Maria Cantwell

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, some days we need a reminder of what perspective in the face of crisis really accomplishes. We know that 50 years after this historic speech, we have an understanding about how incredibly magnificent this moment was, so I am so glad to join my colleague in commemorating it. It was about holding the consciousness of a society and how to respond to an unbelievable, tragic, violent event and to hold the consciousness of a society with words--just words. And that is the point--that words matter; that words matter to a society. They are what holds us together. They are what creates unity. They are what creates perspective. In this case, they also created history. Senator Kennedy spoke to a crowd in Indianapolis and announced the death of Martin Luther King--an unbelievable responsibility. If you watch now in videos of the speech, you will hear the gasps of the audience, who was unaware that that event, in that moment, had taken place. Yet he spoke to the crowd about why violence and retribution should not be pursued. He created calm among chaos. He created a moment where everybody realized that they were commemorating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, that his life had been about a nonviolent response to tragedy and to the challenges we face. When we commemorate this moment with this designation, we are commemorating a moment, in my opinion, of the human spirit. We are commemorating a moment--the incredible pain Robert Kennedy must have felt, knowing that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. Yet he spoke to the crowd about keeping the peace and remembering the lessons of Dr. King. We will never know what kind of Presidency RFK might have given our Nation, but we know this from his speech: We know what kind of man he was, and we know what kind of human spirit and soul can communicate, in that moment of tragedy, the direction of a nation. It is so important at this moment in our history that we reflect on this 50th anniversary. At a time when it is better to use words to speak calmly and competently in the face of tragedy, I hope that here in Washington, we will remember one of the greatest political speeches of all time. I yield the floor.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, in every corner of our country today and across my State in Washington, countless students are taking part in a walkout in support of reforms to combat gun violence. I stand in solidarity with these students who are trying to provide an example of why we must make progress on this issue. No student should fear for their life while attending school, and I will continue to work on solutions here to curb gun violence. We in Washington State have been able to make progress by passing initiatives to close gun show loopholes and to move forward on extreme person legislation. I should say that that was passed by the citizens of our State. We should look at the example of Washington's initiatives and the success we have had in our State in curbing gun violence as commonsense solutions that should be considered here in Washington, DC. When we look at these issues, I am reminded of the tragic shootings in our State--of Sam Strahan, from Spokane, who was killed, and individuals who were killed in Washington in a Marysville-Tulalip shooting when Jaylen Fryberg, at just 15 years old, opened fire on students and killed Gia Soriano, Andrew Fryberg, Shaylee Chuckulnaskit, and Zoe Galasso and wounded Nathan Hatch. These tragedies are more than we can take at our schools. These tragedies are something that we need to address here in Washington. So I stand in solidarity with our students who are trying to address these issues and address our Nation's need to come together and provide better solutions to protect our students. We are still heartbroken about this shooting in the sense of it being an example of the challenges we face--a young man who took his father's gun. He was a father who never should have had the gun to begin with because he was on a domestic violence restraining order. Yet he was still able to go to a store, get the gun, and keep the gun in the home. Then the young student was able to take that to school. I want all of these families to know that we still think of them, that we are still mourning the loss of these individuals, and that we are working very hard with our colleagues to come to some resolution. I yield the floor.

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

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I wish to speak about an urgent challenge facing my constituents and my colleagues in the Pacific Northwest that unfortunately was ignored in this massive legislative mishmash we were asked to vote up or down on in the middle of the night: wildfires. Communities across the West, including my home State of Washington, are being torn apart by these disasters. Last year, the Diamond Creek fire burned 128,000 acres in my State. In 2016, the Okanogan Complex burned 305,000 acres. Just those two fires alone burned an area around two-thirds the size of Rhode Island, and both devastating events spewed ash and toxic smoke across a vast region and destroyed billions of dollars' worth of forest products. I am very concerned that these are not freak or rare, once-in-a- generation events. According to our best scientists, the killer combination of climate change and decades of inadequate forest management has made these monster infernos the new normal. The numbers speak for themselves. Ten thousand, that is the number of houses that have been burned down in wildfires last year. Eighteen billion, that is the initial estimate of how much damage wildfires caused just in California last year. Sadly, 54 Americans were killed by these wildfires in 2017. That is why I have spent years collaborating with other Senators from affected States to hammer out commonsense, bipartisan solutions to this increasingly urgent challenge. First and foremost is the inadequate funding for fire prevention and suppression programs. How much longer are we going to shortchange fire programs? The fire budget Congress allocated for this last year was short by over $1.4 billion. Under current law, when there is a funding shortfall like this, the Forest Service has to rob its own programs to make it up. What programs? The ones dedicated to fire prevention and forest restoration that could help prevent future fires. That is crazy and very short- sighted. Also, we need a better management strategy for our national forests-- an innovative strategy to manage our forests in smarter, more efficient, and more sustainable ways. There are many case studies of how we can reduce fire risk and increase local forestry jobs, all while restoring forest ecosystems. For example, the Colville National Forest has been using innovative management tools to reduce the risk of wildfire in northeast Washington. The forward-thinking restoration work being performed by Vaagen Brothers Lumber in Colville has enabled this small National Forest to be ranked in the top three forest products-producing national forests in the country. Their holistic approach to forest restoration has also earned them the proud spot as the No. 1 national forest for number of culverts replaced to improve fish passage and water quality. The success of local projects cannot help but inspire me and my colleagues. I am pleased to report that all of the Senators from the Northwest--both Democrat and Republican--have agreed on what is needed to enable the Forest Service to be proactive rather than simply reactive when it comes to wildfires. Senators Risch, Wyden, Crapo, Murray, Merkley, and I agree that the Forest Service's fire-borrowing problem needs to be fixed. All of us cosponsored legislation to do that. Senators Risch, Wyden, Crapo, Murray, Merkley, and I also all agree that we should treat the most at-risk parts of the national forests before they burn up and do so in a way that is supported by science. All of us cosponsored legislation to also do that. These bills have been endorsed by environmental groups, timber industry, firefighter organizations, and local governments. All of these local and national stakeholders are in agreement, that we need to supply the Forest Service and impacted communities with funding, provide jobs in rural communities, and reduce the fire risk in our most at-risk forests. Unfortunately, despite the urgency of the problem, despite the strong consensus on both sides of the aisle and amongst a diverse range of stakeholders, despite the fact that we have hammered out legislative text, it appears the inclusion of our bipartisan measure is being blocked from being included in the pending bill. It is hard to overemphasize my frustration at the current situation. It took weeks, months, and in some cases years to develop these proposals and vet with affected stakeholders this suite of bipartisan bills. The bipartisan consensus legislation we offered last week included a permanent fix to the Forest Service's fire-borrowing problem. That was legislation cosponsored by 15 Senators. Our proposal also included funding for Secure Rural Schools. That bipartisan legislation was cosponsored by 32 Senators. It turns out there were actors set on blocking our attempts to enact reasonable wildfire legislation. We received a counteroffer at the eleventh hour, and it contained only a short-term funding solution, with eight new radical land management policies that they knew we could not accept. The new provisions ranged from repealing protections for old-growth trees on the Tongass National Forest to giving away Federal land. Other objectionable provisions included allowing exemptions for large clearcuts from environmental review and removing people's ability to file lawsuits on Forest Service projects in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. That is ridiculous. Instead of working to forward bipartisan ideas, Republican leadership decided to inject ``poison pill'' environmental riders into the process in a ``take it or leave it'' midnight offer. This leaves many of us with a lot of doubt as to whether Republican leadership has ever been serious about fixing wildland fire budgeting. History tonight shows that they see it only as a vehicle to sideline long-established environmental laws that protect people, wildlife, and our public lands. Well, I want to tell everyone here that we are not giving up. There are so many bipartisan, noncontroversial improvements to Forest Service management that can be enacted. Members, like my colleagues from the Northwest, want to get something done. Our constituents are demanding it, and we need to do it before the next fire season starts in just a few months. I want the record to reflect that, while there were many provisions I supported in the underlying legislation, I could not in good conscience vote for a bill that purposely left urgently needed wildland firefighting legislation on the cutting room floor. We can and must do better next time, and I am going to keep working at it until we get this problem addressed.

Ms. CANTWELL

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

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak against the Trump administration's egregious attack on our pristine coastlines in the Pacific, the Atlantic, Alaska, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Dramatic increases in oil and gas development offshore pose a direct threat to our coastal economies in the United States, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. I know many of my colleagues are going to join me on the floor this afternoon to talk about this and about the specific impacts in their areas. The draft leasing plan, which is what has been put forth by the Secretary of the Interior, is an unprecedented attempt to allow offshore oil and gas drilling in over 90 percent of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, including in Washington and Oregon. The truth is that instead of creating new jobs in the oil and gas sector, the administration is poised to choose big oil jobs over the ocean-dependent industries like fishing, shipbuilding, and tourism on our coasts. I know this because I just traveled to many of our coastal communities in the State of Washington, which make their livelihoods off of fishing or tourism, that are very concerned by this proposal. And just yesterday, a public hearing was supposed to take place in Tacoma, WA, which was canceled. The Trump administration failed to account for the value of the existing robust coastal and ocean economies that could be jeopardized by expanding offshore drilling in those areas. Our ocean-related economy is so important to our State that expanding drilling directly threatens the ocean environment and marine resources that support millions of jobs in construction, fishing, shipbuilding, tourism, recreation, and maritime transport. The ocean-related industries in the areas targeted by the administration's plan contribute over 2.2 million direct jobs, nearly $75 billion in wages, and over $150 billion in GDP. The reason I bring this up is that the economic benefits of these industries cannot be overstated: nearly $8 billion from fishing and seafood, nearly $70 billion from marine transport, and over $125 billion from tourism and recreation. We know that oilspills or other natural disasters related to oil and gas activities, such as the Exxon Valdez or the Deepwater Horizon disaster, can disrupt entire coastal economies. For example, if you took just the Deepwater Horizon spill in size and compared it to the coastal areas of Washington and Oregon, the impacted area would cover all of Washington and a big chunk of Oregon. We know that these can be devastating. The shore-adjacent counties in the targeted areas host over 39 million jobs and contribute over $2 trillion in wages. The economies of the shore-adjacent counties represent 65 percent of the affected coastal States' GDPs. That is just one way of saying that coastal States and their economies are big drivers in our U.S. economy and that they are extremely dependent on clean water, coasts, our oceans, and our fisheries. The Washington coast economy relies on healthy, sustainable oceans, which support our fisheries in places such as Grays Harbor and Pacific County and in many other parts of our State, to make sure they have seafood processing, recreation, and tourism. Our Washington maritime economy is worth $50 billion in economic activity and 191,000 jobs, and tourism on the coast adds jobs for anglers, charter boats, cruise guides, restaurants, hotels, and more, which are so iconic in the Pacific Northwest. They are the culture and heritage of our coastal communities. The fact that so many recreational fishermen can be out on our healthy oceans and attracting more people to come and explore is so much a part of the Northwest that putting it at risk to oilspill activities or activities related to exploration is just not something these communities want to do. Just this past week, I received resolutions from various communities on our Pacific coast that urged that this idea be turned down. The Washington and Oregon coasts are not really suited for oil and gas development. First of all, there are extreme sea states, treacherous storms, and the remote nature of our coastlines. As one of our maritime communities told me, it doesn't really have the resources for cleanup in the area. If a spill happened, who would be there to clean it up? In the meantime, our fishermen, if they have oil sheens behind their fishing boats, can be fined. If we are ready to fine fishermen for oil sheens behind their boats, why are we proposing a plan in the treacherous waters of the Pacific Northwest without having any idea who is going to clean up the mess? Adding to the risk in the Pacific Northwest is the Cascadia Subduction Zone--one of the most dangerous faults in the United States. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is long overdue to create a significant earthquake. You hear from lots of people about this. In fact, after The New Yorker wrote a big story called ``The Really Big One,'' many people from across the country emailed me to ask: Are we ready for this to happen? I can tell you, with what happened in Japan, people are very concerned about how we prepare for that in the Pacific Northwest. So it makes no sense to put an oil rig on one of the most high-risk, earthquake-prone zones in the United States. In a 1991 spill, the dangerous and choppy seas prevented first responders from being able to contain more of the spill. That is why I have fought to improve oilspill prevention and response in the State of Washington by deploying our Neah Bay tug, which is a full-time tug, to make sure we get boats safely through our waters; by increasing oilspill response equipment throughout the Strait of Juan de Fuca; and by pushing for the Coast Guard to invest in research on tar sands oil. Those are some of the things we can do to protect ourselves, but we need to do much more. We must weigh future decisions about where we should allow oil and gas exploration with the costs to our coastal economies. We must incorporate the lessons we have learned from disasters such as Deepwater Horizon, which is part of this picture, or the Exxon Valdez in order to improve oilspill prevention, response, and safety. Herring fish from Prince William Sound are still very much impacted and have not fully recovered after the Exxon Valdez. So telling our fishermen that this is a great idea, that Washington fisheries, whether they be crab or other fisheries, should be susceptible to these kinds of spills--that is just not something our fishermen want to hear. In addition to these efforts to drill off of our coasts--efforts that have been repeatedly blocked in the past--President Trump wants to roll back important safety regulations that were put in place after Deepwater Horizon, such as blowout preventer systems, well control, and production safety systems. Now Secretary Zinke wants to open these coastal areas. Our State has been responding to his proposal for months and months. We gave very important data to say that this was not a good idea off the coast of Washington. It is interesting because Secretary Zinke made a last- minute decision with regard to Florida, which didn't turn in its information about its State on this issue. Then later, after a visit with the Governor, Secretary Zinke said that this was something he didn't want to see happen. The people of Washington don't want political games played. They want to have their say on this issue, and they want to make sure their voices are heard loud and clear. Our coastal economies are too important to us, from a jobs and cultural perspective, to go about even proposing the research on drilling in our coastal areas. I am disappointed that yesterday there was a last-minute postponement of a public meeting that was supposed to take place in Tacoma, WA, to hear from our citizens about their opposition to expanding oil drilling off our coasts. I am not sure whether there will be a hearing rescheduled or exactly what was behind the cancelation, but it was one of the first opportunities Washingtonians could have had to express their views on this issue. Based on the vocal opposition of our communities, I sent a letter to Secretary Zinke, with 15 of my House and Senate colleagues from the Pacific Northwest, calling on Washington and Oregon to not be part of a future lease program. I know that many people, including our Governor, have done the same. Members from the Pacific, Atlantic, gulf coast, and even Alaska are writing to Secretary Zinke, asking him to exclude their areas from future drilling activities. I am very concerned that we are wasting taxpayer money in reanalyzing what we have analyzed before--that oil and gas development in the Pacific Northwest does not make sense for our coastal communities. We will fight to protect our fishing jobs, our tourism, our recreation, and all of the things that are part of the center of our culture on our coasts. We hope Secretary Zinke will follow science, protect our coastal economy, stop this foolish idea that drilling off of our coast is either necessary or prudent, and move about to protect our Federal lands. I thank the Presiding Officer. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I join many of my colleagues in voicing my strong opposition to S. 2311, the 20-week abortion ban bill. This legislation puts political ideology ahead of women's health and tramples on women's constitutional rights. First, the 20-week abortion ban intrudes on private healthcare decisions. Reproductive health choices are highly personal and individualized and should be left squarely in the hands of women in consultation with their physician, healthcare team, and loved ones. S. 2311 violates this principle by subjecting private healthcare choices to an arbitrary and unscientific blanket ban. Second, the 20-week abortion ban violates the longstanding constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. In 1973, a 7-2 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that the constitutional right to privacy includes the right to terminate a pregnancy. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected bans on abortions before viability, which generally occurs well after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Today, 7 in 10 Americans support upholding Roe v. Wade. A diverse coalition of Americans--including physicians, civil rights advocates, and faith organizations--has come out against this legislation for a number of reasons. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American College of Nurse-Midwives, for instance, have said that the legislation ``. . . would dictate how physicians should care for their patients based on inaccurate and unscientific claims.'' The American Civil Liberties Union has said this legislation ``. . . directly contradicts longstanding precedent holding that a woman should `be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion' when deciding whether to continue or terminate a pre-viability pregnancy.'' And Three dozen faith-based organizations have written in opposition to this legislation, saying, ``The proper role of government in the United States is not to privilege one set of religious views over others but to protect each person's right and ability to make decisions according to their own beliefs and values.'' We should be working to open up access to reproductive healthcare for more women and families, not fewer. Effective family planning services, including birth control, have a proven record of boosting health and economic mobility while reducing unwanted pregnancies. The U.S. Senate has urgent priorities to address. We should not be wasting time on another misguided attempt to take away women's healthcare and constitutional rights. I strongly oppose S. 2311.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, today the Senate will vote on the nomination of Alex Azar, President Trump's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services. I join many of my colleagues in expressing concerns about this nominee. First, I believe Mr. Azar will accelerate the Trump administration and congressional Republicans' harmful agenda on Medicaid, which I view as nothing less than a war on Medicaid. Medicaid is a lifeline for millions of Americans and a smart healthcare and economic strategy for our country. Last year, I spent hours on the Senate floor presenting data and information to my colleagues showing why cutting and capping Medicaid is a very bad idea. I met with Medicaid patients, safety net hospitals, community health centers, and local elected officials in every corner of my State. They had a crystal-clear message for me: Cutting and capping Medicaid will be bad for patients, bad for the healthcare delivery system, bad for local economies, and bad for our State. They expressed a consensus view that capping Medicaid is not healthcare reform, nor is it innovation; it is simply a budget mechanism to throw people off of healthcare. Mr. Azar has stated that he favors a block grant or per-capita cap financing approach for Medicaid. He speaks highly of the current Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, CMS, Administrator and their troubling regulatory agenda for Medicaid. Mr. Azar has been a cheerleader for the partisan legislation we debated last year that would permanently eviscerate Medicaid. These bills, depending on each iteration, would take Medicaid coverage from 14 million Americans, sunset the successful Medicaid expansion, and eliminate up to one-third of Federal Medicaid investment over the next two decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office. I have every reason to believe that Mr. Azar would continue and accelerate the Trump administration's war on Medicaid. Second, I have no evidence to suggest that Mr. Azar will stop the Trump administration's track record of throwing needless chaos into the individual health insurance markets. There is bipartisan agreement that we need to make health insurance more affordable, particularly in the individual market, where about 7 percent of Americans buy coverage; yet the Trump administration has rejected bipartisan consensus and moved us backwards. This administration has proposed to unleash ``junk insurance'' under the guise of association health plans, cancelled cost-sharing reduction payments, created roadblocks to insurance enrollment, and pursued backdoor schemes to rescind protections for people with preexisting conditions. I have every indication that Mr. Azar will continue this trajectory of higher costs, less coverage, and more uncertainty. I believe we can and must tackle rising healthcare costs by innovating in the delivery of healthcare, instead of simply capping programs and kicking people off coverage. To that end, I hope that Mr. Azar will advance true delivery system change in the Medicare Program, as he says he wants to, and engage with Senators of both parties to work on good ideas to bring more value and efficiency to our healthcare system. For these reasons, I will oppose Mr. Azar's confirmation to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak about this legislation. At the outset, I thank my colleague from Georgia and the Senator from Utah for their work on the affordable housing tax credit. The Senator from Utah said: Let's work together. I stand ready to work with him on affordable housing in the future, and, hopefully, with the Senator from Georgia, we can make progress on what is a crisis in America. I come to speak in opposition to the legislation before us today, the tax reconciliation bill. One of the requirements of the legislation that I most ardently oppose is including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas development. Basically, this bill pays for the tax cuts for corporations and millionaires by raising taxes on the middle class, undermining healthcare, and requiring oil drilling in one of our Nation's most iconic national wildlife refuges. Everyone should understand that a vote for this reconciliation bill is a vote that will go to the biological heart of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and require drilling. I believe that opening up the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling is being done as a supposed revenue raiser to offset the soaring costs of this tax bill for corporations and the wealthy, but the process that it went through is a sham. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge will raise less than $1 billion over 10 years. This doesn't even meet the $1 billion reconciliation instruction, and it certainly doesn't represent a serious offset to the huge deficits in the bill. To put this in perspective, less than seven one-hundredths of 1 percent of the $1.5 trillion increase in the national debt will be from this policy in this legislation. Drilling in the Arctic really has nothing to do with serious budgetary policy, but it has everything to do with evading regular order to pass something that could never pass in the regular order of the legislative process. In addition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, this bill would sell 7 million barrels of oil from our Nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. A portion of that sale is simply to meet the reconciliation instructions--that is to say, to make this bill work. Yet the sale of oil from our petroleum reserve would also provide a $300 million windfall to four States--Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. So this bill is selling off oil in order to pay for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I do not believe that that makes sense. Under this sham process, the bill will turn one of our Nation's wildest and most pristine areas into an oil field. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the largest refuge in our Nation and is one of the crown jewels for us in the United States for wildlife refuges. I believe it is a U.S. Serengeti. We received a letter from Jane Goodall, who basically said: Around the globe so many indigenous people have been harmed in the name of ``progress''--let us not add one more tragedy to the list. We have other sources of energy. I ask unanimous consent that the entire letter we received from the Jane Goodall Institute be printed in the Record.

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, describes it as ``the only conservation system unit that protects, in an undisturbed condition, a complete spectrum of the Arctic ecosystems in North America.'' It is home to an incredible diversity of wildlife--47 different species of mammals, including polar bears, grizzly bears, wolves, Dall sheep, moose, musk ox, and caribou. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge also provides important habitat for over 40 species of fish and more than 200 species of migratory birds. So why would we want to destroy this refuge? It was first established by the Eisenhower administration. Congress later protected this amazing Arctic area and its ecosystem in order to protect the wildlife and protect the habitat because of its incredible diversity. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is really known as the ``last great wilderness'' in our country, one of the great, last wild places, but this legislation turns that on its head. It would make oil and gas development one of the statutory purposes of the Wildlife Refuge, and under this legislation, this Refuge would become the only Refuge where oil and gas development is required by law. It opens up the entire 1.5 million-acre coastal plain for oil and gas exploration and requires the leasing of at least 800,000 acres. It requires the leasing of areas with the highest oil and gas potential, no matter the consequences for the wildlife or the environment. The bill requires that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be managed as a petroleum reserve, which is unprecedented, and it undercuts managing the Refuge for wildlife. The bill includes no clear requirements to comply with environmental laws or to protect wildlife. Its sponsors, however, say that they are not preempting environmental laws and that, in fact, laws like the National Environmental Policy Act will ``fully apply.'' Yet this bill undercuts those assurances of compliance with environmental laws by adding oil development as a purpose of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Adding oil development as a purpose is contrary to the purpose of a wildlife refuge. The purpose of a wildlife refuge is to protect wildlife and to make sure that the managers of wildlife do so in a sound fashion. At every other wildlife refuge in the country, development within the refuge is only permitted to the extent that it is compatible with protecting wildlife. This bill tries to waive one of the most important management protections that applies to every other national wildlife refuge--that development must be compatible with protecting wildlife. They have to do this because they know that oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is not compatible. It is just the opposite. It is important to note also that this bill does not provide any energy security. There is no prohibition in the bill against exporting oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and in all likelihood, much of the oil will be exported. In addition to opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to development, the bill also requires the sale of 7 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to give $300 million, as I mentioned earlier, to several States--Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. So at the same time as we are being told that we must ruin a national wildlife refuge because we need the oil, we are selling oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It does not make sense for America. It just doesn't add up. The impact of oil and gas exploration in the wildlife area and the danger to our wildlife cannot be overstated. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's coastal plain and nearby waters are designated as critical habitat for polar bears, which are listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Female polar bears head to the Arctic Refuge's coastal plain so that they can create snow dens, where they give birth to their young. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has a higher concentration of polar bear denning habitat than any other area on Alaska's North Slope. The refuge is also the summer calving grounds for the porcupine caribou herd. This herd's range extends into Canada, and we actually have a treaty between both of our countries to protect this herd. The almost 200,000-member herd has an annual migration of hundreds of miles--and in some cases, thousands of miles--wintering in the south of the Refuge. I think that this herd of caribou is so important because scientists say that it has an entirely different kind of migration pattern than other caribou in Alaska, that it has been adept at dealing with the adaptation that comes along with climate change. Why not, instead of ruining their habitat, study and understand this migration that has been studied since the 1950s? It has been part of our national investment in understanding wildlife. It has been supported by both Democratic and Republican administrations, to understand the science and background of this caribou herd. These caribou are an important food source for many Alaska Natives but in particular the Gwich'in people who live south of the Refuge. Wildlife biologists argue that the risk to the caribou herd and to those who rely on them could be quite significant. So why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? The last few years have been a difficult budget situation in Alaska. Relying on oil for 90 percent of the budget, I agree with many others, is unsustainable. Every dollar the price of oil per barrel drops, reduces the State budget by $30 million, or close to 1 percentage point per dollar. The general revenue fund in Alaska dropped over 80 percent after 2012, and that situation caused Alaska's $4 billion deficit projection last year. Difficult choices had to be made about taxes, savings, spending, and what the State government should do. Thankfully, their economy hasn't collapsed, but in the last big oil-driven recession in the 1980s, Alaska's banks failed, housing prices collapsed, and 15 percent of the population left. Why am I bringing this up? Because the good news is today's Alaska economy is more diverse than it was 30 years ago. I know this because I talk to my colleagues and because we are interacting in a lot of ways in the Pacific Northwest. Alaska is well known for its tourism. Two million visitors to Alaska spend $1,000 per person in the State, supporting a $7.3 billion outdoor industry. My colleagues here may not realize what my colleagues from Alaska and Washington know, and that is that the State of Alaska and Washington have a lot of interdependence. A recent study found that 113,000 jobs in Puget Sound are tied to Alaska's economy, and this number has doubled in the last 30 years. What are those jobs? One-quarter of those are in the seafood industry. Almost 1,000 commercial-vessel owning fishermen who work in Alaska's fisheries are part of the trade between us. The Alaska trade accounts for one in five containerized shipments through the Port of Seattle and the Port of Tacoma. Another 14,000 jobs are tied to passenger transportation to Alaska, including 430,000 cruise ship passengers who come through Puget Sound every year. That is just one way of saying the Washington-Alaska economies are tied together, and as a hub for Arctic commerce, I have worked with my colleagues Senator Murkowski and Senator Sullivan on issues such as new Coast Guard Arctic icebreakers that are so needed for the future. I have supported more funding for demonstration programs for renewable energy and microgrids in an effort to help the local economy. I feel the same way about rural broadband across the Nation, and we want to make sure we are deploying and helping with everything we can to bring more connectivity to Alaska, but I really question how opening the Arctic Wildlife Refuge is a solution to these problems. Even under CBO's aggressive view, if leasing occurs in the Refuge, it will be many years before Alaskans see any significant revenue. So my colleagues should be aware that doubling down on oil by sacrificing one of the great wildlife refuges will not, in my opinion, help close Alaska's budget deficit, and it will not help them diversify for the future. This Arctic Wildlife Refuge is too special, too important. It is one of the crown jewels of our National Wildlife Refuge system. We should be preserving it. We should not be destroying it. We should not be turning it into an oilfield. I am reminded that many people over many decades have fought for this great area of our country, to maintain its environmental stewardship, starting with Olaus Murie, who went there and did great explorations and convinced many people here in this Washington that it was something so special and worth preserving. After decades of his scientific exploration in Alaska, Olaus testified in 1959 in support of creating the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. He said: ``We long for something more, something that has a mental, a spiritual impact on us. This idealism, more than anything else, will set us apart as a nation striving for something worthwhile in the universe.'' So what is setting us apart today? Some very short-term gains. In 100 years, when this economic tax bill will long be forgotten, the question will be whether something important in the universe still exists in the Arctic wildlife area. We didn't create the Arctic Coastal Plain, but I can state this: We cannot recreate it. What we are doing today is taking a step toward destroying it. I urge my colleagues to oppose this reconciliation bill. Do not sacrifice the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to oil development. Don't take one of the great, wild, pristine places on this planet and turn it into an oilfield. We can do better as a nation. I know we can do better as a region, and we can do better with a better Arctic strategy for our Nation's future. I yield the floor.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I wish to call attention to several urgent and bipartisan health programs that Congress must renew without further delay. The Republican majority has spent much of this year trying to pass partisan healthcare and tax legislation. As a result, they have neglected to extend numerous uncontroversial healthcare programs, threatening these programs' very existence and causing needless chaos and uncertainty. It is past time that the Republican-controlled Congress extend these programs to provide healthcare access and certainty to millions of Americans. First, I would like to address the Children's Health Insurance Program, CHIP. CHIP is a bipartisan healthcare success story. Enacted 20 years ago, thanks to the leadership of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch and the late Senator Ted Kennedy, CHIP brings affordable health coverage to children in families who are not eligible for Medicaid but struggle to afford private insurance. Washington's successful CHIP program, Apple Health for Kids, covers about 60,000 children. Through CHIP, parents get peace of mind, and States and the Federal Government pitch in to share the cost. CHIP means affordable healthcare for 9 million children. On average, a family of four pays $158 per year in premiums and deductibles for each CHIP-enrolled child. The same family would likely pay more than $1,000 in annual out-of-pocket costs on a commercial insurance plan, even after counting available financial help. That is a difference of more than $800 per year for millions of families across the country and represents real affordability. Because of CHIP, children have a medical home. In fact, more than 90 percent of Washington children with CHIP coverage visited a primary care provider at least once in 2014, the most recent year in which data were available. CHIP also provides kids with benefits that are often more comprehensive than those offered in the commercial insurance market, including immunizations, periodic screenings, hearing exams, and dental care. We know that prevention and early detection are key to reducing the burden of disease and health costs. CHIP emphasizes these early interventions during the critical early years of a child's life, helping kids grow up to be healthy, productive, and successful adults. Yet, despite CHIP's near-universal popularity and lack of partisan controversy, this Congress has allowed CHIP to go unfunded since October 1, 2017. This long and unprecedented lapse threatens CHIP's very survival. Already, it has thrown States, including Washington, into crippling uncertainty and administrative disruption. Some States have been forced to send letters to CHIP families informing them that their coverage will end. Moreover, if Congress fails to extend CHIP, my State will be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars to make up for Congress's failure to act. Next, I would like to highlight the urgent need to reauthorize funding to community health centers. Community health centers are a bedrock of the healthcare safety net and are the preferred medical home for tens of millions of working Americans. Washington's 26 community health centers serve 1 million people in every corner of my State, from Spokane to Seattle, Omak to Port Angeles. Community health centers are a lean and efficient healthcare delivery model, focusing on primary care, prevention, case management and social services for their patients. They are also good for the economy, supporting more than 9,000 jobs and $1 billion in annual economic output in my State alone. The Community Health Center Fund, which comprises the majority of these health centers' Federal funds, expired on October 1, 2017. As a result, community health centers in my State are at risk of having to turn off the lights and turn away patients. Already, the expiration of the Community Health Center Fund has threatened these centers' ability to retain and hire nurses and doctors and make financial arrangements for the coming year. The Community Health Center Fund was enacted in 2010 so that millions of newly covered Americans would have a medical home. The fund is doing just that. Moreover, the Community Health Center Fund was extended with strong bipartisan support in 2015, when an overwhelming majority of the House and Senate, myself included, supported its extension as part of the Medicare and CHIP Reauthorization Act, MACRA. It is past time for Congress to extend this program without delay. In addition, Federal funds have been allowed to expire for a number of additional but equally important health programs. All enjoy a history of strong bipartisan support. These programs include the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program, the Special Diabetes Program, the Teaching Health Center Program, and certain Medicare provisions. The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting--MIECHV-- Program is an evidence-based grant that is helping States and Tribes improve early childhood and maternal health. MIECHV-funded home visiting programs, which are voluntary, have benefited 1,650 Washington families in 15 counties and have reduced in half the likelihood of child abuse and neglect. MIECHV is a prime example of evidence-driven policymaking that is improving the health and well-being of vulnerable mothers and children. It is also strongly bipartisan. Unfortunately, MIECHV's Federal funding expired on October 1, 2017. The Special Diabetes Program and the Special Diabetes Program for Indians are modest investments with a proven track record of combatting diabetes. As a senior member of the Senate Diabetes Caucus, I recognize that diabetes is a leading cause of death and a major driver of healthcare costs. In particular, the Special Diabetes Program for Indians supports 27 community-driven grant programs in Washington's Tribal communities, helping Tribal members prevent, diagnose, and manage this condition through lifestyle changes, counseling, and treatment. The Teaching Health Center Program is also a small investment with a big return. Teaching Health Center funds are currently being used to train 722 primary care medical residents in 27 States and the District of Columbia. Data show that many physicians eventually practice close to where they train, and the Teaching Health Center Program is training physicians where they are needed most. In Spokane, Toppenish, Tacoma, Yakima, and Auburn, Teaching Health Centers are training a new generation of safety-net physicians to serve those most in need. While the Teaching Health Center Program has received a short-term extension, its funding will expire on January 1, 2018, if Congress does not act. Lastly, several temporary Medicare provisions have expired and must be renewed. These provisions help rural Medicare patients get hospital, ambulance, and home health services where they live. Additional Medicare ``extenders'' prevent essential services like physical therapy from being arbitrarily capped for Medicare patients. Extending these provisions is important to preserving healthcare access in rural Washington State and empowering our healthcare delivery system to continue to improve and innovate. The programs I have highlighted and many more are vital to my constituents, my State's economy, and our healthcare delivery system. They are also strongly bipartisan. I call on my Republican colleagues to work with us in a good-faith negotiation to extend these programs immediately.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, today we are closing in on a critical decision that will have a lasting impact on the innovation-driven economy of the United States. The Chairman of the FCC has decided to repeal a critical consumer protection known as net neutrality. This is a wrongheaded move. It is misguided. It is being driven by big cable interests that want to continue to gouge consumers and charge them more, making sure that consumers either pay or have their internet lines slowed down. This decision turns the success of what has been an essential 21st- century innovation over to those in big corporations, instead of making sure that Main Street innovators continue to do what they do best. I don't think the American people want cable companies to be the gatekeeper on the internet. They want to have the FCC continue to play a role in making sure that an open internet is there for all, so that small businesses, entrepreneurs, and innovators can continue to build on the success of communicating with their consumers and their business partners without having artificially slowed-down lines. Who would this impact if the FCC moves forward? You could say that seniors would be impacted with regard to receiving their telehealth medicine and that students would be impacted in the slowing down of their education. Families who access educational tools for their children could also see charges, and the open highway that has been so important in making sure that new internet businesses are started could be impacted. The No. 1 reason we have to fight this decision--making sure that we do everything we can to stop the FCC from implementing this rule and giving consumers the protection of net neutrality--is that it will harm our internet economy. Last summer we had a townhall meeting about this, where I heard from many of my constituents. I then sent in many business cases to Chairman Pai so that he would understand why this impacts us so much. Let's make sure that we understand what is happening. The FCC had rules that had prevented companies from throttling, or blocking, and it had paved the way for many great successes. In the United States, we have Fortune 500 companies and a tech industry that is responsible for 7 percent of our Nation's GDP and 6.9 million jobs in the United States of America. Why would you change the rules now? Why would you leave after having made sure critical protections were in place and, instead, replace them with the ability for certain companies--cable, specifically--to wreak havoc on this economy? Thirteen percent of Washington State's economy depends on a healthy internet sector. The internet economy for our State supports 250,000 jobs, and at a time when the Nation has not had enough wage growth, these tech jobs have been a bedrock for the middle class. Chairman Pai is clearly not focused on the 250,000 jobs and the 13 percent of our State's economy. Just this past weekend, I and my colleague, Congresswoman DelBene, met with many of these small businesses. Their message was loud and clear: Please stop Chairman Pai from ruining the internet by taking away key protections that make sure our businesses run successfully. Chairman Pai is abdicating his role. He is abandoning the consumers whom he has sworn an oath to serve, and he is turning his back on innovators. He has really changed the direction for us and our innovation economy. I know that he thinks this is a light touch, but I guarantee you that it is a ``no touch'' regulation. What we need is to make sure that these companies do not artificially charge consumers, small businesses, and Main Street more for what they already are doing now and doing successfully. Obviously, an open internet rule and the rules that we are living under now have fueled an innovation economy. Every business plan of every startup relies on the company's ability to be able to contact its consumers. With this much of our economy at stake, let's not continue to make mistakes. Let's continue to fight here in the Senate and make sure that we stop Chairman Pai and the FCC from having the resources to implement this rule. It is so important now that we continue to fight for small businesses, for Main Street entrepreneurs, and for the innovation economy. We deserve to have an open internet. As the small businesses and innovators just said to me this past weekend in Seattle, this is really like siding with the big companies and saying that they are going to make all of the decisions, that they are the ones that are going to be in control. They are not going to be for competition, and they are not going to be for this level of innovation. They are going to slow down what is one of the best parts of our economy. I hope that our colleagues will join the fight and stop the FCC, in any manner possible, from implementing what is, literally, a very, very anticompetitive strategy and one that is very, very focused on big corporations, instead of the innovation economy of the future. I yield the floor.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, the Department of the Interior is the steward and guardian of our public lands--our national parks, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas. As the Supreme Court said more than a century ago, it is the Secretary of the Interior's responsibility to see that none of the public domain is given away to anyone who is not entitled to it. As the steward and guardian of the public lands, the Secretary must represent the government and the people of the Nation as a whole, not the special interests or even the interests of a single State. But the Secretary does not do his job alone; he has delegated his authority and responsibility for land and minerals management to the Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management. The Assistant Secretary exercises the Secretary's direction and supervision over the Bureau of Land Management. The Assistant Secretary needs to be someone who can discharge this important duty fairly and impartially. Equally important, though, he must be seen by the American people as someone capable of being a good steward of their public lands and not as someone who comes to the job with a predisposition to dispose of their public lands to special interests. An impartial and unbiased decision-maker is a core element of the due process. The principle that no one can be the judge in his own case has been a hallmark of Anglo-American law for over 400 years. I believe confirming Mr. Balash to be Assistant Secretary of Land and Minerals Management would be contrary to this principle. In 2014, Alaska's Department of Natural Resources filed a claim for 20,000 acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with the Bureau of Land Management. Alaska's Department of Natural Resources sought to remove the long-recognized boundary of the Refuge. It asked the Bureau of Land Management to convey the 20,000 acres of Refuge land that would then be outside the Refuge's boundary to the State of Alaska so that those lands could then be leased for oil and gas development. Mr. Balash was the head of Alaska's Department of Natural Resources at the time it made its claim to the Bureau of Land Management. The Bureau of Land Management properly rejected Alaska's claim. Alaska appealed the Bureau's decision to the Interior Board of Land Appeals, where the appeal is now pending. If the Senate confirms Mr. Balash to be the Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management, he will be overseeing the Bureau of Land Management. He will exercise the Secretary's direction and supervision over the Bureau of Land Management. He will be in a position of reversing the Bureau of Land Management's decision which originally denied Alaska's claim. Moreover, Secretary Zinke has the authority to take jurisdiction of the case away from the Board of Land Appeals and to delegate that authority to decide the case to Mr. Balash. Mr. Balash may become the Interior Department's judge in the case that he initiated as Alaska's commissioner of natural resources. That is my main concern. I asked Mr. Balash his plans to recuse himself from participating in the Department's consideration of Alaska's claim. I believe Mr. Balash thinks that he will comply with whatever the department's ethics office says the rules are--which is basically a 1-year recusal from being involved in that situation. That said, Mr. Balash, even under these current rules, could be in the position of being the final arbiter on a case he previously brought on expanding Alaska's claim to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He alone could make the decision. He alone could reverse the decision on the State of Alaska's claim to the Bureau of Land Management--a claim that was turned down. He could reverse that. For that reason, I am not supporting Mr. Balash's nomination to this position today. There are so many things that we have right now that are an unrelenting assault on our public lands and our environment by this administration, and there are many on the other side of the aisle who are supporting that. We have seen an unprecedented use of the extraordinary procedures of the Congressional Review Act to nullify carefully crafted rules to protect the public lands and environment. We have seen the Secretary of the Interior unlawfully postpone implementation of other lawful rules. We have witnessed and seen legislation on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge run through here without the proper processes and procedures. We saw the majority use the extraordinary procedure of budget reconciliation not to balance the budget, as it was intended, but to circumvent regular order. Only this week, we witnessed President Trump launch an unprecedented and unlawful assault on our national monuments. Mr. Balash, I fear, will become maybe an unwilling but nonetheless a participant in these assaults on our public lands. That is why I cannot at this point give my support to this nomination. I know my colleague from Alaska has worked with him. I respect his opinion on this position. I hope he will respect mine. I do not think that at this point in time, without a better recusal, I can support Mr. Balash's nomination. I thank the Presiding Officer. I yield the floor.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. The Arctic Refuge's coastal plain and nearby waters are designated as critical habitat for polar bears, which were designated as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 2008. Female polar bears head to this area every fall to create snow dens where they give birth to their young. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is also famously known as the summer calving grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd. The herd's range extends into Canada. A treaty between our countries protects the herd and its habitat. The almost 200,000-member herd has an annual migration of hundreds of miles--and in some cases thousands of miles--wintering south of the refuge. These caribou are an important food source for many Alaska Natives, but in particular the Gwich'in people, who live south of the refuge. Wildlife biologists argue that the risk to the caribou herd--and those who rely on this herd--could be quite significant. Do you know what Webster's definition of stewardship is? The careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care. Since 1960, under President Eisenhower, this iconic refuge has been protected. Tonight, unless you help strike this, you will be joining the ranks of those that believe in polluting a wildlife refuge, and you will be joining an administration that I guarantee you is going to go down in history as getting an F in stewardship. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is too special and important; it is one of the crown jewels of the National Wildlife Refuge System. We should not destroy this pristine landscape and allow it to be turned into an oil field. I want to remind my colleagues of the words of the great environmental steward Olaus Murie. After decades of scientific exploration in Alaska, Olaus testified in the Senate in 1959 in support of creating the Arctic refuge. He said, ``We long for something more, something that has a mental, a spiritual impact on us. This idealism, more than anything else, will set us apart as a nation striving for something worthwhile in the universe.'' What is setting us apart today, colleagues, is just the opposite. We are striving for short-term gains. In a hundred years, when the economic effects of this tax bill are long forgotten, we will still bear the blame for letting go of ``something worthwhile in the universe.'' We didn't create the Arctic coastal plain, and we cannot recreate, but we can surely destroy it. I urge my colleagues to oppose sacrificing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and to support removing this provision from the bill. I yield the floor.

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, my amendment strikes the title requiring oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This refuge is the largest refuge in our Nation and the last pristine ecosystem for the Arctic in North America. Requiring oil development in the heart of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should not be in this bill. Although the bill text has been changed to address Byrd Rule violations, the Congressional Budget Office continues to estimate that it will raise less than $1 billion over 10 years. Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling doesn't even meet the $1 billion reconciliation instruction. It certainly doesn't represent a serious offset to huge deficits in the Republican bill. To put this in perspective, this represents less than seven one- hundredths of 1 percent of the $1.5-trillion-dollar increase in the national debt that the Republican tax policies will cause. Drilling in the Arctic has nothing to do with serious budgetary policy, but it has everything to do with evading regular order to pass something that could never be enacted on its own. In addition to drilling in the Arctic refuge, this bill would sell 7 million barrels of oil from our Nation's strategic petroleum reserve. A portion of that sale is necessary simply to meet the committee's reconciliation instructions. The sale of oil from the reserve would also provide for a $300 million windfall to four States: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. So this bill is selling off oil from our strategic petroleum reserve in order to pay for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It doesn't make any sense. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one of the crown jewels of the national wildlife refuge system. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, describes it as ``the only conservation system unit that protects, in an undisturbed condition, a complete spectrum of the arctic ecosystems in North America.'' It is home to an incredible diversity of wildlife: 47 different species of mammals, including polar bears, grizzly bears, wolves, Dall's sheep, moose, musk-ox, and the Porcupine caribou herd. The refuge provides important habitat for over 40 species of fish and more than 200 species of migratory birds whose lives depend on the Arctic refuge. The refuge was first established by the Eisenhower administration. Congress later protected this amazing Arctic ecosystem in 1980. It did so specifically to protect wildlife and wildlife habitat in its natural diversity. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is known as the Last Great Wilderness and is truly one of our last great wild places. But the provisions of this bill turn the purpose of the Arctic refuge on its head. It would make oil and gas development on the refuge's coastal plain one of the statutory purposes of the wildlife refuge. Under this bill, our Nation's most pristine national wildlife refuge will become the only refuge where oil and gas development is required by law. It opens up the entire 1.5-million-acre coastal plain for oil and gas exploration and requires leasing of at least 800,000 acres. It requires leasing of areas with the highest oil and gas potential, no matter the consequences for wildlife or the environment. The bill requires that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be managed as a petroleum reserve, which is unprecedented and undercuts managing the refuge for wildlife. The bill includes no clear requirements to comply with environmental laws or to protect wildlife. Its sponsors, however, say they are not preempting environmental laws, and that, in fact, laws like the National Environmental Policy Act will ``fully apply.'' Given the assurances that environmental and wildlife refuge laws will continue to apply, I do not understand why their bill adds oil development as a purpose of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Adding oil development as a purpose of the refuge seems contrary to its primary purpose, which is to protect wildlife. What a no-brainer: The purpose of a wildlife refuge is to protect wildlife. Refuges must be managed that way. At every other national wildlife refuge in the country, development within the refuge is only permitted to the extent it is compatible with the primary purpose of the refuge: protecting wildlife. But because the bill makes oil and gas development a refuge purpose, oil drilling in the refuge will no longer be subject to a meaningful ``compatibility determination.'' This bill essentially waives one of the most important management protections that applies to every other national wildlife refuge. They have to do this because they know that oil and gas isn't compatible with protecting wildlife--it is just the opposite. This bill does not provide energy security. There is no prohibition in the bill against exporting oil from the Arctic refuge. In all likelihood, much of this oil will end up being exported. The Republican majority agreed to include only one amendment during the Energy Committee's consideration of this issue, and that amendment required the sale of 5 million barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve to give $300 million to the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The bill has now been amended to require the sale of 7 million barrels from our strategic petroleum reserve. So at the same time as we are being told we need to ruin a pristine national wildlife refuge to drill for more oil, the very same bill is selling off millions of barrels out of our strategic oil reserve, which was used most recently during this hurricane season to protect Americans from gas price spikes. The impact of oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the danger to its wildlife cannot be overstated. The importance of the refuge for wildlife such as polar bears and caribou have been documented in letters I have received from biologists and other scientists who have worked in the Arctic. I ask unanimous consent that the letters be printed in the Record.

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor with my colleague from Maryland to talk about the State and local tax deduction. I thank the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee for his hard work on trying to articulate what is fair tax policy for Americans. Senator Wyden and I come from parts of the country with probably some of the most unique tax codes. He doesn't have a sales tax in Oregon. We don't have an income tax in Washington. We are not an expensive tax State. We are not an expensive tax State. There are other States such as Texas, Nevada, and Florida that also don't have an income tax. Under this bill, those States and the citizens of those States, like many others, are going to be penalized. Middle-class Americans are going to have their taxes raised to give a tax break to corporations. So while we might want to discuss what is fair tax policy as it relates to the competitiveness of our economy, the good news for the people of the State of Washington is that we have very competitive businesses, whether it is Microsoft or Amazon or Starbucks or Costco or Boeing. They are all working hard. They are all working in multiple places, and yes, they are all doing really, really well. The question is, Do we need to reduce their corporate rate so significantly, and to do so, take money out of the pockets of middle- class families across the United States of America? The reason I mention Senator Wyden and the States of Oregon and Washington, is that, even though we have a unique tax code, our State's economy has grown faster than the national average every year since World War II. That is to say, the uniqueness of our tax code has not hurt us, and yet in the State of Washington we have had the highest minimum wage for a long time in the United States. Now we are raising it in various parts of our State. We have had a unique view of where our revenue should come from. Why now? Why now? After 100 years of tax deductibility by taxpayers in this country, why are you taking away their ability to deduct only to give a tax break to corporations that are making record profits? After 100 years, why are you doing this? Well, I think some of my colleagues have said it best. They have called it double-taxation. You are going ahead after 100 years and saying it is OK to tax the same amount that we pay to the State that you also are going to tax at the Federal level. As one article mentioned, ``Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers said the Federal Government might try to monopolize taxation to the entire exclusion and destruction of State governments.'' That is right. Our Founding Fathers said: Do not have double taxation. So for 100 years--100 years--we protected the citizens of this country. Yet someone over there is thinking: Do you know what? I need $1.4 trillion. Where can I get it? Let's do it on the backs of middle-class families, because they might not notice until 2019 when their tax bill comes and they have a different equation. I get that my colleagues think they have solved this problem by getting rid of the deductions and now all of a sudden giving you a double standard deduction. I have done the math. I have done the math for us in Washington State, and over 300,000 people in Washington will see their taxes go up immediately, probably paying anywhere from $750 to $1,000 more in taxes. Is that fair? They are sitting in the shadow of these large companies who are making record profits and doing quite well, asking why are they the funders of this tax break. Why are they? Why are we getting rid of a policy that has existed in our country for over 100 years and penalizing them just to give this corporate break? I can tell you I don't buy the notion that this is going to trickle down to productivity and wage growth. I know what is driving productivity and wage growth in my State. It is a great, educated, skilled workforce. It is staying ahead of innovation whether it is making software or new ways of doing business, and, yes, it is a constant challenge. Those businesses tell me all the time we need more infrastructure, we need more affordable housing, we need a better transportation system, we need better education. So they are very concerned about the ideas in this legislation. So you are going to tax immediately about 300,000 Washingtonians with a higher tax rate and, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation and other entities, probably by the time this is done, at the end of this bill, over a million Washingtonians are going to pay more money. That is why I am so concerned, along with other States that have been fighting this battle for so long. Why now? Why now? What is the urgency that you are taking away the ability of my citizens to deduct their local sales tax, their property tax, and, in the House case, other expenses, whether they are medical or education or their mortgage? It is just beyond me, when the middle class has suffered so much and has not recovered from the downturn in the economy, that you think the best economic strategy is to take money out of the middle-class taxpayer. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from the National Governors Association from Governor Sandoval from Nevada. I mentioned they don't have an income tax. They are highly sensitive to this issue.

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, their letter says that the deductibility of State and local taxes has been a part of their stability, and they are about meeting the needs of their citizens. So the notion that we have the National Governors Association, the homebuilders, the Realtors, so many people concerned about this is falling on deaf ears. I guarantee you it will not fall on deaf ears when the citizens have a chance to respond to this. The notion that we not only are taking away this ability to deduct, but we are also in this legislation making a change to the way inflation is calculated, what is called Chained CPI--I am not going to bother to explain the details to you, but I will tell you this. It will change your tax bracket, and you will be in a higher tax bracket. So besides giving you less deductibility, they are changing a formula and making you pay more taxes. This bill needs to slow down. It needs to focus on what will help our economy grow, and economists don't believe this bill is going to do much to help the economy grow. It is going to give those corporations money to pay for dividends. Seventy-five to eighty percent will go to their shareholders, and those shareholders and the stock market will do well. What we also need to focus on is the investment that middle-class families need to stay in their home, to make education affordable, to pay for healthcare, and to have communities work. The fact is, the Fraternal Order of Police is also against this legislation because of taking away of this local deductibility. It is like Hamilton said: Why are you doing this at a Federal level? I thought the other side of the aisle was the States' rights people? I thought they were there to protect the uniqueness of the Tax Code to say that States have rights, to say that States ought to be able to decide their own future. Well, after 100 years, you are taking that away today, and you are going to hear from the citizens of this country who are upset that they have to pay higher taxes just to give these very successful companies a corporate tax break. I yield to my colleague from Maryland.

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the waiver provisions of applicable budget resolutions, I move to waive all applicable sections of that act and applicable budget resolutions for purposes of the pending amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Thank you, Mr. President.

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 5 minutes.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise to talk about the affordable housing crisis that is gripping our Nation. When I say ``crisis,'' I mean I know that people here are on the precipice of talking about what we are going to do in response to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and Maria, and I would like to say, the housing crisis that will exist in the aftermath of those hurricanes is real, but there are also even greater implications from the housing crisis that exist today without those hurricanes, and it is only going to continue to grow and get worse until we deal with it. This past February, more than 2,000 families packed into the New Holly Gathering Hall in South Seattle. Each family was hoping to hear its name called. It wasn't a contest. It wasn't a game. It wasn't the lottery. It was a lottery to see if families could get affordable homes. The Mercy Othello Plaza would soon open 108 affordable housing units. That is hardly a match for the more than 2,000 families who were interested in trying to get into one of those affordable units. Based on the numbers alone, their chance of getting an affordable home was lower than an applicant's chance of getting into Harvard. Ninety-five percent of the families attending that night left disappointed, continuing to search for affordable housing. This is just one story of how the affordable housing crisis is gripping our Nation. I am sure every one of my colleagues in the Senate could talk about a story they have heard in their State because this crisis impacts every State. It impacts every community, both urban and rural alike. As I have traveled across the State of Washington, I have seen some of the most hard-hit areas for affordable housing. I even have veterans returning home not being able to find affordable housing. I have seen an aging population living longer and also not having the resources when looking for affordable housing. I have seen young workers who want to be close to where their employment is and yet having to drive so far away because that is the only place they could find affordable housing. We have seen homelessness in numbers that harken back to previous days when we had a true recession. The most damning part of the housing crisis is, we know how to solve it. We just need the courage to act. For decades, the housing growth was the most stimulative part of our economy. Throughout the 1980s, housing was 18 percent of GDP. Today that number has dropped to just 15 percent. When people discuss tax reform and GDP growth, housing is still one of the ways that economists will tell us that we can grow GDP. In the sixties, seventies, and eighties, if somebody asked, How do we stimulate our economy, usually a cheer would go up for housing, but since the economic downturn, we haven't heard that cheer. In fact, it is almost as if we have forgotten how stimulative housing is to our economy. The total number of houses built between 2007 and 2016 total just 8.9 million units, which is far below the 15 million-plus average for every 10-year period through the seventies and nineties. We are off the pace of what it takes to provide affordable housing. As a result, the vacancy rates and inventories of homes for sale have also fallen. The national vacancy rate--which is the number of homes for sale--has receded to the 2000 level, erasing all the runup we saw in the housing boom. Moreover, homeownership in the United States is now at its lowest rate since the 1960s. Twenty million American families, including 11 million renters, are now spending more than half of their income on housing. That means less money for other essentials like food and healthcare and gas. The National Low Income Housing Coalition tells us that 7.4 million more available affordable homes are needed because we have seen an increase of 60 percent since the year 2000 in the need for affordable housing. So the United States has become a rent-burdened economy. If we don't address this crisis, the problem is only going to get worse. In fact, one study found that if we don't address this crisis, we are going to see another 25-percent increase in the number of Americans spending more than half of their income in rent. I know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in the House of Representatives are talking about what they want to do in tax reform. I would say they should look at this data as it relates to where we are with homeownership and housing and things that would eliminate the private activity bonds--one of the key drivers of affordable housing production. It would be a big mistake if they got rid of that. Obviously, there are units of affordable housing that are being planned and built right now. In fact, one estimate is that over 1,000,000 units wouldn't be completed just because of the House provision. Obviously, limiting the mortgage interest deduction for new homeowners could potentially increase taxes on homeowners and thereby limit the number of people who could afford a home. Almost one-third of taxpayers nationally claim the property tax deductions. They could also see an impact to that. I hope our House colleagues and our Senate colleagues will see, in light of the housing crisis, what a terrible idea those things are. How did we get to this crisis as it exists now? Part of the issue was demand. For starters, the 2007 housing crash pushed millions of families into the rental market and reduced wages on working families. The demand for rental housing skyrocketed. Over 7 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure, and they demanded more affordable places to live. Today the homeownership rate is the lowest in our Nation since the 1960s. The last 10 years have seen the largest gain of renters on record. The demand for rental housing shows no sign of slowing down. Millennials, like many of the young people we see who want to be close to jobs in our burgeoning economy, are forced to rent instead of own. They are seeing that challenged, in big numbers, by the fact that there is not enough supply. At the same time demand was going up from returning veterans, from aging seniors, from workplace needs, from many more people needing affordable housing after being pushed out of the homeownership market-- at the same time demand was going up, supply failed to keep pace. Affordable housing stock is being, and was being, converted to market rate-based units. That means they got taken out of the affordability framework. A new report found that the number of apartments being deemed affordable for low-income families dropped 60 percent over the last 6 years. With all this pressure and demand of people falling out of home and back into the market and pushing things down, we saw so many units that were affordable units get transferred over to market-based rates and thereby losing supply. The new production of affordable housing has not filled the gap, and production of affordable housing is at its lowest 10-year production rate on record since 1974. It, too, has played a role in this problem. The combination of increased demand and lack of production has caused the explosion in our affordable housing crisis. The number of Americans facing extreme unaffordability--that means they are paying more than 50 percent--has gone from 7 million Americans to 11.2 million Americans. That is a 60-percent increase in the number of people in the United States who are in this area of extremely unaffordable rates for housing. While I know we are going to discuss natural disasters and helping communities recover--everywhere from the families who have been impacted in Florida, in Texas, and various places--we also have to look at the issue of affordable housing everywhere from Seattle and Portland and San Francisco to all the way across the country, to Philadelphia and Miami and many other places. In the aftermath of Katrina, Congress passed an expansion of the low- income housing tax credit, and it built 28,000 affordable units on the gulf. I know my colleagues will want to do something similar for Texas and the Gulf States to make sure we are doing something, but we need to understand that at the time of Katrina, there was a need due to more than 275,000 homes destroyed by that hurricane. Building 28,000 units was barely a blip. The low-income housing tax credit helped rebuild some units, but it came nowhere close to solving the housing crisis in New Orleans. Market rates in New Orleans are 35 percent higher after the storm, and 37 percent of households are paying more than half of their income in housing. Now, 12 years later, another disaster has hit, and we are going to try to address this crisis, but the housing burden for extremely low-income families in Texas and the major metro areas of Texas is among some of the worst in the Nation. That was before the crisis. Before the actual impact of hurricanes, Texas was already at a crisis point. Texas has only 29 affordable units for every 100 low-income households looking for those options. Houston is the third worst in the country for housing availability for extremely low-income people. Now families from Florida to Puerto Rico are going to also be finding a very difficult situation. Expanding the tax credit could help, but we have to do more than just expand the tax credit for those disaster States. We need a very big systematic investment in affordable housing all across the United States, and expanding the low-income housing tax credit is one way to do that. The good news is, we have good bipartisan support for the low- income housing tax credit enacted in 1986. It helped build 3 million rental units across this country over the last 30 years. If you want to make a dent in this crisis, both in response to the hurricanes and the crisis that already existed, we need to begin filling that gap by increasing the credit. That is why I joined Senator Hatch in introducing the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Improvement Act, something that would help us build hundreds of thousands of new units in the next 10 years. I am glad Senators Wyden, Portman, Sullivan, Merkley, Scott, Bennet, Collins, Kaine, Heller, Leahy, Shaheen, Murray, Schumer, Murkowski, Young, Graham, Schatz, Booker, Hassan, Isakson, and Sanders are all supporters. We have good, bipartisan support from people who understand that this crisis is real and that it is only going to grow. But we also know that the additional tax credit would create almost 450,000 new jobs over the next 10 years. That is because housing is stimulative to the economy. Construction alone supports over 2 million jobs. And it helps by making sure that the economic impact to GDP is realized now through this investment. It also helps us save money as an economy and a country by putting a roof over people's heads. One of the reasons I was so excited to work with Senator Hatch on this was because in his home State of Utah, they made such great progress in dealing with their homeless veteran population. The community decided that by putting a roof over someone's head, they actually helped lower overall costs. One study found that placing people in affordable housing lowered Federal Medicaid expenditures by an average of 12 percent, and a University of Pennsylvania study found that taxpayers could save $16,000 per homeless person who was placed in affordable housing. So we need to act. We need to realize that housing provides an investment in job creation and has historically contributed between 2 to 4 percent of GDP growth since the 1980s; that it is an underpinning of our economy; and that we need to make sure that our Tax Code works and make sure that people are purchasing homes as well as finding affordable housing. As our colleagues deal with the end-of-the-year policy issues and deal with our response to these storms, I hope we will realize that this underlying crisis also needs attention. We have worked on a bipartisan basis in the past to address it, and we can work on a bipartisan basis in the future to both stimulate our economy and solve these problems. Ninety percent of the affordable housing units being built in the country use these tax credits, so it is only by extending the tax credits, putting a roof over people's heads, that we are going to be able to deal with this crisis. The good news is, it helps us save money and it helps us with GDP growth. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.

Ms. CANTWELL

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

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor this morning to talk about a GAO report, or a Government Accountability Office report, that is being released today, which says that the cost and impact to the Federal Government of climate change is in the billions of dollars. In fact, it is in the hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 5 years, and, over the next decade-plus, it is in the trillions of dollars. Why is this so astounding? It is astounding because we have not had the Government Accountability Office outline for us before what the impacts of climate costs the U.S. taxpayers, what it costs the Federal Government, and that we are paying an astronomical cost. Right now we are discussing the supplemental, and we can see the costs of the damage we have experienced from storms, damage from wildfires, and damages from other kinds of events and how much it costs the Federal Government. The GAO took the last 2 years to develop this report after receiving a letter from me and Senator Collins of Maine to say that we wanted to understand these costs. Why did we do this? The Senator from Maine and I have long been advocates of looking at issues of adaptation and mitigation. We can debate all we want about what people think the impacts are of climate and what drives it. What we are here today to say is that we know that it is costing billions of dollars, and, as stewards of the taxpayers' money, we ought to do a better job at adaptation and mitigation. That is why we sent the letter, and that is why, probably 7 or 8 years ago, she and I started working to try to encourage various agencies that are most impacted by this to do a better job at adaptation and mitigation. For us in the Pacific Northwest, we got to this point because we saw a shellfish industry almost devastated by the level of ocean acidification caused by changes in temperature. It was so much so that we had to help the shellfish industry with science and research. If we wanted to keep a shellfish industry, we had to look at the science behind the seeding and do it at specific times when there was the right chemistry balance in the water. This incredible economy is enjoyed by so many Americans. The Washington shellfish industry that we have--five generations, six generations of families in that industry--was almost lost because of these changes. Also, as a State that has a great deal of hydropower and very cost- efficient electricity, a 1-degree temperature change means a lot too in terms of snowpack--20 percent less snowpack. It means a lot to us for the challenges we face in keeping affordable electricity rates. When it comes to fire, we have certainly taken it on the chin with two unbelievable back-to-back fire years, with unfortunate loss of life and billions of dollars of economic loss impacting both the Federal Government and to local communities. What we are saying is that we can do better. We need to recognize these costs and the impact and do a better job of planning for them in the future. That is why one of the things that I have done with my colleagues--Senator Murray from Washington, Senators Risch and Crapo from Idaho, and Senators Merkley and Wyden from Oregon--was to introduce a bill to help reduce our risk when it comes to fire seasons and what we can do to better protect our communities. That is the kind of planning and adaptation that we think we need to address. Today's report cannot be ignored. It cannot be ignored that the Federal Government is going to have to spend this much money dealing with the impacts of climate. That is what the Government Accountability Office is saying. It says we need a better plan. We need to reduce costs. We need to look at these impacts and make sure that we as a nation are putting every resource into this. Otherwise, we really will be spending trillions of dollars. That trajectory is real. That is what the GAO report says--hundreds of billions of dollars now and trillions in the future, but if we would simply recognize these impacts and start addressing them by having agencies recognize climate and plan for it, both in terms of adaptation and mitigation, I guarantee you that we can save the taxpayers money. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will heed this report. This report is saying that climate is impacting us, the Federal Government. It is costing us a great deal of money. I guarantee you that it is money we would rather have to focus on whatever issues my colleagues would like to focus on--whether it is education, job training, or any of the other issues that someone might want to address, such as healthcare. We cannot afford to continue to pay this kind of money while not dealing with climate. Impacts and costs are only going to accelerate. That is the scary thing. The GAO report says these numbers are going to increase for the future. Can we at least sit down at the table and talk about the ways-- just like on fire, just like on flooding, just like on drought--to plan strategies for how we can work together to mitigate these impacts? I guarantee you, if we don't, this bill is going to continue to rise and the conflicts are going to get worse. If you look at this year alone--even though I am saying it is $600 billion over the next 5 to 10 years and trillions over the next 20--we will probably see $300 billion in economic impacts in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. What is the conclusion I am drawing? I think the report is very clear. The research is very clear. One thing that is happening, as the climate changes, is that there are more intense weather events. These intense weather events are presenting challenges like we have never seen before. These challenges and the devastation that caused them are something that we need to take into consideration in the future. Certainly, we need better science. We shouldn't rely on the European weather agency to give us the best, most accurate information about storms and weather. We should do that ourselves. We should use the great research that is being done at the labs in Tennessee on climate and what we can do to best prepare our Nation. We need to come to the table when it comes to the issues of drought and plan for strategies that work and work successfully now, not wait another 20 years and have the cost be even more astronomical. I thank my colleague from Maine for joining this effort of getting this documentation by the Government Accountability Office. We need to take their accounting very seriously and start doing things that will help us reduce the risk, lower the cost, better protect our communities, and give the taxpayers a sense that we are not leaving them to devastation and storms every year but that we are coming up with better strategies to save lives and to save dollars. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.