Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BENNET. Thank you, Mr. President. Last week, in his address to Congress, President Trump called education ``the civil rights issue of our time.'' I completely agree with that. Millions of American kids are trapped in underperforming schools with little hope of gaining the skills needed for good-paying jobs in the 21st century economy. In America, poor kids hear 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers by the time they get to kindergarten. If you don't think that makes a difference, you ought to talk to any kindergarten teacher in America. By the fourth grade, only one in four kids in the United States can do math at grade level, and even fewer than that can read at grade level in this country. About 9 in 100 are going to receive a college degree or its equivalent by the time they get to the age of 25. As a Nation, we are falling behind the rest of the world. American 15-year-olds rank 15th in reading in the world, 19th in science in the world, and 37th in math in the world. These numbers are shameful. They are a national disgrace. Because these results fall mainly on communities of color in this country, this is a civil rights crisis in the United States--as the President said, the civil rights issue of our time. It is for those reasons and other reasons that Congress passed No Child Left Behind in 2001, so as to strengthen the accountability and transparency for public education all over this country. Despite its good intentions, the law came with onerous requirements that did not work for many communities, including my own. When I was the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, there were few experiences more miserable than dealing with the Federal bureaucracy and their auditors, who would make judgments that were driven more by compliance than by the needs of our children. Somebody who understood that well was Margaret Spellings, who was, at that time, the Secretary of Education for this country. We owe her a debt of gratitude for the work that she did as Secretary. I, personally, owe her a debt of gratitude for the waivers she granted to the Denver Public Schools, when I was superintendent, to allow us to focus not on the compliance of rules that made no sense but to focus on the kids in this school district. I know that was the experience of educators all over America, which is why, in 2015, the Senate came together--and I am a member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee--to replace No Child Left Behind. Finally, 8 years too late--8 years after it was supposed to be reauthorized--under the leadership of Chairman Alexander and Senator Murray, we were able to pass the Every Student Succeeds Act. The bill earned overwhelming support. The country was ready for a change. The law brought much needed reform to the Federal Government's role in education by giving States far more flexibility for innovation, while preserving important, core accountability protections, which are critical for those of us who are interested in the civil rights mission of the Federal Government. It was a rare example of bipartisan cooperation and smart policymaking in Washington, DC. In fact, I cannot think of another case in which we received that much bipartisan support on such a difficult issue in the time that I have been here. The way I see it--and I say this as a parent of three children in the public schools in Denver and as a former school superintendent--the only reason for Washington to be involved at all in public education is with regard to civil rights, and that is an important reason for us to be involved. All kids should have access to great schools regardless of where they live, what ZIP Codes they are born into, or who their parents are. With Every Student Succeeds, the new bill, States will design their own accountability systems and interventions when schools struggle. That is a big change from No Child Left Behind. It is a welcome change. The law shifts enormous responsibility from the Federal Government to States and transforms over 15 years of education policy. The law is not perfect, but it represents one of the most significant changes and, I would say, importantly, one of the most significant retrenchments of the Federal Government in domestic policy in modern American history. That should be acknowledged. It should be welcomed. As States shift to the new model, many are asking for clarification about how to implement the law and make the most of greater State control over education. That is why the Department of Education issued rules last year to provide much needed clarity, stability, and flexibility to States, making it easier for them to transition from the broken system that we had under No Child Left Behind to the newer and more State-driven approach that we now have. Now some in Congress have targeted this regulation. They have invoked the Congressional Review Act to repeal the rules wholesale. That would be so foolish after the progress we have made and the direction in which we have headed. It would tie the hands of the Department of Education from properly implementing the law and delay much needed flexibility and accountability for the States. It would be a disservice to students, to educators, to teachers, and to principals all across the country, and it would undermine the implementation of the entire law. As I have said many times--and I have learned this the hard way--when it comes to education policy in particular, bad implementation can be just as harmful--even more harmful--than bad policy. Repealing the rules would also sow confusion among States about when they must comply with this new law. The Every Student Succeeds Act includes a timeline for transition so that States have time to plan, but many specifics of that transition are unclear. The Department of Education's rules clarify that timeline and give States the flexibility with which to implement some parts of the law later than others. Why would we want to take that away? Repealing the regulation would throw all of that away. Will schools have to fully comply with all aspects of the law by 2018, or is there some flexibility to stagger its implementation? Beyond the timeline, striking the regulation wholesale would also throw States into limbo by creating uncertainty over other important parts of the law. For example, the act includes a major change in how the law applies to English learners, which is one of the fastest growing populations in our schools throughout the country and now represents nearly 1 out of 10 students nationwide. In the new law, many provisions concerning English learners moved from title III to title I. As States undertake this shift, they need clarity on how to design accountability systems that include English learners in order to ensure kids do not fall through the cracks. For example, the rules make it clear that States can create proficiency goals for different groups of English learners rather than creating a uniform goal for all students. Striking the rules would also undermine core elements of the law, like the requirement for States to report on school spending and resources. The regulation clarifies that States must create a uniform procedure for this reporting, which is vital for transparency around funding and investments and, I would say, is vital with respect to the civil rights mission of this law. It is easy to publish numbers. Believe me; I have seen it. It is a lot harder to publish numbers that are accurate and meaningful by which parents and kids can make informed decisions. Right now, as we sit here, States are developing accountability plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act, and they are drawing on the current rules to guide that process. A change now could delay the submission and approval process for these plans. States will not know whether to use different templates or the ones they already have. They do not know if they have to restart public comment periods, delaying submissions and throwing the entire timeline into uncertainty. There is no reason we should be doing this to our schools, our teachers, and our principals. Repealing the rules would also suppress innovation and limit flexibility. I know that is the clarion call on this floor a lot of the time. In this case, people are going to get the opposite of what they expect. Flexibility is central to the Every Student Succeeds Act. I fought for many aspects of the law in order to give States the ability to design their own accountability systems, and I believe in that. Yet, in the absence of express, legally binding guidance from the Department of Education about where and how they can experiment, States will respond to that uncertainty by embracing the safest course. I saw that all the time when I was superintendent. States stand to lose a lot of money if they are not in compliance, particularly $15 billion in annual title I funds for students who live in poverty. They do not want to risk it. It may seem odd, but we need these rules in order to ensure flexibility and innovation for States. Nonbinding guidance is not enough. Finally, if we use the Congressional Review Act to repeal this rule-- a very, very blunt instrument--the Department of Education will not be able to publish any rule that is ``substantially the same'' unless the Congress passes a new law--the Congress that took 8 years longer than it was supposed to in order to reauthorize No Child Left Behind the last time. This could mean that the Department of Education--and this is something people here need to pay attention to if they care about civil rights--would not be able to issue any new regulation to provide clarity for States as they transition to the new law. They would be left completely in the lurch, potentially hamstringing education policy across the country for a decade. What is a shame about it is that there is absolutely no reason to do this. If the rules need to be changed, we should work together to improve them, but a CRA is not the correct policy tool. That is especially true when passing it would prevent all future regulation on core aspects of the Every Student Succeeds Act. There has to be a better way for us to come together than this. I agree with the President that education is the civil rights issue of our time, and we should defeat this vote on this CRA. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, as we continue to debate H.J. Res. 44, a resolution of disproval to nullify the BLM planning 2.0 rule, I would like to bring to the attention of my colleagues an editorial published last week in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. It outlines many of the reasons we should oppose the repeal of the BLM planning 2.0 rule. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, last year was the hottest year on record, and 16 of the last 17 years have been the warmest years ever recorded. Climate change science is some of the most thoroughly established and well-tested research in history, and 97 percent of the published research says climate change is real and caused by humans. Climate change is an urgent threat to our health, our national security, and our economy. How we address it is what we need to debate, not whether it is real. As I have said before, I will work with anyone in this Chamber-- Republican or Democrat--to address this issue. That is appropriate because survey after survey of people in Colorado--a State that is a third Democratic, a third Republican, and a third Independent-- demonstrates that they believe the science, no matter which party they belong to. In a very welcome sign, just last week, a group of statesmen, including former Secretary of State James Baker III, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, Jr.,--all Republicans--released what they described as a ``conservative climate solution.'' These distinguished leaders have come together at just the right moment--at the perfect moment--because our new President says that he is ``not a big believer'' in climate change. In fact, he claimed during the campaign that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive. Consistent with that view, the President's nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, recently said that the debate over climate change is quote ``far from settled.'' He wondered in December whether global warming is ``true or not,'' whether it is caused by humans and whether the Earth is cooling instead of heating. As attorney general of Oklahoma, he sought to prevent the very Agency he has been nominated to lead from fighting climate change, suing the EPA 14 times. It is important, I guess, to note that while it is rare for somebody in America to share these views, Attorney General Pruitt is not alone in his extreme views in the new President's Cabinet. Rick Perry, the nominee to be Secretary of Energy, wrote in his book that climate science is ``all one contrived phony mess'' and that the Earth is actually ``experiencing a cooling trend.'' Ben Carson, the nominee to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said: ``It is not clear if temperatures are going up or going down.'' Rex Tillerson, the new Secretary of State, said: ``None of the models agree on how climate change works.'' Mr. Trump's CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, said: ``There are scientists who think lots of different things about climate change.'' When the Pope was talking about the importance of addressing climate change, which he said was a very real threat, there was an American politician who said that the Pope should stick to religion and that he wasn't a scientist. In fact, the Pope studied chemistry. I am glad he is using his voice on this important issue. To be clear, some nominees seem to have undergone a confirmation process evolution on climate, but this seems more an effort to hide their extreme views in an effort to be confirmed rather than a genuine conversion based on facts or science, and that is a shame because the world cannot wait for this administration to stop ignoring the science. Over the past 150 years, human activity has driven up greenhouse gas levels in our atmosphere higher and faster than at any time over the last 400,000 years. That is not surprising because we have pumped almost 400 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution. As a result, carbon dioxide concentrations have risen from 280 parts per million to 400 parts per million for the first time in recorded history. That significant change over an insignificant period of time is dramatically changing the Earth. These emissions act like closed car windows: They allow light and heat in, but they don't allow most of the heat to ever escape. Already, record heating has melted ice sheets as large as Texas, Georgia, and New York combined, adding billions of tons of water to our oceans every year. These rising seas have partially submerged cities in Florida and Georgia several times per year. They threaten 31 towns and cities in Alaska with imminent destruction. They are forcing a city in Louisiana to relocate its residents away from what is now an almost permanently flooded coast. By 2030, there won't be any glaciers left in Montana's Glacier National Park. While extreme events and natural disasters become more frequent, so do the effects climate change has on our daily lives. In my home State, 7 out of 10 Coloradans know that climate change is happening, and nearly half say they have personally experienced its effects. Shorter winters are already a threat to Colorado's $4.8 billion ski and snowboard industry and its 46,000 jobs. Since the snow is melting sooner, there is not enough water for what are now longer summers. Colorado's farmers are forced to grow food with less water, a changing growing season, and higher temperatures. Our agriculture industry employs over 170,000 Coloradans and contributes more than $40 billion a year to our economy. These changes are not only threatening farmers' livelihoods, they are changing production and food prices at grocery stores. Our beer industry is even weighing in. This week, I received a letter from 32 brewers from around the country, including three from Colorado, who oppose Scott Pruitt's nomination because they depend on America's clean water resources to brew their beer. Hotter summers and the droughts they prolong cause wildfires that now burn twice as much land every year than they did 40 years ago. Together, State and Federal agencies are paying nearly $4 billion a year to fight those fires. Warmer waters and drought are hurting animals everywhere, like our cutthroat trout populations in Colorado. That is not just a problem for the fish; in Colorado, rivers generate more than $9 billion in economic activity every year, including supporting nearly 80,000 jobs. As warmer temperatures increase and spread across regions, so do incidents of vector-borne diseases like the West Nile virus and the hantavirus. And what do we do when we have longer, hotter summers? We crank up the air-conditioning, burning more fossil fuel and only perpetuating the problem. I understand that sometimes it is hard to focus on climate change when the effects seem distant, but it should be impossible to ignore the immediate national security threat posed by climate change that is here today. Here in the Senate, in 2015, we passed a budget amendment with bipartisan support to promote ``national security by addressing human-induced climate change.'' That is what the amendment said. It got bipartisan support. The former Secretary of Defense, the former Director of National Intelligence, and the former admiral in charge of U.S. Naval forces in the Pacific have all warned us that climate change is a threat to our national security. Around the world, climate change is increasing natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources like food and water, complicating American involvement and security. Climate change is linked to drought and crop loss and failure in southern Africa, leaving more than 6 million children malnourished by famine. It is increasing monsoons and heat waves in Pakistan, driving 11 million people out of their homes. It is even connected to water and food shortages that have intensified civil unrest from Egypt to Syria. At home, climate change already has cost us billions to relocate and buffer military infrastructure from coastal erosion and protect military installations from energy outages. At the U.S. Atlantic Fleet in Norfolk, VA, the largest naval installation in the world, sea levels have risen over 1 foot in the past 100 years. All the systems that support military readiness, from electrical utilities to housing at that base, are vulnerable to extreme flooding. When the Department of Defense ``recognizes the reality of climate change''--those are their words--``and the significant risk it poses to U.S. interests globally,'' we should listen. When the Nation's most recent national security strategy says that ``climate change is an urgent and growing threat,'' we should act. As a Senator from Colorado, I understand very well why people sometimes are frustrated when the EPA, for instance, does take action-- or sometimes when it doesn't take action. There are certainly some regulations that don't make sense, where a well-intentioned idea or an ill-intentioned idea--I think they are usually well-intentioned--from Washington ends up not making sense when it hits the ground. That is why I fought to revise EPA fuel storage tank regulations that hurt Colorado farmers, ranchers, and businesses in my home State. I supported an amendment making the Agency take a look at a new regulation that burdens families trying to remodel older homes. There are other regulations that I voted to get rid of. I supported, for instance, lifting the export ban on crude oil from the United States of America, a bill that we passed last year in connection with a 5-year extension of the tax credits for wind and solar energy, a great deal for the State of Colorado--both the lifting of the crude oil export ban and the extension of the tax credits for wind and solar. I have also supported and fought for our coal community. In Colorado, working with my colleague Senator Gardner, I fought to keep a Colorado mine open to protect good-paying jobs in my State. I am proud to have a hard hat in my office bearing the signatures of the people who work at that mine. I have to say tonight that the often-asserted claim that efforts to regulate carbon or more generally to protect our water and our air have significantly led to job losses in this country is false. This argument is a fraud perpetrated by politicians making promises that are broken from the start. The reality--and it is important to understand the reality so we can remedy the situation--the reality is that free market forces and not mostly Federal regulation are transforming American electricity production. American coal employment peaked in the early 1980s, long before we began seriously expanding natural energy. Natural gas has been gaining market share compared to coal since before 1990. Colorado, for example, has benefitted greatly from the natural gas boom. In almost every part of the United States, natural gas plants are now cheaper to build than coal plants. Facilities that were built when I became a Senator 8 years ago were built to import natural gas and are now being retrofitted to export natural gas to the rest of the world. That is good for our environment, and it is good for the geopolitical position of the United States. Innovation is making renewable electricity more affordable for everybody. Between 2008 and 2015, the cost of wind power fell 41 percent. The cost of large-scale solar installations fell 64 percent. This has led to a 95-percent increase in solar deployment in 2016 over the previous year. The annual installation doubled in 1 year. If we truly want to support our world communities, we should listen to Teddy Roosevelt, who once said that ``conservation and rural-life policies are really two sides of the same policy; and down at the bottom this policy rests upon the fundamental law that neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily given to the future.'' The truth about the future is that there may be a lot of sound reasons to review, revisit, and even retire any number of Federal regulations, and I will bet there are, but cutting regulation will not reopen shuttered coal mines. It is not about regulations or the EPA or about a War on Coal. Economic factors, market factors are driving the shift from coal to natural gas and renewables, and we need to recognize this shift and help coal communities adapt to a changing energy economy. They have contributed to building the economic vitality of this country. Their work helped us win World War II. We have to recognize the contribution; we can't just turn our backs. But we also need to acknowledge what is causing the changes that are occurring in our energy production because if we can't acknowledge the causes, we can't fix the problem; we can't make a meaningful difference for people in the communities that are affected by these changes; we can't fulfill what have become empty political promises instead of making real commitments on behalf of the American people. We also have to take advantage of the changes in energy production to fuel economic growth and create new jobs. Already, renewable energy is creating jobs throughout the country. Energy efficiency employs 2.2 million Americans. Solar and wind companies employ more than 360,000 Americans, including more than 13,000 in my home State of Colorado. Colorado now ranks first in the country in wind energy manufacturing. All together, clean energy employment grew 29 percent between 2009 and 2014 in Colorado. This isn't a Bolshevik plot, as I said on the floor before. These are American jobs. These are manufacturing jobs. These are plants where it is not just about the wind turbine but about all of the supply chain that goes along with it that can't be made in China and shipped to the United States and installed here. These jobs in this supply chain are American jobs. They are good jobs that pay a good wage, and they are meaningful to our economy. Last year, solar jobs grew 17 times faster than jobs in the rest of the national economy. They increased by 20 percent in Colorado in 1 year. The expansion of natural gas, as I mentioned earlier, is also aiding our transition to a cleaner energy economy. Between 2005 and 2012, natural gas production grew by 35 percent in the United States. In Colorado, it expanded by 139 percent. Colorado now ranks sixth in the country in natural gas production as 10 of the Nation's 100 largest natural gasfields are now located in Colorado. These industries together create good-paying jobs that can't be exported overseas; and all of these changes, taken together, are beginning to address climate change. From 2008 to 2015, the American energy sector reduced its carbon emissions by 9.5 percent. We reduced our carbon emissions by almost 10 percent while the country's economy grew by more than 10 percent, and we are starting to see the same trend around the world. Global emissions stayed flat in 2015 while the global economy grew. Turning our backs on reality is not a recipe for job creation in this country, but embracing the reality is. So I would ask this new President, after the campaign he ran and the promises he made, why he would promote policies that will kill American jobs and industries. Unfortunately--I regret to say this--even though 70 percent of Coloradoans say climate change is real and that humankind is contributing to it, the answer to my question about this administration's policies comes back to what it believes--to what it believes is a debate on climate change. If we allow science to become debatable, we can contort our thinking to fit any fiction at all to support or undermine any public policy. We risk discarding facts we don't like and ignoring experts with whom we don't agree in favor of special interests, which often dominate our political system. Our country needs more from us than that. Our national defense demands more than that from us. When State Department analysts concluded with evidence, with science, that the Keystone Pipeline would not materially increase carbon emissions--facts lost in the phony debate here in Washington--I voted for it against intense opposition from my own party and many of my strongest supporters. That was a painful vote, one of the most painful I have ever taken and difficult to explain to many people I admire, but I was guided by the facts, not by politics, guided by the science, not by politics. We have always drawn strength as a country from our belief in science, our confidence in reason and evidence. It is what Harry Truman called our ``unflinching passion for knowledge and truth.'' In school, we teach children to support theories with facts and look to science to explain the world. When it comes to climate change, we cannot allow the narrow limits of political expediency and special interests to cloud our sound judgment. That is not a lesson we should be teaching our children who need us to act on climate. That would set a horrible example for the people who are coming after us. Our ultimate success in addressing climate change will rely on the same scientific method that sent us to the Moon and eradicated smallpox. If we surrender evidence to ideology, when it comes to climate change, we abandon the process of scientific inquiry. We leave ourselves completely unequipped to defend what we discover to be true. We loosen our grip on the science that allows us to understand that evolution is real and vaccines are effective; that something is true and something else is false. That, not doubt and denial, is the lesson we should leave our children; that we have the courage to confront this challenge without bias; that we have the wisdom to follow facts wherever they lead. That is what this Senate should do. That is what our country should do. We have seen the evidence now. It is not theoretical anymore that we can grow our economy, the fact that we will grow our economy, that we can conserve energy while we do it, that we can create entirely new industries and technologies to power the most significant economy that human beings have ever seen in the history of the world, and that we can deal with climate at the same time. The two are linked. Apparently, that is not what this President believes, and that is not what his nominee to be Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency believes. Because that is so far out of step with what Colorado believes and for all of the reasons I have talked about today and for the sake of our climate and for good-paying American jobs all over this country--but particularly in Colorado--I am compelled to vote no on the President's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

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

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to begin by congratulating our new Senator from California for her first speech in the Chamber. I know it is not her first official speech, but she is here on this important night to talk about the state of public education in this country and this confirmation process. So I thank her for her remarks. I also want to thank the ranking member of the Education Committee of the Senate, Senator Murray from Washington State, who is here tonight as well. I know she has been here all day today and was here all day on Friday as well, because the set of issues we are discussing are so important. As I sat here listening to the Senator from California, I was thinking about the work we have done recently on the committee on which we both serve--the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee-- with the leadership of Chairman Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, and Ranking Member Senator Murray, from Washington State, to pass a new reauthorization of No Child Left Behind--a bill that if you said: Let's have a rally on the steps of the Capitol to keep No Child Left Behind the same, not a single person in the United States would have shown up for that rally. It took this body 7 years--7 years after we were supposed to reauthorize No Child Left Behind--to actually do the work. But when we did the work, we were able to get it through the committee once unanimously. This committee has on it, among other people, Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont and Senator Rand Paul from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. They seldom agree on anything, but they agreed on that bill. We got it out of the committee almost unanimously, and then passed it on the floor of the Senate with over 80 votes. It passed with a huge bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives, and it was signed by the President. It was 7 years too late, but we were able to do it in a bipartisan way--which is what education issues should always require. It is a shame that tonight we are here with a partisan divide because of the selection President Trump has made to lead the Department of Education. So I just want to say thank you again to Senator Murray for her leadership. Since our first days before we founded this country, education has been an American value. In Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, colonists recognized their collective responsibility to educate their children. They wrote into law that children, both wealthy and poor, must be taught to read and write, and to learn a skill, like blacksmithing, weaving, or shipbuilding, to secure their economic independence. As democracy took root in early America, public education became not just an ideal but an imperative. An enlightened public, the Founders believed, was essential to self-government. Thomas Jefferson wrote that we must ``educate and inform the whole mass of the people. . . . They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.'' Benjamin Franklin believed: ``The good education of Youth has been esteemed by wise Men in all Ages, as the surest Foundation of the Happiness both of private Families and of Common-wealths.'' With education, the common man would be able to select leaders wisely and fight back against the tyrannical instincts of those in power. He would be able to understand, maintain, and protect his rights, so that government could not usurp authority and devolve into despotism. In a country ``in which the measures of Government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the Community as in ours,'' George Washington explained, ``knowledge . . . is proportionally essential.'' This set of beliefs represented a fundamental break from the aristocratic ways of the old world. A republic that was ``for the people'' and ``by the people'' required an educated people. With this new world also came a new conviction that individuals could determine their own future, that their birth or circumstance no longer limited their potential. This foundational idea grew to become the American dream: Every child, regardless of who her parents are or where she came from, could achieve an education and grow up to achieve a better life. Over time, as our Republic became more and more democratic, as the right to vote and lead was secured by African Americans and women, education became the fundamental means by which Americans sought to secure their liberty and their equality. Perfecting our Union by expanding education has not come without struggle, but we have often succeeded because we have recognized that symbiotic relationship among the needs of our country and the success of individual Americans and our aspiration to move forward. This included the need for a universally literate workforce in the 1830s and the creation of Horace Mann's Common School Movement; the demand at the turn of the 20th century to replace out-of-date Latin schools with progressive high schools that prepared students for the emerging industrial workforce; the challenge of providing World War II veterans with a career path and the creation of the GI bill for college education; and the need to tear down the barriers of Jim Crow school systems in the 1950s and 1960s. Too often, as a country, we confronted these challenges too late and at the tragic expense of our fellow American's potential. ``With all deliberate speed'' has proven not fast enough, especially for children living in places like the Mississippi Delta and South Central Los Angeles. At each of these turning points, we have asked for more from our public schools. To their credit, our educators--teachers, specialists, and principals--have risen to the challenge, many times much sooner than the rest of us. They have helped us build a nation admired for our forward progress, for opportunity, and for equality. That is the American ideal from our founding until today. I come to the floor tonight with a sense of urgency because our generation is at risk of being the first American generation to leave less opportunity to our children than we inherited. If we do that, we will have broken a fundamental American promise to our children. In our Nation, education is supposed to be at the heart of opportunity, but today our education system fails far too many kids. Schools that once were engines of opportunity and democracy are now too often traps for intergenerational poverty. As a result, only 3 out of 10 children born to very low-income families in the United States will make it into the middle class or higher. Only 4 out of 100 will make it to the top 20 percent of income earners. Already, the United States has less social mobility than at least 12 other developed countries--among them, Canada, Japan, and Germany. In America, children growing up in poverty here hear 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers by the time they reach kindergarten. In fourth grade, only one in four of our students in poverty is proficient in math, and fewer than that can read at grade level. As few as 9 will receive a bachelor's degree by age 25. As a nation, we are falling behind the rest of the world. When George Bush, the son, became President in 2000, we led the world in college graduates. Today we are 16th in the world. American 15-year-olds score lower than their peers in 14 countries in reading, 36 countries in math, and 18 in science. Much of the rest of the developed and developing world is figuring out how to produce more and more educated citizens, while the United States is standing still and therefore falling behind. We must refuse to accept outcomes that are a tragedy for our children, a threat to our economy, and an immeasurable risk to our democracy. To make change, we need to stop treating America's children as if they belong to someone else. To meet our children's needs, we must invent a 21st century approach to education, a system for the delivery of free, high-quality education built for the future, not for the past. We must have the courage to shed old ways of thinking, abandon commitments to outdated approaches, and explore new ideas. This reenvisioned system must focus like a laser on what is best for kids, not what is convenient for adults. It must be comprehensive and integrated from early childhood to postsecondary education. A 21st century system of public education must set high expectations, demand rigor, and create meaningful accountability. This system must embrace different kinds of schools and create a culture that is focused on continuously learning from each other--among traditional, charter, and innovation schools, and across districts, cities, and States. We need to change fundamentally how we prepare, recruit, place, train, retain, and pay teachers and school leaders. That entire system belongs to a labor market that discriminates against women and said you have two professional choices: one is being a teacher and one is being a nurse. So why don't you come teach Julius Caesar every year for 30 years of your life in the Denver Public Schools, where we are going to pay you a wage far lower than anybody else in your college class would accept. Those days are gone. We had discrimination in the labor market that actually subsidized our school system because very often the brightest students in their class--very often women--had no other career options and therefore were willing to teach. That whole system needs to be transformed in the 21st century. We have 1.5 million new teachers whom we have to hire over the next 6 to 8 years in this country, and we have no theory about how to hire them or how to keep them. Fifty percent of the people are leaving the profession now in the first 5 years. This new system of public education should embrace technology and personalized learning. We must create space for innovation in school autonomy, and we must also provide choice to parents and kids, but our goal is not, and should not be, school choice for choice's sake. For a youngster in a low-income family, there is no difference between being forced to attend a lousy school and being given the chance to choose among five lousy schools. That is no choice at all. It is certainly not a meaningful one. The goal is, and must be, to offer high-quality education at every public school so parents can choose among grade schools in their neighborhood and throughout their cities and towns. We must refuse to accept the false choice I have heard over and over again during this confirmation process that you either support school choice in whatever form or you defend the status quo, just as we must reject the idea that you cannot support public schools and advocate for change. This old rhetoric and manufactured political division will not work for our kids. We need to rise above the narrow, small politics that consume our attention and permit and prevent us from making tough choices. Instead, we need to recognize that a 21st century education can and should look very different than a 19th century education or a 20th century education, and no matter what approach or method of delivery, it must be high quality. The good news is, we know it is possible to reverse course and create meaningful change. Several cities around the country have already begun creating roadmaps to this 21st century approach. Denver is one of them. In Denver, we made a deal--create a public choice system that authorizes charters, creates innovation schools, and strengthens traditional schools. We empowered schools through autonomy and worked to create a culture of shared learning and innovation focused on all ships rising. We demanded quality, and we implemented strong accountability. High-performing schools were rewarded, replicated, and expanded. Low-performing schools had to be improved or be shut down. We made tough decisions. We closed schools. I sat in living rooms, classrooms, and gymnasiums with parents urging them to demand more from the school district, even if it meant that their child had to go to a different school. Along with concerned citizens, teachers, and principals, I went door-to-door to enroll kids in new schools. Denver created innovative teacher and school leadership policies. We tried to rethink the tired model of the last century and create a new career for this one. That is why today in Denver you will find teachers teaching other teachers and being paid for it, knowing that their job is not only to educate their students but also to improve the honorable craft of teaching so our kids can achieve even more. We used the levers of Federal law, strong accountability, and civil rights protections as the backbone of change. We cannot have made the changes we did had it not been for the national demand for improvement in our schools--the civil rights impulse that underlies the Federal involvement in public education, as well as the courage of our community to demand something better for our children. Denver has begun to see the results of hard work. Over the last decade, Denver Public Schools students' achievement growth increased faster than the State's in both math and English. This outcome was achieved by students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch and also students not qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch. Latino and African-American students' achievement in English and math grew faster than their counterparts' throughout the State. Sixty-one percent more students graduated in 2016 than in 2006. We have a long way to go, but I would suspect that if we could say of every urban school district in America that we are graduating 60 percent more students this year than we were a decade ago, we would be feeling a lot better about where we are headed as a country. In Denver, over that time, the overall ontime graduation rate increased almost 30 points, and the ontime graduation rate for Latino students has doubled since 2007. Since 2006, Denver Public Schools' enrollment has increased--many cities have lost enrollment--over 25 percent, making it the fastest growing urban school district in America, partly because Denver has grown but also because parents and kids and families have now found schools that are responsive to their families' needs and supportive of their children. I am the first to say, and I always will be the first to say, that we still have a lot of work to do to make sure the ZIP Code Denver's children are born into doesn't determine the education they receive. But cities like Denver are moving in the right direction. Now we need to move a nation in the right direction. Tonight, as we stand here in this marbled Chamber among these statues that tie us to our past, I am thinking of our future. I am thinking of the millions of poor children across time zones our Founders could not have imagined, heading home after a long day at school, shifting their backpacks of books to find a comfortable spot, sharpening pencils for math and pastels for art, clearing a space on a busy dinner table for homework. I am thinking about children teaching other children, older brothers and sisters teaching their younger siblings, expecting that they will have more opportunity than their parents. I am remembering the naturalization ceremony I attended just last Friday at Dunn Elementary School in Fort Collins, CO, where Kara Roth's fifth grade class welcomed 26 new Americans from 13 countries to the United States. I am thinking about teachers and principals and students--while we are here speaking--who are up tonight, planning for tomorrow, and hoping for a future that allows them to review at home before they teach tomorrow the best lessons for teaching the productive and destructive forces of volcanoes, what Scout learns in ``To Kill a Mockingbird,'' or the mathematical reasoning that calls on us to invert the second fraction when we divide. I am imagining a country that fulfills our generational responsibility by providing quality early childhood education to every American family who wants it--a K-12 school for every child to which every Senator would be proud to send his or her child or grandchild and access to college and skills training that prepare students for economic success without shackling them to a lifetime of debt. All of that leads me to comment briefly on President Trump's nomination for Education Secretary. I have no doubt that Mrs. DeVos sincerely cares about children. It is not her fault that President Trump nominated her. So let me be clear that I am addressing the President and not Mrs. DeVos when I say that this nomination is an insult to school children and their families, to teachers and principals, and to communities fighting to improve their public schools all across this country. Even with the limited questioning allowed at the education committee hearing, it quickly became clear that Mrs. DeVos lacks the experience and the understanding to be an effective Secretary of Education. The bipartisan progress of American education achieved over the last 15 years was predicated on a deep commitment to three principles: transparency, accountability and equity. Mrs. DeVos's testimony and public record failed to establish her commitment or competence to protect any of these foundational principles. Her ``let a thousand flowers bloom'' approach asks American school children to take a huge step backward to a world without the high expectations and transparency that we need to give parents and taxpayers the information they deserve on how our schools are performing. Those high expectations, paired with the clear commitment to accountability, ensure that our successful schools should be replicated and our struggling schools should be held accountable for improvement, regardless of whether it is a choice school or a district school. Finally, we know that the Secretary of Education holds the sacred job of ensuring that every child in America gets the resources and the support they deserve, regardless of their income, background, or educational needs. This commitment to equity is at the core of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Mrs. DeVos has shown no evidence of her commitment to be the torch bearer for both excellence and equity. Her ideology and dogmatic approach communicates a lack of understanding and appreciation of the challenges we face and the depths of solutions they demand. A commitment to choice without a commitment to quality serves ideology rather than improvement, and a commitment to competition without a commitment to equity would forsake our democratic ideal that a free, high quality public education must open the doors of opportunity for all. For the first generation of students to whom that promise feels elusive, they deserve an Education Secretary who has the courage, competence, and commitment to orient our mighty education system to build opportunity for all. Mrs. DeVos shows none of those skills, and our young people cannot afford to wait 4 years for their chance at the American dream. Millions of Americans recognize this, which is why this nomination has generated more controversy than any other. I look forward to working with anyone--as I have over the years, including even Mrs. DeVos--anyone interested in improving our children's opportunities and taking seriously the future of our democracy. But I will not support her nomination. I will vote no on this nomination and urge my colleagues to do the same. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. The Denver Post editorialized yesterday, stating the obvious horrible truth here: American journalists have been killed reporting on terrorists. They've been beheaded. . . . To suggest that some kind of shared bias exists throughout American newsrooms so strong that it compels journalists to hide truth and thereby endanger the public is as dangerous as it is demonstrably untrue. That is right. It is dangerous. It is dangerous for the leader of the free world to be saying that journalists are crooks; that the facts they are publishing in newspapers and online are untrue when they are true. It is dangerous when we are engaged in an experiment of self- government that goes back about 240 years to the founding of this country to refute things that are absolutely true as false and to claim that the reason they are being raised is because people lack integrity; that journalism is all about false news. The White House put out a list of, I think it was in the seventies, of terrorist attacks they claim had never been reported, and newspaper after newspaper after newspaper had to run lists of the events that the White House described as unreported and then have links to the stories in their own newspapers and other newspapers that had reported on terrorists. As the Denver Post noted, and it is worth remembering this, there are journalists who have lost their lives trying to cover this story to have us better understand what is happening in the Middle East, what the threat of terror looks like, and have been beheaded on television because they took that risk. With respect to the judges, for years it has been so painful around here to get anybody confirmed. I see these folks who are lawyers who have to put their law practice on hold for something that should be the greatest reflection of achievement of their life, being appointed to a Federal district court in this country, and who wait and wait and wait because of the unconscionable delay and disputes and partisan bickering that happens here instead of getting people on the court to do the job that they need to do. Now we are going to be in the business of accusing judges and the judiciary of being crooked, of not following the law, of just playing politics. I think it is really important for us--not just Democrats but also Republicans--and I know my colleague is here from Florida. I wish to say in this body how much I appreciated his comments last night. He may not appreciate that I am saying that, but I appreciate his comments because a lot of what he said I completely agree with. I know it has become fashionable to tear down rather than work to improve the democratic institutions which generations of Americans have built. This place didn't get here by accident. It is not a fluke. The Founding Fathers would be shocked--shocked--to know this Republic still exists. They would be proud. I think they would be proud of the progress we have made, but they would be shocked, at the time they were compromising with one another--slave owners and abolitionists, compromising to create this Republic that had never existed in an expanse as big as the Thirteen Colonies geographically or with as many people in the Thirteen Colonies geographically--for them to see this about 240 years later from coast to coast, 330 million people, the strongest military on the planet, the strongest economy on the planet, a place where people want to come--just as my mother and her parents came--to build opportunity for the next generation. That is incredibly special in the history of humankind. As I think my colleague from Florida was saying last night, we need to treat it with a little more care. I am not just talking about the Senate. I am talking about our responsibility to provide oversight for this administration. I am talking about the importance for us to set an example for the children I saw last Friday at the naturalization ceremony, just as they are setting an example for us. None of us is going to be here forever. We have a lot of work to do. There are a lot of people here and around the world who are counting on us to pull ourselves together and start making this place work. I will finish by saying that I think in this world of social media, it is also critically important for us to remember the importance of edited content and the work that journalists do. There is not a class of school kids whom I don't impose at least that thought on, as they think about the research they are doing for their papers and the work we need to do as Senators. I thank my colleagues for their indulgence. Thank you for allowing me to speak on this floor. It is a great privilege to be here, but it is a privilege we need to exercise in a way that actually reflects the values of this country and the expectations that the American people have for us to address their priorities. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, the hour is late, or early in the morning, and my colleague from Hawaii is here. Before I leave the floor, I want to say how pleased I am to see the Senate actually debating the state of education in America. I said earlier today when I was here that if you are born poor in this country, you arrive at kindergarten having heard 30 million fewer words than your more affluent peers, and if you are born poor in this country, by the time you get to the fourth grade, only about one in four kids is proficient in mathematics, fewer than that are proficient readers. What it all adds up to is that if you are poor in the United States, your chances of getting a college degree by the time you turn 25 are about 9 in 100. I often think about that when I am in this Chamber because there are 100 desks here, and if we were poor kids living in America, the desks that would be occupied by college graduates would be the three desks that my colleague from Hawaii is sitting at in the front row over there, the four desks behind him, and then two more desks in the following row. Every other desk in this Chamber if they were occupied by poor children in this country, would be occupied by somebody who didn't have a college degree. Sometimes people say to me: Well, don't you know that not everybody will go to college. College isn't for everybody. I find that when people say that, they are often talking about other people's children, not their own children. Even if that is true--and I do believe we should build a robust system in this country that is not about a college degree but is about acquiring skills and knowledge that can put people on the path to acquiring a salary that is actually worth something. In fact, the Presiding Offer and I have a bill together that would allow students to use Pell grants for those kinds of educational opportunities that may not get you to a college degree but will put you on the pathway to acquiring greater skills. I think it is very important that we have a system where people are acquiring that kind of knowledge, but it also is true that it is, I think, completely at war with who we are as Americans; that there is a class of people in the United States, in the land of opportunity, who because they are unlucky enough to be born poor, are unlucky enough to go to schools that nobody in this Chamber would ever be content sending their kid or their grandkid to. In fact, if we had the results that we have for poor children in America for the children and grandchildren of the Members of this body, I am sure we would all leave and go back home and fix this problem. We don't talk enough about the State of public education in this country. We almost don't talk about it at all. We just had a Presidential election in this country where the issue didn't come up almost at all. I am glad we are having the debate, and I strongly believe that the person President Trump has nominated is ill- equipped to help the country overcome the challenges we face in public education and put us on the path we need to be on, which is a path that says that we are going to provide in the United States robust, high- quality early childhood education for every family in America that wants it. We are going to have a system of public education in this country that provides a K-12 school for every single child in America that is a school that any Senator would be proud to send their kid. We are going to make sure that every young person in the United States, and maybe even people who aren't so young, has the ability to graduate from college or acquire the skills and knowledge they need to compete in the 21st century and do that without acquiring a mountain of debt that requires them--in the case of people graduating now from colleges in Colorado--to take 22 years of their lives to pay that debt back. It doesn't make any sense. This is the land of opportunity. The gateway to opportunity is a high-quality education, and too many of our kids in this country in the 21st century don't have access to it. My hope is that when we get through this debate, we can focus on the work that is happening in places like Denver, CO, where we have seen, in just a 10-year period, a 60-percent increase in the number of kids who are graduating from high school. I am the first to say that we have a long way to go in Denver in terms of making sure that a kid's ZIP Code doesn't determine the education they get. I said earlier tonight and I believe if we could say that every single city in America, every single urban district and every single rural district where there are poor children and kids of color going to school that we had increased the graduation rate over the last 10 years by 60 percent, I think we would feel a lot better about where we are headed as a country. That is a fundamental challenge for this country. It is the most important domestic issue we face, and I hope this debate tonight, this 24 hours we are spending on this nominee, is not the end of our debate. As I said the other day in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, I think it would be a useful exercise for that committee to spend the next year studying what is going on in public education in this country, what is working well, what is not working well, and figure out how we can work--the Federal Government can work--with States, local governments, and local school districts to provide the kind of opportunity that every kid in America deserves. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I see the majority leader of the Senate. I will suspend until he has finished.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I too wish to congratulate my colleague from South Carolina on his remarks. We don't share the same view on this, but he is an important voice in the Senate, and I am glad that he is a colleague on the Education Committee in the Senate. As a matter of fact, the other day I said that I wish the President had the sense to appoint him Education Secretary. The kids whom I used to work for in the Denver Public Schools would have been very, very well served by him. The President, of course, is entitled to choose his team, and that is partly what elections are about. The Attorney General, more than any other Cabinet official, must be the people's lawyer, an advocate for the rule of law above all else. My office has received nearly 23,000 calls and emails opposing this nomination. Many of them I cannot read today on the floor for fear of violating the Senate rules. But it is clear from these comments that young Coloradans who came to the United States and know no other country but this country, who arrived here illegally, but, through no fault of their own, fear they will be deported back to a country they don't know--it is clear to me from the comments that I have received in these letters that Coloradans in the LGBTQ community fear that an Attorney General Sessions would turn a blind eye toward discrimination. It is clear from these comments that Senator Sessions has not earned the confidence of many Coloradans who may soon rely on him to protect their rights and to identify abuses of constitutional power. And Coloradans, many of whom I know, fought for equality and justice during the civil rights movement, and fear that it will turn back much of the progress we have made. We have a disagreement about Senator Sessions' role before he came to the Senate, but the fundamental reason I object to his nomination as Attorney General is that he led the fight in 2013 against our bipartisan effort to reform the broken immigration system in the United States. And I sat here on this Senate floor night after night after night listening to the Senator use fear and inaccuracies to derail our best chance in years to fix this broken immigration system. Now, in time, I have come to understand that people come to this floor and they don't always--they are not always accurate in what they say. Sometimes they don't mean to be accurate; sometimes they are just mistaken. That was the first time I had ever heard that kind of relentlessness, saying things that just weren't right. I am being careful with my language because of last night's ruling. He claimed that our bill--and, by the way, that bill, unlike almost anything that has happened in this place in the 8 years that I have been here--started out as a bipartisan effort, four Democrats and four Republicans working together for 7 or 8 months in a room trying to solve each other's issues. There is a lot about the Senate today that the American people should not and cannot be proud of, and I will come to that in a minute. But as to the work of the Gang of 8, I would have been happy for people to have seen what happened behind closed doors in those 7 months. It is how the Senate ought to operate. It went to the Judiciary Committee where Democrats and Republicans together amended the legislation. They made it better. And then it came to the floor of the Senate and we had more amendments, and it passed with 68 votes. It still hasn't passed the House. It has never even gotten a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. Senator Sessions claimed during that debate that our bill would have ``dramatically increased incidence of criminal alien violence, officially legalizing dangerous offenders, while handcuffing immigration officers from doing their jobs.'' He claimed it would have legalized ``thousands of dangerous criminals while making it more difficult for our officers to identify public safety and national security threats.'' Senator Sessions claimed our bill would lead to a ``huge increase in immigration,'' invite a flood of immigrants into our Nation who would steal jobs from ``struggling American workers.'' These claims are demonstrably untrue. If our bill had become law, we would have secured our borders, we would have bolstered internal security, we would have better protected American workers, and we would have strengthened our economy. Contrary to his characterization of what was in that bill, the 2013 bill provided far greater security than President Trump's plan. The first two words in the title of that bill were ``border security.'' That has been completely ignored by the critics. It has been completely ignored by people who want to make an issue out of this in national campaigns. But the reality is it provided billions of dollars toward new technologies to monitor the border. It called for the building of a 700-mile fence. By the way, none of the rest of it would come to pass until we took care of the border. Nearly 20,000 new Border Patrol agents--four times more than ordered by President Trump and double the current number--and not paid for by raising taxes on the American people at our border with Mexico, not paid for in a way that would destroy our trading relationship with Mexico, but paid for by fees that people were paying as they were becoming lawful in the United States of America. It had protections in the bill for American workers to ensure that employers hired American labor first. I know he objected to this, and I understand we had a difference of opinion, but the bill included a tough but fair path to citizenship, requiring people to go through background checks as part of a long path to citizenship. During the Presidential campaign, Senator Sessions advised President- Elect, now-President Trump on immigration policy. In fact, my understanding is the President's immigration Executive orders-- including one being challenged in court--mirror Senator Sessions' positions. These positions are antithetical to our history, to our values, to whom we are as a country. Last Friday was the highlight of my year. I got on a plane and I left Washington--that was pretty good in and of itself--to go home to Colorado. On Friday, I went to Dunn Elementary School in Fort Collins, CO, where Kara Roth's fifth grade class welcomed 26 new Americans from 13 countries to the United States. It is an International Baccalaureate program in this elementary school. This is an annual event. We were there in the gym, and the fifth graders were there singing; a young girl had won an essay contest on ``What it Meant to be in America.'' There was a color guard. Kids came in wearing their Boy Scout uniforms to post the colors, the American flag, and the flag of Colorado. The fourth graders were there watching what they would be doing next year as fifth graders. There was no need for a politician to tell anybody in that room that America is an exceptional country. No politician needed to say that to the fifth graders in Mrs. Roth's class who were studying the Constitution and studying immigration. We certainly didn't need to tell that to the immigrants from all over the world. I think I mentioned, they were from 13 different countries. One of the great parts of the ceremony was when they asked people to stand up to the country from which they came, and fifth graders also stood up if they were from that country. There were kids from China; there were kids from Mexico standing up in this fifth grade class; incredibly, three kids from Libya whose parents are at the university in some capacity in Fort Collins. As always in these naturalization ceremonies, people had tears in their eyes because as one of them once said to me at another time in Colorado, his dream had come true the minute he became a citizen of the United States because he knew his children would be citizens of the United States of America. Everybody in the room knew that. What is important for us is these fifth graders' perspective on American government, on democracy, and on the history of this Republic I think probably may not be quite exactly right because they, thank goodness, have been untarnished by special interests, untarnished by campaign money and partisan fighting, and power struggles that have nothing to do with the American people or their priorities. Their view of what the essence of self-government is all about is really what it is all about. It is really what we are supposed to be doing here: a commitment to a republic and democracy, a commitment to the rule of law, a commitment to the separation of powers. The stuff they are reading in their little Constitution just like this one is what this place is supposed to be about. It is supposed to be what we are doing here. It is the reason why I am objecting to this nomination.

Mr. BENNET

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

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, Mr. Trump's poorly drawn and implemented Executive order blocking refugees from the United States sacrifices fundamental American values and does not make us safer. For the first time in memory, the order imposes a ban on all refugees entering our country, many of whom are fleeing war or who risk persecution for their religious or political beliefs. The order affects many thousands of children, women, and men whom our government has vetted for years and cleared for rescue. President Trump's action--taken in the first days of his new administration, for political reasons, without regard for real world consequences and without the expertise of our national security professionals or even some of those appointed by the President himself--represents a rare, but shameful, departure from a constitutional heritage that has made America strong and a beacon to oppressed people throughout the world. For generations, immigrants and refugees have come to our country to flee religious persecution and to seek a better life. Indeed, these are the very people who founded our original colonies. Although, as now, we have occasionally failed to live up to our ideals, over generations the United States has accepted millions of refugees from around the world. My own family is part of this story, as so many people's families in this Chamber are. My mom was born in Poland in 1938 while Nazi tanks massed at the border. She and her parents miraculously survived the Holocaust--one of the worst human events in history. After the war, after arriving in Sweden and then Mexico City, they were able to come to New York City in 1950. They wanted to come to the United States because it was the only country in the world where they believed they could rebuild their shattered lives. And they did. This weekend, my mom joined hundreds of thousands of Americans to call on the President to change course, knowing that our family's struggles in Europe require us to recognize the danger and persecution facing families throughout the Middle East today. Out of a population of 22 million, almost 5 million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries--some to Europe--and have registered as refugees. More than half of those displaced are children. According to the United Nations, more than half of the remaining Syrian population--6 million of them children--require assistance such as food, water, and health care. Nearly one in four people in Lebanon today--tonight--is a Syrian refugee, and the fourth largest city in Jordan is now a refugee camp. In the wake of President Trump's refugee ban, it seems useful to ask--and I am sure the American people are asking--why are so many millions of people fleeing their homes, their countries, and their history? They are doing it to save their lives--and, in many cases, their children's lives--from ISIS's medieval barbarism and Assad's unrelenting brutality. They seek to escape the murder, rape, detention, and torture they suffer because of their religion or their ethnicity or both. Assad is their enemy. ISIS is their enemy. Today's refugees are fleeing the violence and extremism that threatens our own national security. Their enemies are our enemies. The same is true of the refugees from Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan. Does this mean we have an obligation simply to open our borders to them? Of course not. We have a national security imperative to ensure that no terrorist tries to sneak into the United States as part of the refugee program. I have long said that the burden of proof is not on the United States to accept a refugee. Rather, the refugee has the burden to demonstrate that they are not a threat to the United States. We have no obligation, nor should we, to take anything on faith. It is for this reason that refugees are more thoroughly vetted than anyone else entering the United States. They must pass stringent screening standards to ensure that they pose no threat, a process that can take up to 2 years. First, the United Nations screens them and collects biometric data. Only those who pass that test are then referred to the United States. And, by the way, no refugee knows at that stage of the process to which country they will be referred--to the United States or to any other country that is accepting refugees. After that, multiple agencies-- including the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the State Department, and our intelligence agencies--conduct rigorous screenings. This process includes repeated biometric checks, several layers of biographical and background screening, health checks, and interviews. Syrian refugees, in particular, receive enhanced scrutiny through an additional security risk review by specially trained officers. Out of the nearly 60,000 people referred to the United States, only about 12,000 have been accepted. Of those Syrian refugees accepted by the United States, three-quarters are women and children and half were under 13 in 2016. We are the leader of the free world, a republic founded on the premise of religious freedom and a society that for generations has called out to the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to be free. That is who we are. Yet, in the name of fighting terrorism in his first week as President, Mr. Trump has sacrificed what has made us exceptional and has banned these children and their mothers from our shores. These children are no different than Omran Daqneesh, whose distant stare from the back of an ambulance in Aleppo bore witness to the senseless violence he suffered; or Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body on a Turkish beach condemned the worst savagery of humankind. Once he learns the details--if he chooses to study them--if President Trump wishes to make our vetting even more extreme than it already is, I guess he may do so. But banning refugees and prioritizing immigration by religion or ethnicity simultaneously abandons our principles and weakens our counterterrorism efforts. It sends the wrong message to our Muslim partners who fight with us in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, including civilians in those countries who have risked their lives alongside our troops. It also hands ISIS a recruiting tool by fueling their narrative that the Western and Muslim worlds cannot coexist in peace. If the President really wants to secure our borders and ensure extremists stay out of the country, there are far better alternatives, and they are alternatives that are not at war with who we are as Americans. We should work together to close security gaps in our Visa Waiver Program and partner with European countries to better track the flow of foreign fighters throughout Europe and the Middle East. We should also do more to counter the ability of terrorists to radicalize and recruit, both here at home and abroad. We should do more to equip our agencies with tools and capabilities to degrade the ability of terrorist organizations--in particular, ISIS--to persuade and inspire using social media. Congress should enact ideas passed by the Senate in 2013 to strengthen border security, double the number of border agents, and address visa overstays. By tackling real vulnerabilities and investing in smart security solutions, we can secure not only our borders but also our values, and we will not repeat the darkest moments of our history when America turned away from those fleeing persecution around the world. A year ago, I came to the Senate floor to share a note sent to me by my grandparents on my first birthday. It is a message that bears repeating tonight. The year was 1965--15 years after my mother and grandparents came to this country after surviving the horrors of the Holocaust in Poland. This is what they wrote: The ancient Greeks gave the world the high ideals of democracy, in search of which your dear mother and we came to the hospitable shores of beautiful America in 1950. We have been happy here ever since, beyond our greatest dreams and expectations, with democracy, freedom, and love, and humanity's greatest treasure. We hope that when you grow up, you will help develop in other parts of the world a greater understanding of these American values. Like so many immigrants, my grandparents knew how special these American values are and how rare they are. We cannot take them for granted or subvert them for a political moment. These values make us who we are. Edmund Burke once wrote: ``In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.'' This is a time when we can learn from the past errors and infirmities of humankind. We cannot turn our backs on women, children, and families who risk persecution, starvation, or death. The President should rescind this Executive order. If not, the Senate should end the ban immediately and start a serious conversation on how to make our country safe again in a manner that is consistent with our fundamental values. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET.--of Colorado.

Mr. BENNET. Thank you, Mr. President. I vote no on behalf of the children--

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, how am I recorded?

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would like to welcome the Presiding Officer to the Senate and just say thank you very much for your willingness to sit here this evening. To my colleagues, thank you for being here. The hour is getting late so I am not going to take up a lot of time with my own words, but I did want to come to the floor and read the words of people who have written my office, Coloradans who took the trouble to tell me what their concerns were with this suggested repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Given the fact that they took the time to write, I wanted to have the opportunity to be here tonight to read their words into the Record. It matters to a lot of people in my State because more than 600,000 people are now insured in Colorado who were not insured before the Affordable Care Act. We have had one of the largest drops of the uninsured rate in the country. We have dropped from 14 percent to 7 percent, really importantly from the point of view of saving money. The amount of uncompensated care has gone down by 30 percent. So those are at the hospital. Those are statistics, but the letters tell the human dimension, the human story that so often is lost in the Chambers of this Capitol. A letter from Kathryn from Denver who wrote: The Affordable Care Act has been crucial to my family the last several years. . . . My sister, a Type 1 diabetic since age 10, is now a Colorado business owner. The Affordable Care Act allowed her to pursue business ownership because--for the first time in her life--she could get individual health insurance coverage without being denied due to her preexisting condition. ACA allowed her to leave her full-time job and start a part-time business and get benefits through ACA. I truly believe so much good has begun to come from this legislation and repealing it will have catastrophic consequences for my family and for so many others. Terry from Denver writes: I am writing concerning the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In 2010, I left my conventional job and took a risk, forming a company to perform engineering consulting services. Since that time, I have helped multiple organizations improve the safety and reliability of their products and consider my efforts to be quite successful. However, I would not have taken the chance to go off on my own if it had not been for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA gave me options in health insurance that I would not have had prior to its passage. There are millions of people like me who count on the security of the ACA. These people are entrepreneurs, freelancers, the self-employed, early retirees, and the like who would not have health insurance if not for the ACA. Therefore, I am asking you to continue your support for the

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would like to recognize and honor the life of Edwin Purl Morlan, a constituent in my home State of Colorado who passed away on November 15, 2016, at the age of 66. He lived in Bayfield and was a pillar of the community in southwest Colorado, where he worked for 27 years as the executive director of Region 9 Economic Development District, a nonprofit that provides support to local businesses and startups. At his retirement party only 8 weeks ago, Mr. Morlan's friends, family, coworkers, and fellow economic development officials and entrepreneurs shared stories of the effect he had all across southwest Colorado and the entire State. Mr. Morlan was a key part of rebuilding this rural region's long-struggling economy. Through his vision and hard work, Ed loaned start-up funds to many of today's iconic southwest Colorado businesses, such as Mercury Payment Systems, Steamworks Brewing Company, and Chinook Medical Gear. During his tenure, Region 9 loaned over $22 million to business ventures. Under Mr. Morlan's leadership, Region 9 Economic Development District led the way to bringing Internet and transportation planning to southwest Colorado, and the district now maintains an indicator report that measures the economic health of 17 regional communities. Mr. Morlan's vision shaped all of these projects. His daughter Kinsee said it well in a recent article in the Durango Herald: ``He just wanted Southwest Colorado to keep up with the rest of the world in terms of economic development.'' Mr. Morlan was also a veteran. Drafted into the U.S. Army at age 19, he served as a combat medic in one of the most dangerous areas in Vietnam, earning both a Silver Star for the many lives he saved and a Purple Heart for his own injuries. After returning from Vietnam, he attended Western State College in Gunnison, where he met his wife, Jackie. As a five-term member of the town board of Bayfield and a member of the local planning commission, Mr. Morlan was part of the inaugural class of Leadership La Plata and helped launch an entrepreneurial accelerator program called SCAPE. His commitment to the community won him the Durango Chamber of Commerce's Barbara Conrad Leadership Award, and Governor John Hickenlooper declared July 28th, 2016 to be ``Ed Morlan Day,'' in recognition of his service. Mr. Morlan was also known for being a restaurant owner, handyman, boat captain, little league coach, friend, mentor, and dedicated family man. At a celebration of life held in Mr. Morlan's honor in late November, over 300 friends, colleagues, and family gathered at the Bayfield High School Performing Arts Center to share stories of a man who was deeply committed to his job, his family, and his community, a man who was a good friend, companion, grandfather, and husband. He is survived by his wife, Jackie Morlan; his sister, Ann Taylor, and her family; his daughters Amber and Kinsee Morlan; his son-in-law Jeff Hammett; and his grandchildren Huxley and Harper Purl Hammett. I join with southwest Colorado in honoring Ed Morlan, and I send my deepest condolences to his family.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to join in honoring Vice President Biden's lifetime of service and sacrifice to our country. Throughout his career, Vice President Biden has carried out his work with a sense of humility, integrity, and authenticity that often seems missing in today's politics. He served as either chairman or ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee for 17 years. In this capacity, he crafted the Violence Against Women Act, which provided critical new protections to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. The landmark bill also supported local law enforcement to help increase prosecutions and convictions of abusers. He has continued this legacy by serving as the White House Adviser on Violence Against Women. Most recently, he led the White House's efforts on the Cancer Moonshot initiative, which seeks to hasten our advances in cancer research, prevention, and treatment. Earlier today, the Senate passed a bill to help make the Cancer Moonshot initiative a reality, which is a further testament to the Vice President's leadership and character. The Vice President's involvement in the Cancer Moonshot initiative was born out of the death of his son, Beau, who lost his battle with brain cancer last year. The Vice President also grappled with tragedy at a young age when his first wife and his 13-month-old daughter were killed in a car accident. The poise, dignity, and humility that the Vice President has been able to maintain in the face of these tragedies speaks to his strength and his character. Through all this, he has continued to serve the American people with the utmost integrity and authenticity, which have undoubtedly contributed to his successful career in public service. The Vice President has also consistently advocated for the leadership role the United States plays in the world. Over the years, Vice President Biden has lent his diplomatic hand to U.S. engagement in development and security in places like Eastern Europe and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America. He has worked tirelessly to strengthen our partnerships across the globe, in places like Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, in an effort to further U.S. interests and the values upon which our Nation has thrived. When he was in Denver this past September to speak at the Korbel School, the Vice President warned against ``turning inward.'' Joe has no capacity to turn inward in any walk of life. His career is characterized by reaching outward to the American people and to the world, working to listen, collaborate, heal, and serve. We can all learn a lot from that open and inclusive approach. We are grateful for the Vice President's leadership and example. I thank him and his incredible family for their service to our Nation.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I will be brief. I want to thank Mr. Wyden, the Senator from Oregon and the ranking member of the Finance Committee, for his leadership on this bill. I thank, as he did, Senator Hatch for his leadership on this bill and Senator Grassley for his leadership on this bill. As the Senator from Oregon indicated, this bill passed unanimously in the House of Representatives. This bill passed with 500 groups supporting the bill from every geographic area in the United States. There are groups from Oregon. There are groups from Colorado. There are groups from the Presiding Officer's State that have weighed in on this and said we should have this legislation passed. We have had testimony in the Finance Committee from people who were foster children who came to the Congress to testify about what had gone wrong in their lives as a result of the system we have in place today, who still made the time to come here to advocate on behalf of children all over the country who are situated in the same way they once were. Now, because of a disagreement in the Senate, this bipartisan bill that passed the House unanimously, that has almost 30 cosponsors in the U.S. Senate, a bill that was supported universally by the testimony we had in the Finance Committee, somehow can't get done before we leave for the holidays. That would be a terrible shame, a terrible stain on this Senate. Tonight there are 50,000 children in Colorado who are in foster care. There are over 650,000 children in the United States of America. What we have heard from them, what we have heard from their advocates, what we have heard from people who serve them--Republicans and Democrats alike--is that the institutional settings that too many of them are consigned to because of the way the law is written today is not the best thing for foster children; that families who can support them and who can nurture them, when they get the benefit of some help, are a far better place for foster children to be than these institutions. When it comes to drug addiction, when it comes to graduation rates from high school, when it comes to attending college--all of these things are affected by the way the current law exists. The Presiding Officer may know that half of the cases of foster children in the United States are related, one way or another, to the scourge of opium addiction that is happening in the United States. This bill allows us to recognize that. It allows the people who serve the children and the families best to be able to intervene in a way that can keep the families together longer. What we know from the testimony in the hearings is that is the best thing for foster kids, it is the best thing for our States, and it is the best thing for the country. So I join my colleague from Oregon in saying we should not go home with this unresolved. We should not go home, with the kind of momentum that exists for this bill inside the Congress and, much more important than that, outside the Congress, without having addressed this vulnerable population of people who live in the United States. It is my fervent hope that we in the Senate will find a way to come to our senses and do our job, just as the people who came here to testify did their job, expecting that the U.S. Congress would respond to their description of their life experience, and what went wrong in a foster care setting has been established by the U.S. Congress. It is up to us to fix it, and that is what we can do tonight or tomorrow morning, I hope, at the very latest. With that, Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Oregon for his leadership on this bill. I thank, once again, the thoughtful chairman of the Finance Committee, Orrin Hatch from Utah, for his leadership on this bill, and I hope over the next 12 or 24 hours we find a way to get this through the Senate. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, in honor of National Manufacturing Day on October 7, I would like to recognize the nearly 150,000 Coloradans who work for the 6,000 manufacturers across the State and contribute $20 billion annually to the State's economy. Colorado manufacturers contribute their ingenuity and talent to support growth in the aerospace, energy, bioscience, defense, food and beverage, agriculture, apparel and many other industries. In 2015, they exported over $8 billion worth of U.S.-made goods overseas. Manufacturing leaders in Colorado are continually looking for innovative ways to produce high-quality products. They have developed strong public-private-university partnerships through the Alliance for the Development of Additive Processing Technologies, ADAPT, Center at Colorado School of Mines, led by the Manufacturer's Edge--Colorado's NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership--and the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute National Research Initiative at the University of Colorado-Boulder. From Oliver Manufacturing in La Junta to Woodward in Fort Collins to Lockheed Martin in Littleton to Reynolds Polymer in Grand Junction, manufacturers play a significant role in our local communities, providing high-skilled jobs and opportunities for suppliers and service providers. That is why I look forward to celebrate the contributions of Colorado's manufacturers throughout the month of October with my colleagues in the Colorado congressional delegation, Governor John Hickenlooper, and Manufacturer's Edge.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am privileged to be here with the Presiding Officer this evening. I thank my colleague from Arkansas for allowing me to speak at this time. I rise to discuss the vacancy on the Supreme Court. Nearly 200 days have passed since the President nominated Judge Merrick Garland to fill the Supreme Court vacancy. Yet the majority still refuses to hold a hearing on his record or a vote on his nomination. As a result, Judge Garland is now the longest pending nominee in the Nation's history. Next week, the Supreme Court will reconvene for a new term with one seat still vacant. I remember reading Justice Scalia's opinion in a case where he described an eight-member Court as a diminished Court. That was the language he used. We now have a Supreme Court that, not just in one term but in two terms, has been diminished by the inability of this Senate to confirm a nominee. There is no doubt that anybody with any sense can see this has been an unconventional period in American politics, to say the least, but in many cases, the majority's refusal to even consider Judge Garland's nomination is the most egregious example of Washington dysfunction I have seen. Within an hour of Justice Scalia's death, the majority leader unilaterally decided the Senate would not consider the President's nominee, even though 342 days remained in the President's term. By taking this unprecedented action, the majority leader hoped that the next President would nominate someone with the same originalist judicial philosophy as Justice Scalia. Indeed, that is what some of my colleagues have said. Waiting would allow the next President to ``nominate a justice who will continue Justice Scalia's unwavering belief in the founding principles we hold dear.'' Another said that we should wait so as to ``preserve the conservative legacy of the late Antonin Scalia.'' By taking this position, they have made clear that they want the next President--perhaps Donald Trump--to replace an originalist such as Antonin Scalia with another originalist. But by taking this approach, the majority leader has radically departed from the plain language of the Constitution and more than 200 years of historic precedent in this Chamber. As an originalist--and he certainly was--Justice Scalia would interpret the Constitution by examining the meaning of the words when it was enacted. Article II, section 2 of the Constitution states: ``[The President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate shall appoint . . . Judges of the Supreme Court.'' When a vacancy arises, the President has an affirmative duty to nominate a replacement, and the Senate, in return, has an affirmative duty to advise and consent. That is what the plain language of the Constitution requires, and that is what the original meaning would have been. But beyond the text of the Constitution, we should also consider the traditions of our predecessors in this Chamber. Members of the majority seem eager to make this point. One of our colleagues said that ``we should follow a tradition embraced by both parties and allow his successor to select the next Supreme Court Justice.'' Another said: ``There is significant precedent for holding a Supreme Court vacancy open through the end of a president's term in an election year.'' The truth is exactly the opposite. In fact, the majority's position today is absolutely unprecedented in the history of the United States or the history of the U.S. Senate. Recently, Professors Robert Kar and Jason Mazzone combed through the history of Supreme Court nominations and Senate confirmations for a piece I believe appeared in the NYU law journal. Since the founding of the country, there have been 103 instances similar to the moment we face today, where an elected President nominated a person to fill a vacancy before the election of the successor--where an elected President nominated an individual to fill a vacancy before the election of his successor. The professors found that in all 103 instances, the sitting President was able to both nominate and appoint a replacement Justice by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. The professors further wrote: ``This is true even of all eight such cases where the nomination process began during an election year.'' That is the history. That is the precedent. So when we hear people come to the floor and say the customary practice has been to do this or that, it is not true. I sometimes wonder why people who are committed originalists are out here talking about the customary practice at all because it ought to be the plain meaning of the Constitution folks are following, but if we are going to talk about the customary practice, let's talk about what has actually happened rather than inventing it on the floor of the Senate. For the last 200 days, the majority has argued we should, for the first time ever--ever--depart from this 200-year tradition. I will say this on this floor: There is nothing conservative about that position. That is a radical position, at war with the Founders' view of this. When the chairman of the Judiciary Committee said that ``the fact of the matter is that it's been standard practice''--his language--``to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year,'' he was incorrect. The fact is, the standard practice in the Senate is just as clear as the plain text and the original meaning. If the sitting President nominates an individual to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, the Senate acts with an up-or-down vote. I should say I am not here to say anybody should vote for the nominee. That is a matter of conscience for every single Member of the Senate, but our job is to have a vote. When Members of the majority say things like, ``It's been 80 years since any President was permitted to immediately fill a vacancy that arose in a presidential election year,'' they fail to mention that in the past 80 years a vacancy has not arisen on the Supreme Court in an election year at all. The 80-year time period the majority highlights is precisely the 80- year period in which no Supreme Court vacancies occurred during an election year. If you go back just one more election--84 years ago--you will find a case from 1932 that is very similar to ours today. On February 25 of that election year, President Hoover nominated Benjamin Cardozo to replace Justice Holmes on the Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed Cardozo 9 days later. So when Senators come to the floor and say we have an 80-year precedent of not confirming Justices at this moment in a President's term, that is only because there hasn't been a vacancy. I might as well say we have an 84-year precedent where we do confirm Justices in the last year because that is what happened 84 years ago with Justice Cardozo. The Senate also confirmed three other Supreme Court nominees in election years in the 20th Century--twice in 1916 and once in 1912. So I can extend my 84-year precedent farther back into history. Through their research, Professors Kar and Mazzone found only six cases where the Senate acted consistent with today's majority--to deliberately ignore the President's nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy and wait for the successor--but none of these cases is analogous in any way to the vacancy we face in this Senate. In those six cases, there were questions about the sitting President's legitimacy, either because that President had assumed office by succession, unlike the current President, who was elected to the Presidency and then reelected to the Presidency, or because the nominations came after the election of the next President, which we know is not the case today because the vacancy occurred 340 or so days before the end of the President's term, and anybody watching television last night would know we have yet to select the next President of the United States. What is amazing is that even in the remaining 13 cases, where there was some question about legitimacy or it was after the successor had been elected, the Senate still confirmed a majority of the President's nominees. Six were the minority, where they weren't confirmed. The rest they confirmed. To suggest this President, whom the American people elected twice, should not be able to fill a Supreme Court vacancy is a radical departure from the Constitution's text and the Senate's historical practice. As the professors conclude, the majority's actions are ``unprecedented in the history of Supreme Court appointments.'' Whether by interpreting the original meaning of the Constitution or by following standard practice, every other Senate has acted, not by refusing to consider the nomination or stalling until after an election or waiting for the next President to make a nomination but by having a debate in full view of the American people and to give the nominee an up-or-down vote. As I said earlier, of course the majority can withhold its consent by voting no. That is their constitutional prerogative. That is what it did in 1987, when the full Senate voted against Robert Bork, even after the Judiciary Committee conducted full hearings and a majority voted against his nomination. The Constitution doesn't say the Judiciary Committee shall advise and consent. It says the Senate shall advise and consent, and that is what a majority of the Senate did in 1795, when it rejected George Washington's nomination of Justice John Rutledge as Chief Justice. By the way, that Senate--which unlike ours actually included some of the Framers who wrote the Constitution--went on to confirm three nominees, all in the fourth year of George Washington's second term--all in the eighth year that George Washington was President. This was true in 1968, when there were serious concerns about President Johnson's nominee, Justice Abe Fortas, to replace the outgoing Chief Justice. Even then, in President Johnson's final months in office, the Senate held confirmation hearings and floor debates. The Senate had a full and public debate on the merits of the nominee. In fact, as the professors found, only 12 nominations out of 160 over the entire course of the history of the United States failed to reach the Senate floor. Most of these were made near the end of a legislative session or were later withdrawn by the President, but in every other instance, the Senate brought the nomination to the Senate floor for a full debate and consideration. If today's majority is concerned with the American people having a voice on who the next Supreme Court Justice is, we should follow our ordinary procedures and allow our representatives in the Senate to consider the merits of the President's nominee. We have denied the American people a debate in a runup to an election. When we should be debating what the composition of the Supreme Court should look like, when we should be debating what is at stake in this Presidential election, our floor is empty. I say, again, this action has been taken in the name of conservatism. There is nothing conservative about this--nothing. This is a radical departure from standard practice. It is a threat to our democracy. It is a threat to judicial oversight. It is a threat to the rule of law. It is lawless. What makes this even worse is that the majority's failure to fulfill our constitutional responsibilities isn't even about policy, it is about politics. It is about rolling the dice on an election, instead of following the plain text of the Constitution and more than two centuries of Senate tradition in the history of the United States. We have had more than enough time to consider the merits of Judge Garland's nomination. The American people have watched the U.S. Senate take the entire summer off and not do our job. In fact, as some of my colleagues have noted, this Senate has worked fewer days this year than any Senate in 60 years, and a lot of those Senates didn't have a Supreme Court vacancy to fill. By refusing to consider the President's Supreme Court nominee for nearly 200 days, the majority is creating, I fear--I hope not--a new precedent, one that threatens to shape future vacancies to the Court and further politicizes the one branch of our government that is meant to be above the partisan bickering that has paralyzed this institution. It is one thing for people in this body to drive the approval rating of the U.S. Congress down to 9 percent, and that is a feat--that is a feat--but to denigrate another institution of government this cavalierly for politics is wrong. The longer this vacancy remains, the more uncertainty and confusion the American people will suffer. Petty politics is now jeopardizing, as I said earlier, not just one but two terms of the Supreme Court. We have to reject this unprecedented abdication of our most basic constitutional obligation. This is one of those things that is written in the Constitution, and there is no one else assigned the duty of doing it other than the Senate. The House has no responsibility. Some people here have said let the people decide. As I said earlier, the best way of letting the people decide is by having an open debate in the Senate. But the Constitution doesn't actually say let the people decide, it sets up what we ought to be doing. I fear that if we start here, where will it end? If a President can't have his nominee considered over 300 days from an election, why not 2 years or 4 years from an election? Why not routinely hobble the Supreme Court until you get your way, until you have your President and your majority? Until then, we will not do the American people's business. Even if the Constitution does not in fact oblige us to consider President Obama's nominee, it is, nevertheless, it seems to me, our duty as responsible public servants to do so and the American people's obligation to hold elected officials accountable and demand a full, functioning judiciary. Believe me, I know it has become fashionable for Washington to tear down rather than work to improve the democratic institutions generations of Americans have built, but as I said, to impair so cavalierly the judicial branch of our government is unacceptable. It doesn't meet the standard of a great nation or a great parliamentary body. Comity and cooperation will not be restored overnight or with a single decision in this Senate. It has taken far too long for us to travel down this destructive road to deadlock, ideological rigidity, and bitter partisanship. Even with all of that, the least we could do is follow centuries of tradition and practice, preserve the judiciary from the partisanship that has paralyzed much of the other two branches, and act as conservatives by fulfilling one of our most fundamental duties as elected representatives. It is long past time for the Senate to do its job, as every Senate before us since its founding has done. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, it is indeed a privilege to be here with my colleague Senator Gardner as we recognize the life of a dedicated Coloradan, former Senator Bill Armstrong. Last week, Senator Armstrong passed away after a 5-year battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife Ellen, daughter Anne, and son Will. He was an accomplished businessman, a longtime public servant, a dedicated educator, and, most importantly, a husband, father, and grandfather. He held strong principles and beliefs that he conveyed with eloquence and clarity. No one ever could question Senator Armstrong's devotion to Colorado or to his students. As a young entrepreneur, Senator Armstrong bought his first radio station at the age of 22 and began a long and successful business career. Over the course of his life, he owned or operated more than a dozen businesses, including radio station KEZW in Denver, Ambassador Media Corp, and the Sun newspaper in Colorado Springs. He also served as chairman of Oppenheimer Funds in Denver. Much of Senator Armstrong's adult life was driven by service, which began when he joined the U.S. Army National Guard, where he served from 1957 to 1963. Following his military service, he began his almost three decades in public service. He was a member of both the Colorado House and Senate and served, as Senator Gardner said, as Senate majority leader before being elected to Congress in 1972. After three terms in the House of Representatives, he was elected to the Senate in 1978. Senator Armstrong brought to this Chamber real world experience, which is often in short supply; a business acumen, which is also often in shorter supply; and a deep belief in the potential of those he served in Colorado. His business background and his knowledge of economic issues earned him spots on the Banking, Budget, and Finance Committees. Throughout his time in the Senate, Senator Armstrong brought important attention to the deficit and budgetary issues. He was a founding member of the Senate Deficit Reduction Caucus. He ultimately chaired the Finance Subcommittee on Social Security, and President Reagan selected him to serve on the National Commission on Social Security Reform. This commission was not like those we see around here these days. It actually produced meaningful proposals and extended the longevity of the Social Security Program for decades and served as a model of how Congress can work together to tackle difficult and complicated issues. While Senator Armstrong was deeply conservative, he often found ways to forge bipartisan compromise. His service on the commission was emblematic of this approach, and it is an approach that is sorely lacking in Washington today. Senator Armstrong was also a strong advocate for our military and the men and women in uniform. He fought to honor those who served in the Korean war and to create a permanent GI bill. He recognized the importance of providing access to postsecondary education, a passion he continued to pursue long after he left this Chamber. He pushed increased pay for our servicemembers, especially to ensure that military families had sufficient economic support. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, he wrote: ``With the G.I. Bill to boost recruiting and pay increases to ease the retention problem, the all voluntary military forces can be preserved and we can end the disgraceful treatment of Americans in military uniform.'' His impassioned advocacy led the Army Times to call Armstrong ``the military pay champion'' of the Senate. As a Western State Senator, he, of course, worked on wilderness and conservation issues that are so important to our State, including the Colorado National Forest Wilderness Act of 1980. Because of his integrity and work ethic, his colleagues asked him to serve as chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee for 6 years. President Reagan once referred to Senator Armstrong as ``one of the strongest voices in the United States Senate.'' President Bush called him ``one of the finest men . . . in Washington'' and ``one of the best and brightest.'' The best testaments to Senator Armstrong came from his own colleagues in the Senate: Former Senator Dole described him as having ``been widely recognized as one of the most gifted and persuasive speakers.'' Senator Hatch said ``Senator Armstrong has been one of the most eloquent advocates in the Senate for his point of view.'' Senator Cochran said: ``I do not know of anyone in this body who is more respected for his integrity and ability than is Bill Armstrong.'' Finally, former Senator Wirth, my predecessor and his fellow Senator from Colorado, said the following: I do not think any individual has expressed his own views more articulately than has Bill Armstrong, nor has anybody pursued them more passionately than he has. I have enormous respect for that passion, Mr. President. It is precisely that sense of indignation that sometimes Bill Armstrong shows on various issues. It is the kind of indignation that drives this institution, and should. That is quoting Tim Wirth. Like many of his predecessors and successors from Western States, the pace and discourse of the Senate was often confounding and frustrating, but he believed it to be ``the greatest legislative body in the world.'' He appreciated the role the institution plays in our country and felt it was an honor to serve here. But, more than just the institution, he loved his fellow Members. He loved the people of the Senate. He called them a family, brought together by ``shared experiences and ideals and great love of our country and aspirations for the future.'' His respect and appreciation for the Senate, for the work we do here, and for the people here showed in his approach to the job. As Senator Wilson noted, ``in his zeal as an advocate he has been respectful of those who oppose him.'' More than that, he was, Senator Wilson believed, ``generous in terms of his own personal conduct, even in heated debate.'' The Durango Herald called Senator Armstrong ``civil and patient in interacting with fellow members of Congress,'' and the Denver Post recognized Senator Armstrong's ``statesmanship.'' These are words and descriptions we don't often hear around this Chamber much anymore. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have these editorials printed in the Record.