Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh by Donald Trump has left this body and the American people deeply divided, but I think it has also united every American in the belief that this cannot be the standard for how the Senate or the Federal Government should operate. This cannot be how our Founders expected us to consider lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States. As recently as when I was in law school, confirmations of a Supreme Court Justice used to be a chance for the American people to learn about our system of checks and balances and the rule of law--what made America so special. No student in Colorado watching our conduct over the past few weeks would have anything to be proud of. Instead of modeling our checks and balances, we have been demolishing them. Somewhere along the way, we began to treat the courts as just another front of our endless partisan war, with each vacancy as an opportunity to bloody the other side and secure an ephemeral political win. And the latest, lowest point in that story is this shambles of a confirmation process. Weeks ago, I announced that I intended to oppose Judge Kavanaugh's nomination. It was after the first round of hearings and before the later allegations of misconduct arose. Then and now, I worried about what his confirmation would mean to the people of Colorado--for those with preexisting conditions who depend on the Affordable Care Act for lifesaving treatment, for our farmers and ranchers who are so worried about climate change, for our children with asthma who are vulnerable to harmful pollutants, for same-sex couples in loving marriages, and for the women across our State who have a constitutional right to make their own healthcare decisions. I worried that Judge Kavanaugh would threaten hard-won progress for all Coloradans, taking us from the independent majority under Justice Kennedy to an ideological majority, deeply out of step with the values of people in my State and, I would say, throughout the United States. I worried that Judge Kavanaugh would block reforms we need to break the fever gripping our politics--a fever on full display over the last few weeks. If confirmed, it is very likely that Judge Kavanaugh would provide a fifth vote against reforms to end partisan gerrymandering, to help workers organize, to help people vote and curb the corrupting power of money in our politics. In the age of President Trump, I have particular concerns about the nominee's expansive views with respect to Presidential power and oversight, views that made me question the extent to which he would fulfill the Court's role as a check on the executive branch. Finally, I had concerns that Judge Kavanaugh had an unusually partisan background for a judicial nominee--a concern borne out during the hearing last week. All of this led me to oppose Judge Kavanaugh's nomination. Soon after, Dr. Ford came forward with these serious allegations of misconduct. She came before the Senate Judiciary Committee and gave very credible testimony. She had no reason to make anything up, and she had every reason to stay quiet, but she came forward anyway because she believed, as she said, it was her civic duty. Her courage has inspired hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of women across the country, including Debbie Ramirez of Colorado, to share their own stories. She inspired other survivors from my State to call, write, and even fly to Washington and meet with me earlier today. For her courage alone, Dr. Ford deserved far better than the casual dismissal we saw from Members of this body or the juvenile taunting we saw the other night by President Trump, who continues the same politics of distraction and division that managed to get him elected and that continue now to threaten to tear our country apart. But President Trump is not the issue here. For all the damage he has done, he is not the cause of our dysfunction. He is a symptom of it, and that dysfunction is what we have to confront, especially now as we find ourselves days away from a party-line vote for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. I recognize that both sides had their own argument or story about how we got to this point. I know that ever since the majority demolished the rule requiring 60 votes for a Supreme Court nominee, there has been no incentive to select a mainstream candidate who can earn the support of both parties. In fact, all the incentives now run in exactly the opposite direction--selecting a nominee who can appease the base of the party and earn the narrowest partisan majority in the Senate. That reality helps to explain why this process has been so divisive. If we still had the 60-vote threshold, it is hard to imagine the Senate moving forward on a nominee without disclosing their full record and without giving the minority party time to review that record so they can ask informed questions of the nominee. That would never happen if you still needed 60 votes, if you still needed the other party as part of the decision making, as part of advise and consent. We would expect the nominee to have to answer directly direct questions. It would have been unfathomable that the majority would downplay serious allegations of misconduct, and, in the case of Debbie Ramirez, refuse to even interview many of the potential witnesses that she identified. None of this makes any sense if our interest is in protecting the integrity of the Supreme Court. It only makes sense if we have now reduced our responsibility and our duty under the Constitution to advise and consent to a completely partisan exercise. That is where we have gotten to. I have said on this floor before that I deeply regret the vote we took to change the rules for lower level officials and judges. I don't think we should have done that. I certainly don't think the majority leader should have prevented Merrick Garland from coming to a vote on the floor of the Senate. That was outrageous, unprecedented in our history. I don't think he should have invoked the nuclear option for the Supreme Court. I think that was a huge mistake. We are going to have a partisan process forever unless we can find some way back there. This new majority rule when it comes to judicial nominees is why we now have Supreme Court nominees audition on cable television networks--in this case, FOX News. It is why the President held a political rally and used it as an occasion to mock the accusers. It is why the White House limited the investigation to ignore key witnesses, allowing the majority leader to declare, as he did this morning, that it uncovered ``no backup from any witnesses.'' Well, they weren't interviewed. It is important to remember what the majority leader did to Judge Garland when Justice Scalia died. He left open a vacancy on the Supreme Court for more than 400 days, and we can't take the time to interview witnesses from a serious allegation from somebody living in Boulder, CO? I forget exactly how many days it was, but it was more than 400 days. Then we have a 4-day investigation that doesn't interview the witnesses that have been named, and the majority leader has the gall to come to the floor and say that the investigation had uncovered ``no backup from any witnesses.'' All of this--most importantly, that lack of investigation--is evidence of a confirmation process that has been overrun by politics, like everything else around here. Only, unlike many other things, this is a solemn responsibility granted to this body exclusively by the Constitution of the United States, by the Founders who wrote that Constitution, and the Americans who ratified it. This may help one party win Presidential or Senate elections, but it is toxic to our institutions. We have exported what hopefully will be the temporary, mindless, empty, counterproductive, unimaginative, meaningless partisanship from the floor of this Senate to the U.S. Supreme Court. We should be ashamed of that. We should be ashamed of that on the floor of this Senate, and we should be ashamed that we are doing that to an independent branch of our government. Earlier today, I had the chance to meet students who were visiting here from Aspen, CO. When I meet with students, I sometimes get the impression they think that all of this was just here--that the Capitol was here, that the Supreme Court was here, that the White House was just here, that somehow it all just fell from the sky. I always remind them that it wasn't just here. The only reason we have any of this is because previous generations of Americans overcame enormous difficulty to write and ratify the Constitution. We forget that Americans were sharply divided over whether to ratify the Constitution. Some worried that the new government would grow too powerful and become the very tyranny they had just fought a war to escape. By the way, think about that for a second--that generation of Americans accomplished two things that had never been done in human history before. They led an armed insurrection that was successful against a colonial empire, and they wrote a Constitution that was ratified by a people who would live under it. No humans had ever been asked permission for the form of government they would live under until Americans got that opportunity. We set an example for the world. It also must be said that the same Founders perpetuated human slavery, which is a terrible stain on their work, but another generation of Americans, who I think of as Founders, just like the people who wrote the Constitution, abolished slavery. They made sure women had the right to vote and passed the civil rights laws in the 1960s. Generation after generation after generation of Americans has seen their responsibility to democratize the Republic that the Founders created and to preserve the institutions that we created so that we could render thoughtful decisions in our Republic. Our process for advice and consent looks nothing like that heritage. When Americans were having that big division about whether to ratify the Constitution at all, Alexander Hamilton wandered into the debate, and he responded to those who were worried that the government would become too powerful or become a tyranny just like the one they had escaped. He pointed out the importance of the courts and the rule of law as a check against tyranny. He wrote that ``the complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited constitution.'' ``Without this,'' he said, ``all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing.'' Hamilton did not say that independent courts were optional. He did not say they were contingent on political convenience. He said they were essential to the working of this Republic, and it is for this reason the Founders designed the extraordinary mechanism of checks and balances, including the unique duties we bear in the U.S. Senate. Yet the Founders also knew that this mechanism alone was insufficient. It required elected officials to act responsibly--to treat advice and consent, for example, as an opportunity to confirm judges of the highest intellect, integrity, and independence, judges who could maintain the confidence of the American people in our courts and rule of law. Today, we have fallen so short of Hamilton's standard. Instead of insulating the courts from partisanship, we have infected the courts with partisanship. I have not met a single Coloradan who believes that confirming judges with 51 Republicans or 51 Democrats instead of 90 votes from both parties serves the independence of our judiciary. It does the opposite in that it makes the courts an extension of our partisanship. This is exactly what Hamilton feared. He warned: ``Liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments.'' Hamilton's warning echoes loudly in the age of President Trump--a man who has called for jailing his political opponents, deporting immigrants without due process, banning entire religious groups, bringing back torture ``and a hell of a lot worse''; a man who fired the FBI Director in the middle of an investigation into his campaign and who has tried to discredit that investigation with routine falsehoods ever since. If there were ever a time to stand up for our checks and balances and the rule of law, it is now. Instead, with this vote, the Senate is, once again, acceding to the White House and undermining the Supreme Court in the process. The result is that we are going to continue to barrel down this dangerous path. Unless we change what we are doing, one of two things will happen: We will replay this process every time, that of confirming Supreme Court Justices with the barest partisan majority and tearing the country apart in the process, or if the Senate and the White House are not of the same party, we will never fill a Supreme Court vacancy. That is not what the Founders expected. It is certainly not what the people of Colorado expect. We are playing with fire. Unlike us, the Founders knew their history. They knew about the fall of Athens, whose history taught them that, more than anything, the greatest threat to freedom is faction. The Founders read the Athenian historian Thucydides, who tells us about a civil war that consumed the city of Corcyra 2,400 years ago. According to Thucydides, the city descended into factionalism. Both parties spared ``no means in their struggles for ascendancy. . . . In their acts of vengeance, they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard.'' As the civil war intensified, both sides struggled to end it because ``there was neither promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; but all parties dwelling rather in their calculations upon the hopelessness of a permanent state of things, were more intent upon self-defense than capable of confidence.'' How familiar that sounds today. In our acts of vengeance, we have gone to greater and greater lengths and fallen to greater and greater depths. We have ignored what justice or the good of the state demands. In doing so, we have degraded the courts as we have degraded ourselves. Yet this is a human enterprise, just as it has been since the founding of the United States of America. Yet our situation is not hopeless. This dysfunction does not need to be a permanent state of things. We can and we must be capable of confidence in ourselves and our institutions once more, for unlike the stories told of ancient kingdoms and empires in history, we still live in a republic, and in the story of our Republic, we alone are responsible for writing its ending or its continuance for the next 100 or 200 years. I think every American is probably disturbed by what has happened, and they all know we can create a better ending. The question they have is whether their elected Representatives in Washington will do so. We need an ending that upholds the independence of our courts, where we return to an honorable bipartisan tradition in the Senate, where we build a culture that has no place for sexual assault and that provides an opportunity for people who have been assaulted to be heard and to be heard in a way that doesn't shame them or embarrass them or make their difficulties even worse. I know there are a lot of people out there--and I agree with them-- who don't see a lot of hope for that in the process that we have had here. What I would say to them is that, tonight, there are survivors from all over our country, including from my home State of Colorado, who are arrayed around the Capitol. Their being here testifies to the resilience of the human spirit. It gives us all hope that however difficult this moment in the United States, progress is always in our hands, that it is always our responsibility, and that we need to act with the kind of courage they are showing tonight by being here. I say thank you to the Presiding Officer, and I thank my colleague from Ohio for his indulgence. I have gone over about 5 minutes. I apologize for that. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, in recent weeks, President Trump has gone around the country touting the strength of the economy. He said: Our economy is the strongest it has ever been in the history of our country, and you just have to look at the numbers to know that. The numbers do tell us that the economy is strong and getting stronger, and that is a good thing, but they also tell us that the economy has been strengthening since 2010--after President Obama acted to save us from another Great Depression and when some Members of Congress wouldn't lift a finger to help him. During President Obama's term, even as the economic data showed more and more investment and more growth, the other side talked down the recovery because, even though it was good for America, it didn't help them win elections. As a candidate, this was Donald Trump's specialty. He was a master of this in September 2016--long into the recovery--when he said: ``This is the weakest so-called recovery since the Great Depression.'' The Great Depression wasn't a recovery; it was the Great Depression. We were coming out of the great recession. He even questioned the government's monthly jobs report, at one point calling it ``total fiction.'' ``Nobody has jobs. . . . It is not a real economy. It is a phony set of numbers. They cooked the books,'' he said of the government's report. ``Don't believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 percent or 5 percent unemployment. The number's probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.'' He campaigned on that. Now that he is President, Donald Trump's attitude has changed. This month he said that we have the strongest economy in the history of our Nation. It turns out that he loves those jobs reports that he criticized so readily under President Obama: JUST OUT: 3.9% Unemployment. 4% is Broken! In the meantime,

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to complete my remarks.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I did want to thank my colleague for his statement about the Attorney General. I think he is absolutely correct about what he said. I used to work at the Department of Justice, and the FBI and the DOJ are filled with honorable civil servants who are doing their best to enforce the law. I thank him for his remarks. I yield to the Senator from Oregon.

Mr. BENNET. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would save my colleague from North Carolina from having to object to his own motion, but I so much believe in what he is trying to do that I can't object. I thank him for his leadership, through the Chair, on this issue over many years. This should be a bipartisan issue. It is a bipartisan issue. My colleague from Colorado, Cory Gardner, and I wrote an op-ed piece together--can you believe that?--in the Denver Post, supporting the work that Senator Burr from North Carolina is trying to do. It is long past time for us to stop continuing to play these political games and actually do some work for the American people. There is not a county in America that doesn't have a Land and Water Conservation Fund project. That is not what I am here to talk about, but I thank him for his leadership. I am here to talk about another area that should be bipartisan, and that is addressing the urgent matter of climate change in the United States of America with the leadership of our government. Instead, this week, President Trump made his latest assault on our country's climate policy by gutting the Clean Power Plan. This decision creates more uncertainty for coal miners by delaying for 2 years what everyone knows we ultimately have to do, and it creates uncertainty for everybody else. President Trump has campaigned for years on the idea that there is a war on coal, ignoring his own Department of Energy's observation that the reason why coal has fallen as a source of our energy is that natural gas, because of the ingenuity of the American people, has become so cheap. That is what displaced coal, but he is ignoring it, just like he ignores economic reality after economic reality. This is not going to help Colorado. We have added 60,000 clean energy jobs and 230,000 outdoor recreation jobs, and we have 170,000 agriculture jobs that are inseparably linked to the stability of our climate. One of the reasons this sector is growing so rapidly is that Colorado does not have the luxury of operating in a fictitious economy. We see the threat of climate change every day, from an infestation of pine and spruce beetles that have destroyed our drought-stricken trees to wildfires that are no longer bound to a season because now they burn, or can burn, all year long, to shorter ski seasons and longer droughts that are affecting our farmers and ranchers. These consequences of climate change are costing Coloradans billions of dollars each year, and this cost is only expected to increase. I have said it before. My State is one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, and one-third Independent. We have a consensus in my State that climate change is real and that humans are contributing to it. That doesn't mean everybody agrees with what the solution should be, but there is a consensus that if we do not act, we will not be fulfilling our obligation to the next generations of Coloradans. In Colorado, for that reason, we have made significant progress transitioning to a cleaner energy mix because we are betting on the economy as it actually exists, not as Donald Trump imagines. So far, that bet has paid off. We have had $6 billion invested in clean energy. We have created hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs in construction, maintenance, and installation that cannot be outsourced and cannot be sent to China. Wind jobs alone are expected to triple by 2020, and our largest utility, Xcel Energy, announced this past June that it is retiring two coal plants early and replacing them with wind, solar, and natural gas, and energy storage. This has nothing to do with the Environmental Protection Agency-- nothing--or regulation. It is because it is cheaper. It is cleaner for the environment, but it is also cheaper for the rate base. That is what we are accomplishing in Colorado, and I know it is true across the country. This assault by President Trump on the Clean Power Plan, which so many States were already complying with, is just the latest in a year- and-a-half attack on important environmental regulations: fuel economy standards for cars and trucks that he got rid of that will make our automobiles and our trucks less competitive overseas; commonsense rules to decrease methane leaks from oil and gas production; opening up of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and our coasts for drilling; attacking the Antiquities Act and the Endangered Species Act; appointing Scott Pruitt, a climate denier, to be the head of the EPA; trying to roll back the clean water rule; trying to use taxpayer dollars to revive retiring coal and nuclear plants on the taxpayers' dime; trying to delay ozone standards to limit smog to prevent our children and seniors from getting sick; and withdrawing from the global climate agreement. We now have the distinction of being the only country in the world not to be part of that agreement. Syria has now joined it, but we are by ourselves. I can tell you that the generation of people in this Chamber who are the age of the pages in this Chamber have a consensus that climate change is real. I know my colleague is here. So I am going to bring this to a close, but let me say that the Republican Party nationally has had a distinguished record on environmental matters until very recently. That may surprise people who have seen the debate and watched it, but it is true. Richard Nixon, a Republican President, signed the Clean Air Act and signed the Clean Water Act. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. Anybody who wants to remember what was going on back then only needs to think about the Cuyahoga River catching on fire and what that looked like. Anybody who remembers that knows that it is very hard to make the argument that net-net the Clean Air Act and the Clean Air Act haven't been good for our economy. That doesn't mean that it is perfect, but it is very hard to make that argument. People will, but I think it is very hard to make it convincingly. Ronald Reagan, one of the great conservative Republicans in the history of America, is the guy who was President when the ozone layer got a hole in it. He was a survivor of skin cancer. Kids who come to my meetings today don't know what the hole in the ozone layer is. They can thank Ronald Reagan for that. Both Bushes said that climate change is real and that humans are contributing and that we have to do something about it, and we need to work through multilateral organizations--in that case it was the U.N.-- to do something about this. Then, what changed? In 2010 the Supreme Court made a decision in Citizens United that opened up our entire Federal Government to billions of dollars of outside money, and the threat of outside money came with a promise to sign something called the ``climate pledge,'' which denied that it was real. Ever since then, we haven't been able to do any bipartisan work on it. The Supreme Court in that opinion talked about its worries about the corruption of action. What we have is the corruption of inaction--the bills that aren't written, the amendments that never get a vote, and the committee hearings that are never held because of a distortion in our political system. We have to change that together because if we are serious about climate, we need an enduring solution. We can't have something that is ripped out like the Clean Power Plan after a year and a half. That will not fulfill the responsibility we have for the next generation of Americans--or to the planet, for that matter. So I am very sorry to be here today under the circumstances that I am here, but I thought it was important to note what the President had done, and I will say again that I hope the time will come when we can make bipartisan progress on climate change. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article from the Wall Street Journal and an article from the Washington Post be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would like to spend a few minutes on a major piece of business this week, our 2018 farm bill. Unlike so much of what comes to this floor--or never comes to this floor, never makes it to the floor--this is not a 5-month bill or a 5- week bill or a 5-hour extension; this is an honest to goodness 5-year farm bill. That is 5 years of certainty and predictability for our farmers and ranchers. It is a testament to the great work of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and I want to thank Chairman Roberts and Ranking Member Stabenow for leading yet another bipartisan, consensus-driven process. When Democrats were in charge way back in 2014, we passed a bipartisan farm bill then. Now we are doing it again, only this time the Republicans are in charge. That is how this place should work. We have set aside the political antics and focused on our farmers and ranchers and rural communities, especially when they have all faced more uncertainty than they have in years. In Colorado we have dealt with years of persistent drought. In the southern part of my State, waterflows in the Gunnison and Animas Rivers are at less than half of their average levels. Feed shortages are even forcing ranchers in Southwest Colorado to sell off their cattle. Besides drought, our farmers and ranchers are contending with erratic commodity prices, a broken immigration system that is actually putting some of them out of business because they can't find workers, and uncertainty over trade because of the administration's unusual approach to foreign policy. All of this has made it harder for them to plan for the next 5 months, let alone the next 5 years. This farm bill cannot come soon enough. The Agriculture Committee has put together an excellent piece of legislation. For the first time in 80 years, this bill legalizes hemp. We forget, but hemp was widely grown in the United States throughout the mid-1800s. Americans used hemp in fabrics, wine, and paper. Our government treated industrial hemp like any other farm commodity until the early 20th century, when a 1937 law defined it as a narcotic drug, dramatically limiting its growth. This became even worse in 1970 when hemp became a schedule I controlled substance. In Colorado, as is true across the country--I have talked to a lot of colleagues about this--we see hemp as a great opportunity to diversify our farms and manufacture high-margin products for the American people. That could help drive incomes in rural parts of my State, like Montrose County, CO. Let me tell my colleagues about Montrose. It is a rural mountain area on Colorado's West Slope. It flattens out to the west. I managed to win 29 percent of the vote there in 2016, and I managed to win 29 percent the first time I ran as well. I can't seem to improve my position. I want to show my colleagues a picture from there. This is from Montrose. Here is their Republican State senator, my friend Don Coram, who is standing right here, standing in front of a hemp plant. This is his greenhouse. He was kind enough to let me visit this past March. He told me that hemp growers operate under a shadow of uncertainty, worried that at any moment somebody in the Justice Department is going to wake up one morning and decide to cripple their operations by targeting their access to water or labor. When we passed the last farm bill in 2014, Colorado farmers harvested around 200 acres of hemp. Last year, we harvested 9,000 acres, and that is despite the uncertainty around hemp's legal status. Our farm bill eliminates that uncertainty by legalizing hemp. If this farm bill passes, our growers are going to have a much easier time opening a bank account, buying and selling seeds, transporting their goods, and accessing water. This bill also gives hemp growers access to important risk management tools, like crop insurance. That is hemp that Don Coram, my Republican politician friend, is standing in front of at his greenhouse. This means dollars for rural Colorado and rural America, where the ingenuity and the creativity of people is already being unleashed on a crop that, until this farm bill was written, we could not grow in our country in a meaningful way and whose byproducts--the things that will create margins for our farmers-- were imported from Canada. Go into stores in the United States today and you will see hemp byproducts, hemp products, but they are grown in Canada. That doesn't make any sense. I am glad this farm bill fixes it, and I am glad the majority leader was the one who led the way on that. Looking ahead in the West, we know that the risks of drought and wildfire are only going to grow worse. That calls on us to make sure that risk management tools are using the best available data. Over the past year, we have worked with Colorado's ranchers to make sure the USDA has good drought and market data for livestock disaster assistance. In uncertain times, these programs are critical to sustaining our farms and working lands, which are fundamental to our heritage in the West and the legacy we hope to leave the next generation. The same is true of our vast grasslands, healthy forests, and abundant wildlife. They are also fundamental to what it means to be in the West, which is why we made sure this farm bill emphasizes conservation and responsible management of our natural resources. In this bill, we increase funding for conservation easements. We also make the EQIP Program easier to access for small farmers and ranchers. That idea came directly from Mike Nolan, a vegetable grower in Mancos, CO, who was having trouble accessing conservation tools designed more for big farms than for his 7-acre operation. We reward farmers in this bill for improving soil health. We strengthen the Regional Conservation Partnership Program and reduce redtape for projects that improve drought resilience. We increase funding for voluntary wildlife habitat improvements on working lands--an approach in Colorado that has helped us protect habitat for iconic species like the Greater sage-grouse but to do it on our own and in collaboration on the ground. In Colorado, forests are one of our most important natural resources. The health of our forests affects the strength of our outdoor economy, the quality of our water, and the safety of our communities from wildfire. This bill doubles funding for collaborative forest projects that promote forest health and reduce wildfire risk. It creates a new water source protection program to bring utilities and upstream communities together around forest health. It also requires the Forest Service to evaluate the health of our watersheds and monitor the effectiveness of treatments, and it provides new authority for the Forest Service to work with local communities on housing and infrastructure--a major issue in our mountain communities. Finally, this bill makes new investments in our rural communities by expanding access to high-speed internet and encouraging projects to improve energy efficiency, energy storage, and cyber security. Working with Senator Daines, we also maintain funding for the Voluntary Public Access Program to increase opportunities for hunting and fishing, which are so important to our outdoor recreation economy. All in all, this is a good bill. It would materially improve the lives in communities in Colorado and across America--something I don't get to say a lot about our work around here. It is even more impressive because the farm bill is not some tiny piece of inconsequential legislation. It is among the most complex things we do as a Congress. It touches every region of our country-- urban and rural--and involves thousands of different, often competing, interests. It affects the lives of every single American--whether they know it or not--through its investment in our food, forests, water, and wildlife. We passed this bill 20 to 1 in the Agriculture Committee. I told the majority leader the other day, when he came for our markup in the committee, that I wish he would send everything through the Agriculture Committee. Then we might actually get something done for the American people around here. We might fix our broken immigration system to make sure our farmers have access to the labor they need. We might address the threat of climate change and the strain it will put on our food systems. We might address the backlog of infrastructure projects in rural Colorado and all across the West, where some of our pipes and dams date back to the 1950s. We might push for coherent trade policies that increase market access for our farmers and ranchers, instead of subjecting them to retaliation and uncertainty. There is a lot we could do if we took a page from the Senate Agriculture Committee and approached our work not oriented toward a political fight for the benefit of cable news but oriented toward a solution for the benefit of the American people. We need to get back to that kind of work around here. We can start by passing this bill and giving our farmers and ranchers the certainty they deserve from our government. Given all they do for us--providing the food, fuel, and fiber we rely on every single day-- that is the least we can do for them. I thank my colleague from Arkansas, who has joined me on the floor and has been such a great member of the Ag Committee as we brought this bill forward. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, each year, 230,000 men and women leave military service. Many enter the civilian workforce. I know everyone in this Chamber believes we can do a better job connecting our veterans and transitioning servicemembers with rewarding and high-paying jobs. I also know people in this Chamber agree that these men and women are ideal employees for American businesses. They are highly trained, many in advanced technologies. They are experienced leaders. They are driven and mission-oriented. As someone who used to work in the private sector, these are all qualities I have looked for in employees. As a Colorado Senator, I know our State has one of the highest percentages of veterans in the country, and we have military bases with transitioning servicemembers. Many veterans from all over the country choose to live in Colorado and make it their home. We also have top science and engineering programs in emerging energy industries hungry for a highly skilled workforce. There is a natural opportunity to connect these groups and strengthen the bridge between our men and women in uniform and rewarding, high-paying jobs. That is what this amendment seeks to achieve. It directs our government to identify opportunities with the military to partner with colleges, universities, and the private sector to train our veterans and transition servicemembers for jobs in the growing energy, cyber security, and artificial intelligence sectors. I thank my colleagues for supporting the amendment and especially Senators Gardner and Duckworth for joining me as cosponsors. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 2983.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized for 2 minutes and that my colleague from Colorado, Senator Gardner, also have 2 minutes.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, the headline of the article reads: ``Trump Retreats on Separating Families, but Thousands Will Remain Apart.'' We need to know, and that, obviously, isn't going to be acceptable to the American people if that is what it is. The last point I want to make tonight, because I know I have other colleagues here, is that it does not help matters when the President is completely allergic to the truth on any dimension but especially on this one. Today, at the White House, in front of all of the cameras and in front of the Republicans he invited there--he didn't invite any Democrats--this is what he said in lamenting the fact that he couldn't do a deal with Democrats. This is the President: We're having a lot of problem with Democrats. They don't care about lack of security, they would like to have open borders, where anybody in the world can just flow, including from the Middle East--from anybody anywhere they can just flow into our country. Tremendous problems with that. Tremendous crime caused by that. We are just not going to do it. That is what he said is our position. As the Presiding Officer knows, I was on the Gang of 8 in 2013 that negotiated what was called the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Enforcement Act of 2013. The first two words in that title are ``border security.'' It got 68 votes on this floor. Every single Democrat voted for it. I want the American people to know what is in it because they will never hear from the President as to what was in it: There is $46 billion dollars for border enforcement; $30 billion to hire and deploy nearly 20,000 new Border Patrol agents, doubling the total number, a doubling of the number of Border Patrol agents; $8 billion for a fence along the southern border at least 700 miles long; $4.5 billion for new surveillance technologies, including air and marine surveillance so we could see every inch of the border, so we would know what was happening there; $2 billion to enact recommendations of a newly established southern border security commission; $750 million to expand the E-Verify; the remaining $1.5 billion dollars for administrative costs to the Departments of State, Labor, Agriculture, and Justice. That was the border security bill we passed in 2013, and that is the border security bill we should pass today. The only reason it is not the law of the land today is that the House would not let it come to a vote. Had they let it come to a vote, had the Speaker allowed it to come to a vote, it would have passed. I think, collectively, we should go back to that work and see if we can't actually solve the problem rather than just play politics with it or, in the case of what we have just seen, rather than play politics with the lives of the children on the southern border. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues who are here tonight and Senator Merkley for organizing this evening. The President has taken a step back from a crisis he provoked, a crisis he caused, and it seems like it is a rare recognition on his part that when a President speaks and a President acts, he speaks and he acts on behalf of the American people, not on his own behalf. The American people could not stand the idea that this country would do what it did to these kids in their name. They could not stand the idea that the whole world would see the separation of children from their parents on the southern border of the United States of America-- perpetrated by our own government. Finally, probably for the first time ever, this President relented to the values the American people share whether they are conservatives or whether they are liberals or something in between that. That is a reason to say I am glad we are moving in that direction. Maybe another good thing will come out of this, which is that the people who stood up who work for this administration and defended this terrible, inhumane policy in the name of the law and in the name of religion--the Bible--might think harder the next time they do that at a moment of conscience like this one. As my colleagues have said, it is not clear tonight what is in the policy. I quote a New York Times article that is on the front page of the paper tonight. It reads: And a Health and Human Services official said that more than 2,300 children who have already been separated from their parents under the President's ``zero tolerance'' policy will not be immediately reunited with their families while the adults remain in federal custody during their immigration proceedings. ``There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,'' said Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Wolfe said the decision about the children was made by the White House, but he added, ``I can tell you definitively that is going to be policy.'' So what are they saying--that current kids aren't going to be grandfathered, that the current kids who have been on the TV this week and the week before are not going to have the benefit of this Executive order? Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. This is what she wrote: I live in a border state. She lives in Texas. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. I am going to read that again. Mrs. Bush wrote: ``Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso.'' No, it shouldn't. She wrote: These images are eerily reminiscent of the [Japanese American] internment camps . . . of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. We now have another one confronting us right now. That episode was shameful. At the time, America was in the midst of a great world war, the second in a generation. The country had just emerged from the largest economic depression in our country's history. There was deep anxiety about jobs and national security, and that anxiety manifested in what became a terrible injustice perpetrated by the U.S. Government against Japanese Americans. President Roosevelt's order called for the relocation of Japanese Americans into prison-like camps. Many Governors throughout the West opposed the camps at the time not because they were unjust but because it was out of bigotry of Japanese Americans. They didn't want them in their State, even if they were locked up in a prison. Kansas Governor Payne Ratner declared that they ``are not wanted and not welcome.'' Wyoming Governor Nels Smith threatened that Japanese who come to his State would be found ``hanging from every pine tree.'' An exception to that was Colorado Governor Ralph Carr, a Republican. Speaking to a crowd of farmers, Carr said: If you harm them, you must first harm me. I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred. ``I grew to despise it,'' Carr said, pointing to the crowd, ``because it threatened the happiness of you and you and you.'' Carr spoke out about that injustice. He gave voice to vulnerable people when it was politically unpopular. In fact, he lost his political career as a result of what he said. His courage may not have won him much notice or applause at the time, but he is in the honor roll of history, and we hold him up as an example of our responsibility to stand for justice and to stand against cruelty. His example should inspire us, but it also should make us wonder what would have happened had he not been there. Like Governor Carr, all of us have to choose whether we are going to stand against a policy of locking up children. We shouldn't do it. We didn't do it. The Bush administration didn't do it. The Obama administration didn't do it. The Trump administration didn't do it, until this so-called zero tolerance policy was put in place. Now, the U.S. Government has essentially jailed a bunch of children who can't see their parents. This isn't helping the national security of the United States. Our immigration system is broken. Sitting in that chair before the President was the Senator from Florida. He and I worked together in the Gang of 8 to write an immigration bill that passed the Senate with almost 70 votes in 2013. It spent $40 billion on border security. It had internal security. It created a visa system so we could see who was here lawfully and who had overstayed their visa and kick out the people who were causing trouble. I sometimes think he doesn't actually want a wall; he just wants the issue of a wall. We could be working with countries in our hemisphere to try to resolve the issues they face--violence, corruption, absence of rule of law, very limited economic opportunities for people--so people could stay there instead of trying to come to the United States just so their kids can survive. That would be a useful thing for us to engage in. A couple years ago when we had the kids coming to the border, I asked myself--I am the parent of three daughters: What would it take for me to send one of my daughters, when they are 13 years old, with a drug smuggler 1,500 miles to the U.S. border? What fear would I have had to do that? I went down there. I think the President should go down there. I went to Mexico and El Salvador and Honduras, and I met in the backyard of our Embassy with a bunch of young people who had either tried to get into this country and failed or tried to get into this country and succeeded. It was very clear they are absolutely terrorized by the gang violence down there, by the insistence on the part of gangs that these kids join gangs, and by the complete abject lack of economic opportunity. There is none. That could affect the national security of the United States, and we should have an interest in trying to make it better. I would put my record on immigration and border security up against any single person in this Chamber because I helped write and pass a bill that spent $40 billion on border security for the United States. Our dysfunction in the House of Representatives caused us not to pass the bill there. Now, we have reached a level of even more dysfunction because the President is making up what is actually causing the problem at the border and enjoys the political theater of going over to the House of Representatives and having a conversation with people about how we are going to solve a problem he created and that his administration created and that Republicans and Democrats in this Chamber alike know he created. Let me close just by saying that we live in a democratic republic--I have said that on the floor--and a democracy will not last very long if the government is separated from the people. We are a self-governing enterprise. In order to do that well, in order to put America's children in the position they deserve to be put in, in order to honor the heritage our parents and grandparents passed on to us, in order to assure America's leadership role in the world, we have to seek the truth as citizens. It is a fundamental responsibility that each of us has. We don't have to agree with each other about much, but we have to find a way to ascertain the truth and then govern toward that and figure out ways of moving the country forward. With an episode like this, I get more and more worried we are reaching a point where it is going to be hard to pull back from the brink. When we are living in a time when our President tells us that our allies threaten our national security, we need to ascertain the truth of that statement. When we are told trade wars are easy to win, and we end up paying more for steel than the people we are fighting a trade war with, we need to figure out what the truth actually is. When somebody runs for office saying they are going to have a beautiful healthcare plan that is going to cover everybody in America at a really low price, we ought to check and see whether that is happening. When somebody tells you--even though it is repeated over and over and over again on one cable TV station in America--that he is going to pay off the debt in 7 years and then comes to Washington and gives us the largest deficit we have seen outside of wartime or recession, we owe it to our children to ascertain the truth of the matter. We owe it to our children to do that, and we owe it to the world to treat the children on our southern border with some dignity--the dignity any human being would deserve. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, this past April, Attorney General Sessions announced a new zero tolerance policy--those were his words--for the southern border. Last month, the Chief of Staff to the President said that this new zero tolerance policy ``could be a tough deterrent. . . . The children will be taken care of--put into foster care or whatever.'' That is what he said. To justify his zero tolerance policy, Attorney General Sessions cited Romans 8, a Bible passage that was used throughout our history to justify human slavery. The administration knew precisely what the effect of this action would be; yet they did it anyway. The result is that over 2,300 children have been separated by the U.S. Government in the name of the American people since May. The results are the images we see of children caged in chain-link enclosures. We hear it in the young boys and girls crying for their parents--all done in the name of America. That is an image that has ricocheted all across the world, just as the image of Bull Connor's dogs tearing at Birmingham's children ricocheted across the world. It said to the world that we actually weren't upholding the high ideals that our Founders set out to create. Well, that is terrible, but what is also terrible is that President Trump will take no responsibility for what he has done and instead takes on a cheap political tactic, which I think he thinks he can get away with. There is a lot of evidence he will get away with it because of the repetition on cable news that somehow Democrats are responsible for this. The President said: I hate the children being taken away. The Democrats have to change their law. That's their law. That statement is false. It has no basis in reality. And I will presume that he is not using the children as a negotiating tool. I am not going to come to the floor and make that accusation. There are people who have said that because they are searching for some logic to explain how he could say something that is so false. He tweeted: ``The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda.'' That is what he wrote. That is ridiculous, and we know it is false because until they created this zero tolerance policy, which they thought would deter other immigrants, the United States of America handled this matter in a way that managed to enforce our laws without doing hideous violence to our bedrock values as a nation. When migrants with children cross the border unlawfully, the government has broad discretion about whether to charge the violation as a criminal offense or a civil offense, and every American administration--every American administration, including the Trump administration until 6 weeks ago, dealt with it as a civil matter and avoided the trauma of family separation by charging them for illegal entry and deporting them. During the first 15 months of this administration, until Attorney General Sessions started this zero tolerance policy, the Trump administration--not the Obama administration--did this with nearly 100,000 immigrants who were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. In terms of the law, nothing has changed in 6 months. The only thing which has changed is the administration's policy and their decision to file criminal charges for every unlawful crossing, including cases that involved families with young children. I think that is the wrong policy. By the way, the Attorney General doesn't make up stories about it is the Democrats' fault. He said this is what will happen because of their policy, but the President will not admit it. American citizens, thank goodness, don't want this done in their name. They don't want our history besmirched by this action and the coverup of whose responsibility it is. That is why a bipartisan group--a bipartisan group--of 75 former U.S. attorneys called for an end to the policy of family separation. It is making their exercise of prosecutorial discretion more difficult. More than two dozen of the largest religious groups in America have asked the President to please relent, knowing he has the power to do so--Rev. Franklin Graham and nearly a dozen evangelical leaders, Republican Governors, Republican colleagues of mine who have not only said they detest the policy but that the President can change it anytime he wants. Those are the facts. I don't know how to solve the problem of newscasters who are willing to repeat things that aren't true. That is hard to do, and it is difficult to separate fact from fiction when we have a President who is allergic to the truth. For my own sake, at times like this, I think it is important to listen to voices like First Lady Laura Bush, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post last week that was so moving. It amazes me that, in 2017, any American citizen would have to write it, but thank goodness she did. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Mrs. Bush's op-ed piece be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to celebrate the diamond jubilee birthdays of the Honorable Wilma and Wellington Webb. Wilma and Wellington Webb embody the best of Colorado. Through a long and distinguished career, they have made history, improved our communities, and set an example of leadership for our State. Wilma Webb's life is defined by service to others. Her career began as a community organizer registering voters, assisting impoverished families, and fighting for equality in education. In 1980, she joined the Colorado House of Representatives, where she was reelected for six terms and served a total of 13 years. During her tenure, Wilma sponsored many substantive bills and became the first African American to serve on the powerful joint budget committee, which writes Colorado's multibillion dollar annual budget. After 4 years of tireless advocacy, she pushed through legislation to recognize Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday in Denver through events like the annual ``Marade.'' President Clinton later appointed her to serve as the regional administrator for the U.S. Department of Labor. Her husband, Wellington Webb, likewise displays an example of public service. Mayor Webb has served in the Colorado House of Representatives, the Carter administration, and Colorado's Department of Regulatory Agencies. In a historic election in 1991, he became the first African-American mayor of Denver. Over two terms, Mayor Webb dedicated himself to improving Denver's parks and open spaces, strengthening public safety, championing inclusive economic development, and expanding access to high-quality education for our children. Like his wife, Mayor Webb's leadership has left an indelible mark. We see it throughout our city, from the Denver International Airport to the expanded Denver Art Museum, the Blair-Caldwell African- American Research Library, and the many buildings that bear his name. As individuals, Wilma and Wellington Webb are exceptional examples of public service. Together, they have formed an extraordinarily powerful force that has left Denver and Colorado more prosperous, inclusive, and just. On this day of celebration, I join Coloradans across our State in sharing my deep gratitude and admiration for the legacy they created and the years of contributions that lie ahead.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, in my typically classy fashion, I dropped the microphone before I began to speak. I was glad to yield to my friend from New Jersey when he told me the reason why because I have three daughters at home, and if one of them-- if I were fortunate enough to have one of them here in Washington, I would want to be having dinner with her, too, instead of being here, but I am here tonight for them and for families just like the other Senators have talked about. My family has an interesting immigration history that people are surprised by sometimes when I talk about it. My mom and her parents were Polish Jews when World War II broke out. Miraculously, they survived the Holocaust. They and one other member of the family survived, and they actually lived for 2 years behind the Iron Curtain, in Eastern Europe. They were finally able to get to Sweden where they lived for 1 year, and they came to Mexico--of all places, Mexico City-- where they lived for 1 year. Then they finally made it to America, a country they believed was the only place on the planet where they could rebuild their shattered lives, and that is what they did. They contributed mightily to this country. They contributed mightily to me, to my brother, and to my sister. When I hear the stories that I hear from my colleagues tonight, what it makes me realize is that my family's story is not unique, but it is what makes America unique because you can't tell my family's story in almost any other country but this country. I had the chance, when I was first in this job, to go to Fort Carson in Colorado to a naturalization ceremony there. There were 30 people from every corner of the globe in our uniform because they were fighting for America, but they weren't yet citizens. They took the oath to that flag, and I used to carry around the list of the countries they came from because out of 30, only 2 came from the same country. Twenty eight came from places all over the Earth, and I sat there thinking to myself how lucky we are to live in a place where that could be true. It is not true in any other country on the planet. I want my children to grow up in the country I grew up in--a country that is a nation of immigrants committed to the rule of law. That is why I was grateful to have the chance to be part of the Gang of 8 that negotiated the comprehensive immigration bill. I was sorry when that didn't ever get a vote in the House, because I think it would have passed had it been voted on in the House. That bill, which contained $40 billion for border security, would be well on its way to implementation today, and I think our political debate as a country would be very different than the political debate we have been having now, which would be good for our country and remind us of the values that we share. Unfortunately, we are not in that position today, and we are left with a problem, trying to deal with the fact that the Executive order that President Obama wrote for the DACA population has been set aside by this President, who then said: Congress needs to figure out what to do about it. That is why we are here tonight. We have had a negotiation now for more than 4 months with what has evolved into the Gang of 6, and I am very pleased that in that effort we were joined by the Presiding Officer, who is my colleague from Colorado. We are the only State that has two Senators on this Gang of 6--one is a Democrat, and one is a Republican. I thank my colleague for his courage and for his leadership at a moment when there are a lot of reasons why this isn't a comfortable place to occupy. But I think it says something about Colorado that at a moment when we have all this craziness going on in Washington and at a moment when the country can't see any sign of a bipartisan pulse here, when our approval ratings hover somewhere between 9 and 15 percent, there is a reason there is a Democrat and there is a Republican from Colorado who actually tried to solve a problem on the floor of this Senate with our colleagues, and that is because Colorado is an excellent place to live and an excellent place to be from. The citizens of Colorado have watched the train wreck over the last 10 years in this Congress from a State that is one-third Democratic, one-third Republican, and one-third Independent. They have to work together to get anything done. Nobody gets their way all the time in the State of Colorado, and they expect this place to work like that as well, and it doesn't work like that enough. So I want to thank again my colleague from Colorado. I want to thank Senator Durbin, who is here, Senator Menendez, and I also want to say to Senator Flake and Senator Graham: Thank you for your courage. When you put together a compromise like this, which I think is a good compromise--it is not the bill I would have written if it were my decision. I would have had a 5-year path for the Dreamers, not a 12- year path or a 10-year path in some cases. I would have had a 5-year path. If I were writing this bill, I wouldn't have insisted that Dreamers not be able to sponsor their parents. The hour is late. It is actually not that late. We should be working, but I understand why the Republicans who negotiated this in good faith needed those concessions. I understand it. I am not thrilled with the President's idea that we need to build a wall to secure the southern border. I do believe strongly that we do need to secure our southern border, just as I know the Republicans that have been in this negotiation believe, as I believe, that there should be a pathway for citizenship for a population of people in our country who know no other country but the United States of America, any more than my own children know any other country besides the United States of America. There isn't, unfortunately, anybody else to do this work except for the 100 Members in the Senate and our friends in the House of Representatives. So our tendency has been to just avoid it and to put it off, and we don't have that luxury anymore because they are no longer protected. Every day in my State there is another family broken up because of the deportation that is going on, and I don't think there is virtually anybody who is a Member of this body who believes the answer for the Dreamers is that they should be deported or that families should be split up. We may have disagreements about how to get there, but that is what the last 4 months of negotiation have been meant to sort out--to find a middle spot where we could land and where we would get not every vote in the Senate but more than 60 votes in the Senate and where we would get a bill passed in the House of Representatives. I think we found it, and one of the things we have done is to meet the four requirements that the President said he wanted when he had us over to the White House: One was DACA. That is the modified Dream Act. One was border security. We have got $2.7 billion of border security in this bill. One was ending what he calls chain migration, which for the DACA population we do by saying that no parent can be sponsored by any child. And he said that he wanted to get rid of the diversity lottery, which we do. He may not love every part of it. I don't expect anybody to, but I do think this is the way we can move this forward, and I think we should move it forward. Bob Menendez talked about the fierce urgency that now we treat the lives that are affected by the decisions we make or, in most cases, the decisions we don't make as collateral damage that somehow we shouldn't concern ourselves with. I don't think we should go home until we address this. I don't think we should leave Washington until we address this. Actually, I will say that I agree with something Senator Graham said. Because of these crazy continuing resolutions--let me just say, in case there is the unlikely event that there is anybody actually watching this on television right now, that a continuing resolution is no different than a temporary budget, and that is all it is--now we have gotten to the place where we were running the government on continuing resolutions for the last 10 years or so. We have passed 30 continuing resolutions. We didn't get our work done at the end of the year for some reason. So now we are going to do the work we should have done at the end of the year with a continuing resolution. They are now talking about another 2-week continuing resolution. Every time you hear the words ``continuing resolution'' you should think of it as a temporary budget. That is what it is. It might be hard to understand it because not a single school district in our State or a single municipality in our State and not a single State among the 50 States would ever run their affairs this way, but for the last 10 years, that is the way we have run the government in a game of chicken, of fiscal cliffs, government shutdowns, and continuing resolutions. So we are now enacting laws that reflect the priorities of whoever was in the Senate 10 years ago, because that is the last time we actually had a real appropriations process around here and a real budgeting process around here. So Senator Graham is right when he said what he said about the defense of this country. Because of continuing resolutions, we have aircraft that are grounded for lack of parts because the budgets make it impossible for them to plan, and that means that we can't train folks to fly those aircraft, to defend us if we have to do something on the Korean Peninsula or something else. On the other hand, on the domestic side of things, since 1980 we have cut domestic discretionary spending in this country by 35 percent as a percentage of our GDP. The Presiding Officer knows as well as I do that if you were in rural Colorado 10 years ago, you didn't hear much about opioids, but now when you have a townhall meeting in rural Colorado or when you live there, as the Presiding Officer does, you know that people actually have less access to treatment today than they did 10 years ago, and I think that is a consequence of our inability to budget properly around here and the inability to deal responsibly with our fiscal matters. It is like we have a perpetual head cold around here that robs us of our ambition to actually do anything or energy to actually do anything, and I am afraid that has infected this discussion about DACA as well. So I want to close by saying that this is the moment when we need to do this. There is not going to be another alternative that can be supported by 60 Senators here, potentially by the President, and by the Dreamers. We are not going to succeed at passing a piece of legislation if the Dreamers feel like we are doing something to their parents that we would never accept for our own families. That is their bottom line. I have been amazed by the young people who I have met over the years and most recently in this debate, who are saying to me: Don't sacrifice my parents for me. I would rather deal with the uncertainty of my position than to know that a trade was made that I can't live with for the rest of my life. That is at the heart of this compromise here, and I think it is entirely consistent with our traditions and values as Americans--entirely consistent with that. So my hope is that all of us hear the voices of these Dreamers, who are contributing at their universities and in our workplaces all over the country, just like our own sons and daughters, and that we actually do something around here for once that is not predictable and that the American people will cheer for, just as the people in Colorado are glad. It is not every single one, but by and large, the people in Colorado are glad that the Presiding Officer and I are working on this. The only way that is going to happen is if we find a way to come together over the next couple of days and do something, other than what people say we are fated to do, which is have another interruption in the activities of our government over a political disagreement when the parties are actually much closer than they have been for a long time. We have a good compromise. We have a good piece of legislation. We have a piece of legislation that if it were put on the floor could get 60 votes. I want to close by again thanking my colleagues. There is a lot around this place that I feel embarrassed about, but I think that if the American people could have seen the negotiation that went on for 4 months, they would have been proud of what they saw because they would have seen Republicans and Democrats coming together not to have one more political fight but to actually solve a real challenge that is facing our country and to do it in a way that is consistent with our traditions as Americans. So I hope in the next couple of days we have the chance to pass this bill. I thank my Republican colleagues who signed onto the bill today for giving us the momentum we need to move into the next day or two, and I look forward to succeeding around here for once. Once again, I want to thank my colleague from Colorado, the Presiding Officer, for his partnership on this legislation. I think it has meant a great deal to the people he and I represent, and I, as a Coloradan and as a constituent of his, want to thank him for the position that he has taken. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to talk about the Dreamers. As I have from the time I was a school superintendent in Denver until now, I had the opportunity to spend time last weekend or the week before with a group of Dreamers in Alamosa, a small town in Southern Colorado. These meetings are usually occasions for people to lay out their dreams for the future in America, the only country they know and the only country they love. This meeting was different than other meetings I have had recently. Instead of the hope and self-confidence I am so used to hearing from young people, what I heard was fear, anxiety, and pain. Everybody in the group I met the other day came to this country as undocumented immigrants when they were children, some just months old. None of them made the decision to come here. They grew up here, and they know no other country besides the United States of America. In 2012, they joined 800,000 Dreamers who came forward across the country to share their information for temporary legal status under the DACA Program. Over the past 5 years, many of these Dreamers grew into young adults, finishing school, starting families, launching businesses. They went about their lives, trusting our government would keep its word and find a way for them to stay in the only country they know. Then, in September, President Trump rescinded DACA, throwing every one of their lives into chaos. During our meeting in Alamosa, not a single person could share their story without breaking into tears. One young man, Julio Maldanado, told me about the iPhone repair business he opened on Main Street. Like so many immigrants, he poured himself into that enterprise as an entrepreneur. Thanks to his efforts, it is now not only turning a profit, it is providing a service to his community and supporting his family. Now all of that is in jeopardy. As I said, Julio couldn't tell his story without starting to cry. When he turned to his business partner who was also there to help, his partner began crying too. Versions of that played out again and again in our meetings and in the meetings I have been having here in Washington, DC, as Dreamers take the risk to travel to Washington to share their stories--honest dream after honest dream being crushed by uncertainty, young people trembling in fear. We hear a lot around this place about how we don't have to act until the last moment. We don't have to act until March 5. This is not true. There are so many children, young people, and young adults in my State who are losing their status as we sit here, unable to accomplish something everybody seems to say they want to accomplish. The President says he wants to accomplish it. The Speaker says he wants to accomplish it. Senators on both sides say they want to accomplish it. We have created this crisis that President Trump set off when he rescinded DACA. This isn't just affecting Dreamers, although that ought to be enough for us to do the job we are supposed to do. For years, farmers and ranchers have told us they need workers with clear legal status. Undocumented workers have told us they face exploitation without legal resources. Families have told us they fear being split apart and sent to places they hardly know, and, today, this week, those fears were confirmed again as we lost another father from Colorado. Just last week, we had a family torn apart in Colorado. Melecio Andazola came to America in 1998 as an undocumented immigrant. Over the last 19 years, he has paid taxes in America, he has raised four children in America, he has followed the rules. Then, on Friday, he was deported. Now it is unclear whether he will ever see his daughter walk across the stage for her college graduation next spring at Yale, in New Haven. It is unclear how he will be able to support his four kids. Because of the choices we have made in Washington, the lives of everyone in that family have been spun into chaos, like so many other families across the country. For years, stories like this have demanded action. That is why the Senator from Illinois who is here today, Senator Durbin, has led this charge for so many years, standing on the floor with photos of the Dreamers from his State and across the United States. It is the reason I was so honored to have the chance to work with him and six others of our colleagues back in 2013, the so-called Gang of 8, a group of four Democrats and four Republicans. I was just talking with my friend from Oklahoma about how this place doesn't work. That was an instance where it worked. We came together to write a bipartisan proposal for immigration reform. Over the course of 8 months, in Washington, we worked through a process that I think would make every American proud for once--both sides sitting down to solve problems. The result was a great piece of legislation. Our bill had more funding for border security, not just a wall but smart and effective border security. It had more funding for internal security. It had a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people who are here, including all of the Dreamers. Part of that bill had the most progressive DREAM Act ever written. It got 68 votes on the floor of the Senate. Not everyone got what they wanted. As I just said to the Senator from Oklahoma in a different context, it is unreasonable to expect that here. Each side had to give, but the result was a great vote. It got almost 70 votes in the Senate, at a time when you can't pass anything through the Senate. For the first time in a generation, we had a real opportunity to resolve our differences on immigration, but as is so often the case in Washington, politics got in the way. In the House, Republican leaders denied our bill a simple up-or-down vote, which would have passed. They preferred to keep immigration alive as a political weapon to divide the American people and distract from the real challenges in our economy. By the way, the Senator from Illinois will remember this. We heard a lot of stretching this week about how much economic growth this tax bill was going to create--0.6 percent here or 0.1 percent over there. The CBO estimate on the Gang of 8 immigration bill was that by bringing people out of the shadows and putting them in a position to contribute legally to the economy, that would have added 3 percentage points to our GDP, to our Nation's economy over the first 10 years, and five incremental points over the second 10 years. That would have been a useful thing to do for our economy. As a result of what happened--or didn't happen--in the House, the rhetoric around immigration has just become more toxic, evermore divisive, evermore unrecognizable in America, a Nation that has inarguably been made great by immigrants. As I said, there are a lot of economists who are awfully skeptical about the economic claims that have been made about this tax bill. If we look at what happened in 2001 and 2003, when they tried to do it before, we all know how that story is going to end. On the other hand, nearly every expert agrees that forcing out the Dreamers would hurt our economy. The Cato Institute found that removing the Dreamers would stunt economic growth by $280 billion. Another study found that comprehensive immigration reform would grow the economy by $1.5 trillion over 10 years and support nearly 1 million new jobs. Despite these facts, there has been a lot of talk around here about how immigrants detract from America or how they somehow leach off the system and lack our values. Those claims are then used to justify actions like canceling DACA. It would be hard for me to believe that anybody making a claim like that had ever sat down with a Dreamer. Daniela Gomez Castro came to Colorado when she was just a year old. As a child, Daniela looked up to her grandmother--one of the few women doctors in her area--and dreamed of following her into medicine. She took classes in biology and excelled in our public schools, graduating from Smokey Hill High School in 2015. To become a doctor, she knew college was the next step, so she enrolled at the University of Colorado Denver as a prehealth major, and in between classes, she worked as a nurse's assistant, restaurant hostess, and student mentor to help cover tuition. Everything was on track. Then, last year, she learned her legal status meant she couldn't get a medical license. After working so hard for so long, her dream is now frozen in place by forces in Washington totally beyond her control. Today, America--especially places like rural Colorado--is desperate for physicians. The Association of American Medical Colleges predicts that, by 2030, we will have a shortage of 100,000 doctors nationwide. As I say, we are feeling that shortage right now in rural Colorado. We don't have enough clinics and treatment centers, even as we face an epidemic of opioid addiction. Two of our counties don't have a single doctor, and a lot of our rural counties have no primary care doctor or nurse. Given that, it doesn't seem to me to make any sense that we should send Daniela back to a place she doesn't remember and doesn't call her home, especially when we need her here. That obviously would be cruel, but my point is, it would also be incredibly shortsighted. Apolinar Lopez Garcia also came here when he was just a year old. His family eventually made their way to Greeley, CO. He thrived in school and joined the Junior ROTC Program in Northridge High School, where he excelled as a cadet. He relished the ROTC sense of community, self- discipline, and duty, so much so that after graduating from high school, he wanted to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps. He filled out the paperwork and waited, but when the reply came, Apolinar was crushed. Because of his legal status, the Marines couldn't accept him. We should think about that. Of all the paths available to a bright, young person like Apolinar, he wanted to serve the country in uniform. You don't feel called to serve a place you don't consider home. You don't feel called to serve a place where you don't share the values, to defend a community that is not your own. Apolinar's choice flies in the face of every specious attack we have heard against immigrants in this debate. He doesn't detract from America. Apolinar wants to defend America. Daniela wants to treat sick Americans. Julio wants to create jobs for Americans. They join 800,000 Dreamers who, for years, have invested in America by paying taxes, starting businesses, and serving their communities. For years, America has invested in them, by educating them, by training them, and instilling in them the confidence and love of country we hope for each new generation of Americans. It is unimaginable now that we wouldn't find a way to resolve their status. We can't avoid this any longer. The Senate and the House are so good at putting off what they should have done last week or last month or last year. This is not one of those cases anymore. On each day we do nothing, 112 people are deported. Over 12,000 people have been deported since September. Every one of them represents a family torn apart, a business shuttered, a payroll not made, an education interrupted, a dream shattered. In the end, our most basic job here--lost in this sometimes--is to look out for the next generation of Americans. Instead of looking after them, we have spent an entire year trampling over them. Let's review the record. With the Dreamers, we have ransomed their futures for political leverage. We are doing it right now. With our backtracking on climate change, we have made their futures more dangerous and costly. With our failure to reauthorize CHIP, we have jeopardized the healthcare of, among others, 90,000 kids in Colorado who may lose healthcare if we don't act. Now, with this tax bill, we have handed another $1.4 trillion in debt to people whose futures we are not investing in because we say we cannot afford to do it--by rebuilding our roads, by improving our schools, by spurring innovation. Instead, we have taken another bet on trickle-down economics at a time when we already have a substantial budget deficit. That is what brings us here at the end of the year, once again, with our not having done our work and passing something called a continuing resolution that no other government enterprise in America gets to do--a temporary budget that doesn't reflect the priorities of the American people. In that mix, the Dreamers find themselves caught up in a political discussion without any assurance that it will be resolved. The good news is that I know there are Republican colleagues here, as well as Democrats, who want a solution for the Dreamers. They see in these young people all of the qualities we cherish as Americans-- family, community, service, enterprise, and patriotism. I would just say, as we get ready to leave here, that I think we shouldn't leave here today. I think we should commit to this issue with our Dreamers. This should be our No. 1 priority together--to figure out how to get this done so we don't have inadvertent casualties occur. After a while, something inadvertent has to be advertent because if you have knowledge of it and if you know what is going to happen, it leads you to believe that you should have acted. We need to stop the brinksmanship and the partisanship, and we need to work together to ensure that their futures will be here in the United States, where we need them, in the only country they know. I thank my colleagues for their indulgence. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to recognize the 90th birthday of Albert Ratner on December 26, 2017. Albert has lived a life of faith and service. Whether as a loving father, life-long philanthropist, or a successful businessman at Forest City Realty Trust, Albert has worked tirelessly for his community. Over his career, Albert has shown a particular passion for giving back to the Jewish community, improving our schools, and supporting innovation at the community level. In Denver, Albert led the charge to transform the Stapleton Airport into a thriving community center with high-quality, affordable housing, green spaces, and new schools. Among those schools is Denver's Science and Technology High School, which has attracted many brilliant students over the last 13 years. Albert's work to revitalize downtown areas across the country have earned him numerous awards, including the National Building Museum Honor Award, the Urban Land Institute's J. C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development, and the Michigan State University's Distinguished Alumni Award. Albert is the proud father of Deborah and Brian, who follow his lifelong values of service, community, and faith. He is also a loving husband to Audrey, his wife of 36 years, and before that, to his first wife, Faye, who tragically died in an automobile accident. On Albert's 90th birthday, we celebrate his accomplished life, one defined by good humor, compassion, family, and faith.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, this is not the topic that I came to the floor to talk about; I will talk about it in a minute. But while the Senator from Oklahoma is here, I thought I would just respond to what he was saying--not on the merits of his particular proposal, because I haven't had a chance to study that yet, but to his plea that this place start to work again. I couldn't agree more with that sentiment. The Founding Fathers were very deliberate people, and they understood that in exercising self-government in the Republic that they were establishing, which subsequent generations of Americans have made more democratic over time, that we would have disputes. People these days in our political system and especially on the cable television at night seem to be astounded that there are people who don't see the world the way they see the world. The Founders knew that, by definition, if we were going to be a self-governing republic, we would have disagreements, and they set out to form an incredibly elegant mechanism to resolve those disputes. It was elegant on the outside of this Chamber--freedom to assemble, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to vote--and it was elegant on the inside of this Chamber. And generations of people who occupied this place understood that the way it was meant to work was not that you always got your way all the time and that part of being here was not just to have disputes but to resolve disputes--and not even our disputes but disagreements that the country might have for a legitimate reason--and, on average, hoped that we would move the country forward. I quite agree that recently--certainly in the time that I have been here--we have been using this place simply to have disputes, not to resolve them. That may be OK if we were in North Korea or in the Soviet Union--the old Soviet Union; it doesn't work in a democratic republic. I want to finish a little bit of the history that my friend from Oklahoma talked about. After the Democrats invoked the nuclear option, which I have said before on this floor is the worst vote that I ever took as a Senator, the now majority leader pocketed that precedent when we changed the rules in the middle and used it--used the nuclear option to change the rules so that now a person gets a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court not with 60 votes but with just 51 votes. My issue with that is that now your party can advance people to the Supreme Court without any reasonable expectation that my party should take responsibility for it, or vice versa. Instead of having potential nominees come here and say: You should put me on the court because I can attract both Democratic and Republican votes because I have an open mind, I worry we are going to have people from both sides say: We are going to have a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees, which says we either have the most conservative jurist in the country or the most liberal jurist in the country, depending on who it is. We have infected the Supreme Court with the partisanship of this body. My hope is, we can actually come together on a set of rule changes that would recognize not just that this place may need to move a little faster in the 21st century but that we ought to be pushing people together to work in a bipartisan way on behalf of the country. Without passing on the merits of the proposal, I thank the Senator for coming to the floor to talk about--to put it in the vernacular--how busted this place is.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, in 2008, the Senate took up the question of whether to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wasn't here at the time, but I remember the issue prompted a rigorous debate. The Senate spent months on the topic. Experts weighed in, and the American people had a chance to share their views in a fairly open process. It is worth pausing to recall the context for that discussion. In 2008, America produced nearly 7 million barrels of oil a day and imported another 12 million. The price of oil was roughly $150 a barrel. There was talk about the world hitting ``peak oil.'' In that context, one side claimed that drilling in the Arctic Refuge was needed to boost domestic production, reduce foreign imports, and lower prices at the pump. The other side countered that any economic benefit from drilling was far outweighed by the need to preserve the Arctic Refuge, a jewel of our public lands, a vital habitat for wildlife, and a sacred place for the Gwich'in people--a place so sacred they are reluctant to even enter it. In the end, after weighing the facts and considering the costs, 56 Senators, included 6 Republicans, voted to protect the Arctic Refuge from drilling. That was 2008. Now fast forward to 2017. The Arctic Refuge remains a jewel of our public lands. It remains a vital habitat for so many flora and fauna. It remains a sacred place for local tribes, and one of America's most spectacular wild places. The case for preservation has not changed. By contrast, the case for drilling has never been weaker. Compared to 2008, domestic oil production has nearly doubled. Oil imports are down 22 percent. The price of oil has fallen 50 percent. Terminals we built to import oil and gas are now being used to export oil and gas. For all these reasons, unlike 2008, oil companies are not clamoring for more opportunities to drill. Just last week, oil companies had the chance to bid on 10.3 million acres open for drilling in Alaska. In the end, less than 1 percent of the land was leased. Think about that. We are not even using all of the land now available for drilling in Alaska. It defies reason that we would open up even more, especially in a place as treasured as the Arctic Refuge. All of this is to say that, if it made little sense to drill in 2008, it makes no sense to drill now. So it should surprise no one that the other side doesn't want a real debate. That is why they tucked this into their massive tax bill, hoping to sneak it in under the hood. Their justification? We need revenue from the oil to pay down the deficit that we are creating with this tax bill. There are two problems with that. First, the Congressional Budget Office found that, because of low demand, revenue from drilling would be far less than projected, potentially hundreds of millions less. Second, the only reason we are having this conversation is because the other side wants to spend $1.4 trillion on tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Consider this: Their plan spends $37 billion to give an average tax cut of $64,000 to those lucky enough to make over $1 million a year. To help pay for that, we are about to drill in one of the most stunning places in America. I am not opposed to oil and gas production. We need transition fuels as we move toward low-carbon, renewable energy. I also recognize that, for many small towns across America, the oil and gas sector is a rare source of steady, high-paying jobs. In Colorado, we have managed to increase energy production to meet our growing demand. But we have done so in a way that protects our public lands and creates jobs, for those in oil and gas and our thriving outdoor economy. We have found a way for all sides to win. If my colleagues from Alaska want to increase energy production, create jobs, and spur growth, I stand ready to help, but let's not pretend that drilling in the Arctic Refuge is the only way to do that. There are places in America where you can set up an oil rig, lay down roads, and run pipelines in responsible way. The Arctic Refuge is not one of those places. It is a treasure we should leave for our children, not a place to drill for no good reason. Sadly, the Senate voted to allow drilling in the Arctic Refuge when it took up the broader tax bill. For every American who opposed this move, know that this isn't over. Senator Markey and I have authored a bill, which now has 41 cosponsors, that would shield the Arctic Refuge from drilling. So I urge everyone to keep fighting, to keep speaking out for America's public lands, which are the envy of the world, to keep standing up for the beautiful places in America we must pass on to the next generation, as our parents and grandparents did for us.

Mr. BENNET

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I come to the floor tonight, once again, to talk about this tax bill being rushed through the House and the Senate. This is the first time in 31 years that a tax bill of this magnitude has been considered. I don't refer to this as tax reform because it is barely reforming anything. It seems a shame that we didn't follow in the footsteps of what then- President Reagan chose to do when he had the opportunity to reform the Tax Code. The bill he worked on, which was every bit as consequential as the one in front of us, commanded the vast majority of votes in this Chamber--Democrats and Republicans voting together--after years of process, years of committee hearings, years of hearings even out in the country, listening to business owners, economists, and citizens talk about what they thought our Tax Code needed to be competitive and to be fair to the American people. I would say through the Chair to the pages that I was in college when the last bill was passed. Now, 31 years later, we are on the verge of passing a bill in the Senate without one Democratic vote--not a single one--and without a single hearing in the Senate Finance Committee, on which I serve--not a single hearing about the text of this bill, not a single hearing to tell the American people that, on the individual side of this bill, we are borrowing $34 billion from our kids to give a tax cut to the 572,000 taxpayers who are fortunate enough to make more than $1 million a year. That is 572,000 taxpayers who are fortunate enough to make $1 million a year. We think it is so essential that each one of them get a $59,000 tax cut that we are willing to borrow that money from our children to do it. We can't think of a better use than that. A better use is not to give a tax cut to the middle class, because we know what those numbers look like in this bill. There are not a half million people who make $50,000 and less in this economy. There are 90 million people. Those people are not getting $34 billion. Those people are getting $13 billion. If we do the math, it adds up to about $160, on average, per taxpayer making $50,000 or less, in the first year. That is the best year. So 2019 is the best year. That $160 per taxpayer works out to about $7.50 a paycheck. So we are justifying $34 billion going to 572,000 families because we say at the essence of this is a tax cut for the middle class that is worth $7.50. I think it is disgraceful to call this a middle-class tax cut. What is as disgraceful is the fact that we are blowing a $1.4 trillion hole in our deficit. There are people on the other side--and I grant them this--who say we will grow out of this and that the tax cut will pay for itself. This is exactly what President Bush said in 2001, when he cut taxes. It is exactly what he said in 2003, when he cut taxes. Remember that when George Bush became President of this country, he inherited a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion. Then, he cut taxes and said it would pay for itself, in 2001. He cut taxes and said it would pay for itself, in 2003. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Not only did he not ask the American people to pay for those wars, but the 2003 tax cut actually came after the invasion of Iraq. Today we have massive readiness problems with our military. Today we confront the potential for conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Today we confront uncertainties in the Middle East and behavior by Russia that we need to worry about. Are we going to go in debt to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut they are not asking for? I am more sympathetic on the corporate side. I believe our corporate rate is too high. If we had worked in a bipartisan way, I think we could have gotten to a deal that 75 or 80 people would have voted for. That would have been beneficial for two reasons. It would have represented more widely the American people's view of what we ought to do here. I have heard the majority leader on the floor talking about partisan efforts like this, and how they are doomed to fail because most of the American people will not support it. We can see that in the polling numbers on this bill. But we could have cut a deal that said: Let's bring our corporate rate down to 25 percent. By the way, let's get rid of some of those loopholes. As for all of the stuff we said over the years about lowering the rate and broadening the base, let's actually do that. That is not what this bill does. This bill cuts the corporate rate to 20 percent and leaves all of the loopholes in place. There is no broadening of the base. So if the effective rate today is actually in the low twenties, even though the published rate is 35 percent, the effective rate is going to be far below 20 percent if we don't actually reform the Tax Code. I think there would have been bipartisan agreement about doing something with the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit, as my colleague from Florida has tried to do to a degree. I think there would have been bipartisan support for the idea that we ought to do something to repatriate the money stuck overseas and invest it here in the United States in infrastructure. But there was no effort to make a bipartisan effort here--none. There have certainly been cases where Democrats have been guilty of that. This is a profound case of the Republicans being guilty of that, and the result is that they have a lousy bill that speaks to the extreme wing of their party rather than to the middle of America, because only in that way could you end up with a piece of legislation that the President is describing as a middle-class tax cut that is not one. Nothing about the math in this tax bill suggests it is. By the way, the $34 billion I talked about does not include the estate tax. When we include the increase of the estates not subject to the estate tax in this bill, it adds, on average, another $10,000. Now we are talking about borrowing $69,000. So we are now borrowing an additional $10,000 from the sons and daughters of police officers, firefighters, and teachers in order to finance an estate tax cut that we will not pay for. Pay for it. Don't borrow the money. I got here 9 years ago at the depth of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Our economy had locked up. Because of the two tax cuts under President Bush, because of the two wars we didn't have the decency to pay for, and because President Bush passed so-called Medicare Part D--which is a prescription drug program for seniors that he didn't pay for--and then with the supply-side economics, they drove our economy into the worst ditch since the Great Depression. When President Obama showed up, the surplus was not a surplus. It was a $1.5 trillion deficit. I was here when we tried to work in a bipartisan way to figure out how to respond to a terrifying circumstance--not for the Senate but for our country. A woman who came to a townhall told me that her plan was to die sooner because overnight she had lost half of her net worth, and she didn't know how to make it through because the stock market had cratered and her pension was cut in half. We had more than a 10-percent unemployment rate in the United States of America, and we couldn't get a single person to lift their finger on the other side of the aisle because they said that the deficit was too big. They said that President Obama was pursuing what the pollsters told them was ``job-killing government spending.'' Those were the words. It wasn't his $1.5 trillion deficit; that is what he inherited. He left with about a $550 billion deficit. It was cut by two-thirds. Today, we stand here talking about this absolutely irresponsible tax bill. It is already at $666 billion. We have a government where we are collecting 18 percent of the GDP in revenue. It is actually about 17.9 percent before this tax cut goes through. We are spending more than 21 percent, and our answer is: Let's cut some more taxes, so we will be spending 17 and change. That is a big delta--17 to 21. That is a conversation we should be having together, not in pieces. All of these people who say: Don't worry about it; it will pay for itself--remember what they said in 2001 and 2003. They said the same thing. They are going to show up here after this Christmas season has passed, and they are going to say: That is why we need to cut Medicaid and Medicare. There is no doubt we have to have a conversation about the sustainability of these programs, and there is no doubt we have to have a discussion about how we are going to get out of the fiscal issues we confront. I have no doubt that the moment we face the next crisis, whether it is a national security crisis or an economic crisis, we are going to wish we hadn't passed this tax bill. We are going to wish that when this economy was at full employment, when interest rates are what they are, that we had thought about how to come together in a bipartisan way and actually do something responsible for once. There is a mayor in Indiana who sent an op-ed piece to the Washington Post last week. He said: Let me break this down for you in terms of my local community. The equivalent of what the Republican tax bill is for my community would be that we would go out and borrow $400 million, which is a staggering sum, not billions and billions of dollars but, on the basis of the size of their government, $400 million--four or five times what our indebtedness is today. Then, what I would do is say: We didn't borrow this money to build infrastructure. We didn't borrow this money to make sure we end poverty in my community or to make sure the water is clean. We gave it to the people in the biggest houses, the richest neighborhoods in our community, hoping that somehow the benefits would trickle down to everybody else. He said that they would be run out on the rail--and they should be. There are some politicians who say that it will pay for itself. There is no economist who has said that this is not going to create a deficit. There is probably a consensus, around $1.4 trillion--I have seen some math that says $1 trillion, and others that say $2.5 trillion. Let's take the $1.4 trillion and consider, as an order of magnitude, if we didn't care about our deficit--which apparently we don't anymore--what else we could spend the money on besides giving this tax cut to the very wealthiest Americans in our country. In the 9 years I have been here, we have gone from no opioid crisis to an opioid crisis that is killing 50,000 Americans. There are communities all over our States, especially in rural parts of the States, where we have no answer. We have provided no additional treatment, even though we have an emergency today that we didn't have before. That is not the America I grew up in. That is not the America our parents and grandparents set up for us. Look at what you can do to create treatment in every United States county for 10 years. That is this $60 billion. That is this little orange part of a $1.4 trillion hole in our deficit. That is one thing you could do. Another thing you could do would be to provide universal pre-K for low-income children for a decade. That might be worth borrowing from the next generation for because they would actually be getting a benefit. They are not getting any benefit from this $59,000 that we are giving to people who make more than $1 million a year. You could double Federal funding for research and development on clean energy for over a decade. You could maintain our technological advantage over China in emerging industries for a decade. That is a huge concern. That would be $50 billion, just this little slice--a foregone priority if we pass this bill, just like the response to opioids. You could fund a 20-man mission to Mars. Because of our fecklessness, we can't even put an astronaut into space without putting them on a Russian rocket. That has nothing to do with our lacking the engineering talent. That has nothing to do with our lacking imagination or, for some of us, a sense of mission. It has to do with the fecklessness of this Congress and the inability of it to walk and chew gum at the same time. We could repair all of America's aging dams, which our parents and grandparents were thoughtful enough to build for us but which we feel we don't need to maintain for the next generation of Americans. We would rather give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America. You could end the backlog of infrastructure repairs in America's airports--end it. Five years of funding, that is only $100 billion. I say ``only.'' That is a huge number, but not compared to $1.4 trillion. You could end the U.S. Air Force pilot shortage. Why do we have a shortage of Air Force pilots? Because this place, for 9 years, has run itself on continuing resolutions. The military can't plan, so we have airplanes that are being scavenged for parts and cannot fly. If they can't fly, the pilots can't get the training hours. If they can't get the training hours, they can't move ahead in their careers, and they can't be ready when the battle comes. You could easily pay for that here. You could fund the first 5 years of the Navy's plan to build a 355- ship fleet. Everyone around here walks around saying: We don't have any money; we are broke. It is matter of choices and priorities. I cannot think of a set of priorities less out of whack with what Republicans think of in Colorado, much less our Democrats and Independents. Here is one we really do care about in Colorado and all across the country. You could pay for all deferred maintenance at our national parks and other land management agencies. That is right here, this tiny purple square--$19 billion. If you look at the bottom right, that includes over a dozen priorities for rural communities that have been kicked around by this Congress and our CRs year after year. Here are a few things that fit in there. Extend high-speed internet to every rural community in America. That might be a good use of money or a good reason to borrow money--to extend high-speed internet to people who don't have it. This is a world where telling a kid in a rural school that they don't have access to high-speed internet is no different than telling them: Sorry, you are not getting textbooks, but these other kids do. We could reimburse rural areas with significant public lands for lost tax revenue, the PILT payment. I promise my colleague from Pennsylvania I am coming to the end. I know he doesn't believe it. These PILT payments are a pain point for my rural counties. Every year we go through the same nonsense at the end of the year. Every single year they say: Is it going to be funded in the CR? They are using it to pay for something else. Yet it would cost a tiny fraction of just the rural priorities part of it. That is $111 billion for all the rural priorities. Eliminating the national backlog for the USDA rural water program--can you imagine what that would mean for rural America and economic development in rural America? They wouldn't have to wait for someone in New York to trickle down to them because they would have an investment in their community. It would create jobs. It would allow them to do economic development and keep their children in their communities and their schools open and their banks open. That is not a priority for the people writing and voting for this bill. President Trump cut Essential Air Service in his budget--zeroed it out. We could fund Essential Air Service for 10 years, providing a critical economic lifeline to small towns across America and in my State. We could fund the U.S. Forest Service fires suppression for a decade, so they wouldn't have to keep cannibalizing other parts of the budget. This year, for the first year, they spent more than half of their budget fighting fires because we don't have the sense to budget them so that they can do fire mitigation. Talk about penny wise and pound foolish. In Colorado, we could clean up the Gold King Mine spill, fund the Arkansas Valley Conduit to provide drinking water to some of the poorest areas in Southeastern Colorado, which we have been promised since John F. Kennedy was President of the United States. We could do everything I just mentioned, all of these investments-- infrastructure, research, public health, housing, national security, and rural communities--for the cost of this tax plan. This is yet another illustration of how profoundly Washington's priorities have decoupled from the priorities of the American people. Beyond that, this bill confirms every other suspicion about how Washington operates. President Trump ran for office saying that he would drain the swamp. This tax plan is a creature of the swamp. It was jammed through with last-minute changes, scribbled by hand in the dark of the night, with 2 a.m. votes--shameful, 2 a.m. votes on legislation that no one had a chance to fully understand. There was input from lobbyists on K Street but not a single hearing where the American people could express their view. Given the process, it should surprise no one that the bill substituted the priorities of the American people with a litany of carve-outs and loopholes that powerful special interests have gotten into this bill. I am going to skip this part because I want to yield to my friend from Pennsylvania, but let me just finish by saying that today, incredibly in America, the top 10 percent of earners take home more than half of America's income. We have not seen that since 1928, the year before the Great Depression. I know the President knows these folks as well as I do. Everybody on this chart is working hard, whether it is the top 10 percent or the bottom 90 percent, but this is not the way our economy ought to work. For almost all of our history, this is not the way it did work. I was a businessperson before I came to Congress, before I was a school superintendent. I have nothing against anyone who has done well, but it is preposterous to suggest that the real problem in our economy, when we have a record stock market and record income inequality, is that wealthy individuals and businesses don't have enough. My final chart is this chart, which shows median household income. Since 1980 until now, the cost of housing, cost of higher education, and cost of healthcare--we have done nothing to address or help this. We have turned our back on this. I think we could have written a bill, as I said at the outset, that had a real middle-class tax cut in it, but we chose not to do it. Last year, I met a mom in Rifle, CO, at an early childhood center. In the course of our conversation, she said to me: ``I've got a job so I can have health insurance, and every single dollar I earn goes to pay for this early childhood center, so I can work.'' That is the story of too many people in my State. My State has one of the most dynamic economies in the United States of America, and still too many people whom I represent are middle-class families whose incomes haven't really gone up, not over 10 years but since 1980, for whom the cost of housing, cost of healthcare, cost of higher education, and the cost of early childhood education have conspired to create for them impossible choices that their parents and grandparents never had to make. Tax reform should have been the opportunity to have addressed that. It should have been a chance to remind that mom in Rifle that our government or at least someone in our government understands the struggles she faces and has the capacity and the will to help to do something about it. This bill squanders that opportunity. This tax bill squanders it. Worse than that, it reminds Americans of the vast space between their lives and the priorities in Washington. It reminds them of the yawning gap between their voices and the voices of powerful special interests. We should reject this bill. It fails on the merits. We should reject it because the bill makes a mockery of how our government should work. There is still time to set aside this legislation and do bipartisan tax reform. I know the other side may believe that it has to forge ahead for a political win, but I would ask, at what cost? As with so many actions around here, we have put it on the next generation of Americans. We have kicked all the hard choices to them ever since I have been here. We have told them that we are going to continue to live in the house of our democratic Republic but that they are going to pay the mortgage. We are so fortunate that our parents and grandparents didn't behave the way we have--they had the decency to look ahead and think of those to come. We have enjoyed years of peace and prosperity in this incredible country. I think, tonight and this week, it is worth all of our asking, will our children be able to say the same of us? I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for his indulgence. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

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

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.