Sherrod Brown

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, today we came together to pass important bipartisan legislation to strengthen our national security and invest in American jobs. Many of my colleagues of both parties have helped get the National Defense Authorization Act over the finish line. I particularly want to thank my colleague Senator Portman from my State, who worked with our office to secure important Ohio priorities, and Senator Inhofe and my friend Jack Reed, who served so well on the Banking Committee in addition to the work he has done on unemployment insurance and on military issues, and Senator Crapo, my colleague from Idaho, as we worked on securing and fortifying our national interests when it comes to foreign investments. All of these colleagues of mine worked with the conference committee to get our agencies new tools to screen Chinese and other foreign investments for national security threats. This bill would not have been possible without the leadership of one Senator in particular; that is, the senior Senator from Arizona. Senator McCain's leadership on this legislation and throughout his career is why this Congress honored him through the naming of this bill--the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act. That is a rare honor. Congress rarely honors its own. We all know we all have feet of clay and don't put our friends here up on a pedestal, but for a few lions in the Senate, including Sam Nunn, John Warner, Ike Skelton, Carl Levin, and now John McCain, we have done that. It honors his commitment to our national security through the John S. McCain Strategic Defense Fellows Program--fitting tributes to the service and sacrifice of a man like John McCain. We know his story--how a young Navy pilot was captured behind enemy lines, yet he never wavered in his commitment to his fellow POWs in Vietnam. I have had my disagreements with him. We all have. But we have always respected each other. He has been a leader whom almost all of us from both parties have relied on for guidance, including national security issues and on issues when, in my first year in the Senate, I worked with Senator McCain on keeping down the costs of prescription drugs. He has been a critical fighter for sanctions to hold our adversaries accountable. Last year, we worked together, along with Senators Crapo, Schumer, Graham, Rubio, Corker, and Cardin, to pass tough, new sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea. He has always been clear that we don't only honor the rule of law or refrain from torture when it is easy or convenient. He authored a 2015 amendment to prohibit the use of torture as an interrogation method. He has been forceful in defending our allies against Russian aggression in Crimea and Georgia and Montenegro. After the Helsinki summit, Senator McCain--one of the few Republicans in this body who is willing to call the President out when he does something, especially on foreign soil, to attack the United States of America--spoke out forcefully against the President cozying up to Putin and his attacks on journalists. He said: ``The President [of the United States, Donald Trump,] made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.'' He said: ``All that makes us who we are--a republic of free people dedicated to the cause of liberty at home and abroad.'' Those words stood out because so few Republicans were willing to utter them. Throughout his life and career, he has lived the motto of ``country first.'' I thank my colleague from Arizona for his work on the National Defense Authorization Act this year. I look forward to continuing our work together to protect our national security and together to serve the people of this great country.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, a free, independent press is vital to our democracy. It is enshrined in our Constitution. We need tenacious, dedicated journalists, who will afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, to ask tough questions, to challenge special interests, to connect Americans with their communities. That is why I joined my colleagues this week on a resolution condemning this administration's awful, vicious, demagogic attacks on reporters--including the decision last week to bar a reporter from attending a White House event just because the White House didn't like the questions she asked--with the repeated labeling of the free press as ``enemies of the people.'' Watch the video from last night. Watch the video in Florida from last night where the President egged on, egged on, and egged on his supporters to start screaming at newspaper reporters and other reporters--people who are doing their jobs. In spite of this President using Stalinist language--I am just reading a book right now written by a Stalinist translator, and this book talks about a lot of the language Stalin used. He called people ``enemies of the people.'' That is Communist talk. That is Stalinist talk. Yet this President calls reporters who get up every day and do their jobs--most of them not paid very well, frankly--the enemy of the people. They do vital work not just in Washington but throughout the country. I would like to take a moment to highlight one of them. I am going to come to this floor every so often in the weeks and months ahead, and I am going to talk about a local reporter--a reporter who gets up every day, who probably doesn't make more than $20,000 or $30,000 a year. In many cases it is a little more than that, but reporters are generally not particularly well-paid people. I want to talk about the important work that local Ohio journalists do. Some of them I have met; others I haven't met but I have observed, because I know how important they are to their communities. I will start doing this on a regular basis because in this town today, with this administration, with this President of the United States--I still can't believe a President of the United States engages in talk like Stalin--the Soviet Stalin-- calling American citizens who get up every day and do their job and do their job to the best of their ability ``enemies of the people,'' and he tries to get the crowds he speaks to, the people he addresses, to chime in and call them ``enemies of the people'' and start calling those reporters names. I want this floor message that I am going to do from time to time to be a constant reminder of how reporters contribute to their communities. Last week, the Daily Jeffersonian in eastern Ohio ran a story on the upcoming Firemen's Festival in Caldwell, OH, a town in Appalachia, reported by a local reporter named Austin Erickson. It is the local fire department's biggest fundraiser of the year. They rely on the proceeds in part because of the corruption in State government where State government doesn't fund local communities like they used to for a whole bunch of reasons, but this fire department relies on the proceeds of the Fireman's Festival to fund daily maintenance, testing, and safety gear of their firefighters. Mr. Erickson talked to the festival's chairman, who pointed to the fire department and told the reporter: ``If it's in those four walls, it's from that festival.'' In other words, if it weren't for this festival, we wouldn't have the fire equipment we need. Through its work, the Daily Jeffersonian and local reporters like Mr. Erickson are informing their communities about ways to support local firefighters and responders who keep them safe. If people like Mr. Erickson of the Daily Jeffersonian in Cambridge, OH, were not writing these stories, were not reporting on the Fireman's Festival, not as many people would go or understand it. They spend their hard-earned money there. It helps their local communities. It helps their fire department. Enemies of the People? If the President would listen and see what these reporters do every day, maybe he would stop the demagoguery. Maybe he would stop calling people names. Maybe he would stop calling his own Attorney General names. Maybe he would stand up to Putin who clearly--that is a whole other story. I won't get into that. Let's go back to these local reporters and what journalists do every day and what Mr. Erickson does. It is what newspapers all over Ohio-- from my hometown paper, the Mansfield News Journal, the paper where my wife used to work, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch, the Cincinnati Enquirer, a smaller paper, the News-Herald, the Lorain Journal--I could go on and on and on, paper after paper after paper. Journalists wake up every day and do their jobs. They serve their communities, and they serve their country. They are not enemies of the people. I just pray to God that the President of the United States will stop that kind of talk.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Yes.

Mr. BROWN

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

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, first, I want to thank Senator Collins for her generosity on time. I know we are trying to schedule a vote, and I am appreciative of that. I am joined on the floor by Senator Cardin, one of the best advocates for people in this body and especially for Federal workers, who have contributed so much, and we will talk about that. Senator Hirono, from Hawaii, is also joining us. Senator Van Hollen, Senator Murray, Senator Kaine, and Senator Cortez Masto will join us a little later in a different venue, and Senators Tester and Warner spoke earlier today. We stand here on behalf of dedicated public servants who get up every day to work for the American taxpayers. They are men and women who support our Armed Forces and support our veterans. They make sure that Social Security checks go out and Medicare is taking care of seniors. They ensure that our food, medicines, and drinking water are safe. They protect our national security. They work in institutions like the NIH, the CDC, and NIOSH, or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, in Cincinnati. They are in community-based outpatient clinics. They are in VA centers. They are in Social Security offices in most of our States. These are American workers who have dedicated their lives to service. They serve Republicans and Democrats. They serve Commanders in Chief, regardless of party. Many of these workers are in Washington, but millions more are in the 50 States. We have 52,000 Federal workers in Ohio contributing to our State and local communities. Nearly one-third of those workers are veterans. The Federal Government makes special allowances to hire veterans, especially at hospitals in Chillicothe, Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Wade Park in Cleveland, and at the community-based outpatient clinics in places like Mansfield, Springfield, Zanesville, Akron, and Parma. These are workers doing their jobs on behalf of the American people, but, shamefully, these are public servants under attack from this administration--as if Federal workers are not Americans, as if Federal workers are not people, as if Federal workers are just a cost to be minimized. The administration has issued Executive order after Executive order to restrict those workers' freedoms to advocate for themselves and for taxpayers in the workplace. They made it easier for short-term political appointees to retaliate against nonpartisan career public servants. Think about that. This President has brought in lots of very ideologically charged political appointees who have retaliated against nonpartisan career public service--people who make sure that Social Security checks go out, who serve veterans, who make sure we do public health the way we should as a nation. These decisions create an atmosphere where whistleblowers who report fraud fear being punished and fear being fired for shining a light on abuse. In the past, workers have had flexibility to use their time to benefit taxpayers, but these Executive orders severely limit workers' ability to discuss problems at the workplace, including ways of improving efficiency in the workplace and including inefficiencies and waste. This is all part of a larger attack on workers in this country, a larger attack on the labor movement. We know that the White House, more and more, is looking like a retreat for corporate executives of some of the largest companies in the country who center their attacks on workers and the labor movement. Corporate special interests have spent decades stripping workers of their freedom to organize for fair wages and benefits they have earned. My colleagues talk about freedom all the time. How about the freedom to band together and speak as one stronger voice in the workplace to get better treatment, better wages, and better benefits? Make no mistake. An attack on public service unions is an attack on all unions, and an attack on unions is an attack on all workers--and I mean all workers. Whether you punch a timesheet or swipe a badge, whether you make a salary or earn tips, whether you are on a payroll or whether you are a contract worker, whether you are a temporary worker, working behind a desk, on a factory floor, or behind a restaurant counter, the fact is that all workers across this country are feeling the squeeze, and hard work doesn't pay off. For decades now, we have seen what happens when workers have no power in the workplace. Corporations view American workers as a cost to be minimized instead of as a valuable asset to invest in. We know that workers are more productive than ever. We know that corporations are making more profit than ever. We know that executive compensation has exploded through the roof, but we know that workers' wages have stagnated and workers' benefits have declined. We know that. The last thing we should be doing is spreading that mindset--those attacks on workers--to attacks on public servants. Workers power our economy. They make the government work for taxpayers. We need to stand up for the American workers--whether it is a Federal worker, a restaurant private sector worker, somebody working at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, somebody waiting tables in Dayton, or somebody working in an office in Mansfield--not make it harder for them to do their jobs. I thank my colleagues for standing with these women and men who do tough jobs on behalf of the American people. I yield the floor for Senator Cardin from Maryland.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, this is a big deal for Americans making $15,000, $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 a year. They will get a refundable tax credit if they claim it--if they can figure out how to claim it, because it is sometimes too complicated. They can get $2,000, $3,000 $4,000, or sometimes a little more than that, in the refundable tax credit. That is money in their pockets to buy school clothes. It is money in their pockets to fix a car that is broken down. It is money in their pockets so they can take their kids to a restaurant occasionally. Filing taxes is complicated for everyone. It can be particularly challenging for those claiming the EITC. Wall Street CEO's and big companies have armies of accountants. This is for working-class families making $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 a year. I thank Senator Heller. I ask support for the Heller-Brown amendment. It will matter to so many working families in Mansfield, Toledo, Sandusky, and all over Ohio. I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, the Federal Reserve's job is to ensure the economy works for average Americans; that Wall Street doesn't again crash the economy and decimate worker pensions; that banks can't cheat families out of their hard-earned savings; that monetary policy helps workers to find and keep a job that pays a living wage. During his time in the Bush administration and his role at the Fed so far, Randy Quarles, nominated as Vice Chair of Supervision, has done the opposite. Time and again, Mr. Quarles has sided with Wall Street and not with workers. Look what happened with the stress tests. The Fed allowed the seven largest banks to redirect $96 billion that should be used to pay workers, to reduce fees for consumers, and protect taxpayers from bailouts. Instead, they plowed that money into share buybacks and dividends that reward--you guessed it--wealthy executives and investors. Two banks had capital below the required amounts. Those banks failed the tests, but they got passing grades anyway. Now the Fed is about to propose new rules to make stress tests even easier next year--making them less frequent and giving banks more leeway to design the exams they will then much more likely pass. The Fed, under Mr. Quarles' leadership, wants to loosen limits on Big Bank borrowing, a move opposed by former Republican FDIC Chair Sheila Bair and former Vice Chair Tom Hoenig. The Fed is proposing to weaken the Volcker rule--the rule that stops big banks from taking big risks with Americans' money--and the Fed is undercutting the role of FSOC and oversight of foreign megabanks that may soon join a proposal to undermine the Community Reinvestment Act. Again, this is a boon to Wall Street and a punch in the gut to American workers. Wall Street simply doesn't respect the dignity of work. Data from last week tells a story Ohioans know too well--big banks and corporations are doing better than ever, while workers still haven't gotten a meaningful raise. So now we install another nominee--this time for 14 years--who doesn't seem to understand that workers are the backbone of our economy? Mr. Quarles missed the 2008 crisis the last time he was in charge a decade ago. He spent his time at the Fed recently doing favors for Wall Street at the expense of working families. Americans cannot afford a nominee who fails American workers and homeowners and taxpayers.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, it has been a good year to be a Wall Street banker. Barely a day goes by that doesn't bring news of another consumer protection rollback, another unraveling of taxpayer protections, or another handout to Wall Street. The man at the center of many of these decisions is right now, on this floor, up for nomination to a 14-year term as Governor on the Board of the Federal Reserve. When Randy Quarles' nomination to serve as Vice Chair of Supervision at the Fed--the first person ever to serve in that position--when it came before the Senate last year, I urged my colleagues to vote no. Quarles' record worried many of us that he wasn't interested in doing actual supervision. I said he seemed far too ready to swallow financial industry talking points, once again, and relax the rules for Wall Street. Since then, his record at the Federal Reserve his confirmed the worst fears so many of us held. In just 10 months under Mr. Quarles' leadership, the Fed has taken steps to systematically unravel Wall Street reform. Let's look at what happened. Start with the stress test. The Fed allowed the seven largest banks to redirect $96 billion that should have been used to pay workers, to reduce fees for consumers, and to protect taxpayers from bailouts. Instead, they plowed that money into share buybacks and dividends that do what? Of course, they reward wealthy executives and the biggest investors. Two banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, had capital below the required amounts. Those banks failed the test, but they got passing grades anyway because they are Wall Street. The Fed reportedly called them up and let them haggle over the test results. Imagine this happening in school--when you were at school growing up in Oklahoma or I in Ohio--to allow them to proceed after haggling over the test results. They allowed them to proceed with buybacks and dividends that would drain the required capital. Under Quarles' leadership, the Fed wants to make funneling money back into stock buybacks even easier. The Fed's pending proposal on Big Bank capital will allow the eight largest banks in this country--banks each worth hundreds of billions of dollars--to redirect up to $121 billion into share buybacks and dividends. This is money that could be used to protect taxpayers from bailouts. Remember, share buybacks and dividends juice stock prices. They do little to increase long-term growth or to reward the workers who make a company's success possible. Going forward, the Fed also wants to make stress tests even easier. Apparently, haggling with the megabanks over the scores wasn't lenient enough. Quarles has proposed letting bankers comment on the tests before they are administered. That is like letting the students write the exams, and the Fed is considering dropping the qualitative portion of the stress test altogether. That is the part of the test that examines banks' risk management processes, data systems, and the fitness of its board of directors. I understand these board of directors are all paid--I believe in every single case of the eight largest banks--at least $200,000 a year. The Fed plans changes for the Volcker rule, the rule that stops big banks from taking big risks with Americans' money. That rule requires the banks make investments in the real economy, not casino-style trades using families' checking and savings accounts. Lest you think only American banks are getting a handout, soon foreign banks will be getting in on the action. This spring, Mr. Quarles said the Fed wants to loosen the rules on foreign megabanks. We are talking about Deutsche Bank, Santander, UBS, Credit Suisse, and Barclays. You have read about those banks. In most cases, those banks have broken our laws. These foreign banks have broken our laws time and again. Yet we are going to loosen the rules on these foreign megabanks. The question I have with all these weakening of protections for American taxpayers and American consumers is, What problem exactly is the Fed, under Mr. Quarles' watch, trying to solve? Banks increased their profits by 13 percent last year. That is before you account for the windfall in the tax cut. When you add in the tax benefits, it was a 28-percent increase in their profits. The banking sector bought back $77 billion worth of stock last year. The CEOs of the six largest banks got an average raise of 22 percent. So what exactly is Mr. Quarles trying to fix? What is not going all the banks' way day after day? The CEO of Wells Fargo got a 36-percent raise, even as scandal after scandal mounted at the bank under his watch. I don't think these megabanks are really the people who need Mr. Quarles' help. Maybe you ought to look elsewhere. Maybe look at the tellers. The average teller in this country makes $12.50 an hour. Wages for ordinary Americans simply aren't moving up. Mr. Quarles was in a very similar position a decade ago in the Bush administration. The financial sector was booming, but average Americans were sitting around their kitchen tables, feeling less and less secure, wondering what they were going to do next. During this time when Mr. Quarles served in the Bush administration, the Treasury Department's foreclosure filings in Ohio doubled--from around 40,000 at the beginning of 2002 to 80,000 by the end of 2006. Mr. Quarles just brushed off concerns about the growing troubles in the mortgage market. Famously, he said in those days, in 2006, that the future looked bright. His actions today suggest he ain't learned a lot since. His amnesia and the collective amnesia of this body are just a little too familiar in this town. We can't afford any more nominees who fail American workers, who fail American homeowners, or who fail American taxpayers. It always comes back to, whose side are you on? Are you going to fight for the little guy, whether she punches a time clock or whether he works in a diner, or are you going to fight for the 1 percent? Are we here to serve American workers in the middle class, or are we here to serve Wall Street? Randal Quarles has made it clear whose side he is on. I urge my colleagues to reject his nomination.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, first, I want to say how much I appreciate Senator Sasse's words. I hope that other people in his political party will have the courage he has to stand up and speak out on some of these things. This week, the President of the United States went overseas. Instead of standing up to America's enemies, the President of the United States went out of his way to attack the American free press. As Senator McCain described today's press conference with Russian President Putin: ``The President made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.'' Let me repeat that. Senator McCain--once a Republican nominee for President of the United States and one of the most respected Senators of our lifetimes--said: ``The President made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.'' We are talking about a man--President Putin--who presides over a regime in which journalists are killed. According to a 2016 PolitiFact article, Russia ranks 180 out of 199 countries for press freedom, behind, not ahead of, Iraq, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and others. This is according to the international watchdog Freedom House. After all, Putin was a KGB agent. Yet the President didn't just defend a dictator against the press; he openly attacked the American free press. While heading to meet with the leader of a country that tramples on the rights of journalists, our President, President Trump, said: ``Much of our news media is, indeed, the enemy of the people.'' That is Soviet talk. That is Putin kind of talk. That is KGB talk. That has never been the talk of an American President. ``Much of our news media is, indeed, the enemy of the people.'' Everybody in this body knows a lot of reporters. Nobody in this body believes that the media are enemies of the people. Unfortunately, almost nobody on this side of the aisle will stand up to the President and say: No, Mr. President. No, FOX News. The media are not enemies of the people; they are doing work that is essential to our democracy. A journalist's entire job is to ask tough questions to challenge powerful interests. In church, we comfort the afflicted. Journalists afflict the comfortable. We know that reporters put their safety and sometimes their lives--we see that--on the line, whether when they are covering floods and hurricanes at home or when they are transversing the globe to bring us war zone stories. We depend on reporters in Ohio and around the world to bring us the stories that have an impact on our day-to-day lives and to tell the stories that might not otherwise be told. Yet, too often today, we see reporters restricted, vilified, and threatened--all for doing their jobs. We can't dismiss these threats as just empty rhetoric. Think of the anguish and the heartbreak and the terrible sight that happened at the newsroom at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. We all know too well how dangerous a job it has become to report the news. Just last Thursday, the Herald newspaper--the daily paper south of Columbus in Circleville, OH--received an unmarked letter in the mail. Inside, it threatened physical harm to all of the workers there. Think about that--just for doing their jobs at a local newspaper in covering football games, in covering a business that might have cheated a customer, or in covering a politician who might have cut corners. In serving their community, these workers had their safety threatened. This is personal to me, and I apologize for making this personal. My wife, Connie Schultz, is a Pulitzer Prize winner from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She writes a weekly column for the Creators Syndicate in 150 newspapers. She is about as far from being an enemy of the people as anyone I know. She was a working-class kid who grew up in Ashtabula, OH. Her dad carried a union card, which saved her life because she had health care at the Cleveland clinic that other people would have not been able to have benefited from whose dads didn't have insurance. She worked her way through Kent State University, and she became a reporter. Do you know why she won the Pulitzer Prize? She won the Pulitzer Prize because she has written about servers--servers in restaurants where sometimes management skims their tips. She has written about single parents who struggle every day and oftentimes get little help from anybody. She has written about workers and a system that is so often rigged against them. They work every bit as hard as we all do here, but they get so little for it. She teaches at Kent State. She teaches millenials. She teaches young men and women who are mostly working-class kids, most of whom will graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, which is something the President of the United States has never faced. They work part time and some of them full time. They struggle to get through their classes. They want to be reporters because they want to go out and comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable because they care about truth and care about honesty. Again, they are as far as can be from being enemies of the people. How shameful it is the President of the United States says that. The job of the President of the United States and the job of our political leaders is to set an example--to respect our democratic institutions, including the press, and to bring Americans together and not divide us. Please, Mr. President, won't you do that? I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, today I wish to congratulate Miss Elsie Steward Young of Highland County, OH, on her 102nd birthday and her recent induction into the Ohio Civil Rights Hall of Fame. Miss Elsie is a legend in southwest Ohio and a lifelong fighter for justice and opportunity for all Ohio children. In 1954, after the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision and ordered an end to segregation in America's schools, the two all-White primary schools in Hillsboro, OH, refused to integrate. The district continued to send Black students to the one all-Black school, which was in shambles. Miss Elsie and a group of mothers took matters into their own hands. For 2-years, the ``Marching Mothers of Hillsboro'' walked to the town's all-White primary schools every single day, just to be sent home, but they continued to march and to show that they would not rest until their children were given the quality education they were guaranteed under the law. They joined with the NAACP to file a lawsuit against the Hillsboro Board of Education, which made it all the way to the Supreme Court--and they won. Because of Miss Elsie and her fellow mothers' advocacy, the Court ordered the schools to integrate, and paved the way for integration in other Northern cities. Their activism is a reminder of what ordinary citizens can achieve when they band together to fight for justice. I am sure that my Senate colleagues join me in Honoring Miss Elsie Steward Young for her service to justice and equality.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Madam President, you all know where I stand on section 232 steel tariffs. I strongly support them because thousands of steelworkers across the country have lost their jobs due to Chinese steel overcapacity. Tough trade enforcement against China cheating has long been overdue. These tariffs are a tool to bring China to the table and to get long-term structural changes to support American jobs. My colleagues know I strongly oppose the Corker-Toomey legislation, which would undo China's tariffs, let China off the hook, and gut the section 232 status. That is why I stood on the floor 2 weeks ago to block that. What we are considering today is different. With this motion to instruct, the Senate will reaffirm that it has a role in section 232 determinations. Of course, we should. That is why I have talked regularly with Secretary Ross and Ambassador Lighthizer throughout this process. I will vote for the motion to instruct not because I think it makes sense to consider trade policy on an appropriations bill that has nothing to do with tariffs but because, of course, Congress should have a role in 232 determinations. It should have a role in all trade policies. I have been saying that for years. I am glad my colleagues finally agree.

Mr. BROWN. I ask unanimous consent for 10 seconds.

Mr. BROWN. Let me be clear. Today's vote is not a vote for undermining the trade agenda. It is not a vote to rescind steel tariffs. I will do everything in my power to defeat any efforts to do that. I yield.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, earlier this month, the Fed released the results of its annual stress test--exercises designed to ensure that the largest banks can withstand economic shocks and will not need another taxpayer bailout in the event of a crisis. These stress tests were not in effect a decade ago before the last crisis and likely would have prevented--or made much softer--the economic landing that we had. What happened with these annual stress tests that just came out illustrates exactly what is wrong with Washington, what is wrong with this Congress, and what is wrong with Wall Street. The Fed allowed the seven largest banks to redirect $96 billion--that is 96 thousand million--that should be used to pay workers, reduce fees for consumers, or protect taxpayers from bailouts. Instead, it allowed the seven largest banks to plow that money into share buybacks and dividends to reward wealthy executives and generally wealthy investors. Two banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, had capital below the required amounts. That is right. Those banks failed the test, but they got passing grades anyway. The Fed called them up, let them haggle over the test results, and allowed them to proceed with buybacks and dividends that drained their required capital. In what classroom in America would a teacher grade a paper and preliminarily give it an F and then negotiate with the student over test results and then say, OK, you passed? But the stakes in this case are a lot higher than one midterm exam. We are talking about the biggest banks in the country. We are talking about whether they send money to the wealthiest investors or, instead, have enough skin in the game to protect taxpayers. So why are these buybacks such a problem? Share buybacks and dividends juice stock prices but do little to increase long-term growth in companies and do very little to reward the workers who make a company's success possible. During the last crisis, we saw big banks send money out the door with buybacks and dividends just months before they imploded and cost taxpayers billions. Watchdogs in the Bush administration had the tools to intervene sooner but, instead, courted Wall Street at the expense of the rest of the country. Some of those regulators today were in the Treasury Department, in the Bush White House, and the Fed in those days and didn't see the crisis coming. They turned their backs and said: It is OK to allow these dividends and allow these stock buybacks. Back to this year, the seven largest banks in the country increased their 2018 stock dividends paid to investors by 24 percent compared to last year. The banks that the Fed allowed to increase their stock buybacks increased their repurchases by a stunning 63 percent. What teller, what salesperson, what branch bank manager in Lorain, OH, Mansfield, OH, or Miamisburg, OH, got a raise like that in the last year? My colleagues don't think much about this, but the average teller in America makes $12.50 an hour. Bank executives are making $5 million, $10 million, and $20 million, and they get big raises on top of that. They get stock buybacks, juicing their compensation as their stockholdings go up and up. Yet the average teller makes $12.50 an hour. Wells Fargo doubled its buybacks--an increase of more than 100 percent. The money spent on stock buybacks alone is 314 times more than what it would cost the bank to boost employee wages to $15 an hour. Remember that the average teller makes $12.50 an hour in this country. Wells CEO Tim Sloan got a 36-percent raise last year, even in the wake of scandal after scandal. I found the ads you see all over the place, watching a Cleveland Indians game on TV, sitting in my living room in Cleveland. I have seen these ads in Washington. I have seen them all over--how Wells Fargo is going to learn from its past mistakes. They were once the greatest company, they failed, and now they will be a great company again. But they gave their CEO--who clearly has had some serious issues at that bank--a 36-percent raise. Again, tellers make $12.50 an hour. Wall Street banks are rewarding themselves rather than workers and, in the process, draining the capital that should be their safeguard against taxpayer bailouts. I hear my colleagues on both sides of the aisle say: We will never allow a bailout again. We are doing things that will set us up to do that because we are moving away from the reforms we made. The problem is getting worse. The Fed wants to make the tests even easier next year, weakening the key constraints that caused Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to fail this year, or would have caused them to fail if they hadn't talked their way out of it. It is quite a student who can talk their teacher out of it. Federal Reserve Vice Chair Randal Quarles has also floated giving more leeway to banks to comment on the tests before they are administered. I like Vice Chairman Quarles. I did not vote to confirm him. I like him. I respect him. I sat across the table from him for 2 or 3 hours, probably total, over his time there. I assume I will get to know him better as we talk on these issues. But he was in the Bush administration as the crisis built and built, when the economy was about to implode. He said things were rosy. We are trusting him. He is the Vice Chair for Supervision. We are entrusting him and others at the Fed to say that it is OK to give leeway to bankers to comment on the tests before they are administered. It is like helping students write the exam. We wouldn't do it anywhere else, but we do it with banks who risk our economy with their instability. They are even considering dropping the qualitative portion of the stress test altogether. That is the part of the test that examines banks' risk management processes, data systems, and the fitness of its very well-paid board of directors. I am not sure of the precise number, but boards of directors in the seven largest banks, I believe, all make at least $200,000 a year. I know they average significantly more than that--for part-time jobs. They are important jobs. They also have other jobs--most of them--but jobs where they so often seem to turn their heads at all of these problems. Banks such as Deutsche Bank, Santander, HSBC, RBS--all foreign-owned banks--and Citigroup, an American bank, have all failed on qualitative grounds before. But rather than taking that as evidence that these banks need to shape up, they are considering scrapping this critical part of the exam. The Dodd-Frank rollback bill that this Congress just passed will also make things worse next year. Right now the Fed is considering how to replace existing stress tests for banks with between $100 billion and $250 billion in assets to make them easier on the banks and less frequent--easier on the banks and less frequent. Rather than having annual company-run stress tests for the largest banks--those with more than $250 billion in assets--the tests now, because of the new law that bank lobbyists and President Trump wanted, will only be required to be periodic. They used to be annual. Now we are saying periodic. Who interprets ``periodic''? A bunch of Fed regulators that have already shown to be too close to bank interests. All of this test curving comes alongside the weakening of other financial protections: dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, undermining the Volcker rule, weakening the Community Reinvestment Act--as if there is no discrimination in this country anymore--and loosening rules around bank capital. Imagine if the people in this town listened as much to workers as they did to Wall Street bankers. But money talks in this town. Lobbyists talk, representing money. Wall Street talks, representing money. Executives talk, representing money. We have very profitable banks--banks that taxpayers bailed out. Congress in the last year gave these banks huge tax cuts. Congress passed a deregulation bill that these banks demanded. We saw an article in the paper recently that Wall Street is retooling its whole lobbyist network in Washington because they didn't get quite enough on the banking deregulation bill. They thought it did a lot for community banks and midsized banks but not enough for the big guys. So they are retooling. I am not making this up. They are retooling their operations so they can do better. You have a Vice Chair for Supervision who clearly favors Wall Street in the rules that he has already suggested. Boy, it is good to be a bank. It is great to be a banker in America. It is great to be a banker in 2018. It is great to be a banker in Trump's America. I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I reserve the right to object. My colleague raises concerns about the effect of retaliatory tariffs on our farmers and others. I couldn't agree more, but we should not pit farmers against steelworkers. Only a few days after Candidate Trump became President-elect Trump, my first correspondence with him was about how we do trade policy in the next few years. One of the conditions--one of the admonitions, if you will--was that you don't play off one industry against another. You don't play off agriculture against autos or steel or chemicals or anything else. I think my colleagues agree that it benefits all Americans if we stop China cheating, if we force them to play by the rules. I would say to my colleagues today--to Senator Toomey and Senator Corker--that I understand they have some bipartisan support on this, but I would say that probably the worst thing you do for America's farmers is to jeopardize passage of the farm bill today. I have spoken with Senator Roberts and Senator Stabenow about that, and that is exactly what this amendment would do. The amendment would gut, most importantly, one of our trade enforcement tools, a tool Congress passed and enhanced in the Finance Committee just in the last couple of years to ensure we protect the industries necessary to defend our country. I know my colleague from Tennessee generally opposes the President's trade agenda. I think he does that from an intellectually honest position, but that is not justification for completely undoing a decades-old statute that is one of the few tools we have to defend national security interests against distortions in the global market. The steel and aluminum tariffs the President has put in place are long overdue actions to defend against the further shrinking of two sectors critical to national defense. Senator Toomey knows this in the western part of his State, as I know it in mine. I know my colleagues agree that excess steel production capacity in China is troubling. We are talking about a country that now has the capacity to produce half of the world's steel, close to half of the smelt, and half of the world's aluminum. It has affected the global market. It has made steel overcapacity a global problem. We know that China puts people to work because they can't afford to have tens of millions of young men unemployed in the country. They subsidize their energy, water, capital, and land. They have dozens of government-owned enterprises. They want to keep their people at work. They cheat when they do. That is very simple. We have an administration now that is finally willing to take action and defend our highly competitive steel industry and steel workers. I know what a competitive steel plant looks like. I was at ArcelorMittal in Cleveland, 7 miles from my house, only a week ago. That is the first steel mill in the world that has been able to produce raw steel with one person-hour of labor. Think of that, a ton of steel produced by one person-hour. That tells you how productive our plants are, but against China cheating and subsidizing nearly all of the components--we simply can't do that. The State of Tennessee, perhaps, has been lucky to avoid the devastation brought to steel towns, like Steubenville, Yorkville, Martins Ferry, Warren, and Lorain, all cities in Ohio, up and down the Mon River in Pennsylvania--Senator Toomey said the same thing--all as a result of China's excess capacity. The shuttered steel mills and thousands of steel workers in Ohio who lost their jobs are constant reminders for my State that this trade enforcement action by the President was long overdue. We have to have steel and aluminum sectors in this country to defend ourselves. It is that simple. We will not have these critical sectors if our steel and aluminum producers can't keep their doors open. This section of the statute, 232, was Congress's way, some time ago, of acknowledging there are connections between trade and national security. Imports can undermine our national security. Congress has recognized that for years. There should be ways for the President to take action when that is the case. The Corker amendment fundamentally rejects that idea and hamstrings the President's ability to protect America's national security interests. Even worse, the Corker amendment would immediately remove the 232 steel and aluminum tariffs, including those on China. Why would any colleagues vote to let China off the hook? Just look at the bipartisan effort to pass the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act, which passed down the hall, I believe, with only two ``no'' votes. There is broad bipartisan support also for ensuring that the President take a tough stance with ZTE, which he has not been wild about doing. But for some reason, when it comes to aluminum and steel, it is OK to let China off the hook. It makes no sense. I know some of my colleagues who support this amendment will say that they would support the President's actions if they were targeted just to China. They think the Corker amendment is necessary because the President has applied these tariffs to our allies. But steel overcapacity is a global problem. It needs a global solution. If we don't take a more comprehensive action, China will cheat their way into those other markets. Ask ArcelorMittal, ask Nucor, ask AK Steel, ask U.S. Steel, just to name a few domestic producers we have in my State. They have all seen the tricks China uses to work around our anti- dumping and countervailing duty laws. Look at the findings of Ambassador Lighthizer's recent report on China's intellectual property theft. He found that China was stealing about $50 billion of intellectual property from the United States every single year. The evidence is clear. I don't even particularly fault China because they are acting in their national interests. Maybe we should try to do the same thing. China is determined to gain U.S. market share in technological advances, and they will stop at nothing to get it. I agree that we should work with our allies, and this administration, to a degree, has. They have negotiated agreements with South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, and Australia. Some of our colleagues are concerned, rightly, about Canada and Mexico being covered by the tariffs. I share that concern. But gutting trade enforcement is not the way to fix that. I have worked with the administration to reach a solution through negotiations; I encourage my colleagues to do the same. I spoke to Ambassador Lighthizer again late last night. We are in a holding pattern with NAFTA talks until Mexico's elections, in about a week. But soon after that, NAFTA talks will pick right up. Steel and aluminum tariffs will be part of that dialogue, as they should be. Because Canada and Mexico have such close proximity to our market, they are primary targets for Chinese transshipment. We have to guard against that or the section 232 tariffs simply will not be effective. I am confident an agreement with our NAFTA partners can be reached. I hope it is reached soon. Canada and Mexico are important parts of the North American steel supply chain. They are important partners in making sure our efforts to address steel overcapacity are effective. The tariffs have been effective. Just yesterday, Republic Steel announced that one of its rolling mills in Lorain, OH, will restart in September. In Granite City, IL, 800 steelworkers were called back to work. The Corker amendment would threaten these new jobs and would thwart other announcements of steel mills restarting in the United States. To summarize, the Corker amendment would permanently undermine a longstanding section of statute that makes sure the United States has the industries necessary to defend itself. It would let bad actors, like China, off the hook, able to flood our markets with unfairly traded steel. It disregards ongoing negotiations with our NAFTA partners. It threatens the improvements seen in our steel and aluminum industries since the tariffs were imposed. For all those reasons, I object.

Mr. BROWN. Madam President, I appreciate Senator Corker's comments. I appreciate a little less those of Senator Toomey, who tried to say that I was thinking that the People's Republic of China has an economy we should emulate. What I actually said--and I have seen him do this before. What I actually said is that China's Government fights for its national interests by putting people to work, and our trade policy, for 25 years--since NAFTA, since PNTR, since CAFTA, since South Korea, many of them pushed by Presidents whom I have stood up for--has undermined American national security and domestic security. So I just reject that. But I appreciate Senator Corker's comments about voting on this. This is a major change in policy, with no legislative hearings, with no real discussion or debate. It is a bit rich when the majority party talks about our not allowing votes when, to start with, there was the Supreme Court nominee of 3 years ago and all the times we tried to do a transportation bill, important in our Banking Committee, as Senator Corker knows. He wasn't really part of the obstruction, but I just find it a bit rich. The reason is that Senator Hatch has already said he wants to do hearings to really understand what it would mean to roll back years of having these trade remedies, like 232. What would it mean? We have lost 7,000 jobs in the steel industry in my State. I don't know the number in Western and Central Pennsylvania--in Senator Toomey's State--but I want to move quickly on having these real discussions and real debates. Having a vote on a bill that nobody really understands, except it is reacting to the President's sometimes bungled positions and attempts on trade enforcement--I share that frustration. I am his ally on this, but I have been frustrated, too, with the back-and-forth on which countries are in and which countries are out. Fundamentally, tariffs are a temporary tool. They are not a trade policy used by the President, in this case to force a discussion and a real policy about what to do with China's excess capacity, where half the world's steel can be made in one country, and they put people to work and undermine international trade laws by doing it. People in my State have paid the price, as they have all over the country.

Mr. BROWN

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

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, we know Americans work harder and longer than ever before and have less and less to show for it. Hard work doesn't pay off the way it used to. Workers in Ohio have known that for a long time--that their paychecks don't stretch far enough. This month, the State's second largest newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, reported on just how bad things are for far too many Ohioans. The Dispatch reported on a new study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio that found--get this--that only 2 out of the 10 most common jobs in Ohio pay enough for one to be able to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment. Think about the number of people who work in fast-food restaurants. Think of the number of people who clean hotel rooms. Think of the number of people who are orderlies in big hospitals. Think of the number of people who do clerical work or who are bank tellers who simply don't make enough to live any kind of a lifestyle which, when they were kids, they expected to live. Look at it this way. Average renters in Ohio earn just over $13 an hour--$2 less than the $15.25 an hour they need to rent a basic two- bedroom. Now, that is statewide, but in Columbus, which is the State's largest city, it is worse. You need to earn $17.50 per hour to rent a basic two-bedroom apartment. Policy Matters Ohio has also done great work in shining a light on working Ohioans. Its report this spring found that last year, 6 of the 10 most common jobs in our State paid so little that workers would need food stamps to feed a family of 3. Six of the ten most common jobs in Ohio paid so little that workers would need food stamps if there were three in the household. Think of what this means. These are Ohioans who are doing everything we have asked. They hold down jobs. They get up every day. They go to work. They serve their communities. They are holding up their end of the bargain--the bargain we are supposed to have in this country. Yet the corporations they work for don't pay them what they are worth. It is not just the workers in these jobs who get hurt by this, it is obviously their families, and, interestingly, it is the taxpayers. Here is why: When corporations refuse to pay workers living wages, when they refuse them opportunities to save for retirement, when they refuse to provide decent healthcare, they create a drag on the economy. Do you know why? It is because taxpayers pick it up. Someone has to pick up the tab when corporations pay $9 and $10 and $11. I was at my high school reunion a couple of years ago. At dinner, I sat across the table--my wife and I did--from a woman who has worked for a bank, for a very well-known, huge national bank. She had worked there for 30 years as a teller, and she made $30,000 a year, after 30 years, working as a teller. So what happens to people like her? The taxpayers end up helping to finance their, generally, barely adequate standards of living. I will get to that in a second. No one who works 40 hours should be forced onto food stamps or housing vouchers or Medicaid or other government aid just to stay afloat. American citizens--American taxpayers--shouldn't be forced to subsidize wages for megacorporations. Yet that is what is happening in Ohio, what is happening in Wisconsin, and what is happening around the country. If people are making $10 an hour, they are probably getting their insurance from Medicaid, which is paid for by taxpayers. They are probably getting the earned-income tax credit, which is a refundable tax credit that is provided by taxpayers. They are probably getting food stamps, which are provided by taxpayers--the SNAP benefit. They are probably getting housing vouchers. What this means is, because a company only pays $10 an hour, taxpayers have to provide the rest, so taxpayers are fundamentally subsidizing them. Think of these huge retail operations in this country. Think of these huge fast-food restaurants. Think of the executives for those corporations who are making $2 million, $5 million, $10 million a year. They are not paying their line workers anything close to their economic value. Do you know what happens then? It means taxpayers are subsidizing these huge companies with their exorbitant executive salaries. This month, the Dispatch talked with a home health aide who lives on the east side of Columbus. Her name is Karon Taylor. Ms. Taylor works hard to support her daughter and grandchildren. She only makes $11 an hour, which is well below the $17 I mentioned that you need in Columbus to be able to afford a family apartment. She relies on federally subsidized housing. She told the Dispatch: I know how to budget, and I can stretch $20 really far. Wages--that's the problem. She works hard, and she does her part, but she needs help to make ends meet because companies refuse to pay workers like her a living wage. It doesn't have to be that way. Last year, as some in this body remember, I introduced a bill called the corporate freeloader fee. It works this way: If you are a huge corporation--I am not talking about a mom-and-pop restaurant, and I am not talking about a lawn care service with 10 employees or about one who is self-employed or about one with 30 employees or even 100 employees; I am talking about large corporations, if you choose to pay your workers so little that they are disproportionately forced onto government assistance so that they are eligible for all of these programs--again, food stamps, Medicaid, the earned-income tax credit, subsidized housing--you need to reimburse American taxpayers. You are a huge corporation. Your executive vice presidents make $1 million; the senior executive vice president makes $5 million; the CFO makes $7 million; the CEO makes $10 million. Yet you are paying your workers $10, $11, and $12 an hour, and they go onto government assistance. Do you know what? Instead of passing the Senate tax bill that gave all kinds of tax benefits to the rich--the bill that was negotiated down in the majority leader's office, where all of the special interest lobbyists scurried in and out when you turned the lights on--if we had passed the tax bill with my patriot employer tax credit, which I will talk about in a moment, and with the corporate freeloader fee, we would have seen a very different tax bill. We would have seen a tax bill that would have said to these companies: Pay your workers a little better, and you will get a little better of a tax break. If you are a huge corporation and you pay your workers so little that they are forced to go onto government assistance, you reimburse American taxpayers. That is the corporate freeloader fee. On the other hand, if you are a company like a whole lot of companies in my State and you pay good wages--if you pay $15 an hour or more--and offer good benefits and if you keep jobs in this country and production in this country, if you don't offshore your production to Mexico or China, then you get a tax cut. That is the patriot employer tax credit. Months and months ago, I spoke to the President of the United States in a discussion with about 10 Senators--in the Cabinet room--about these two ideas. The President said he liked the patriot employer tax credit, giving tax benefits to those who do the right thing. Apparently, he seemed to like the corporate freeloader fee also, punishing those corporations that don't do the right thing and making them simply pay a fee to the government for that. In the end, the President of the United States joined the majority leader and the Speaker of the House in writing a tax bill, whereby, 5 years from now, 80 percent of the benefits in that tax bill will go to the richest 1 percent of the people in the country. Imagine instead if that tax bill had actually been written like this--in a way that would have seen wages go up and the standard of living go up. Instead, the special interests went to work. Instead of tax reform that would have given companies real incentives to invest in workers, we got a tax cut that will lead to billions in stock buybacks that will benefit corporate executives. In that meeting at the White House, the President also said: Our tax bill is going to mean a $4,000 to $9,000 raise for the average American worker per year. I am like, really? Nothing even close to that has happened. Instead, what companies have done is they have taken their largesse that has been provided by middle-class and working-class taxpayers--the 80 percent of benefits going to the 1 percent wealthiest people in corporations--and they have done stock buybacks. They have increased their own executive compensation. Workers have gotten almost nothing. Workers have gotten squeezed on both ends, whereby paychecks haven't grown fast enough, corporations have paid poverty-level wages, and housing has gotten more expensive. Think of this. One-quarter of renters--one-quarter of the people who rent in my State, who are not much different than those who are anywhere else--pay half of their income in housing. There are 400,000 renters in Ohio who pay half of their income or more in housing. Do you know what that means? It means, if the car breaks down, it means if a kid gets sick, it means if you miss work for 2 weeks for some reason, you are probably going to get evicted. It happens every day in every city, in every community, in every rural area in my State. We know we need to do more to preserve and grow our stock of affordable housing in this country. Instead, the administration is making it worse. It has proposed to hike rents by 20 percent for almost all Ohio families who receive housing assistance. In going back to Ms. Taylor in Columbus, OH, she is a home health aide. She still isn't paid enough. Average rents for Columbus families would go up by a projected 22 percent. Do you think her company is going to pay her 22 percent more or even 10 percent or 5 percent more? Her housing costs would go up because of a decision by Dr. Carson-- ratified by the White House--to cut that help, to reduce that help. Housing, healthcare, education, gas, and transportation are all getting more expensive. Workers wages aren't keeping up because corporations don't value workers. We know one solution to this problem--giving workers a voice in the workplace. A single worker can't take on a corporation. A single worker can't take on the CEO and can't take on the behemoth in the executive suite. That is why you need collective bargaining. Last September, 400 security officers in Columbus got raises--from as low as $9 an hour to a minimum of $12.45 an hour. They signed their first union contract with the Service Employees International Union, Local 1. That union card bought them a minimum $2.50 raise. That is still below what workers need, but it is progress. They joined together, and they demanded a unified voice in the companies they helped to build. It is not just unions. We need stronger workplace standards to make sure workers get the pay they earn. In Columbus, OH, 2 years ago, I stood with the Vice President of the United States and the Secretary of Labor, and we announced an overtime rule, wherein 130,000 Ohioans would get a pay increase or would work fewer hours for the same amount of money. Here is how it works: If you are the supervisor on the night shift at a fast-food restaurant and you are making $35,000 a year and your company--a fast-food restaurant, a big national company--decides to call you management, it can make you work 50 hours, 60 hours, 70 hours a week and pay you not a cent of overtime. So this updating of the Federal overtime rule that we did--that the Secretary of Labor did, with Vice President Biden and President Obama, 2 or 3 years ago or so-- said that 130,000 Ohioans would get paid time and a half for that 50th or 55th hour, instead of going straight salary just because the company classified no overtime. Unfortunately, the folks in the White House--the folks who promised to drain the swamp--have sided with the fast food restaurants and with the big employers, and they are trying to strip away that overtime rule so those workers will continue to have to work 50 or 60 hours and not get a dime for it, meaning less time for their children, less time with their families, less leisure time, less pay--all of that. So, fundamentally, whose side are these people on? They are always on the side of the wealthy. They are always on the side of the richest corporations. They are always on the side of the privileged. They are never on the side of people who fight, work, and struggle just to stay above water. At the same time, we need to go after corporations that misclassify their workers. They pretend they are independent contractors so they can avoid paying into Medicare and Social Security and paying their share of taxes and wages. From housing to wages to workers' rights, we need to change how we think about these issues. It is not multinational corporations that drive the economy. It is workers. Since 2010, since the auto rescue, every single month from 2010 until this month at least, June 2018, we have had an increase in the number of net jobs created in this country--every month since 2010. Granted, the President's comments notwithstanding, the growth in jobs in 2017 was less than the 5 years before. We have had a slowly increasing economy where job growth isn't as big as we want and wage growth certainly isn't as big as we want, but we have seen it because in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, the government understood that you grow an economy from the middle up. You don't give tax cuts to the richest people saying it is going to trickle down. You give tax breaks and focus on growth in the economy in the middle level, so that workers making minimum wage get raises. As I said, it is not multinational corporations that drive the economy, it is workers making the minimum wage, workers paid in tips, workers on factory floors, workers behind desks, workers in hospital wards, in restaurant kitchens, and in classrooms, and workers on salary and workers punching the clock. It is about fighting for the little guy, whether she punches a clock or whether he works in an office; fighting for the little guy, whether she works construction or whether he works in manufacturing; fighting for the little guy, whether he sits behind a computer terminal or whether she is midlevel management in a fast food restaurant. You grow the economy from the middle class out. But if you don't value work, Americans can't earn their way to a better life for their family, no matter how hard they work. That is what people around here don't understand. I sat at this desk watching a very close vote last year where 49 of my colleagues--49 out of 100 colleagues--all of whom have government-paid health insurance, stood on this floor and voted yes to taking away insurance from 900,000 people in my State, and in Wisconsin from 400,000 or 500,000 people. People who have government insurance paid for by taxpayers, who are U.S. Senators who have these jobs, who have these titles, who have this income and these benefits, were willing to take insurance away from millions of people, and hundreds of thousands of people in my State alone. Again, if work isn't valued, if my colleagues in this body don't understand the value of work--and they don't seem to, frankly, with the way so many of my colleagues vote--Americans can't earn their way to a better life for their families--again, no matter how hard they work. That is what we have to change. Until Wall Street, corporate boardrooms, and Members of the Senate respect a hard day's work, we will continue to see the consequences. The gap between Wall Street and Main Street will keep growing, it will be harder and harder for workers to afford housing and other expenses. Our middle class will continue to shrink, as it has, and our economic growth will continue to lag behind. We can work together to fix that. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Murray, I ask unanimous consent that a fellow on Senator Murray's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee staff, Lori Achman, be granted floor privileges through August 3, 2018.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, last Friday was a dark day for American workers and a dark day for the American auto industry. On the very same day that General Motors laid off the entire second shift at the historic Lordstown plant in the Mahoning Valley in Northeast Ohio, we got word that GM plans to build its new Chevy Blazer in Mexico. That is right--the company bypasses American workers, lays off an entire shift, and sends more jobs to Mexico. All this comes on the heels of the windfall GM got from the tax bill Congress passed last year. GM now can bring some $7 billion in overseas cash back to the United States at a dramatically lower tax rate, they can immediately deduct the cost of any new investments in plants and equipment, and their overall corporate tax rate dropped by about one-third. They could use that extra cash to invest in Lordstown, to build more cars in America, but what do they do instead? They lay off 1,500 workers--1,500 Ohio workers, 1,500 families affected--in Niles, Ravenna, Kent, Reminderville, Youngstown, Girard, Lordstown, and all over the Mahoney Valley and beyond. That is just a year after they laid off the third shift--more than 1,000 workers--at the same plant. They have some nerve. The workers at this plant are among the best in the world. The car they make, the Chevy Cruze, beat out the foreign competition in its class last year. For the 2018 models, J.D. Power and Associates named the Cruze among the top two cars in its class. They named the Lordstown plant among the six top plants in the Americas. Anyone who has been to Lordstown wouldn't be surprised. Ten years ago, the Federal Government rescued the auto industry. Eight years ago, I actually drove one of the first cars--with Governor Strickland and others--off the line, one of the first Chevy Cruzes coming out of the Lordstown plant. Two years ago, I stood in Lordstown for the plant's 50th anniversary, and I saw the pride the community takes in that plant. GM estimated that more than 10,000 people--young and old, families with children, workers who had been there almost the entire 50 years, vintage car buffs, former workers--turned out to watch the parade and to celebrate the plant. The line to get into the plant for a tour stretched down the street and around the block. That is what this plant means to the communities it serves. That is what the auto industry means to the communities it serves. It appears General Motors has forgotten some of that. That is why we worked so hard to save this industry, including General Motors, after the economic crisis. In addition to the Federal auto rescue, the State of Ohio gave GM more than $80 million in tax incentives. But now, after Ohio gave millions to this company, GM turns its back on Ohio--all while making record profits, all while reaping the rewards of the tax bill paid for by taxpayers. As a country, as a State, we are invested in this industry. GM needs to invest in America and in Ohio. It needs to invest in the workers and in the communities that built this company and made it great. Instead of making plans to invest in Mexico, GM should be working with workers, with the union, with local officials--with all of us--to invest, instead, in American workers. We have invested in GM; GM should invest in Ohio workers. I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, the images that we have seen from our own country over the past few days are shocking and heartbreaking. They don't reflect our values as a nation. I am glad the President is reversing course. I am glad that he is signing something, putting a stop to his administration's cruel, pointless, and heartless policy of separating children from their parents at the border. That is just the beginning of the work that needs to be done to undo the damage that the President's policy has inflicted on these children and to begin to create a more human and humane immigration solution. Any parent can tell you that being separated from a child is one of the worst things you can imagine. We have seen pictures and heard the sounds of crying children--children who are still in diapers. When I first heard that audio clip--I think all of us remember the first time we heard it--of children who were screaming and crying for their parents, I almost couldn't listen to it. As an American, as a human being, as a father, as a grandfather, it was revolting. It should be hard to listen to. We should recoil at those terrible sounds. The second it is not heard, the second we shrug our shoulders and do nothing at the sounds of little children who are wailing, that is the second we lose our humanity. It is hard for us to listen to. If it is hard for us to listen to--if it makes us uncomfortable--that is nothing compared to what it must mean, to what it must feel like, and what those parents are going through. Yesterday, the administration reported that some 2,300 children were taken from their parents at the border in just a single month. Everybody in this body has gone to a school, and probably everybody in this body has gone to a grade school to visit. Remember what it is like to walk down the hall or to walk into a gym or to walk into a classroom and see dozens or even hundreds of children. Think about that. Think of walking into a school and seeing happy children--lots of them, dozens of children--who are singing or talking or playing on a playground. Now think of these 2,300 children who were taken from their parents at the border in a single month--from May 5 to June 9. For 5 weeks, there were 60 kids taken, every single day, on average. There were 60 kids yesterday, 60 kids the day before, and 60 kids the day before that. We don't know how many since June 9, but from May 5 to June 9, there had been 60 kids every single day. Clearly, the President did the right thing. Clearly, the President did it under great political pressure. Clearly, the President never admitted he was wrong about it. That is not something he would do, unlike most human beings I know. Yet signing something today doesn't magically reunite those families overnight. It is not like these children now--as any of my colleagues who have watched children who are at a grade school, who will run out to the cars when their moms pick them up or run out to the playground, joyfully, when their dads visit. They will not magically reunite with their families overnight. Signing this order the President signed--oh, so clearly reluctantly--will not undo the trauma those children have endured. We still don't have good answers as to what has happened to those kids or what kinds of conditions they are living under. We have heard reports of siblings who have been ripped from their parents that they can't hug each other. We have heard of staff being told they are not allowed to comfort these children by touching them and hugging them. Imagine that. A child is taken away from her mother, and you are not even allowed to comfort her. You are just supposed to let her scream. That is inhumane, un-American, and is counter to everything most of us--at least in this body, if not the White House--have been taught. Dr. Colleen Kraft, the current President of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the past medical director of the Health Network by Cincinnati Children's in my State, warned that the toxic stress resulting from these separations can slow down brain development. She called it ``a form of child abuse.'' Today, I demanded answers from the Secretary of Health and Human Services and from the Secretary of Homeland Security about what they are doing to care for the mental, physical, and emotional well-being of the thousands of traumatized children in their custody. This chapter isn't closed. You don't just say, ``Thank you, Mr. President, for finally doing the right thing. Everything is fine.'' We have to track those 2,300 children for that month's period. There have been almost 2 weeks since then and more children. We have to find these children, comfort them, and examine them. Pediatricians have warned that this is some kind of child abuse because it can slow down brain development, and these children have already seen horrors that the rest of us can't imagine. Some of these parents are seeking asylum in America. They are fleeing violence, and they are just looking for a safe place for their children. Who knows how many of these children already were traumatized because they had lived in a war zone, because they had lived in an area with all kinds of violence from drug wars. They were pulled out of that and were traveling with almost nothing but the clothes on their backs and very little, with one or both parents, and went north, not knowing what was going to happen each day and seeing things that almost none of us growing up has seen. Then they were separated from their parents at the border. The way we keep our country safe is by going after terrorists and violent criminals, not by turning our backs on families and children just like ours, whose only goal is to escape violence and persecution. We have a lot of work to do to fix our immigration system, but tearing families apart will not solve anything. We need to come together, and we need to work on a bipartisan solution that recognizes we aren't going to deport 13 million people who are already here. We can secure our borders. We can create a pathway for people to earn citizenship if they follow the law, to have a job, and pay taxes. My son-in-law, Alejandro, lives in Cranston, RI--the boyhood home of our colleague Senator Jack Reed. He was 10 years old--maybe 11 years old--when he came to this country. His mother was a journalist. She had her life threatened as a journalist in El Salvador. She fled their country to come to our country. The parents then went to New York. We embrace people like that--who are refugees, whose lives we can save, and who can contribute so much to our country, as Alejandro has and his mother has. His whole family has contributed to this country. He is the father of two of our grandchildren now. This may be a complicated issue, but we are a country of values that protects people. We are a haven for so many people. We have made a difference in so many lives because of who we are and what our values are. Surely, it is a complicated issue, but the administration has only made it so much worse. It has added the challenge of having to undo the damage it has done in having to work to get those children back to their parents and help to make them whole. I hope we are seeing the end of this heartlessness. I hope this isn't a one-step pullback by the President, and then there will be more attacks on immigrants and more attacks on children. We have a lot of work to do to pick up the pieces and reunite families. The administration needs to provide answers immediately as to how it is going to make that happen and end the cries of these children with comforting words and much more. I close with this story. I had a message on Facebook from an Ohioan. He had heard the tragic story of a 10-year-old with Down syndrome who was reportedly separated from her parents at the border. That is barbaric, but this Ohioan gives me hope. He wrote that he and his wife have a daughter with Down syndrome. They wanted to offer to take in the little girl and her mother and have them stay with their family in Ohio. Imagine that. Those are the values of Ohioans. Those are the values of North Carolinians. Those are the values of Americans. They are not the President's values, who, because of whatever motive, has separated these families. That encompasses the State and the country I love--this family who wrote to us. I know there are so many more Americans out there who feel the same way--who practice compassion, whose hearts break for these children. It is time for their government to step up and reflect those values of this great country. Mr. President, yesterday, I met a veteran from Massillon, OH, James Powers. Mr. Powers brought to my attention a problem he was having with the VA's accounting mistakes, and our conversation led to a bill I introduced with Senator Tester, a Montana Democrat, and Senator Boozman, an Arkansas Republican, the bipartisan Veteran Debt Fairness Act. Both Senators serve with me on the Veterans' Affairs Committee. Both Senators know how VA overpayment and debt affect veterans every day. James retired 2 years ago, but he noticed that the Army was continuing to pay him both an Active-Duty salary and retirement benefits. James caught the mistake. He did the honorable thing. He notified the VA it was overpaying him, but the VA continued to overpay him. Then it charged him twice to recoup the overpayments, and they garnished his benefits. The staff in my office worked with the VA to resolve James's issues, but this should never have happened in the first place. It is fixed now. He had to go through that. To his credit, to James's credit, he wanted to make sure his experience, which was uncomfortable--or worse at times--would change policy and affect future veterans so they wouldn't have to go through this, which is why I admire him so much. This story is too common. In 2016, the VA issued some 200,000 overpayment notices to veterans. When this happens, the agency often tries to get its money back by withholding some or all of the monthly disability payments our veterans have earned. Our veterans deal with enough stress already. They shouldn't be forced to pay for the VA's accounting mistakes. Our bill would ban the VA from charging veterans for its own mistake in overpayments. It should protect veterans' payments who depend on their benefits by capping the amount the VA can deduct from a veteran's monthly payment at 25 percent. It would ban the VA from collecting debts that are more than 5 years old. Our veterans sacrifice so much already to serve our country. I am the first Ohioan to ever serve a full term. I have been on this committee now for 12 years, the Veterans' Affairs Committee. I am on that committee because we should serve those who serve us. We should protect those who protect us. The veterans shouldn't be paying for the mistakes of the agency that is supposed to serve them. Unfortunately, our bill was not included in the National Defense Authorization Act last week. Instead, we have an amendment to the MILCON-VA bill to require the VA to track down these overpayments and report to Congress on the scope of VA debt. We will continue to push for the Tester-Boozman bill, but I hope all of my colleagues will join me in supporting this bipartisan, commonsense step toward fixing VA overpayment and debt for America's veterans. I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

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

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, earlier this year, the Commerce Department found the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE guilty of persistently and willfully violating U.S. sanctions laws on North Korea and Iran. That is a pretty serious offense for a large company to commit. It found that the company then repeatedly lied about it and went to great lengths to cover it up. In response, as we should, across party lines, our government took action and put a series of strict export and transaction prohibitions on ZTE in mid-April of this year. We did what we should do. A large international company--it happened to be Chinese in this case--broke the law, broke a serious law on sanctions and then lied about what it did, so we took action. It is pretty galling to learn that early this morning, the Commerce Department announced yet another agreement with the Chinese telecommunications giant to enable it to interact with U.S. companies. They committed that kind of offense, then they lied about that kind of offense, and now we are saying: It is OK. You can come back into our country and do business with us. What gives here? We can't allow a Chinese company or a company anywhere--I mean, I am not picking on China in this case, but China is a country we have had difficulty with. It is habitually breaking international trade laws and seems to have as much trouble with the truth as some people in the White House have. Yet we have allowed this Chinese company to violate U.S. law time and again, to lie about it time and again and get away with it. By turning a blind eye to ZTE's blatant violations, the Trump administration is putting Chinese jobs ahead of American jobs, putting Chinese national interests over America's national security. Why in the world would we do that? ZTE is a Chinese company best known for making cheap smartphones, mostly sold in developing countries, although it also sells them here. That is important. It means a company that knowingly breaks U.S. laws could have control over information people have on their phones. It is bad enough that we send this message: OK, you broke the law. That is bad enough. Then you lied about it. You broke serious international law, sanctions laws that protect our national security in part and protect the world from these countries--countries such as North Korea and Iran, which are bad actors. You broke the law by helping them, breaking sanctions laws, and then you lied about it. That is bad enough. Now we are not only not penalizing them, we are giving them an advantage when these companies could have control over information people have on their phones. This company that cheated isn't a company that makes cars; this is a company that makes telecommunications equipment that can be used in an insidious sort of way against our own people. This could have real national security implications if that information is abused. As we have seen with recent revelations about Facebook giving Chinese telecom giants access to its data, private firms are not always careful with how they manage people's private lives and private data. The administration's new agreement with ZTE reportedly emerged from direct discussions between President Trump and the President of China. I can't even imagine what those discussions must have been. Think about what the President of China had to defend, what his country did, what his company did. Yet the President of the United States was willing to say: Oh, we will forgive it. We are not really worried. We love you. We love your country. We love this company--even though it is prioritizing Chinese jobs over American jobs, and it is prioritizing Chinese national security interests over America's national security interests. In a nutshell, America's national security must not be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations. I don't know if the President, talking to the President of China, said: OK, we will do this for you, and you did this for us. Whatever the ``you did this for us''--I don't know whether it means the President's business or the President personally or whether ``us'' means America's national interests, but I have not seen any of America's national interests that are getting favored in this whole transaction. Trading American sanctions enforcement to promote jobs in China is a bad deal for American workers and a very bad deal for the security of all Americans. Let's look at how we got here. Last year in March, ZTE agreed to a combined civil and criminal penalty and forfeiture of $1.2 billion after illegally shipping telecommunications equipment to Iran and North Korea, in direct violation of U.S. sanctions laws. They made false statements and obstructed justice. I am not a lawyer. I understand that this is serious stuff--shipping telecommunications equipment to Iran and North Korea, which are two really bad actors in the world, two countries that virtually everybody on this Senate floor has spoken out against at one time or another. It violated U.S. sanctions laws--laws that this Senate passed close to unanimously. They made false statements. They obstructed justice. Then the Commerce Department determined that ZTE then lied about its crimes. How does it get more serious than that? Commerce Secretary Ross said recently--the Commerce Secretary appointed by the President, Secretary Ross. I know him well. I like some of the things he has done, particularly in Cleveland. He said: ``ZTE made false statements to the U.S. Government when they were originally caught and put on the Entity List, made false statements during the reprieve it was given, and made false statements again during its probation.'' At least the company is consistent: They lie during this part of the process, and they lie during that part of the process, and then they lie during that part of the process. So we know that about this company's character. These false statements covered up the fact that ZTE paid full bonuses to employees who had engaged in illegal conduct, and failed to issue letters of reprimand. They break the law. They lie and lie. Then they give bonuses to the executives who lie. How much more can this company grind Americans' faces in the dirt as they lie, cheat, and steal, and then the American President, in a face-to-face meeting with China, says: It is OK. We don't mind. I speak for the American people. Do it again. It fundamentally says: If you grind Americans' faces in this muck after all that China has done and this company has done to America's national interests and then you say ``We are not going to punish you,'' it pretty much says you are free to do it again. Secretary Ross said: ZTE misled the Department of Commerce. Instead of reprimanding ZTE staff and senior management, ZTE rewarded them. This egregious behavior cannot be ignored. The President's Secretary of Commerce has said that we can't ignore it. He has said that they cheated, they broke the law, they lied, they lied again, and they lied again. They rewarded those lies and gave bonuses to those who lied. They never reprimanded them. That is what the President's Secretary of Commerce is saying. Then the President said: It is OK. It is OK. We don't mind. We will get something else for this. That is why this spring, after Ross's comments, the Department of Commerce issued a law enforcement decision imposing a broad denial of export privileges on ZTE for its repeated violations of U.S. sanctions and export control laws. These denial orders are law enforcement actions. Any changes to them should be decided independently. But that ain't happening here. The President is overruling a law enforcement decision--as he criticizes the FBI almost daily--made in the interests of America's national security, in part by people appointed to their offices by the President of the United States. He didn't just appoint the FBI Director; he didn't just select his Vice President; he appointed Mr. Wilbur Ross as his Secretary of Commerce. The Secretary of Commerce is saying, fundamentally: Mr. President, don't do this. This company needs to be punished. Again, the President overrules a law enforcement decision made in the interests of America's national security, all in order to save jobs. That is at least a reason, but the problem with that is that the jobs saved are in China. They are not in Mansfield, OH. They are not in Cleveland, OH. They are not in Shreveport, LA, the Presiding Officer's home State. They are not in Toledo, OH. Think about that. The administration looks the other way for a company that broke the law, that threatened national security, and is doing it to protect jobs in Communist China, in the People's Republic of China. It defies all odds. Can you imagine China saying: You know, I think we are going to hurt our national security so we can put some more jobs in Akron, OH. We are going to compromise our workers' interests so we can put more jobs in Zanesville, OH. It is OK that China is going to get a little hurt so we can get some more jobs in Chillicothe, OH. I don't think they think that way. They do everything in their power. They steal our technology. They undermine our industries. They put our companies out of business. And then we do this. The only person I know who wants to do this is the President of the United States. The Secretary of Commerce doesn't like this decision. I am sure the FBI doesn't like this decision. I have yet to meet a Republican or Democratic Senator who says: Attaboy, Mr. President. Undermine our national interests. Protect Chinese jobs over jobs in Harrisburg or jobs in Ann Arbor or jobs in Madison, WI, or jobs in Atlanta, GA. America's policies toward China--it might be an interesting idea to put Americans first, that our policies toward China should put our country first. That is what China does in reverse. That is why Congress needs to push back on this decision by the President and address it directly as soon as possible. The National Defense Authorization Act offers a chance to do that. Senator Van Hollen inserted language into the CFIUS bill which received overwhelming support from both parties when we marked it up in the Banking Committee 2 weeks ago. That legislation is now in this Defense bill. With the settlement agreement announced by Commerce, that legislation will require some change, some tweaking, to make sure that it covers what the administration has already done and at the same time prevents the President from moving forward with this agreement. Senator Cotton, a conservative Republican; Senator Van Hollen, a progressive Democrat; Senator Crapo, a Republican and the chairman of the Banking Committee; and I, a Democrat and the ranking member of the Banking Committee, pressed for an amendment that would do that. This bipartisan amendment would send a clear signal to the White House and, more importantly, would send a clear signal to the world that we don't agree with that behavior. It would send a clear signal that Congress disapproves of this most recent agreement. It is inexplicable. Unless the President has some personal reason for doing this--unless it makes the President's business more profitable, unless it puts money in the pocket of his family or himself--and I am not accusing him because I just don't know--I can't figure out what all of this means. Why would you side with Chinese workers over American workers? Why would you side with Chinese national security over our domestic security? I can't figure out why you would unroll, unspool, a decision by your own Cabinet member to punish this company for breaking the law once, twice, three times with Iran and North Korea, for lying about it once, twice, three times, and for giving rewards to those company officials who broke the law and then lied about it. I can't think of any other explanation as to why a President of the United States would possibly make a decision like that unless it was in his own, personal financial interest. This bipartisan amendment would send a clear signal that Congress disapproves of that, so I urge my colleagues to support the Van Hollen- Cotton amendment. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, barely a day goes by that doesn't bring news of another consumer protection rollback and another handout to Wall Street, day after day in this body or downtown. This weekend, we heard that the Federal Reserve plans changes to the Volcker rule--the rule that stops big banks from taking big risks with Americans' money. The month before, the Federal Reserve Vice Chair, Randal Quarles, said the Fed wants to loosen rules on foreign megabanks. Those are the banks like Santander and Deutsche Bank. These are banks headquartered abroad, but they abuse the public trust in this country and have been fined in the past. The Federal Reserve Vice Chair--who once was in the Bush administration, and prediction after prediction missed the implosion of the economy in 2007 and 2008--wants to loosen the rules on foreign megabanks. I don't even understand the logic, let alone the sensibleness of it. Today, we learned that Mick Mulvaney is continuing his systematic dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by disbanding the Consumer Advisory Board. It is a board of 25 advocates for American consumers and industry experts. It is required by law to meet twice a year, but Mulvaney now says they won't hold any meetings--not today, not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, period--they were supposed to meet with Mulvaney to advocate for American consumers, but they are done with that, I guess--not ever, until Mulvaney replaces all the members with his handpicked cronies. Even though Federal law says: You have to meet with them--required by law to meet twice a year--Mulvaney said: I am not meeting with them until they quit and I get my handpicked friends of payday lenders, friends of Wall Street, friends of big banks, friends of financial service companies who think about politics and government and regulation the way I think. What is right about that? Apparently, Director Mulvaney, who, as we know, has two jobs--Office of Budget and Management and also head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau--and that is peculiar, putting it mildly. He has two absolutely full-time jobs that he is supposed to do, apparently, although he has time to chat up payday lenders at golf resorts in the Bahamas, but he can't make time to meet with actual consumer experts, even though it is the law to do that twice a year. He doesn't like these consumer experts, so he is saying he is not going to do it. The Board is supposed to advise the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on trends that they are seeing so the Bureau can stay ahead of scams and fraud. It is one more tool--or should be one more tool--to try to prevent corporations from scamming consumers before it happens. For a change, let's stop the corruption and stop the back-scratching and stop the favors for Wall Street before they happen rather than taxpayers bailing out these companies after they scam the public and then the public is left penniless in far too many cases. It is also an opportunity for the Director to hear what kinds of consumer problems Americans are facing. Here is fundamentally the reason why. Pope Francis, soon after he assumed the papacy, admonished his parish priests to go out and smell like the flock. Go out and smell like the flock. In other words, go out among people and see what troubles them, see what their problems are, try to experience their lives as much as a well-paid public servant can, including a Senator, including a Congressman or Congresswoman, including a city council person, whoever. Go out and smell like the flock. So instead of Mulvaney going and hanging around payday lenders in Bahamas, maybe he ought to go out and smell like the flock. Maybe he ought to follow the words of Pope Francis and listen to the problems people have. One of the ways of doing that is listening to these 25 advocates for American consumers and industry experts. As I said, they are required to meet twice a year, and if he is not listening to them--he clearly isn't listening to people who can share some of these thoughts. Similarly, when Lincoln was President, his staff wanted him to stay in the White House and win the war and free the slaves and preserve the Union, and Lincoln said: No, I have to go out and get my public opinion baths. Well, Director Mulvaney could use some public opinion baths. He could use some going out and smelling like the flock. Maybe he then would understand consumers' problems. But he really doesn't seem to want to do that. Over and over again, he has used his position at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to do favors for corporate special interests rather than look out for the people he is supposed to serve. He canceled an investigation into the payday lending industry, which preys on consumers and traps them in a downward spiral of debt. We know how that happens. People don't genuinely get one payday loan. Their car breaks down, and they borrow $400 because they can't get to work. They will not be able to pay their rent if they can't get to work, so they borrow the $400 because they don't have $400 in their pocket. A quarter of Americans--more than that--don't have $400 of discretionary money in their pockets to pay for an emergency. They go to a payday lender. They can't pay them back right away, so they get another payday loan. They can't pay that back, and by the end, they end up paying $1,500. They never get out of that downward spiral. Does Director Mulvaney care? Apparently not. He is too busy hanging out with payday lending advocates and payday lenders themselves. If that weren't bad enough, this week he ordered the Bureau to team up with those same payday lenders. He joined a lawsuit to delay a rule protecting consumers from triple-digit interest rates. Do you know why I say triple digits? Again, that is what happens. Almost nobody gets one payday loan. They simply can't pay it back quickly enough, so they get a second and a third. You don't have to be very good in math. Even Senators can understand this. If you are getting three, four, five, six payday loans, you are into paying triple-digit interest rates. If you borrow $300, you end up paying back $500, $600, $700. He has gutted the Office of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was supposed to stop discrimination in lending. He has disbanded the team that protected student loan borrowers. Nobody who is even as conservative as anybody in this body might be, who is in the tank with Wall Street as much as anybody in this body might be--there are a whole lot of them in that category--nobody really believes that we created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to fleece consumers and to protect payday lenders, but that is what the new administrator seems to want. He has hired a bunch of political cronies. We know that. He has given them political salaries. We know that. When he testified to the Banking Committee, sitting behind him were very well-dressed political cronies pulling down very big salaries, comparable to his salary and in some cases higher than Senators' salaries. I am not complaining about that; I am just saying that these are well-paid people who are political cronies who simply aren't looking out for consumers. It never ends. That is just the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Step back and look at what is happening in Washington, and you see the same pattern--favors for Wall Street, favors for special interests, no matter what it costs American workers, no matter what it costs American families. The White House looks like an executive retreat. It looks like a retreat for Wall Street executives, except when it looks like a retreat for drug company executives, except when it looks like a retreat for big bank lobbyists, or except when it looks like a retreat for payday lenders and Big Pharma lobbyists. That is the White House. This place looks the same. The doors open wide around here for lobbyists from the big drug companies, for lobbyists from Wall Street, for lobbyists from the biggest insurance companies in the country--not so much for public interest. You can see that in this body. Mick Mulvaney even admitted to a room full of bankers--get this. This is illuminating. It is illustrative. It doesn't shock me because I have watched him, and I have watched many people who are just like him here. Mick Mulvaney even admitted to a room full of bankers that he decided whom he would meet with based on campaign contributions. I am not making this up. He was a Congressman before. These are his words: We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you're a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn't talk to you. If you're a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you. Hear that again. This is Mick Mulvaney, who is now in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And consumers aren't writing big checks to Members of Congress; it is the interest groups. He said: We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you're a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn't talk to you. If you're a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you. Those are his words. What was particularly troubling about that was he was telling a room full of bankers that story, and he was saying: Come to me. Come to me. Give us money. Not him per se because he is not running for office now, but give Members of Congress money. Get involved. Make contributions. Come into their offices--don't give them the money in the office. That would be perhaps vulgar and illegal. But give these politicians money, and then they may do things for you. As the head of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he was basically inviting these bankers: Give more money. Give more money. Give more money. Imagine that. Imagine that. Talk about the White House looking like a retreat for payday lending executives and Wall Street executives. Now we are seeing how devastating those priorities are for American consumers. Think about the 3\1/2\ million victims of Wells Fargo's fake account scandal. Think about the servicemembers who had their cars repossessed while serving their country overseas. They come back from combat, they come back from service overseas, and their car has been repossessed. Why? Because the Bureau is not on the beat anymore to protect those servicemembers from those kinds of scandals. Think about the grandmother who ended up paying 300 percent on a $300 loan. While Mick Mulvaney is looking out for Wall Street, who is looking out for the servicemember? Who is looking out for the grandmother? Who is looking out for the Wells Fargo fake account scandal victims? I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, last month in the Banking Committee, we passed bipartisan legislation to give our country more tools to respond to foreign investments from countries like China that pose a threat to our national security. I appreciate the Presiding Officer's interest in this issue also. The Senate Banking bill was attached to the Defense bill in the Armed Services Committee later that week, and the House also passed a similar bill through a key committee at the same time. This is good news as we try to address threats to our national security, and I hope we can get this to the President's desk quickly. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States--so-called CFIUS--screens foreign investments for national security threats and blocks those that undermine our national security. But as countries like China have adopted new tactics and new techniques to acquire our critical knowledge and know-how, the laws that give CFIUS its authority haven't been able to keep up with technology; hence, the reason that Senator Cornyn and Senator Feinstein and Senator Van Hollen and Senator Crapo and I have worked on this. I want to thank them for introducing legislation last fall to expand CFIUS's authority to keep up with these new tactics. The Banking Committee bill builds on their efforts to modernize CFIUS to make sure that it has the tools it needs to tackle today's threats. No country--not even close--no country has been more aggressive than the People's Republic of China in going after American technology in aviation, robotics, new energy vehicles, and others where the United States has established itself as a global leader for a long time. In just 3 years, from 2013 to 2015--from the beginning of 2013 to the end of 2015--the number of Chinese acquisitions coming under CFIUS review jumped 38 percent. And China is getting more clever, more sneaky--you can choose the word you like--at finding ways to get around the rules to avoid review at all. We have seen Chinese companies start to structure deals so that they can gain access to sensitive technology and information without triggering the CFIUS review. For example, if a Chinese investor wants to buy a controlling stake in an American company, CFIUS would review that deal and have the chance to block it. But if Chinese investors instead got seats on that company's board, they could still have access to the same sensitive technology without going through the CFIUS review. Or some foreign investors also might, for instance, decide to enter into a joint venture with an American company instead, giving them access to all of the technology and data and know-how but bypassing the CFIUS review process. The American business may not even particularly like joining up with this Chinese company, but the Chinese company will coerce them into a joint venture as a condition. This is what China is really good at, and U.S. corporations have been too weak-kneed in succumbing to this as a condition for continued access to the Chinese market. They play for keeps. Our corporations play far too often for narrow profits, even if at the end it is bad for American national security and even if at the end it is bad for American economic security. Our bipartisan bill will give CFIUS and our export control agencies the tools they need to ensure that these types of investments don't slip through the cracks. The bill strengthens the CFIUS review process, the export control laws, and enforcement of both, particularly when it comes to critical technology and investments from State-owned companies. But, so often, and as important as these updates are, CFIUS was created only to deal with national security threats but can't do any more than that. Right now, we have no way to evaluate deals that may pose a threat to our economy. In 2016, foreign direct investments in the United States totaled $370 billion. None of that--not a dollar of that--was reviewed to ensure it was in our long-term strategic economic interests. So while some of those investments were reviewed to protect our national security from Chinese threats, not one dollar was examined, was screened, was looked at, was reviewed to ensure that it was in our long-term strategic economic interests. That is why I joined with Senator Grassley to introduce the bipartisan U.S. Foreign Investments Review Act. It would empower the Department of Commerce to begin screening all types of large foreign investments for their long-term economic impact and consequences for American workers and American businesses. I thank Senator Grassley for working on this important legislation. Updating CFIUS is important for our national security. That is paramount, but we also need to expand it because it is important that our economic interests be protected. We understand that the Chinese subsidize their energy, water, land, and capital. They often are state-owned enterprises. They are so often able to come into our markets and simply break international trade rules and put our companies out of business and throw our workers out of work. (Mr. Kennedy assumed the chair.) We have seen foreign investments here that have raised serious concerns, including worries that those companies are pursuing investments for the sole reason or the principal reason of undermining American industries and giving their own companies an unfair advantage. Again, some of these companies are owned or controlled by foreign governments. When it is Chinese, especially, their water, land, capital, and energy are subsidized, and it takes away our ability to compete because we don't do that. We took a first step with an amendment in the CFIUS reform bill. For the first time, the Department of Commerce--in this bill that the Presiding Officer and I worked on in the Banking Committee--for the first time, the Department of Commerce will be required to study what American companies China is buying and in what sectors so we can begin to assess how big the threat is. Now we need to move forward with our comprehensive bill. We surely know there are Chinese investments in the Presiding Officer's State of Louisiana and my State of Ohio. There are Chinese investments coming in that could, in fact, undermine our economic security, could cost our companies business, and could cause some companies to go out of business because of Chinese subsidies for their investments and ultimately put workers in Louisiana, Ohio, and elsewhere out of business. It is simple. Before we do business with a foreign entity--whether the Government of China or companies subsidized by governments in that part of the world--let's make sure it will create jobs, let's make sure it will grow the U.S. economy, and let's make sure it will not undermine our national security or American industries. We are already behind when it comes to protecting our economy from Chinese investment. I welcome investment from around the world, but I don't welcome it if it is going to undermine our national security, and I don't welcome it if it is going to put American companies out of business and American workers out of jobs. Senator Grassley and I will continue working to change that. It is time to move forward. I yield the floor.