Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I ask for its second reading and object to my own request.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I understand that H.R. 3204 has been received from the House and is at the desk.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 285, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I ask unanimous consent the committee-reported amendment be agreed to, the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to Calendar No. 233, S. 42.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to a period of morning business with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. BENNET

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, in an increasingly global economy, we must find ways to promote innovation, increase college access, and make college affordable so that our students can remain competitive. In light of today's Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing which focused on these important topics, I want to recognize Colorado's own Colorado State University-Global Campus for their impressive work in this area. This year marks CSU-Global Campus' 5-year anniversary, and I would also like to congratulate them on reaching that milestone. CSU-Global Campus, and its president, Dr. Becky Takeda-Tinker, have demonstrated a remarkable commitment to ensuring a quality education at an affordable price. As the first and only 100 percent online, fully accredited public, non-profit institution in America, students enrolling at CSU-Global today will not see any tuition increases as long as they take at least one class per year, even if tuition rates increase five years down the road. CSU-Global does this because it wants students entering today to be able to plan their education and anticipate the full cost of graduation. CSU-Global Campus has been at the forefront of new innovative approaches to learning, including offering competency-based courses. Students have access to CSU-Global's full course content online for free and can receive academic credit for passing an exam with a score of 70 percent or better. A 3-credit exam costs $250 and a 1-credit costs $150; the fee covers 2 exam attempts in 12 months. There is no additional fee for students to access the materials, faculty, and resources during their study period leading up to the exam. Many of these resources are innovations themselves and include a 24-7 online tutoring service, 24-7 tech support, and a virtual library. Its students' progress are carefully tracked electronically and student support is a priority. Students partner with faculty or receive other student support if it seems they have struggled in a certain class. Students at CSU-Global are given the flexibility needed to accommodate the many demands on their time, but are still counseled through to completion. Thirty-four percent of CSU-Global's students are first-generation college students and 23 percent are from the underserved population. Finally, at a time when our country continues to recover financially, 95 percent of CSU-Global graduates are working for pay as of February 2013. As the cost of college continues to rise, CSU-Global Campus is an innovative alternative. After repaying its $12 million start-up loan a year ahead of schedule in 2012, it now operates a sustainable model without future appropriations from the State of Colorado. Mr. President, in April 2013, CSU-Global ranked seventh in U.S. News & World Report's ranking of the Best Online Bachelor's Programs. On the occasion of its fifth anniversary, I congratulate CSU-Global on its tremendous achievements.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, most of us here in the Senate have read at least something about our Nation's founding. Although it is striking, what is almost always overlooked is the Founders' use of the language of ``the republic.'' Asked by a citizen on the street which was being created behind closed doors in Philadelphia, ``a Republic or a monarchy,'' Benjamin Franklin famously said: ``A republic, if you can keep it.'' As with most foundational decisions, the Founders made this choice deliberately. The idea of democracy frightened Hamilton, Adams, and others, because they equated it with mobs in the street. They worried that mob rule would overcome rights bestowed not by their government but by their Creator. They studied the classics and their models were the Greek and Roman republics. They set out to do something never done before, to create a republic of the scope and scale never before attempted, and one that could expand as the country grew. Today we are the world's oldest and greatest democracy. During the last century, America has expanded the constitutional rights of women and people of color well beyond landowning White men, originally privileged. In our time, we have come to understand that democracies are about the rights of citizens, but a republic, the Founders understood, is about the duties of citizens, the obligations a citizen has to a society whose constitution guarantees his or her rights. Basic duties are to pay taxes levied by a representative government, to defend our country when called upon, and to obey the law. Our Founders had something even greater in mind, qualities that would make a republic endure. Like republics from ancient Athens forward, they believed in popular sovereignty, based on citizen participation in government. They believed in the commonwealth, all those things we hold and value in common, such as our defense and our shared infrastructure, and the welfare of the next generation of Americans. They believed in putting the common interest above personal or narrow interests, a sense of the national interest. How else could committed slaveowners and abolitionists form a country and a government? They believed in resistance to corruption, those who would turn the national interest to personal gain. We were founded as a republic and we have become more democratic across time. We are democratic and republican. Interestingly enough, what came to be the semblance of the first political party in America called itself the Democratic Republicans. It was founded in 1791. Sounds pretty weird today, I know, but it simply meant those who believed in democratic equality and freedom, working to uphold the ideals of the Republic. One of our bedrock American principles is that we must protect our rights through performance of our duties. That is not some abstract political theory. This is a definition of who we are and how we must govern ourselves. We have rights and responsibilities as citizens and as Senators. We have the right to free speech but the responsibility not to shout ``fire'' in a crowded theater. We have the right to assemble but the responsibility to do so peacefully. In this body we have the right to filibuster but the responsibility to govern on behalf of the American people. But the fewer the Americans who exercise the most fundamental right, I would say duty, of voting, the more political influence extreme groups in our society have. This is where we find ourselves at the dawn of the 21st century, with a Senate that at times is dominated by a small faction that does not represent the mainstream of American political thought, and a House that is gerrymandered into dysfunction. This institutional paralysis has created a vacuum into which a million special interests happily roam. Actually, I should call them narrow, not special, interests. From ancient Athens onward, narrow interests have been the enemy of every republic. That has never been truer than it is today. Keeping the Republic created by our Founders should concern every generation of Americans, including our own. The sovereign power belongs to all the people, not just a vocal few. It is our responsibility, it is our duty, as elected officials when that ideal is tested, to work together to restore a sense of the commonwealth and the common good that enabled us to prevail in world wars and to overcome depressions. This is our cause, but we are stuck. We are stuck because we are fighting over yesterday's battles instead of seeking to anticipate, as our Founders did, how we will manage change. To one degree or another, all Senators and possibly all Americans are conservative. If conservative means to protect our Nation's principles and ideals, I am a conservative. If conservative means to preserve a culture of tolerance, justice, and equality, I am a conservative. If conservative means to respect the unique cultural heritage of America, I am a conservative. If conservative means to protect our natural heritage, I am very much a conservative. But while we protect and preserve the best of what makes us who we are, we must adapt to change. Scarcely one of us in the Senate has ever sought office without advocating some kind of change: change of officeholder, change of party, change of policy. That is good, because the future is arriving faster and faster and we have gotten no better at anticipating it. Even with the seemingly endless crawls of the words ``breaking news'' at the bottom of our screens, no one predicted the Arab spring before it sprung. That is the most closely watched region in the world. There are great historic tides that demand that we change and adapt to them in order to preserve and protect and conserve our central values. We do not live in a stagnant world. Indeed, we are living in the midst of great revolution that makes the 21st century as different from the 20th as the 18th century was from the 17th. We are living through what may be the peak years of change on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. But even though we may come here oriented to change, the institutions of government, Congress included, are oriented to the past. Our committee structure and our regulatory agencies imagine an economy that existed deep in the last century. We are designed to support incumbent interests, not the innovators that will drive job growth and wage growth in the 21st century. This is a fatal flaw, if we are ever going to tackle the growing income inequality that our Nation faces, an inequality that has been unmatched since 1928. We are regulating the telegraph when the world is wireless. Just one example: Almost a year ago I visited Apple out in Silicon Valley to learn something about their work in education. A little over 4 years ago, when I was superintendent of Denver Public Schools, I did not spend one second thinking about how to apply a tablet to the education of our kids, because there was no such thing as a tablet--a little over 4 years ago. Today the tablet, combined with platforms such as the iTunes platform, presents an unbelievable opportunity for our children and children all over the world to learn and to teach each other. It was amazing to see. In any case, Apple presented a slide showing that 75 percent of their last 12 months of revenue was derived from products they did not sell 5 years before--75 percent of their revenue came from things they did not sell 5 years before. We have not updated our Tax Code since 1986. I was in college in 1986. What are the chances that our Tax Code is helping drive job and wage growth in 2013, 27 years later, more than a quarter of a century later? In this Congress and in this government, we are desperately out of sync with the world as it is. It is, in fact, an irony that we must change and adapt to preserve the principles that we treasure. But we must. Today, many flying the tea party banner resist all change. Indeed, they want to go back, often to a past that never existed, or to a time that has no relation to our time. Too often, their politics embrace old interests that will not drive us forward to an economy that is creating jobs and raising wages. Our founding principles should not change. I agree with that. But our practices and methods must change to become relevant. These two parties, or three with the tea party, have to escape their orthodoxies for this to be possible. Efforts to maintain the status quo or to return to some mythical past are doomed to fail. That is simply because time and the tides of human affairs will not stand still. We do not control history and cannot dictate to it. Change is the one constant. How we attempt to shape it to our purposes, by creative, imaginative public policies will determine whether we can preserve the best of our past, our principles, our heritage, and our values. Those who seek to protect our Nation against change by sitting on the beach before a massive incoming tide with shovel in hand will be swept away as surely as King Canute. As I mentioned earlier, anyone who believes their orthodoxy or their ideological orientation prepared them for the Arab spring or made us safer is deluded. Our job must be to create a shared understanding of the facts when we work in a town that is arranged to obscure them. Despite the desires of nostalgia, we are not going back to the laissez faire world of Herbert Hoover. Social safety nets are here to stay to protect children, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, and to protect our ability to call ourselves a civilized nation. But even they will have to be changed if they are going to survive for the next generation of Americans. The revolution of globalization and information has transformed the world's economy and cultures and societies all across the globe, including here in the United States. These revolutions, like the Industrial Revolution before them, cannot be stopped. It is up to us to decide whether we can accept this new reality and position our country to lead, as it has since our founding, or whether we shrink into an imaginary conception of what the world once was and what the United States once was. With all of this change and pace of globalization comes fear of the future and a sense of loss of what once was. That is human nature. I do not exempt myself from that. At a time of uncertainty, it has become fashionable in some political circles to capitalize on it politically. This kind of demagoguery is not unknown in American history. Anytime Americans become fearful or worried, there have always been those who saw personal advantage in fanning those flames. But they do not join an honor roll of history, an assembly of our greatest leaders. Media attention, which is easy and cheap, is not a measure of leadership. Division does not require moral authority. If we are at another of history's turning points, as many believe, as I believe, one road leads to the worst of our past. The other leads to a new definition of our freedoms. We treasure the freedoms incorporated in the First Amendment to our Constitution. We remember at the height of the Great Depression that Franklin Roosevelt declared four new freedoms: Freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want and fear. Today, in the middle of what one might characterize as a political depression, let's consider some new freedoms for the 21st century: Freedom from foreign oil; freedom from false patriotism; freedom from the politics of division; freedom to create a constructive future; and, yes, freedom from unconstitutional government surveillance. We have duties to perform far greater than merely funding the government. Just ask any poor child or her teacher in a typical American school. The good news is that fear has never and will not now dictate the fate of our Republic. History's dustbin is filled with failed demagogues. And we are not going back. But we need to hurry. The world is not waiting for us. Americans want us to move forward into the 21st century with the imagination, creativity, adaptability, and values that have made this country so great from its founding. The stakes are simply too high in our time to allow our institutions to be crippled by politicians who color far outside the lines of conventional American political thought and who react with angry and mock surprise when their policy objectives are not achieved. It is time to close this sorry chapter in the history of the Congress, reopen our government, preserve the full faith and credit of the United States, and work together as Senators from the various States on the people's business. I suspect that is why most of us wanted to serve to begin with. Madam President, I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, before he leaves the floor, I want to thank the Senator from Oklahoma for his commitment to this issue, for his candor. We do not necessarily agree on every single thing, but I do know he is a man of great conviction and we are lucky to have him in the Senate. It is my hope we can get to a place where we actually are together addressing these budget issues in a way that is not management by crisis or one across-the-board cut after another but actually is a thoughtful plan to relieve our children and our grandchildren of this burden we are threatening them with. So, through the Chair, I thank my colleague. Madam President, I come to the floor today, after the Senator from Oklahoma described today as a day of petty kindergarten political games, to talk about a place where they are not playing any of those right now, and that is a town in Colorado that I represent called Estes Park, which has been a beacon of resilience. It is in the mountains just northwest of Boulder. It is the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. I can see from the Presiding Officer's reaction that she may have been there. The town has several thousand residents and hosts close to 3 million visitors a year, including an average of over half a million visitors in the month of September. This time of year is peak tourist season. The weather is beautiful. The aspens' leaves are even more beautiful than the weather, and the elk famously wander through the park and through the town. Whether you are coming to rest or recreate, Estes Park welcomes you, and it always has. In 2011 visitors generated $196 million in tourism spending and supported more than 2,700 jobs. By some estimates tourism accounts for 43 percent of local employment. But when the floods hit in Colorado, Estes Park was almost entirely cut off from the outside world. As shown in this picture, here is Route 34 going to Estes Park. Two of the major roads into town were wiped out for miles at a stretch, leaving only one road into town. Many homes and businesses were destroyed. But the residents of Estes Park picked themselves up and began the recovery process. Limited access to the town has been restored. Folks had just started opening their businesses again. Visitors had just started to return to Rocky Mountain National Park. And then Congress stepped in and dealt an unbelievably cruel blow by shutting down this government. Let me quote what Estes Park resident Tom Johnson said on the Tuesday of the shutdown: I think politicians are playing around, like they do, and it's the people who wind up-- ``And it's the people who wind up''-- with all the problems for it. Man, they did it to Estes Park, when they shut down that park. Rocky Mountain National Park closed with the shutdown. Hundreds of campers have had to cancel their reservations, and likely thousands more canceled their plans to visit. The Denver Post reported that if visitors to Estes Park decline by 70 percent, it could mean the loss of 1,100 jobs, $90 million in spending, $5.8 million in State sales tax revenue, and $4.4 million in local taxes. This is one community in Colorado, one community in the United States of America tonight, as we horse around here in the Congress. The shutdown is a kick in the teeth to our local governments and small businesses in their efforts to recover from these floods. One of the area's more famous businesses is the Stanley Hotel. John Cullen, the hotel's owner, told us that while it is booking visitors for long weekend trips, it has been slow to bring in the usual number of guests during the week. He says it is because locals cannot come to Rocky Mountain National Park for the fall foliage. He tells us they have done everything they can to keep the hotel open because it is a major employer in Estes Park, but he is losing money on a daily basis. Diane Muno is a local business owner in Estes Park, with four retail shops. The Spruce House and the Christmas Shop are two local Christmas and holiday stores; the White Orchid and the White Orchid Bridal Shop sell clothing and other apparel. Some of these businesses have been serving customers in Estes Park since 1969. They are institutions in this Colorado community. The flooding damaged three of four of her businesses. One was seriously damaged and has not yet reopened. The other two rushed to reopen to recover, and they would have been fine except we closed Rocky Mountain National Park, and that has slowed foot traffic in a significant way. Diane's October revenue for these four stores is down 67 percent--two-thirds down--from this point in October last year. She typically has 12 to 15 employees, but she is working a skeleton crew of 6. Another business damaged by the floods was Kind Coffee. Its owner, Amy Hamrick, has been relying on Internet sales while she is working to reopen the store. The community has rallied around the store, as our communities that have been struck by the floods have done. It bought coffee beans and mugs and T-shirts online and helped clean up floodwaters. But the same story holds: She took a huge hit when the government shut down. Making horrible things worse, Amy's husband David Hamrick, a firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, has been furloughed. This is what this inability of Washington's politicians to get done the most basic function we have--to keep the government running--has wrought in this one Colorado community. Amy told National Public Radio: We carry on through the middle of October with tourism dollars and locals coming to see the elk rut and to go into the park and see the color. . . . And the national park is also our largest employer in town. So our community now has lost a lot of jobs in the interim. This is exactly why it is the wrong moment for Colorado, for Estes Park, to have Washington's dysfunction come crashing down. They do not deserve it. They do not deserve it. But, as they are now saying in Estes Park, they are mountain strong and they will get through it. And I know they will. Amy Hamrick took the time to remind us that 90 percent of the town is open, dry, and ready for customers. She said: The town . . . is beautiful and the golf courses have elk on them 24 hours a day. Estes Park, like much of Colorado, has taken a hit, but it will not stay down. The community continues to pull together and recover. As expected, its neighbors are going the extra mile to help everybody out. This quote from Jeannie Bier captures the spirit of Colorado. She said: We live down in Loveland and it is difficult for the people down there right now-- I know it is difficult down there because I was there last week with the mayor and county commissioners and others looking at devastation in Loveland-- but we also knew it is just as difficult up here in Estes and they are our neighbors, so we took the roundabout way to get up here to support Estes as well. The floods will not deter them, and neither will the outrageous stupidity of this shutdown. Rocky Mountain National Park is closed, but there are still plenty of other reasons to come and enjoy Estes Park. Earlier today somebody who works with me named James Thompson spoke with the town's mayor Bill Pinkham and asked him what is the one thing he would want me to say on this floor. The message was plain and simple. He said: Michael, tell them it's spectacularly beautiful up here. It's still a great experience. We're open for business! This town has been through a lot and has risen to its challenges. So I say to everybody, come to Estes Park. Enjoy the beauty. Shop at our businesses. Dine at our restaurants. And meet the folks who would not let a natural disaster or a manmade disaster stop them from succeeding. You can learn more about a trip to Estes Park at visitestespark.com. To my colleagues, I urge you to come to Colorado for a different reason. Maybe we could all learn something from these incredible people about what it means to pull together in the face of a crisis. For those of us playing politics with this shutdown and playing politics with this fiscal cliff, I would really encourage you to spend a single moment in one of our flood-ravaged towns. That might bring some welcome clarity to the debate. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I would like to first say how much I appreciate the words of the Senator from Virginia and the words of the Senator from Montana. They are known to be commonsense people, to work in a bipartisan way day after day in this Congress, against all odds, to actually try to make something work around this place. So I thank them for their leadership and their comments this morning. For 4 years I have come to this floor at about this time of the year and talked about how Washington has become the land of flickering lights where the standard of success is not how we are imagining the future and what we are doing for the next generation of Americans but that we are managing, after a little bit of aggravation and hostility, to keep the lights on for 1 more month or for 6 more months. Well, this time we are not the land of flickering lights. The lights are out in Washington. They have managed to shut down the government. No mayor, no school superintendent, no city council in Colorado would threaten the shutdown of their government over politics. Whether they are a Democratic mayor or a Republican mayor or a tea party mayor, we wouldn't stand for it in Colorado. They certainly would never threaten the credit rating of their community over politics. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. We just had these terrible floods in our State, and people are struggling to do everything they can to keep their governments open to provide people who have been displaced by the flood, who have lost everything they own, the services they need. This shutdown is already hurting the U.S. economy and Colorado's economy, and it is not surprising why. There is a lot of rhetoric around this place about uncertainty and the damage it does to our economy. Nothing could create more uncertainty than shutting this government down and threatening the credit rating of the United States by saying: We are not going to pay our bills. We have an ideology that is so far outside the mainstream of American political thought that we can't find a way to actually win elections that align with our ideology, so we are going to use these kinds of tactics to bring this government to its knees. The AP reported that the U.S. and European stock markets fell yesterday as investors and world leaders worried about the threat to the global economy. According to the Denver Post, the shutdown may cost the United States at least $300 million a day in lost output during a 1-week shutdown. What good is that doing anybody? How is that helping any American? Economists have estimated that a 3-week closing would cut economic production by 1 percent. It would cut our GDP by 1 percent. How does this self-inflicted wound help anybody? In Colorado, to be clear, just as in the other States we have heard about today, it is not just the families who rely on Federal programs or Federal workers who are suffering because of this shutdown. The Denver Post reported that in a neighborhood near the Denver Federal Center, Rick Koerner, who owns Stack Subs sandwich shop in Lakewood, estimates he has lost about 5 percent of his normal business since the shutdown began on Thursday. He says he can't afford to lose any customers because, in his words, ``it's a thin-margin business to begin with.'' How are we helping him? In the same story, Deborah Giovingo, who owns a restaurant called Paradise Cove on West Alameda Avenue, just east of the Federal Center, said she is also witnessing a loss. ``We're not getting our regular lunchers. I think they're really trying to conserve their money.'' Right now, how are we helping these people? One city perhaps hardest hit in our State is Colorado Springs in El Paso County. According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, the furloughs at our military bases include more than 1,000 workers at the Air Force Academy, 400 workers at Schriever Air Force Base, 2,200 at Peterson Air Force Base, and 700 at U.S. Northern Command. At Fort Carson another 1,000 workers are off the job. Is our job more important than their job? Is the job they do to protect this country, to defend this country, less important than the job of these elected representatives in Washington who are still taking a salary? I don't think so. Are these jobs less important than the people who are actually in theater right now in Afghanistan? I don't think so. After 1 week of shutdown, the WIC Program--the Women, Infants, and Children Program--will have no funds for clinical services, food benefits, and administrative costs. Roughly 100,000 women and children in Colorado participated in the WIC Program last year and will lose their benefits. The shutdown will delay SBA loans for Colorado's small businesses. Last year SBA processed 1,300 applications, for a total of $559 million in loans, and they are on the ground right now, thank goodness, working with people who have suffered through these floods. Our national parks, wildlife refuges, and recreational lands--major drivers of Colorado's economy--are closed. They are shut down. Approximately 13,000 people visiting national parks in Colorado will be turned away each day this government is closed. It will result in nearly $800,000 of revenue a day for our local communities, which are already suffering because of the floods. Estes Park is one of the towns that have been terribly affected, and this is one of their peak times of the year for tourism because of the changing leaves. They are losing that opportunity, and we are making it worse because the government is shut down. Thousands of Federal employees are out of work during this economic recovery. There is a delay in Social Security services. There will be a delay in veterans' benefits by the end of October. Colorado is home to almost 400,000 veterans. That is almost 10 percent of our State's population. At risk is the funding for Head Start agencies and the Export-Import Bank's support for small companies. But what is just so insulting at this moment is that we are trying to recover from this flood. The recent flooding damaged at least 17,000 homes and other structures, several thousand of which were outright destroyed. Millions of dollars' worth of public infrastructure has literally been swept away. More than 200 miles of Colorado roads and at least 50 bridges have been damaged or destroyed. Nine Coloradans lost their lives in the floods. The floods consumed an area of Colorado that is twice the size of Rhode Island. The devastation defies belief. Houses have been leveled and reduced to piles of debris, and some of these communities lie in ruins. FEMA has pledged to go to great lengths, and they are working very hard to ensure that crucial disaster response and recovery services are not interrupted. To be clear, so far, emergency funds are still flowing and emergency workers are still in place. They are doing a phenomenal job, and I want to say on this floor, on behalf of everybody in Colorado, how grateful we are for their work. FEMA is going to make sure this work gets done, but nevertheless a number of FEMA employees-- both based in Washington and at the FEMA Region VIII office headquartered in Denver--are vulnerable to furloughs if this shutdown continues. Our economy is recovering in Colorado, and we are being led by innovative businesses that have been growing jobs despite the dysfunction in Washington. This year I visited many of them--companies that, in the depths of the worst recession since the Great Depression, were actually creating jobs by inventing our future. That is what innovators do, and that is what Coloradans do. We are letting them down profoundly here by failing to exercise our most basic responsibilities as legislators, as people who receive a salary from the taxpayer. They do not send us here to shut it down, they send us here to improve it. They send us here to come to agreement and to compromise and to imagine a better future for our children and for our grandchildren. That is what we are here to do. Instead, a very radical faction in the House and some of their colleagues here in the Senate have shut this government down in support of an ideology that, as I mentioned earlier, is far outside the mainstream of American political thought. They are entitled to their opinion. Everybody is entitled to their opinion. But they are not entitled to shut the government down if they don't get what they want, and that is where we find ourselves. It has been a privilege for me to work in this place, and the moments I have enjoyed the most have been the ones where we have worked in a bipartisan way, with colleagues on the other side, to dramatically improve the way the Food and Drug Administration works so that new drugs could be approved more quickly and so that the 600 bioscience firms in Colorado that came to me and said they could no longer raise venture capital because it was all going to Europe and Asia because of uncertainty with the FDA and to please help them fix that--with Republican colleagues, we were able to get that done. In working the immigration bill we passed, with the Gang of 8--four Democrats and four Republicans--we solved each other's political problems to bring a product to the floor that actually could pass with nearly 70 votes--a supermajority of the Senate--and we still need to pass that bill in the House. That bill, in stark contrast to the government shutdown we are going through right now, actually will drive GDP growth. The Congressional Budget Office tells us that immigration bill adds 3 points of GDP growth in the first 10 years and 5 points in the second 10 years. By the way, at a moment when these people are saying they are shutting the government down, mostly because of the health care bill but also because of their concern about a growing government and widening deficits, the immigration bill reduces the deficit by $900 billion over a 20-year period. That is real money even in Washington, DC. They could be passing that bill over there. Instead, the government is shut down, and it has been a catastrophic failure of leadership that has brought us to this place. I have absolutely no doubt, from all the press reports I have read and what I hear from my Republican colleagues in the Senate, my friends in the Senate who are Republicans, that if Speaker Boehner put on the floor of the House the Senate version of the so-called continuing resolution, it would pass with a broad majority of Democrats and Republicans, and the American people would cheer because that is what they want. They want us working together. And the standard of success needs to be something greater than that we kept the lights on, which in this instance we haven't. We haven't even done that. What is the signal we are trying to send to this complicated world in which we live by shutting this government down? Why is it that people here get away with things that no local elected official would ever get away with? So we have to continue to fight to get this government open. We are going to have another fight to make sure that, for the first time in the United States, we don't fail to pay our bills and blow up the full faith and credit of the United States--which is one of our most important assets, right up there with the rule of law, right up there with our capitalist economy. From our founding, the full faith and credit of the United States has been a bulwark for us. But once we get past that, what we need to fight for is the next generation of Americans. That is why we have been sent here. Whether we are Democrats or Republicans, that is why we are here. And they are waiting to see whether we are willing to be the first generation of American leadership to provide less opportunity--not more--to the people that are coming after us. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I will be brief because I think Senator Udall has covered it very well. But I also want to rise today on this floor to thank all 100 of our colleges who were necessary for getting this done and for getting it passed. We have to move it along to the President's desk. There are a lot of times when people at home wonder whether anybody in this place is listening to them and whether we are doing something other than playing politics with each other. This is a clear case where people here have listened to the people in Colorado, who have generously from time to time helped people in other States that were confronting disasters. Now it is our turn to ask for help, and that help has been granted. I wish to thank Senator Udall for his leadership in particular, but also all the Members in the Senate who made this possible. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all quorum calls during the period of morning business be charged equally to both sides.

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I wish to first say thanks to the great Senator from California at this time for her words. We need to pull together for other places, Sandy and other things. Now it is time for the country to embrace Colorado, as my senior Senator so eloquently said. I know he may have to leave the floor, but I wish to say how much I have appreciated his leadership in all of this. It has made a huge difference. The work that is really being done is the work on the ground, as Senator Udall was saying. That is the most important work--the first responders, neighbors helping neighbors. But it also has been a time when our political leadership has come together in a way at least for once not to get in the way and actually try to support the people who are just trying to serve their friends and neighbors. I wish to say thank you to Senator Udall, my senior Senator and my friend, for his leadership. As he mentioned, our State is a long way from recovering from the floods that have inflicted so much damage over this month. The damage has been historic. Based on the latest estimates, over 16,000 homes have been seriously damaged. Thousands have been destroyed. The floodwaters consumed more than 2,000 square miles across Colorado's Front Range--an area about twice the size of Rhode Island. To give some sense of scale, it would be as if Rhode Island were completely underwater twice or, as Senator Mark Udall said, as if it covered a State the size of Connecticut. The floods have tragically killed at least nine Coloradans. We hope that number won't go up, but we don't know if it will. Over the weekend I went to Jamestown, which is a small community about 14 miles northwest of Boulder, CO. Tara Schoedinger, the mayor of the town, showed me around. The damage to this one town was simply unbelievable. It was as if a bomb had gone off in the middle of this community. The flooding destroyed over a fifth of Jamestown's homes, half of its roads, both of its bridges, a central fire hall, and much more. The storm killed Joe Howlett, age 72, a beloved pillar of the Jamestown community. The mayor's house is right next to Joe's house. The mayor's house is fine. Joe Howlett's house was destroyed by a mudslide that came down from the very top of the hillside, the very top of the mountain behind his house, killing somebody who had been the glue of that community. I have a couple of photos from the visit that I wish to share to give a sense of scale of this damage. This used to be Main Street in Jamestown. We can see it passing between these two utility poles on either side of what is now a raging river. Main Street is gone. It is not the asphalt that is gone; the whole street, the roadbed is gone. All that remains is a torrential river that ran in a completely different place than it does today. This photo shows the end of Main Street in Jamestown. My deputy chief of staff took that picture. This is what Main Street used to look like. This is what Main Street in Jamestown, CO, looks like as we stand on the floor of the Senate today. I will say, as the senior Senator is still here, it was amazing, the resilience of the people of this community, the sense of humor people had, and the sense of community they had. There were probably 30 people or so left out of a town of 300. They had come back to see their belongings and to secure what was left of their homes. What they were talking about was how they were going to rebuild this community together. There were tears from time to time, as you naturally would expect there to be, but what really came through, as it always does at the back end of these disasters, was the human spirit we see in each one of our States. We are particularly proud of the Coloradans who are struggling together to get through this incredibly difficult time. In my mind, these are the most heartbreaking pictures, people who have dedicated their lives to being able to secure homes for their families. They, by the way, had no expectation there and in other parts of the State that they would ever be affected by a flood and see everything lost. One woman came up to me while I was there and said, ``this was our house.'' It was in reasonably decent shape compared to some of the others I had seen. She also had a rental property down the road in which she had invested her life savings. She had no flood insurance. She said: I just don't know how we are not going to go broke as a result of this piece of bad luck. I also saw in Evans, CO--a rural community near Greeley in the northeastern part of the State--two trailer parks that had been entirely destroyed by floodwaters from 1 mile or 1\1/4\ miles away. In the middle of these trailer parks, there was a cement pipe that was about this tall sitting underneath a carport. The thing must have weighed tons. It was a huge culvert pipe that had come from 1\1/2\ miles away through these raging waters to position itself in this trailer park. The people who live there work in agriculture in our State, clean hotels in our community, and work in our oilfields in northeastern Colorado. When I went to the trailer park, the people were assessing the damage. They have lost everything. Because they couldn't qualify for financing for those trailer homes, they bought them with cash. One person there said: Senator, it is awfully lucky this happened during the day and not at night because our kids were at school during the day. If they had been there at night, we don't know how many of them would have been killed by these floodwaters. In addition to the human dimension of all of this, which is the most important dimension, the flooding also inflicted enormously costly damage to Colorado's infrastructure. Over 200 miles of roads in Colorado have been affected by this flooding. The mountainous terrain in the State is going to make repair work exponentially more expensive and exponentially more difficult. I salute our Governor and everybody who is working to make sure that at least temporary roads are built to these communities in the next 90 days, which would otherwise be completely cut off. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from the Colorado Department of Transportation that estimates the total damage just to Colorado's federally maintained roads and highways. These are not our State and local roads; federally maintained roads and highways will exceed $400 million.

Mr. BENNET. Senator Udall and I have a simple bill that would raise the $100 million cap for Colorado for emergency funding for our highways, matching what Congress has done, as Senator Udall has said, many times previously--in fact, as far as I know, every time an issue like this has arisen. We have already talked to the Congressional Budget Office about this. They have looked at the bill. They have told us that it will not cost the Federal Government one dime because the money is already there. It has already been appropriated. It just needs to be used for the purpose Congress laid out--to help States with major disasters that inflicted cost damage on that State's highway system. Colorado needs this Congress to act, and act now, to get this done so that Colorado can access the highway aid we will clearly need to recover in the coming months. This $100 million cap on emergency funding from the Federal Highway Administration, as I mentioned earlier, has been lifted many times before. It has been done routinely and swiftly by this Congress following other major disasters when it was obvious--as it is in our case--that federally maintained highway costs would exceed $100 million. We lifted it for the Sandy States, as I have pointed out, earlier this year when we passed the Sandy supplemental on January 29, 2013. We lifted it on November 18 for Hurricane Irene and the Missouri River basin flooding. We lifted it on September 30, 2008, for Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. We lifted it on May 25, 2007, for storms in the State of California. We lifted it on December 20, 2005, for Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. All told, Congress has waived this $100 million cap 14 times in the past 25 years. It is routine, and it is normal when there is a major disaster that causes major highway damage in excess of $100 million. Senator Udall and I have been working with our colleagues in the Senate. Nearly all of them have indicated a readiness to work with us to pass this bill. I am very grateful for that. I also wish to thank my colleagues for working with us to get this done quickly for Colorado in recognition of how badly we need this cap lifted and this Federal funding made available. I urge my colleagues to pull together to work with us to quickly clear this bill in the coming days so we can get Coloradans the help they need. If you will indulge me a few more minutes--and if the Senator from California would as well--I wish to take a quick moment to tell you why this is so important. A picture tells a thousand words--especially when I am the one who is speaking. I want to show the damage to Colorado highways as a result of this historic flooding. This photograph was taken during a helicopter tour by Vice President Biden, Governor Hickenlooper, and FEMA officials of flood damage in Greeley, CO, earlier this week. We can see that a huge portion of the road has washed away and water has breached a dam. I would like to say that FEMA has been doing a tremendous job with our local and State officials. This is a section of Highway 72 that collapsed and washed away after a flash flood tore through Coal Creek near Golden, CO, which is outside of Denver--maybe in Golden they would say Denver is outside of Golden. This is what the road looks like there. A bridge on the south side of Lyons is gone. Huge portions have broken off. This is a photo of the bridge that is missing. Here is another shot of large portions of U.S. 34 washed away. This is a very clear example of the way these mountain roads work. In this case, when the prospectors first came to Colorado, what they would do is pan for gold in the bottom of the rivers, near the plains. They would see whether there was gold leaf there. That would lead them to walk up these valleys--very steep valleys--to see where the gold was coming from. They founded towns in these places. That is the way the river came, then the road followed the river, and that allowed them to get to their town. You can see in this case this road has been completely washed out by the river. This is just another instance of mountain roads where we can see the dropoff below is what used to be road but no longer is. Here is a roadway that, when this photo was taken, is completely submerged and with extensive damage. And then this, what used to be a ribbon of pavement, is now in fragments in the remaining water. In times of disaster in this country, we have stood together time and time again. Working on behalf of the people of Colorado, along with Senator Udall, that is what we are asking for again. We have pulled together with all of our colleagues and we are going to need all of you to pull together with us. The Founding Fathers had a lot of work to do and they are often quoted around this place, but they were engaged in founding a country, not dismantling one. This is a reminder of why this vision was so important and why people, frankly, are counting on us to carry this on for this generation of Americans and for the generations that will follow us. With that, I thank the Chair for his indulgence, and I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Earlier this year Congress passed funding for Federal Highway Administration emergency relief. States such as Colorado that have been hit with significant natural disasters are eligible for funding. Our State will be in desperate need of these funds, as New Jersey and New York were in desperate need. The scale of the damage far exceeds what our States and local governments can cover. As my senior Senator said, there is a catch. There is a cap of $100 million per incident, per State, on this Federal highway assistance. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from Gov. Hickenlooper urging Congress to raise the current cap on emergency funding and explaining why this is something Colorado desperately needs to have done. State of Colorado, Office of the Governor, Denver, CO, September 23, 2013. Hon. John Boehner, Speaker, House of Representatives, Washington, DC. Hon. Nancy Pelosi, House of Representatives, Washington, DC. Hon. Harry Reid, Majority Leader, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC. Hon. Mitch McConnell, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC. Dear Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Reid, Minority Leader Pelosi, and Minority Leader McConnell: As you may know, this month massive rains and heavy flooding left over a dozen Colorado counties in devastation. With the rains, highways, bridges, and culverts were washed away. As a result, even now many communities still are cut off and isolated from the rest of the state. Colorado is in dire need of help. Communities across Colorado's Front Range and Eastern Plains are starting to deal with aftermath of the flooding and destruction. The affected counties include Boulder, Adams, Larimer, Weld, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Clear Creek, Denver, El Paso, Fremont, Jefferson, Logan, Morgan, Pueblo, and Washington--an area so expansive, that it surpasses that of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Rhode Island combined. Early analyses show that the flooding was so severe that it may not occur again for 500 to 1,000 years. Thousands of Colorado families are without homes, potable water, or power. Before the state can fully restore essential services to impacted towns and cities, and allow residents to permanently return home, we must repair our devastated highway system. Early estimates are that at least 50 bridges will need significant repair--30 of which must be fully replaced. Approximately 200 highway lane miles must be reconstructed. Temporary crossing structures are needed in the interim. And, today, numerous state highways and local roads remain closed, cutting off primary, and in some cases the only, access to Colorado cities and towns. Assessing the damage to Colorado's highway system is underway. But early assessments are that the damage will be several hundred million dollars. Under the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013, Public Law 113-2, the U.S. Federal Highways Administration (FHWA) Emergency Relief Program (ERP), received over $2.02 billion to help states rebuild and repair damages to their highways and bridges. In this bill, states impacted by Hurricane Sandy could receive up to $500 million per disaster in ERP funds; however, all remaining states--including Colorado--were capped at $100 million per disaster. Given the widespread devastation to our state highway system, we are respectfully asking that Congress raise this $100 million cap for Colorado as well. As the Colorado congressional delegation stated in a letter to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, there are precedents for waiving or raising this cap. For example, the $100 million was waived in response to damage caused by Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, and Hurricane Irene and the Missouri River basin flooding. Recently, the cap was raised to $500 million for those states devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Based on Colorado's anticipated highway needs and the precedents mentioned above, we ask that you raise this cap for Colorado. Time and again, Congress has answered the call to help communities during times of disaster and loss. The September 2013 floods may prove to be the worst natural disaster in the history of our state, and is likely the worst we shall ever see in our lifetimes. Before we rebuild our homes and businesses, we must rebuild our roads to reopen our communities. On behalf of all Coloradans, please raise this cap to $500 million, so that we may begin this process. Sincerely, John Hickenlooper, Governor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. That is my point. I think we are dealing with something that is so far outside of the mainstream of what political actors, at least in my State who are elected who are Republicans or Democrats, would support. I think it is important for us to call attention to that because that is what we are dealing with. I see the Senator from Minnesota is here, so my last observation. If one of us represented a State government that opened and closed its doors or threatened to open and close its doors every single year, I can assure you that businesses would look to do business in some other State, not in the State in which we work. That is what we are doing to the United States of America right now. We have so much going for us. The innovators are out in the economy innovating. Natural gas is cheaper than it has ever been. We could build this economy if only a few actors in Washington would get out of the way. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I will be brief. I want to thank the Senator from Louisiana while she is here, not just for her words and for reminding us this isn't about who can scream the loudest on cable television, it is about the work that actually needs to get done in the Senate on behalf of the American people, but I also want to thank her for all the work she has done over the years with FEMA. It has made a big difference in my State already. They are working well with our local and State officials. We have a long way to go, and the last thing we need to worry about is whether the government is going to shut down. Fortunately, because of the work the Senator and others did around here, the emergency part of this is going to continue to carry through, even if there is a shutdown. But there is a lot of uncertainty that is related to that. So while Senator Landrieu was here, I wanted to thank her for that. I am sorry the Senator from Delaware has left the floor for a moment, because he has been holding it down and I wanted to ask him a question about his previous work. He was a county executive in Delaware before he was here. I was a superintendent of schools. I worked for the mayor. Senator Klobuchar, who is here from Minnesota, was a district attorney. I think every one of us is completely perplexed by the hostage taking that is going on around this place. I ask the Senator from Delaware, he was the county executive of a county in Delaware?

Mr. BENNET. I say through the Chair, does the Senator think that any county executive or mayor or local official in the Senator's State wouldn't be run out of town if they threatened the credit rating of their community for politics?

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I would like to thank my colleague Mark Udall for summarizing so well what we are facing out in Colorado. I thought I would share a few of my thoughts too. As Senator Udall said, our State is in the midst of unprecedented flooding that has wiped out entire communities in over a dozen counties across Colorado. Last week rain began to fall across our State, across the Colorado Front Range, and it didn't let up. A lot of reports have termed this historic, but to get your head around the scale and scope of the damage it is important to express what that means in hard numbers. In the course of 1 week, 21 inches of rain fell in parts of Boulder, including over 9 inches on September 12 alone. The previous alltime high for a single day in Boulder was 4.8 inches in 1919, and they have kept records since 1893. The average annual precipitation in Denver is 14.9 inches--for an entire year. On September 12, 11.5 inches poured down in Aurora. Just to give a sense of the order of magnitude, that is almost as much rain as it typically gets in 1 year--in 1 day. It was the same story all across the Colorado Front Range. The result was flooding, destruction, and tragedy on an unprecedented and unmanageable scale. Based on the latest estimates, over 17,000 homes were seriously damaged, over 1,500 homes were completely destroyed, and over 2,300 agricultural properties were flooded. In just Larimer County alone, they estimate that 200 businesses were destroyed and 500 more were damaged. At least 30 highway bridges were destroyed, and at least 20 more were seriously damaged. Hundreds of miles--hundreds of miles--of major roads have been washed away, as Senator Udall said. The floodwaters consumed more than 2,000 square miles across 15 counties along the Front Range--an area about twice the size of Rhode Island. Because the rain is just finally letting up and emergency officials are only beginning to measure the magnitude of this rain, these numbers could easily go up, and they could go up a lot. As recently as yesterday morning, 4 days after the flooding reached a crisis, over 1,000 Coloradans are still stranded and awaiting evacuation, with hundreds still not accounted for. Tens of thousands were forced to evacuate, and many had to abandon their homes within minutes, grabbing whatever they could carry and wading through rising waters to seek shelter and safety. Most tragic of all, eight Coloradans are either confirmed or presumed dead as a result of this storm. Those are just some of the numbers and a taste of the pain this disaster has brought to cities and counties across our State. As Senator Udall mentioned, over the weekend I joined him and Governor Hickenlooper and others on a helicopter tour of the damage, and from the air the scope and scale of the destruction boggles the mind. Here is some of what we saw. These photos were taken from the Denver Post and other media. Here is an image showing dozens of vehicles flooded in Greeley, CO. Here is a home and a car stranded after a flash flood destroyed a bridge near Golden. Dozens of other bridges also collapsed. This is a picture of the Big Thompson River washing out the Loveland Water Storage Reservoir. In this picture, young Casey Roy, 9 years old, is looking through a window into her family's basement under 3 feet of water. And there are thousands of families in Colorado just like Casey's. Finally, this image shows the Big Thompson River overflowing and tearing apart Colorado U.S. 34 in the Big Thompson Canyon--another example of the damage to the infrastructure across our State. Madam President, how much time is remaining?

Mr. BENNET. I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes.