lift people out of poverty and give them new opportunities for personal enrichment and service to their neighborhoods and communities. Among many examples, SIFE teams have shown poor single mothers how to start their own small businesses that boost their incomes and provide for their families. Farmers and small business people are given instruction about turning their ideas into companies that solve problems and provide jobs in disadvantaged neighborhoods. It is the free market system at its best. It is SIFE. It is Alvin Rohrs. Rohrs heads a staff of more than 60 professionals at the headquarters in my hometown of Springfield, MO. Dozens of staffers help with SIFE's efforts to spread the positive word about business development and how it can influence initiatives through which scores of students develop projects to lift others out of despair. More than 1,600 teams on college campuses--more than 57,000 students--are active in 39 counties, including China and Russia, demonstrating the power of local business to solve local problems and create wealth. SIFE is a powerful force for enlightenment and good works. Rohrs has led SIFE's development into a megaphone for the positive power of business in the world community. This year he reaches a milestone--30 years at the helm. He has earned many awards and accolades for his works in the charity community and in the business world. He has an unwavering belief in the work of SIFE and the message it carries into energizing entrepreneurs and creating new wealth. I congratulate Alvin Rohrs and SIFE on their growth, accomplishments and good work providing the world community with personal understanding of free enterprise and the rewards it offers to people in all walks of life and all economic ranks. My hope is that SIFE and Alvin Rohrs continue this critical work for many years to come.