Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, it is a great privilege to be here tonight with the senior Senator from Colorado because the topic I come to the floor to talk about tonight is the West. Similar to the Presiding Officer, I have been thinking a lot about our home State of Colorado because we currently have a terrible wildfire burning just west of Fort Collins. Susan and I and the girls went up to Jamestown this weekend--I think I told the Presiding Officer this earlier--and dropped them off at camp, and that is far away from where this fire is. It is on the other side of Estes Park. But even from there, we could see an incredible plume of smoke, and in the 45 minutes or so we were there, I would say the volume of that plume of smoke increased by three-or fourfold and we could tell something terrible was going on. As the Presiding Officer knows better than anybody in this Chamber, this devastating fire has destroyed over 100 structures and has tragically claimed one life and endangered many others. In fact, as we stand in this Chamber tonight, there are many endangered by this fire. At over 43,000 acres and growing, it is the third largest fire in Colorado's history. Today, I think I can say for both of us, our thoughts go out to the family who lost a loved one and to the hundreds of firefighters who are bravely working on the ground as we are here tonight. We wish them well and we wish them success in battling this blaze. As the Presiding Officer knows, wildfires are simply part of life in the West. Managing our land to improve resiliency needs to be a focus of ours in this Congress. That is why I am pleased, as a member of the Committee on Agriculture, to say the farm bill reauthorizes stewardship contracting, which allows our Federal land management agencies to implement high priority forest management and restoration projects. Much of the Presiding Officer's career has had to do with these programs. I thank him for his support, and I have been pleased to be able to carry on his work as a member of the Agriculture Committee. This is a critical tool for initiatives that restore and maintain healthy forest ecosystems and provide local employment. The Presiding Officer, I think, was on the floor maybe yesterday talking about the importance of this to our timber industry in Colorado and across this country. Another truly western aspect of this bill I would like to focus on tonight is conservation and specifically the stewardship of our western landscape. In my travels around Colorado, I have been heartened to see over and over farmers and ranchers arm in arm with conservation groups and with sportsmen, all in the name of proper stewardship of the land, of protecting our open spaces. They all share the recognition that keeping these landscapes in their historical, undeveloped state is an economic driver--as family farms, as working cattle ranches; for tourism, for wildlife habitat, and to preserve our rural way of life and our rural economies. Every citizen knows the American West is a destination for those seeking wide-open spaces--a ``home on the range,'' as they say, a way of life that is focused on working the land and the wise stewardship of our natural resources. We also know that as we have grown as a country, there has been increasing development pressure on this way of life and on the landscape. That pressure is exactly why the farm bill's conservation title is so vital to people in the West. I serve as chairman of the Conservation Subcommittee of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and through the dozens--literally dozens--of farm bill listening sessions I have held over the last 18 months, farmers and ranchers were always talking about the importance of conservation; conservation of their way of life and conservation of their land, particularly the use of conservation easements which help landowners voluntarily conserve the farming and ranching heritage of their land, a heritage that is so important to our State and to the entire West. So I wished to spend a few minutes sharing some of the stories Coloradans have shared with me and, maybe more important than that, showing our colleagues what this looks like. Of course, we live in the most beautiful State of all 50 States, in Colorado. This photo is from the Music Meadows Ranch outside Westcliffe, CO, elevation 9,000 feet. On these beautiful 4,000 acres, Elin Ganschow raises some of the finest grass-fed beef in the country. Thanks to the Grassland Reserve Program, Elin's ranch now has a permanent conservation easement. So this beautiful land will likely always have someone running cattle on it. This photo I have in the Chamber is from the San Luis Valley, where my predecessor, Ken Salazar, is from. Fifteen different conservation easements--finalized by the Colorado Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust--protect nearly all of the private land over a 20-mile stretch in the valley. The great work of the Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust, aided by the programs in the farm bill conservation title before us, is protecting our western way of life in Colorado. This beautiful picture is also from the valley. This is not a movie set, by the way. This is how we live our lives in the great State of Colorado and why these programs have been so important. Finally, I want to share one more Colorado story about preserving our State's fruit orchards. Most people do not know this, as I have traveled the country--and I imagine Senators Isakson and Chambliss from Georgia might even be surprised to hear--Colorado is a national leader in the production of peaches. This picture is of a peach orchard in Palisade. My friends from California might also be interested to know that Colorado has a burgeoning wine industry as well. In Colorado's Grand Valley, pictured here, conservation programs have been efficiently employed to protect 14 family farms growing peaches and wine grapes among other things. The Federal investments made available to protect these lands have not only ensured they will stay in agricultural production, but the resources provided from the Natural Resource Conservation Service, NRCS, help these family farms acquire new land to plant and new equipment to plant it. Mr. President, as you can see--and as you already know--conservation is an integral part of what we are all about in the West. It helps define who we are. Sometimes people only focus on conserving public land in its undeveloped state, and that is an important endeavor in Colorado and across the West. But private land conservation--the type aided by the farm bill--is critical for so many reasons: to protect the agricultural heritage of the land, and for wildlife habitat: elk, bighorn sheep, pheasant, Colorado cutthroat trout--the list goes on and on--so many of the prized species that are important to our Nation's sportsmen and nature lovers. Finding open landscapes and the species that inhabit them are a fundamental part of what it is to be in the West. We need to preserve these open spaces. That is what this title does. I strongly support this new conservation title as reported out of the committee on a bipartisan vote. I know some would look to amend this bipartisan consensus, to cut conservation resources in the name of deficit reduction or to apply it to some other purpose. I am the first to say we need to cut our deficit. We need to put the entire budget under a microscope--including agriculture--to cut waste and eliminate redundancies. And, by the way, we have. This committee--the Senate Agriculture Committee--under the leadership of the chairwoman and the ranking member, is the only committee I am aware of in this entire Congress--the House or the Senate--that has actually come up with a bipartisan consensus on deficit reduction. I thank the ranking member and the chairwoman for their leadership, for setting a model, an example for the other committees that are working--or should be working--to get our deficit under control. I might say, $6.4 billion of those cuts do come from conservation, not all of which I like. But we made difficult compromises at the committee level. We have a more efficient conservation title that won support from both sides of the aisle, and we ought to move this bill forward. I know there has been a little bit of the usual back-and-forth about amendments that are not necessarily related to the topic at hand, and we have a habit of doing that in the Senate. I hope there can be an agreement reached by the leadership so we can move this critically important bill forward. Again, at a time when so much partisan bickering is going on around this place, to have seen the fine work that was done by this committee--Republicans and Democrats working together--to strengthen this commodity title, create real deficit reduction, and actually end direct payments to producers--one of the most significant reforms in agricultural policy that we have had around this place in decades--it would be a shame--worse than a shame; it would be terrible--to let that work go to waste. With that, Mr. President, the hour is late. I am going to stop so we can close. I thank the Presiding Officer very much and say again what a privilege it was to be able to talk about our home with him in the chair. So with that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. BENNET

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, today I wish to honor a former Tuskegee University professor whose efforts to support this country during the First World War, with the help of the hard-working young people he recruited for agricultural clubs, have gone largely unacknowledged until recently. After the United States entered World War I in April of 1917, Professor John D. Wray left his position at Tuskegee University and relocated to North Carolina to aid in the war effort. As a professor specializing in agricultural science, Wray utilized his unique skills to help grow food for servicemembers fighting abroad. He partnered with Black county agents to organize and encourage African-American farmers' children to join agricultural clubs, which became known as the Saturday Service League. Wray even created a newspaper, the Rural Messenger, which was advertised as ``the only Negro farm journal in the world.'' In the first issue, Wray wrote that the children ``were told why they should engage in this work as a necessary defense for their country; that they could greatly assist by growing food to feed the boys who had gone to the trenches.'' In just 1 year's time, Wray had increased participation in North Carolina agricultural clubs tenfold, growing enrollment from 1,400 to more than 14,000. The Saturday Service League produced more than 17,000 chickens, 30,000 eggs, 23,000 pounds of pork, 700 bushels of wheat, 500 bushels of peas, 1,800 bushels of peanuts, 32 bales of cotton, 45,000 bushels of corn, and 700 bushels of potatoes in a single year. Even after the war ended in 1919, many of the youth were inspired by Wray's patriotism and continued to work in the clubs to help feed the hungry and displaced peoples of Europe. By World War II, the clubs were nicknamed the ``Victory Volunteers.'' Born in 1889, Wray grew up on a tobacco farm near Durham and moved to Greensboro, NC, to attend the Agricultural and Technical College, where he received his degree in agricultural science. There he met his wife and developed a passion for community organizing. Utilizing the agricultural skills he learned at the college, Wray taught the youth he organized modern farming techniques that increased yields 10 times over, actively improving the utility of each farmer he encountered. In 1915, the North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station offered him a job with a salary of $1,200 per year, making him the first African- American agent for the North Carolina Extension Service. He also became an advocate for young Black men who were mistreated while serving their country in military service. While many wartime stories focused on the front lines of combat, it is equally important to recognize Americans who worked to support them. Professor John D. Wray knew exactly what he could do to maximize his support for the United States in one of our greatest times of need. I learned of Professor Wray through his granddaughter, Kathryn Green, who now resides in Denver, CO. She and her family take great pride in his contributions to our Nation's war effort during World War I. I join them and all Americans today in offering our gratitude and thanks to Professor Wray's outstanding commitment to country, community, and the agricultural sciences.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to support the goal of my friend and colleague from New Mexico of delivering lower cost medicines to Americans. But, unfortunately, I cannot support his underlying amendment, No. 2111 to S. 3187. I agree that we should increase access to generic drugs wherever we can, and I agree that the path to market for generic products is fraught with legal challenges. But I have several concerns about the amendment. First, as convoluted as it seems, the Hatch-Waxman law that created the pathway to bring generic drugs to market has been a tremendous success in doing just that. Eighty percent of the drugs on the market now are generic, and over the last decade consumers have saved $931 billion on their drug costs as a result. There is clearly a balance in the system, and mechanisms within that system are working to bring generics to market. As I understand it, a key element of generic entry into the market is the incentive to challenge brand-name patents. The underlying amendment changes the key incentive for generic manufacturers--the 180 days of market exclusivity. The amendment allows late filers to now share in the exclusivity, significantly reducing the incentive for companies to file early and ensuring that products get to market as quickly as possible. Generic manufacturers have a limited window for market advantage, and it is the revenues gained during this incentive period that fuel additional product development. There is a balance here. If we need to adjust that balance, I think it needs to be done in a broader context. We need to be sure that any changes that we might make do not disrupt the balance and inadvertently harm consumers. While other aspects of the amendment are well-meaning, they may also have unintended consequences. I look forward to continuing the dialog on this issue with my colleague and others as we all work collectively to provide lower cost medicines to our constituents while maintaining an appropriate incentive for companies to innovate and develop the therapies that patients need.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, today I wish to congratulate the Denver Gay Men's Chorus on its 30th anniversary. For the last 30 years, the group has shown great commitment to educational, cultural, and social enrichment in the community on behalf of the Rocky Mountain Arts Association. Since the Denver Gay Men's Chorus was formed in 1982, it has performed more than 130 concerts and more than 1,400 compositions, arrangements, and medleys. The group has commissioned 25 works. It performed at the 1996 World Summer Olympics in Atlanta at the opening of the Olympic Diversity Center. It has also received the Denver Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. Today, the organization has more than 170 volunteer singers who perform at numerous community outreach events every year. They include performances at Manhattan Middle School's Diversity Week to end school bullying and a performance at the World AIDS Day Concert. I join the State of Colorado in thanking this organization for working to address social issues and spread a message of tolerance and for enriching our community and our State. I look forward to its future work and the effect it will continue to have on our community.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I thank the ranking member.

Mr. BENNET. I would like to try for 10 minutes but if I can do it shorter----

Mr. BENNET. I thank the Senator from Iowa, the chairman of the HELP Committee, for his indulgence. Yesterday I spoke about some of the process on the important issues of drug safety and making sure there is a good system for safer drugs, both in preparation and distribution. I know we seem to get close to reaching a resolution, which is tremendous. I have heard many of my colleagues praise different parts of the bill, which I will do as well in a minute. But I want to take 1 more minute again, while the chairman and the ranking member are on the floor, to recognize what an enormous accomplishment their leadership has resulted in, getting this bill to a close. As I said yesterday, I think the work of the HELP Committee, both Democrats and Republicans, with the leadership of the chairman and the ranking member, is a model for this Congress. It is the reason why the quality of this bill is so high. We still have a few votes to go tomorrow, but people forget that it is rare to be working on a full extension of anything here. This has become the land of flickering lights, where we keep things on for 1 more month or 2 more months. Here we actually have a 5-year extension of this legislation. It is wonderful to be working in such a bipartisan and businesslike fashion. It is not lost on me how much work has been put into the bill by my colleagues on the HELP Committee, including the Presiding Officer, or the HELP Committee staff. I want to reiterate my thanks and gratitude for the work on the bill that will truly help patients and American families get the medical products they need when they need them. That brings me to the subject of medical devices. Colorado is the sixth largest medical device sector in the country, with over 600 bioscience companies overall. We obviously need to strike a balance, as we think about this legislation, because as we speed the FDA approvals, we have to ensure that devices are safe. This year has represented a good-faith bipartisan effort among members on and off the HELP Committee to find policies that will empower the FDA to ensure safer devices and also ensure that our companies on the ground have more regulatory certainty and predictability. The FDA has been upfront about the challenges the device center faces--reviewer turnover, young, less experienced reviewers, and management challenges. At the same time we have heard from venture capital investors who say that regulatory uncertainty at the FDA is a reason they have been hesitant about continued investments in the United States and thought about the future investment in Asia and Europe. The new medical device user fee will go a long way toward ensuring the FDA has the resources to provide safer, more effective medical devices in less time and with more predictability. Over the course of a year we were also able to craft a balance of policies on both the innovation and safety side. This includes reinforcing regulations in place since 1997 that require the FDA to take the least burdensome approach to approving medical devices by not asking companies for unnecessary or unrelated information. I see the Senator from Minnesota on the floor, and I thank her for her leadership on this piece of legislation. It also includes important safety provisions such as ensuring the medical devices have a tracking number so if there is any problem, doctors and patients can quickly know if their product is one that works. I would like to say a word about drug shortage, which is a discussion issue every Member is hearing about in their States. In just the last year, the FDA was notified of about 220 drug shortages. We know that the amount of patients this affects is monumental. For cancer alone, over 550,000 patients have been currently affected by our national drug shortage crisis. In Colorado, our patients and providers are extremely frustrated. A pharmacist at St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction said that he keeps a 2-page list of 50 drugs that he cannot get or can barely get a hold of, including 12 chemotherapy drugs. I want to share a couple of constituent stories from my home State. Dawn Gibbs from Long Mount, CO, wrote: Dear Senator Bennet: I am contacting you to inform you of my grave concern of the national shortage of the preservative free cancer drug Methotrexate. My 2-year-old cousin receives this drug for her newly diagnosed leukemia of October 2011. Her doctors told her that they only have a 2 week supply left at their clinic. This drug keeps her leukemia from traveling to her brain. This shortage is life threatening to her and 3,000+ like her with this cancer. I thank you for your assistance in this matter. I know that my little 2-year-old cousin cannot speak out on her own behalf, so I am honored to be her voice. I feel my voice will not be enough alone to make a difference, and I hope that you will be our voice. Dawn Gibbs' voice is being heard on behalf of her cousin, just as patients all across the country are lending their voices to this important debate. Carol Gill from Morrison, CO, wrote: Dear Senator Bennet: I have stage 4 cancer. My current treatment regimen is doing a fine job of keeping the disease stable. This regimen includes a biweekly infusion of two generic drugs--5FU and leucovorin--and two other drugs still on patent. I receive treatment at the University of Colorado Hospital. My oncologist just called me to say that the University of Colorado Hospital is out of 5FU. Today oncologists at the University of Colorado Hospital are calling their patients to tell them some or all of their cancer treatment must be suspended. Thank you for taking this seriously and taking immediate steps to correct it. Carol Gill. My hope is that this Senate bill can give some reprieve to these Coloradans in desperate need of their lifesaving drugs. The Senate bill would give the Food and Drug Administration the much needed authority to require drug manufacturers to report any discontinuance or interruption or other adjustment that would likely result in a shortage, especially those drugs needed to provide emergency care. It would also immediately create a task force that would create a strategic plan to address drug shortages and submit recommendations to Congress as well as study the effect on drug pricing as it relates to shortages. The people in my home State and every one of our home States need us to provide solutions to this problem yesterday. They cannot wait any longer, nor should they. I will say again that it is because of the leadership of the two people sitting here, the ranking member of our committee and the chairman of our committee, that we have been able to get this bill to the floor for a vote. I think we should take that vote tomorrow and move forward on behalf of patients all across this country and the bioscience community. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

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

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I came to the floor tonight to talk about the FDA reauthorization bill that is before the Senate. I was sorry we could not get it to a vote today. I am hopeful that tomorrow we will be able to because from my perspective, as someone who has only been here for a few years, the process, the committee process that led to the creation of this bill, is a model for how this town ought to be working. The conversation we have had for so many months and even years has felt decoupled from the conversations I have been having in my townhall meetings and across the country about the challenges we need to address. This gap has been miles apart. But in this piece of legislation, I think we have actually found something responsive to patients, responsive to consumers, and responsive to the bioscience industry that is so important to my State and so many States across the country. Chairman Harkin and Ranking Member Enzi deserve enormous credit for running an excellent process that has enabled this Senator and others on the committee to be responsive to what our constituents say they want, which is a modern FDA with improved patient safety and innovation. We have also had committee members who were interested in rolling up their sleeves and doing hard work together irrespective of which party they were in. We have been able to work through a markup with virtually no partisanship. This has been a uniquely fine process, which is why we have had such great momentum toward a full extension in what I call the Land of Flickering Lights. The standard of success around here has become: Keep the government running for 1 more month, keep this extension in place for 2 more months. We actually have on the Senate floor a rational and responsible bill that is a 5-year extension of the Food and Drug Administration authority. Tonight I only want to talk about two aspects of the bill. There are a number we worked on, but tonight I spare you with the rest. In 2010 I introduced a bill called the Drug Safety and Accountability Act. Chairman Harkin and Ranking Member Enzi took notice, and we were able to form a working group to address serious problems in the FDA's statutory authority. FDA laws that are supposed to protect our domestic drug supply were created in 1938 and desperately needed to be updated for the 21st century. Back then the lines of commerce were based on 48 States. Now we live in an era where over 80 percent of the active ingredients in our pharmaceuticals and our drug supply are being manufactured abroad. Couple that with the FDA laws that force them to inspect American facilities every 2 years but they have no mandates on how often they inspect facilities overseas. The GAO has found that FDA can only keep pace with inspecting the most high-risk overseas facilities, the places where our moms and dads are getting their pharmaceuticals for our children, once every 9 years. So patients taking their pills have no idea whether the ingredients in their drugs were made in China or India or if they were ever inspected. Our American manufacturers are operating on an uneven playing field. They have to expect a surprise FDA inspection every 2 years on average here and make sure they are following all of their good manufacturing practices, when their foreign counterparts do not have to worry about FDA visiting them for a decade, if ever, because they can delay or refuse FDA inspection because they are overseas. Patient groups and the industry came together to try to change that, and this bill does change all of that. It would implement a risk-based inspection schedule for both foreign and domestic manufacturing sites. It would make sure that drug manufacturers know who is in their supply chain every step of the way. And for the first time, if you are abroad and you refuse or delay inspection without a fair reason, the FDA can refuse to let your product into this country. These are all the steps American families already think we have in place to protect them. I cannot tell you how many townhalls I have had where people have been shocked to learn that the products they have in their medicine cabinets have never been inspected by anyone. This will change that. It is a thoughtful, commonsense approach I think all of the constituents to this debate support. So we need to make sure that happens. I also want to talk about something called track and trace. American families also want to know what happens to their pills, pills that can mean the difference between life and death, once they leave the manufacturer, enter the country and change hands several times. Right now we can know a lot more from a bar code on a gallon of milk than from a bar code on medication. That seems absurd to people at home. I take a moment again to thank the Chair and ranking member for their commitment to working together to meet the challenge of developing a uniform traceability system. This is something that has been worked on for over a decade in this town, and we are finally this close to making it the law of the land. I thank, in particular, my colleague, Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, for being such a great partner in this work. FDA, the HELP Committee staff, Pew, and other stakeholders across the supply chain have been meeting for weeks with my staff and with Senator Burr's staff, all in good faith. Our goal is to finalize a plan after we wrap up this Senate bill. Let me talk about another very exciting part of this bill. If we pass this bill, for the first time the FDA is going to be able to apply 21st-century science to the approval of drugs, particularly drugs that are breakthrough medications, drugs that we know will work in one subset of populations even if they might not work so well in another. This is very important to cancer patients all across the United States who are looking to access these breakthrough therapies. So from the standpoint of driving an industry in this country that in my own State has a median salary of roughly $74,000, and from the point of view of patient health and protecting our supply chain, this FDA reauthorization is a must pass. I thank the members of the committee and especially the chairman and the ranking member for establishing a model for how this Senate should operate. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet.) The Senator from New Hampshire.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise to highlight for my colleagues how Congress now has a critical opportunity to support the competitiveness and prosperity of American agriculture. We need to move the farm bill forward. It is fitting that this week marks the 150th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Federal Department solely dedicated to meeting the needs of America's farmers, ranchers, and rural communities. Agriculture is at the heart of Colorado's history and cultural fabric. It also continues to be one of our most significant economic drivers. At a time when many sectors are struggling to find growth, Colorado farmers and ranchers are more productive than ever, finding innovative ways to harness growing consumer demand for agricultural products both at home and in overseas markets. As evidence of this success, agriculture is the one sector of the U.S. economy that boasts a trade surplus. During the first 2 months of 2012, Colorado exports of agricultural products grew by 25 percent over the same period in 2011, led by an 80-percent increase in dairy exports. This good news comes on the heels of several consecutive years of double-digit increases in Colorado agriculture exports. The USDA is part of this success story. Colorado farmers and ranchers work closely with local USDA employees to support the productivity of their operations and to maintain the health of their land and water resources. It is a vital partnership. And with expiration looming on many programs important to Colorado agriculture, I can think of no better way to commemorate the USDA's 150th anniversary than by reauthorizing the farm bill. Over the last several months, the Senate and House committees on agriculture have come together to craft a bipartisan farm bill that not only provides America's farmers, ranchers, and rural communities with the tools they need to keep growing but also makes a significant contribution toward important national deficit reduction goals. The farm bill passed by the Senate Agriculture Committee makes very significant progress in simplification, accountability, and taxpayer savings. Using feedback I received from over 20 listening sessions statewide, I worked to secure Colorado's top farm bill priorities. In particular, I am encouraged by the farm bill's revamped conservation title. It maintains vital authorities for land and water protection while also consolidating over 20 existing conservation programs to provide producers and landowners with much needed flexibility. I also strongly support efforts by the Senate Agriculture Committee to strengthen the Federal crop insurance program. Time and time again, Colorado farmers have told me that affordable crop insurance is the single most important risk management tool the USDA can provide to producers for addressing today's economic and ecological challenges. According to Colorado State University, agriculture contributes $40 billion toward the State economy annually. Of course, the benefits of a strong farm economy extend far beyond the farm. It means stronger energy, transportation, and retail sectors. It also allows us to provide food assistance to the most vulnerable populations at home and in countries suffering from famine due to drought and conflict. In short, reauthorizing the farm bill is one the most important things this Congress can do to provide farmers and ranchers with the certainty they need to plan for the future. It will help to keep rural America growing and thriving, and it will help to invigorate an economy just now getting back on its feet. Acting on this legislation during USDA's 150th year would make the accomplishment even better.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, during the worst recession since the Great Depression, which we are now fortunately coming out of, the highest the unemployment rate we ever got, even at the depths of that recession, for people with a college degree was 4.5 percent. We saw unemployment rates of 18 percent, 20 percent for certain groups of people--4.5 percent if one is a college graduate. It seems to me, first of all, that is an incredible stress test of the value of a college degree in this 21st century in which we are living. We ought to be making it easier, not harder, for students to go to college. However, as we know, interest rates on Federal student loans are scheduled to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1, unless Congress can get out of its own way and do what is right. For the life of me, I don't know why we cannot come to an agreement. This is not a Democratic or Republican issue. The cost of college has increased 550 percent since 1985. Two-thirds of students in this country rely on loans to afford college. In the past decade, average student loan debt has increased by more than 25 percent. This, by the way, is not a function of people not doing the right thing. It is a function of the fact that median family income has continued to decline in this country for the first time in this country's history, while the cost of college has escalated like crazy. If this increase goes through, it would add thousands of dollars of debt to the more than 166,000 Coloradans who currently receive Federal student loans. Increasing the cost of loans for students already struggling to repay their loans harms both individual students and our fragile economy. When I visited the University of Colorado at Denver just last month, I heard firsthand from students about how important low-interest rates are to that ability to afford college. Many of the students I heard from were worried their student loan debt would prevent them from achieving their career goals or buying a house or making other decisions they are confronting. In Colorado, the average student graduates with more than $23,500 in debt. Just in the last hour, Jeremiah shared the following story with me on Facebook. This is less than an hour ago. He wrote: I am studying geography and environmental science with an emphasis on urban studies and planning at the University of Colorado, Denver. I am the first of my family to attend college and 100 percent of my schooling is paid for by grants and student loans. I worry about the interest rate hike that is bound to happen this summer, and with the economy not in full recovery I worry even more about securing a job after graduation and how to afford repayment of my loans, especially if interest rates are to increase. As the Presiding Officer probably knows, in her State and my State, college attendance is actually at a record high because there are young people all over this country--certainly in my State--who have sought refuge on our university campuses from an economy that doesn't have jobs for them--which is a great place for them to be. It is a great investment in them and a great investment in our future. But for Jeremiah and thousands of others, millions of other students just like them, we are threatening, through our inaction, to actually drive up the cost of college when that is where they need to be. That is the reason why, in the last 2 weeks, more than 1,300 Coloradans have written to my office to demand Congress act to prevent the student loan interest rate from doubling. Here is one letter I received from Kim Haas, who is from Granby, CO. She wrote: While I try to keep informed, I don't generally make a point to contact my representatives. On the issue of student loan rates doubling, I had to speak up. My husband and I live in rural Colorado. I have been working toward becoming a professional counselor. Because of our remote location, I have done most of this online while staying home with my son. This takes a lot of self-motivation and time management skills. It also means taking on a lot of debt. Please take the actions necessary to prevent my rates from doubling. It is imperative to our financial, vocational, and life success. Her life success. I suspect that most of these students are not all that interested in what party affiliation they are in. I think if they were here on this floor, which is empty today, they could use some Colorado common sense to actually get this done. In the Senate and in Washington today we are facing a filibuster even though we know in the end we are going to find a way to do what is right and keep these interest rates from rising. Also, our Facebook page is continually updated. This is from Phil Townsend who wrote in--and I thought this was a pressing question about what we are focused on today. Here is how Phil put it: If you had a loan that would take you a decade to pay off even if you lived as cheap as possible and only ate ramen noodles, would you want its rates doubled? This is real life for the people we represent, and we should get this sorted out. Once again, I urge my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, to come together and give our students all across the country the security they need to pursue their education. For them this isn't a game. For the people who came to the University of Colorado at Denver a month ago and shared their thoughts with me, this isn't a game. This is real life. It is their lives. It is their futures. They are relying on us to sort this out and get it done, and we should.

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I want to take the opportunity to discuss the importance of reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank. Last month while in Colorado I had an opportunity to visit innovative businesses such as Coolerado, which creates energy-efficient air conditioners, Sandhill Scientific, which manufactures medical devices, and Leitner-Poma, which builds gondolas for ski resorts. They are building the gondola that is being installed in Vail this year to mark Vail's 50th anniversary. It was fun to see those American jobs being created for that great American industry. All of these companies rely on financing options from the Export- Import Bank to help them compete in the international marketplace. In fact, while visiting Coolerado, I actually saw an 18-wheel truck back up to the loading dock at Coolerado to load a bunch of their devices to be shipped to Europe as a consequence of the work they had done with the Ex-Im Bank. These are manufacturing jobs right here in the United States, stamped ``Made in America'' on the outside of these devices, and we have been unable to get this through the Senate. Coolerado used credit insurance from the Export-Import Bank to help enter the international market. As we emerge from the worst recession since the Great Depression, we should look for more opportunities to support the next Coolerado, Sandhill Scientific, or Leitner-Poma. Instead, we have been in this prolonged debate about the very existence of the bank, and now we are weeks away from the expiration of the bank's charter. I am quite sure there is not a single one of our international competitors around the world that is engaged in this debate. In fact, they are engaged in absolutely the reverse, which is the question of how to create more exports for their domestic industries, and we should be doing the same. As we look to strengthen and to reverse that curve I talked about earlier of median family income falling and to see rising wages again in this country and create more jobs, we should be looking for opportunities to increase exports at small businesses like the ones I saw in Colorado. We face a profound structural issue in the economy today in this country. As I said on the Senate floor before, our gross domestic product is now higher than it was before we went into this recession, and productivity has been going off like a skyrocket since the early 1990s. As we responded to competition from China and India, the use of technology to make businesses more efficient and the recession itself drove productivity through the roof because firms had to figure out how to get through these difficult times with fewer people. Median family income has fallen, and we have 23 or 24 million people in this economy who are either unemployed or underemployed. Wage growth and job growth--for the first time in the country's history--has decoupled from GDP growth. That happened during our last recovery under the previous administration. I make this statement not as a partisan observation; that is just the time that it happened. We saw economic growth, but we didn't see wage growth and we didn't see job growth. Now I fear we are seeing the same sort of trend in our economy. There are two important solutions. One I mentioned earlier, which is that education is vitally important because if people are educated, they are more likely to get a job in this 21st-century economy. Remember, the worst that the unemployment rate ever got for people with a college degree was 4.5 percent. The other part of that equation is innovation. It is businesses that start tomorrow, next week, and the week after that are actually going to create jobs that are going to lift wages. This is one of the reasons I have been so glad to work with the Presiding Officer as we think of new ways of approaching regulations at the FDA to ask the question: Are we driving bioscience in the United States or are we driving venture capital offshore to look for other opportunities? We should be up day and night thinking about this in the Senate because that is how we are going to bring an alignment back between the economic growth the economists tell us we are having and the job growth and the wage growth the people at home want to see. There is a lot of talk in this Chamber about winners and losers and how the government shouldn't pick winners and losers--we hear that a lot here--as if the current Tax Code isn't full of choices that have already been made about winners and losers. A lot of those choices that have been made have been made for the benefit of incumbents--not here but incumbent enterprises. However, it is the innovators that we are leaving behind. As we think about comprehensive tax reform, which I hope we get to sooner rather than later, I think on every one of these questions we should be asking ourselves: Is this credit or is this incentive or is this inducement more or less likely to drive job growth in the United States, to drive incomes up in the United States, or to drive exports from the United States? If the answer to that is no, we should stop doing it. This has to be more thoughtful than a fight between one narrow interest and another narrow interest. I think the American people are demanding that, and we should respond. In the short term, the work in front of us now is to get this Export- Import Bank bill to the floor, to get it voted on, and to pass it as they did in the House of Representatives yesterday. I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise to talk about the importance of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act. As a husband and as a father of three young daughters, this issue is especially personal to me. This piece of legislation provides extremely valuable Federal resources to help victims of domestic and sexual violence rebuild their lives. Whether it comes in the form of an emergency shelter, legal assistance, a crisis hotline or advocacy, this bill provides the assistance that victims need, especially in the most vulnerable time. Domestic violence, spousal abuse, and sexual assaults represent enormous public policy challenges. Because of the very personal nature of these crimes, it can be extremely difficult for victims to come forward to get the help they need, let alone call out those who have committed these heinous crimes. But since this bill was first enacted, the annual incidence of domestic violence continues to drop. Additionally, domestic violence reporting has dramatically increased and victims are receiving lifesaving assistance to help them move forward with their lives. In my home State of Colorado, we continue to make great progress reducing the number of domestic and sexual assaults that occur, but we must continue to do more. In 2010, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control published a report which estimated that 451,000 women in Colorado were victims of rape in their lifetime. It also estimated that 897,000 Colorado women were victims of sexual violence other than rape in their lifetime. That same report said 505,000 men had been victims of sexual violence in their lifetime. These statistics are staggering in my view, and they make the case for why we had to pass this bill and continue to strengthen the programs that provide lifesaving services. The Violence Against Women Act also includes invaluable programs to coordinate community efforts to respond to incidents of domestic and sexual violence by training police officers, judges, and other members of the criminal justice system. The legal system in our country is already stretched so thin. The resources provided by this bill will help law enforcement and court officials track down and bring to justice those who commit these crimes. In my opinion, we can't do enough to get these criminals off the streets. For instance, we need to ensure that we support protection and prevention services such as training judges and police officers on how to identify and respond to abusive situations. We can significantly decrease domestic violence fatalities and the number of displaced families if we have better trained officers in our legal system and health and human services arena. Finally, I wish to thank Chairman Leahy for his tireless efforts to move this critical piece of legislation forward, as well as Senators Murray and Klobuchar for their continued leadership on behalf of women and children all across the Nation. With a big bipartisan vote today in the Senate, we came together to make sure the Violence Against Women Act was passed. With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 2047 and ask unanimous consent that it be modified with the changes that are at the desk.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise on behalf of amendment No. 2047, which I have cosponsored with Senator Blunt. I deeply appreciate his leadership. This bipartisan amendment would allow for a nonpaid advocate to represent communities facing a closure or a consolidation. Advocates would represent their communities' interests throughout closure proceedings and would work with the Postal Service to identify alternative methods to maintain service standards. Advocates would have access to documents, data, and reports related to the proposed closure. Advocates would also have authority to appeal a final decision on closure to the Postal Regulatory Commission if there was a concern it would hurt service standards. Finally, the amendment would allow the strategic commission already contained within this bill to develop interagency agreements so that post offices could provide additional government services, such as the issuance of Social Security cards and hunting and fishing licenses, similar to what it already does for passports. In 2011, to take 1 year, the Postal Service accepted 5.6 million passport applications that generated $182 million in revenue. This amendment has the potential to cut government costs, improve access, and help keep post offices open by supplementing revenue streams in a way that is particularly helpful to our rural communities. I hope the Senate could adopt this amendment. I yield to my colleague Senator Blunt and thank him for his work.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to discuss our bipartisan efforts to pass a crowdfunding amendment that provides needed flexibility but also ensures that crowdfunding has sufficient oversight and investor protections. I was proud to work with Senators Merkley and Brown in crafting this bipartisan proposal. The Senate passed our amendment by a 64 to 35 margin. The House of Representatives subsequently passed our language when it considered the JOBS legislation earlier this week. As the Securities and Exchange Commission works to implement this new law, it is my hope that it will recognize that the funding portal registration process is meant to be more streamlined and less burdensome than traditional broker-dealer registration. Given the size of the investments that are likely to occur in crowdfunding, the SEC should work to provide an appropriate level of oversight without making it cost-prohibitive to become a funding portal. Funding portals should be allowed to organize and sort information based on certain criteria. This will make it easier for individuals to find the types of companies in which they can potentially invest. This type of capability--commonly referred to as curation--should not constitute investment advice or recommendations, which the law otherwise prohibits. Similarly, funding portals should be allowed to engage in due diligence services. This would include providing templates and forms, which will enable issuers to comply with the underlying statute. In crafting this law, it was our intent to allow funding portals to provide such services. We also sought to provide the Securities and Exchange Commission sufficient flexibility to promulgate rules to ensure individuals have the necessary information and protections to make informed investment decisions. It is my hope that the Commission will exercise such discretion judiciously and will not create a regulatory regime that is too cumbersome and expensive for funding portals to operate or for issuers to sell their securities. In preparing the law, we sought to find the right balance, preserving basic investor protections while ensuring enough entrepreneurial flexibility to help this promising medium take off for the good of our economy. I am hopeful that the Commission will respect this balance as it moves forward to implement this law. Finally, we provided 270 days for the Commission to implement this new law. I hope the SEC will make every effort possible to meet this deadline.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, today I want to honor Senator Barbara Mikulski, who has represented the people of Maryland for more than 35 years, and who earlier this week became the longest-serving female Member of Congress. Senator Mikulski is a fighter, a fearless leader and a role model for women and young girls everywhere, including my three daughters, Caroline, Halina and Anne. During the course of her distinguished career, Senator Mikulski has been an incredibly effective advocate, and in particular has taken a leadership role in mentoring other women as they follow in her footsteps to the halls of Congress. She has represented Maryland exceptionally well--on issues ranging from civil rights and the environment, to issues affecting working families and our criminal justice system. Tracking Senator Mikulski's career is also a good way to follow the progress of women in our country. When first elected to Congress for Maryland's 3rd district in 1976, Senator Mikulski was one of 21 women serving in Congress. Today there are 92 women serving, thanks in large part to the trailblazing efforts of Senator Mikulski. Through her work in an array of roles, from the women's amendment in the Affordable Care Act to her leadership on the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families, Senator Mikulski is known as a coalition builder. This role has led her to cultivate personal and professional partnerships among the members of the Senate. Likely some of the country's most important work is done during the bipartisan dinners she frequently hosts for her female Senate colleagues. I am proud that my first vote as a Senator in January 2009 was in favor of one of Senator Mikulski's bills, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which guarantees women equal pay for equal work. And I have thoroughly enjoyed working with her in the Senate HELP Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization and passage of the Affordable Care Act. I look forward to continuing to work with Senator Mikulski on these and other important issues in the Senate. March is Women's History Month, and I can think of no better time to honor and reflect on what Senator Mikulski's work has meant to the United States Senate and to her constituents in Maryland. Let us follow the leadership of Senator Barbara Mikulski and continue to fight for a better America.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Thank you, Madam President. And I thank the Senator from Illinois for his leadership and agree it is vital we pass the transportation bill.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, in my townhalls we talk about a lot of things that are very different from what people argue about in this place. One of the issues we talk about is the economy. And we talk about these four lines, as shown on this chart. The first line is our gross domestic product, the economic output of the United States of America, which is higher today than it was before we went into this recession. A lot of people do not know that. We are producing more than we were producing before we went into the recession. Our productivity has gone up dramatically since the early 1990s, as we have responded to competition from China and India and other places, as we have used technology to enhance our economic output. We have the most productive economy we have ever seen. But we also face some very potentially catastrophic circumstances in this economy, one of which is that median family income has fallen for the last 10 years--the first time that has happened in our country's history. And the other is that we have 23 or 24 million people who are unemployed or underemployed in an economy that is producing what it was producing before the recession happened. That is a structural issue. I have spoken on this floor about the importance of education in that context because the worst the unemployment rate ever got for people with a college degree during the worst recession since the Great Depression was 4\1/2\ percent. That is a pretty good stress test of the value of a college education. The other thing we need to make sure we are doing as a country is continuing to innovate and drive innovation across the United States because it is those companies--the ones that are created tomorrow, the ones that are created next week--that are going to create new jobs in this country. That is going to drive our median family income up instead of down. That is why I am on the floor today to talk about a bipartisan bill, a bill Senator Merkley and Senator Brown and I have worked on, on crowdfunding. It is an amendment that I hope will come to the floor. I hope we can get to a vote. Over the past months, we have worked together in a bipartisan way on a crowdfunding proposal that would allow crowdfunding to thrive but would also create an appropriate level of oversight and investor protection. We have done something very unusual in this town: we took time to listen to people. We listened to crowdfunding platforms, entrepreneurs, and investor protection advocates. Many of them support this bill and have endorsed this bill. We worked hard to incorporate their ideas. As a result, we have a bipartisan amendment that has the support of both businesses and consumer advocates. That is something which does not happen frequently in this town. I hope we will have a chance to vote on it. I will urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to see this as a real opportunity to take one step--not a huge step but one important step--forward to filling this gap we see, to creating an economy again where rising economic output also means rising wages, and that rising economic output also means growing jobs. This crowdfunding amendment is a chance to do it. It is bipartisan. I have some letters of support, and I ask unanimous consent that they be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNET. It moves this ball down the field. I hope it establishes a model for how we can work together to make sure that we are actually addressing things I am hearing about in the townhalls and that we are driving wage growth and job growth here in the United States. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to recognize the Senator from Oregon, Mr. Merkley, for his leadership on this issue and for his willingness, when times got tough, to dig even deeper and make sure we get to the balanced approach that is reflected in this amendment. It is a bipartisan amendment, which around this place I think is worthy of all of us taking a moment to recognize, and it is an amendment the people who know most about crowdfunding support. I wish to read several paragraphs from some of those folks. From Launcht, which is a crowdfunding platform, they note that our compromise: [i]s important because, unlike previous bills, for the first time, we have a Senate bill with bipartisan sponsorship, a balance of state oversight and federal uniformity, industry standard investor protections, and workable funding caps. From the National Small Business Association, we hear that our compromise: [w]ould promote entrepreneurship, job creation and economic growth by making it much easier for small companies to raise capital and get new ideas off the ground. This legislation represents a reasonable effort to accommodate differing points of view and to move this important idea forward. One prominent investor protection advocate wrote that: [t]he CROWDFUND Act addresses this concern by providing significant regulatory relief to very small issuers without unreasonably compromising the investor protection provisions on which the federal securities laws are grounded and the long-term success of the U.S. securities markets has been based. The Senator from Oregon did an excellent job of describing the provisions in this bill, so I am not going to go over that ground again. But I do wish to talk for a moment before I yield to the Senator from Rhode Island about what it is we are trying to solve. Too often I think we don't ask ourselves what the nature of the problem is we are trying to solve before we actually set about solving it, and then--no surprise--we end up actually making matters worse. In my townhalls the chief concern of the people who come is that median family income has continued to decline in this country. For the first time in this country's history, the middle class is earning less at the end of the decade than they were at the beginning of the decade. That has never happened before in the United States. So person after person has come and said: Michael, I have done what I was supposed to do. I kept working at my job. Nobody said I didn't do a good job. But my wage is actually less in real dollars today than it was at the beginning of the decade, but the cost of health insurance continues to go up, the cost of college. I have had at least half a dozen people say to me they cannot afford to send their kid to the best college they got into. I can't think of anything that is more of a waste of our productivity than that. The essential problem we are facing in this economy is structural. Our gross domestic product, believe it or not, as we stand here, is higher than it was when we went into this recession, the worst recession since the Great Depression. Productivity is also way up. The efficiency with which we are driving that economic growth is way up because we have had to respond to competition from abroad. We can't take anything for granted anymore. We have employed technology to drive productivity from the cotton pickers in my wife's hometown to the largest Fortune 500 companies that we have, and we have 23 or 24 million people who are either unemployed or underemployed in this economy. The economic output is back, but it has decoupled from wages and it has decoupled from job growth and that was true before we went into the worst recession. You see, the last period of economic growth in this country's history is the first time our economy grew and wages fell, that our economy grew and that we lost jobs. It was a decoupling of economic growth from wage growth and from job growth. There is something terribly wrong with that picture, and it is creating an enormous downward pressure on the middle class in this country. There are a bunch of things we need to do, but there are two major things that I think we need to do; one is, we need to educate our people for the 21st century. The worst the unemployment rate ever got for people with a college degree in the worst recession since the Great Depression, the one we just went through, was 4.5 percent. That is a pretty good stress test, it seems to me, of the value of a college education in the 21st century. But as a country today, if someone is a child living in poverty, their chances of getting a college degree are 9 in 100. If we don't change the way we educate people in this country, we will continue to see 91 of 100 children living in poverty constrained to the margin of our economy and the margin of this democracy. That is an important piece of work. We have a vital national interest in that, and we are not paying attention to it here. But also we have to create the conditions in this country where we are driving innovation and driving job growth because the days of just expecting the largest companies in this country to create jobs are over. The jobs that went away in the 20th century, many of them are not coming back in the 21st century. It is about businesses that are started tomorrow and next week and the week after that and the month after that. In order to create those sorts of conditions, the amendment we have presented, this crowdfunding amendment, could unleash billions of dollars, as the Senator from Oregon said, of local investment, investment on Main Street--or on someone else's Main Street through the Internet--that could allow people with great innovative ideas for the first time to raise capital from our middle class and from other people who would like to participate in this kind of new business venture. This is not all we need to do. There are many things we need to do, and I think there are things in this overall bill we need to fix. But this bipartisan amendment represents a real step forward. As we look to the future, it is the reason we need to do comprehensive tax reform in this Congress. It is the reason we need to fundamentally think differently in this Congress about our regulations. We should be asking ourselves the question: Are we more or less likely to be creating jobs in the United States with rising wages? I think we should put the politics of this aside because there isn't a person in this Chamber who doesn't want to do this. We start, though, with the recognition that we have structural issues we need to resolve. I hope everybody who hasn't had the chance to get a look at the amendment will look at it. I hope people on both sides of the aisle will support this amendment. I am very pleased it is bipartisan, with Senator Merkley and Senator Brown, and I look forward to voting on this amendment this afternoon. I see the Senator from Rhode Island is here. I thank him for his leadership on this legislation, and I yield the floor.