Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Senator Armstrong once described himself as ``relatively inflexible on principles'' but ``flexible on the details.'' A former high school debater, he always spoke with passion and knowledge in an attempt to sway people his way. But when it came time to get the job done, he understood how to make a deal. Senator Armstrong had a fiercely passionate, strongly principled yet pragmatic, respectful, and constructive approach to his work. We could use a lot more of that around here. Later in life, Senator Armstrong decided to give back to his country and community in a different way--by serving as president of Colorado Christian University. He called his work at the university ``the most significant, energizing, and rewarding work I have ever undertaken.'' He had a vision for the college and for his students, and he devoted all his energy to their success. Under his leadership, Colorado Christian University has flourished. Enrollment more than doubled and freshman retention increased. The school has been ranked in the top 2 percent nationally for its core education and was named a ``college of distinction.'' The university's endowment has almost doubled. The school has begun substantial redevelopment plans to expand and update the campus. He cared deeply for his students and will be greatly missed by the CCU community. In fact, I recently asked Senator Armstrong for his input and perspective as part of a task force on higher education. I knew I could count on him to provide thoughtful advice on how to improve our system of higher education. He was glad to assist in our efforts. Senator Armstrong had a deep respect for democracy and our country's future. He represented a time when Members of Congress held true to their convictions but knew when to forge compromise for the greater good. His is a legacy that will benefit Americans for generations to come. His example will be missed and cherished by those of us who still serve in the Senate. There is one last point. None of us is going to be here forever, and we should keep that in mind. I think Senator Armstrong understood that. He was committed to stewardship when he was here in the Senate, and that is an example we should all follow. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, today I want to recognize the legacy of two great Coloradans, Sonia and Martin J. Wolf. After 54 years of marriage and a lifetime of public service, Martin and Sonia passed away recently within weeks of each other in Denver, CO.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Connecticut, and I would say to the Senator from Connecticut, those attempting to disparage the size of Connecticut--being from Colorado, I certainly won't do that, but I would ask you to share the biggest concern you have heard about requiring universal background checks on gun sales.

Mr. BENNET. You know, it is Pride Month, and we have our Pride parade this Sunday in Denver. For the last 10 years, that is how we have celebrated Father's Day. Father's Day coincides with Denver's Pride parade, and my wife and children and I all go. This Sunday my phone rang. My oldest daughter was on a civil rights tour in the South with her choir, and we started talking about this, and she reminded me that we missed last year's Pride parade because we were at the Shorter AME Church in Denver worshipping with that congregation in the wake of the shootings in Charleston. She was the one who had to remind me of that, but when she did, it was another reminder of how searing these experiences are for the next generation of Americans. I thank my colleagues.

Mr. BENNET. I appreciate the answer to that question. I will share some of the experiences of Colorado, and I will ask the Senator from Connecticut a question. I want to say first to the people of Orlando and the people of Florida how sorry I am for the tragedy that has befallen them. On Sunday morning, I got up and opened the paper on my device and saw at that time that 20 people had been killed, and then it quickly grew to 50. I can only remember the shock when we had the shootings in the Aurora movie theater, and I know the Senator from Connecticut had the tremendous shock of the killings of the elementary school children in Newtown, CT. I thought, as I always do when this happens, that my brother or sister could have been in there, my mother or father could have been in there, or my son or actually one of my daughters could have been in there, and I thought of the feeling somebody must have when they know they are never going to see their loved one again. I was fortunate, obviously, not to be in that circumstance, but on Sunday morning, my wife Susan and I were taking my 11-year-old daughter--my youngest daughter--to camp, and the only thing I was trying to do before I got her there was to make sure she didn't see the news, make sure she didn't hear about what happened, make sure she didn't leave her parents feeling the anxiety they felt after Newtown happened, the horror they felt after Aurora happened, the knowledge that they are growing up in a country unlike the country we grew up in, where children have a reasonable fear that something like this could happen to them. Our experience in Colorado--as the Senator knows, on July 20, 2012, a gunman walked into a crowded theater in Aurora--people were there just to watch a show--and killed 12 innocent people, just like the innocent people who were killed on Sunday morning or the children killed in Newtown. There were 58 wounded from the gunfire. We lost 12 lives, people who were full of life and aspirations, loved by family and friends. I have read their names on this floor. I have talked about who they were on this floor. But unlike Washington, in Colorado, our legislators rose to the occasion and made some tough decisions, which is why I am asking this line of questions to the Senator from Connecticut. They got together and they actually strengthened our background check system. Colorado's Legislature closed the gun show loophole and the Internet loophole and required a background check for every gun sale. What has happened? Let me give an example. In 2015 the stronger background check system blocked 7,000--I want to be precise about this--7,714 people from buying guns. That may sound like a lot, but 350,000 people applied for guns in Colorado in 2015. That is just over 2 percent of the people who applied for guns. Ninety-eight percent of the people who applied got their guns. By the way, I have a report from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which on a monthly basis publishes all this data so everybody in Colorado can see what is going on. It has, among other things, the average wait time, the average time it takes on the Internet to get this check done in Colorado. It takes 9 minutes to get the background check. More important than the percentage--that, of course, is a low percentage--is who is in the percentage. We have murderers who have been denied guns. We have rapists who have been denied guns. We have domestic abusers in that 2 percent who have been denied guns. We have kidnappers who have been denied guns. Is there anybody who is going to come to the floor of the Senate and say that Colorado is worse off because we have kept guns out of the hands of murderers and kidnappers and rapists? This isn't mythical; this is the actual fact of what is going on in a western State that has background checks. Nobody can come here and argue that we are not safer because these people who shouldn't have had a gun don't have a gun, this 2 percent. But in stark contrast--this is why I came to the floor tonight--this is in stark contrast to what the Colorado Legislature did after the Aurora shooting. This Congress did nothing after Newtown, after Aurora, after Orlando--nothing. Time and again we return to this floor after a mass shooting and yet are unable to do the simple things, such as close the gun show loophole once and for all. That is not about taking guns from people who already have guns; that is about keeping guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have guns. If your State is like my State, that is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 percent of the people who can't get a gun or apply for a gun permit. The least we can do is close the terrorism loophole that allows terrorists on the watch list or people who are on the watch list to buy a weapon. That makes no sense at all. I think the American people clearly agree with that. The American people clearly support background checks. Ninety percent of the American people believe we should strengthen background checks. I thank my colleagues who are here today. It is a particular privilege to be here with my two colleagues from New Mexico, and I thank the Senator from Connecticut for his leadership.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would just like to add one thing, if I could.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I extend my sincere appreciation and gratitude to Dennis X. McCormack for his tireless contributions to bettering the lives of Colorado's veterans. Dennis could have relaxed after retiring. He had earned it after 26 years in the military as an Army chief warrant officer, CW5, helicopter pilot from Fort Bragg's XVIII Airborne Corps and 12 more years in the private sector. Instead, Dennis was committed to service. Before retirement, he was giving his time, expertise, and passion to veterans, military families, and soldiers facing deployment and the difficulties of day-to-day life. Every day, the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces make incalculable contributions to our society. Dennis recognized a responsibility to support those contributions and made his own. He served with many organizations such as the Suicide Prevention Partnership of the Pikes Peak Region, LifeQuest Transitions, the Home Front Cares, Inc., Sentinels of Freedom--Colorado Springs Chapter, and South East Armed Forces YMCA, Colorado Springs. He served as a peer mentor for Colorado's El Paso County Veterans Trauma Court, a program he helped found. He also served in the first group of AW2 advocates for the Army Wounded Warrior Program and was an organizer of the Colorado injured military support group. I had the distinct honor of meeting Dennis in 2011, and I have worked with him in the intervening years. His deep dedication to veterans was clear, and that passion inspires my work on behalf of our Nation's veterans. He has received the American Red Cross Hometown Hero Community Service Award, the President's Award from Homefront Cares, and the Joe Henjum ``Service Above Self'' Award from the Rotary Club of Colorado Springs. These speak to his integrity, character, and commitment to the community. Dennis demonstrates the best of Colorado, and his tireless service has helped make our State one of the best places for our servicemembers, veterans, and their families to live. I add my recognition of his service, knowing that his work contributes to a stronger and a safer nation.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, today I wish to recognize Mark Van Tine, vice president of Digital Aviation for the Boeing Company and chief executive officer of Jeppesen. He is retiring after 35 years with the company as a champion of the aviation industry. Mr. Van Tine leads more than 3,800 employees at Jeppesen, which is headquartered in Englewood, CO, and serves general, business, military, and the commercial aviation sectors. Additionally, Jeppesen works closely with the aviation industry to improve the flying experience at Denver International Airport. A new navigation pattern design, for example, allows commercial airline pilots to descend in a single, smooth arc rather than a more traditional stair-step pattern, resulting in lower costs, fewer carbon emissions, and gentler landings. Since 1981, Mr. Van Tine has held numerous positions at Jeppesen, including serving as its chief information officer, before being named CEO in 2002. In 2012, he became the leader of Boeing's new Digital Aviation organization, taking on the tremendous challenge of overseeing Jeppesen's digital transformation. This involved moving the entire global aviation industry to electronic charts, which reduced paperwork and increased efficiency. Mr. Van Tine is also an active contributor to the general aviation community. He sits on the boards of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, GAMA, and the Experimental Aircraft Association, EAA. In 2009, he served as GAMA's chairman and has since chaired the association's Security Issues Committee for the last 5 years. He also chairs the Jeppesen Aviation Foundation, which honors the legacy of Captain Elrey B. Jeppesen by supporting educational institutions, organizations, and students in the aviation community. Encouraging students to become the next generation of aviation leaders is Mr. Van Tine's greatest passion. His commitment to education has ensured Jeppesen continues to support programs that introduce Colorado students to science, technology, engineering, and math using aviation. This includes initiatives such at Aurora Public Schools, Experience Aviation, Rocky Mountain BEST, Shades of Blue, and the Cherry Creek School Foundation. Under Mr. Van Tine's leadership, Jeppesen has become a sponsor of numerous scholarships aimed at encouraging students to pursue aviation careers. Mr. Van Tine has also created a national STEM competition for high schoolers with the annual prize being a 2-week build of a Glasair Sportsman airplane. This June marks the third year Mr. Van Tine will join students to assemble an aircraft in the GAMA/Build-A-Plane Aviation Design Challenge. I congratulate Mark Van Tine on his many accomplishments and years of outstanding service to the aviation community. He is truly an asset to the people of Colorado and to the millions of passengers around the world who are safer in the skies and at sea through the use of his navigation services.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, for over 35 years, the Holocaust Memorial Observances of Greeley and Northern Colorado have worked to raise awareness of the atrocities of Nazi crimes and the perils of anti-Semitism and have fostered greater understanding and knowledge throughout Colorado. Through various educational experiences, the Holocaust Memorial Observances have preserved many of the stories of the courage and bravery that have come to define that period. This month, the members of the Holocaust Memorial Observances committee hosted a series of discussions, films, and school visits, including a presentation by Holocaust survivor Peter Daniels, formerly known as Peter Berlowitz. Thanks to the committee's hard work, our children, grandchildren, and generations after them will have the opportunity to reflect on the experiences of people like Peter Daniels and his inspiring story of survival and determination. It is my pleasure to commend the Holocaust Memorial Observances of Greeley and Northern Colorado committee for their dedicated service to this critical cause and to congratulate the committee on continuing to provide a platform for individuals to counteract hate and prejudice.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I agree with my colleague from Colorado. In an attempt to protect certain States with guaranteed funding levels, in 2006 Congress changed the Older Americans Act funding formula to ensure States received a guaranteed funding level based on senior populations. Due to Colorado's growing senior population and this provision from 2006, Colorado saw massive cuts during sequestration, when other States did not.

Mr. BENNET. We believe that, moving forward, it is imperative that steps are taken in future reauthorizations to safeguard services for all seniors regardless of their State of residence. It is our hope that as Congress continues to address issues that are important to all senior citizens, we find a path forward to address the issue we have raised here today.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, moving forward, we intend to work with the Senate Banking Committee and HUD to address any technical or substantive concerns that have arisen. Specifically, it is our intention to ensure that FHA has the ability to insure loans for energy efficient homes while also including protections to maintain accurate evaluations of a borrower's ability to repay. Additionally, as this amendment is being implemented, we understand that HUD's ability to test and modify the savings that may be counted should be considered. In fact, we considered these concerns while drafting this legislation. The methodology we included for measuring energy efficient savings is an ANSI certified standard and the most widely accepted technology in today's marketplace. Over 1 million homes have already been energy rated using this technology. And this is the same underlying technology successfully utilized by the EPA's Energy Star program. Again, we are pleased that the Senate passed our amendment, and we look forward to working with the Banking Committee and HUD on improvements.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am very pleased with the Senate's show of support for the Isakson-Bennet amendment, which was a modified version of the Sensible Accounting to Value Energy Act. We have been working on this bill together for more than five years. The SAVE Act simply creates a voluntary program to encourage people to include energy efficiency in the purchase price of a new or existing home. It allows sellers the option of providing a HUD-qualified energy efficiency report to prospective buyers who are applying for a home mortgage. If that loan is backed by FHA, the energy efficiency of the home and the cost of a borrower's future energy bills will be taken into account by the mortgage lender. Builders and manufacturers are constantly creating new energy efficient products and features, but the enhanced value and energy savings achieved by these innovations are not fully realized by the market. The passage of this amendment will for the first time provide a mechanism to account for those saving and unlock demand for new energy efficient products and significantly reduce homeowner's utility bills.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise to discuss the vacancy on the Supreme Court and the majority's ongoing refusal to consider the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland. Forty days have passed since the President of the United States nominated Judge Garland to fill Justice Scalia's seat. This is longer than it took for the Senate to confirm Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981. In fact, 75 percent of all Supreme Court Justices have been confirmed within 31 days, but today-- 40 days after his nomination--many Senators haven't even extended Judge Garland the simple courtesy of a meeting. The majority's refusal to hold a vote is without precedent, and the majority has cited none. Instead, the majority is trying to shift the blame. Incredibly, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee recently came to the floor to blame, of all people, not other Senators, not other politicians, but the Chief Justice of the United States of America for politicizing the Court. Ten days before Justice Scalia's death, the Chief Justice said: ``The process is not functioning very well.'' That turns out to have been something of an understatement. The Chief Justice went on and said that the process ``is being used for something other than ensuring the qualifications of the nominees.'' Again, he was not referring to what is going on now in the Senate. This happened before Justice Scalia passed away. There was no way that the Chief Justice could have known there was going to be a vacancy. He continued: ``[Supreme Court Justices] don't work as Democrats or Republicans . . . and I think it's a very unfortunate impression the public might get from the confirmation process.'' His words struck me--particularly given what has gone on since then-- as a candid expression of his concern for the Court as an institution. This concern apparently upset the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He took to the floor and said: The Chief Justice has it exactly backwards. The confirmation process doesn't make the Justices appear political. He continued: The confirmation process has gotten political precisely because the Court has drifted from the constitutional text, and rendered decisions based instead on policy preferences. It is absolutely breathtaking that the Chief Justice would be criticized for ``drifting from the constitutional text'' when, for the past 10 weeks, the majority has drifted from article II, section 2, clause 2, which sets out our constitutional responsibility to advise and consent in very clear terms. Worse, the majority's drift 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. This is absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Senate. Throughout our history, the Senate has confirmed 17 nominees in Presidential election years to serve on the Supreme Court. The last of these was Justice Kennedy in 1988. When the President made this nomination, he had more than 340 days left in his term. We are talking almost a quarter of the President's term. That is a lot more time than most of those 17 Justices had before this Senate. In the last 100 years, every nominee to a Supreme Court vacancy who did not withdraw--and a couple did--received a timely hearing and vote. On average, the Senate has begun hearings within 40 days of the President's nomination and voted to confirm 70 days after the President's nomination. There is no excuse for not holding a hearing and a vote. If that is what we are going to pay attention to in this Chamber and if that is what we are going to argue for--originalism, strict constructionism--the plain language of the Constitution is clear. There is a reason why no Senate has ever had the audacity to do what this Senate is doing right now--because of how clear that mission is and because there is no one else to do it. The Constitution says: The Senate shall advise and consent. It doesn't say: The House of Representatives shall have a role. It doesn't say: Let the people decide. It says that this is the Senate's job. We should do our job just as every Senate, until now, has done its job since the founding of the country, including the Senate that was there when George Washington was in office. Three of those 17 appointments were confirmed by a Senate that actually contained people who had been at the constitutional convention, and they were consistent with their understanding of what the Founders had agreed to. They had a vote on the floor of the Senate. I am not saying how people should vote. They should vote their conscience, but we should have a vote. The American people expect us to do our job. I want to be clear that I believe there should be hearings. I think we should go through hearings to establish the qualifications of the nominee. I think that is really important. The point I am making about having this vote does not have to do with whom the President nominated. It has to do with our institutional responsibility. It has to do with the rule of law and the image we want to project to our country and overseas. Finally, I have a word to say about the President's nominee. Merrick Garland is an honored and accomplished judge. Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet with him and learn about his judicial record and philosophy. I have known Chief Judge Garland for more than 20 years. I have actually worked for him at the Justice Department when we both worked for the Deputy Attorney General of the United States. I was fresh out of law school, but even then Judge Garland's humility, work ethic, and commitment to the rule of law inspired me and continue to inspire me. Our meeting last week confirmed what I already know. Judge Garland is an intelligent and pragmatic judge who is extraordinarily well- qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. I have wondered whether that is the reason the majority is not holding hearings. They could simply hold the hearings and vote against Judge Garland, which is their prerogative. Why not hold hearings? Maybe they know that the American people, given the opportunity to hear directly from Judge Garland, would see that he is precisely the type of judge who should serve on the Court. A vacancy on the Supreme Court is a rare thing. It doesn't come around very often. For those of us in this country, whether we are in the Senate or in a classroom somewhere, those vacancies, hearings, and debates on the floor present an unparalleled opportunity--a remarkable opportunity--for the American people to engage in a debate about the Court, the Constitution, and all kinds of issues that the Court will consider. That is what these hearings are about. That is what could be going on this summer during this Presidential election year, and we would have a discussion about where we want to head as a country. We are not having it. We are not having it because of this unprecedented action. Because of what the majority has done here, by not meeting with the nominee or holding a hearing, they are denying him the opportunity to make his case to the American people. In the meantime--and this is really critical--the Court will continue to be impaired. Impaired is the word that Justice Scalia himself used when he was asked to recuse himself from a case involving Dick Cheney, then the Vice President of the United States. In that case, he was asked if there would be a presumption of recusal. Justice Scalia's answer to that was this: Maybe if I were on the court of appeals--because if I were on the court of appeals, there would be somebody to replace me, but that is not how it works on the Supreme Court. When there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court, leaving the Court with only eight Justices, there is nobody who can fill in. There is nobody to become the ninth Justice. He said that the Court would therefore be impaired. The action that is being taken right now threatens to impair the Supreme Court not for one session but for two sessions of the Court before there is another election. In fact, for the third time since Justice Scalia's death, the Supreme Court could not resolve a dispute because of a 4-to-4 split. The longer this vacancy remains, the more uncertainty and confusion the American people will suffer. As I said, two terms of the Court will be jeopardized by petty politics. Believe me, I know it has become fashionable for Washington to tear down rather than work to improve the democratic institutions that generations of Americans have built, but to so cavalierly impair the judicial branch of our government is pathetic. It is time for the Senate to do its job as every Senate has done before us. Again, I am not asking my colleagues to support Judge Garland's nomination. That is a matter of conscience for each of us. But we must fulfill our basic constitutional obligation of holding a hearing and a vote. This is literally--because it is in the Constitution and no one else is granted this power--the least we can do to demonstrate that we are a legislative body that functions as the Constitution requires. We certainly have plenty of time. In view of that, if by contrast we leave for our scheduled 7 weeks of summer vacation--which is not enshrined in the Constitution but is a schedule that is set by the Senate--without having fulfilled our responsibility, the American people should demand that we return to Washington and do our job. It is past time for my colleagues to meet with Judge Garland, hold hearings on his record, and give the American people an up-or-down vote on this judicial vacancy. I thank the Presiding Officer. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

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

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to thank the Senator from Georgia for his tireless work on this bill. We have been at it now for 3 years, and here we are on the floor close to passing it. There is not a Senator in this body who possesses the knowledge that Senator Isakson does about real estate and how it works in the United States. It has been a real privilege to work with him on the bill. I also wish to thank the chairwoman and the ranking member of the committee for their fine work on this bill. It is time to enact this commonsense bill, the SAFE Act, as it is called. It is supported by groups all across the political spectrum, including the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Our amendment, as Senator Isakson said, would allow for a home's energy efficiency to be considered when a borrower applies for a loan. So when you apply for a mortgage, you can request an energy audit, and if you have a loan backed by the Federal Housing Administration, the energy efficiency of your new home and your future energy bills will be taken into account by your mortgage lender. Why is that important? Well, today, even though homeowners spend more money on energy than they do on taxes or buying home insurance, energy costs are not taken into account. And when they are taken into account, as a consequence of this bill, the savings derived from that energy efficiency can then be applied to paying your mortgage. I want to be clear--and Senator Isakson said this--this amendment is not a mandate. It simply sets up a voluntary program. It will create thousands of jobs in manufacturing and construction. By 2040, the estimates are that it will save consumers $1.2 billion in energy costs and save enough energy to power 100,000 homes every year. I have heard from builders all across Colorado who support this amendment--people like Gene Myers, CEO and founder of Thrive Home Builders in Denver. He has built more than 1,000 energy-efficient homes, but he understands that we won't fully attain the benefits of efficiency in the market until we properly value it. For these reasons, a large and diverse coalition supports this amendment. I urge my colleagues to support this commonsense amendment to improve energy efficiency, save money, and create American jobs. Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from Georgia.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Marion Wittmann, a fellow in my office, be given floor privileges for the remainder of this session of the Congress.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, today I congratulate Casey Family Programs for 50 years of public service to help vulnerable children and families in the child welfare system. Founded in 1966 by Jim Casey, the founder of United Parcel Service, UPS, this private operating foundation has been working quietly and effectively on behalf of our most vulnerable children and families. At the beginning, Casey Family Programs started with a specific focus on providing quality foster care. After gaining considerable experience in providing direct services, Casey Family Programs recognized that it could help more families and children by working to support long- lasting improvements across entire child welfare systems. Today the foundation provides strategic consultation, technical assistance, data analysis, and independent research and evaluation at no cost to all 50 states. It also serves county and tribal child welfare jurisdictions across the Nation, including my State of Colorado. Casey Family Programs seeks a unique partnership with the States by asking what jurisdictions hope to achieve as it relates to the foundation's mission. In my State of Colorado, this means helping State leaders implement Colorado's Federal waiver program. It means developing initiatives to reduce reliance on congregate care, if other options may be more appropriate for the child and family. It means working with our Denver courts with a judicial engagement team to enhance collaboration among the courts, agencies, and families. Casey Family Programs also has a specific team based in Denver dedicated to Indian Child Welfare. At the Federal level, Casey Family Programs offers its experience, research, and data to help policymakers understand and address the complicated issues of child welfare and foster care. Over the years I have been proud to work with Casey Family Programs, and I appreciate their dedication and commitment to the original vision of their founder, Jim Casey. I believe we all share this vision of helping children find a safe and stable home, but achieving it is more challenging than it seems. I congratulate Casey Family Programs on 50 years of public service, and I look forward to continue working with the foundation in Colorado and in Congress for years to come.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am here tonight to discuss the Supreme Court vacancy caused by Justice Antonin Scalia's death. First, I think it is important to reflect on Justice Scalia's life and profound contribution and influence on the Court and our country. He was one of the longest serving Justices in our Nation's history, and, as far as I can tell, every single day he served, he applied his considerable intellect, integrity, and wit to the work before him. Although I disagreed with many of his decisions, I never doubted his commitment to the rule of law. He was a principled originalist. He was loyal to his country. By all accounts, including moving testimony from his children, he was devoted to his family and to his friends, including to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with whom he often disagreed. Judge Scalia's judicial philosophy was well understood when President Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1986. Many Senators then opposed his judicial approach, but in an echoing indictment of today's Senate and its partisanship, 30 years ago the U.S. Senate confirmed Justice Scalia 98 to 0--a vote that testifies to Justice Scalia's qualifications and to the integrity of Members of this body who disagreed with his vision of the Constitution but, exercising their constitutional duty, refused to withhold their support for a qualified nominee. Here is what article II, section 2, clause 2 says about our and the President's duty: 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 shall nominate a replacement and the Senate shall advise and consent by voting on that nominee. That is what the plain language of the Constitution requires, and that is what Presidents and the Senate have done throughout our history. That is why, in the past 100 years, the Senate has taken action on every single Supreme Court nominee--even those made during a Presidential election year. Throughout our history, there have been at least 17 nominees confirmed by the Senate in Presidential election years. The last of these was Justice Kennedy in 1988. This history reveals that when the chairman of the Judiciary Committee said last week that ``[t]he fact of the matter is that it's been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year,'' he was incorrect. The fact of the matter is that since the founding of this country, the Senate has done its job even in an election year. In fact, during one election year, the Senate voted to confirm not just one but three Justices to fill vacancies on the Court. The President was none other than George Washington, and he was in the fourth year of his second term when that happened. That Senate included some of our Founders, delegates to the Constitutional Convention. But, come to think about it, what did they really know about the Constitution? On that subject, by the way, it has been incredible in the truest sense of the word to hear people--Senators and even candidates for President who claim to be, as Justice Scalia surely was, constitutional originalists or textualists--willfully ignore the plain meaning of the Constitution in favor of this so-called standard practice. That is not a form of constitutional interpretation with which I am familiar, but it seems to be guiding the majority leader and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee away from the text they claim to revere. They wrote together in the Washington Post: It is today the American people, rather than a lame-duck President whose priorities and policies they just rejected in the most-recent national election, who should be afforded the opportunity to replace Justice Scalia. I have a chart. I redlined the actual words of the Constitution with the claim of the majority leader and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. We can see they bear no relationship to one another. In fact, only seven words--the black words--remain from the original constitutional text, including in those seven words a conjunction, a definite article, and a preposition--otherwise known as ``and,'' ``the,'' and ``of.'' Oh, and by the way, if we want to talk about a real standard practice, the President becomes a lameduck only after the election that is coming up and only until the inauguration. When we look at the history, it is telling that, unlike almost all our other work, the Senate's consideration of Supreme Court nominees has been remarkably expeditious. On average, the Senate has voted 70 days after the President's nomination. When Justice Scalia died, 342 days remained in the President's term--nearly a full quarter of his final term in office. Why has the Senate, notorious for its glacial slowness, historically acted with such deliberate speed when it comes to our consideration of Supreme Court Justices? I suspect there are three principal reasons: first, the constitutional clarity that commands us; second, the unique nature of the responsibility--no one else, including the House of Representatives, can exercise it; and third, the essential importance of the Supreme Court's composition. With respect to the Supreme Court's composition, no less of an authority than Justice Scalia himself explained it well. Asked to recuse himself from a case involving Vice President Cheney, Justice Scalia rejected the suggestion that he should ``resolve any doubts in favor of recusal.'' He observed that such a standard might be appropriate if he were on the court of appeals, where his ``place would be taken by another judge, and the case would proceed normally. On the Supreme Court, however, the consequence is different: The court proceeds with eight Justices, raising the possibility that, by reason of a tie vote, it will find itself unable to resolve the significant legal issue presented by the case.'' Justice Scalia then quoted the Supreme Court's own recusal policy observing that, ``[e]ven one unnecessary recusal impairs the functioning of the Court.'' If even one unnecessary recusal impairs the Court, imagine what a 14-month vacancy would do. Imagine if, in 2016, we had a repeat of 2000, when the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, except with only eight Justices on the bench. Imagine the constitutional crisis our Nation would have to endure. I know it has become fashionable for Washington politicians to tear down rather than work to improve the democratic institutions that generations of Americans have built. But to impair so cavalierly the judicial branch of our government is pathetic. It is a standard one would expect of a lawless nation, rather than a nation committed to the rule of law. It is the behavior of a petty kangaroo court, not of the U.S. Senate. And it threatens to deny justice to millions of Americans in the name of petty politics. It is time for the Senate to do its job, as every Senate before us has done. I am not asking my colleagues to support the nominee. That is a matter of conscience for each of us. But what is unconscionable is that the majority, if it keeps its word, will have no hearing, will hold no vote, and refuse even the courtesy of a meeting with the President's nominee. Speaking of doing our job, in view of the seriousness of the Court's nomination, we should reconsider the majority's proposed 7-week summer recess for the Senate. In July and August alone, we are barely in session for 8 days. Unlike our responsibility to vote on Supreme Court nominees, the Senate schedule is not enshrined in the Constitution. It is set by the majority. In that connection, I am glad to invite any of my colleagues to my office to watch a video of a constituent of mine whom I met 2 weeks ago in Pueblo West. She manages a retail store and struggles every month to keep it going. Unlike the Senate, she has 22 vacation days a year, not a month. Instead, she works a second job to pay for childcare so she can keep her main job. Millions of Americans are watching the Senate take the entire summer off and claim there isn't time to do our job. That doesn't meet the standard of a great nation or a great parliamentary body. What is worse is that this whole charade has become an extension of playground politics, the childish pettiness that has metastasized in this Presidential primary season. How far have we drifted from our simple constitutional obligations when one side refuses to even meet with any prospective nominee? What message does that send to the people of Colorado and across the country? Where I come from, taking your ball and going home isn't acceptable behavior on the playground. How could it possibly be acceptable in the U.S. Senate? Senate greatness, the national interest as a legislative guide, maturity, and comity will not be restored overnight or with a single decision. It has taken far too long for us to travel down this destructive road to deadlock, ideological rigidity, and bitter partisanship for restoration of greatness to the Senate to occur quickly, but we should begin--we must begin, and we can begin--with our treatment of some of our most serious, even sacred duties: the confirmation of the next Justice of the Supreme Court. We are not here to pacify a political base or satisfy one or more special constituencies or rally our political parties. We are here to elevate our Republic, to make it a beacon for the world, to demonstrate how mature representatives of sovereign States govern a mature nation. This Supreme Court nomination is not a test of strength between the executive and legislative branches. It is a test of our strength as leaders with an honorable history and a heritage of wisdom and maturity. How we manage our constitutional duty to provide serious consideration and deliberation to a rare appointment to the Nation's highest judicial office will determine whether we deserve the respect of Americans who rightly expect us to exhibit dignity, mutual respect, and wisdom on their behalf. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I will be very brief. I have a longer set of remarks that I want to give next week celebrating the Broncos' victory, and I know our colleague from Wyoming is here. But since the Presiding Officer is shackled to the desk and can't make remarks, I would say on his behalf how grateful the two of us are to the Senator from North Carolina for the graciousness of his remarks. I know how hard it must have been. But to have the Senator not only make the remarks but provide original poetry at the end, is more than anybody could have expected. So through the Chair I thank the Senator for that. I also want to say how proud we are of the Broncos and the Broncos organization, the Bowlen family, and the entire team for what they were able to pull off. I was able to watch it in my living room with my wife and daughters. I congratulate, in particular, Von Miller, who is the MVP, and our defense, who played a game like no other defense I have ever seen. Finally, I would simply say thank you to Peyton Manning for the example he has set for my children and for children all over our State--that what matters is not how good you are or how skilled you are or how you act in the minute, but what matters is the patient decades of hard work a person is willing to put in to perfect their craft. That is what Peyton Manning has demonstrated. That is what he has shown. That is the value he has lived. I think he has made a huge difference, as I say, to the next generation of Coloradans. We learned last week, as well, that this game, just like any game, is not about any one individual; it is about a team. We saw a team--the weaknesses and strengths--come together and win a game over a very, very tough organization in the Carolina Panthers. (Mr. BARRASSO assumed the Chair.) With that, I see my colleague from Colorado is now on the floor. I yield the floor by saying: Go Broncos.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Colorado for moving his amendment forward. I am here on a different subject, which is to discuss an amendment that I submitted with Senator Isakson concerning residential energy efficiency. The so-called SAVE Act has always been thoroughly bipartisan, drawing the support of Senators Isakson, Toomey, Moran, Portman, Boxer, and others, and attracted support from groups all across the political spectrum from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce all the way to the Sierra Club. Our amendment would allow for a home's energy efficiency to be considered when a borrower is applying for a loan by making a simple change to home underwriting and appraisal standards. Specifically, when you apply for a mortgage, you can request under this legislation an energy audit, and if you have a loan that is backed by the FHA, the energy efficiency of your home and your energy bills will be taken into account by your mortgage lender. Without this change, even though homeowners spend more on energy costs than taxes or home insurance, the amount you pay each month for energy is not taken into account. This amendment isn't a mandate. It doesn't require anything. It simply allows mortgage lenders to account for energy costs in the same way they account for taxes and insurance. It makes no sense that cosmetic improvements like new countertops increase a house's value, but an energy-efficient furnace, which will actually save homeowners thousands of dollars, does not. This amendment will create thousands of jobs in manufacturing, construction, and energy efficiency. It will save homeowners money on their energy bills, and it will decrease foreclosure risk. It will increase the energy efficiency of our homes. It does all this by giving consumers a choice they don't today have. I have heard from builders all across Colorado who support this amendment--people like Gene Myers, who is the CEO and founder of Thrive Home Builders. He has built more than 1,000 energy-efficient homes in the Denver area, but he understands we will not fully attain the benefits of efficiency in the market until we properly value it. For these reasons, a large and diverse coalition supports this amendment, including the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Association of Home Builders, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the U.S. Defense Council, among others. I urge my colleagues to support this bipartisan and commonsense amendment to improve energy efficiency and create American jobs. I thank the Senator from Georgia, Mr. Isakson, for his leadership and his sponsorship of this legislation. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, all across the Middle East and Europe, hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing the medieval barbarism of ISIS and the violent cruelty of the Assad regime. Out of a population of 22 million, more than 4 million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries. These refugees--almost all of them women and children--have been living away from their homes for years in Jordan, Turkey, or other host countries, struggling to survive, struggling to be free. Hundreds of thousands have decided to make the dangerous journey to Europe. Many perish along the way. According to the United Nations, over 3,200 refugees attempting to reach Europe died or went missing in 2015 alone. Throughout our history, when we have been at our best, the United States has accepted the world's most vulnerable seeking refuge from violence and murder. Our principles don't mean very much if we jettison them when we find them politically inconvenient or difficult to live by. The legislation we voted on today represents a significant departure from our proud history. It would require the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the Director of the FBI, and the Director of National Intelligence to personally certify that each refugee from Syria and Iraq poses no security threat before admission into the United States and would effectively halt the refugee process. This is not the reason I opposed the legislation. It is worth noting it is likely those three officials would be able to do nothing else during the course of the day to keep us secure because they would be busy signing certifications. It is very clear, from all the testimony we have heard at our committees and people who are experts in this area, that a blanket prohibition like this doesn't actually make us safe. Refugees are the most thoroughly vetted group of anyone entering the United States. Let's start with that. The United States first screens them and collects biometric data. Only those who pass are then referred to the United States--and refugees don't even know which country they are going to be referred to when they approach the United Nations. Then multiple agencies--including DHS, the FBI, the State Department, and our intelligence agencies-- conduct a rigorous screening process. This includes health checks, repeated biometric checks, several layers of biographical and background screenings and interviews. Out of the 23,000 individuals referred to the United States, only about 2,000 have been accepted. It should be understood by people in this body--and I hope it is understood by the American people--that no refugee enjoys a presumption of acceptance into the United States. The reverse is true. They are required to pass the most stringent standards of any group seeking to enter the United States--a process applicants must endure with uncertainty for over 2 years. So instead of playing politics, in my view we ought to be having a serious discussion about how actually to keep our country safe and what will make it safer. One of the things I learned when we were working on the immigration bill in the Senate--which still hasn't passed the House. I would remind everybody, the only bill to secure our border, the only bill to provide internal security when it comes to immigration was the bill that passed through the Senate that has never been taken up by the House in any form. One of the things I learned was that of the 11 million undocumented people in the United States, 40 percent of them--almost half--are people who came lawfully to the United States but overstayed their visa, and we have no way of tracking that. We have no way of understanding who those people are. This legislation would have fixed that. I would have loved to have seen the House pass a companion piece of legislation, but that concerns me because there are a bunch of people in here who haven't been vetted at all. So instead of playing politics, we ought to figure out what we can do. Another example. A group of us have introduced a bill that strengthens the Visa Waiver Program, which terrorists can exploit to enter the United States. Currently, over 25 million people come to the United States every year through this program. Our legislation addresses important security vulnerabilities and closes the program to foreign fighters. The omnibus we just passed in December included some important parts of our bill. It prevents people who have traveled to terrorist hot spots in the last 5 years--including Iraq and Syria--from even using the Visa Waiver Program. It also requires all travelers using the program to have electronic passports, which are harder to fake. These are big changes to make the American people safer. Together, these changes will help stop terrorists from coming to the United States, but there are still important parts of the bill we must pass, including requiring individuals using the Visa Waiver Program to submit biometric data such as fingerprints and photos before boarding a plane to the United States, working with our European partners to close their borders to the flow of foreign fighters heading to ISIS and back, requiring better information sharing on foreign fighters and dangerous individuals. This is not to say that a refugee--or even a U.S. citizen--is not vulnerable to radicalization. We need to be vigilant about that. Americans are justifiably concerned about the reality of the threat and the dangerous world in which we live today. We must counter terrorist groups' ability to radicalize using social media, both here at home and abroad. Our country needs a much better strategy for countering and degrading ISIS propaganda and its recruitment machine. We have to develop creative and agile technologies to effectively degrade the ability of terrorist organizations like ISIS and others to persuade, inspire, and recruit by using social media. Congress should also pass the Senate immigration bill I mentioned earlier, which included a historic investment to secure our borders and enhance our interior enforcement. As a reminder to everybody here, this bill would double the number of border agents, expand fencing, implement new technology and resources, address visa overstays, and provide for full monitoring of every inch of our southern border. By addressing real vulnerabilities and investing in smart security solutions, we can protect our borders and also--and also--live by our values. We cannot allow ourselves to return to dark periods in our history when Americans debated turning away those fleeing cruelty around the world. My mom who was born in Poland in 1938 while Nazi tanks amassed at the borders--she and her parents miraculously survived--Polish Jews-- miraculously survived one of the worst human events in human history, and they survived it in and around Warsaw. They lived there for 2 years after the war and then went to Stockholm for a year, Mexico City for a year, and then they came to New York City. They came to the one country in the world where they felt they could rebuild their shattered lives. On my first birthday--when I was 1 year old, 1965, 15 years after my mom and her grandparents came to the country--my grandparents sent me a birthday card. This is what they said in that card. They wrote in English, by the way, 15 years after they came to the United States: 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 to develop in other parts of the world a greater understanding of these American values. We have very few opportunities to live by our values. This is one of those times. In this case it is not about developing them, as my grandparents worried during the Cold War, in other parts of the world. This is making sure that we hold on to the values that have defined us as a nation, that have separated us from so many other nations in the world and made this a place where my grandparents and my mom were able to come and achieve the American dream--a dream that would have seemed unimaginable to them during the Holocaust. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am sorry the Senator from Colorado has the misfortune of presiding over the Senate when I am giving a speech, but it is nice to see him. I wanted to come to the floor today to mostly say thank you but also to make some observations on a day where I am actually proud of the Senate. I am proud of the work we have been able to do to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary School Act with a vote in the Senate of 85 yes votes. This came after a vote in the House of Representatives that was 359 yes votes. And this comes after a time when just months ago it seemed as though we were paralyzed on this bill and unable to get a vote in the House and in the Senate. In fact, the House passed a very partisan bill that didn't get one Democratic vote. And when the Democrats were in charge, we passed bills that didn't get Republican votes, and then we couldn't even get them to the floor. Now we find ourselves just a few months later with a huge bipartisan result. I want to start by commending Lamar Alexander, the Senator from Tennessee, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, for his extraordinary leadership, as well as Patty Murray, the ranking member of the committee, for her leadership. They ran this committee and they ran this process in a way that ought to set the standard for the rest of the committees in the Senate. They followed regular order. They started with a bipartisan product. They asked every single member of the committee whether we had ideas to try to improve the legislation. They moved it out of committee unanimously-- unanimously. This is a committee that has on it the junior Senator from Kentucky and the junior Senator from Vermont, just to pick two examples, and they got a unanimous vote. Then we brought it to the floor, we had amendments, an open process, passed it off the floor, the House passed their version of the bill, and we had an actual conference committee. Can my colleagues imagine that? I think it is the second one or maybe the third; there was one fake one and then two real ones since I have been here in the last 7 years. I have actually had the good fortune to be on two of them, including this one. So we produced a product and got it to the floor, and now it is going to the President's desk. I say to the pages who are here today that we are 8 years away in the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. The bill expired, in effect, 8 years ago, and we have taken 8 years to get this work done, which, if you were grading us in terms of getting our homework done in time--if the teachers at the Page School had the opportunity to scold us for being 8 years late with our homework, they probably would. But I am going to celebrate because I am glad this day has finally come. For teachers and for principals and for students and for families all across the country, this change is going to come as a great relief. Some people ask: Why should the Federal Government have any role in education at all? I think it is a fair question because of what we spend on K-12 education, only 9 percent of it is Federal. The rest of it is all State and local. The reason why the Federal Government is involved is because of the civil rights impulse that says kids ought to have a great education no matter what ZIP Code they are born into. That is what we tell ourselves. If you are lucky enough to be born to wealthy parents or unlucky enough to be born to poor parents, when it comes to education, you ought to be able to get a good education. The Federal Government is meant to help ameliorate the differences that exist in too many places all across the country. That was the idea when we got involved in this in the 1960s. Then we fast-forward to No Child Left Behind, the idea that George Bush had and Ted Kennedy had and the others who worked on that bill, including Margaret Spellings and others, had. The idea was that our kids are not succeeding all across the country and they are not remotely having the same opportunities, and we ought to expose that to the country. Notwithstanding all of the things about No Child Left Behind that I can't stand, the one thing I will be forever grateful for was the requirement that districts across the country annually assess kids and disaggregate the data so people can see how kids are doing by ethnic group and by their level of poverty or affluence and that we expose that to the country and stop hiding from what are terrible results for many kids living in the United States. Over the period of time that No Child Left Behind has been in place, we have been unable to hide from the results we have seen. What are those results? It is very clear now that we have studied it that if you are a kid born into poverty, you arrive in kindergarten having heard 30 million fewer words than a more affluent peer. Ask any kindergarten teacher in America whether that is going to affect the outcomes in kindergarten, and she will tell us. We now know that there are whole communities in America, across cities and across rural areas, where there is not a single school that anybody in this body would be willing to send their kid or their grandkid to--not one. And those of us who are proponents of school choice, as I am, need to recognize that there are huge parts of geography in the United States where there is no choice. The choice is illusory. You have one lousy school to choose from and another lousy school to choose from. Then what we have discovered is that we have made it harder and harder for people to be able to afford college. As other countries around the world are understanding more than ever, we need something north of a high school diploma to compete. When George Bush, the son--and I say to the Presiding Officer that this is a temporal observation, not a partisan observation--when George Bush the son became President, we led the world in the production of college graduates. Today we are something like 16th. My question is, Do we want to be 32nd or do we want to do something different to give people greater opportunity? As I have said on this floor before, where this all ends is in a situation where if you are a kid born into poverty in America, your chances of getting a college degree is equivalent to roughly 9 in 100. They are not roughly 9 in 100; they are 9 in 100. That means that if these Senate chairs and these desks--there are 100 in this Chamber-- were inhabited by poor kids instead of by Senators, there would be those 3 seats, then those 3 seats, and then 3 of those seats in that row that would be inhabited by college graduates, and the entire rest of this Chamber would not be. I think that if we faced those odds for our own kids in this body--if Senators faced those kinds of odds for their own kids--we would quit the Senate and we would go home and we would try to fix whatever we could fix to ensure that our children didn't have a 9-in-100 chance but maybe had a 90-in-100 chance of being able to make a decision about whether they wanted to go to college. I think one of the reasons why we find ourselves with those kinds of results for our kids--not just around education but around health care and around many other issues--is that too often we are treating America's children like they are someone else's children, not like they are our own children. And if we treated them like they were our own children, I think it would focus our mind. I think that not just on education but on all kinds of issues, we would stop figuring out how to get through the week, stop trying to figure out how to keep the lights on for 1 more week or 1 more month or do a temporary tax deal that we could call a yearlong deal and it is actually a 2-week tax deal at the end of the year, and we would actually start doing what the American people want us to do, which is invest in the next generation--investment in the next generation in terms of infrastructure, in terms of immigration policies, in terms of energy; approaching the next generation by saying we have a theory about how we are going to right the fiscal problems this country faces. And we would be doing a lot--State, local, and Federal Government--to ensure that we had an education system that was much more aligned to the outcomes we want for our kids than the system we have. Having said all of that, I am so glad we have made the decision that we have made to pass this bill today because if we had a rally tomorrow on the steps of the Capitol to keep No Child Left Behind the same, literally no one would show up, which maybe explains why we have been able to get this bipartisan result in the end. I think the other thing that explains it is the fact that the No Child Left Behind bill, when it was passed, represented perhaps the biggest and greatest Federal incursion on State and local governments that we have seen in modern American history. Part of what we are doing here by changing the way this bill works is retreating, which I think is appropriate and what we should do. When I was superintendent of the Denver public schools, I used to wonder all the time why people in Washington were so mean to our kids and to our teachers. What I realize being here is that they are not mean; it is just that they have absolutely no idea what is going on in our schools and our classrooms. I think it is perfectly reasonable for the Federal Government to say: We expect you to do better. We expect you to close these achievement gaps. We have a national interest in knowing that kids are moving forward no matter where they are born, just as I think we have a national interest in understanding where the next 1.5 million teachers are going to come from to replace the teachers we have lost. But when I was a superintendent, the last thing I wanted was anybody in Washington telling me how to do the work or telling my teachers and principals how to do the work. That is not the province of anybody in Washington, DC, and there was too much of that with No Child Left Behind. I want to talk a little bit about a few aspects of the bill today that I think are important. I am not going to talk about everything because there is an awful lot that changed. The first thing that is important to me was thinking about how we spend money when it comes to schools and understanding better how those resources are used. I mentioned earlier that the whole reason the Federal Government is involved in education is because of a civil rights impulse. It might surprise the Presiding Officer to know that we are only one of three countries in the OECD that spend more money on affluent kids than we do on kids in poverty as a country. Part of that has to do with the way we fund education through property taxes, but part of it is compounded by the way the Federal Government has required reporting from school districts and States, going back to the 1960s, where we said to States and school districts: You need to report not an actual teacher's salary but an average teacher's salary, and that is what we are going to require you to do. For reasons that I am not going to belabor here today, that became something called the comparable loophole and meant that it was unclear where the resources were going, including the title I resources which are meant for kids living in poverty. I wanted to close the comparability loophole as part of this legislation. We got a vote in the committee, but it didn't make it into the bill. But we have made a change in reporting, which is that we are now requiring districts and States to report on actual teachers' salaries, not average teachers' salaries, and what that is going to mean is much more transparency about where money is going in our school districts. It is pretty easy to think about it this way. If you imagine an average salary for a school district, if you are in a high-poverty school, it tends to be that younger teachers, newer teachers are in that school. Those newer teachers are paid not at the average salaries but an actual salary down here. If you go to a more affluent school, teachers tend to be more experienced and paid more, and they are paid up here. So in the wealthier schools, the school is billed as though it is paying lower average salaries even though it is paying higher salaries. The poor schools are being billed as if they are paying higher salaries, but they are paying lower salaries. That is a travesty. That is a massive subsidy going from poor kids to wealthier kids in this country because of the requirements of the Federal Government going back to the 1960s. We have to change that reporting, and I believe in the next incarnation of this legislation we will finally change the budgeting itself. We also focused on teacher leadership as part of this bill and teachers in general. They are the most important thing when it comes to a quality education. We know that the most important thing a kid who is living in poverty can get is 3 years of tremendous instruction. If they do, we can close the achievement gap. We know we can. There is a lot of attention paid to this question of how we get rid of low-performing teachers, and having been a superintendent, I am all for it. But the most important question or fact we need to observe is that we are losing 50 percent of our teachers from the profession in the first 5 years. What is it we can do to keep teachers longer than that? We can't keep them for 30 years anymore. It is not going to happen. We imagine that is going to happen. We have exactly the same system that was designed when we had a labor market that discriminated against women and said: You have two choices--one is being a teacher and one is being a nurse. So come teach Julius Caesar every year for 30 years of your life in the Denver public schools. Those days are over. They are over. Our compensation system and the way we train people and the way we inspire people to teach needs to change to match the labor market we have today. We could not solve that problem in this bill. That problem is not going to be solved here, but we did create more flexibility when we rewrote title II, which has been essentially a slush fund of lousy professional development, and we focused our funding on opportunities for teachers to serve as mentors and academic coaches. Eagle, Durango, and Adams 12 in our State are leading the way in these innovative practices. We create support for teacher residency programs inspired by the Denver and Adams State teacher residency programs so that we are not saying we are going to have to rely on higher education programs that are not going to prepare our teachers to do the work we need them to do. Instead, we are going to train them in classes with master teachers so they can perfect the craft of teaching. They can bring their content-matter expertise, and they can learn how to teach in the place that matters, which is in school. We have resources to train great principals because there is nothing more frustrating for teachers than somebody in their building who doesn't know how to lead. We have funding to help modernize the teacher profession for preparation, recruitment and hiring, replacement and retention, compensation, and professional development. I am often asked what is the one thing that will change outcomes in our schools. What I tell people is that there is not one thing, it is everything. There is almost nothing about the incentives and disincentives in our K-12 system that are aligned to the outcomes we want for kids--almost nothing. What we say is: On all of these different dimensions, school districts, feel free to innovate and feel free to use some Federal resources on the most important thing you can do, which is making sure you have a great workforce in your building. We have funding to create differentiated compensation systems and increased school leader autonomy to support the reshaping of instructional time, planning time, and professional development. We are not going to hire teachers in Washington. We shouldn't hire teachers in Washington, but as I said earlier, we do have a vital national interest in knowing we have a pipeline of the very best people who are coming to teach our kids. I did not mean this to sound political or sound like a politician or sound a little bit like that, but, believe me, there is nobody in this room who has a job that is harder than being a teacher. There is nobody in this building who has a job that is harder than being a teacher in a high-poverty school--nobody. Nobody. That is the hardest job you can have. We train people in ways that don't prepare them for the work, we give them leadership that doesn't support them in the work they are trying to do, and we pay them a crummy wage that no one in their college class would subject themselves to. No wonder that fewer than one-third of eligible voters under the age of 30 would recommend teaching as a job to a friend. Until we change that, until we have a system that says that teaching is a great and noble profession, that it is something we can do as a way to give back to the community, a way to build the future of this country, and 70 percent of American voters are saying ``I would recommend that to a friend,'' we know we are not on the right track. This bill doesn't solve the problem, but it points the way to flexibility that I think is vitally important--flexibility around teachers and also innovation to try new things, funding for schools and districts to innovate. St. Vrain instituted a STEM academy that ought to be replicated all over. Northwest BOCES is modernizing professional development and support for rural educators. We have some very important parts of this bill related to rural schools, and Denver Public Schools has developed a unique English learners program. These are the kinds of things that can be replicated with the innovation dollars that are in this bill. Very important to me, the bill supports the replication and expansion of high-quality charter schools, which we have seen have great success in Denver. I mentioned support for rural schools and districts. We have support for rural districts that I heard from that said: Michael, it is all well and good that Denver is able to get that grant money, but we don't have a grant writer to be able to do it. This will give them assistance to be able to write those grants, and it will allow rural communities for the first time--like the community the Presiding Officer is from--to be able to come together, as they want to do, and apply jointly for funds from the Federal Government. On accountability, very importantly, we kept the requirement for annual testing in this bill. I hate testing as much as anybody else. Believe me, the Bennet girls who are students in the Denver public schools hate testing more than anybody else. But it is critically important that until we can figure out another measure, the only way we can measure growth of kids is through that annual test. I commend Chairman Alexander for keeping that option alive in his opening bill, and we kept it in the end. It still requires that we break down data so we can see how kids of color are doing compared to their peers and how low-income kids are doing compared to wealthier kids. It requires that States address the bottom 5 percent of schools and requires States to deal with the stubborn cases of high-performing schools where there are kids in subgroups--kids of color and in particular special needs kids--who aren't succeeding and aren't performing. It also relents in important respects and says that decisions about how to change schools don't belong in the Federal Government, don't belong with the Department of Education, but they belong at home. I agree with that completely. I want to close, and I say to the Presiding Officer, forgive me for asking for a few more additional moments. I want to thank all the Coloradoans who helped us write this bill. I thank the Colorado Association of School Executives, the Colorado Association of School Boards, the Colorado Department of Education, the Colorado Board of Cooperative Educational Services, the Colorado Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers in Colorado, the dozens of teachers who took time to speak with us, numerous school districts and superintendents who provided us feedback and ideas, civil rights groups across the State, including the NAACP, the Urban League, and Padres & Jovenes Unidos, the Colorado Impact Aid advocates, Colorado's Children Campaign, Colorado Succeeds, the Charter School League, Rural Schools Alliance, Colorado PTA, Clayton Early Learning, the Merage Foundation, the Colorado Education Initiative, and many more. This is a great day in the Senate. It is proof that we can overcome our differences and come together and actually solve problems. But it is only the start of what we have to do. It is the next generation of Americans that is going to have the opportunity we have. In this global economy, this shrinking economy, in some ways this savage economy, it is going to be harder and harder to get by without an education. It is going to be harder to get by with something north of a high school diploma, harder to get by with something less than a college education. It is hard to get by if you don't have access to midcareer education so you can change your profession. But we have taken a step forward in this bill. I look forward to the day when I can come to the floor based on the results that we see to demonstrate that the ZIP Code you are born into doesn't determine the education you get; when we are actually funding what we say we are funding in order to close the achievement gap; when we see that kids 0 to 5 actually have access to those 30 million words that their more affluent peers have; when we can say that every kid in America is going to a school that any Senator in this place would be proud to send their kids; when we can say to anybody in America who has worked hard through their K-12 education and been admitted to the best college they could get into that ``You can go there and not bankrupt yourself or your family.'' Then we can come to the floor and say we are not treating children like they are someone else's children; we are treating America's children like they are America's children. And I think we can get there working together. I will close by again saying thank you to my colleagues on the HELP Committee. Thank you to Senator Alexander and Senator Murray and their counterparts in the House of Representatives. Thank you for all of your good work. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 10 minutes to the 10 minutes I have been allotted.