Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I won't go on too much longer, but in addition to showing these images, I do want to pass along a few of the stories we are hearing from Colorado families from the past week. In Jamestown, a small mountain community of just a few hundred people in the mountains northwest of Boulder, a mudslide destroyed the home of 72-year-old Joey Howlett, a pillar of that community. It killed him. In the hours that followed, Jamestown residents pooled their resources so that no one was without food or shelter. The town, isolated from outside assistance, was literally split in two by the flood, so they rigged a pulley system to carry food, medicine, and supplies across the rising waters to fellow townspeople. Just outside of Lyons, CO, four adults, three children, and two dogs had to scramble up hills and across ledges with no trails to escape the floodwater. At one point they literally had to make a human chain across waist-deep water so nobody would be carried away. These are a few of the thousands of stories from across our State. We know these floods are devastating. We know the loss some Colorado families feel today is beyond words. We know some have lost loved ones, and many others have lost homes and businesses that took them decades to build. But stories such as this remind me Coloradans are resilient, that the worst disasters often bring out the best in our neighbors. All across the State we have seen Coloradans of different ages, backgrounds, and beliefs pull together and help each other get through this massive storm. We saw real heroism a thousand times a day as first responders and National Guardsmen risked life and limb to carry the young, the old, the vulnerable, and the injured to safety. I close by saying thank you to the FEMA Administrator for his prompt response to our request to declare a disaster. He would not let me leave the floor without saying that if you are in Boulder, Weld, Adams, or Larimer Counties, and impacted, you can go to disasterassistance.gov or call 1-800-621-FEMA to register for disaster assistance. As we move from rescue to recovery, frustration and enormous challenges lie ahead. We know in the coming weeks, months, and even years Colorado is going to face a lot of rebuilding, and we will rise to this occasion. We will build it back better than it was before it was destroyed. We are going to fight every day for Colorado families, many of whom have lost everything, to make sure they are getting the support they need.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1847.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the calling up of the amendment be vitiated out of respect for my colleague from Louisiana.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, through the Chair, I would say to the Senator from Louisiana that my understanding was he would object. He was on the floor when I offered it and I thought he was going to object. So knowing of his objection, I withdraw the amendment. Having said all of that, I think it is a shame that we can't get going with this bipartisan bill. I wish to thank the chairman and the ranking member for their incredibly great bipartisan work on this energy bill. I wish to thank Senator Jeanne Shaheen from New Hampshire and Senator Portman from Ohio for the bipartisan work that has been going on for months, if not years, on this bill. I am pleased to come to the floor--I wish to introduce my amendment but not today because of the objection, but to at least talk about a bipartisan amendment we would like to get on this bill. I wish to thank my colleague Senator Ayotte for joining me in this important effort. Our amendment is based on stand-alone legislation we have written called the Better Buildings Act, which encourages energy efficiency in commercial buildings. Over the last several years we worked with building owners across Colorado and the country to craft the legislation. The economic and environmental benefits of improving energy efficiency in buildings are clear. A well-publicized retrofit of the Empire State Building in New York reduced energy usage by 38 percent--almost 40 percent--and it saved an estimated $4.4 million annually for the building owner. The retrofit also created over 250 construction jobs right here in the United States that can't be sent overseas. It is this example, and these ideas, that helped form the basis for the Better Buildings Act and this amendment. In crafting the measure, we started to think about efficiency in buildings not only from the top down where a building owner makes the improvements, but also from the bottom up where a tenant would see advantages from designing and configuring their rented office space in an energy-efficient manner. With all of that in mind, the amendment we have introduced accomplishes two principal goals. First, it allows for a first-of-its-kind study by the Department of Energy to chronicle private sector best practices as tenants build out their lease spaces in commercial buildings. This study would then inform a voluntary Department of Energy program to recognize tenants, to acknowledge tenants that design and construct high-performance lease spaces in the future. The second provision, called Tenant Star, would expand on the popular ENERGY STAR Program and make it available to tenants, not just landlords. Under our amendment, tenants will be recognized for the efficient performance of their leased office space. This will provide value to their customers, their investors, and ultimately to the building owner. The ENERGY STAR label has proven a very powerful tool to achieve whole building efficiency. Our language takes the next logical step and confers this recognition on tenants as well. This bipartisan amendment is broadly supported--from the Alliance to Save Energy to the Real Estate Roundtable, to the Sierra Club. It also received a favorable hearing in the Senate Energy Committee in June, and I thank the chairman for that. The Congressional Budget Office has confirmed it has no score. I urge my colleagues to support this bipartisan and commonsense amendment. I hope we can get to the business of legislating around this incredibly important bipartisan bill. With that, I thank the Presiding Officer for his patience, I yield the floor, and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, today I wish to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the dedication of the Cadet Chapel at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In the half century since its founding, the Cadet Chapel has become a National Historic Landmark and the most popular manmade attraction in Colorado. Each year more than 750,000 visitors explore this iconic and unique building. Today, the Cadet Chapel is a multifaith house of worship specifically designed to provide multiple distinct worship areas under a single roof, meeting the spiritual needs of the Academy's cadets. The chapel's aluminum, glass and steel structure features 17 spires that soar 150 feet toward the Colorado sky. Annually, over 4,000 cadets are provided 850 religious worship and educational opportunities to practice their personal faith. The chapel also provides religious rites and observances such as baptisms and dedications, weddings, funerals and memorial services. Most worship services are open to the general public and thousands of visitors each year attend worship. The Cadet Chapel fosters outstanding civic involvement by partnering with the local community to host four annual free concerts with over 2000 attendees. The U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel is truly unique. Its iconic architectural structure serves as a symbol of the Academy and is recognized worldwide. Most important, the Cadet Chapel enables the free exercise of religion for cadets in this unique campus setting and aids the Chaplain Corps at the Air Force Academy to inspire men and women to become leaders of character through spiritual formation. In the 50 years since the Cadet Chapel was dedicated our Nation has sent Air Force Academy graduates to serve in the skies and jungles of Vietnam and the deserts of Iraq. Those that once bowed their head beneath the spires of the Chapel served our country in the former Yugoslavia and in the mountains of Afghanistan, and they continue to serve the cause of freedom around the globe today. We thank them for their service, and we congratulate the Air Force on the 50th anniversary of the dedication of the Air Force Academy's Cadet Chapel.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, on Saturday, July 20, Colorado will commemorate a solemn anniversary because a year ago, almost exactly to the day, in Aurora, CO, a theater full of people, who at that moment wanted nothing more than to escape the heat and enjoy a movie with their family and with friends, found themselves in the middle of a senseless and violent tragedy. A gunman opened fire and took 12 lives a year ago, innocent people, loved by family and by friends. He physically wounded scores of others. Days later, as this photo shows, thousands of Coloradoans attended a vigil hosted by the city of Aurora. We shared tears and prayers. We also resolved to support each other, to heal, and to always remember those who lost their lives--which is what brings me here today. Since that time, we have continued to see an outpouring of support all across Colorado and, for that matter, all across the United States of America for those we lost, their loved ones, and for the city of Aurora. The grace and courage of the families and survivors affected by this terrible tragedy serve as a powerful reminder to all of us of the resilience of the human spirit. Today we remember the victims, victims such as Jessica, an aspiring young journalist; Rebecca, a mother of two who joined the Air Force after high school; and Veronica Moser Sullivan, age 6, who had just learned to swim and loved to play dressup. We also remember the acts of heroism and the resolution demonstrated by so many Coloradoans in the aftermath of this tragedy, people such as Matt McQuinn, who threw himself in front of his girlfriend on the night of the shooting, saving her life; and the brave first responders and volunteers who helped save lives and comforted those in shock and heartbreak. We remember the city of Aurora and the State of Colorado, which has once again come together to help one another through unspeakable loss and heartache. At a recent service of over 3,000 people at the Potter's House, an Aurora-based church, Rev. Chris Hill told those in attendance that ``We believe morning is coming to Aurora. Aurora means the dawn.'' I think that captures the spirit of resilience and toughness that characterized Aurora, my beautiful State of Colorado, and these United States of America. Before I leave the floor, I want to read once again the names of the victims in Aurora: Jon Blunk, AJ Boik, Jesse Childress, Gordon Cowden, Jessica Ghawi, John Larimer, Matt McQuinn, Cayla Medek, Veronica Moser, Alex Sullivan, Alex Teves, and Rebecca Wingo. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I ask to speak as in morning business.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I first wish to say how wonderful it has been to serve with you in the Senate. As you take your leave to go back to the real world in Massachusetts, we all wish you well and we thank you for everything you have done while you have been here, especially the good cheer you brought to our caucus. Thank you very much.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to start by thanking the able Senator from Arizona for his statement, for his leadership, and for his incredible work on this bill. I wish to thank all of my colleagues who have been in this so-called Gang of 8, both Democrats and Republicans, including Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin and Bob Menendez on the Democratic side. But today I especially want to thank the Republican Members of this group, led by John McCain, and including Lindsey Graham, Jeff Flake, and Marco Rubio, for their extraordinary leadership. For reasons everybody in this Chamber understands, their willingness to be at the table and to stay at the table was an act of leadership unlike any other I have seen in this Chamber in the 4 years I have served here. We would never be here today voting to fix our broken immigration system were it not for them. So on behalf of the people I represent in Colorado I thank them. For me this all started in Colorado, because everywhere I went I heard people talk about how the broken immigration system was affecting them. I would hear the peach growers in Palisades say one thing and the cattle ranchers on the eastern plains say something else. The immigrant rights community, many of whom represented children in my old school district, our high-tech community, our ski resorts--everybody was feeling the pain of a broken immigration system that Washington was refusing to fix and they had actually given up hope that Washington would fix it. They didn't know each other cared about this issue, so we pulled them together over about a 2-year period. We had hundreds of meetings and traveled thousands of miles in the State to create something called the Colorado Compact, a statement of six principles about what Colorado expected immigration reform to look like. Now that we have come to the end of this process--we have come to the end of the Gang of 8, finishing the Judiciary Committee proceedings, the work on the floor--I can say this bill is entirely consistent--it is not identical, but it is entirely consistent with those principles. The first of those principles of the Colorado Compact is immigration is a Federal responsibility. This is not something that should be done State by State by State in this country. The Founders themselves recognized this because they put the regulation of immigration in the Constitution and charged the U.S. Congress as our obligation to deal with it. That was the first principle. The second principle was ensuring our national security. This bill meets that test as well. It is the strongest border security bill ever passed in the Senate. It doubles the number of Border Patrol agents on the southern border. We build 700 miles of fencing. It adds new technologies. We spend nearly $50 billion on border security. I believe we should have a secure border. In Washington this becomes a trade. For me, it is not a trade. We should have a secure border, and we should have a pathway to citizenship, and this bill accomplishes both. The people in Colorado who wrote this Colorado Compact called for more effective enforcement of our immigration law, and this bill will give them that. It includes a fully operational, biographic, and biometric entry-exit system, more effective measures to detect fraud and abuse of our visa system, and an employment verification system to be used by all employers. This is all in this bill. That has not been in prior efforts that either passed or failed in the Congress, but it is in this bill, and it is a critical part to making sure we don't end up here again. The Colorado Compact said we should have a bill that strengthens our economy. This bill meets that test with a visa system much better aligned for our 21st century economy--a merit-based system. We have high-tech and INVEST visas, visas for agriculture that will give our farmers and ranchers a fighting chance to hold on to their farms and to their ranches, and give the people who are working in that industry much-needed relief. There are great benefits for our tourism and ski industry as well. And, on top of everything else, the Congressional Budget Office tells us this bill doesn't increase our deficit but reduces it over the first 10 years by $197 billion and over the next 10 years by $700 billion. Colorado said we want a bill that is focused on families and keeping families together. This bill does that by clearing the green card backlog and ensuring family members are able to reunite more quickly. There is better protection for children in detention and the immigration court system. Finally, we call for a commonsense approach to the 11 million, and this bill does that with a tough but fair path to citizenship for the 11 million. As so many people in this Chamber, my life story is a story of immigration because I am the son of an immigrant. My mom was born in Poland in 1938 while Nazi tanks massed at the border. She and her parents miraculously survived one of the worst human events in our history: The Holocaust. After going to Sweden and Mexico City, they were able to come to New York City in 1950. My mom was almost 12 years old. She is the only one in the family who can speak any English at all. On my first birthday--this is 1965, so 15 years after they came to the country--my grandparents sent me a birthday card. This is the card they wrote. Here is what they said, in English, by the way. They said this in English: 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. They had only been in this country for 15 years. They didn't speak English when they got here. They had survived the most horrific event of the 20th century, and this was the place that gave them hope and, more than that, it allowed them to rebuild their lives in the only country in the world where they thought they could. This bill reaffirms we are a Nation that respects the rule of law and reaffirms our history that we are a Nation of immigrants, and it will keep that hope alive for millions of people, both here and abroad, for years to come. I urge a ``yes'' vote on this bill. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Of all the staff in the Senators' offices who worked on this bill, I will take further time tonight to mention a few names. First, I thank people on my staff, Rachel Velasquez and Stefanie Aarthun, who did amazing work, both of them, over many months on this bill and not only here. Also, we worked on the Colorado Compact in the State of Colorado. This was what enabled us to be part of this conversation. I have thought throughout this process how important the work was that we did in Colorado in preparation for this moment, to get to this moment. It simply would have been impossible to succeed at producing what we call the Colorado Compact, composed of six principles. They were so bipartisan that when we had the press conference, the person who came to read the first of these principles was actually my Republican opponent in the 2010 Senate race, Ken Buck. I want to thank him for that and the others who were part of the compact. I especially thank my deputy chief of staff, Sarah Hughes, who did an amazing job of pulling everybody together. She has been with me longer than anybody on my staff. Nothing I could have accomplished in the jobs I have had before and certainly not in this instance could I have done without Sarah Hughes. The same goes for Jon Davidson, who is my chief of staff and who is a model for what a chief of staff in the Senate should be--or anywhere else, for that matter, but particularly here, where the pressures can be so extraordinary. His ability to attract an incredibly talented team of people who work on all kinds of issues, from immigration, to health care, to education, is incredibly important in the constituent service we do both here and in Colorado. Simply none of it would have happened if somehow I hadn't been lucky enough to hire Jonathan Davidson, who has been around this place, actually, as a young person, for a very long time, having been, among other things, Paul Sarbanes' chief of staff when he was the chair of the Banking Committee. By my side both before I came to the Senate and in the Senate on this issue has been Sergio Gonzales, who has worked tirelessly. ``Tirelessly'' doesn't even capture it--24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it has felt like. He certainly looks that way. He won't appreciate my saying that, but it is true, and people who know Sergio will know what I am talking about. He has done an amazing job with a sense of humor and has served not just me during this but the entire Gang of 8, and we will be forever grateful. There were many times during this process that I have thought about Sergio's grandfather and his grandmother. His grandfather, Corky Gonzales--Rodolfo ``Corky'' Gonzales--played such an important role in Colorado's history and the history of the West, and a library was just named for him last week. I have wondered what he would think about knowing we live in a country where his grandson has helped to shepherd across the line the most important immigration reform in this country's history. So I thank Sergio Gonzales for his leadership as well. None of this would have been possible without Chuck Schumer, whom I talked about earlier. None of it would have been possible without his incredible staff: Leon Fresco, Stephanie Martz, Mike Lynch, his chief of staff--all of whom did an extraordinary job of keeping us on track and keeping Chuck on track, and I deeply appreciate that. The others I wanted to mention while on the floor today are the staffs of the people with whom we negotiated the agriculture provisions of this bill. Dianne Feinstein did a great job leading that effort, with Chris Thompson, Neil Quinter, and Kim Alton, who all work for her. I deeply appreciate their work. From Orrin Hatch's office, Matt Sandgren did an excellent job all the way through. I particularly want to say thank you to Marco Rubio's staff and their efforts to bring Democrats and Republicans together on this issue. This is the first time we have had an immigration bill where the agriculture provisions in the bill are endorsed by both the growers and the farm workers union. That has never happened before. I thank all of them for doing that. We would not have accomplished that without some very late night meetings, and Enrique Gonzalez was always there along with John Baselice. He will never forgive me for that, and Enrique will never let me forget it, but they did extraordinary work on that part of the bill and other parts of the bill as well. I thank the leader's staff--Serena Hoy--the Judiciary Committee staff, and the floor staff. As I say, I have submitted names for the Record, but there are names here that are too often not mentioned on the floor of the Senate, so I want to read these names. These are the schedulers for the eight Senators who worked on this bill so hard for so many months. The day I knew we were actually going to get this done was the day John McCain said in his office some months ago that unless we begin to meet three times a week, we are never going to get this done. As the Presiding Officer knows, that is an enormous commitment of time, to meet three times a week, and we did it week in and week out. Sometimes we weren't even in Washington but back home on the telephone, but we carved out the time to do it, and that could not have happened without the schedulers in our offices--from my perspective, certainly not without Kristin Mollet, who is my extraordinary scheduler. I told her at our first meeting--I don't know if I was interviewing her or she was interviewing me; it was probably a little bit of both--that the scheduler is the heart of the operation. If the schedule doesn't work, the wheels come off and nothing else works. Kristin Mollet has done an extraordinary job getting us through this process. In no particular order, let me please say thank you to Alice James, with Senator Graham; Megan Runyan, with Senator Flake; Rob Kelly, with Senator Menendez; Claire Reuschel, with Senator Durbin; Jessica Bonfiglio, in Senator Rubio's office; and a very special thanks to Alex Victor, with Senator Schumer, and Ellen Cahill in Senator McCain's office. We could not have done this without them. In the story I told before about when I was a superintendent and working in business, not in politics--I had never run for office before when I took this job--I mentioned that the key is finding people a lot better at doing their job than you would ever be at doing their job. Well, that has never been more true than it has been in the Senate, where the quality of the work we do depends entirely on the quality of the staff we have. So I want to say thank you to all the Senate staff for their efforts.

Mr. BENNET. In the vein of thank-yous, I wanted to come down after this historic day, passing this historic bill, to say some thank-yous. I have already thanked my colleagues in the Gang of 8 and the other Senators who worked so hard on this bill, and there will be a time to do that on another occasion. Sometimes people have asked me during the course of my checkered career: How did you get to do this? Why did they let you do this? How did somebody with no apparent skill or aptitude for public education, for example, get to run the Denver Public Schools, one of the most cherished things I have ever done. My answer has always been the same, which is the key is to find a bunch of people who are better at doing their job than you would ever be at doing their job. Assemble them, organize them around a project, a challenge or an obstacle and let them do their thing. The Presiding Officer spoke eloquently about this yesterday when he thanked his personal staff and the Senate staff on his way back to Massachusetts. I ask unanimous consent to submit the list of staff for the Record.

Mr. BENNET

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

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET. Here is how I answer that. I appreciate the question. Through the Chair to the Senator from Texas, it is clear that this is not going to get us anywhere, this procedural fight the two of you are having every couple of weeks. I think that is clear. I think it is clear that the debt ceiling is something that has been raised time and time again by Republicans and by Democratic Presidents over the years. I think it is also clear that we have to deal with our debt and our deficit. I believe that. But for myself, I don't feel like I would come to the floor and say that I am only going to allow this bill to go to conference with the Republicans in the House if all the money comes to Colorado--or some other stipulation I would want that 99 other Senators would not agree with. The second thing is that I think it is important for people to understand that this issue--again, I am not in any way trivializing the issues around our deficit and our debt. I want the Senator from Texas-- I hope he understands that. I hope he knows that about me. But I worry about the debt ceiling as a tool for accomplishing this, first for the reasons that have to do with our credit rating but also because there is a view among some that the debt ceiling is about bills we are going to incur as opposed to the ones we already have incurred. In other words, it would be one thing if somebody said: I am spending too much money and I am going to cut up my credit card, and that is what they would do, but that is not what the debt ceiling is about. What the debt ceiling is about is somebody saying: You know what, I want the best cable package I can find, I want the best satellite package I can find, and when the bill comes to pay for it, I am just going to chop it up into little pieces and not pay it. That is what I don't like about this approach. But everybody is entitled to their own approach on this question. I just wish we could move forward here instead of continuing to earn the 10-percent approval rating Congress has. That is all I am asking for.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I know the Senator from Massachusetts is here, and I look forward to hearing his farewell. Before he does, I wanted to say thank you to the Senator from Nevada for his work on this bill, for getting us to a bipartisan result, for helping us grow the vote, and for the statement he made about surely not one of us would have written the bill exactly the way it is written. But there is much more that is good about this bill than not. I am grateful for his support. I thank the Senator.

Mr. BENNET. I wish to finish my statement, and then I will gladly yield for a question. I was glad to hear the Senator from Alabama. He and I disagree on the immigration bill, but we certainly agree on the issue of the concern all of us have about this economy--or most of us have about this economy. It is one of the reasons we should pass this immigration bill. The Congressional Budget Office tells us we would see 3 additional points of GDP increase in the first 10 years, 5 over the two 10-year windows, if we pass the bill. To the point about American jobs, I was very glad to hear him say he was not talking about the 11 million people who are here because most of the 11 million people who are here are working. But they are working in a shadow economy, a cash economy, under circumstances where they can be exploited. We have allowed that to happen because of the broken immigration system we have. If all you cared about--and I deeply care about it--was raising wages for the American worker, you would want to bring those 11 million people out of that shadow economy. You would want them paid in something other than cash, and you would want them, for heaven's sake, paying taxes at a time when we have the kinds of deficit problems the Senator from Texas is describing. The Senator also talked about the future flow of immigrants. I should say I was part of the bipartisan group. This is not a partisan bill, this immigration bill. There were eight of us. Four Republicans and four Democrats worked together on this bill, and one of the things we thought hard about was the future flow of immigrants to this country because generation after generation of Americans, since the founding of our country, has relied on new immigrants to bring their ideas, to bring their talents, to bring their energies to our shores to build their businesses here. Today what we are saying to people--even people who get college degrees in the United States, degrees that we subsidize, that we pay for--even to those people, we are saying: Don't stay here. Even if you want to stay here, please go home to China and start your business there. Go home to India and compete with us there. Hire people there instead of creating jobs here in the United States. We are a nation of immigrants. We subscribe to the rule of law. This bill is a ratification of those two American ideals--ideals that you can almost not find in any other country in the world. That is why I am so glad that for once this body is actually acting in a bipartisan way to deal with not an easy problem but a tough problem. I will tell you the kids who are visiting today from 4-H all across the country and from my State of Colorado actually are expecting us to do these hard things, as our parents and grandparents did before them, so we don't leave them in the lurch. That is what is at stake. That is why I wish we could find a way past this budget impasse as well so we actually could start to have a responsible conversation about what we are going to do on the entitlement side and on the revenue side, so we do not continue to hack away at domestic discretionary spending in ways that could lead us, with some of the House proposals, to invest only 4 percent of the revenue we collect in the future--4 percent in transportation and agriculture and education. There is not a business in this country that would last a year if it invested 4 percent of its cash flow in the future of that business. At some point we have to move beyond where we have been here and actually get into a serious discussion about how we are going to manage this debt down over the next decade or two in ways that do not prevent us from growing our economy and in ways that do not subject our children to unpaid bills. It would be as if I went to the mortgage lender on my house and I said: I would like to buy a house, and I am going to take out a mortgage, and then I am going to give it to my kids to carry for me instead of paying for it myself. That is the position we are in today. The only way we are going to solve that is if Democrats and Republicans can sit down together and actually move past the talking points. With that, I will yield for a question.

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

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I was here to talk about immigration, and that is what I will talk about. But I have been caught in a crossfire on this subject, and I want to say my view is this is exactly what people hate about Washington, DC. It is exactly why we have a 10- percent approval rating. For 4 years I went to townhall meetings and was asked over and over and over: Why don't the Democrats in the Senate pass a budget? Which I think is a very legitimate question. We got a new Chair of the Budget Committee and we passed a budget after 4 years, and now we are told we can't go to conference to have a discussion with House Republicans about what our budget ought to look like. I actually disagree with the Senator from Texas, I have to say respectfully, on the merits of this issue; that is to say, on the debt ceiling itself. This is the reason I think folks in Colorado can't stand this place. There is not a mayor in my State, whether they are a Republican or a Democrat or a tea party mayor, not one--not one who would threaten the credit rating of their community for politics. Not one. We would run them out on a rail, because that is not the way you do business. The credit rating of a community is the most important thing it has. The full faith and credit of the United States of America--which until the last debt ceiling discussion had never been questioned--was questioned for the first time in our history; not because of the size of our debt--which, by the way, I have spent 4 years trying to work on because I believe it is a very severe problem we face, and I look forward to working with the Senator from Texas on this issue--but because of the political dysfunction in DC. That is why we got this downgrade. The Senator from Alabama, who has left the floor, was talking about the restatement of our GDP numbers in the first quarter. I worry a lot about that. The people I represent are not concerned with the procedural stuff that goes on here. What they are worried about is an economy they are living in day after day after day where, even in periods of economic growth, median family income is falling, middle- class families are falling behind. They are worried about an economy where they are earning less at the end of the decade than they were at the beginning, but their cost of higher education continues to escalate, their cost of health care continues to escalate. As individuals, as families, and as members of a generation, they are worried we are going to be the first generation of Coloradans and Americans to leave less opportunity and not more to the people who are coming after us.

Mr. BENNET. I object.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, there is no one else on the floor. I thought I would take the opportunity to talk again a little bit about our immigration bill. This has been such a gratifying process to me because it has been bipartisan from the start. In fact, I have been telling people that it is not even that it has been bipartisan, it has been nonpartisan. The work on the Gang of 8, which led to work in the Judiciary Committee, which led to work on the floor is the way this place ought to operate on a whole host of issues, from energy--the Presiding Officer cares a lot about that--to infrastructure, to the budget issues I was just talking about with the Senator from Texas. It is important for people to know that this is a bipartisan bill because I think people are fed up with the partisanship in this town, and they do not believe it reflects the way they live their lives. There is a reason for that. It does not. This place is decoupled from the lives of ordinary American people, and this is an effort--among others, hopefully--to recouple those priorities. I have been interested in the objections to the immigration bill since the beginning. First there was the objection that it was actually going to drive up our deficit. Not surprisingly, we learned from the Congressional Budget Office that this bill actually would create the most significant deficit reduction of any piece of legislation we considered here, certainly that we passed here--$197 billion in the first 10 years, $700 billion in the second 10 years. Even in Washington, $1 trillion is still a lot of money. That is what we heard, both because people now not paying taxes would be paying taxes and also because of the economic growth that would be generated if we could restore the rule of law to our immigration system and to this economy. That was an objection. That objection was answered--not by me but by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The second objection was that the legislation was not going to get a fair airing, that it was going to be rushed through in the dead of night. I don't like doing work that way. There were eight ``no'' votes on the fiscal cliff deal at the end of the year, and I was one of those ``no'' votes, one of three Democrats who voted no not largely but partly because it had not had any process and it was in the middle of the night. This bill, by contrast, had 7 months of negotiations among four Democrats and four Republicans. It had 3 weeks to go through the Judiciary Committee, a markup that had 160-some amendments, many of which were accepted. Forty-one Republican amendments were accepted to this bill. It came to the floor for the debate we have had over the last few weeks. I realize the amendment process is jammed up, and I am sorry about that because I think people ought to be able--including the Presiding Officer--to offer the wise amendments they have and the not-so-wise amendments they have, at least in my opinion. But there certainly has been an open process for this bill. Sometimes I have heard people say, well, it is just like health care all over again. I was here during the health care bill, and I can say this process looks nothing like that process. There is a third objection from some who say there is no border security in this bill. First of all, that wasn't even true of the Gang of 8 bill. We had substantial border security, and as my lead, I was taking what John McCain and Jeff Flake--both Senators from Arizona-- said was important. They are two Senators who have a border State, and they have been working hard to resolve these issues in our group. We made a substantial investment in that bill for border security and technology. Even fencing was included in that bill. I think it is a reasonable expectation--not of Republicans but of the American people--that our border should be secure. Certainly the people in Colorado believe our border should be secure. So when Senators came and said: We would like to vote for this bill, but we would like to do more on border security, not only was I open to that, I supported that. The bill before us has incredibly substantial border security. There are 700 more miles of fencing. We doubled the number of Border Patrol agents on the border. One of the Senators said to me that we are at a point now where there is a Border Patrol agent every 1,000 feet on the southern border. One might ask whether that is a wise use of resources, but it was important for some people to have that before they would sign on to this bill. So I don't think any reasonable person looking at this could say border security has not been addressed. So what are the objections to moving forward? We have heard people say: Well, it is the path to citizenship or we don't like that part of the bill. That was a core principle for the four Democrats and four Republicans who started this negotiation, and it has been a core principle for a lot of people who voted for this bill. A very important reason to pass this legislation is to resolve the situation for the 11 million people who are here illegally. The pathway to citizenship is the right way to do it. This is not amnesty. This has to be earned. People have to pay a fine. People have to learn English for the first time in our history. People have to pay their taxes. It takes 10 years to get a green card, then 3 years after that. They have to pass background checks all along the way so we know who the people are we want to stay in this country and who the people are we want to leave this country. I see the Senator from Louisiana is here, so I will wrap up. To my friends who think some lawful status that doesn't include a pathway to citizenship is useful to this country, I ask them to look at countries all around the world that have created a subclass of people--not even citizens, just a subclass of people--who have no attachment to their culture, no feeling they are ever going to participate in their civic or political institutions or meaningfully in their economy, no chance to believe their children or the children after them are actually going to make those contributions as well, and ask: Does that look like the United States of America to you? That is not what the Founders had in mind. We hear a lot of cheap talk about the Founders around here these days. That is not what the Founders had in mind when they wrote into the Constitution that it was our responsibility as a body to deal with immigration. So I hope people will consider that objection, take a look at the Senate bill, and will, hopefully, support it. With that, I know the Senator from Louisiana was scheduled to speak, so I will yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am here today on the immigration bill, but I wish to thank the Senator from Vermont for bringing our attention to this very serious issue. It is a little bit of a variation on a theme today about trying to reconnect the priorities of the American people--frankly, whether they are Republicans or Democrats or anybody else--and this place, which has become totally disconnected. I wish to say through the Chair to the Senator from Vermont how on point he is. The people I represent care about the fact that they are living in an economy that even when it grows--I was talking about this a little bit earlier--it is not producing sufficient jobs and it is not driving up income. That is what they are concerned about. The student debt crisis the Senator speaks about, where it tripled over the last 10 years, is a huge part of this story. It is a significant part, because if a family's income is going down but the cost of higher education is skyrocketing--by the way, at the same time the cost of health care is skyrocketing--it makes it very hard to get ahead. People are desperately worried, as I said earlier, that we are going to be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to our kids and grandkids. But there is another issue as well, which is today, in the 21st century in this country, if a person is born and living in poverty, their chances of getting a college degree or the equivalent of a college degree are 9 in 100--9 in 100. For the folks in the Chamber, for the pages who are here today, we have 100 chairs, 100 desks in the Senate. If these desks represented poor children living in this country instead of Senators, those four desks in the front row and four at that end right there, and another one, those are the only folks who would be getting a college degree. Ninety-one other people in this Chamber would be constrained to the margin of this economy and a margin of our democracy from the outset. Matters are getting worse, not better. We led the world in the production of college graduates when George Bush--this is not a partisan observation, it is a temporal one--when George Bush, the son, became President. We led the world. Let me tell the young people who are here today, 13 years later, we are 16th in the world in the production of college graduates. Because of our inability to come together and figure out how to deal comprehensively over time in a thoughtful way with the fact that we don't want to stick our kids with this debt we have acquired--which we need to do; we are just hacking away at domestic discretionary spending for higher education, for K-12 education, for agriculture, for infrastructure. Some of these budgets we have considered--we have not passed them here; they passed them over in the House--would invest only 4 percent of our revenue, 4 percent of the revenue we collect, in the future of this country. Ninety-six percent on something else is not going to get the job done. On an issue such as this, where our students are saying: How do you at least not make matters worse, we ought to be able to come together in a bipartisan way and solve this problem. I thank the Senator from Vermont for coming to the floor to focus our attention on something the American people actually care about.

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

Mr. BENNET. I say through the Chair to my friend from Texas, I have not read the bill, but I will read the bill. I commit to him that I will do that. I appreciate the implication of this, which is that the Senator is not objecting to my metaphor about the cable bill being cut up, because I do think that is a real problem. We are not saying to people--we should not be saying to people that we are going to behave in an irresponsible way. As somebody who used to spend his time restructuring companies that were really well run, really well operated but had horrible balance sheets, I would have to think hard about the treatment that creditors would provide to, in this case, the U.S. Government when I look at that. I will look at that. I say to the Senator from Texas that there are other things we might even be able to agree on too around here. For a long time I have thought it would be important for us to put health care on a budget in this country. We are not on a budget. During the health care debate I had an amendment called the fail-safe amendment that would say to the American people and to the Congress: This is what we have to spend on health care. That is all there is. There is not any more. We have to manage toward that. If we failed, if we tripped over it, we would actually have to make cuts, make changes to our system of health care. We spend twice as much as any other industrialized country in the world, and it is crowding out a lot of other things that the 4-H kids and others whom I worry about care about. So I think there is much we can work on, but I just don't think we are going to get to it through this kind of discussion. We might get to it through this kind of discussion. In any event, I will commit to the Senator from Texas that I am going to sit down and stop talking about what he said.