Sherrod Brown

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Imagine if that had happened. So we start off with 47 Republicans writing to the Ayatollah, saying, fundamentally: Don't negotiate with President Obama. We have seen now not a single one of my colleagues is in support of this agreement, even though Secretary Powell supports it, even though former Senator Lugar, who was as respected as anybody in this country as a former Republican Senator, supports it. It is not just disappointing that not a single one of my Republican colleagues supports this, but the first day the agreement came out, I heard talk radio saying: Read the agreement. Read the bill. The first day this agreement came out, 19 Republicans--on that first day--came out in opposition to this agreement. There is no way they could have read it. I know how complicated this agreement is. I have read it. I assume that every one of my Democratic colleagues, in an arduous, focused, difficult, persistent way, studied this issue. Then I see what happened on the other side of the aisle when it was--as Timothy Crouse said the press does in the ``Boys on the Bus--`` if one of them flies off the telephone wire, they all fly off the telephone wire. That is what happened. I was just so disappointed. Senator Corker is here, one of the people who did not sign that letter and one of the people who thought about this issue. But what I saw in the contrast of the way we looked at this, it was pretty disturbing. I will conclude. My time is running out. This agreement will matter for our country. It is clearly in our national interests. I think there has been no good answer offered on what happens if we walk away. That is why I ask my colleagues to vote no on the next vote coming in front of us. Thank you.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. President Lincoln said: It has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and it should not continue. Early in President Obama's term, I printed out that quote and handed it to him because it underscores to me the value of labor and the wealth that labor creates for our country, our society, and for those workers and their families. I gave the President that quote because it is my hope that all of us as elected officials remember how important it is that we stand up for workers, organized and unorganized, labor union and nonlabor union members. It is important to stand up for the workers who have built this country. They laid down the railroad tracks that move people and products across the country. They work on shop floors. They innovate as they labor. They toil in mines. They dug the coal that would power our trains and our factories. These workers built our strong middle class and they continue to be the backbone of our economy. Over the past month, as many of us did in our States, I visited factory floors across Ohio. At each stop, I witnessed the ingenuity and dedication of workers. Last Thursday I visited All American Clothing in Arcanum, OH. It is a family business and a classic American success story. In 2002, Lawson Nickol worked for a blue jeans manufacturing company. He watched as his company outsourced more and more of its operations, more and more of its production to other countries. Lawson Nickol was appalled as he saw coworkers and friends losing their jobs all the way down the supply chain of this company. He knew he had to do something. He left his job and he founded All American Clothing Company in Darke County, a rural county west and north of Dayton, OH. He started making jeans in Arcanum, OH. The first few years were difficult. The company survived on family savings, taking financial risks, working long hours, and having a little bit of luck. But 13 years later, All American is proof that you should never bet against American workers. The jeans aren't only made in Ohio; they are made in other places all over this country. The company is growing. The company expanded in 2012 with the help of a $150,000 low-interest CDBG development loan. Its products are 100 percent American made and support Ohio jobs. Lawson's business is a family affair. His son, B.J. Nickol, is a co- owner and company president. B.J. told me that ``it is not about greed for us. It is about giving people jobs and making a decent living.'' Travel across Ohio and across the country, and you will find more companies like All American thriving on the talent, tenacity, and hard work, blood, sweat, toil, and tears of American workers. I visited an Airstream plant in Shelby County and a Continental ContiTech plant in St. Mary's. I toured the Honda Logistics North America plant in East Liberty and the GE Testing Facility in Peebles. I attended the grand opening of the Hart Schaffner Marx suit facility in Brooklyn, OH, a suburb of Cleveland. I wear this suit today, made in Cleveland, OH, by union workers in a Hugo Boss plant. Since then that plant has been sold to Hart Schaffner Marx, which is opening its production right now. When I visited that plant in my Hugo Boss suit and talked about the fact that this suit had been made at this plant with 150 unionized workers, a worker walked up to me and said, ``Senator,'' and she touched me on the chest and said, ``I made that pocket.'' All of these operations are flourishing because of Ohio workers. While our workers support our economy, we are not doing enough to support them. Too often workers have no paid sick leave, no paid family leave, and no overtime pay. President Obama is taking important steps to help working families. New overtime rules would expand overtime pay so that 40 percent of salaried workers would be eligible. Think of it this way. A worker--an employee who is the shift manager on the second shift at a fast-food restaurant who is classified as management may be making only $30 or $35,000 a year. They work that worker more than 40 hours a week. Yet that worker gets no overtime because that worker is classified as supervisory. That is wrong. Under the President's plan, the rule he passed down, 160,000 more Ohioans will earn overtime pay for the work they are already doing at their place of business. This week the administration announced that Federal contractors will be required to provide up to 7 days of paid sick leave each year. It will mean 300,000 Americans working on Federal contracts will be able to stay home if they get sick or take a day off to care for a sick child. It means they are less likely to show up to work when they might infect somebody else with the illness they have, so everybody is more productive. These are important steps, but there are limits to Executive action. Too many workers are left without paid sick leave, without maternity leave, without overtime pay, without predictable work schedules. Too many women still earn less than men for the same work. The President, through Executive action, can solve some of this, as he should, as he is given power by Congress to do, but we need legislative action. Previous generations of workers fought for the protections we take for granted: child labor laws, workplace safety protections, unemployment insurance. They fought in union halls, they organized in union halls and church basements. They demanded a government that respects the dignity of work, that passes laws recognizing the decency and dedication of workers. After decades of attacks on our unions, laws are often the only protections workers have. Fifty years ago, one in three workers was a member of a union--one-third of workers were members of unions. Now that number is 1 in 10. That is why action from this body is needed more than ever. Workers, when they are organized, when they have a union, are protected so they are paid the overtime they earn. They are protected often with provided sick leave and maternity leave. They are protected because of their union from injury in the workplace. Because not as many people belong to unions today--that is why we need to pass the Healthy Families Act, we need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, we need to pass the Schedules That Work Act, and we need to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. This is action we can take today in celebration of Labor Day that would make a tremendous difference in the lives of American workers who built this economy. This past weekend, we celebrated Labor Day with picnics and barbecues and time spent with families, we issued statements honoring American workers. Let's not just honor them with words, let's honor them with deeds. Let's move forward in a way that puts labor, that puts the American worker front and center. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. I will be brief and turn it back to Senator Portman. We worked on this issue for a long time. We remember what happened with algal blooms 4 years ago. We remember just last year--1 year ago-- in August, 500,000 people in northwest Ohio didn't have drinking water. Imagine what that does to a community for 2\1/2\, 3 days. We know that the Western Basin of Lake Erie is the shallowest part of any of the Great Lakes--only 30 feet deep in the Western Basin. Contrast that with Lake Superior, where 600 feet deep is the average. You can see the vulnerability of Lake Erie and what it means. Whether it is from runoff, whether it is from agriculture and homeowners and commercial and industrial establishments, the Maumee River Basin is the largest river feeding any of the Great Lakes. Whether it is coming together on climate change and heating of the water and all the issues that affect the short term and long term, our legislation will help us this year and help us the next couple of years. We obviously need long- term solutions. This is critical. I called the mayor of Toledo today, and I know Senator Portman is working with the city, the county, the State EPA, and the U.S. EPA on this. This is very crucial for people in our State and ultimately throughout the Great Lakes as these problems proliferate. I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

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

Mr. BROWN. Madam President, I remind my colleagues that tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of President Johnson traveling to Independence, MO, to be with President Truman, who in the 1940s had attempted to push through Congress legislation to expand the Social Security Act to include what we now call Medicare. When President Johnson went to Independence, MO, he signed the legislation. The one we pay the most attention to is Medicare, which is health care for the elderly, but probably equally important and certainly very significant is the creation of Medicaid. Medicaid came out of several years of congressional debate where Congress understood that low-income people--especially low-income people who were working--didn't have insurance. It was for people who were poor, people in nursing homes, and it evolved for elderly people. Most of the money in Medicaid goes to take care of the elderly in nursing homes, and it has had such an impact on their lives. But think about what Medicare has done. Prior to 1965, this social insurance program--this program we call Medicare today--provided health care to almost every senior. Prior to 1965, only about half of the senior citizens in the United States of America had health insurance-- only about half. Huge numbers of the elderly lived in poverty. They lived in poverty partly because for a whole host of reasons they couldn't save enough and Social Security wasn't quite enough. Many lived in poverty because of their health care costs. They would go to the doctor and have to pay out of pocket. They barely could afford that and sometimes couldn't afford that. So what Medicare does is it provides 50 million seniors today with health insurance. It wasn't easy. A majority of Republicans in the House and the Senate opposed the creation of Medicare. The John Birch Society--we know it today as the tea party--the John Birch Society in those days opposed the creation of Medicare. Insurance interests and the medical interests opposed Medicare. It was a huge struggle. As I said, a majority of Republicans voted against the creation of Medicare. Just like the Affordable Care Act--Republicans didn't like the Affordable Care Act and don't like the Affordable Care Act today. Republicans didn't like Medicare a generation and a half ago and opposed it. Bob Dole--then Congressman Dole, later Senator Dole, later Presidential candidate, Republican nominee Dole--bragged about opposing Medicare, saying it wouldn't work. He bragged about that for a couple of decades after it took effect. But we know social insurance works. What is social insurance? Social insurance is where everybody pays into something. Whether it is Social Security, whether it is unemployment insurance, whether it is Medicare, people pay into a government program of some kind, and then when they need it, they get assistance. You pay into Social Security. If you become disabled, you get a benefit. Once you retire, you get a benefit. You paid into it. It is called social insurance. You pay into Medicare all your working life, but when you turn 65, you receive a Medicare benefit. You get health insurance; you get hospitalization; you get a doctor's benefit. You pay into unemployment insurance, which is another kind of social insurance. When you get laid off, you get assistance so you can continue to feed your family and go on with not as good a lifestyle but at least you will have enough to get along. That is why social insurance matters. What is troubling about all of this is there are still people in this country--particularly conservative Republicans--who just don't like social insurance. They don't like Social Security. They don't like unemployment insurance. They don't like Medicare. They will tell you they do. Very few politicians running for office say they don't like Medicare. But we know that because if, in fact, they get elected, we know what they do when they are in office. They try to privatize Social Security, as President Bush did. They try to voucherize Medicare, as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee in 2012, Paul Ryan, tried to do. And we know what so many Republicans--conservatives, the most conservative Republicans--thought about unemployment insurance when they tried to cut it back, when they tried to weaken it, and when they tried to undercut it. So while government isn't close to solving all of our problems, social insurance sets a safety net that protects the public. It protects you in your old age with Medicare. It protects you if you are disabled with Social Security. It protects you if you are laid off with unemployment insurance. That is why, when people hear my colleagues--particularly, again, the most conservative Republicans, who have never supported these programs--go after these programs, understand what privatization means and understand what vouchers mean. It means shifting costs of health care to seniors instead of this program taking care of those seniors. It means privatizing Social Security. In my State of Ohio, half of the senior citizens rely on Social Security for more than half of their income. So think what would have happened if a decade and a half ago President Bush had actually been successful in trying to turn Social Security over to Wall Street, which is what he wanted to do. If he had been successful in turning Social Security over to Wall Street, think what would have happened to people's Social Security checks in 2007, in 2008, in 2009, in 2010, and in 2011, when the bottom fell out of Wall Street and our financial systems. That is why these social systems are so important. That is why tomorrow, when we commemorate the 50th anniversary of President Johnson traveling to Independence, MO, to the home of President Truman and his signing the Medicare bill, and how much it has meant to generation after generation--my parents, my grandparents, and the parents and grandparents of so many of us in this body and in the gallery--that matters so much to us. So I wanted to stop by the floor to say happy birthday to Medicare-- happy 50th birthday. We want to see another 50 years where Medicare makes a huge difference in the lives of so many Americans. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, we know that our generation, people in the Senate and in the House--people in their forties, fifties, and sixties--inherited from their parents and grandparents the greatest infrastructure in the history of the world. From the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s into the Reagan years, when we decided we should invest less in infrastructure, we had this incredible infrastructure we inherited from our parents and grandparents. Yet, for whatever reason, we have allowed it to crumble. We haven't invested. We haven't modernized. We haven't even maintained it as well as we should. The dismal state of our Nation's outdated roads and bridges and railways cost Ohioans and North Carolinians valuable time and money and energy. The State legislature in my State and I know the State legislature in the Presiding Officer's State have been on a budget-cutting tear. My State legislature has decided to slice in half, and then some, local funding for many things, including infrastructure. As a result, the streets in any town in Ohio, virtually--not just big cities, not just suburbs, but more affluent communities, small towns, and rural areas-- the streets and highways continue to crumble. It is because this body has been far too dysfunctional because of the pledges that many elected officials have made to a Washington lobbyist that they will never close tax loopholes and will continue to fail to fund infrastructure because of what State government has done in my State. But instead of debating a long-term bill with that funding, we debate a hastily assembled bill, without an open process, without amendments, that no one expects will even be considered by the House of Representatives. The Speaker of the House, a fellow Ohioan, used a four-letter word to describe this legislation when or if--I assume when--it goes over to the House. The Senate is considering a bill that doesn't do enough for infrastructure. It makes bad choices about how to pay for these investments. Yet, at the same time, President Obama proposed a 6-year, $478 billion transportation package that would provide a major expansion in investment. It is supported by all kinds of organizations--business, labor, contractors, AFL-CIO, manufacturers, steelmakers, concrete makers--businesses that want to have good infrastructure to get their goods to market and want their employees to be able to drive to work or take the bus to work without major damage to the axles of their cars when they hit the potholes on too many city streets. Instead, we are looking at a bill that pays for just 3 years and offers small increases over current spending levels. Think about how we are doing this. This is a 6-year authorization, with funding for slightly less than 3 years but collecting the money by budget gimmicks over 10 years. What kind of game is this? Instead of funding infrastructure the way we used to when we would come together bipartisanly and fund infrastructure with real dollars and real investments, we are now playing games. That is why in the House of Representatives the Speaker of the House used a four-letter word to describe this bill. It is why so many are so dissatisfied in the House of Representatives. It will pass with a majority. It will pass with cloture. It has already gotten 60 votes. But they are 60 pretty unhappy votes because nobody I know in this body thinks we are doing this anything close to the right way. If we had considered amendments in the regular order as the majority leader promised, I would have offered a fully paid for proposal to boost the bill's investments and expand the major projects program. Let me talk about that for a second. This amendment would fund projects such as the Brent Spence Bridge between Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. The Brent Spence Bridge, built in 1959, 1960, connects Cincinnati with northern Kentucky. I-75 running north and south goes from Cincinnati to Dayton. The Brent Spence Bridge includes I-75 and runs from Cincinnati, to Dayton, to Lima, to Toledo, to Detroit. I-71 also comes together right at the Brent Spence Bridge as it crosses into Ohio--Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, not far from Akron. So my colleague, the senior Senator from Oklahoma, Mr. Inhofe, who has played a major role in transportation and would like to do it right, has pointed out several times during this debate, the equivalent--get this--that one bridge--4 percent of our Nation's GDP crosses that bridge every day, every week, every month, every year. Four percent of our gross domestic product moves back and forth across that bridge; yet that bridge is about 55 years old. There has never been a serious accident with that bridge. There have been problems. There have been some safety issues. I don't think anybody expects it to fall down next year--I am not being an alarmist--but when are we going to do something to fix that bridge? Senator McConnell, the majority leader--that bridge, for curious historical reasons--the Ohio River, which separates there Ohio and Kentucky--almost the entire Ohio River is considered to be in Kentucky. So this bridge, which covers 4 percent of GDP, is in the home State of the majority leader, and yet the majority leader did not allow another Senator to offer an amendment that actually would take care of rebuilding and fixing up that historic bridge that is very crucial to our economy. Without the Federal Government, that bridge won't get replaced. The State government of Kentucky is not going to do it. Ohio is not going to do it. They should play a role. They could toll that bridge. Who knows. They should play a role. Federal investment in highways was mapped out by President Roosevelt and started by President Eisenhower with the interstates. It was always bipartisan until the pledge by far too many Members of this body to special interest lobbyists who said we can't do that, we can't fund this infrastructure. On the transit side, I would have sought to strike a pilot program that allows pilot projects with any private investment to ``skip the line'' of Federal funding, meaning these projects, which are often bad for workers that operate the new line, would have been in a special category that they surely didn't earn because they haven't served the same public purpose and gone through the same justification process, if you will, as a normal public transportation project. When the majority leader brought a combined transportation bill to the floor last Tuesday, he used his privileged position to prevent any Senator from offering amendments. I remember the elections last fall when Senator McConnell--then the minority leader--said that things will be different in the Senate. It didn't take long for Senator McConnell to sort of trump his predecessor by doing it even worse--pardon the play on words with the verb there. This matters because bad process can lead to bad outcomes. The Senate, given the opportunity to have a full debate on transportation, would be voting on a much stronger proposal. As the Presiding Officer knows, this bill has improved over the last couple of weeks. They have taken out--this bill originally was going to slice money out of the Social Security fund to pay for highways and bridges and transit. We have never done that before in this body. We were going to take money out of money that was already promised and dedicated and about to be spent to help cities that have been particularly devastated by foreclosures. They were going to use money from that. They were going to use money from community banks--they still are--in this proposal. They are going to charge everybody who is getting a mortgage $50, $100, $300 at closing to help pay for transportation--what is that about?--instead of doing it right and funding transportation the way we used to, bipartisanly, back when Senate candidates and House candidates didn't sign pledges from special interest lobbyists where they tie their hands and are not able to come up with revenue for a transportation bill. If all the committees of jurisdiction over this bill held markups to actually discuss the bill, had hearings for the bill, had been able to amend the bill, it would have been a much stronger bill. The chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee did good bipartisan work on highways. I commend Senator Inhofe and Senator Boxer--one Republican and one Democrat--but their work is the exception. The banking committee, on which I serve as ranking member, traditionally developed the public transportation portion of this bill. It is done bipartisanly through the regular committee process. Not even a hint of that happened this year. The Finance Committee, of which I am a member, has jurisdiction over much of the revenue that is used to offset funds going into the highway trust fund--no markups there either. As introduced, this bill would have robbed Social Security, as I said, taken money from the Hardest Hit Fund, as I said, for communities devastated by foreclosure crisis. I invite the majority leader to come to Cleveland--I know he comes to Cleveland to fund-raise--but come to Cleveland and look at the neighborhood I live in. I live in ZIP Code 44105. My wife and I have lived there for a couple of years. In 2007, that ZIP Code had the highest number of foreclosures in the United States of America. That happened because of Wall Street greed, in large part, but the fact that it did happen means there is far too much blight in this neighborhood. The Hardest Hit Fund matters to clean up some of this neighborhood and enable people to get back on their feet. The commerce committee, the third committee--first, there was banking and then Finance. Then there is the EPW that did it mostly right. The banking committee was excluded, the Finance Committee was excluded. The commerce committee, which is responsible for highway safety and rail safety, held a markup but not a single Democrat on the committee supported the language in the legislation because they did nothing about public safety. If my recollection is right, younger people are allowed to drive trucks--as if we want less truck safety. I say ``young people'' meaning 18-year-olds. I know I am getting older, but I don't really want 18-year-olds driving these rigs when they clearly don't have much experience and less training. It also did not fix some of the rail issues we should fix, having seen some of these terrible accidents. It was one thing after another. For the past 2 weeks, a large part of the legislation was written in the Republican offices with little input from Democratic Senators. Even though the majority leader has said that times have changed, we are going to have a full committee process, an open amendment process, debate, and all of that, this didn't happen. The greatest barrier of this bill, aside from the limited growth in investment, is this bill makes choices about revenue that this Senator thinks the Congress and the American people will regret. I have mentioned a couple of them. Let me talk about those that were a part of the banking committee, on which I sit, which I think I probably know the most about. Despite opposition from consumer advocates and participants in the housing market, including bankers and realtors, the bill would increase the guaranty fees paid by homeowners that are charged to protect against losses to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That means when going to a closing, you are going to be assessed a fee. It would increase the cost of homeownership by $4,000 for borrowers who have a 20-percent downpayment for the median home price and would increase even more for those who put less down. That is why a vote for this bill is a vote to increase the cost of homeownership for families across the country and puts taxpayers at greater risk. There is a history of opposition to the use of this fee for purposes other than housing. More recently, Senator Crapo, a Republican, and Senator Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, wrote a provision in this year's budget resolution to prevent this fee from being misused, and of course they are right. This bill requires the IRS to use private debt collection agencies to collect taxes because the majority leader was looking for anything he could find that might produce revenue--it has nothing to do with transportation--but anyplace he could find in the government funds to produce revenue that then could be used to pay for a highway bill. Again, it is smoke and mirrors and just sort of funny money. One of the ways he did this was to take money from the IRS--even as we cut the budget for IRS debt collection--to take some more of that money and give it to a private debt collection company to collect this debt. That was considered to be approximately a $2 billion revenue generator for reasons that aren't quite clear. It has been tried before and each time it has lost money and it has been repealed. The companies hired for these efforts were found to have frequently harassed low- income families and they violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, but the majority leader needed that billion-plus dollars for his highway bill. People here didn't have the guts to stand up and say, no, we may have made this pledge to the special interest lobbyists and we can't come up with revenue, but instead let's actually do this right. No, they aren't going to do that. They take money from the Hardest Hit Fund, Social Security money, increase costs to middle-class people at a closing who are trying to get a mortgage, and privatize debt collection. It is hard to see how these programs that hurt families--the Hardest Hit Fund, the debt collection, the Social Security money--how this makes sense to pay for investments for bridges and roads. This bill would reduce the dividends paid to banks with over $1 billion in total assets that are members of the Federal Reserve System. That raises $17 billion. While it might make sense to reduce the dividend--you can argue that--I have heard people on both sides of that debate. If we exempted the smallest banks under $1 billion, there are plenty of community banks that are $2 to $3 billion in size. Most are smaller, but they will be paying more--hundreds of thousands of dollars--millions in some cases. All of the people who voted for this bill--voted for cloture, voted for this highway bill--are assessing a number of community banks in their States for this money. We don't know if the new rate of 1.5 percent that Senator McConnell has decided on is fair. I appreciate the cutoff of the lower rate of $1 billion, but we should be working this out in committee, discussing it and hearing people on both sides. They started with every bank and arbitrarily cut it to set the $1 billion threshold. They arbitrarily dropped the percentage from 6 to 1.5. Nobody truly knows what I am talking about when I talk about this because nobody truly understands this program. Even people who are on the banking committee don't know it very well. Maybe we should have researched and discussed it and had hearings on it. Instead, the majority leader came around to these banks and to this committee and they thought, hey, we can get $16 billion there by changing a program and nobody knows what it is anyway. Well, he has taken that money from a lot of community banks. More power to him. It is another reason I am not going to support this bill. It is ironic that on the fifth anniversary of Wall Street's Dodd-Frank reform this bill would undercut rules to help small banks. Before I close I want to be fair and point out some of the good provisions in this bill. First, the Senate voted on a strong bipartisan basis to add an amendment to renew the U.S. Export-Import Bank. This Bank has helped 350 businesses in my home State, two-thirds of which are small businesses. It doesn't cost taxpayers a cent. Interestingly, the Export-Import Bank, begun by President Roosevelt in the 1930s, was always bipartisan. Its reauthorization, continuation, renewal, and update was always done by Congress on a bipartisan basis. My recollection--I am not quite sure this is precise, but my recollection is that only once was there ever a vote in the Senate for the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank because there was no need to because everybody agreed with it. Yet because of the far right, the tea party-- we used to call them the John Birch Society when they opposed Medicare and now they are called the tea party when they oppose the Affordable Care Act--has decided this Export-Import Bank, which helps businesses and companies, particularly small companies in Dayton, Toledo, Cleveland, Charlotte, Asheville, and Durham--helps small businesses export their products. They need some help sometimes. Every other country in the world--every other major country, we think, has some kind of an export financing agency such as this, but we are not able, for political reasons, call it crony capitalism--the tea party weighed in and convinced a lot of Senate and House Republicans that it is not such a good idea. Right now the Ex-Im Bank is in this bill. Hopefully it will stay in over the process. I am hopeful. Because the Speaker used a four-letter word to describe this bill, I am hopeful when we get a short-term extension--I hate cliches but this is such a good one--when we kick this can down the road again for another 2 or 3 months, whatever it is going to be, I am hopeful the majority leader and the Speaker will include the Export-Import Bank reauthorization and make it long term, but it is not clear if they will. I want to also point out that Chairman Shelby, the chairman of my committee in banking, with whom I have a good relationship, included a number of proposals for transit policy that I think make good sense. The mass transit account was created in 1983 under President Reagan. It was done right. Public transit has always received around 20 percent, sometimes a little more, of any new revenue that is dedicated to growth. We have a tradition in this country that for every $100 we are spending on the Transportation bill, $20 of that goes to small bus systems in Lorain, OH, it goes to RTA for trains and rail in Cleveland, it goes to major transit systems in New York or anywhere around the country. This bill initially was less than 20 percent. I appreciate Chairman Shelby and the majority leader getting it back up to 20 percent. There is a new program for competitive bus grants. It is underfunded at $190 million a year. This bill increases the amount of American-made steel and other components. That is a good thing. With all my criticism on this bill in the way it was handled by the leadership in this House, there are some good things in this bill. I hope the Senate will move forward after today with a desire to revive the bipartisan process based on regular order when we address transportation issues. I stand ready to work with my colleagues in both parties to deliver a robust 6-year transportation bill. 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, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. BROWN. I thank the Chair. I ask unanimous consent to be joined in a colloquy with Senator Merkley of Oregon and Senator Coons of Delaware.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, during the financial crisis, $13 trillion in household wealth was erased. Nine million jobs were lost, and 5 million Americans, 5 million families and individuals lost their homes. The financial services industry has bounced back, and far too many American families have not. While many in Washington may have forgotten the financial crisis, millions of Americans haven't forgotten how predatory lending practices contributed to the housing bubble and helped spark this crisis. For them, this was the crisis. Unscrupulous lenders offered loans that required no documentation, loans with teaser interest rates that later spiked and undermined a borrower's ability to repay, and loans where borrowers never paid down their principal. Borrowers with these higher cost loans were foreclosed upon at almost triple the rate of borrowers with conforming 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. The crisis revealed a host of other harmful practices, such as steering borrowers to affiliated companies, kickbacks for business referrals, inflated appraisals, and loan officer compensation based on the loan product that they peddled. These practices offered little benefit to the borrower. They were not about helping those families purchase a home they could afford. It is no coincidence that as borrowers' costs increased, so did loan officers' compensation. These abuses didn't start in 2007 and in 2008. In many communities, predatory lenders began moving in a decade or more before the crisis. In Ohio, the housing crisis was a slow burn rather than the boom and bust cycle that happened in States such as California and Arizona. From 1995 to 2009--think about this--my State of Ohio had 14 consecutive years where there were more foreclosures than the years before. For 14 years in a row, the number of foreclosures went up and up and up--14 years in a row. My wife and I live just south of Slavic Village in Cleveland, ZIP Code 44105. I mention that ZIP Code because in 2007, that ZIP Code had the highest foreclosure rate of any ZIP Code in the United States of America. This wasn't because of speculation. This was a declining industrial base, and this was the kind of predatory lending that tended to settle and sink its talons into communities like Slavic Village. Government policies favoring finance over manufacturing caused steel mills across Northeast Ohio and the rest of the country to shut down and force people to look elsewhere for work. Between 2000 and 2010, the population of Slavic Village dropped 27 percent, down to 20,000 people, and then the subprime lending industry moved in. By 2006 more than 900 of Slavic Village's 3,000 properties--900 out of 3,000--were in foreclosure. If the home next door to you is foreclosed on and abandoned, you can bet the value of your home begins to decline 2 percent, 3 percent, 4 percent, and then the one across the street and then one down the street. One can see what happens to this neighborhood. One in three Ohioans in the height of the crisis--one in three Ohioans' mortgages were underwater. One in every seven mortgageholders was 30 days delinquent or in foreclosure. Behind every foreclosure is a painful conversation. We don't think much about that here. We think of numbers, policies, and statistics. But imagine if you are a mother or father, and you have a 12-year-old or 13-year-old son and daughter. First, the mother loses her job. Things change around the house. You begin to cut back on things. You begin to take money out of the college fund to send your kid to Cuyahoga Community College. Then the husband loses his job. Then you have to have that discussion. There were 5 million discussions like these that went on in these homes where there were foreclosures. You have to explain to your son or daughter: We aren't going to be living here. We can't afford this house. We are leaving the neighborhood. You are probably going to a different school. We don't know where we are moving. We are going to have to find a new place to live. Maybe we are going to have to give away the family pet. There is a shelter in Parma, OH, that went from 200 to 2,000 dogs and cats that they were housing because so many people gave up their pets because of the foreclosures that so many families endured. We came together as a result to pass Wall Street reform so families would no longer be forced to upend their lives because a mortgage company preyed upon them. Dodd-Frank established a commonsense rule that requires lenders to ensure that borrowers have the ability to repay their home loans. We created a consumer protection bureau to make sure that never again would consumers be an afterthought. Much of the CFPB's important work has centered around mortgage regulation. Their rule to streamline forms will help inform consumers to understand what is happening at the closing table. The ability to pay. A qualified mortgage rule balances the need for mortgage credit with the need of documentation of income and other borrower protections. We know there is more to be done. We must ensure that small lenders and community institutions can remain competitive. We know how bank concentrations become more and more of a problem. We must provide homeowners with protections from a broken servicing model that has harmed so many of our communities. We must ensure broad access to affordable housing--the right thing to do for families and communities. We must move forward. We know there will be a clear choice. As we move forward, we know there are two paths to follow. We can accept the false narrative that inaccurately blames low-income borrowers in the Federal programs, FHA, VA, to maintain their underwriting standards during the boom. In other words, we can blame the victim. We can say: Oh, it was the homeowners who caused this. It was the people who got the mortgages. It was all their fault. They weren't smart enough and they were so irresponsible. And we can blame the government because it is always the government's fault or we can recognize there were flawed incentives encouraged by a lack of regulatory oversight at the heart of our Nation's financial system-- flawed incentives that made risk-taking more profitable, flawed incentives that increased loan officers' compensation when they made loans they should not have been making. We can maintain the 30-year fixed mortgage that has made homeownership more affordable and given so many families an asset upon retirement. We can preserve a strong government role in the mortgage market, but instead too many in this body want to undermine the reforms that we put in place 5 years ago. Republicans and their allies in the financial industry fought Wall Street reform every step of the way. They have been attacking these consumer protections since the day they began. We have to remember what a top financial services lobbyist said. The day the President signed Dodd-Frank, the top lobbyists in the financial industry said: Well, folks, today is half-time. Today is half-time, meaning, OK, we lost in Congress, but we are going to keep pushing these agencies. We are going to keep lobbying Congress. We are going to try to roll back these rules. We are going to stop these rules. We are going to dilute these rules and make them ineffective. The bill my Republican colleagues today on the Appropriations Committee brought in--Senator Coons will talk about that. The bill the Republicans brought into Senator Merkley's and my banking committee isn't a narrower targeted effort at reform for small banks. It is a sweeping overhaul that rolls back Wall Street reform. Once again, they want to undermine consumer protection. They want to use small Main Street institutions as cover, but in the end they want to allow special interests and their allies to undermine reform and leave the American people exposed to the problems that happened less than a decade ago. It is unconscionable that this abuse was ever allowed in the first place. Senator Merkley, a leader on this issue, especially in the Volcker rule, will speak about his efforts and what he has seen in the past and particularly looking forward to the future about what we do about predatory loans and people and banks preying on consumers.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Madam President, the Brown-Manchin amendment expands the full-service community schools model to schools across the country. Community schools are different from Promised Neighborhoods--two different approaches to what is a complex set of challenges. Community schools start with a focus on the school, engage partners in joint efforts to improve student achievement and development, and in the process work to strengthen family and community. Madam President, I yield the remainder of my time to Senator Manchin.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader. I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, next Tuesday, July 21, is my wife's birthday, and it is also the 5-year anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act becoming law. Nearly two decades before that, Barings, an international bank, was destroyed by fraud committed by a single one of their traders. In reality, there were no profits, unbeknownst to many at the time, just big losses that this trader managed to conceal until the firm collapsed. When writing about his actions later in his memoir, the trader said: Luckily for my fraud, there were too many chiefs who would chat about it at arm's length but never go further. And they never dared to ask me any basic questions, since they were afraid of looking stupid about not understanding futures and options. This helps illustrate how we got to that financial crisis. Wall Street so often speaks its own language--one most Americans can't understand and one that prevented consumers and taxpayers and sometimes even participants from asking questions and from challenging Wall Street. September 2008 was preceded by a decade of deregulation, after furious lobbying by the financial industry--lobbying buttressed by obfuscation and deceit, always underscored by greed. Risky behavior was rewarded with gargantuan profits for the firms and multimillion-dollar bonuses for the traders and the executives. Questions were not asked. People often looked the other way. So many were confused and tricked, if you will. Regulators didn't do their jobs. Congress was too--putting it mildly--bought and sold by Wall Street, and look what happened to the American public. Most Americans didn't fully appreciate the connection between Wall Street and our lives until 2008. That is when the biggest banks' recklessness led to the loss of 9 million jobs. The unemployment rate reached 10 percent, 5 million Americans lost their homes, and $13 trillion, with a ``T''--that is 13,000 billion; that is what a trillion is, 13,000 billion dollars--in household wealth was erased. My wife and I for 2 years have lived in the city of Cleveland in ZIP Code 44105. I mention the ZIP Code because that ZIP Code in 2007, I believe--it was around that time--that ZIP Code had the highest rate of foreclosures of any ZIP Code in the United States of America. It wasn't because people in Slavic Village, Cleveland, OH, in my neighborhood were trying to game the system. It was not because there were all kinds of con men and women in the neighborhood. It was mostly because of job loss due to the decline in manufacturing. It was also because firms that were rewarded by turning over homes and fees came into those communities offering something more than people could really think they would get, and so foreclosure after foreclosure after foreclosure happened. The financial crisis created 9 million people who wanted to work for a living, contribute to society, and support their families but could not. And behind the millions of foreclosures were 5 million painful conversations. Think about this. We in this body talk about numbers, we talk about statistics, we talk about foreclosures, we talk about derivatives, we talk about banks, we talk about fees, we talk about all of this, but think about what a foreclosure means. We don't dress the way we do, making good salaries and benefits, hanging out more with people of means rather than people without much means; we don't think a lot about what a foreclosure might mean to a family. Think about this: A mother and father both have sort of middle-income jobs, working-class jobs. They have a daughter who is 12 and a son who is 13. The mother comes home one day and says: I lost my job. The family scrapes things together, figures they can keep going. Six months later the father comes home and says he lost his job. The kids and the father have a conversation. It is pretty clear they are going to have to move out of their house because they are going to be foreclosed on. They sit down with the son and daughter and they try to explain what this is going to mean. The daughter says: What school are we going to go to? The parents say: I don't know. We are going to have to move out of this house and leave our school district. The son says: What happens to our friends? And the parents say: We don't know because we are going to move. Then they have another painful conversation. What happens to our dog? We don't have the money to feed the dog, and in that new apartment we are not going to be allowed to have a pet. Think about that. They lose their home and their neighborhood and their friends. They even have to give away their family pets. They are cutting back. These are the stories that aren't really told around here--what actually happens to these families when they are foreclosed on. Those conversations happened--I don't know how many conversations, but I know there were 5 million homes foreclosed on where conversations took place such as that night after night after night, as parents explained to their children what was happening to their way of life. Parents were sometimes telling their children, We are going to have to share a house with relatives. Families leaving neighborhoods, leaving schools, leaving friends behind, parents trying to find a new home for the family dog that the child had grown up with since the child was 3 or 4 years old, that is why we passed Wall Street reform. Despite doomsday predictions from the Republicans--almost all of whom opposed Dodd-Frank reform, almost all of whom opposed Dodd-Frank because Wall Street opposed Dodd-Frank reform--despite those predictions, it has been a huge success. In 2011, as the law was beginning to be implemented, we heard Republicans running for President, people such as Newt Gingrich, a historical figure who has, by and large, been forgotten now, who used to be the Speaker of the House down the hall, who used to be one of the most powerful people in Washington, who stood toe-to-toe with President Clinton and shut down the government in the 1990s. He said Dodd-Frank will kill small banks, kill small business, kill the housing industry. He was wrong. Since Dodd-Frank has been implemented over the past 5 years, the private sector has created 13 million new jobs, household wealth has grown by $13 trillion, exceeding precrisis levels, and business lending has climbed 30 percent. Wall Street reform didn't ruin the economy, Wall Street reform stabilized and strengthened it. Polling that Americans for Financial Reform released last week shows that Americans agree with this assessment. They overwhelmingly support strong financial regulations and they overwhelmingly support the goals of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But this month--and for the rest of the year--we have seen Republicans try to undermine Wall Street reform, try to do the bidding of Wall Street itself, and try to do all they can to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. We have seen it in the Budget Committee and in the Agriculture Committee and in the Banking Committee and in the appropriations process. Last week, in the Senate Banking Committee, Republicans held another hearing with representatives from the financial industry advocating for legislation to undermine parts of Dodd-Frank. Week after week, it seems, we hear from people who come in front of the Banking Committee-- people who seem oblivious to the fact that Wall Street caused this damage to our society, people doing the bidding for Wall Street banks, people who have excused the greed and the overreach of Wall Street and what Wall Street has done to the men and women, done to children, done to families, done to neighborhoods in our society. My ZIP Code is doing better than it was, but we can still see the ruin and the devastation brought to ZIP Code 44105, in part, because of Wall Street greed. We can see it all over this country. Tomorrow, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rich Cordray, who I can proudly say is from my State of Ohio, will testify again in Congress. This will mark his 54th appearance--either him or someone else from the CFPB. As Republicans claim, the CFPB is unaccountable to Congress--hauled in front of Congress one, two, three, four-plus dozen times, and they still say it is unaccountable. Figure that out. It is all about the politics. Again, they are doing Wall Street's bidding. This past weekend, two Republican Commissioners on the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission-- agencies whose job it is to police Wall Street, to prevent another crisis--these two Republican Commissioners wrote an op-ed denouncing regulation. They wrote: ``One of the greatest potential risks to the financial markets is the work of the regulators themselves.'' They are not saying regulators should have been tougher on Wall Street. They are saying these regulators are overreaching and not doing what they should. In fact, these regulations shouldn't have existed many times. This is the attitude we are up against. We know they will keep fighting to tear down this law just as hard as they fought to keep it from passing. Now, when Dodd-Frank was passed back in July 5 years ago, in 2010, President Obama signed the bill only a few hours later. The chief lobbyist for the top financial services, the top lobbyist in Washington, proclaimed: ``Now it's halftime.'' What did he mean by ``now it's halftime''? It was that, Wall Street lost that battle in Congress on Dodd-Frank, and now it was time to turn to the agencies and to try to weaken, obfuscate, blunt these rules, delay, and do whatever they could. There were 3,000 lobbyists during the Dodd-Frank act--6 lobbyists for every Member of Congress. Even then they couldn't win because enough of us here had the guts to stand up to Wall Street and do the right thing. Many of those 3,000 lobbyists are back. In 2012, lobbyists for banks outnumbered consumer protection advocates 20 to 1--1 consumer advocate to 20 bank lobbyists spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to weaken the law. We must stand firm. We must push back on efforts that roll back the reforms. We should stand up for the CFPB. Nobody is arguing that we can't improve and strengthen Dodd-Frank. We want to do that. But if improve and strengthen means doing Wall Street bidding, that is not what improve and strengthen should mean. There are enormous challenges we have to tackle. Today's typical American consumer obviously has no union to demand a defined pension or a fair wage and no dependable retirement savings account. The average borrower has left college with a diploma and $33,000 in student loan debt. Nearly 60 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds now live with their parents, largely due to staggering student loan debt and stagnant wages. Five million Americans have mortgages that are under water, meaning they owe more than the house is worth, which represents nearly $350 billion of negative equity. That means if you total up all of the debt of those 5 million Americans--how much they owe on their homes-- and subtract what their homes are worth, it would amount to $350 billion of negative equity. One in five Americans has an error on her credit report that might prevent her from accessing a traditional banking system. It is not due to a mistake they made, but they have an error on their credit report that they, for whatever reason, have not been able to fix. One in three American adults has debt in collections, the majority of which is medical debt. Fifty-seven percent of Americans say they are not financially prepared for the unexpected. A financial crisis only makes these trends worse. Where do we go? Some sectors of our economy have done better than others. When times are good, we return to discussions about regulatory relief, which I support, for small banks and credit unions. I think we need to make some changes in the midsized regional banks, such as the Huntington in Columbus or the Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati, to help make them competitive, particularly with the large banks. What about relief for the average American? All of us in this body need to broaden our focus beyond so-called regulatory relief. The answer to everything, according to my friends on the other side of the aisle, is to cut taxes on the rich and deregulate and weaken consumer laws, weaken safe drinking water laws, weaken clean air laws, and weaken Dodd-Frank laws. That is their answer to everything. What about relief for average Americans? What about increasing the minimum wage? What about helping Americans who are making $30,000 or $40,000 but are denied overtime because they have been put in a salary or management category even though they are only making $30,000? They may be running the night shift at a fast-food restaurant and have been classified as bosses so as salaried workers, they don't get overtime even if they are working 60 hours a week. How about relief for that average American? How about relief for Americans who don't have sick leave and go to work when they are sick and take the chance of infecting somebody else, because if they stay home, they will not receive any pay? How about if their child is sick? Do they send their child to school, because they can't take a day off because they don't get a personal leave day to take care of their child? So their child may end up going to school, doesn't do as well and may get other children sick, which means less productive students or less productive workers if the parent ends up going to work sick--all of those things. Why don't we have relief for working-class and middle-class families--minimum wage, overtime pay when they have earned it and help those families get the kind of sick pay and sick leave as the people who work here have who dress up and are well paid and have the advantage of working in the Senate? Why are we not doing that? We shouldn't be afraid to ask questions that will lead to the reforms we need. We shouldn't be afraid to challenge the status quo, and we should never be afraid to make Wall Street accountable. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, too many Americans are still struggling in today's economy. Despite comments by some candidates for President, Americans work hard but still have trouble getting by. We know that Americans on average are working longer hours than workers in almost every other rich country in the world--significantly longer hours. Simply, they are not getting the pay they have earned and the compensation and the lifestyle to which they aspire and have worked so hard toward. For many workers, it feels as though the harder and longer they work, the less they have to show for it. And they are not imagining things. Since the 1970s, middle class wages have been stagnant while the number of hours spent on the job has gone up. In short, Americans are working more for less. The middle class has shrunk in every State in this country. The Pew Research Center studies show that the share of adults in middle-income households has fallen from 61 percent in 1970 to 51 percent in 2013. In Ohio the share of families that are middle class is now below 50 percent. We need to do more to build on-ramps for middle-class hard- working Americans instead of saying that Americans are not working hard enough, instead of asking workers to do more and more for less money. It is not uncommon today for salaried workers--salaried workers, not millionaire salaried workers but lower income and middle-income salaried workers--to work 50-, 60-, 70-hour weeks without getting a cent in overtime. When workers put in extra time, it should be reflected in their paychecks. Right now a number of employers are gaming the system to avoid paying overtime, and American workers are losing wages as a result. It is past time for overtime hours to mean overtime pay again. That is why my colleagues and I sent a letter to the President earlier this year urging the administration to restore the strength of overtime payrolls. Forty years ago, we as a nation decided that most workers, whether they were paid hourly or a salary, should receive overtime pay when working more than 40 hours a week, but the teeth in that law have been eroded. The strength of that law, the power of that law, and the effectiveness of that law have been eroded over the past 40 years. In 1975, 65 percent of all salaried workers were covered by overtime pay rules. Currently, just 8 percent of salaried workers are covered. That could be a night manager in a fast food restaurant making $30,000 a year classified as management--classified because that person is salaried--and asked to work more than 40 hours and still only making $30,000 a year. So 40 years ago, 65 percent of salaried workers would have been paid time and a half for those extra hours beyond 40 for that night manager, but today they don't get paid over time. They may work 50 hours, they may work 60 hours, but they simply are not compensated for it. The salary threshold of $23,600 a year has remained static for decades because it hasn't been indexed for inflation. So in 1975, somebody making $23,000 a year was paid overtime for beyond 40 hours. Today someone making $23,000 a year isn't. If they are making $30,000 or $40,000, they aren't paid overtime. So we see what has happened. The salary threshold was put in place to exempt highly paid executives, but because it hasn't increased in 40 years--they didn't build an inflation number into it or a cost of living adjustment--instead of hitting CEOs and lawyers who shouldn't get paid overtime in hours excess of 40, workers earning as little as $455 a week now go without overtime pay just because they are salaried and just because they are called management. It allows employers the opportunity to put somebody on salary, work them many more hours, and then fail to compensate them. The current threshold is now so low that it is below the poverty line for a family of four. So a salaried worker making a few dollars below the poverty line and working 50 or 60 hours doesn't get paid overtime. That is actually what has happened. The American public is starting to understand this, and that is why so many people are calling on the President to do this. Overtime pay should be available to everyone who puts in the extra time--not just those earning a poverty level wage. That is why I applaud the Department of Labor's proposed rule that would strengthen overtime standards and take them back--not quite even as good, but we are pretty satisfied with this--to the 1975 level. The new rule will more than double the salary threshold for earning overtime pay from $23,000 annually to $50,000. That would mean that 40 percent of salaried workers are now eligible for overtime. In my State, as a result of this rule, 160,000 Ohioans would get a raise, as would 5 million Americans in States such as Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and all over this country. This means more money in the pockets of American workers. The rule proposes lengthening the threshold to the 40th percentile of income for full-time salaried workers instead of setting a raw number. This means that the strength of the rule is less likely to erode over time. Not only will this rule help families make ends meet, it also boosts consumer spending, creates jobs, and bolsters the American economy. Just like raising the minimum wage, when more money is put in the pocket of somebody making $8 an hour or $9 an hour or when you put more money in the pocket of a midlevel manager making $30,000 a year in a fast-food restaurant--if you put more money in their pocket--they are going to spend that money. They are not going to invest that money in a Swiss bank account. They are going to spend that money in the community, buy more groceries, go into the hardware stores and do more to fix up their houses and do more to generate economic activity and create jobs for our economy. But there is still more we need to do to support American workers. This is an important step toward building our middle class. There is still more we need to do to support American workers. We need to give hourly workers a raise by raising the minimum wage. The legislation a number of us on the floor have worked on, the Raise the Wage Act, would increase the minimum wage incrementally to $12 an hour by 2020, giving a raise to 1 million Ohioans, 28 million people across the country--1 million Ohioans. Tipped workers shouldn't have to struggle to get by. They deserve to earn a living wage to help put food on the table. Lots of people in this body are unaware, as some Americans are. People here should be more aware of it, but people here tend not to know people that work in diners. People who work in diners as waitresses and waiters in diners can be paid as little as $2.13 an hour. The minimum wage for working in a diner in a so-called tipped wage or for the people who push wheelchairs in airports or in some case for many other kinds of jobs is $2.13 an hour. It is not $7.25, which is the minimum wage for everyone else. That is why we need to move on raising the minimum wage, on bringing the tipped wage up to at least 70 percent of the minimum wage. Workers will be happier and they will be more productive when they are healthy, when they are making decent salaries, making a little bit better wages. Americans also deserve a day off when they get sick. Forty-three million Americans--2 million in my State--have no paid sick leave at all. They are faced with impossible choices. Do they stay home to care for a sick child or go to work so they can put food on the table? Workers are happier and more productive when they are healthy. Guaranteeing paid sick leave would save precious health care resources, it would give employers safe and stable workplaces, and it would give families peace of mind. It would mean that workers are not going to work when they are sick, infecting other workers and affecting productivity and profits at that business. That is why we should pass the Healthy Family Act. Overtime is important. Minimum wage is important. The Healthy Family Act for sick leave days is important. All are steps that we need to support hard-working American families. We know what has happened in the economy the last 10 years. We know the wealthiest 5 percent are doing better and better and better. Profits are up for companies. Executives are making bigger and bigger bonuses. But working class, lower-middle-class workers are simply not getting ahead or even able to tread water to stay even, for that matter. The minimum wage will help, paying overtime will help, and the Healthy Family Act will help. The Toledo Blade put it well last week: ``America's widening income gap isn't an inescapable outcome of the free market, but a political choice that can be mitigated with intelligent public policies.'' This is a political choice. We have seen this body and the body on the other side of the Capitol continue to give more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. We won't invest in infrastructure, we won't invest in working families, we won't help raise wages, we won't help with overtime, and we won't help with workers who just need a few sick days off, as people in bodies such as this typically have. I urge the Department of Labor to finalize their strong overtime proposal as quickly as possible. It will make a huge difference in the lives of millions of Americans. With that, I yield back. 20th Anniversary of the Normalization of Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Vietnam

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, today I call attention to our Nation's education infrastructure. America's schools are in desperate need of repair. A 2014 report by the National Center for Education Statistics found that the U.S. needs to invest nearly $200 billion in school facilities just to bring them up to date. This echoed the findings of the American Society of Civil Engineers, who in 2013 gave American public school buildings a D-plus rating. Fortunately, there is a way for Congress to help facilitate these necessary improvements. The Qualified Zone Academy Bond (QZAB) program helps schools that serve low-income students pay for building renovations, facility upgrades, equipment purchases, and other expensive projects. QZABs provide tax credits to financial institutions who provide bonds or other debt instruments to qualified schools. These tax credits decrease interest payments for schools that take on debt to renovate their facilities. Since creating QZABs in 1997, Congress has consistently extended the program, even expanding it for a brief period between 2008 and 2010. But the program expired at the end of 2014. It is time Congress enhanced and made permanent this important tax credit. Today I will introduce the Rebuilding America's Schools Act. This bill would extend permanently the QZAB program and increase the allotted funding for the program from $400 million per year to the levels authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-- $1.4 billion. Lastly, it would allow schools to use QZABs to finance construction of new buildings. Under current law, QZABs can only be used to finance renovations or upgrades to existing school buildings. I hope my colleagues will join me in cosponsoring the Rebuilding America's Schools Act.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, today I call attention to our Nation's education infrastructure. America's schools are in desperate need of repair. A 2014 report by the National Center for Education Statistics found that the U.S. needs to invest nearly $200 billion in school facilities just to bring them up to date. This echoed the findings of the American Society of Civil Engineers, who in 2013 gave American public school buildings a D-plus rating. Fortunately, there is a way for Congress to help facilitate these necessary improvements. The Qualified Zone Academy Bond (QZAB) program helps schools that serve low-income students pay for building renovations, facility upgrades, equipment purchases, and other expensive projects. QZABs provide tax credits to financial institutions who provide bonds or other debt instruments to qualified schools. These tax credits decrease interest payments for schools that take on debt to renovate their facilities. Since creating QZABs in 1997, Congress has consistently extended the program, even expanding it for a brief period between 2008 and 2010. But the program expired at the end of 2014. It is time Congress enhanced and made permanent this important tax credit. Today I will introduce the Rebuilding America's Schools Act. This bill would extend permanently the QZAB program and increase the allotted funding for the program from $400 million per year to the levels authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-- $1.4 billion. Lastly, it would allow schools to use QZABs to finance construction of new buildings. Under current law, QZABs can only be used to finance renovations or upgrades to existing school buildings. I hope my colleagues will join me in cosponsoring the Rebuilding America's Schools Act.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I always appreciate the words of Senator Isakson, who was the cochair of the Ethics Committee, where I served with him, and now on the Veterans' Affairs Committee, and I appreciate his work and Senator Blumenthal's work on one of the most important committees in this Senate. Mr. President, about a year and a half ago, on a cold January morning in Cleveland, where I live, at a Martin Luther King breakfast, I heard a speaker say: Your life expectancy is connected to your ZIP Code. Think about that. Whether you grow up in Columbus or Canton or Appalachia, whether you grow up in a city or a prosperous suburb or a low-income suburb or a small town or a rural area, so often your ZIP Code determines whether you have access to quality health care, to good education, to good jobs, and to the social support necessary to succeed. That is particularly true when it comes to education. The quality of our children's education should not be determined by their ZIP Code. Too often that is the case. Teachers and schools in far too many cases lack the resources necessary to ensure students can grow and succeed. Achievement gaps persist between economically disadvantaged students and their more advantaged peers. These gaps persist between Black students and White students, Latino students and White students. They persist between native and non-native English language speakers. They persist between students with disabilities and those without. These achievement gaps inevitably, predictably almost always lead to opportunity gaps. We know education is the surest path to success--we say that around here ad nauseam--regardless of where you come from. That is why closing these gaps is vital to ensure children--all children--have the opportunity to succeed. These achievement gaps are not caused by failings in our students. They are usually not caused by failings with our teachers. They are the result of policies that leave schools with massive resource gaps. The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights conducted a comprehensive survey of schools across the Nation. Some of the results they found were appalling. Black, Latino, Native American, Native Alaskan students, as well as first-time English learners attend schools with much higher concentrations of inexperienced teachers. One in five high schools in this country lacks a school counselor. Around 20 percent of high schools do not offer more than one of the typical core courses for high school math and science, such as algebra I and II, geometry, biology, and chemistry. We cannot call our country ``the land of opportunity'' while we fail--we, policymakers, communities, leaders, activists--while we fail to provide too many of our children with well-equipped schools. The bipartisan opportunity dashboard of core resources amendment will help us close these gaps. It will strengthen transparency provisions in the Every Child Achieves Act so parents and taxpayers know how schools are performing on key measures of success--measures such as contact with effective teachers, access to advanced coursework, and availability of career and technical opportunities and counseling. It will ensure that States hold schools accountable when inequities exist. Reporting is an important and helpful tool but surely not enough. If this new data shows persistent disparities, States and school districts need to take action. This amendment requires States to develop a plan to ensure that resources reach districts that are most in need. States will have flexibility to design these plans in a way that works for local communities. The amendment does not tell States how to address inequities; it just requires States to identify those disparities and work with communities to fix them in whatever way works for those communities in that State. We must move beyond simply using test scores when we assess our schools. Tests are an important benchmark of success, but they are by no means the only one. To succeed in life and in school, students need access to dedicated literacy programs, to music and the arts, to advanced classes, to college and career counseling. We need to measure access to all of these opportunities, not only math and reading scores. Improving access to core resources will not close the achievement gap overnight, but it puts us on the right track. Our amendment has the support of teachers and civil rights organizations. I want to thank Senators Reed, Kirk, and Baldwin for their bipartisan help and support in getting this amendment to this place. I urge my colleagues to adopt this amendment to ensure that all children, regardless of their ZIP Code, have access to the core resources needed for a quality education. Unfortunately, instead of strengthening our public education system, some of my colleagues want to, as we say around here, ``voucherize'' the public school system, privatize, spend resources elsewhere primarily. We have seen how so many of our public schools serving vulnerable populations are already in dire need of resources, yet vouchers would divert more of these resources away from public schools, reroute those resources to for-profit schools, in some cases, that simply are not accountable to the public. Vouchers do not provide a real choice for the majority of students. They may cover some--but usually not all--of the tuition of private schools, meaning the students who need help the most often get little choice at all. Study after study shows that private school vouchers don't improve student achievement. My State, by some rankings, is the next to worst--next to last in the country--in the quality of charter schools and the accountability of charter schools, in large part because there is a huge network of for-profit charter private schools in our State that simply have not served students that well. That is why I urge my colleagues to vote against any proposal to voucherize our schools. Instead, we need to strengthen our public school system, which educates the vast majority of our children. That is why schools across the country, especially those with high concentrations of poverty, need more funding--not less. For 50 years, the Federal Government has helped level the playing field for students by directing funds to schools in areas that lack resources. Unfortunately, some of my colleagues are trying to dismantle this system by taking away funding from high-priority schools to more affluent schools, a bit of a reverse Robin Hood. They call this proposal portability. But no matter what you call it and why you call it that, taking funding away from the schools that need it most and sending it to the schools that need it least is wrong. I will urge my colleagues to oppose this effort. In our country, all students should have access to a high-quality education, regardless of how much money their parents make, regardless of how much education their parents have, regardless of what ZIP Code they live in. We must invest Federal resources in schools and districts that need the most and where they can make the most difference. 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, I have come to this floor a number of times arguing against trade promotion authority. I have done that for months. This body should not give up its authority to amend trade agreements, and it should not pave the way for a trade deal that looks like it is going to be more of the same--corporate and worker sellouts. We have seen it with NAFTA, and we saw a similar kind of move on PNTR with China, where our bilateral trade deficit almost literally exploded since 2000, when this body and the other body moved forward on PNTR. We saw it with the Central American Free Trade Agreement, when President Bush had to wake in the middle of the night and get on the phone with Republican Member after Republican Member to get them to change their vote on fast-track so he could get the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which he sold in the name of counterterrorism. We saw it in the South Korean trade agreement, when this President made promises of more job creation and higher wages, neither of which has borne out. We have seen big promises and bad results on trade issue after trade issue after trade issue after trade issue. We have seen it through the Presidencies of George Bush 1, Bill Clinton, George Bush 2, and now Barack Obama. As I said, this body should not give up its authority to make better trade agreements. In essence, what we are saying in this body with this vote, which will take place within the hour or so, is that we are willing to give up these powers to the executive branch to give us more of the same, trade agreements that don't work for our communities, don't work for our workers, don't work for our families, and don't work for our small businesses. While this Chamber will vote on trade promotion authority today, so- called fast-track, it doesn't mean we throw in the towel on the congressional oversight of our Nation's trade policy. Moving forward with fast-track means it is more critical than ever that we protect Congress's prerogative to have a say on a deal that could offset 40 percent of the world's economy. Members on both sides of the aisle, Members on both sides of this debate, supporters and opponents, Republicans and Democrats, a good mix of each, have had conversations with me and many others about how this deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is too secretive. We have had conversations about how the U.S. Trade Representative is not answering the concerns of Members, even supporters of TPA and TPP, on issues such as currency, workers' protections, workers' rights, tobacco, and public health. Starting today, we need to make sure any Trans-Pacific Partnership deal--and that is the deal we will vote on later. I am assuming TPA will pass today. I hope not. I assume it will pass, go to the President, and I assume he will sign it. The next question is, What happens with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is 12 countries coming together. It includes a handful of countries in the Western Hemisphere, including the three NAFTA countries--Canada, the United States, and Mexico--a couple of South American countries and Asia and the Australian subcontinent countries will be part of this trade agreement. If China is added to it, we hope there is a vote in the Congress, although there is no promise of that from the administration--but we need to make sure any deal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership includes strong labor protections. There are always big promises about labor protections, but a President has yet to deliver on these labor protections. I am particularly concerned about Vietnam, a large country of tens of millions--approaching 100 million people. Vietnam is a country that has one labor union controlled by the Communist Party. It is a country that doesn't have collective bargaining rights. Yet we are assuming somehow that wages will come up high enough in Vietnam that they don't undercut U.S. wages, even though they don't have free trade unions, they don't have collective bargaining, and there is no mechanism so far in these trade agreements, whether it is TPA or Trans-Pacific Partnership, that Vietnam reach these wage levels and begins to move toward collective bargaining and free trade unionism prior to its admission to TPP. We need to figure out all of those questions. We need to make sure that any TPP deal has strong environmental protections. Again, there were big promises on other agreements, but there is never much on the delivery side of these promises. We want to see strong currency provisions. Again, there have been big promises on TPP but with little results in the past, and so far we have an administration that is not willing to carry it out. We need to make sure we protect Medicare and Medicaid from investor- state dispute resolution, and we need to preserve access to medicines. We know citizens in the developing world simply can't afford the high cost of Western medicines. Much of the time Americans can't afford the high cost of medicines, and we are an affluent country. When we look at some of these TPP countries in South America and Asia, they can afford them even less. We need to make sure there are strong preserve-access-to-medicine provisions. We need to include protections that prevent this deal from being a tool for tobacco, which is perhaps the simplest to understand and one of the most troubling because of its moral bankruptcy. This body is about to vote for fast-track legislation. If we don't stop this train from going down the track on which it seems to be heading, we are handing Big Tobacco even more power to addict children to tobacco in the developing world and countries that don't have nearly the public health system we do and don't have the affluence to be able to fight back against Big Tobacco. We have been pretty successful in doing that and protecting our children. About 15 years ago when I was a member of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, I remember seven tobacco executives came to our committee. There was a picture on just about every front page of newspapers in the country, where the seven CEOs of the biggest tobacco companies in the country, some of the biggest in the world, raised their right hands and pledged to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and out and out lied to that committee about nicotine and cigarettes and the addictive qualities of nicotine. These same tobacco companies, over time, pledged that they would no longer put billboards near schoolyards, pledged that they would no longer hand out sample packages of cigarettes near schools, pledged that they would stop their Joe Camel promotions. I remember the ranking member of the Finance Committee, Senator Wyden, was as outraged as I was with Big Tobacco. I asked them a question at this hearing. I said: You are willing to do that in this country? You are willing to say that you will no longer have billboards near high schools, and you will no longer hand out samples of cigarette packs near schools, and you will stop your Joe Camel ads? I then said: Are you willing to do that in other countries around the world? The answer was: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. When these tobacco companies go to the developing world and peddle their poisons, they know public health in the developing world is about fighting cholera, fighting AIDS, fighting malaria, and fighting tuberculosis. They simply don't have the public health resources that we do in our country to fight Big Tobacco. That is my concern about what could happen. I will talk for a moment about how Big Tobacco uses trade agreements generally to undermine public health. We know tobacco use is the world's leading cause of preventable death. It is why countries around the world are passing stricter laws to protect their citizens from the massive health risks tobacco poses. Big Tobacco has turned trade deals into a tool for defeating commonsense international public health efforts. How could that happen? Why would a trade deal be a vehicle to weaken anti-tobacco laws, the laws that especially protect children against addictive tobacco? Here is how it happens: It uses a trade agreement provision known as investor-state dispute settlement to attack a nation's public health law. Under this process, corporations use trade agreements to dispute domestic laws that they say undermine their investments. I will use the best example, but there are several. Not many years ago, Australia passed the Tobacco Plain Packaging Act. Big Tobacco challenged this law. First of all, they opposed it in the Australian Legislature. They lobbied against it, but they were unsuccessful. The Australian Legislature passed the plain packaging consumer protection anti-addicting children tobacco law in 2011. Then, they sued, and it went to the Australian supreme court. Big Tobacco lost that case too. So you know what they did? I give them credit for being pretty clever. They paid their lawyers a lot of money. Big Tobacco challenged this new law under the Australia-Hong Kong Bilateral Investment Treaty in a World Trade Organization dispute settlement proceeding. That means although Australian courts had ruled in favor of this law--their legislature passed it and the supreme court said it is constitutional-- Big Tobacco, from the platform of Hong Kong, sued the Australian Government, saying, fundamentally, that was takings, that would undermine their profits. I believe a three-person tribunal will hear this case. These are not Australian lawyers. Australia has nothing to do with this case except that they are going to be victimized. I know the Presiding Officer cares about sovereignty for our country. I know this cuts across party lines. Conservatives, as much as progressives, care about sovereignty and public health. What we are doing is turning over the sovereignty of our Nation to these tribunals that can undercut our sovereignty. Tobacco companies have launched similar cases against Uruguay and Togo over proposed laws. Cases like these can bankrupt small countries. Togo is one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth. It was forced to give up its tobacco labeling laws, bowing under pressure from Philip Morris, a company whose sales, I believe, are larger than the GDP of Togo-- bowing under pressure from Philip Morris, which threatened an ``incalculable amount of trade litigation.'' So here are some U.S. trade lawyers who threatened to sue a poor African government or, in some cases, Latin American government which, once it exercised its sovereignty to protect its children against potential addictive tobacco marketing--marketing that will lead to children being addicted to tobacco--but they back off because they can't afford to go to court against the deep pockets of Philip Morris. This is Big Tobacco's strategy: Litigate and bankrupt countries into submission. What we are facing is huge corporations using trade laws to blackmail countries--call it another word if you want; I think ``blackmail'' is about as close as it gets--into overturning laws that were passed by their legislature and usually ratified by their court system. People from another country--a very rich country--and one of the richest industries in that country, represented by some of the most privileged Harvard- and Yale-trained lawyers, are saying: We are going to overturn your democratically elected law because our profits are more important than protecting your children in Togo or your children in Uruguay, than protecting your children's health. That is fundamentally what they are saying. So a vote today--since we haven't fixed tobacco--on fast-track is essentially saying--unless the people voting for it are going to go to bat, for a change, against Big Tobacco--fundamentally, we are saying it is OK for Big Tobacco and it is the privilege of the Big Tobacco lawyers to go to court and choose large tobacco profits over 15- and 16--or may I say 12- and 13-year-old children's health in poor countries in the developing world. That is a rather uneven match. Yet we ratify that with a ``yes'' vote today. (Mr. TOOMEY assumed the Chair.) We also have a responsibility to look out for the American worker who we know will be hurt by this deal. We know that--while I may disagree with the Presiding Officer from Pennsylvania over whether these trade agreements produce net jobs or what he, I think, believes--I believe these trade agreements produce a net loss of jobs. That aside, people on both sides of this debate understand and have acknowledged that because of our actions, because of what we do here in this body and in the House and in the White House--what we do here with this trade agreement will throw some people out of jobs. We know there will be dislocation. People will lose their jobs because of our decisions. So how in the world could we possibly pass this without first taking care of those workers who lose their jobs? We make a decision; you get thrown out of work. My colleague makes a decision; you get thrown out of work. We are just going to turn our backs because we don't really care about helping you even though you lost your job because of our decision. So TAA is particularly important. It is not that we should pass the trade adjustment assistance; it is what we should do with it. I am disappointed that the TAA bill being considered today is significantly less generous to those workers than it should be. There will be many workers who lose their jobs. Even if we pass TAA, there will be many workers who lose their jobs who will not be taken care of under TAA. It does not make the program available to all workers. I am disappointed that the bipartisan funding levels--which almost every Democrat in this body cosponsored--in my legislation that included a more generous level for TAA--we agreed to it in 2011 in this body, but for no reason at all, those numbers were cut. I want to expand eligibility. I want to increase its funding. We are making it easier to pass TPP, but we are cutting the TAA Program by 20 percent. So how does that figure? We are saying we are going to pass this trade agreement--40 percent of the world's economy-- yet we are cutting the protection for workers, the aid for those workers who lose their jobs because of our decisions in this body. We are cutting those workers 20 percent. Last, we have an opportunity in this bill today to once again support the Leveling the Playing Field Act and ensure it gets to the President's desk. This will be the vote after the TPA vote. This bill is essential to protect our manufacturers from illegal foreign competition. We can't have trade promotion without trade enforcement. This is not controversial. It shouldn't be partisan. Regardless of how one votes on TPA, we need to make sure our deals are enforced. Leveling the playing field will increase U.S. companies' ability to fight back against unfair trade practices. It is critical for our businesses, and it is critical for our workers who are drowning under a flood of illegally subsidized imports. It has the support of businesses and workers, Republicans and Democrats. I want to particularly thank Senators Portman and Graham and Casey for their work in support of this issue. No matter where we stand on TPA, we should all be able to come together to demand enforcement of our trade laws. We cannot have trade promotion without trade enforcement and without protecting those workers who we know will be left behind. We know these agreements cause wages to stagnate. We know these agreements cause factories to close. They cause imports to increase. They devastate families and communities. This is a terrible mistake we will make--which we have made over and over and over and over--if we pass this today. If we pass TPA, it is the same mistake we made with NAFTA--big promises of job increases, wages going up. Bad results. We did it when we passed PNTR. We did it when we passed CAFTA, the Central America Free Trade Agreement. And we are about to do it again. Shame on us. At least take care of workers if we are going to pass this legislation. 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, I rise to oppose the motion to invoke cloture on TPA, the so-called fast-track legislation. I am still incredulous, as I have watched this trade nondebate, if you will, at the speed at which, time after time, the majority leader has tried to shut down debate. It has happened again and again, and that is compounded by the secrecy of this whole process. I can't count the number of times in my State of Ohio and in meetings in Washington, with people from all over the country, that people have said we have little or no access to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. TPA, in the past--fast-track--has actually been sort of a rule book for how we should negotiate trade agreements and, at the same time, has been a direction on how to negotiate these trade agreements and a rule book on how it is presented on the Senate floor. Yet none of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations by Ambassador Froman have been informed at all by a TPA because we haven't had a TPA yet. We haven't even had an instruction booklet in the past. At the same time, we have gotten the worst of both worlds because we are voting on TPA, and we really haven't been able to see what is in TPP. I know supporters of TPP will say we are going to have 60 days now, but Members are casting their votes now--where 60 votes are required and they have maximum leverage-- to put no final point on it, just giving up the leverage they have as we are still kept in the dark on what is happening. Let me give one example before I get to where I think we are making a mistake by moving so quickly today, in essence, fast-tracking fast- track. One example, my office and I personally have repeatedly spoken to the President of the United States and the U.S. Trade Representative, Ambassador Froman, repeatedly asking them to fix some of the language on tobacco. Because one of the things that apparently--we really don't know for sure--the Trans-Pacific Partnership does is it gives even more power to American tobacco companies--more power to American tobacco companies to have influence over laws in particularly small countries which don't have the wherewithal and can't afford the huge legal bills a large tobacco company can afford to write public health law. If a small country wants to write a law to protect their children from marketing of tobacco products--which is what we have done in this country--the U.S. tobacco company or British tobacco company can--let's keep it here. The U.S. tobacco company can threaten a lawsuit against those countries, and those countries are probably going to back off because they probably can't afford to go to court with the big American tobacco company. Even something as clearly violative of the public interest and of public health as what damage Big Tobacco inflicts on children has not, to our knowledge, been addressed. Again, so much of this is secretive that we don't even know that. That is why there is anger in this country and why there is--so many people in this country tell me, so many in my State: Why are you moving so fast? Why is this coming up right now? Why don't we know more about this whole process? Yet again, the majority leader is shutting down debate. He will be joined, I assume, by a small number, a distinct, small number of minority Democrats, getting up over the 60-vote margin so they can shut down debate, so they can move the TPA--the fast-track--forward, so they can get the Trans-Pacific Partnership down the road. No matter which side of the TPP debate, no matter which side of the trade promotion authority, TPA, fast-track--no matter which side you are on, it is clear that our trade policy creates winners and losers. It is clear. Even the most vigorous cheerleaders for free trade--the Wall Street Journal editorial board, for instance--even the strongest free-traders, even though people who reflectively support these free- trade agreements acknowledge there are winners and losers. They will argue that these trade agreements create more jobs than they lose. I don't agree with that. They argue that. Put that aside. But they also acknowledge that people lose jobs because of decisions we make. We are about to pass fast-track here. We are about to pass trade promotion authority, leading probably to the Trans-Pacific Partnership having a reasonable chance of passage. We are about to do that. We are making that decision here. Members of Congress, people who are well paid, with government-financed retirements and health care--we are about to make those decisions, and we know--we are knowingly making that decision, acknowledging that some people will lose their jobs because of a decision we make, but we are not going to take care of those workers. We are going to pass today the TPA, the trade promotion authority, fast-track. We are going to pass that and ignore those workers. How shameful is that that we know the decisions we are making in this body--we are making the decisions, the President of the United States makes this decision, the House of Representatives has made this decision, the Senate is about to make this decision, we are making this decision, knowing people will lose their jobs because of our actions. Yet we are unwilling to provide for those workers who lose their jobs. Let me give a little history, a special message to Congress. In January of 1962, President Kennedy said: When considerations of national policy make it desirable to avoid higher tariffs, those injured by that competition should not be required to bear the full brunt of the impact. Rather, the burden of economic adjustment should be borne in part by the Federal Government. That is President Kennedy at the advent, at the beginning, at the creation of the trade adjustment assistance, the support for workers who lose their jobs because of--again, I repeat--decisions we make in this body, in the House of Representatives, in the White House. We make decisions on trade. We know people will lose their jobs. We should help them. It should be our moral responsibility to help them. Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana said: ``No small group of firms and workers should be made to bear the full burden of the costs of a program whose great benefits enrich the Nation as a whole.'' This is as true today as it was 53 years ago. It is not a Democratic idea. It is not a Republican idea. Everyone from the Cato Institute--a libertarian-oriented think tank in Washington, a bunch of well-paid scholars who make pronouncements from on high about various kinds of public policy issues--to the Wall Street Journal--a similar body but one with greater ability to disseminate information--even those two venerable institutions admit the trade agreements do not create winners everywhere. A Cato Institute trade briefing says, ``All of those job losses are a painful but necessary part of the larger process of innovation and productivity increases.'' I am always a bit amused when people who--again, well-educated, good pay, dress like this, good benefits, good retirement, good health care--make pronunciations saying: Well, job losses are painful--not to us, of course. The same as editorial writers who make these decisions, these pronouncements on trade, they are not losing their jobs. People in my State are losing jobs on these fair trade agreements. We are going to inflict this pain. As the Cato Institute and the Wall Street Journal say, by the decisions we make, we are going to inflict pain on these workers. People are going to lose jobs in my town of Mansfield, OH. People are going to lose jobs where I grew up. People are going to lose jobs in Cleveland where I live now. People are going to lose jobs in Zanesville and Newark because of decisions we make today on fast- track, because of decisions we will make next year on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. People are going to lose their jobs, but we are going to vote today to cut off debate, and we are going to forget, at least temporarily, about helping those workers who lose jobs because of decisions we make. How immoral is that? How shameful is that? What a betrayal we are inflicting on those workers if we make this decision today. Former Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel writes, ``Even [free trade's] most fervent admirers concede trade creates winners and losers.'' I will debate until the cows come home the net benefits of these trade agreements. I think they are net job loss. But even if you believe these trade agreements are net job-gainers--I don't think there is a lot of evidence of that--but even if you believe that, we know people lose their jobs because of decisions we make. That is why Republicans in the past have supported trade adjustment assistance in principle and in policy going back decades. Fifteen years ago, President George W. Bush said, ``I recognize that some American workers may face adjustment challenges''--that means they get thrown out of work. It is a nice way a President might talk about people he has left behind. Put that aside. ``I recognize that some American workers may face adjustment challenges as a result of trade.'' At least to President Bush's credit--I wish his words would be followed today on this floor by the majority leader, by Republican Leader McConnell as he cuts off debate and leaves behind trade adjustment assistance. President Bush said, ``I support helping these workers by reauthorizing and improving trade adjustment assistance programs that will give workers impacted by trade new skills, help them find new jobs quickly, and provide them with financial assistance.'' I can give lots of stories about people I know in Youngstown, Lima, Dayton, Hamilton, and people in Portsmouth who lost their jobs because of trade, but at least they have gotten a helping hand from a government that used to have their backs and believe in them--at least until today--from a government that actually will extend that hand and help them retrain. Maybe they can become a nurse, maybe they can work in information technology, maybe they can become a radiology technologist at the local hospital. Earlier this year, my colleague John Cornyn--Republican from Texas, the senior Senator and assistant Republican leader--told reporters that ``there is no doubt that the benefits of more trade do not fall uniformly. There are some segments of the economy that don't prosper as well.'' We know that. We have seen that acknowledgement across the board. Yet today Leader McConnell is going to cut off debate, even though decisions we have made have cost people their jobs. That is why we have a moral obligation. It is not a new idea. It is not a partisan idea. It is universally accepted. Trade deals don't benefit everybody. That is why this moral obligation to include trade adjustment assistance in any package with TPA is so important. We can't send a framework for a new trade deal to the President's desk without assistance for the workers who will be left behind, but that is not what we are doing today. Today, it is full-speed ahead, cut off debate, move ahead on fast-track, move ahead on trade promotion authority. I assume a number of my Democratic colleagues are going along with it. I hope the wrath of people in this country--if the House and Senate refuse to do what some of their leaders say they will, that they will pass trade adjustment assistance, that they will take care of those workers--if they don't live up to that promise--and many times in the past they haven't lived up to similar promises--a lot of my colleagues are going to go home and face people who say: Wait. You made a decision. I got thrown out of a job because of a decision you made, because of a decision you made as a House Member, because of a decision you made as a Senator, because of a decision you made, Mr. President. I was thrown out of work, and you passed on June 23--or whatever today is--fast-track without taking care of me, even though it was your decision that I lose my job. What kind of government--what kind of principles do we live under here? In March, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in National Review Online: To be sure, any trade deal, while a net plus overall, produces winners and losers. But the TPP will be accompanied by so-called Trade Adjustment Assistance, training and subsidies to help those negatively affected. Again, Krauthammer, as he is about 95 percent of the time, is wrong. He is wrong that it is going be accompanied by the trade adjustment assistance. The assumption all along, even among TPP proponents, has been that TPA would be passed in tandem with aid for workers. But you know, even though that is what we did first here, Republicans in the House of Representatives are unwilling to vote for them together. They are just not going to vote. Speaker Boehner, for some reason, acquiesced to the President of the United States, pulled them apart, and had separate votes. Think about the message we will send. If we put another huge trade deal--parenthetically, once-majority leader, Republican leader Trent Lott said: You can't pass a trade agreement in an even-numbered year. Do you know why he said that? He said that because people don't like trade deals in this country. People know NAFTA sold them out. They know CAFTA sold them out. They know PNTR with China sold them out. They know Korea sold them out. We heard these promises over and over. With NAFTA, we were promised 200,000 jobs in 2 years. Thank you, President Bush 1, and thank you, President Clinton, for that. We lost 680,000 net jobs. Central America Free Trade Agreement--thank you, President Bush 2, for that. Promises were made, big promises about job increases, big promises about wages going up. It didn't happen. Wages stayed flat. Jobs were lost. Thank you, President Bush 2, for that. Korea, South Korea Free Trade Agreement, negotiated in part by President Bush, pushed through the Senate by President Obama--thank you, Mr. Presidents of both parties, for that. They told us 70,000 jobs would be created out of the South Korea Free Trade Agreement. No, we have lost 75,000 jobs. Using the same formula that we have--we have seen this over and over. We know what happens. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that between 2009 and 2012, two-thirds of displaced manufacturing workers who did find new jobs ended up taking lower paying jobs. Most of those workers saw wage losses of more than 20 percent. You can debate whether the gains others experienced make these losses worth it. I don't think they do. I think if you have traveled darned near anywhere--if Members of Congress spent a little more time with people who can't contribute to them, with people who don't belong to a local rotary club, with people who might just work hard, play by the rules, not make a lot of money, barely make it, sometimes have their house foreclosed on, sometimes lose their job--if we would spend a little more time with people like that, I think we would see how these trade agreements are working. There is a debate to be had. I will cede it is debatable, whether these trade agreements--whether the evidence is that they create jobs or lose jobs. I think it is pretty clear they lose jobs. But there is no debate. There is no debate on what actually happens here. Because of decisions--I will repeat--before this vote coming up in about 60 seconds, because of decisions we make in this body--the President makes, Senators make, Congress men and women make--because of decisions we make in this body, people in our States, whether it is Arkansas or Arizona, Oregon, Utah or my State of Ohio, people lose jobs because of decisions we make. There is no question people lose jobs because of decisions we make. Anything short of providing for those workers who lose their jobs today, not doing this on a promise--we are basically trusting the majority leader who doesn't really like, I understand, the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program. We are relying on the word of Speaker Boehner, who doesn't particularly like trade adjustment assistance. We know most of the Members of his party in the House of Representatives do not particularly like trade adjustment assistance. We are going to rely on their promise. We are voting today on the fly. We are saying to workers in this country: Yes, we have made decisions that may have cost you your job. We are going to try to help you when you lose that job, but we are still going to go ahead today and do that. That is why I asked my colleagues to vote no on this motion today to invoke cloture on trade promotion authority.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I would like to mention that as to the other two absences, Senator Menendez had voted no on cloture before, and Senator Lee had voted no on cloture before. So the vote would have been 61 to 39. More importantly, this is a day of celebration in the corporate suites of this country, to be sure, because they have another corporate-sponsored trade agreement that will mean more money in some investors' pockets. It will mean more plant closings in Ohio, Arizona, Delaware, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Maine, and all over this country. Most importantly, what I didn't understand about the vote today is that even though the Wall Street Journal, the CATO Institute, and others acknowledge that, as to the decisions we make here on trade agreements--while they say it is a net increase in jobs--people lose their jobs because of the decisions we make. So we make decisions here today that throw people out of work. We know that. Across the political spectrum that is acknowledged. But we today don't do anything to help those workers that lose their jobs. We make a decision to throw people in Mansfield, OH, and Cleveland, OH, out of work, but then we don't take care of those workers that lost their jobs because of our decisions. It is shameful.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I rise today to address America's retirement savings crisis. A 2013 survey conducted by the Governors of the Federal Reserve System found that roughly 31 percent of Americans have no retirement savings or access to a defined-benefit pension. In addition, 19 percent of respondents nearing retirement--those aged 55 to 64--reported having zero savings or pension to rely on in the coming years. In light of these figures it is more important than ever that Congress ensure America's seniors have access to the Social Security benefits they have earned. Yet provisions such as the Windfall Elimination Provision, WEP, and the Government Pension Offset, GPO, prevent millions of Americans--including teachers, firefighters, and police officers--from receiving their full benefits. It is time Congress repealed them. This afternoon, I, along with Senator Collins and a number of my Senate colleagues from both sides of the aisle, introduced the Social Security Fairness Act. This bipartisan bill will repeal both the WEP and GPO provisions which Congress enacted in 1983 and 1977, respectively. In December 2014, these unfair provisions chipped away at more than 2 million Americans' Social Security benefits. That same month, in my State of Ohio, more than 200,000 Ohioans had their Social Security benefits reduced because of these provisions. Over the past 35 years, fewer and fewer workers have been given access to defined-benefit plans, and, today, only about half of the total U.S. workforce is covered by an employer-sponsored retirement plan. That is why Social Security is critical for so many. Congress should make sure that every American has access to all the Social Security benefits he or she has earned. Repealing these provisions is an important step in that direction. I ask my colleagues to join me in repealing the WEP and GPO by cosponsoring this legislation.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I rise today to address America's retirement savings crisis. A 2013 survey conducted by the Governors of the Federal Reserve System found that roughly 31 percent of Americans have no retirement savings or access to a defined-benefit pension. In addition, 19 percent of respondents nearing retirement--those aged 55 to 64--reported having zero savings or pension to rely on in the coming years. In light of these figures it is more important than ever that Congress ensure America's seniors have access to the Social Security benefits they have earned. Yet provisions such as the Windfall Elimination Provision, WEP, and the Government Pension Offset, GPO, prevent millions of Americans--including teachers, firefighters, and police officers--from receiving their full benefits. It is time Congress repealed them. This afternoon, I, along with Senator Collins and a number of my Senate colleagues from both sides of the aisle, introduced the Social Security Fairness Act. This bipartisan bill will repeal both the WEP and GPO provisions which Congress enacted in 1983 and 1977, respectively. In December 2014, these unfair provisions chipped away at more than 2 million Americans' Social Security benefits. That same month, in my State of Ohio, more than 200,000 Ohioans had their Social Security benefits reduced because of these provisions. Over the past 35 years, fewer and fewer workers have been given access to defined-benefit plans, and, today, only about half of the total U.S. workforce is covered by an employer-sponsored retirement plan. That is why Social Security is critical for so many. Congress should make sure that every American has access to all the Social Security benefits he or she has earned. Repealing these provisions is an important step in that direction. I ask my colleagues to join me in repealing the WEP and GPO by cosponsoring this legislation.