Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise to discuss the President's nominees for the Federal bench. I strongly believe that women should be in charge of their own healthcare decisions. Family planning choices are deeply personal, and women should be free to make the choice that is right for them, their family, faith, personal beliefs, or medical needs. As States like Alabama, Georgia, and others attempt to roll back women's access to reproductive healthcare, it is more important than ever that we work together to protect this right. Unfortunately, too many of President Trump's nominees to the Federal courts hold beliefs that fail to respect long-settled precedent on women's healthcare. For example, the Senate recently voted to confirm Sarah Pitlyk to a Federal district court. As an attorney, she defended Iowa's unconstitutional ban on abortions at 6 weeks. Pitlyk has also worked to defend the Trump administration's Title X gag rule, which prohibits healthcare providers who receive this critical funding from discussing the full range of family planning options with their patients. And finally, she lacked any meaningful trial experience. It is no wonder the American Bar Association found that she was unqualified to serve on the district court. Despite Roe v. Wade being the law of the land, too many of President Trump's nominees have actively sought to undermine the rights of women to control their own reproductive health choices. Their amicus briefs, legal writings, and arguments demonstrate a hostility towards women's rights that are incompatible with the role of a Federal judge. I will continue to evaluate President Trump's judicial nominees based on their stances on women's reproductive health and remain committed to voting for nominees who have a strong record on upholding constitutionally protected reproductive healthcare rights. Accordingly, had I been present in the Senate, I would have voted against the nominations of Michael Park to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Dan Collins to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Peter Phipps to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Wendy Williams Berger to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Brian Buescher to the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, Michael Liburdi to the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, Sean Jordan to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Brantley Starr to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Jeffrey Vincent Brown to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, and William Shaw Stickman IV to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Stephen Menashi to serve on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and Lawrence VanDyke to serve on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Moving forward, it is my hope that the President will nominate individuals who respect women's healthcare decisions.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wanted to spend a few moments to recognize my colleague and friend, Senator Isakson from Georgia. When I first came to the Senate in 2009--a decade ago, it surprises me to say--I was on the Banking Committee. We were in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and millions of Americans were losing their homes each month. We held a hearing on housing, and I remember Senator Isakson coming to testify because, before he was in politics, he had spent several years in the private sector working in real estate. I appreciated that moment because, one, I had also spent some time in business before politics, and two, because it was so refreshing to hear from someone who actually knew what they were talking about. Over the past 10 years, I have had the benefit of Senator Isakson's experience, friendship, and wisdom on both the HELP and Finance Committees. In Johnny, so many of us have had a model for how to get things done even in this moment of partisan division. He was a welcome throwback to a time when people didn't come to this town just to spend every moment on cable news but to get things done for the people they came here to represent. Johnny's record suggests there is nothing quaint or naive about that approach to the work because over his 15 years in the Senate, he has managed to secure quite a few bipartisan accomplishments, including several things we have worked on together. I remember Johnny really digging in and getting his hands dirty on the SAVE Act, our bill to make Federal mortgage loan agencies consider the returns from energy efficiency when they determine your ability to make your monthly payments. We passed that out of the Senate, and it was a tremendous credit to Johnny's determination and focus. We passed a bill to modernize the FDA's medical device inspections and to strengthen patient access to rehabilitation hospitals in Colorado and Georgia. We passed an amendment to strengthen funding for early learning programs. And we introduced bills together to provide tax relief for AmeriCorps members who earned Segal Awards to help pay for college. I could go on, and it is a credit to Johnny's broad record of bipartisan work. Johnny has been a particular champion for our veterans. As a former member of the Georgia Air National Guard, Johnny has been a steady and effective advocate for those who have served. Last year, he was instrumental in passing a bipartisan bill to make it far easier for veterans to take their benefits to private doctors for care, among other long-overdue reforms. With our large population of veterans in Colorado, we were especially grateful to Johnny for his leadership. There is a lot more I could share, but the point is, Johnny has used his time here well--with real results for the people of Georgia. He didn't do it through bullying or shouting or threatening to bring the Senate to its knees if he didn't get his way. He did it Johnny's way-- with unfailing kindness, grace, humor, and dogged persistence. It would be easy to mistake Johnny's kindness for a lack of intensity or determination, but behind his easy smile is a fierce devotion to Georgia and a welcome impatience with the inaction of this town. That approach is how Johnny leaves this body not only with a considerable record of accomplishment but with a long list of admirers on both sides of the aisle who are now wondering who is going to host the annual bipartisan BBQ. We are sad to see him go, and we wish him all the best as he returns to Georgia to focus on his health and spend time with his wife, Diane, their three kids and eight grandkids. Johnny, I wish you the very best. Know that the Senate will feel your absence and cherish the example you set here.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I want to spend a few minutes recognizing our late colleague and my friend Senator Kay Hagan. Kay and I both came to the Senate in 2009. I had the privilege of working with her on two committees--HELP and Banking. As a former vice president of the North Carolina National Bank, she had a lot more to offer to that committee than I had, and I tried to learn from her whenever I could. Kay and I both came to the Senate in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression. We were losing 700,000 jobs a month, and millions were losing their homes. It was an incredibly difficult moment for the country, but it brought out all of Kay's best qualities. Everyone knew that Kay faced some of the toughest politics of any Member of our caucus, but in those early days, I saw her take vote after vote on some of the hardest issues. She never wavered. She voted for the Recovery Act to save the economy when we were in free fall. She voted for Dodd-Frank to restore confidence and accountability to the financial sector, which was something she knew quite a lot about. She spoke out against amendment No. 1 in North Carolina and for marriage equality. She also cast a decisive vote for the Affordable Care Act. As a Democratic Senator from North Carolina and as a freshman Senator, none of those positions were easy to take, but she knew they were the right places to be for her State and for the country. Because Kay did what she did, millions of Americans kept jobs they would have lost, and millions of Americans gained quality, affordable health insurance for the first time in their lives. In her home State, the LGBT community had a Senator in Washington who, for the first time in history, was willing to fight for their full and equal rights. One of our colleagues, the senior Senator from Tennessee, likes to say: If you have come to Washington just to hear yourself talk, just stay home and get a job on the radio. It is not worth the trouble of your coming all the way here. Kay didn't come to Washington to talk. She came to work and to lead. Over her term, Kay was a fierce and principled advocate for North Carolina. As a member of the Committee on Armed Services, she helped to prevent cuts to tuition programs for veterans. She sponsored the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help close the gender pay gap across the country. She worked across the aisle to promote conservation and outdoor recreation, which is something we appreciate in my home State of Colorado. She was a lot less interested in the empty politics of this town and a lot more interested in making progress for the people of North Carolina and for our country. She was a voice of reason, pragmatism, and humility in this body, which sorely lacks all three. In other words, Kay took her job seriously but never herself, and no matter how difficult it might have been, she never failed to put the people of North Carolina ahead of the politics of the moment. It is why she earned deep respect from both sides of the aisle, not only for her work ethic but for her kindness, her warmth, and her grace. There was not a room in this complex, including the one I am standing in right now, that wasn't brightened the moment that Kay Hagan walked in. To Chip, her husband, and to their kids--Jeanette, Tilden, and Carrie--I hope you know how proud we all are of Kay. She represented the best qualities of North Carolina. It is why her colleagues adored her. It is why her staff loved her and revered her, and it is why all of us who had the privilege of working with her in this body will miss her terribly. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, Republican tax legislation in 2017 was completely misguided. Despite our best efforts, the bill passed in the middle of the night. It was completely partisan, not a single hearing. There wasn't a single Democratic amendment, and this is what that bill looked like. As I repeatedly pointed out, the Republican taxpayers gave 572,000 taxpayers, with incomes over $1 million, more in tax cuts than the 90 million Americans who had incomes below $50,000 a year, making income inequality worse in this country. In all, 43 percent of the benefits of the GOP bill went to the top 5 percent, households with incomes over $319,000 per year. It is why I came down to this floor repeatedly to oppose that tax bill. Since 2001, the United States of America has borrowed $5 trillion from the Chinese for the privilege of giving tax cuts mostly to the wealthiest people in our country. We never paid for any of it. We said the tax cuts would pay for themselves. They never have paid for themselves. Instead, we issued bonds, and we issued debt. The Chinese bought most of that debt to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest people in America. Over that period of time, we actually made income inequality worse during a time when income inequality is the highest it has been since 1928. We have had no economic mobility for 50 years for the bottom 90 percent of Americans--for 9 out of 10 Americans. If I had to summarize my townhall meetings in Colorado, a place with one of the strongest economies in this country, it would be that people come to the townhalls and they say: Michael, we are working incredibly hard, and no matter what we do, we can't afford housing, we can't afford healthcare, we can't afford higher education, and we can't afford early childhood education. ``We can't afford a middle-class life'' is what they are saying to me, the vast majority of people. I have said that in an editorial board recently, and somebody said: Do you mean the vast majority? And I said: Yes, the vast majority. That is what it looks like when you have an economy that is not driving growth from the bottom up, when only the people at the very top are the ones that are benefiting from it. There are people who don't come to my townhalls because they are too busy working two and three jobs, like the people I used to work for when I was superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, a school district where most of the kids live in poverty and most of the kids are kids of color. I know what their parents would say if they weren't too busy to come to my townhalls. This is what they would say: We are killing ourselves. We are killing ourselves, and no matter what we do, we can't get our kids out of poverty. That is straining our democracy. It is straining the whole idea that we are a land of opportunity, when there is no economic mobility for 90 percent of Americans and when people who are in poverty, no matter how hard they work, can't get out of poverty, can't get their kids early childhood education, and can't get their kids decent health care. And most places don't have access to early childhood education, even if they could afford it. Notwithstanding this challenge over the decade, what we have done in Congress is to borrow money from the Chinese to give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country. That is not all we have done. We borrowed another $5.6 trillion to pay for 20 years' worth of wars in the Middle East. That is $11 trillion, $12 trillion, $13 trillion that from the vantage point of the people struggling in this economy, we might as well have lit on fire. For that amount of money, we could have fixed every road and bridge in America. We could have increased teacher salaries by 50 percent. We could have paid for preschool for every kid in America who needs it-- and that is every kid in America. We could have made it easier for people to afford college instead of having to spend 25 years of their life paying back their college loans, like some of the pages who are here tonight are going to have to do when they graduate from college. We could have made Social Security solvent for my kids' generation. We could have paid down some of our deficits and our debt, which is now over $1 trillion, thanks to irresponsible policies of the President with the able assistance of the majority leader. Tomorrow--I take no pleasure in saying this--we are being asked to vote on something that will make the Republican tax bill much worse, effectively repealing the cap on the State and local tax deduction, what is known as the SALT cap. It is a bad idea. Before I get into that, I want to acknowledge my colleagues' very legitimate concerns who are going to be supporting this legislation. First, the Trump administration designed the SALT cap to take revenge against people who didn't vote for Donald Trump, to take revenge against some deep-blue States and districts. That policy shouldn't be designed with political retribution in mind. Every single passing day, this guy who is our President looks more and more like a tyrant or a dictator who believes that the only people he serves are the people who voted for him, and he doesn't have a responsibility for the rest of the country. That is not right, and I can see why people would want to correct that injustice. It is an injustice, and I am not here to defend that injustice. It is wrong. Second, the Treasury rules to implement the SALT cap are overly broad in ways that harm existing programs with legitimate purposes. Nobody should be surprised at all that the Trump administration issued another sloppy policy that makes unnecessary opponents out of potential allies; that is, after all, their general approach to government. But while I agree with the concerns of the proponents of the resolution, I believe we can address all of them in a much more effective and targeted manner than undermining the SALT cap. Some proponents have said that this isn't actually valid--the State and local tax deduction--and if we wanted to write a bipartisan bill that isn't about SALT, we could deal with the other tax policy issues affected by the Treasury rule. But this is about the State and local tax deduction. So let me be very clear, the vast majority of the benefits of repealing the SALT cap would go to high-income Americans. Repeal would be extremely costly, and for that same cost, we could advance much more worthy efforts to help working and middle-class families all over the country. Let's take a look at what lifting the SALT cap would do. On this chart, these are the incomes of Americans, starting over here with people earning less than $25,000 and over here with people earning more than $153,000, and everybody else in between. The benefit of this resolution goes to people at the very top--the top 0.1 percent, who are people who have $3.3 million of income on average; the top 1 percent, who have an average income of $755,000; and the next 4 percent, who make $319,000. Together, that comprises the top 5 percent in America. Under this resolution, the top 5 percent will get 83 percent of the total, and 83 percent of the benefit will go to people making more than $319,000; and 56 percent of the benefit will go to the top 1 percent. So 56 percent of the benefit goes to the top 1 percent, or people making $755,000 a year. If we want to help the middle-class families who are harmed by the SALT cap, there are much less expensive and better targeted ways to do it. To put this in some perspective, SALT cap repeal is even worse for inequality than the Republican tax legislation--far worse. To summarize, 83 percent of the benefits of the SALT cap repeal go to the top 5 percent--83 percent--versus 43 percent in the GOP tax bill. We can say we are for a progressive tax bill and for fighting inequality or we can support the SALT deduction, but it is really hard to do both of those things. I feel strongly about it because of how irresponsible the other side has been. I know that is not the objective of people on my side, but the way we approach these issues really matters to the American people so they know whom we are fighting for. Instead of repealing the SALT cap, which gives 83 percent of the benefits to the richest people and makes income inequality even worse in America, for almost exactly the same amount of money, we could cut childhood poverty by 40 percent. That sounds like a useful thing to do for America at a time when you have the worst income inequality that we have had since 1928. In 1 year, we could cut childhood poverty in America by 40 percent with a simple change to the Tax Code that Sherrod Brown and I have written, called the American Family Act. It will cost $1 trillion over 10 years, which is about what the SALT cap costs. That would be a much more valuable use of our resources than giving the money to the people who are making more than $319,000, especially after the Republican Party passed the irresponsible bill they passed and we passed $5 trillion of tax cuts since 2001, almost all of which went to the wealthiest people in America, making income inequality worse instead of investing in our country, vainly waiting for it to trickle down to everybody else. As you can see on this chart, these are almost the same income levels that are seen on the previous page of who benefits from the American Family Act. Thirty-one percent of the benefits go to the people who are making less than $24,000--not 54 percent going to the top 1 percent, but 31 percent going to the bottom, the lowest income earners in America. Then, 24 percent goes to the folks who are a little less poor than that and, then, 19 percent and 19 percent. And if you are making above $119,000, you get 2 percent of the benefit of it. That to me seems like a much more reasonable approach, at a moment in the country's history when income inequality has been on the rise, economic mobility has been stagnant, and when we have an education system--and I say this as a former school superintendent, with no joy at all--that is actually reinforcing the income inequality we have rather than liberating people from it, because the best predictor of the quality of education is your parents' income to the point of savagery. That is the best predictor because your parents' income is an excellent predictor of where you will live, and that is an excellent predictor of the education you will have. The American people are desperate for relief in this economy. Republicans have made matters much worse by passing the Trump tax bill. I think Democrats should be on this floor fighting for progressive legislation that supports working people, that gives people a chance who are living in poverty to lift themselves out of poverty, and to give kids in this country a fighting chance no matter what the circumstances are of their birth. The good news is that all of those things are available to us if we would come together in a bipartisan way and actually invest in our country again and create a Tax Code that actually drives economic growth for everybody, not just the people at the very top; rewards work again, ends childhood poverty, and delivers an education system that liberates people from their economic circumstances instead of shackling them to it; and pursuing a climate change policy that actually drives economic opportunity throughout the United States in rural and urban areas. We have an incredible opportunity in front of us as a democracy to change the way our economy works so that everybody benefits from it when it grows. That is how you build a strong democracy. Donald Trump doesn't understand any of that, which is why he has pursued the policies he has pursued. It is important for us to fight those policies as well as offer ideas like the American Family Act, like increasing the earned income tax credit, like passing paid family leave, and raising the minimum wage. These are things we could do that will make an enormous difference to working people all over this country, and I believe that is the agenda we should be pursuing. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, last month, over 50 Americans were killed in mass shootings in this country while we were on the August recess when we should have been here doing our job. One hundred Americans are killed every day from gun violence. There are 100 desks in this room. There are 100 chairs by those desks. And if these were the Americans killed by gun violence, they would add up to every single desk that is in this room. Yet the majority leader didn't bring us back during the August recess. He didn't say we should cancel our vacation and come back to work for the American people. He hasn't put a bill on the floor or given an opportunity for anybody else to put a bill on the floor now that we have been back in session for the last 2 weeks. In the last 18 months, Colorado alone has lost 885 people to gun violence. That is a record in my State. The House of Representatives has done their job. I think more than 200 days ago, they passed background checks over there, and we haven't even taken them up over here. This isn't a matter of bringing up the bill and voting on the bill; we can't even get the bill to the floor. For 200 days, we haven't been able to bring the bill to the floor. Why? Because the majority leader of the United States of America says that he is only going to bring gun legislation to the floor if he knows what the President will sign. He is not capable, as the majority leader of the United States, to put an amendment on the floor for an up-or-down vote even when that amendment passed the House of Representatives 200 days ago and 96 percent of the American people support it. Ninety-six percent of the American people support it. Why can't he bring it to the floor? He says that only if the President tells him that he will sign it will he bring it to the floor. We all know how hard it is for the President to make up his mind about anything--particularly about guns when he has one thing to say right after a tragedy has happened, and then 2 days later, after he meets with the NRA, he is singing from a completely different song sheet. Here is what Mitch McConnell said in 2014: The Senate should be setting national priorities, not simply waiting on the White House to do it for us. I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. This is an independent branch of government. The 100 people sitting in this room have been sent here to represent the people who voted for us and the people who didn't vote for us. And 96 percent of them say they want background checks on guns, but we can't even have a vote. I would like to see a vote just so I could see who in this Chamber wants to vote against background checks. I think it would be amazing for the American people to learn that, instead of just hiding behind this myth that the President of the United States gets to decide what comes to the floor. He is not the majority leader. There is one person in America who gets to decide what comes to this floor--one person in America--and that is the majority leader, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky. It is not Donald Trump. He knew that in 2014, and he knows it today. But the NRA is too scared to see this thing come to the floor because they know that it will pass and that they will lose as a result of that. It is long past time for us to beat the NRA on this issue. I know my colleague from Washington State is here, so I will not go on for too long, but if I could, I will just take a couple of minutes. I am also from a Western State, the State of Colorado, and 20 years ago, we had one of the very first school shootings in this country. It was at Columbine High School. In the wake of that, we passed background checks. We passed the same bill that Mitch McConnell will not bring to the floor--the same bill almost 20 years ago. My oldest daughter is 20 years old. She was born right after Columbine. Our two other daughters are 19 and 15. Like so many children across this country, they have grown up thinking that going to school is unsafe, that they could be shot at school. They have had to do drills that we never had to do when we were kids--never had to do. They have the knowledge that the U.S. Congress doesn't care about them because for 20 years we have done nothing. In Colorado--a Western State, a Second Amendment State--we passed these background checks. As a result, every year, 2 or 3 percent of the people who come to buy a gun can't buy a gun because they are murderers or they are rapists or they are domestic abusers. They are people who shouldn't have a gun. I would like to see anybody come to this floor and tell me why Colorado would be safer if we didn't have those background checks; why we would be safer if murderers got guns and rapists got guns and domestic abusers got guns. They can't come here and do it. They are hiding from the vote, and it is their responsibility to vote. There is only one person in America who can hold that vote, and that is Mitch McConnell. I can tell you this: It is not because we are too busy around here. We were in session last week for 27 hours. That is not even a French workweek. That is pitiful--pitiful--27 hours. Do you know how many amendments we have considered in the 9 months that we have been here this year? We have considered 18. That is two amendments a month. We have passed four amendments in this broken place. It is pitiful. Before he became majority leader, Mitch McConnell came down here and said that we were going to work on Fridays, that we were going to have regular order. We had a 27-hour workweek. I can tell you this: It is not because we are considering the election protection legislation, which is one of the bipartisan bills the Senators in this Chamber want to vote on to respond to the Russian attack on our democracy. It is not because we are too busy with those bills. We are doing nothing here except for confirming judges for Donald Trump. I think I speak for my colleagues when I say I am willing to work more than 27 hours. I am willing to work a French workweek or a U.S. workweek if it means we could actually have votes on amendments that 96 percent of the American people support. I close by saying there is no one else to do this job but us. The House has done its job. Donald Trump can't make up his mind about anything. Maybe he would like us to send him the background checks to help him make up his mind about what he can do for the American people, but I can tell you this: Our kids can't do this. They are too busy. They are in school. They are trying to learn reading and math. They should not be asked to try to figure out how to stop these mass shootings in this country or what it would look like to have a representative body of the United States actually represent the people who sent us here instead of sitting around in our offices, trying to avoid hard votes. How is it a hard vote when 9 out of 10 Americans support it? It is only a hard vote because the NRA is taking names and watching this. I say to my colleagues: We would be so much better off, Democrats and Republicans, with our ripping this bandaid off and getting on with the business that the American people sent us here to do. Mitch McConnell should put on this floor these background checks. I thank my colleagues for their patience. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise after 10 years of being in the Senate and after having endured speech after speech after speech on this floor that has claimed the Republican Party is the party of fiscal discipline. It was politics that created something during the depths of the worst recession, called the tea party, which rallied all over America to stop what it said was runaway spending. When I arrived here, I actually believed that the Republican Party was a fiscally responsible party, that there was some principle behind it. I know better today. I was naive. It is all about politics. There have been five budget deals since 2013 between Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and whoever has happened to be in the White House. These deals were meant to overcome the idiocy of the across-the-board cuts that were created by the sequestration--which nobody in America understands but which are basically across-the-board cuts on spending-- that otherwise would have been investments in your family, maybe, or investments in our military. They were agreed to as part of a fiscal cliff deal in the dark of night, at 2 o'clock in the morning, by nobody--literally nobody--who had actually read the bill. Ever since then, politicians in Washington have been making deals to try to overcome it. When President Obama was President, this is how much money he was allowed to spend. Since Donald Trump has been President, this is the money that the Republicans have spent. This red is defense, and the blue is nondefense. Under President Obama the deals increased by an average of $33 billion above the sequester. The two deals under Donald Trump increased spending by $154 billion, four times as much--four times as much--at a moment when the President is saying our economy is the best it has ever been in American history. The result of this is that under Donald Trump the deficit has increased by 15 percent each year. The deficit just between last year and this year is up by 23 percent as a result of the Republican majority in the Senate and Donald Trump. We are on track to run $1 trillion deficits every year as far as the eye can see. That is after 10 years of economic growth and unemployment below 4 percent. At no time in our history have deficits been this large outside of a major war or a recession, which brings me to my second slide. This is the annual spending growth around here. This is the annual spending growth around here of defense and nondefense. They are both in here. Under President Obama, in his first term, the spending went up by 3 percent. We were in the worst recession since the Great Depression. He had to pass the Recovery Act. That is in this number. That is in this number. It was at the depths of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Three million Americans lost their homes, and 9 million Americans lost their jobs. We had a 10-percent unemployment rate-- not a 4-percent rate, not a 3 and change, but a 10-percent rate. In the name of fiscal responsibility, Republicans did nothing except berate the President for trying to save the economy and for what he was trying to do. I will come to that in a moment. This includes the Recovery Act. Overall growth--annual spending growth--grew by 3 percent during President Obama's first term. It fell by 2 percent during President Obama's second term. It has gone up by 4 percent during Trump's first term. It has increased more under this Republican President. Admittedly, he is not a conservative. It has grown more under this Republican President than it did when President Obama was trying to save the economy during the worst recession since the Great Depression. This 3 percent number includes the Recovery Act. The Republicans are now growing government spending by more than that--by more than that. Here is what they said when they wouldn't lift a finger during the depths of the worst recession. Congressman Mike Pence, before he was Vice President, said: We the people do not consent to runaway Federal spending. We the people do not consent to the notion that we can borrow and spend and bail our way back to a growing America. He said that to a tea party rally here in Washington, DC, that was here to stop runaway spending. Where are they today? It is worse today than it ever was under President Obama. It is far worse, not a little bit worse, because not included on this slide are the tax cuts that have never paid for themselves and are not paying for themselves here. Donald Trump and the Republicans have created $2 trillion of deficit spending because of the tax cuts and $2 trillion of deficit spending because of the spending. By the way, they are not actually spending this money, in a sense. They are borrowing all of it from our children. They have not paid for a dollar of it--not one dollar. They are borrowing it from the pages who are here. They are borrowing it from the children of cops, teachers, and firefighters--that is who they are borrowing it from--to give tax cuts to rich people, to make our economic inequality greater. Congressman Mick Mulvaney, now the President's Chief of Staff, talking about the Obama administration's budget at the time, said: It's hard to explain how detached from reality that is, to think that the country can spend another $1.6 trillion when it doesn't have the means. It means either you haven't been paying attention or you don't care. He is the President's Chief of Staff. He is the President's Budget Director. If that was runaway spending, how is this not runaway spending? The junior Senator from Texas said: The debt is out of control. And, it is jeopardizing the future for our kids. I have got two little kids who are 4 and 2. He lectured the President. And, the idea of handing them a $16 trillion debt, I think is immoral. Really? What about $24 trillion? What about $30 trillion? Is that more moral than $16 trillion? Really? Now, former Speaker Paul Ryan said: ``We will end up with a Greece- like situation on our hands.'' ``A debt crisis is coming to the country.'' That is what he said here. Admittedly, he left in the middle of a government shutdown, never to come back to Washington, DC--a fitting end to a decade of fiscal fights and shutdowns and government closures, all done in the name of fiscal responsibility, never actually achieving it and--never, ever actually achieving it--only for the opportunity to spend like this. I can't tell you the number of times I have heard about this on this floor: The debt and the deficit are just getting out of control, and the administration is still pumping through billions and trillions of new spending. Paul Ryan said: Our debt is out of control. What was a fiscal challenge is now a fiscal crisis. We cannot deny it; instead we must, as Americans confront it responsibly. And that is exactly what the Republicans pledged to do. That is exactly what the Republicans pledged to do. They immobilized our government. They shut it down over and over and over in the name of fiscal responsibility--no help to the economy or the next generation. That is the farthest thought from their mind. After years of obstruction in the name of fiscal responsibility, they nominated Donald Trump, who promised during the campaign to deliver a giant, beautiful, massive tax cut and borrowed all of the money for it from working people in this country. There was a mayor in Indiana who wrote a piece about that in the paper that I thought was so instructive. He said: That tax plan would be tantamount to my going to my city council and saying that I want to go borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before in the history of our town, and I am not going to use it to invest in roads or bridges or the sewers or anything else, and I am just going to take the money we borrowed that our kids are going to have to give back, and I am going to give it to the richest neighborhood in my town. He said they would have asked: What have you been smoking? He promised to pass ``one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history'' and ``not touch Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.'' He said he would eliminate not only the deficit. This is Donald Trump, the candidate whom the Republicans voted for, whom FOX News, which is in theory the conservative channel, has supported like an organ of the State, with hosts who claim they are fiscally responsible. But he promised to eliminate not only the deficit but the entire national debt--that immoral debt of $16 trillion that is now climbing to $30 trillion. And the way he was going to do that was by ``vigorously eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, ending redundant government programs, and growing the economy,'' as well as by ``renegotiating all of our [debt] deals.'' He hasn't renegotiated one. He spent more time failing to get a deal with the leader of North Korea than trying to address this challenge. Donald Trump said: It can be done. . . . it will take place and it will go relatively quickly. If you have the right people, like in the agencies and the various people that do the balancing . . . you can cut the numbers by two pennies and three pennies and balance a budget quickly and have a stronger and better country. This is the President of the United States of America. That is ridiculous. That is ridiculous, but it is no more ridiculous than the history of the Republican Party, the supposedly fiscally conservative party--what a joke. Going back to 2001, the last time we had a surplus in America, Bill Clinton was President. He was a Democrat. He had a $5 trillion projected surplus over the decade--unimaginable today. It is unimaginable today, but politicians like us were having discussions about what to do with the surplus, what to do with abundance, how to make Social Security solvent, how to give the middle class a real tax cut, not a fake tax cut that is masquerading and covering up the tax cut for rich people. But we did none of that, and, instead, George Bush, who followed Bill Clinton, cut taxes in 2001. Almost all of the benefit went to wealthy people. He cut taxes in 2003, and both times it was just like Donald Trump said and the Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said both times. They said: Oh, don't worry about it. They will pay for themselves. A lie, a lie, and the number is in the math. It is not about philosophy. This isn't about ideology. This is about the math, and everybody in America could see it because that is what produced the $16 trillion that Paul Ryan said was so immoral, $8 trillion ago and on the way to $30 trillion in debt. By the way, it is important to know that when this Congress voted for those tax cuts in 2003 that were not paid for, the money was all borrowed by the sons and daughters of working people in America. We had troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we didn't even have the decency while we had people at war to pay for those wars or to say to the American people: We need to pay for those wars. No, we are not going to pay for those wars, and we are going to borrow the money from America to give tax cuts to rich people. Then, President Bush, on top of that, seeking reelection, passed Medicare Part D, the drug program for seniors, and paid for none of that either. All that money is from our children--all of it--and there has never been an effort to pay for it since. Then, because of their lax regulatory oversight of the housing market, the economy collapsed. The economy collapsed, and Barack Obama was handed not a $5 trillion surplus but a $1.2 trillion deficit from the Republicans, from George Bush. During the course of his Presidency, we had to weather the worst recession since the Great Depression. The worst it ever got around here was $1.5 trillion on the deficit, and the other side called him a Bolshevik and a Socialist. Well-meaning people from all over Wall Street and other places came down here and said: Fix the debt. Fix the debt. Where are they today? Where are they today? By the time he left, President Obama had cut the deficit by more than half--by more than half. Every one of these deals has been cut by Mitch McConnell, every single one. So it didn't surprise me at all this week that he was reported in the Washington Post to have said to the President that no politician has ever lost an election spending more money. No politician has ever lost an election spending more money, said the Republican majority leader to the President. I can't think of a more Bolshevik statement than that, to use terms that the other side has been using for 10 years. I can't think of a more irresponsible position than that when we are not in the depths of a recession, when 10 million people haven't lost their jobs, when the economy, according to the President, is the best economy we have ever had. This is the moment we should be securing our future. This is the moment we should be preparing for another foreign engagement. Because of these deals that have been led by Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader from Kentucky, when you add it all up, not only do we have this extraordinary deficit that we have never seen in the country's history-- Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

Mr. BENNET. But since 2001, we have cut taxes by $5 trillion. We borrowed all of that money from our children, and almost all of the benefit went to the wealthiest people in America. We spent $5.6 trillion on wars in the Middle East. We didn't pay for a single dollar of it. That is $11 trillion, $12 trillion that we could have spent to fix every road and bridge in America, that could have fixed every single airport in America that needs it, that could have made Social Security solvent for my children's generation and for the other children of the people who came out here and said: We are here to immobilize the Democratic President in the name of fiscal responsibility. But now we know the level of their fiscal hypocrisy. It knows no end. If there is one benefit of this--if there is one benefit of this, the American people are--

Mr. BENNET. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to recognize the 30th anniversary of the Outdoor Industry Association, OIA. Based in Boulder, CO, OIA is the leading trade organization of the outdoor recreation gear and apparel industry. Founded by a group of 14 brands and specialty retailers, OIA has grown to include 1,300 companies that are the backbone of an $887 billion outdoor recreation economy supporting 7.6 million jobs across the United States. For the past three decades, OIA has represented American businesses and individuals whose vocations and avocations are connected to this Nation's best idea: our public lands and waters. OIA is motivated by a shared commitment to protecting, maintaining, and expanding outdoor recreation infrastructure and ensuring every person in the United States has equitable access to nature. From its earliest days, OIA has partnered with conservation organizations to advocate for our public land and water. OIA helped to permanently reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and they continue to press for full funding. They have also supported wildfire funding legislation, rails-to-trails, and similar transportation infrastructure programs and continue to work toward responsible climate and energy policy. The organization also produces outdoor recreation economy report that highlights the influence of the outdoor recreation sector on the national economy, including statistics on consumer spending, tax revenue, and job creation. This report is an incredible resource for lawmakers, land managers, and local planners. As a result, over the past half decade and following Colorado's leadership, States have created State offices of outdoor recreation to ensure that government leaders and business leaders are working together to grow their recreation economies. I am honored to continue to work with OIA to protect our public land and water. Earlier this year, OIA announced their support for the Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy Act, S. 241/H.R. 823, our bill to protect 400,000 acres of public land in Colorado while safeguarding existing outdoor recreation opportunities. OIA stated that they are ``one hundred percent in support of the Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy Act because it would protect nearly half a million acres of public lands across Colorado and support the state's $28 billion outdoor recreation economy while honoring its history in protecting Camp Hale, the origin of the 10th mountain division during WWII.'' I appreciate OIA's support for conserving public land in Colorado. OIA members exemplify the collaborative and altruistic stewardship at the heart of the outdoor recreation industry. For that, I congratulate OIA on this 30-year anniversary and thank them for their contributions to our American outdoor heritage.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, later today, the majority leader will use the so-called nuclear option to once again break the Senate rules. This is going to be the latest episode in a series of decisions that have been made around here--mostly by the majority leader but not only by the majority leader--to degrade the Senate's responsibility to advise and consent. What has happened here is a travesty. We have destroyed--this generation of American politicians has decided that somehow we have prerogatives that the people who came before us didn't exercise. I think part of the problem we have is that people are so sick and tired of the dysfunction around this place, they are not even paying attention to what is happening here even though, in theory, it is happening in their name. Two days ago--on the first of April, fittingly--the majority leader wrote an op-ed laying out his case. He wrote: Since January 2017, for the first time in memory, a minority has exploited procedure to systematically obstruct a President from staffing up his administration. Let's read that again. Since January 2017, for the first time in memory, a minority has exploited procedure to systematically obstruct a President from staffing up his administration. Senator McConnell went on to write: Crucial jobs are still being held empty out of political spite. He seems to have completely forgotten the Obama administration when he was the leader of the minority, when he was systematically denying President Obama the right not only to put people in his Cabinet and in his administration but to put judges on the bench as well. Before President Obama arrived in Washington, the filibuster had been used 68 times on this floor--68 times since that rule was created sometime right before 1920. In the first 5 years of the Obama administration, the Republicans filibustered his nominees or used the filibuster in some other way 79 times. It had been used 68 times from when the rule was created to when President Obama became President, and then over the first 5 years of his administration, they used it 79 times. And they can't remember a time when a minority systematically denied a President the ability to put judges on the court or to staff their administration. When President Obama was President, they filibustered the Secretary of Defense nominee for the first time in the history of America, and he was a former Senator and a Republican. His name was Chuck Hagel. They filibustered him. Secretary of Defense seems like a pretty crucial appointment. In President Obama's last 2 years, the Republican Senate confirmed only 22 judges. That is a smaller number than at any time since the Truman administration. Twenty-two judges was all he got. President Obama left 100 vacancies to President Trump to fill--a record number. There were more vacancies at the end of his term than there were at the beginning. It has been a concerted strategy of Senator McConnell's for a decade--for more than that--and he has succeeded. He led the most famous blockade that has ever happened in the Senate, and that was the blockade he led of Merrick Garland. When Justice Scalia died 342 days before the end of President Obama's term, Senator McConnell responded to that by saying: ``This vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.'' He called President Obama a lameduck President. There were 342 days left in his term. He had an entire year left in his term. Until that point, the Senate had never refused to consider an elected President's nominee because the vacancy arose in an election year, which they claimed over and over again wasn't the case. Since the Nation's founding, the Senate has confirmed 17 Supreme Court nominees in election years; it has rejected 2. The majority leader would later say: One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and said, ``Mr. President, you will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy.'' He did it because he knew he could get away with it, and he thought he would roll the dice. It was shameful. And it wasn't true that it was consistent with our history; it was completely inconsistent with our history. Whether you support Donald Trump or you don't support Donald Trump, I think you can thank the majority leader for electing Donald Trump because by keeping that vacancy on the Court, he made that the issue in the election, and he galvanized the Republicans around a candidate who otherwise wouldn't have been very appealing to many of them. People say that he stole a Supreme Court seat. It is bigger than that--he won the Presidency for Donald Trump. And we know what has happened since that time. But it amazes me that in the name of things not moving quickly enough, he can come out here and claim that the most significant thing he has ever done is what he did to Merrick Garland and then the record he has set putting judges on the circuit courts and the district courts since Donald Trump was elected President. Nobody has ever had this many judges put on the court as fast as the majority leader has put them on the court. Now, for district court judges, he wants to do it in 2 hours of time. He is just going to crank the machine until it is not available to him anymore, and it has been clear that has been his objective from the beginning. But it is not just that the judges are conservative judges; it is that they are not as good as they used to be. You know, until the group of people in this room--including me, by the way--in 2013, out of desperation, I came to this floor and voted to change the rules so that President Obama could actually get some nominees confirmed, some judges confirmed, and some administrative appointments confirmed. I have said on this floor before that that is the worst vote I have taken as a Senator, and I apologize for that vote. I share some of the responsibility for where we find ourselves today. The majority leader said at that time: ``You're going to come to regret this decision.'' And I will say this about him: He was right. I do. Not for me and not for the Senate but for the American people who are having their judiciary infected by the mindless partisanship of this place, which is hopefully temporary partisanship. But those are lifetime appointments that we are confirming that we can't take 30 hours to confirm anymore, and now we are going to do them in 2 hours just to make sure we populate the court with conservative judges whose views are consistent with the majority leader's and the President of the United States. But, as I said, it is not just about their point of view, their judiciary philosophy, it is also their quality, because if you have to earn 60 votes for a lifetime appointment or--when I was in law school and you were a qualified judge who was nominated by a President for the Supreme Court, you would then command 90 votes or 95 votes, and that gave the American people confidence that the judiciary was insulated from politics, that it was insulated from partisanship. Now, because of what the majority leader has done to the Supreme Court, we are going to put people on that Court with lifetime appointments by the barest partisan majorities. It is impossible for me to see how that is going to build confidence in the judiciary. So when he says he has just put it back to the way it was before anybody around here started to filibuster circuit court judges, that is not true because before that, you would get 90 votes for somebody who was qualified for the Supreme Court, and today, you get whatever you get from the partisan majority that happens to be in power. By the way, I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen when we have a President of one party and a majority of another party and there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court, or two or three. If we don't change our behavior around here, those vacancies are just going to remain until we have a President and a Senate of the same party, however long that takes. But if you only need to get 51 votes, I guess you don't have to be that qualified. The Senate confirmed a nominee recently to the Sixth Circuit who wrote blog posts peddling conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and compared abortion to slavery. He was confirmed 51 to 47. He would never have survived the vet before. The Senate confirmed a nominee to the Fifth Circuit who dismissed concerns about glass ceilings for women, sexual harassment, and the gender pay gap as a Trojan horse for government intervention. He was confirmed 50 to 47. This man would never have gotten to this floor before we changed the rules, and he now has a lifetime appointment. The Senate confirmed a nominee for the Eighth Circuit, even though the American Bar Association rated him unanimously as ``not qualified''--a unanimous rating of ``not qualified,'' and he is now a circuit court judge with a lifetime appointment. It has never happened in our history. The ABA questioned whether he ``would be able to detach himself from his deeply held social agenda and political loyalty.'' He was confirmed 50 to 48. They said he was unqualified unanimously because they thought his ideology would blind him, and now he has a lifetime appointment. The Senate confirmed a second judge the ABA deemed unqualified for a district court in Oklahoma. According to the ABA, this nominee frequently missed work, and when he did show up, it was often in the middle of the day. He was confirmed by 52 votes. Last December, the Senate confirmed a third judge the ABA found unqualified with 50 votes. He barely made it, but Vice President Pence made a trip from the White House to break the tie. The partisan temper that is destroying this place needs to come to an end, and we need to make sure, between now and whenever that happens, that we don't take down the rest of government with us. The Founders didn't design the court to be an extension of our partisan foolishness. The independent judiciary is responsible for enforcing the rule of law, which is at the heart of our democratic Republic. It is what separates us from so many other countries around the world that have failing economies because no one subscribes to the rule of law or that are filled with corrupt institutions, where rules are bent, broken, or ignored, with no thought about what is going to be left for tomorrow but just the looting of the economy for the benefit of people today. The Constitution makes it clear that the Senate has a responsibility--we have a constitutional responsibility--to advise and consent on judicial nominations. There is no one else assigned that responsibility. The House of Representatives has nothing to do with it. Through this decade-long--it is more than that--20-year-long series of preemptive retributions, where one party says: If we don't do it to them, they are going to do it to us, we are now at the point where we are destroying the judiciary, and I think we should pull back from the brink. I don't think the majority leader should invoke the nuclear option today, should break another rule around here. No one else in America runs their operation by breaking the rules. Just in this session alone, we have seen not only this, not only this violation of our norms and our customs, of the rule of law, of our responsibility to advise and consent, we have seen the same people support the President's extraconstitutional destruction of the rule of law when he claimed an emergency to fund his wall or to fund $5 billion for his wall, which, by the way, he said had already been largely built. Just like the majority leader today is saying, we have a record number of judges who have been confirmed since President Trump has been put in office, but we are not moving quickly enough so I have to change the rules by using the nuclear option. I need to declare an emergency to build the wall, even though it is almost complete because of my excellent administration. It is all gibberish, and it is all meant just to get a result for partisan reasons. I think when the history is written about this period of our political system, this is all going to look like a tragic farce--all of it. People are going to know, when they write an op-ed piece on April Fools' and say one thing, and they have spent the last 20 years doing something else, that is not going to be lost to the pages of history. People are going to know how the system worked when we arrived here, when the people who were in this Chamber arrived, including myself, and maybe in some tiny, little footnote there will be something that says: Well, at least Bennet was out here admitting the mistake he made to contribute to this disaster. For the life of me, I don't know why we aren't correcting course. We are free people. Everybody in this Chamber, I think, should have an incentive to try to be remembered well and to be remembered as a good steward of this place and of the work we did here. I doubt very much, when our careers are at an end, what people are going to say is, the good news is, they broke the rules. I know what the result is going to be today. I know my friend from Oklahoma has actually worked hard to see if he could get a bipartisan result here, and today that has been impossible, but what I really hope is that we can change what we are doing in the Senate so we can protect and preserve the independence of our judiciary and that maybe we will even move beyond the bipartisanship that is bringing the Senate to its knees today. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I thank Senator Gardner. I agree with his assessment and those of Chairman Murkowski, Senator McSally, and Senator Cortez Masto, about the urgency and path forward for DCP implementation. I would like to reiterate that this bill does not exempt or waive any environmental laws. In drafting the DCPs, both the upper and lower basin carefully considered the environment and the existing environmental analyses and compliance documents. Additional NEPA compliance would be needed if Federal actions are outside the scope of effects analyzed in the existing compliance and decision documents. I ask Senator Sinema, if this is also her understanding?

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I wish to pay tribute to the bravery and service of PFC Frank K. Pantleo, a recently passed World War II veteran from Pueblo, CO, who served with honor in the Pacific Theater. Private First Class Pantleo served in the U.S. Army in World War II from 1943 to 1945 with the 132nd Engineer Combat Battalion. He fearlessly aided in the Bismarck Archipelago Campaign, the Eastern Mandates Campaign, the Southern Philippines Campaign, and the Ryukus Campaign. Private First Class Pantleo was awarded the American Service Medal, the Asiatic Pacific Service Medal, the Philippine Liberation Ribbon with one service star, the World War II Victory Medal, and the Good Conduct Medal during his time in the service to this Nation. Every day, men and women in uniform like Private First Class Pantleo heroically serve on the frontlines of our Nation's defense. I stand with Coloradans today to honor his sacrifice and his memory.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President. I wish to honor the distinguished career of Bruce Benson, the outgoing president of the University of Colorado. Through his tenacity and hard work, Bruce made the university and the State of Colorado a better place. CU is one of the Nation's great universities, and Bruce's contributions, including the record- breaking growth in research funding, have made it a source of statewide pride. Bruce would admit that he was originally reluctant to take the job and with good reason: He had already enjoyed a long and fruitful career in politics, philanthropy, and business. However, those experiences and relationships were exactly what made Bruce so effective. As only he could, Bruce was able to use these experiences to further CU's standing as one the Nation's prominent public universities and research institutions. Under Bruce's leadership, the university's research funding reached record levels, surpassing $1 billion during the last academic year. This money allowed for critical research in biotechnology, healthcare, energy, and aerospace and a number of other fields. Additionally, CU had its 6 best fundraising years during his time at the helm, including a record $440.4 million between 2017 and 2018. All the while, Bruce guided efforts to implement operational efficiencies, cut bureaucracy, and improve business practices at the university. Successes like these solidify Bruce's legacy and his commitment to the future of Colorado. It is worth noting that he is retiring as the longest serving CU president in more than half a century. Bruce has always been a tireless champion for Colorado's young people. He worked to make the DPS Foundation into the great civic organization it is today. He has also done extraordinary work at Children's Hospital Colorado. Bruce has consistently worked to change the lives of children and students across the State of Colorado, from the youngest of kids to college graduates. I know I speak on behalf of all of Colorado when I say that we are all grateful for his service.

Mr. BENNET

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

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to congratulate the Presiding Officer on being in the Senate and presiding over the Senate. I come to the floor to remind us how we got here. President Trump told us over and over and over again during his campaign that Mexico would pay for the wall. He said it at the beginning of the campaign. He said it in the middle of the campaign. He said it at the end of the campaign. He made that promise over and over again. The U.S. Congress didn't make that promise. There is no way for Congress to force Mexico to pay for the wall. We cannot force Mexico to pay for the wall. It is not Congress's fault. It is the President's fault, and it is his promise he has broken. Instead of going to Mexico to get them to pay for the wall, as he said he would do over and over again, he has now asked Congress to pay for it. He has now asked the American taxpayer to fulfill his broken promise. By the way, that is after 2 years of having a Republican majority in the Senate and a Republican majority in the House who said: We don't want to build your wall. We are not going to help you keep your promise. In fact, you promised Mexico would pay for the wall. Go get Mexico to pay for the wall is what the Republican Senate and the Republican House said. So he was frustrated. He said how frustrated he was. He went out to the American people during the 2018 election, and the people rewarded him by electing Democrats to be the majority in the House of Representatives. Then, last December, those Democrats offered the President $1.3 billion for border security. It wasn't for his medieval wall. It is for what he now calls steel slats. Instead of accepting that fact--the fact that nobody here wants to fund the wall he said Mexico would pay for--he shut down the government for 35 days. Then, after all the misery he inflicted, after the billions of dollars he cost our economy, to say nothing of what he did to the Federal workers, he basically got exactly the same deal as he got before he shut down the government, making the shutdown pointless, making the billions of dollars of lost wages and economic activity in America pointless, all a casualty of his inability to keep his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall and his inability to get Republican majorities in the House and the Senate to build his wall. So having failed to get Mexico to pay for the wall, having failed to get a Republican Congress to pay for the wall, he now says he is going to declare a national emergency to pay for the wall. We should ask ourselves--we must ask ourselves--whether this is an appropriate use of emergency power. By the way, if it was an appropriate use of emergency power, why didn't he just declare an emergency before he shut the government down for 35 days? Why cost the economy billions and billions of dollars if you can just do this by declaring an emergency? The easy answer for that is that it is not an emergency. He is only doing this now because he lost the negotiation. He lost his leverage. He embarrassed himself by having the longest shutdown in American history. This is not a national emergency. This is just plan B. The President has admitted as much as he was signing the declaration itself--the declaration of emergency. He said: I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster. . . . I just want to get it done faster, that's all. It is not an emergency. He just wants to get it done faster, which is astonishing coming from a guy who has not spent the money that Congress has already appropriated for the wall. He hasn't even spent that money, and now he is saying he wants to go faster, and he has to declare a national emergency to do it. By the way, America, you may have noticed that the President is also now saying that ``much of the wall has already been fully renovated or built.'' ``Much of the wall has already been fully renovated or built.'' That is what your President is saying to you at the exact same time he is saying that he needs a national emergency to build the wall. It is preposterous. It is a joke. On top of everything else, he is not telling the truth about that. He has not built a mile of this wall since he has been President of the United States, even though Congress has appropriated more than $1 billion--I think about $1.7 billion--to do it. When he signed the emergency declaration, he said that national emergencies have ``been signed many times before. It's been signed by other presidents from 1977 or so; it gave the presidents the power.'' ``There's rarely been a problem'' the President said. ``They sign it. Nobody cares.'' That is what he said. Nobody cared because those were real emergencies, not fake emergencies. They weren't emergencies being declared by Presidents who had promised that Mexico would do something, and then it didn't happen, and now they had to declare an emergency. They certainly were not cases where the President came to the Congress, including a Congress of their own party, and said, I want to do something, and they said no. Then, they said: Well, we are going to declare an emergency. That has never happened before in American history. By the way, if we go down this road, this will not be the last time this happens. This will happen time and again, which is why every Member of the Senate should vote for this measure of disapproval. Since 1976, when Congress passed the National Emergencies Act, Presidents have declared national emergencies 58 times. Fifty-three of those times have been to do things like block the sale of weapons to foreign countries or to sanction governments, like Iran and North Korea. The four remaining cases were after two U.S. planes were shot down by Cuba, after we invaded Iraq and desperately needed to protect critical infrastructure, after the outbreak of swine flu, and after 9/ 11. Failing to fulfill his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall is not a national emergency, and if he thinks it is, he should sanction himself for failing to keep his promise. As I said earlier--and this should bother everybody who believes in our system of checks and balances and who believes in the Constitution--never has a President sought to enact a national emergency like this after Congress has said no. In our Constitution, Congress has the power of the purse. Every single Senator should be voting to protect that. Over the months and now stretching into years, I have been shocked at how the people around here who declare that they are constitutional conservatives have put up with a President who obviously doesn't care about the rule of law, doesn't care about the separation of powers--as you see here--isn't concerned about having an independent judiciary, and wants to threaten the leading journalists of this country, calling them fake news. I would think this step would be one step too far, even for anybody in this Chamber who supported this craziness up until this point. Let's add it all up. What has it gotten us? The President couldn't get Mexico to pay for the wall. He couldn't get a Republican House and a Republican Senate to pay for the wall. So now he is violating the Constitution to steal money that has been appropriated by this branch-- by Congress. He is stealing that money from the Department of Defense, from our warfighters, and from the U.S. military to expropriate private land held by American farmers and ranchers--many of whom I assume are Republicans--through eminent domain. As I have said on this floor before, if any President tried to do that in Colorado, there is not a person in our delegation who would support that--stealing our farms and ranches. It must be said that, for a politician, he has a very unusual view about eminent domain. Here are some quotes of his: ``I think eminent domain is wonderful.'' For those of you who don't know what eminent domain is, it is when a government decides it wants a project, and your house is in the middle of where that project is going to go. Then, the government can use this thing called eminent domain to take your house and pay you for it. That is what it is. It is rarely used because most people don't want the government deciding whether they can live in their house or on their farm or on their ranch, which--in the case of people on the border of the United States--has been in their family for generations. That is why the local Congressman down there doesn't want this wall built. I think he is a Republican. But the President said: ``I think eminent domain is wonderful''--not sometimes essential, not a tool that is useful from time to time. He said it is ``wonderful.'' He said: ``Eminent domain is something that has to be used, usually you would say for anything that's long, like a road, like a pipeline, or like a wall, or a fence.'' He didn't say steel slats, but I am sure the same thing applies. Here is another quote. This is fascinating. I have not met a single person in Colorado who would agree with this--not one--and I bet you there is not a person in Mississippi or Texas or Alabama who would agree with this sentiment either. This is what the President of the United States said: Most of the time, they just want money. It's very rarely they say, ``I love my house, I love my house, it's the greatest thing ever.'' Here is another quote--and just for everybody who is watching this because people are going to come out on this floor and say: Oh, no, the money will not be used for it in this case--not for a wall, not for eminent domain. Donald Trump says: We are going to need a little eminent domain to get that wall built, just so you understand. . . . You need eminent domain, you have to take certain areas, okay? That is the kind of language you would expect out of some autocrat someplace, not in a democracy. I say to my Republican friends here who are going to vote with the President on this bill, that is what you are supporting when you are voting with him on this bill. I don't know how anybody goes home and defends that. For anyone who wants to go home and defend misappropriating money that has been dedicated to the Department of Defense and to our military and to take that money extra-constitutionally and use it to take the property of law-abiding citizens, I don't understand how you defend it. I am not making any of this up. These are his words. By the way, it is no wonder he can't get it through the people's Representatives in Congress because there is not a single person here who would ever admit to doing what he is about to do and what he says he wants to do. What a betrayal of conservative principles this is. As I said, this whole exercise itself is an admission that he has broken his promise to the American people. We didn't break it, Republicans in the Senate. We didn't break it, and we should not help him keep it if it is going to break the Constitution. In fact, we can't help him keep it unless somebody around here has a way of persuading Mexico to build the wall or pay for the wall, which I don't think there is a single person here who has that kind of influence, as influential as all of us think we are. I don't understand it, but it is amazing to me why people would cash in their conservative principles so cheaply--$3.6 billion. The idea that you would be willing to give up your principles in such a tawdry exchange should be infuriating to the real conservatives who I know are in this country. Many of them live in my State of Colorado, which is a third Republican, a third Independent, and a third Democratic. Don't come to our State and tell us you are taking away our houses because we don't care about them--that we will just take the money instead for a broken promise that you didn't keep. That would not sell in Colorado. I don't know why it sells in Texas. I can't imagine that it does. I don't know how anybody could support that. By the way, that is not even the most important point. The most important point is that we have ground ourselves up for a 35-day government shutdown, for 3 months of media cycles on this fight by the President on a wall that he now says is almost fully built, while he is declaring an emergency to build a wall that hasn't been built. While we are screwing around here to keep a broken promise that Mexico is going to pay for the wall, this is what was going on in China. By the way, I know somebody is going to say: Hey, they have a wall. They do have a wall. They built it 500 years ago. That is not what they are working on today. They took care of that medieval wall 500 years ago. Today, what they are doing is they are spending $125 billion on high- speed rail this year alone. That is $125 billion on high-speed rail. You get on one of those trains and you could hear a pin drop. If you go on Amtrak, which I take all the time--I feel grateful that we have it-- it is less than half the speed, and you can't put your Coca-Cola on the table in front of you without it falling over or falling on your neighbor. China has spent $300 billion on new roads, bridges, and ports across the globe through their Belt and Road Initiative. They have bought stakes in 16 different ports across Europe and the Mediterranean, some of which have fallen into their hands because--and this is part of the plan--the debt that the countries have put on to build the ports is so onerous that China gets to own the ports. They have built the longest sea bridge in the world. They have laid over 3,700 miles of fiber optic cable to connect Africa to Latin America and, ultimately, to China. On that Belt and Road Initiative, they have laid their technology over that with fiber optic cables so they could extend the surveillance society that they are building inside of China right now, while we screw around with this wall. By the way, on the $3.6 billion for the wall, here is an interesting chart. Here is how much cement China used over a 3-year period, from 2011 to 2013. This is what they used in 3 years, 2011 to 2013. I was in the Congress then. We were in the depths of the great recession during that period of time. It was 6.6 gigatons of concrete. Here is how much we have built in concrete in 100 years: 4.5 gigatons. They used 4.5 gigatons in 3 years. They have used dramatically more than we have used in 100 years, and we can't even get an infrastructure bill off this floor. The White House can't even write an infrastructure bill. All night, every night, on the cable, all we hear is $3.6 billion for the wall, the wall, the wall--the wall that the President says has already been mostly built, that he is now declaring a national emergency to build. The world is racing ahead of us, as I have said on this floor over and over again, while we are getting run around by one inane distraction after another. It has been said that the President is somebody who is mostly concerned with winning the politics of any given day. That is what he tries to do, and he is often very effective at it. We spend a lot of time talking about him and his priorities, unlike figuring out a plan to counteract what China is doing or others are doing. I bet they have a great strategy in China and Iran. Russia is not so obviously good at that strategy. Actually, come to think of it, they are pretty good, too. If you can stay off FOX News, the President will not pay any attention to what you are doing, so go do whatever it is you want to do while we fritter away one day after another of the American people's time over a broken promise that he never could keep. Unless we are prepared to be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to the people coming after us, we need to do a lot better than what we are doing, and part of that is to ensure that we preserve the institutions that built this country, like the one we are standing in right now. I know that among some people there is an effort to divide the government from the American people and that there are people here who think they have been sent here for one purpose, which is to discredit the Federal Government. I have a lot of problems with the Federal Government--lots of them. I was a school superintendent before I came here. I have a lot of problems with what is happening to poor children who are going to schools in our public system of education across the country, so I am not here to defend government or the way it works right now. In fact, I don't think Democrats should be the party defending bad government. We should fix it where it needs to be fixed. We are talking here about our institutions. We are talking here about the rule of law. We are talking here about the Constitution that generation after generation after generation of Americans has preserved--not always perfectly, often very imperfectly. Every generation of Americans has seen it as their obligation, their responsibility, to at least try to live up to the pages in our founding documents, and where we failed, we got up and we tried again. This whole country is founded on the idea that we will have disagreements because we live in a Republic, and in a Republic, you have disagreements. There is no King or tyrant to tell you what to think. That is the reason we live in a democratic Republic. This place here and the Chamber down the hall are part of the mechanisms that were drafted into our founding documents for us to resolve our disagreements. The Founders believed something. They had no good example in the past, but here is what they believed. They believed that out of that vigorous disagreement, we would create more imaginative and durable solutions than any tyrant could ever come up with on their own. That is why they designed the institutions the way they did, and that is why they created the checks and balances that they did. There is a reason no President has ever done what this President is trying to do. They exercise self-restraint because of what is in the Constitution and because nobody on this floor would have supported him. There are many ways this generation of politicians--and I accept my share of the blame. There are many ways in which we have degraded these institutions in our time. We have destroyed the Senate's responsibility to advise and consent on judicial nominations and Supreme Court nominations. That has been turned into a purely partisan exercise by this generation of American politicians. I am ashamed of that. I am ashamed to have been here when we did that, and I take my share of the responsibility. What I say to my colleagues is that we cannot continue to degrade these institutions and expect that the next generation of Americans is going to look back on us with anything except contempt. Generation after generation after generation of Americans has preserved these institutions so the next generation could have the opportunity to resolve their disagreements in these Chambers. We will regret it. We will regret it if we go down this road. As the majority leader said in another time: Things have a way of changing around here sooner than you think, and someday the shoe will be on the other foot. If this Republican sets this precedent and some Democratic President follows it, that is one more step away from living in the Republic that we all claim we cherish, from the democracy we all claim we cherish, to put power in the hands of a tyrant who may or may not represent the will of the American people. We may never get another vote like this around here. This is going to be the time that each of us is going to decide whether we are going to act to preserve these institutions for the next generation or whether we are going to continue to degrade them in our mindless partisanship and, in this case, to somehow fulfill a promise the President never could keep. That would be a shameful day in the U.S. Senate. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise to honor the career of Sam Mamet, who recently announced his retirement as the executive director of the Colorado Municipal League. Sam spent the better half of his adult life working to empower communities and local governments across Colorado. It is not an understatement to say that every corner of the State is incredibly grateful for his work. Sam joined the Colorado Municipal League in 1979, when he spearheaded the organization's advocacy in the State capitol. After 26 years in that position, Sam would go on to spend the rest of his time in the organization as its executive director. There, he worked tirelessly to foster partnerships across the State and the country that have benefited Colorado's 270 towns and cities. He also spent time as an adjunct professor of political science at CU Denver. Throughout my time in public service, I have always appreciated Sam's thoughtful approach to policymaking, his collaborative spirit, and his unwavering advocacy for our local communities. When I worked in local government, I always knew I could count on Sam to ensure that our perspective would be heard at the State and Federal level. After joining the Senate, I have had the benefit of his advice across issues, ranging from infrastructure to tax policy. Going forward, I will miss Sam's wit, humility, and sense of humor-- attributes in short supply in our politics today. Although Sam is retiring from the Municipal League, I suspect he will continue to serve the State of Colorado with the same passion that has characterized his career. We wish Sam well in retirement and extend our deepest thanks for his lifetime of public service.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to pay tribute to the bravery and service of PFC Floyd K. Lindstrom, a Colorado Springs World War II veteran who has earned our Nation's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor. I also want to recognize the significance of February 3, 2019, which marks the 75th anniversary of his death. He was killed in action at the battle of Anzio. It is my pleasure to commend the efforts of the VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System and Colorado's veterans community, which worked to bring a Medal of Honor for display at the Lindstrom Colorado Springs Community-Based Outpatient Clinic. Much has been said about the battle that compelled Lindstrom to act above and beyond the call of duty where he earned his place in the Hall of Heroes. According to the citation, Lindstrom acted with ``conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity'' in defeating a German counterattack on a hill near Mignano, Italy, November 11, 1943. When the enemy counterattacked, Lindstrom and his platoon were forced to fall back to a defensive position. Unable to eradicate the enemy nest from this position, Lindstrom fearlessly picked up his heavy machine gun and ran up the hillside to gain a new position, only 10 yards away from the enemy machinegun; yet again, Lindstrom was unable to reach the gunners who were hiding behind a large rock. Lindstrom charged uphill once more facing a steady stream of fire and killed both gunners with his pistol. In this moment, Lindstrom embodied the true spirit of self- sacrifice. Every day, men and women in uniform like Lindstrom heroically serve on the front lines of our Nation's defense. I stand with Coloradans today to honor his sacrifice and his memory.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, as you know, I seldom rise on this floor to contradict somebody on the other side. Over the years, I have worked very hard to work in a bipartisan way with the Presiding Officer and with my Republican colleagues, but these crocodile tears that the Senator from Texas is crying for the first responders are too hard for me to take. They are too hard for me to take because when the Senator from Texas shut this government down in 2013, my State was flooded. It was under water. People were killed. People's houses were destroyed. Their small businesses were ruined forever. Because of the Senator from Texas, this government was shut down for politics. He surfed to a second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses but was of no help to the first responders, to the teachers, and to the students whose schools were closed with a Federal Government that was shut down because of the junior Senator from Texas. It is his business--not my business--why he supports a President who wants to erect a medieval barrier on the border of Texas, who wants to use eminent domain to build that wall, and who wants to declare an unconstitutional emergency to build that wall. That is the business of the Senator from Texas. I can assure you that in Colorado if a President said that he was going to use eminent domain to erect a barrier across the State of Colorado, across the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and he was going to steal the property of our farmers and ranchers to build his medieval wall, there wouldn't be an elected leader from our State who would support that idea. That comes to my final point--how ludicrous it is that this government is shut down over a promise the President of the United States couldn't keep and that America is not interested in having him keep. This idea that he was going to build a medieval wall across the southern border of Texas, taking it from the farmers and ranchers who were there, and have the Mexicans pay for it isn't true. That is why we are here, because he is now saying the taxpayers have to pay for it. That is not what he said during his campaign. Over and over he said that Mexico would pay for the wall--over and over again. I was going to talk about what he said about the junior Senator's father, but I am going to let that alone. It was after that. Now we are here with the government shut down over his broken promise, while the Chinese are landing spacecraft on the dark side of the moon. That is what they are doing, not to mention what they are doing in Latin America and with their One Belt, One Road Initiative in Asia. That is what they are doing while we are shut down over a promise he never thought he could keep and didn't keep. Finally, this idea that my colleague from Texas--and I am sorry to say this because I respect him. He is obviously a very intelligent person, but this idea that Democrats are for open borders is gibberish, and it is proven by what the Senator from Louisiana said, which is that time after time, we have supported real border security, not a wall that Mexico pays for that gets you attention at campaign rallies from some people in America and that gets talked about on FOX News at night. In 2013, the Senator from Texas didn't support it. I did. In 2013, we passed a bill here in a bipartisan way. It got 68 votes. It had $46 billion for border security in it--$46 billion, not $5 billion for his rinky-dink wall that he is talking about building. There was $46 billion for border security. To be precise about it, it had 350 miles of what the President now refers to as steel slats. By the way, America, do you hear him not calling it a wall anymore? Now it is steel slats. Now it is a border barrier. There were 350 miles of so-called steel slats in that bill. Do you know what else was in that bill? I think the Presiding Officer voted for that bill. In that bill, we doubled the number of border security agents on the border. They could practically hold hands on that border. There were so many border security agents in that bill. We had billions of dollars of drone technology so that we could learn what we have learned in Afghanistan and in other places, to see every single inch of that border--every inch. We had internal security in that bill so that small businesses, farmers, and ranchers don't have to be the immigration police, and so that, finally, in America we could actually know who came here legally on a visa but overstayed their visa. Forty percent of the people in this country who are undocumented are here because they came legally and overstayed. We still can't do that in America because that bill passed the Senate, but it couldn't get a vote in the House because of the stupidest rule ever created, called the Hastert rule, named after somebody who is in prison. That rule has allowed a minority of tyrants in the Congress to bring a Democratic President low--President Obama, whom they didn't let do anything--to ruin the speakership of John Boehner, and to allow Paul Ryan to almost accomplish nothing while he was Speaker, except leaving this place in a government shutdown. The so-called Freedom Caucus has had a veto around this place for 10 years and completely distorted the Republican Party here, if I do say so myself. That may sound presumptuous, but I know a lot of Republicans in Colorado who don't agree with almost anything or anything that the Freedom Caucus has stood for. Yet they have had a veto on good, bipartisan legislation passed by the U.S. Senate. So I am not going to stand here and take it from somebody who has shut down the government while my State was flooded or from a President who says that he wants $5 billion to build some antiquated, medieval wall, which he said Mexico would pay for, when I helped write and voted for a bill that actually would have secured the border of the United States of America, that would have secured our internal defenses as well. This is a joke, and the fact that it consumes the cable networks all night, every night, and all the rest of it--this government should be open. We can debate whatever it is we want to debate. Do you think the Chinese don't know that we can't land a spaceship on the dark side of the moon? Do you think the Russians don't know that for the first time since John Glenn was sent up to orbit this planet, America cannot put a person into space without asking the Russians to do it? Do you think the rest of the world doesn't know that we are not investing in our infrastructure; that we are not investing in the young generation of Americans; that we are willing to lose the race for artificial intelligence to the Chinese; that we are going to break all of our longstanding alliances since World War II at a moment when China is rising; that China's GDP has quadrupled since 2001, tripled since 2003, doubled since 2009? Do we think that no one in the rest of the world knows all of that about us? We should reopen this government today. We should reopen it today. Then, what I hope much more than that is that we actually come together to figure out how we are going to govern this country again and stop playing petty, partisan politics, which is going to do nothing to educate the next generation of Americans, which is going to do nothing to fix the fiscal condition of this country. For 10 years--for 10 years, I have heard the junior Senator from Texas and I have heard the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives talk about how important it is to get the fiscal condition of our government fixed. In fact, that has been the pretext for shutdowns and for fiscal cliffs and for all of this stuff that does nothing but denigrate our democratic Republic. Now, for the first time almost in history--it happened once before during the Vietnam war--we are actually having our deficit shooting through the roof while unemployment has fallen. It has never happened before. These are the people who called Barack Obama a Bolshevik and a socialist at the depths of the recession, when we had a 10-percent unemployment rate, and didn't lift a finger to do anything. They have now given us a fiscal condition where our deficit is going up while our unemployment rate is falling. Do you know how hard it is to accomplish that? Do you know how irresponsible you would have to be to accomplish that? Yet that is what has been accomplished. When I was first here--it was actually a little after I was first here--I used to walk through Denver International Airport, which we are very proud of in Colorado. By the way, it is the most recent airport that has been constructed in America. While we have been closed, other airports around the world--new airports have been opened just while we have been closed. Denver International Airport is the most recent airport in the country to be opened. It was opened 25 years ago--a quarter of a century ago--and during moments like those when the Senator from Texas shut down the government while Colorado was underneath floods and people had lost all of the things I talked about earlier--their houses, their jobs, and their lives--I used to want to walk through that airport with a paper bag over my head because I was so embarrassed to be part of this. I often wondered why anyone in their right mind would want to work in a place that has a 9-percent approval rating. In fact, I brought a chart--two charts--one day to the floor, one that showed we hadn't always had a 9-percent approval rating, to remind people how far we had fallen in the public's estimation over the time that the Senator from Texas and I have been here. Then I brought out another chart that looked at who else has a 9-percent approval rating. I can't remember all--it has sort of been lost in the mist of time--but I do remember that the IRS had a 40-percent approval rating; there was an actress who had a 13-percent approval rating; more people wanted America to be a Communist country--11 percent--than approved of this Congress; and Fidel Castro had a 5-percent approval rating, which was lower than our 9-percent approval rating. He was the only one who had a lower rating than that. So my question, often, was this: Why would anybody want to work in a place that has such a low approval rating, and why would they want to behave in a way that only made matters worse? I am sorry to say this, but there is an answer. If you think you have been sent here to dismantle the Federal Government--and I have lots of problems with this Federal Government. I think it does a lot of things very well, and, as a westerner, I certainly believe we need to not be in the business of defending bad government. We need to be improving the government. But if you think your job is to dismantle it--as the Freedom Caucus does, in my view--then a 9-percent approval rating suits you just fine because you get to go home and say ``See how terrible all of those guys are? See what idiots all of those guys are?'' while you are taking your pay while the Federal workers are not getting paid, while you are keeping your job while they are losing their job. There has been an effort not just to dismantle the Federal Government but to separate it from the American people, to claim that it is someone else's or that it is corrupt. In many ways, I think it is; I believe it is. I believe this place is one of the most corrupt parts of the whole thing. But because it is corrupt or because it can't get its act together or because it is too far away from the people or, I think I would say, because it is populated by a bunch of self-interested politicians who don't care about the priorities of the American people--whatever the reason is, it is not separate. It is not separate. The reason that is important is that we live in a democratic Republic, and the Founders of this country did two things that had never happened in human history: They led a successful armed insurrection against a colonial power in one generation, and they formed a democratic Republic whose Constitution was ratified by the people who would live under it. What they knew because they were enlightened thinkers--or I should say not what they knew but what they believed because they had only bad examples from which to draw when they sat there in Philadelphia writing that Constitution--but what they knew was that in a Republic, we would have disagreements. That was their expectation, and their belief was that out of those disagreements we would--and, by the way, they knew we would have disagreements because they had disagreements, and they had failed on some very important things. It has to be said. They perpetuated human slavery because they couldn't come to an agreement about that, and other people, whom I think of as Founders--just as important, just as significant as those Founders--ended the enslavement of human beings in America and did other important things, such as make sure my daughters had the right to vote. Those people also are Founders. But what they believed at their core was that through our disagreements, we would forge more imaginative and more durable solutions than any King or tyrant could come up with on their own. That was their belief. That was their expectation. I would say that our country, in many ways, has eclipsed any expectation they ever had of what America would become. For the moment, we are the richest country in the world. We have the greatest capacity for self-defense of any human population in the history of the world. We are far more democratic and far more free, with all of our imperfections, than they would have ever imagined and probably than most of them would have ever wanted. We are the longest lived democracy in human history. But, for some reason, there is a generation of politicians in America today who don't think it is necessary to live up to the standard that they set and the standard lots of other people have set from the founding of our country 230 years ago until today. I don't even know what day it is anymore of this record-long shutdown, but the pretext for it is an invention. It is a creation of something in the President's mind. It was something we have learned from reading the press that was a mnemonic device used during the campaign to remind him to talk about immigration in an effort to divide Americans from one another instead of an effort to bring us together, in an effort to turn what just 3 years ago was a bipartisan issue in the Senate--securing our southern border with $46 billion--into a cudgel to be wielded at campaign rallies. In any case, the least we could do while we have these shabby disagreements that are not worthy of our predecessors, that are not worthy of the State I represent--which is one-third Democratic, one- third Republican, and one-third Independent--that are threatening to make our generation the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to the people coming after us, a generation of politicians who are openly suggesting that America's role in the world should be diminished--the least we could do is reopen our government and stop pursuing this self-inflicted harm that it creates in having hundreds of thousands of Federal workers out of work and not being paid, not able to support their families while we continue to stand on this floor, having mindless arguments that are going to do nothing to advance the future of our country. We shouldn't shut the government down, as it has been in this case, for a campaign promise the President, I am sure, knew he could never keep. With that, I yield floor.

Mr. BENNET. I thank the Senator from Texas for having this conversation. I don't think I was yelling--but I will go watch the tape--or screaming at you. I also have never called anybody on this floor a liar, as you did, in 2015. I get the theatrics of all of this. I guess I want to say two things. One, I appreciate the fact that you, at least, seem to be accepting the fact that every Democrat who is here, on that immigration bill in 2013, voted for it--voted for the 350 miles of wall you are talking about. You didn't vote for that bill or the Senator from Texas didn't vote for that bill, and I assume you had your reasons. By the way, I wouldn't presume to think what the Senator would think about as a person from a border State. My State is not far from the border. We see the effects for ill and for good of immigration in my State. I do know this. There were two Senators from a border State--the border State of Arizona--who were on that Gang of 8 bill, with whom I sat, day after day, negotiating the provisions for months. They didn't have to just vote for the bill or against it, but they had to go home to Arizona--John McCain and Jeff Flake did--and explain why they supported it and why it was the right thing to do for Arizona, which, as the Senator from Texas knows, is a border State. The idea that there is a problem to be solved here because Democrats in this Chamber are for open borders is false, as the Senator indicated. The second point is, the Senator from Texas referenced Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin was standing outside the steps of Constitution Hall, and somebody who was passing by--this is while they were writing the Constitution--said: Mr. Franklin, what kind of government are you creating--a monarchy or a republic? That was the question. As Senator Cruz has said, his answer was ``a Republic, if you can keep it''--if you can keep it. His answer was not ``a Republic''; it was ``a Republic, if you can keep it,'' because he knew that the words written in the Constitution weren't going to preserve themselves, that this exercise in democratic self-government, a democratic republic, would require generations of women and men--not just in this Chamber but as citizens and I would say as founders--to keep the Republic they created. That is what is at stake here. That is what is at stake when the government has been shut down for politics, when we have a President who doesn't believe in the rule of law, who attacks judges whose decisions he disagrees with, who attacks the free press, who have that freedom because of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is that Republic which is at risk when we are not educating the next generation of Americans, when we are not investing in our infrastructure, when we have the unbelievable and unprecedented fiscal hypocrisy that has resulted in a ballooning deficit while the unemployment rate is going down. It is a farce. It is a farce. My closing word is to say that I will work with anybody--including the Senator from Texas, if he will work with me--to put this sorry episode behind us. And I don't mean this sorry episode of this government shutdown, although that is a sorry and pathetic episode, but this episode of American political history where we have done so little for the next generation of Americans and done almost nothing to honor the legacy of our parents and grandparents and the people who came before them. That would be worth doing around this place before we all die. With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, over the weekend, as you may have heard, our government set a new record. It wasn't for the number of roads being built or repaired in this country. It wasn't for higher math scores or graduation rates for kids in the United States of America. It wasn't for passing the most bills or investing the most dollars in our future. It wasn't for paying attention to the next generation of Americans. It was for the longest shutdown in the history of the United States--a selfish act taken by partisan politicians that is an embarrassment to our country and to our future. It has been 24 days. We have Federal employees all over the State of Colorado and I am sure the State of Alaska, the Commonwealth of Virginia, as we heard before, who are out of work because of what Washington has done to them. It is nothing they have done. They have fulfilled their end of the bargain. But because we have a screw loose around here because we are the only modern, industrialized country in the world that shuts down its government for politics--our allies don't shut down their government for politics, and our foes don't shut down their government for politics. No local government shuts down its government for politics. No school district shuts down its government for politics. No State would ever think of doing it. No elected official at any level of those governments would show their face in the grocery store on the weekend after they shut down the government and said to the citizens of Alamosa or the citizens of Durango or the parents in Denver public schools: Sorry. Your kids can't come to school today because we are shutting down the government for politics. It is ridiculous. I met an air traffic controller today who got her check on Friday after she worked through the entire holiday. She had a kid. I don't know how old he was, but he was a baby who had to be carried. She worked the entire holiday, was separated from her family, got her check on Friday, and it was for 77 cents. The people in this body might as well be standing outside and lifting their middle finger at her and at the TSA workers who were there today at Denver International Airport making sure that we were safe, that the traveling public was safe, and who were not getting paid, unlike the people here during this shutdown. By the way, that airport, which we are very proud of in Denver and in Colorado, the Denver International Airport, is the newest airport that has been built in the United States of America, and it was built almost a quarter of a century ago because we are not making the investments that anybody else in the world is making. As I said, no other advanced country in the world shuts down its government for politics. I expect us to have disagreements. We should have disagreements, but we shouldn't shut down the government over this disagreement. It has been 24 days. While we were shut down, other countries were actually investing in their future. In the last 24 days, South Korea broke ground on an expanded bullet train outside their capitol of Seoul. While we were shut down, Canada announced support for a new 5- megawatt geothermal plant--the first of its kind in that country. India issued tenders to set up 7.5 gigawatts of new solar capacity. New Zealand announced millions in new resources to improve the safety of rural highways. You should see our rural highways. And it is not just this shutdown; it is a decade--a decade of fiscal fights made in the name of fiscal responsibility that have put us in the position for the first time since the Vietnam war and before the Vietnam war to see our unemployment rate falling and the deficit going up. This same wrecking crew who called Barack Obama a Socialist and a Bolshevik and was incapable of bringing themselves to help at a moment when our unemployment rate was at 10 percent and we were at the depths of the worst recession since the Great Depression has now closed the government and given us a $1.5 to $2 trillion deficit while the unemployment rate is falling. And every one of them promised their constituents and my constituents that these tax cuts would pay for themselves. God knows, when they add it up, what this shutdown is going to cost the American people. It is not saving them money. Vietnam opened a new international airport near Halong Bay to attract tourists and boost the economy. Singapore is preparing an Underground Master Plan to maximize its urban space by moving things like data centers, utilities, and water reservoirs below ground. A new report shows that for the first time ever, Germany drew more energy from renewable sources than coal in 2018. Ireland, in contrast to what I was just saying about the United States of America, ended the year with a budget surplus. Imagine the flexibility it gives legislators and policymakers there to think, what are we going to do with this surplus? How are we going to invest in the next generation? How are we going to shore up our equivalent of Social Security? Maybe we can have a real middle-class tax cut or lift some people out of poverty in our country. We can't ask those questions today because of our fiscal imbalance and because the Government of the United States is shut down. While we were shut down, other countries moved forward with a trade partnership that excludes the United States. Once it is fully in place, it will represent a trading block of nearly half a billion consumers whom our manufacturers should be selling to and our small businesses should be exporting to. Not surprisingly, China has been extremely busy over the last 24 days while we have been shut down. While we have been shut down, China landed a spacecraft on the dark side of the Moon. That has never happened before in human history. There was a time in our history--you will remember it--when the Russians launched Sputnik. That caught our imagination. John F. Kennedy said: We are going to put a man on the Moon within the decade. That is what he said. That is what we did. Now, because of the fecklessness of this Congress, did you know that America cannot send an astronaut into space without asking the Russians for permission to ride on one of their rockets? A whole generation of Americans that I was part of was inspired by the space mission that NASA led. Unfortunately, in my case, it did not lead me to understand anything about mathematics or science, but it inspired us as Americans to have a big vision for what our country could do and for what our country could do in competition with our adversaries around the world. Do you think the Chinese are not observing what we are doing while they are putting a rocket, a spaceship on the dark side of the Moon for the first time in human history--something they will always be able to claim; something we will never be able to claim? Do you think the Russians know that we can't put somebody up on the space station if we want to, that we have to wait for them to let us do it? Just after they put that spaceship on the other side of the moon, China announced that it is planning another mission to the moon by the end of the year and a mission to Mars by as early as 2020. It announced that it is planning to invest in 4,200 miles of new railway lines this year, including almost 2,000 miles of high-speed rail. Do you know how many more that is than we have? About 2,000, and that says nothing about the investments that they have already made. They have begun operating new high-speed rail lines in East China and Northern China with initial speeds of 155 miles per hour while our government is closed. That is another plan; that is another set of tracks. China has plans for a 6-gigawatt wind farm on the border with Mongolia that, once completed, would become the largest in the world. China continues its pursuit of a vast space-based communications network that will cover every inch of the Earth. If we are not careful--if we are not careful--they are going to deploy 5G a lot more quickly than we will. That is what the rest of the world is doing while we are shut down. My view of this is that we don't need to wait for the President on this. That is what the majority leader keeps saying. He keeps saying: Well, I can't pass something the President will veto because it will not become law. I don't understand the logic of that, speaking of math. We passed a bill in this Senate--this Republican-controlled Senate; I think it was virtually unanimously--to keep the government open. The House of Representatives passed a very similar bill to keep the government open, and in the middle of this, in the midst of all of this, President Trump said: I am not going to accept that because I am going to use this moment to extort Congress for $5 billion for my wall. He said to the people he refers to as ``Chuck and Nancy'': Give me the $5 billion. They said: Why don't you just open the government? The Senate has passed it almost unanimously, and the House has passed it. His answer was ``because I will lose leverage,'' meaning: I will not have the misery I am creating for the Federal workforce. I will not have people who can't pay their mortgage, who can't pay for their early childhood education, who can't pay for their education. I will not have their misery to use to extort Members of Congress into giving me $5 billion for my wall. This is notwithstanding the fact that he promised over and over and over again when he was running for President that Mexico would pay for the wall. That is not my talking point; that is not my coming out here and being unfair and trying to exploit a weakness or a misstatement. I think it is fair to say that almost all of his campaign was based on the idea that there was going to be a wall and that Mexico was going to pay for the wall. He could not have been clearer about that. Now he's trying to shut down the government because he knows that Mexico will not pay for the wall. The rest of us knew the whole time he was telling America untruths about it. He has now turned, instead, to the American taxpayer to say: OK. I wasn't telling the truth about it then, but don't pay any attention to that. You now have to pay for the wall. Our first response to that is: No, you haven't even spent the money that has been appropriated for the wall to date. He has not built an inch of the wall. Look it up. The second problem is that anybody who has studied this question for any moment of time knows that his proposal is a waste of money for the United States. I am not going to be lectured by anybody on the other side about the need for border security. I was part of the Gang of 8 that negotiated the immigration bill in 2013. That was a bill that had not $5 billion of border security in it, not $2.3 billion of border security in it, but $46 billion of border security. It got 68 votes in the Senate, never went to the House, was never allowed to have a vote because of the tyranny of the so-called Hastert rule, which requires people not to vote their conscience but to vote only along party and partisan lines--another disgraceful chapter in modern American political history. That $46 billion in that bill doubled the number of security agents at our border. It built 350 miles of what the President now refers to as steel slats, as if he invented that idea. It made sure we could see every single inch of our border. If the Chinese are going to be able to see every single inch of the world, the least we could do is see every inch of our border, and in that bill we were able to do that. Meanwhile, he tells his base--and FOX News repeats it every single night--that Democrats are for open borders; Democrats are for terrorists pouring in over the southern border. I have become convinced--and we spent years working on immigration, years working on border security, years working with my most cherished Republican colleagues on this issue in a bipartisan way--that the President doesn't want the wall. He wants the entertainment of the wall. He wants to rally his base around the wall. Meanwhile, he is taking the leading economy in the world, a country with the largest capacity for self-defense in human history, and he has shut down its government over a $5 billion, phony wall. It is a disgrace. It is a disgrace for all hard-working Federal workers--and their families who depend on them--who are out of work, who are being furloughed, who aren't being paid. It is a disgrace for every person who works in State and local governments and in school districts all across this Nation, who would never think about shutting down their government but who understand what they possess as civil servants is a sacred trust to their community and to the next generation of Coloradans or of folks from New Hampshire or of Alaskans or of Americans. We can't wait for the President--and I will finish with this--because he either doesn't want the wall or he doesn't have the capacity to get to a solution to it. So we have to do our work as Senators. We have to vote to reopen the government. If that were put on the floor tomorrow, it would pass, and I will bet that it would pass with a veto-proof majority. Why? Because the constituents of everybody in this place would say: Are you out of your mind? Don't come back here and have another townhall and explain why you shut down the government over politics. Instead, Democrats and Republicans should come together in this Chamber and set an example for the American people and say: All is not lost. This exercise in a democratic Republic is going to live to fight another day. We have come to our senses. We are not going to beat our own constituents to death for the purpose of empty partisan slogans or ideas that aren't going to advance the interests of the next generation of Americans. I worry every night that I am here about what kind of history the next generation of Americans is going to write, about what we did when it was our responsibility to make sure that we fulfilled our commitment to them, the same ones that generation after generation after generation of Americans have fulfilled for people who came after them. That is what it means to be a citizen in a Republic like ours. We are violating every norm of that approach to the work and allowing our competitors around the world to create advantages for themselves and potential liabilities for us. We shouldn't let this thing go into the 25th day or 26th day or 27th day. We should end it now. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise tonight to talk about the government shutdown. I thank my colleague from Minnesota for her remarks. I remember the 2013 shutdown that she talked about. The reason I remember that is that while this place was shut down by the Senator from Texas, my State was under water from some of the worst floods we had ever seen, and there were people at every level of government--the local level, county government, the State level--coming together to work with FEMA, coming together to work with religious organizations, coming together to work with ordinary people to literally dig themselves out of the mud and the rocks that were the consequence of floods we had never seen before. I had to stand there almost like a fool explaining that the Federal Government was shut down for politics, and here we are again. For 10 years, I have come to this floor and said over and over that this place had become the land of flickering lights. The standard of success was only whether we kept the lights on for one more day or one more week. The standard of success had nothing to do with whether we invested in the next generation of Americans and had nothing to do with what America's place in the world was, and tonight, 18 days later, we are shut down. Just like in Minnesota and just like in New Hampshire, people in Colorado are suffering as a result of this. This shutdown is inflicting real harm on people who are Federal workers who can't pay their mortgage, can't take care of their kids, can't hire a plumber. We heard today that the EPA is only getting paid half of their paycheck. You can't pay only half your mortgage. You can't go to the grocery store and pay only half your bill. We have farmers and ranchers all over the State of Colorado who can't get operating loans from the FSA to buy seed or fertilizer. We have had FEMA meetings canceled and critical projects delayed that are vital to our rebuilding after the 2013 flood, the last time there was a long shutdown like this. After a terrible fire year in Colorado, the Forest Service can't move forward with new projects or reduce wildfire risks in our communities. Rocky Mountain National Park is closed. Why do people from Estes Park have to bear the burden of the stupidity of this place--the inability to govern like every other entity in America governs, where you could never shut down your local government and you could never shut down your school district? But for some reason, you can do it over politics. In this case, why? It is over a mnemonic device that the Trump campaign supplied to candidate Trump--the wall--and two things that weren't true: one, that Mexico would pay for the wall. If he had fulfilled that promise, we wouldn't be here because there wouldn't be a need for $5 billion because the Mexicans would pay for this wall. That is what he said over and over. It was objectively not true, just as it is not true that what is needed is the wall that he has proposed. We had a bill here in 2013 that 68 Senators voted for. That bill had $46 billion of border security in it, 350 miles of fencing on the southern border, internal security, and fixed our visa system--far more effective than the ineffective wall that the President is trying to build now for $5 billion. He can't even spend the money that has already been appropriated, and now he has shut the government down for $5 billion to keep a campaign promise that is not true. It wasn't true then, and it is not true now. This is ridiculous. Last week, China marked the New Year by landing a spacecraft on the dark side of the Moon. That has never happened before in human history. Here in the United States, while they were accomplishing that, we had a government shutdown. Close observers might say--and they would be right--that NASA--which, by the way, is closed-- marked New Year's Day by successfully flying the New Horizons probe past an object 4 billion miles away. We should celebrate that achievement, but let's also remember that mission was 18 years in the making because people planned for the future. An American craft is literally on the outer edge of human discovery, and last week we were shut down while the Chinese landed their craft on the other side of the Moon. Because of the fecklessness of people in this body, we can't even put an astronaut into space now. We have to call up the Russians and ask them to put us on a rocket to take us up there. Do you think our parents and grandparents would have stood for that? There was a unanimous vote in this Chamber, and it passed in the other Chamber. We should reopen the government. This is doing too much damage to the country, and the President should understand that part of his job of being President is keeping the government open, not cheering it when it is closed. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to recognize the service of Dr. Kathleen Hogan, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency at the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Hogan's distinguished career is a testament to the power of one public servant to deliver progress for the entire country. Over her years of Federal service, Dr. Hogan dedicated her considerable talent to helping our country use energy more efficiently. Dr. Hogan appreciated the promise of energy efficiency, not only to address the climate threat, but also to reduce waste and save money for households and businesses nationwide. She also appreciated the necessity of bringing government and the private sector together on solutions. At the Department of Energy, Dr. Hogan oversaw the Better Buildings Program, an initiative to encourage buildings to become 20 percent more efficient by the end of the decade. The program was formally codified through legislation I introduced with Senator Kelly Ayotte in 2013. Its success, however, is entirely the result of Dr. Hogan's tenacity, persistence, and rare ability to forge partnerships beyond government. While at the Department, Dr. Hogan also forged robust appliance standards that save consumers more than $60 billion on their electricity bills annually. At the Environmental Protection Agency, Dr. Hogan spearheaded Energy Star, a voluntary program to promote efficiency in housing, industry, and a range of consumer products. Today, Energy Star is one of the most widely recognized consumer labels in America. Since 1992, the program has saved families and businesses over $450 billion and 3.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity. The legacy of Dr. Hogan's public service is all around us: in the kitchens of millions of American households, on the factory floor of industrial plants, in the cleaner air our children breathe each day, and in the dozens of new partnerships between the Federal Government and businesses from nearly every sector of the economy. We are deeply appreciative of Dr. Hogan's contributions, and we wish her all the best in her next chapter. Above all, we thank her for a distinguished career of service to our country.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, a few months ago, I had a chance to go up to the Colorado-Wyoming border to spend a night at the Ladder Ranch. It is a beautiful property--that is an understatement--situated in the Little Snake River Valley. If you were designing a postcard for the American West, you would struggle to do better than this place. The ranch is owned by Pat and Sharon O'Toole. It has been in the family for six generations, dating all the way back to 1881. To give you some sense of how long that is, at the time, the State of Colorado was just 5 years old, and the Ottoman Empire was still around. Our world has been transformed since then, but the Ladder Ranch has endured through the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the two World Wars, and the transformation of our economy. Of course, none of that happened just by chance. It happened because the family looked ahead and made hard choices to deliver that ranch from generation to generation. Pat and Sharon are continuing that legacy today, and they are joined on the ranch by their daughters, and their son, and a whole bunch of grandkids. I am sharing the story of the Ladder Ranch because in many ways, it is the story of farmers and ranchers across my State and across the country--of people applying their ingenuity and common sense to hand more opportunity to the next generation. One of the privileges of representing a State like Colorado is that I have had the opportunity to learn about places like the Ladder Ranch and the legacy of every one of our farms and ranches represent. When I joined the Senate Ag Committee, the truth is that I had no idea how hard it can be for our farmers and ranchers. Like many people, I had very little appreciation of where our food comes from. If you are in agriculture, you can do everything right and still fall behind because of forces beyond your control. Today, farmers and ranchers in this country are facing tremendous uncertainty. They have persistent drought, which is growing worse due to climate change and threats of wildfire. They have low commodity prices and challenges with finding people who can work, because of our immigration debate here in Washington, and to find the seasonal labor they need. Dairies are struggling to hire the workers they need. Now, on top of all of that, they have the confusion of the existing trade policies of the United States. Two weeks ago, the USDA announced that farm incomes are projected to drop 12 percent this year. When you add it all up--the uncertainty, the policy, the politics--farm income is going to be down 12 percent this year. All of this acts like a weight on our farmers and ranchers, making it even harder for them to pass on the legacy of their work to the next generation. Earlier this year, our Agriculture Commissioner in Colorado, Don Brown, who is himself one of the most successful farmers in our State, said: ``You're only 22 once.'' By that he meant that there is an entire generation out there deciding whether or not to pursue a career on the family farm or ranch, and they are looking at all of this uncertainty, and a lot of them are deciding that it is not worth it. That is why the average age of farmers is what it is in the United States. We owe it to our farmers and ranchers to provide consistency where we can and to help to preserve the legacy of American agriculture for years to come. By passing the 2018 farm bill, that is exactly what we have done. This bill means more certainty for America's producers in this volatile environment. This bill maintains crop insurance, and it makes risk management tools more effective. Most important to Colorado, this bill helps our farmers and ranchers to diversify their operations for the first time in 50 years. This bill fully legalizes hemp. The majority leader was out here earlier. I want to congratulate him on his work to do that. In Colorado, our hemp growers have operated under a cloud of uncertainty for years. Our farmers worry about maintaining access to their water. They couldn't buy crop insurance or transport seeds. Some ran into redtape opening a bank account or even applying for Federal grants. Despite these challenges, hemp cultivation in my State grew sixfold over the last 4 years. Again, it is interesting that the majority leader has wanted this, as well, because the climate in Kentucky and the climate in Colorado have almost nothing in common. But hemp grows in Kentucky, and it grows in Colorado. We see hemp as an opportunity to diversify our farmers who manufacture high-margin products for the American people. Now, Coloradans will be able to grow and manufacture hemp without a cloud of uncertainty hanging over them. This bill also helps farmers and ranchers hand more opportunities to the next generation. It increases funding for conservation easements and makes it easier for people to secure them. It invests in America's farm economy to drive innovation in agriculture and to keep up our competitiveness in the 21st century. It doubles funding to help communities in places like my State to deal with forest health, and it protects our watersheds better. Working with the Presiding Officer, we increased funding for wildlife habitat and provided more opportunities for hunting and fishing on private lands. We worked with Senator Boozman of Arkansas to give rural communities new ways to improve housing and infrastructure. The bill also provides new resources to help farmers and ranchers adapt to major challenges like climate change. For example, it creates tools for farmers and ranchers to sequester carbon, improve soil health, and become more resilient to drought. We increased resources in this bill for renewable energy and energy efficiency for rural businesses. All in all, this 2018 farm bill is an excellent piece of legislation, and a lot of credit lies in the approach we took on the Agriculture Committee. It should be like this for all of our committees. It is a committee on which we don't have partisan differences. If we have differences, we have regional differences, and we work them out. That is why that committee, which I am proud to serve on, is one of the only functioning committees in the Senate. We passed a 5-year farm bill the last time there was a farm bill, not a 6-month one, not a 6-day one, but a 5-year farm bill. This is another one because Republicans and Democrats both know we have to support our farmers and ranchers, not create even more uncertainty for them. The other privilege of being on that committee is that I spend a lot of time in my State in counties where it is unlikely that I am ever going to win 10 or 20 percent of the vote, but I keep going back and back, not because I think I will win but because I think, as a country, we have to find a way to bring ourselves together and solve problems. Our farmers and ranchers are a model for that. They are applying their ingenuity to things like climate and drought every single day. They don't have the luxury--and I would say we don't have the luxury-- of pretending that politics is the only thing that matters. They are focused on delivering their farms or ranches to the next generations and handing more opportunity, not less, to them. That is all that matters, and that is the ethic we should be applying to our national politics. Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act Mr. President, I want to take a few minutes to call on the Senate to pass the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act. The bill extends critical VA benefits to veterans who were exposed to toxic chemicals while they served in the waters off Vietnam. There is no reason the Senate shouldn't pass this. Our country already provides these benefits to veterans who served on land, and it is well past time we extended care to those who served at sea. This bill is the result of a lot of good bipartisan work in the Senate, and the House has already passed it. To get this across the finish line, we should look to the example our veterans set for how to come together and fight until the job is done. In Colorado, the United Veterans Committee has advocated strongly for this bill, and veterans from across our State have spoken out on behalf of their colleague veterans who deserve justice with the passage of this bill. Their example reminds us that there is no obstacle we cannot overcome to provide every veteran who has served in the United States of America with the greatest healthcare in the world as a reflection of their service. In this moment, we should rededicate ourselves to that goal by passing this significant bill. Let me end by thanking Senator Gillibrand and the Presiding Officer for their leadership, along with Chairman Isakson and Ranking Member Tester for getting it to this point. We need to pass this bill in the Senate before we go home. It is the right thing to do. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.