Thomas Carper

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Thank you, Mr. President. I rise this evening to speak on the nomination of Congressman Mick Mulvaney to be the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. I am going to start by talking in a minute about some of the critical roles that the Office of Management and Budget plays. Before I do that, I want to go back for a moment to some of the comments of my friend who just preceded me on the floor. Going back 8 years ago, I remember that in the last 6 months of 2008, we lost 2.5 million jobs in this country--2.5 million jobs in 6 months. In the first 6 months of 2009, we lost 2.5 million more new jobs. That is 5 million jobs in 12 months. Since the beginning of 2010, we have added 16 million jobs in this country. The unemployment rate in this country jumped as high as 10 percent by the end of 2009, and by the beginning of this year the unemployment rate was cut in half. During the first fiscal year of this last administration, the Obama-Biden administration, the deficit, the budget they inherited for that fiscal year ballooned to $1.4 trillion. I am an old State treasurer, Congressman, Governor, and now Senator. That's a lot of money. We have had in terms of GDP probably higher deficits than that during World War II, but that is a lot of money. During the last administration, the debt, deficit as we knew it, dropped by about two-thirds, maybe a little more than two-thirds. Do we have a balanced budget coming into this year? No. Is it better than $1.4 trillion? It sure is. The unemployment rate was cut by half, the annual deficit has been cut by two-thirds, and instead of losing 5 million jobs as we did in 2008 and 2009, we added 16 million jobs. Could we do better than that? We have. Have we ever had a longer running economic expansion in the history of our country than the last 7 years? I am told we have not. Can we do better? Yes. Hopefully, in our spending plans and in the regulatory work that we do, we will adopt policies that provide the kind of environment that leads to job creation and job preservation. That is what we do. We don't create jobs here. As my friend who is presiding knows, we help create a nurturing environment for job creation. One of the things we need for that is commonsense regulation. If you look at the role of the OMB Director, one of those listed on this chart, No. 2, is regulatory process. The regulatory process is the way regulations are created in this Congress, and as the Presiding Officer and others know, it is dictated by legislation called the Administrative Procedure Act. If the Presiding Officer were an agency that was considering promulgating a rule or regulation, the agency would basically say to the rest of the world: We are thinking of promulgating a regulation on subject x. It is really a heads-up that they are thinking about doing this. It doesn't mean they are going to, but they are thinking about it, so those who might be affected by that regulation, regulation x, would have a chance to say: Hmm, something might be coming our way, and we have an interest in it--or we don't. This gives them a chance to go to the agency and say: We hear you are interested in promulgating a regulation on this particular subject. Let's talk about it. That is why the agency gives a heads-up, so that those who might be affected by it have the opportunity to talk to the agency, come to their elected officials, and share their opinions. The agency can accept the comments they get or reject them. The Members of Congress can accept or reject them. We can actually arrange for our constituents who might have an interest in a proposed or possible regulation to arrange for meetings to make sure the agency that is thinking about promulgating a new rule or different rule or regulation has an opportunity to meet with those who would be affected positively or negatively. The agency, armed with that information--the input they receive from filing a notice of rulemaking--if they decide to go forward, they will eventually propose a draft rule. This is not a final rule or regulation, but a draft. They promulgate that draft regulation under the Administrative Procedure Act, and those who are interested in or affected positively or negatively by the draft regulation again have the opportunity to go back and talk to the folks who promulgated that rule or regulation, stating what it is they like or don't like, proposing changes. They look us up--the Representatives, Senators--and say: Here are our concerns. We think this should be strengthened or weakened or taken out or added. There is a period of time--a comment period--for the draft regulations. Sometimes those who can be affected by the regulations will come to us and say: We don't think we have enough time to fully understand what the effects of this draft regulation would be, and we would like to have more time to comment. Then what we do as elected officials is reach out to the agency and say: We don't have enough time. We are hearing from too many of our constituents that there is not enough time. How about another week or month or some reasonable period of time? Sometimes we get what we ask for, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes we get half of what we ask for, but that is the way it works. At the end of the day, the agency may decide that they have enough of a bad response--bad vibrations from those who would be affected, as opposed to picking up good vibrations--and the agency may pull the reg entirely and say: We will do this another time but not now. But they might go ahead and change the drafting to prepare to offer the final regulation. When the agency is ready to report out the drafted regulation, that is not the end of it because that is where OMB comes into play. There is an agency within OMB called OIRA, which refers to an oversight role that the OMB plays. Essentially, as we used to say in the Navy, if a message or something were sent from one level of command to another to another, we actually say we ``chopped'' it through different levels of command. My colleague who has better experience in the military, as I recall, may have had a similar kind of experience. But the draft regulation that is promulgated has to be chopped through OMB. It has to be chopped through OMB. They have the final say, and they can kick it back to the agency or not. Changes may or may not be made, but eventually the final reg is published in the Federal Register. There is a period of time that runs, and eventually if folks really don't like it enough they can basically file a suit and go to court to try to block the regulation. We see that happen from time to time. Faced with a suit, the agency might want to pull it back and make some further modifications. We can join in those amicus briefs or not. If all else fails, Harry Reid, who used to be the majority leader, a Democrat, wrote a law a number of years ago, the Congressional Review Act, which allows the Congress, years from now, to take another look and see if it is something--it is not that old, it had regs come out in the last couple of months--and ask: Is this a good idea or not? And if the majority of the House and Senate, with the consent of the President, say: No, we don't think this regulation is a good idea, it can basically be taken off the field and put on the shelf. That is the way the process works. Some people don't think that is a very good process. I think it is pretty good. I hope that if Mick Mulvaney is confirmed to this job, this regulatory process is one that will be put to good use. One of the things Cass Sunstein did, at the direction of President Obama, was begin a look-back policy, saying we are going to look not just forward for new regulations, we are going to look back at the old ones we have and see which ones have maybe outlived their utilization and should be eliminated or modified. I have stopped counting how much money has been saved during the look-back process over the last several years, but it is in the billions of dollars--maybe even in the tens of billions of dollars by now. I hope the next OMB Director will continue it. We have been joined here by my colleague from Michigan. I would just ask him if he is pressed for time. I will go maybe about another 10 minutes, and then it is all yours. Another big job of the OMB Director, not surprisingly, is to help the President prepare in submitting a budget. I want to take just a minute and maybe use another chart to talk about how we spend our money. As my colleagues know, the spending is a pie chart kind of like this, and it is divided into maybe four major areas. One of those is--some people call it mandatory spending. I call it entitlement spending: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, maybe veterans' benefits. It is spending the people are entitled to by virtue of being a certain age, being disabled, maybe having served in our Nation's military, maybe being disabled in the course of military service, maybe they earned a GI bill. Those are the kinds of things that are being considered as entitlements or mandatory spending. As a percentage of the budget, if we look at the green colors here, it adds up to a little more than half the budget. Another maybe 5 to 10 percent of the budget is this sort of beige color or gray--this area right here. It is about 5 to 10 percent of the budget. It is debt service, principal interest on our Nation's debt. Fortunately, our interest rates are low. If they ever go up, ``Katy, bar the door.'' Then the principal on the debt service will go up a whole lot. We have been blessed with low interest rates. It will not be that way forever. So entitlement spending, a little over 50 percent; debt service, principal interest on the debt, 5, 10 percent. The rest is called discretionary spending. It is defense spending so it is about 40 percent discretionary spending. That is the spending that is done by our Appropriations Committee, about a dozen Appropriations subcommittees, including Agriculture, Armed Services, Housing, Transportation, you name it. Over half of the amount of spending that is called discretionary spending, right here in the blue, more than half of that is defense spending and less than half of that is called nondefense discretionary spending. As it turns out, we could eliminate, I am told, every bit of our nondefense discretionary spending, and we would still have a budget deficit. That would be everything from agriculture to the environment, to transportation, law enforcement, prisons, you name it; the whole kit and caboodle, everything other than defense. I don't think we want to get rid of all that. We might want to find more efficient ways to spend that money. God knows we can find more efficient ways in spending defense money. One of the ways we can do that is to take a page from something that happened today in the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and with our governmental affairs hat on, we had the leader of the Government Accountability Office with us. We also had a couple of inspectors general, and we had the head of the Census Bureau. They came to talk with us and present to us something called the GAO--Government Accountability Office--high-risk list. What is a high-risk list? It is a list of programs that are in danger of wasting a lot of money. It could include roughly $400 billion a year in revenues that we are leaving on the table; owed but not collecting. It could be $300 billion a year in major weapons systems cost overruns. It could be $110 billion, $115 billion a year on something called improper payments, moneys that are paid wrongly, mistakenly--not fraud but just mistaken payments--and it can include a lot of other things. It could be properties that the Federal Government needs to get rid of, and we have done good work on that. Senator Portman and I worked on that, as did Senator Coburn when he was here, and we worked a lot on property reforms. With the help of Senator Johnson last Congress, I think we made pretty good progress. There are a lot of ways we waste money. What we do in the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, with our governmental affairs hat on, is we use the GAO high-risk list as a to-do list to be able to save money. If you have GAO, in concert with the Office of Management and Budget, working together with the inspectors general in every major Federal agency, working with the oversight committees in the Senate, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and with our counterpart oversight committee in the House--if we all are working together, going in the same direction, we can actually figure out how to save a lot of money in defense spending and nondefense. With all the overpayments that occur in Medicare and Medicaid--it is almost $100 billion just between those two--we could actually make some real progress. Our budget deficit is still too large. Not that many years ago, when Bill Clinton was President, the last 4 years of that administration, we had 4 years of balanced budgets. We had not had a balanced budget since 1968. Over the last 4 years of the Clinton administration, we had four balanced budgets in a row. How did we do it? One, we had a good economy, as you all recall. There were more jobs created in those 8 years than any 8 years in the history of the country. I was Governor then, and there were more jobs created in those 8 years in Delaware than any year in the history of our State. I like to say I didn't create one of them, but we tried to create a nurturing environment for job creation and job preservation. One of those ways--one of the elements that is important--is certainty and predictability. It has been mentioned earlier today that the concern that a number of people have with Congressman Mulvaney as OMB Director is he allegedly has said government shutdowns are not that concerning. I don't know his exact words. One of the things we were reminded of today by GAO is, businesses need predictability, they need certainty, but the other thing they need--what the Federal Government needs and its employees need are some predictability and certainty as well. Stop-and-go government is painful to businesses, but it is especially painful and wasteful for the Federal Government. Continuing resolutions, government shutdowns--our Federal employees spend a lot of time just preparing for shutdowns. That is wasteful, it is demoralizing, and we can't do that. I think that is--I will stop there. I see the majority leader is here, and I want to be respectful to him. There are other concerns I have that I will submit, but I hope my colleagues will keep these thoughts and these concerns in mind when we consider the nomination of Mr. Mulvaney to head up OMB. I would say to my friend the majority leader, I appreciate the time we had together in your office earlier this week. I would just ask him to consider one more time, if we had the opportunity for a judge in Oklahoma to make a decision tomorrow on the access to the emails we discussed, I think we could all vote with a clear conscience a week from Monday on the nomination of the Administrator for the EPA. I would encourage the majority leader to do that. Thank you very much.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Mike Boettcher of my personal staff have floor privileges through December 31, 2017, and Andrew J. Wishnia and Ann Marie Chaney of my Environment and Public Works Committee staff have floor privileges for the duration of this Congress.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I rise today to talk for a few minutes about the nomination of our congressional colleague, Congressman Tom Price, also known as Dr. Tom Price, to serve as our next Secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services. When Senator Tester arrives on the floor, I will yield to him. I know he has reserved time. I will be happy to yield to him when he arrives. But until then, I just want to make a couple of comments, if I could. From the outset, my colleagues--our colleagues and I; not all, but a number of us--have had concerns, in some cases very grave concerns, about many of President Trump's nominees. Having said that, a number of them have gotten overwhelming support from both Democrats and Republicans. I checked as of sometime yesterday afternoon. There had been seven votes on nominees at that time. I think four of them had gotten overwhelming bipartisan support; three did not. But from the outset, my colleagues and I have had grave concerns about many of President Trump's nominees. But we have a responsibility, I believe, to thoroughly consider every Cabinet nominee on the merits of his or her fitness to serve. To evaluate Congressman Price's nomination, I looked--and a number of us have looked--at his career in the U.S. House of Representative, which I believe spans some six terms, which would be somewhere between 10 and 12 years. We did that in order to learn more about his guiding principles as a legislator. All of us have guiding principles. I know the Presiding Officer, who has shared with me his guiding principles any number of times, but mine include trying to figure out what is the right thing to do--not the easy or expedient thing, but what is the right thing to do; to treat other people the way we want to be treated; three, to focus on excellence in everything we do. If it is not perfect, make it better. Four, when you know you are right, you are sure you are right, just don't give up. Those are sort of my guiding principles. I sometimes violate one or more every week. But I always know that I have them, and it is actually helpful to have sort of a compass to get me back on track. But we wanted to learn more about the guiding principles for Congressman Price as we considered his nomination, his core values. During Congressman Price's time in the U.S. House of Representatives, he spearheaded efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which I regard as landmark health legislation that has provided 22 million Americans, including about 35,000 Delawareans with affordable, reliable, and comprehensive health insurance coverage. Some people say: Well, is it perfect? No, it is not. No, it is not. Well, I guess ever since Harry Truman was President, you had one President after the other, one administration after the other, bemoaning the fact that we had so many Americans who didn't have access to health care coverage. So the question would be: Well, why don't you do something about it? One of the things that we have done about it is to finally pass the Affordable Care Act, and I will talk more about that in a little bit. Congressman Price has opposed the Affordable Care Act from day one, leading his colleagues in the House of Representatives to obstruct and sometimes undermine, first, the drafting of the law and, then, its implementation. Instead of working with colleagues from both parties to offer improvements to the new law, he rallied against the need for essential benefits, such as contraception or mental health treatment or, frankly, access to medical procedures like colonoscopies, mammographies, prostate screenings--the kinds of things that, for individuals who are at risk of having colon cancer or breast cancer, if they had access to those kinds of screenings, could be detected earlier, with a lot of money saved, a lot of misery saved or avoided. In some cases, a loss of life is avoided as well. Congressman Price introduced proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act, doubling down high deductible plans and high-risk pools, which have a failed history of inadequate funding, waiting lists, and annual or lifetime limits. Over the past few months, our Republican colleagues have said loud and clear that they will repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Candidate Trump certainly said that many times during the campaign. When he was elected, he said that one of his major goals was to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When he became President, it was the same message. But at the same time, we have heard from stakeholders across the health care sector about what will happen if the Affordable Care Act is repealed without a replacement. Plain and simple, doing nothing would unfurl chaos across the health care delivery system. The individual market, the marketplaces, the exchanges would collapse. Estimates project that more than 32 million Americans would become uninsured over the next decade. Health insurance premiums in the individual market would skyrocket, increasing by up to 25 percent immediately and doubling again by 2026. From what I can tell, the cause to which Mr. Price has dedicated himself--and that is, repealing the Affordable Care Act with no plan to take its place--would devastate people's lives and our economy. As we prepare to vote on his nomination, I think it is appropriate to remind our colleagues how we got here and the hard work that we did to approve a health care reform bill that is helping millions of people today. I have a couple of charts that I would like for us to take a look at. We have on the right of this chart the United States of America, and on the left, we have Japan, a place I used to fly in and out of a lot when I was a naval flight officer during the Cold War. One of the things that we learned a few years ago--6, 7, or 8 years ago--when we were debating what to do, if anything, in the last administration about extending health care coverage to a lot of Americans who didn't have it, we looked at countries around the world in the Finance Committee to see who was doing a better job and who was not. Among the interesting things that we found out about Japan was that they were spending about 8 percent of gross domestic product to provide health care coverage to the folks in their country--8 percent. In the United States, at the time, we were spending 18 percent of gross domestic product, more than twice of what they were spending in Japan. Think about it: 8 percent of GDP to provide coverage and 18 percent of GDP in the United States. You might say: Well, maybe that is because we were covering a lot more people in the United States than they cover in Japan. Well, as it turns out, just the opposite is true, because not only do they spend in Japan like half as much as a percentage of GDP as we do, but they actually get better results, lower rates of infant mortality, higher rates of longevity among adults, and they cover everybody. They cover everybody. When the Affordable Care Act was adopted, we had somewhere between 40 and 50 million Americans who would go to bed at night without any health care coverage at all. I like to say the Japanese are smart people, and they are good allies of ours, good customers of ours. They can't be that smart, and we cannot be that dumb. So as we were going through the debate on the Affordable Care Act in the Finance Committee about 6 or 7 years ago, one of the things we did is to say: Well, let's look at some other countries and see if they are doing something that maybe we could learn from and maybe we could take to heart and sort of reshape our health care delivery system with that in mind. One of the things they do really well in Japan is they provide good access to primary health care. If you happen to live in Japan, you don't have to go very far in your neighborhood to find a health care provider. It might be maybe someone like an RN, or it might be something like an advanced practice nurse and maybe a primary care doc, but they have easy access to primary health care. What they like to do in Japan is to define problems and to address problems when they are small and when they can be treated. They focus a whole lot on prevention and wellness. That is a great lesson. If you look at the Affordable Care Act, that is a lesson that we learned and incorporated into that legislation. The heading on this chart is this: The Affordable Care Act is a Republican plan. Surprise. Why do I say that? Well, when you go back to 1993, we had a new President, Bill Clinton, and a new First Lady, Hillary Clinton. She basically felt--and I think her husband did, too-- that every President, every administration since maybe Truman, had been talking about the need to try to make sure a lot more Americans had access to health care--quality health care--but nobody could actually figure out how to do it. So Hillary Clinton began working in 1993 on health care, and people eventually called it HillaryCare--HillaryCare. If my life depended on it, I could not explain the elements of HillaryCare, but I could explain the elements of the Republican alternative that was offered to it. It was introduced by a fellow named John Chafee, a Republican Senator from the State of Rhode Island, and it had a number of elements to it. So I just want to mention these five elements that were found in the Republican alternative in 1993 to HillaryCare. Senator Chafee's bill is the column right here. The next column over is called RomneyCare--right here. Farthest from me--my left, your right--is the Affordable Care Act. We will look at five different components. As to individual mandate, which of these proposals had the individual mandate and which did not? As to employer mandate, which of these proposals included the employer mandate and which did not? There is the ban on preexisting conditions--the idea that insurance companies could not say: Oh, because you had breast cancer, because you had this or that--patient or health care--if someone needs health care but they have preexisting conditions, insurance companies can't say you can't get coverage because there was a ban included on that. As to subsidies for purchasing health insurance, which of these had it and which did not? And we are going to look at the idea of--we will call them exchanges--purchasing in bulk. When we were debating the Affordable Care Act, people would say: Why do you want to do this? I would say: Well, look at the Federal Government. In the Federal Government, you have the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. If folks work as full-time employees, they can get access to health care. We get our coverage usually through private insurers. The Federal Government provides about 70 percent of the premium costs; the individuals provide about 30 percent of the premium cost. It is a large purchasing pool because we have over a million people in the Federal Government purchasing pool. We don't get free or cheap insurance, but it helps drive down the cost because you are buying health care coverage for a lot of people. Somebody had a bright idea in 1993--John Chafee, I think, and the folks working with him, 20 Republican Senators and 3 Democrats, who said maybe we ought to give folks who don't have health care coverage the opportunity to buy their coverage in large group plans, much like we have in the Federal Government. I will just hit the pause button right there and stop my remarks for now and yield the floor to the Senator from Montana.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I don't speak often on the floor, but it seems that whenever I do, you are the Presiding Officer. I have said this before, but you are a glutton for punishment. I thank you for your willingness to show up day after day. I was going to talk a little bit about the Affordable Care Act as it relates to Congressman Price, who has been nominated to be Secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services. Before I do, I want to follow up on the comments of my friend Senator John Barrasso, who is the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee on which we both serve. He is the senior Republican, and I am pleased and really privileged to be the senior Democrat alongside him. What I would just say in response is--if Senator Schumer were here, he would be perfectly capable of thinking for himself and defending himself, but I would say this: On the question of whether Judge Gorsuch will have a hearing, I think he will have a hearing, and he should have a hearing. On the question of whether there will be a 60-vote margin--the last couple of people who have been confirmed for the Supreme Court, both Democrats, were confirmed by more than 60 votes. I don't know Judge Gorsuch well, but I do know Merrick Garland pretty well, and I must say I am disappointed that he never got a hearing, although he was nominated by Barack Obama when there was almost 10 months remaining in President Obama's term. Not only did he not get a hearing, a lot of folks on the other side of the aisle couldn't find the time to meet with him, and he never had a vote--a 60-vote margin or even a simple majority, 51 votes. For us to now hear it is important that Judge Gorsuch get a hearing and get an up-or-down vote, I just wish I had heard those voices here over the last year when a very good man was treated I think very badly--very badly. That was Merrick Garland. That is for another day, but I couldn't let the moment pass without saying anything. Mr. President, to back up to about 30 minutes ago, I was talking about the Affordable Care Act, and I yielded to Senators Tester, Isakson, and Barrasso. Now I want to come back to where I was. I am a Democrat. I am proud to be a Democrat, a retired Navy Captain, and I went to graduate school, undergraduate at Ohio State, Navy ROTC, studied economics. After the Navy, after the Vietnam war, I moved from California to Delaware, got an MBA at the University of Delaware and studied some more economics and some other things in their MBA program. I became State treasurer, Congressman, Governor, Senator. I have always been intrigued by how we harness market forces. How do we harness market forces for good public policy outcomes? You don't always hear Democrats say that, but that is the way I think. I think if we can find ways to harness market forces and achieve a good public policy outcome, that is a good thing. We ought to try to find them, and I think if we can, we can generate good bipartisan support for our ideas. At the end of the day, if it meets our goals, so be it. I keep going back to 1993, which is when John Chafee, whom I knew--I was a Congressman then. Actually, in 1933, he introduced his own version of the Affordable Care Act, cosponsored, I think, by 20 other Republicans and maybe 3 Democrats. Among the Republican cosponsors of John Chafee's legislation--which actually looks like the Affordable Care Act--were a couple of Republicans who are still here. One of them is the chairman of the Finance Committee, Orrin Hatch, and the other is the fellow on the Finance Committee who is actually senior in terms of the Finance Committee to Orrin, and that is Chuck Grassley. They cosponsored the 1993 legislation that Chafee introduced. I want to take just a moment and go through the five key provisions in Senator John Chafee's 1993 legislation. I will start here at the bottom of this chart. One of the things we see in the Chafee legislation was the idea that folks who did not have access to health care and were not part of a large group plan would have an opportunity to have the benefit as we do in the Federal Government and, like half the people who get health care in the country, get coverage through a large group plan. So there would be a large group buying access to health care coverage for a lot of individual people who happen to be in that group; maybe they work for the same employer. But Senator Chafee came up with a good idea, and the idea was that we might want to create in each State something called exchanges or marketplaces where people who didn't have coverage could find coverage and be part of a larger group and enjoy the benefits of being part of that larger group. I think they called them exchanges. They may have called them purchasing groups. But it was a 1993 idea. He also said that folks who got their coverage through one of these exchanges or marketplaces in 1 of 50 States should get some help in buying down the cost of health care premiums if they are getting coverage through the exchange or the purchasing pool in their State, the marketplace, and we would call that a sliding scale tax credit. The lower the income of the person buying their health care coverage through the marketplace, the bigger the tax credit, and as a person's income goes up, the size of the tax credit goes down and eventually goes away. That was in Senator Chafee's legislation in 1993. Also in Senator Chafee's legislation was something called an individual mandate, which basically said that under his proposal, people had to get coverage. You couldn't make somebody get coverage if they absolutely refused to, but the idea was to penalize people in one way or another, maybe with a fine or something like that, and say: If you don't get coverage, we can't force you to, but we are going to impose a fine or penalty on you, and over time, that fine or penalty will increase. Maybe eventually you will say: Well, I am paying this fine or this penalty, and it is going to be pretty expensive. Maybe I ought to get health care coverage to avoid the penalty. That is called the individual mandate. Chafee's mandate was that employers of a certain size would be required to provide health care coverage for employees. It was a mandate, not for all employers but for a number of them when they reached a certain number of employees. Then the fifth provision in the Chafee plan in 1993 was a ban on preexisting conditions. Some know that the Presiding Officer is a physician in his State. And a number of people in my State, I am sure in his State as well, lost coverage because they had a preexisting condition. Maybe they had coverage for a while, and they lost coverage or lost their job or something like that, and then they had a condition that could be a scare with colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer--you name it--and they eventually planned to sign up to get health care coverage, and because of the preexisting condition, they couldn't get it. So what Chafee said in his proposal to insurance companies was: You cannot refuse to provide coverage for someone because they have a preexisting condition. The health insurance companies said: Well, if you are going to put that preexisting condition on us, then we have to have the individual mandate. In these State exchanges you are going to create, Senator Chafee, we have to make sure there are people in the purchasing pools in each of the States who are young and invincible, like our pages sitting here in front of me today--young, healthy. They just can't be people that are old and infirm and not well because they will consume a lot of health care costs. We need a mixed pool that is insurable so insurance companies can insure this pool for health care and not lose their shirts. That was the long and short of it in the Republican plan from Senator Chafee, with some bipartisan support in 1993. Mitt Romney became Governor of Massachusetts sometime after the turn of the century, and he was interested in running for President. He is a smart guy. Some of us know him, some better than others. But he is a very smart fellow. He is smart enough to know that if he wanted to run for President some day--and he did--one of the things he could do that could help bolster his chances was to be able to demonstrate after years and years of people talking about providing health care coverage to just about everyone in our country, he could actually say: We did this in our State. We actually provided coverage for just about everybody in Massachusetts who needed coverage. When he decided to do this, he was smart enough to go back to Senator Chafee's blueprint from the 1993 legislation. It was a decade later that Mitt Romney became Governor. I say this as a recovering Governor myself: You are always looking for what works to see if it might be transferrable to your State. But he seized on Senator Chafee's proposal, and the similarities are pretty striking. Like the Chafee plan, RomneyCare--they call it RomneyCare--created these State exchanges, or purchasing pools, just as in Chafee's legislation. They had the sliding scale tax credits to help them buy coverage, buy their health insurance through the purchasing pool so people with a lower income could get a bigger tax credit, and as their income goes up, the credit gets smaller and smaller, and then it finally phases out. That is what they did in RomneyCare. The third thing they had was a ban on preexisting conditions in Massachusetts. If someone had a preexisting condition, the insurance company could not say: No, no coverage for you. They had to provide coverage. Just like insurers told Senator Chafee all those years ago in 1993; that if we are going to have to insure people because of preexisting conditions, you have to give us a pool of people to insure, that we can insure and not lose our shirts. That included individual mandates so we could have the young, the healthy in the pool, and at the same time call for the employer mandate so employers of a certain size had to ensure that their employees were getting health care coverage. That was in the Romney plan. They launched it about a decade ago, and right off the bat it was warmly embraced by the people of Massachusetts. They thought this could be cool. And it was good. It was the right thing to do. It might just work and be an example for the rest of the country. So they had a warm embrace and a good launch. In the first couple of years, they did a good job in RomneyCare in covering a lot of people and reducing the number of people who did not have coverage. What they didn't do such a good job on, though, for the first several years, was on the affordability side. Health care costs continued to rise in Massachusetts. There were several reasons for that, one of which was the individual mandate. They had a fine. So if you happen to be young and maybe you didn't think you needed health care, you had to pay a fine if you were a certain age and didn't sign up. It was an increasing fine that went up over time. Eventually, people decided, Well, if I have to pay this fine, I might as well get health care coverage, but they didn't do it initially. They were negative in terms of coverage. Eventually, in Massachusetts not only did they do a good job in increasing coverage, they actually did a pretty good job on affordability. One of the reasons is, they had a good mix of people in their pools and a fair amount of competition between health insurance companies and providers--competition. Fast forward to 2009, the Affordable Care Act. When the Affordable Care Act was reported out of committee to come here to the floor, what did it have? It had, No. 1, let's create these State large purchasing pools, State exchanges and marketplaces, and that is in Chafee's bill and in RomneyCare. It had sliding scale tax credits to help buy down the cost of coverage in the exchanges and marketplaces. There was a ban on preexisting conditions, but insurers said: No, we can't insure the people you want us to, we will have to cover everybody, and those who have preexisting conditions, you have to make sure we have a good mix of people in the insurance pool. So just like in Chafee and in RomneyCare, we had the individual mandate. You can't make people get coverage, but you can have an accelerating scale so people will eventually bite and get the coverage, and we also had the employer mandate. Not every employer but a certain size number of employers had to have--had to cover their employees. It is kind of remarkable. I think if you talked to most people in this country, and you walked through this, they would be amazed to know that the Affordable Care Act, with these five major provisions, was actually stolen, plagiarized, from a Republican Senator, Chafee, in 1993; but from Governor Romney's proposal. There is more to the Affordable Care Act, including the expansion of Medicaid coverage--not for everybody, but up to 135 percent or so of poverty, and the real focus on how do we move from a sick care system, where we just spend money on health care for people who are sick, why don't we spend some money to try and make sure people stay well, on prevention and wellness, early access to care, so folks can get a colonoscopy maybe before they come down with colon cancer or get a mammogram before breast cancer, those kinds of things. One of the great things of the Affordable Care Act, little known to most people, is the idea that we need to collaborate in the delivery of health care so it is not just one hospital working by itself but maybe build a network of hospitals, and maybe with these, working with doctor groups, groups of doctors. The idea is to collaborate in the delivery of health care in ways that focus on wellness, prevention, and that is, I think, little noticed; the idea of better results for less money. I call it value, looking for value. That is just a little bit of history, and I think it is worth looking at. Could we look at the next one. I have a pie chart I would like to share with everybody. I don't know if the Presiding Officer has seen this before. I have used it once or twice. This is a pie chart that has about 300 million people in it, and this represents the 300 million or so people in our country who have health care coverage. The blue represents those folks who get their coverage through their employer. It doesn't mean the employer pays for all the costs of their health care; the employer pays the majority, and maybe the employees pay some fraction or percentage of that coverage. Over half the people in the country today getting health care coverage are those in large group plans. If you look at what is going on with premium increases, and increases in copays and deductibles, my understanding is the premium increases for these folks--over half of the 300 million people in the pool--we actually compared premium increases before the ACA was adopted and the years after, and premiums still go up for these folks but not by as much as they had before the Affordable Care Act was adopted. So that is how most people get their coverage here. Next, about--let's see, this green area right here, it has anywhere between 15 and 20 percent of people who get health care coverage in this country, they are in Medicare, the 65 and over or totally disabled, unable to work, and qualify for Medicare because of that. One of the little known things about the Affordable Care Act is that the Medicare trust fund had been running out of money for quite a while, and the date at which it eventually runs out of money and will not be able to provide coverage can continue to get closer and closer. One of the benefits, little known or noted in the Affordable Care Act, is that since it was adopted, the life of the Medicare trust fund has been extended by 12 years. After coming down for years and years and years, the life of the Medicare trust fund has been extended by 12 years. Medicare people, they don't buy their coverage on the exchanges, but a lot of people can still use fee-for-service. Maybe it works for some people. I don't know if it is the best way to get good coverage for an affordable price, but we have seen a migration to what is called Medicare Advantage. I think it is like managed care with a heart and a head, and now about one-third of the folks on Medicare get that coverage. Fifteen to twenty percent of the people get their coverage in this big 300 million-person pie chart from Medicare. About 20 to 25 percent of the people who are getting health care coverage in the country today get their coverage through Medicaid. Believe it or not, it is not mostly part families or women with children, it is mostly people--maybe like our parents or grandparents who are in nursing homes, a lot of them with dementia. They spend down their resources and they end up going to nursing homes, and Medicaid pays to help keep them alive and cared for, and that is anywhere from 20 to 22 percent. The States previously--virtually every State has a Medicaid plan, but one of the things we did with the Affordable Care Act was to say we want to encourage States to cover not just up to 100 percent of poverty but maybe up to 135 percent of poverty. The Federal Government will pay about 90 percent of that, and maybe someday less than that, but we want more people to be covered through Medicaid, which is actually more cost-effective than the purchasing pools I talked about earlier. So we have 300 million people getting health care coverage. The lion's share of them--over 55 percent--get coverage from large group plans. About 22, 25 percent is Medicaid, about 15 to 20 percent Medicare, and what is left is about roughly 6 percent or so, they get their coverage through the exchanges, through the marketplaces. When our Republican friends and others criticize the marketplaces and the sliding scale tax credits and the individual mandates, the employer mandate, and maybe the ban on preexisting conditions, what they are criticizing is right here, a very small portion of the pie, the heart and soul of what was proposed by Senator Chafee in 1993 and the heart and soul of what was in RomneyCare in Massachusetts a decade later. There is a certain irony there not lost on me and I know not on others. Can we do some things to improve the delivery of health care among all of these groups? Sure. Can we do it where it covers more people and does it in a more cost-effective way? Sure we can. But the idea of sort of getting rid of this--getting rid of particularly the piece down here and a lot of the other provisions that are represented in this pie chart, I don't think that makes a lot of sense. A friend of mine is a firefighter. We work out in Wilmington at the YMCA before I jump on a train and come to work. We were talking not long ago about a situation you have with a building that is on fire, and the people are up in the tall building and maybe can't get down to the elevators, and they rush to the windows to look out to see if there is anybody down there. The firefighters are outside the building that is on fire, and they are yelling with a bull horn up to the folks on the fourth and fifth floors: Go ahead and jump. We will catch you. But the people who are being asked to jump notice that the firefighters don't have any nets. The idea of health care coverage where we are actually covering a lot more people, and to say we are going to pull that away from you for 20 million, 30 million more people, and don't worry, somewhere down the line--a year or 2 or 3 years from now--we will provide the nets to catch you, I think that makes no sense--no sense. We got this far, so maybe one more chart. Who gets hurt by repealing the Affordable Care Act? I will just say this and then close, I say to my friend from Maryland. The answer is everyone. We do not have a lot of rural space in Delaware. I know we have a lot in Louisiana and quite a bit in Maryland. But folks who get their coverage from the rural hospitals, whether it is in Delaware, Maryland, Delmarva, whether it is in Louisiana, the rural hospitals, they are going to get clobbered if we repeal the Affordable Care Act and take away the Medicaid expansion, take away the marketplaces. They will get clobbered and a lot of them will close. The federally qualified community health centers, they are going to get clobbered, and they provide coverage for 10 million people in our country. When people are denied coverage in those rural hospitals or suburban, urban hospitals or the federally qualified community health centers, where people don't get coverage there, they will get health care somewhere, and it may be going to an emergency room at a hospital, getting really sick and having to get admitted and then spend a lot of money. Where does the money come from? From those of us who use the health care system, who are paying premiums and our employers are paying premiums. The costs are really absorbed by the hospitals themselves. It makes not a lot of sense. The person in the House who has been really in the forefront of repealing the Affordable Care Act is the person that Donald Trump has now named to be our Secretary of Health and Human Services. The idea of having a new Secretary overseeing the Department of Health and Human Services, someone who is trying to run this program and oversee it and make sure that it works in a way that provides more coverage at an affordable price, is actually a person who has been trying to kill it for as long as he has been in the House of Representatives. Some people may not be concerned or upset about that, but I am. I think that before we put that person in charge in that job, we need to remember some of the lessons I just shared with folks here today. For these reasons, I cannot support the nomination. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, thank you for your leadership on this issue, and God knows, how many others. You are a force of nature. I am happy to be with you on this day. I come from Delaware, and we have about a million people who live in Delaware, and they are not shy about telling their congressional delegation--Senator Coons, Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester, and me-- what they are thinking. We go home just about every night. They get to tell us a lot of times in person. They also call our office. We have three offices in Delaware. They call our office here in Washington. They send us emails. We used to get a lot of letters, but now mostly we receive emails, not too many letters. I have never seen the kind of outcry, if you will, from the people of my State on any nomination. I have been privileged to serve. This is my 17th year. So we have seen a lot of nominations come and go, seen a number of Presidents come and go, but I have never seen anything quite like this. I asked my staff to compile for me, through yesterday, the number of folks who either called us or emailed or sent us letters on the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education. As of yesterday, over 3,700 people had contacted my office. That may not be a lot from Oklahoma. That may not be a lot from California. That is a lot in Delaware. I ask my staff to break down--let us know if we heard from anybody outside of Delaware: over 700. Then I said, for the folks who contacted us from Delaware with respect to this nomination of Betsy DeVos, how many were for her? Out of over 3,700--10. I have never seen anything like that. So that means there are over 3,700 people in my State who raised their voice up against her nomination. Just because the numbers are like 370 to 1 against the nomination, that doesn't necessarily mean I should oppose the nomination, but it certainly makes me stop and think if I had been inclined to do so. I rise today, not just as a United States Senator, but as a recovering Governor and a father, one who knows the value of public education from personal experience. My wife and I grew up--she in North Carolina and me in West Virginia, a little bit of Ohio, and mostly Virginia--we grew up in public schools. Our sons attended public schools throughout high school, graduated and went off to college, and we are proud of what they have accomplished. They are 26 and 28 years old today. I am very proud of what they have accomplished. I have a stepson from my first marriage. He lives in Michigan. He raised a family, four children and his wife, and I am very proud of what he accomplished--again, a product of public schools. When I graduated from high school, I was fortunate to win a Navy ROTC scholarship and go to Ohio State. I worked a couple of jobs while I was going to school and was able to become one of the first people in my family ever to go to college and to graduate from college. I spent five as a naval flight officer during the Vietnam war. At the end of the war, I came back to the United States and moved to Delaware. There, thanks to the GI bill and continuing to fly as a Reserve P-3 aircraft mission commander, I was able to make ends meet and get a graduate degree in business administration from the University of Delaware. The 8 years I was Governor, from 1993 to 2001, I spent a big part of those 8 years focusing on creating a more nurturing environment for job creation, job preservation. Our Presiding Officer has heard me wax on in our committee--more often than he probably wants to remember--about a major job of government under State, local, Federal, is to create a nurturing environment for job creation, job preservation. In a family, you have breadwinners, people earning an income, making a way for themselves, for the rest, and our job is a whole lot easier. One of the keys to that nurturing environment is to make sure the young men and women coming out of our colleges, our high schools, our trade schools have the ability to read, to write, to think, to use the technology, and to have a good work ethic and go out and be a good employee for any employer who might hire them. Public education is personal for me. I have had this remarkable connection to it for my whole life. In our little State, I visit schools almost every week. We have a program called Principal for a Day. I have been Principal for a Day. It is from the State chamber of commerce. I joke and tell people I have been Principal for a Day in about half the schools in Delaware. It is probably not quite right but probably 30 or more. I keep running into kids who went to high school and say: ``I was your principal, did you know that? Only for a day, but it was a good day.'' I learned a lot from doing that. I mentored, for probably a couple of decades, a bunch of different kids, trying to help be a good role model for them and give them an extra person to be able to lean on and to count on. Just recently, I was over at the school a couple of miles from our home at Mount Pleasant Elementary, which has a terrific elementary school in the Brandywine School District in Northern Delaware. The Teacher of the Year there for the State was good enough to let me come by and shadow her for part of her day and see what a really terrific teacher does. During the 8 years I was Governor, one of the highlights of every year was the day I would host, in June at the end of the school year. We have 19 school districts. Each school district picked the Teacher of the Year. They have the chance to have lunch--the Delaware Teachers of the Year--and just to focus on their school districts and their schools and their classes, what was working to raise student achievement and really be inspired by all of them. I hear regularly from my constituents about the importance of public education. In fact, I was out running late Sunday afternoon, actually into the dusk. I was going by a Wawa on Philadelphia Pike, just north of Wilmington. Some guy came by and he rolled down his window. As I ran along, he said, ``Don't vote for that Betsy DeVos.'' I said, ``Really. Can't get away from it.'' But I hear it a lot. I hear the message loud and clear. Many of our colleges have covered this nomination at some length. But I think it bears repeating. I would just say this: Experience matters. Mrs. DeVos has, as far as I can tell, no experience in public education as a student, none as a parent, none as a teacher, none as a school administrator--none. Maybe that alone should not disqualify her, but it is concerning. During her confirmation hearing, Mrs. DeVos failed to answer the most basic questions relating to education policy, and she demonstrated, not just in my view but certainly the views of a lot of the people who watched and shared their views with me, that she was unqualified, really unprepared for what I think is a critical task. Many of my colleagues who support Mrs. DeVos point to her experience in Michigan, where Mrs. DeVos used her significant wealth and influence apparently to push an education reform agenda centered on vouchers, centered on for-profit charter schools that delivered questionable outcomes for students and taxpayers. Let me just say, I was a Governor who proposed legislation, signed legislation creating charter schools. I have been a champion of public charter schools in my State and in our country. I have been a champion here in the Congress. I am not a champion of all these for-profit colleges and universities that we have. Some of them are very good; some of them are not. I am concerned with the advent of for-profit charter schools, particularly those that are not doing the job, getting the job done and raising student achievement for the young men and women who are students there. Leading the Department of Education is a very big job. It is a very important job. The Secretary of Education is responsible for overseeing a budget of some $36 billion for K-12 education and $150 billion for higher education, as well as managing a portfolio of more than $1.2 trillion in outstanding Federal student loans. I have been fortunate as a Congressman, as a Governor, as a Senator, to work with any number of Secretaries of Education in the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, the administration of Bill Clinton, the administration of George W. Bush, and the administration of Barack Obama--people like Dick Riley, former Governor of South Carolina, people like Arne Duncan, who was a great school leader in Illinois and for our country as well. When I think of the giants they were and the work they did and how knowledgeable they were, how inspiring they were, how uplifting they were, that is the kind of leader we need. They were not just all in Democratic administrations or Democratic and Republican administrations. As much as ever, we need that kind of leader today. I will conclude by saying that Mrs. DeVos too often lacks experience, just as often has the wrong experience that we should expect from someone to lead the Department of Education at what is really a critical juncture for our country. I cannot support her nomination because I am not a convinced that she is interested in bringing Democrats and Republicans together on a shared vision of improving public education in this country. Reluctantly, I must urge my Democrat and Republican colleagues to listen to this groundswell of voices from across the country and ultimately oppose this nomination.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I also rise this evening to talk about the nomination of our colleague from Alabama, Senator Jeff Sessions, to serve as our next Attorney General. Like many of our colleagues, I have heard from an incredible number of people in my State regarding this nomination--some in favor, fewer than 100--many against. Almost 1,300 Delawareans have called, emailed, or written to my office, expressing their opposition to Senator Sessions' nomination. I would like to share, if I could, just a few excerpts from some of the emails that I have received concerning this nomination. We will start with Priscilla from the town of Newport in the northern part of our State. She wrote to me about the experience of her family growing up in a segregated society. Here is what she had to say. She said: I lived through my parents not having the right to vote, not being able to go through the front door of a restaurant or doctor's office, using the colored fountains and bathrooms. Never again. Another person, Rhonda from Dewey Beach wrote to me about Senator Sessions' voting record on voting rights. Here is what she had to say. She said: Mr. Sessions has called the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a ``piece of intrusive legislation.'' Under him, the Justice Department would most likely focus less on prosecutions of minority voter suppression and more on rooting out mythical voter fraud. Here is one from Wilmington, DE--my hometown now--from a woman named Dawn. She wrote to me about her concerns as a parent of a child with autism. She wrote these words: I am writing to express my deep concern with Jeff Sessions' nomination for Attorney General. I am a parent of an autistic son and am terrified that people with these types of views will be in power to enforce (or not) the laws that protect the rights of my son and so many others. Mr. President, the common theme throughout these letters, these calls, these emails is their fear that Senator Sessions will not be an Attorney General for all Americans. I know that many of my colleagues--our colleagues--will soon be voting their hopes by voting to confirm Senator Sessions to be our next Attorney General, but too many of my constituents, including African Americans, immigrants, women, Muslims, and other vulnerable populations, have called and emailed my office in numbers that I don't think I have ever seen before to express their fears and to ask me to do something about it as their senior Senator. I have heard their voices loud and clear, and I feel compelled to add my voice to so many others in opposing this nomination. Let me just say this as clearly as I can. I do so with no joy, no joy. Last night, as I was thinking about what I wanted to share on the floor this evening, my mind drifted back to another time and place. The Presiding Officer may not know this. I grew up in Danville, VA, my sister and I, the last capital of the Confederacy. I got there I think when I was just about 9 years old and left when I was about to finish high school. The home that we lived in right outside of Danville, VA--if you walked out the front door, about 100 yards down the road on the other side was a church, Woodlawn Baptist Church. That was our church, and my mom dragged my sister and me there every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, every Wednesday night, and most Thursday nights. When my sister and I were in high school, we stood on the doorstep of that church Monday through Friday when school was in session, and we would catch a school bus. About 200 yards down the road, on Westover Drive, there was another school bus stop, where African-American kids got on their school bus, 200 yards away. We would drive in our school bus 10 miles to our school, Roswell High School, and the kids at the other school bus stop would get in their bus, and they would drive past our school another 10 miles to get to their school. On weekends, my dad worked a lot. He was in the Navy Reserve as a chief petty officer. He was gone a lot on the weekends. My mom worked in downtown Danville in the five-and-dime store. My sister and I would catch a bus, and we would ride downtown to go have lunch with my mom on many Saturdays when we were 9, 10, 11, 12 years old. I couldn't help but notice when we got on the bus that if you were White, you got to sit up front, and if you were Black, you sat in back. We would go to a blue plate diner with my mom at lunchtime. There was one section where, if you were White, you got to eat there, and another section where, if you were Black, colored, you would eat there. To go to the restrooms, it was colored only, White only. After lunch, my sister and I would go to Rialto Theatre in Danville, and my mom would give us each a quarter. And for 25 cents, we could see that afternoon three movies until she was finished with work, and we would go home together. At that Rialto Theatre, if you were White, you sat down in front on the first floor; if you were Black, you sat up in the balcony. I will never forget that when I was a little boy in Danville, one day, I went to the dentist's office for some dental care. I remember this older African-American woman coming into the dentist's office, and she was in pain with I think an abscessed tooth. She said: I know I don't have an appointment, but could someone just help me out of my misery? They said: I am sorry, ma'am. You don't have an appointment. We can't do anything for you. And she left crying. My parents--it turns out I am a Democrat; they were Republican, as far as I know. They got to vote, and they got to vote regularly. But I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that the kids at that bus stop who caught that bus to go to that all-Black, all-African-American school, my guess is that a bunch of them didn't get to vote because of something we had in Virginia called a poll tax. Among the lessons that my sister and I learned at Woodlawn Baptist Church was the Golden Rule: Treat other people the way we want to be treated. Among the things that we learned at that church is Matthew 25: We should care for the least of these. When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me? When I was thirsty, did you give me a drink? When I was sleeping in prison, did you visit me? When I was a stranger in your land, did you welcome me? And we were taught: yes, yes, yes, yes. Micah 6. In my church this past Sunday, the question was raised: What is expected of us by the Lord? And we received three answers. And the three answers: Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with thy God. I have taken those lessons from my childhood, and those are lessons from my own church today. And I want to tell you that as a kid growing up in Danville, VA, I can understand how other kids in my community were racist or bigoted. I can understand how it happened in Alabama or North Carolina, where our Presiding Officer is from. But somewhere along the line, somebody got ahold of me and said: You know all that stuff you are talking about in church and the Bible? If you really believe it, here is how you should act and talk and speak. And finally it sunk in. I just want to say that Jeff Sessions has been my colleague. I have been here for 16 years. He has been my friend and colleague for 16 years. We read the same Bible. There have been times where we read it together over the years. When we met in my office just a few weeks ago, we talked about how our faith guides us in our lives. I reminded him of how Matthew 25 talks about moral obligations, ``the least of these,'' which I have talked about. As I carefully considered my friend's nomination to serve our country in such a critical role, I found that while we agree on many issues, including that our faith is an important guide not only in our personal lives but in our capacity as public servants, I found that our views on too many important issues diverged. Like many Americans, I am troubled by the direction Donald Trump is seeking to take our country in these first few weeks of his administration. I believe that an independent Attorney General can provide a check on this President's legal recklessness, and it may be more necessary now than at any point in recent history. Donald Trump has already revealed an agenda that reflects his divisive campaign, one that I believe will make our economy less robust, less fair, our environment less clean, our country less inclusive, our freedoms less free, and our allies less inclined to take America at its word. Many of us worry that Jeff Sessions will not be the independent check on this administration that we need, and many of us worry that Jeff will not hold our Justice Department to the principles that everyone, no matter their age, income, sex, or color, deserves equal protection under the law. My colleagues and I have these concerns with a number of Cabinet nominees. I voted for more of them than I voted against. Having said that, we need individuals to serve in these key posts who are willing to speak truth to power. Ironically, that is what got Acting Attorney General Sally Yates in trouble. She did it a few days ago when she was fired for refusing to defend the Muslim ban because she thought it might not be lawful. Throughout the campaign, Senator Sessions supported a religious-based test for immigrants, and I fear that Senator Sessions is unlikely to stand up to Donald Trump and tell him that he is wrong on this front. To be honest with you, I just believe we need somebody who will do that, and unfortunately I fear there is a good chance that Senator Sessions believes Donald Trump just might be right. I am also afraid that Senator Sessions won't be the independent check our country is likely to need, especially in this administration. Ultimately, however, the votes are where they are, and it appears that our friend, our colleague, Senator Sessions, will be our country's next chief law enforcement officer and chief attorney. Over these past days and weeks, I thought about whether our friend is the best person for the job, as I have said. I know others have too. I also thought about the millions of Americans who fear that he may have views about different races and minorities that could seep into the Justice Department, resulting in an unequal applications of our country's laws. My thoughts have led me to the example of Lyndon Johnson, a man from the South who served, as you may recall, in the U.S. House of Representatives in Texas for a number of years and later suddenly became President under tragic circumstances, as we all recall, in November of 1963. LBJ didn't just oppose civil rights while in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, he often bragged about it. But he went through a public transformation that would lead him to pass the first civil rights bill since reconstruction as Senate majority leader in 1957 and then signed into law some of our Nation's landmark civil rights laws--the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Act, the Fair Housing Act, and countless others. LBJ's transformation didn't happen overnight, though. The truth is that his views on civil rights and racial justice might have been there all along. Here is what Robert Caro wrote about LBJ in the most recent installment on his life: Although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said, but what is equally true, is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary: to hide traits that might make others reluctant to give him power, to hide also what he wants to do with that power. If men recognized the traits or realized the aims, they might refuse to give him what he wants. But as a man obtains more power, camouflage is less necessary. The curtain begins to rise. The revealing begins. So it was, in Caro's view--and I think he is probably right--so it was with Lyndon Johnson. Mr. President, that reminds me of another quote tonight. This is one from our former First Lady Michelle Obama, who said these words: ``Being President doesn't change who you are, it reveals who you are.'' It reveals who you are. We are not confirming Jeff Sessions to be our next President, but we are confirming him to be our next Attorney General, and we must ask, as the curtain rises, what will it reveal? What will it reveal about Jeff Sessions? Unfortunately, each time Jeff's career has led to more power, whether it was district attorney in Alabama, attorney general for his State, or as U.S. Senator, it has revealed a Jeff Sessions who is much the same as he has always been. It has revealed Jeff Sessions to be less inclined to undergo the transformation that so many others before him have undergone to put themselves and our Nation on the right side of history. I will close with this thought: If Senator Sessions is confirmed, it is my sincere hope that our friend and our colleague will recognize the awesome responsibility and the opportunity he has to serve not only the people of Alabama, not only the people of the South or the Southeastern part of our country, but Americans across our country of all races, all colors, all creeds. In this body, it is often important that we vote with our hopes rather than our fears, and unfortunately, tonight I am not yet prepared to vote my hopes. But the words of a reporter writing about President Johnson a few years ago give me some hope as we look forward, and maybe they will give hope to the rest of us. Here is what that reporter wrote about Lyndon Johnson: Perhaps the simple explanation, which Johnson likely understood better than most, was that there is no magic formula through which people can emancipate themselves from prejudice, no finish line that when crossed, awards a person's soul with a shining medal of purity in matters of race. All we can offer is a commitment to justice in word and deed that must be honored but from which we will all occasionally fall short. And I would just add, and we do. I hope these words I have just quoted resonate with our friend and colleague, Senator Jeff Sessions. If they do, both he and our country will be better for it. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I would just remind my colleagues that a lot of folks in my State and people I talk to around the country believe it is outrageous that the last President nominated a candidate for the Supreme Court for almost a year--a full 10 months--before stepping down before his term ended, and that nominee never got a hearing. We had a National Prayer Breakfast this morning, as our Presiding Officer knows. One of the occurring themes of the speakers at the Prayer Breakfast was the Golden Rule, the obligation to treat other people the way we want to be treated. I think that should apply to this nominee from this President. I also believe it should have applied to the last nominee from the last President. I think the way Merrick Garland was treated was outrageous, and he was roundly praised by Democrats and Republican, Members of this body, alike. The fact that he never got a vote I think is appalling. It runs against everything I was taught to believe. Perhaps the Presiding Officer's parents raised him the same way. My parents raised us to believe that two wrongs don't make a right. Two wrongs don't make a right. Folks on our side believe--although deeply troubled by the way the last nominee for the last administration was treated--this nominee deserves a hearing. My hope is that he gets one and there is time set aside to prepare for that hearing. My hope is that he will take the time to come and meet with us, particularly those of us who have concerns about his nomination. I think he should be subject to the same 60-vote margin the last several Supreme Court nominees were subjected to and passed; I think in one case it was 62 votes, and in another case, 63 votes. I just want to let my friends on the other side--and they are my friends--know that we and, frankly, a lot of people in this country are still troubled, looking back. We are going to look forward with the Golden Rule in mind. My hope is that our colleagues will do the same in the future. Mr. President, I rise on a subject that some of my colleagues have talked about here today. It is one that we have been discussing for almost the last 24 hours. It is a Congressional Review Act resolution to disapprove the stream protection rule. People may wonder, What does this mean? There once was a Senator from Nevada named Harry Reid. He once wrote a law that said: If Congress doesn't like a particular rule that has been approved and has gone through the process--drafting, all the approval processes--published in the Federal Register, and something like 60 days on the legislative calendar have run, then that rule is official; it is in full effect. However, if a Member of this body or the House wants to use the Congressional Review Act authored by Senator Harry Reid, they can repeal a rule for which the 60-day legislative clock has not run since that rule or regulation was published in the Federal Register. In this case, 60 legislative days have not passed since the stream protection rule was promulgated, printed in the Federal Register, and one or more of our colleagues has said: Let's use the CRA-- Congressional Review Act--to see if we can block or repeal it. I spoke on this yesterday, and I am happy to have a chance to talk a little bit about it again today. A prevailing argument in favor of this resolution to kill the rule is the significant negative economic implications of managing mining operations and site reclamation in such a way that life and economy continue along with and after extraction ends. Let's take a few minutes to reflect on the other side of the coin. I can assure you that hunters, fishermen, birdwatchers, and recreation enthusiasts of all ages, sorts, and varieties in my home State of Delaware--and I am sure in every State in our Nation--value an environment that supports the places they treasure and the species they seek. That is not the legacy of mining. Because of historically weak reclamation and restoration requirements, Appalachia now has more than a million acres of economically unproductive grasslands that cannot support farming, ranching, or the hardwood forest products sectors. That is one of the reasons for and one of the many strengths of this rule: to focus on post-mining economic uses of land, which could include ranching, forestry, tourism, birdwatching, hunting, fishing, and the list goes on. In America today, there are 47 million men, women, and children who hunt and fish. We all represent them. According to a 2014 report from the National Wildlife Federation, these activities deliver an astonishing $200 billion to the country's economy, and they support one and a half million jobs. I wish to also point out that mining impacts on headwaters are particularly important, as they represent the very foundation of our water system that supports all these activities and generates all of these benefits. Just to illustrate this point, Appalachia--a region in which I grew up--is the world's leading hotspot of aquatic biodiversity. I was born in Beckley, WV, and we lived there for 6 years or so after I was born and I came back a whole lot over the years to hunt and fish with my grandfather, but I had no idea there was this kind of biodiversity in that region. There are more species of freshwater fish in one river system in Tennessee than in all of Europe. Think about that--more species of freshwater fish in one river system in Tennessee than all of Europe. Yet surface coal mining has destroyed more than 2,000 miles of streams in this region alone. Cutting the heart out of our ecosystems is no way to do business. The question is, Would mining companies respect and consider these values and benefits as part of their operations and reclamation efforts without surface mining and clean water laws and the effective protections provided by the stream protection rule? I would say probably not. It is no surprise, then, that conservation and fishermen's organizations, such as Trout Unlimited, the American Fly Fishing Trade Association, the Izaak Walton League of America, and Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, so strongly support this rule and robust implementation of the Clean Water Act. In fact, 82 percent--over 8 out of 10--of America's hunters and anglers feel that we can protect water quality and also have a strong economy and good jobs at the same time. It is a false choice to say we can't have both at the same time. The stream protection rule would protect and restore an estimated 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forest over two decades-- areas important for hunting, fishing, and outdoor recreation. All these activities would provide local citizens and communities with economic opportunity to replace or build upon what often are one- industry regions. They, in turn, support local economies and create accessible work opportunities for residents, many of whom would otherwise struggle to make ends meet, care for their health, and support their families. In the end, this is a much more valuable and sustainable future for everybody concerned. These truths hold in their unique ways in mining States across our country, whether they involve ensuring salmon runs in Alaska or ranching in Wyoming. I will close by repeating a point I made previously in support of this stream protection rule. This past year, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement and the Fish and Wildlife Service completed consultation under the Endangered Species Act, resulting in what is known as the 2016 Biological Opinion. This new Biological Opinion smooths the way for more efficient Endangered Species Act compliance and provides some important protections to industry and State regulators regarding possible impacts of mining operations on protected species. I think it is important to note that if we kill this rule--and I hope we will not--that protection for industry and State regulators will go away, and those players will have to resort to a more cumbersome case- by-case review under the Endangered Species Act for all activities that might affect protected species. That would be a shame. That would be a shame, especially for a struggling industry. For this and for so many other reasons, this is a job-creating, economy-expanding rule. Why wouldn't we support it? Once again, I urge a ``no'' vote on this resolution. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I rise in opposition to this effort under the Congressional Review Act to block implementation of the stream protection rule. CRA offers Congress an important tool, as we know, to consider potentially egregious rules that are promulgated usually at the end of Presidential terms. The stream protection rule, which we are considering this evening, is not one of those. I live in a State--Delaware--whose citizens can be adversely affected by the upstream actions of others and border States whose citizens could be compromised by the things we do. I take it as a matter of faith that we should treat other people the way we want to be treated. We call that the Golden Rule, and I know that not everyone shares my passion for the Golden Rule, even though it appears not just in my faith, those who happen to be Catholic or Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist--it appears in all faiths, the idea that we ought to treat other people the way we want to be treated. I also believe the Federal Government should act to protect citizens from the harm of the actions that other citizens would do to them. This stream protection rule is, I believe, one of those actions. I am a native West Virginian. I was born in Beckley, WV, a coal mining town in South Central West Virginia. I understand well the role coal mining has played in supporting families in my native State and communities there for longer than any of us can personally remember. I also know that mining operations have had a devastating impact on the lives of those who have endured compromised drinking water and destroyed natural habitat, with a loss of the fish and wildlife that define the fabric of my native State and all other States. This rule has been a long time coming, as we have heard this evening. Indeed, we are living with rules governing mining conduct that go back, I believe, as far as 30 years. It is time for an upgrade, and I think the rule before us is a sound, responsible, and carefully developed answer to that need. In what is becoming an art form in this country, there are myths-- some call them alternative facts--that are swirling around this rule. As ranking member and the senior Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, I want to address a couple of them. Some would attack this rule's provisions as redundant and inconsistent with State obligations under the Clean Water Act. I am also a former Governor and am keenly aware of the problems of inefficient governance and avoided at all costs conflicts between State agencies. It wasn't always easy, but we didn't need Federal actions to compound those frictions. I am happy to say that the drafters of this rule heard those concerns, and this rule promotes collaboration and coordination between mining and environmental agencies and clarifies their roles, preserving their authorities under the surface mining and clean water laws. Both the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers concurred with the final rules, and in doing so, EPA said: ``We have concluded that nothing in the Stream Protection Rule is inconsistent with the provisions of the Clean Water Act and that the final rule does not inhibit the EPA's Clean Water Act authority to require that surface mining activities comply with all applicable provisions of the Clean Water Act, particularly those provisions related to water quality.'' The EPA goes on to say: ``The final Stream Protection Rule incorporates measures to limit duplication and avoid inconsistency in the implementation of Surface Mining and Reclamation Act and Clean Water Act programs, while supporting complementary, comprehensive, and effective environmental reviews of proposed surface coal mining operations.'' Some would say that the stream protection rule allows the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to veto Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act permits. That is not true. It is true that section 7 of the Endangered Species Act does require the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement of the Department of the Interior to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service if any action ``may affect'' listed terrestrial and freshwater species. The stream protection rule allows permit applicants and regulatory authorities to achieve ESA compliance in a variety of ways but does not provide the Fish and Wildlife Service any veto authority over permits. Indeed, this past year, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement and the Fish and Wildlife Service completed consultation under the Endangered Species Act, resulting in what is known as the 2016 Biological Opinion. This new Biological Opinion smooths the way for more efficient Endangered Species Act compliance, while providing important protections to industry and State regulators regarding possible impacts of mining operations on protected species. I think it is important to note that if we kill this rule, that protection for industry and State regulators will go away. Let me repeat that. I think it is important to note that if we kill this rule, that protection for industry and State regulators will go away, and those players will have to resort to a more cumbersome case-by-case review under the Endangered Species Act for all activities that might affect protected species. That would be a shame for a struggling industry. For those and a host of other reasons my colleagues will offer today, I urge a ``no'' vote on this resolution. I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield back my time.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I come to the floor with a lot of other folks to talk about the health care in this country. I think one of the goals we all share--and maybe we are not sure how to get there--is how to make sure that everybody who needs access to health care has it, that it is affordable, and that they get reasonably good quality, whoever they are and wherever they come from. When I was a naval flight officer, we used to fly a lot of missions out of Japan during the Cold War. I have a special interest in Japan, and I like the folks there. They are pretty remarkable in what they have achieved over the years. One of the things they have achieved over the years is providing pretty good health care for a fairly modest amount of money. We started working on the Affordable Care Act 7 or 8 years ago. One of the things I learned about Japan was that they were spending 8 percent of their gross domestic product for health care in their country. We were spending 18 percent. As it turns out, they were getting better results. They had lower rates of infant mortality and higher rates of longevity. People lived longer. Newborns died less frequently than we did. On top of all that, in Japan they covered everybody. Everybody was covered for health care. We had about 40 million people--over 40 million people at the time--whose health care coverage was to get into an emergency room of a hospital, try to get in line, and get someone's attention. I know how smart the Japanese are, but I don't think they can be that smart and we can be that dumb. That is sort of where we were 6, 7 years ago. So we said: What are we going to do about it? I think almost every President--maybe since Truman--had a goal of making sure everybody in this country had access to health care. A lot of folks talked about it and maybe tried to do something. The first time we had a serious effort to do that was during the Clinton administration, not led by President Bill Clinton but led by First Lady Hillary Clinton. What she came up with and worked on was something called HillaryCare. The Republicans came up with an alternative to HillaryCare introduced by the Republican Senator from Rhode Island, John Chafee--a really good guy, a very able guy. I actually served with his son Lincoln in the Senate. But in 1993, 1994, when most people focused on HillaryCare, John Chafee introduced legislation with 20 or so Republican cosponsors. A couple of them are still here, I think. Senator Orrin Hatch was one of them, and Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was one of them--maybe a couple of Democrats, as well. But 20 to 25 Senators, mostly Republican, cosponsored the Chafee legislation. This chart mentions the Chafee bill and what was included in the Chafee legislation. One of the things included was the individual mandate--basically, that everybody had to get coverage. Second was the employer mandate, which basically said that employers had to provide health care coverage for their employees--maybe not for everyone, maybe not for the smallest businesses--but getting employers to meet what Senator Chafee and other Senators thought were the employers' obligations, their responsibilities. In the Chafee legislation there was a ban on preexisting conditions. In the Chafee legislation there were subsidies for purchasing insurance. Purchasing it where? Purchasing it in State exchanges. The idea of creating large purchasing pools--there were folks who didn't have health care coverage who could get their health care coverage in a large purchasing pool. If their income was low or relatively low, they would be eligible for tax credits to buy down the cost of their health care coverage. They would get theirs from the exchanges and the purchasing pools. Those were all ideas in Senator Chafee's legislation in 1993. Do you know what? I am a Democrat and probably shouldn't say this, but I thought they all made sense. The legislation didn't go anywhere. In the end, HillaryCare didn't go anywhere. But long before we had serious debate on the Affordable Care Act, people were talking about the same thing. You go over here--RomneyCare in 2006. Individual mandate: Got it. Employer mandate: Got it. Ban on preexisting conditions? Yes. Subsidies for purchasing insurance? Yes. Establish State purchasing groups? Yes. Those are all in RomneyCare. I have always given Governor Romney credit for the idea of the individual mandate, but apparently that was wrong. It was in Senator Chafee's legislation as well. Governor Romney took the handoff, if you will, from Senator John Chafee and introduced what they call RomneyCare in Massachusetts. It was introduced in 2006. When it first was introduced, they had real good success in getting people covered. It was successful in terms of getting people covered. Where they were not so successful initially was affordability. They had to work on affordability. Part of the problem there was it took a while for the healthier, younger people who did not think they needed health care coverage because they were young and invincible. It took a while for them to start. They said: The fine keeps going up year after year after year. Maybe I should get some health care coverage and not pay the fine. Ultimately, I think RomneyCare did a much better job on affordability. If you take those five key provisions, the individual mandate, employer mandate, ban on preexisting conditions, subsidies for purchasing insurance, and establishing the State exchanges--key provisions in the Chafee bill--they are in RomneyCare. Believe it or not, they are in the Affordable Care Act. I know some of our Republican friends think that nobody listened to them when we wrote the Affordable Care Act. Actually, these are your ideas. These are your ideas. Some of the provisions or aspects of the Affordable Care Act that our friends across the aisle have been most critical of are things that were originally their idea--originally their idea. Then we changed this thing. Senator Sanders who has joined us on the floor. We added to that. We expanded Medicaid. We said to States--we didn't make them expand Medicaid, but we said: If you do, the Federal Government will pay the lion's share of the increased costs in Medicaid. I think initially maybe 24 States signed up and said: We will do that, including the District of Columbia. Later on, another seven or so, eight States--I think Indiana is one of those that decided, under then-Governor Pence, to expand Medicaid up to about roughly 135 percent of poverty from maybe closer to 100 percent of poverty for most States. That is a little bit of a good history lesson. I think we have another chart we can look at. It is a pie chart. Sylvia Matthews Burwell came by--the Secretary of Health and Human Services came by a month or two ago and talked to our Democratic Senate caucus. One of the things she said to us that I thought was especially informative was she talked about this pie chart. What she said is: Think of this pie chart. It includes about 300 million Americans who get health care, at least those who get some kind of health care other than emergency room. She told us that roughly half of the people, a little bit more than half of the 300 million people among the Americans who are getting health care--a little over half, 57 percent--get their coverage through employer coverage. The employers provide that as a condition of employment. Another roughly 22 percent-- that is this area, sort of the brown area--is Medicaid and the S-CHIP program, the Children's Health Insurance Program, a bipartisan idea. Bill Roth worked on that, the Clintons, and others. I even worked on it as Governor. About 15 percent--this area right here, the green--is Medicare. Then down here you have the individual markets, the marketplaces, and so forth. There are roughly 5 or 6 percent down here where people are getting their coverage. A lot of the attention, a lot of the criticism of the delivery of health care in the last 6 or 7 years by our friends on the other side has been down here with the marketplaces, the exchanges. Those were their ideas. One of the nice things the Affordable Care Act has done--not many people know this--but the Medicare trust fund, which is in danger of running out of money, the life of that trust fund has been extended by 12 years because of the Affordable Care Act. The Medicaid pieces have been--the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Matthews Burwell, has negotiated with a number of Governors to try to give them the opportunity to sort of customize their Medicaid programs. I think maybe in Indiana they wanted to have a small copay for the people who participated in Medicare. That is what they got. So it is not all one size fits all, but there is some differentiation between Medicaid. Now we have roughly two-thirds of the States that have signed up for Medicaid expansion. So that is just a little visual. Do we have another chart here? The question is, Who gets hurt by repealing the Affordable Care Act? If we just repeal the Affordable Care Act, and we don't replace it at the same time we repeal it or change it, a lot of people will get hurt, including a lot of people who are in the exchanges and getting health care coverage maybe for the first time in a long time, and actually folks who are not in the exchanges, people who get their health care coverage in all kinds of ways, including employer provided, Medicare, and Medicaid, or privately purchased. We don't need the kind of uncertainty, the lack of predictability that would be created by repeal without having a very clear picture of what we are going to replace it with at the same time--not a year from now, not 2 years, not 3 years, not 4 years from now but at the same time. That is what we ought to do. I will close with this. I note one of my colleagues from a big State up to the northeast of us has a few things he wants to say. I welcome hearing him. My dad used to say to my sister and me when we were kids growing up, a little younger than our pages--we would do some bone-headed stunt, and he would say to my sister and me: Just use some common sense. That is what he would say. Just use some common sense. He said it a lot. We must not have had much. Well, just repealing the Affordable Care Act and not having something to replace it with immediately that provides coverage just as good-- affordable, comprehensive coverage--that would not be very good common sense. We can do better than that. We can do better. I hope our Republican friends, with this rush to judgment to repeal and replace 2 or 3 or 4 years down the line, can come around and say: No, that does not make much sense. I hope they will listen to some of their colleagues and some of the rest of us who say: If we are going to repeal the Affordable Care Act, let's know what we are going to replace it with, and make sure we do that on day one. With that, I am happy to yield the floor to my friend from Vermont.

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

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER.--in the State of Delaware, I vote no.

Mr. CARPER. On behalf of the people--

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, how am I recorded?

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Madam President, if I could speak through the Chair. I failed to mention one thing about Sorry Works, Seven Pillars, and what we are doing in Delaware. If we have that meeting between the patient who had been harmed, the physician and provider, and they have the need where there is an apology and an offer to try to make the patient whole--no attorneys involved--if the patient says no, I am not interested in doing that, nothing that is said in that conversation between the two of them can be used in a court of law, which I think is an interesting approach. We are anxious to see how it works over the next couple of years. Ironically, I was probably the only Democrat--maybe the only member of the Finance Committee--who was trying to get included in the Affordable Care Act provisions dealing with medical malpractice. I had this idea--not to let a thousand flowers bloom or ideas like that--to figure out five or six good ideas and put them on steroids to see if they actually work on a larger scale. I could not get a cosponsor on the other side of the aisle, which blew my mind. It still does. I could never understand that. In the meantime, the ideas are starting to crop up and flourish, and, hopefully, we can find out what works and do more of that. Thank you.

Mr. CARPER. It is great to see my friend from Kansas on the floor and looking forward to serving the next 6 years. One of the things I focused on as a member of the Finance Committee on the Affordable Care Act was the idea that we have doctors, hospitals, and nurses who in some cases provide entirely too many tests and procedures and so forth that are needed to treat somebody just in order to cover--as Naval aviation used to say--our 6 o'clock. You didn't want to have somebody come up from behind you to shoot you down. So we talked about covering our 6 o'clock. Doctors, hospitals, and nurses spend a lot of time covering the 6 o'clock, as my friend knows. I am an Ohio State boy. I am going to say something nice about Michigan, which is really out of character here. In Michigan, the University of Michigan Medical School and hospital came up with a policy called Sorry Works. If a doctor, hospital, or nurse made a mistake that adversely affected a patient, they apologized. The idea was to apologize, make up for it, make them whole, help them get well, cover their financial costs and so forth. It is called Sorry Works. It is a good idea. I met a guy who is a doctor and a lawyer--a Republican--from Illinois who took the idea of Sorry Works and he put it on steroids and they called it Seven Pillars. It has been a great example of what actually works to reduce the incidents of medical mistakes in hospitals and nursing homes and also to get better health care outcomes. You reduce medical malpractice costs, and you also get more satisfaction from the patient side. We have taken that idea in Delaware--Seven Pillars--at Christiana Care, which is the big health care delivery system in our State. We have taken that and have begun to incorporate it in the way they work. If I am your doctor and you are my patient and I perform a procedure on you, if you are harmed or hurt--not your fault, my fault--the idea is I apologize. I meet with you privately--no lawyers--and apologize for what has happened and try to make you whole. If you lost wages, if you have pain and suffering, they pay your health care costs and make you whole. Don't hide it. Don't put it under the rug but take full acceptance, responsibility. That is one of the approaches being used to try to deal with medical malpractice costs. I think it is a good one. It is not the only good one, but it is one. I happened to be walking through the Chamber and heard my friend speaking, and I thought I would share that with you, with everyone. When I was Governor of Delaware, we used to meet with my Cabinet. We would be talking about a particular problem or challenge we faced in Delaware. I would say to my Cabinet: Some other State or some other Governor has actually addressed this issue. They figured out how to deal with this this. Our challenge is to find out what works and do more of that and to see if it can be transferred to Delaware. Sorry Works is a Michigan idea. It morphed into Seven Pillars in Illinois, and now it is being incorporated in my own little State in our big health care delivery system. It is something that works. I am not sorry that it works. I am glad that it works, and I am happy to share it with my friend from Kansas and whoever else might be interested. I yield.

Mr. CARPER. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I just want to thank our colleague from Ohio for recalling the memory, the life of John Glenn and his wife Annie. I was privileged to know him. I am an Ohio State graduate, Navy ROTC. I am a retired Navy captain and a huge admirer of John Glenn and his bride. One of my fondest memories of them was at an Ohio State football game a few years ago. As the Senator from Ohio knows, one of the big attractions at an Ohio State football game at halftime is to script ``Ohio,'' where the band spells out the word ``Ohio.'' Usually one of the tuba players kind of dances around for a while and then dots the ``i.'' So fans are used to that happening. On this particular occasion, no tuba player came forward to dot the ``i,'' but John Glenn and Annie went onto the field and dotted the ``i,'' to the amazement and delight of 100-and-some-thousand fans. Later on, they came up. I was up in the President's box with President Gordon Gee. I am not sure; maybe my friend from Ohio was there as well. But what a joyous memory that was. He ran for President briefly too. I was pleased to support him. He didn't stay in the race for long. I thought he was a great marine, great pilot, great astronaut, great Senator, and would have been a great leader for our country. The last thing I will say is this. Who is it that said this? Maybe-- Alan Simpson, former Senator from Wyoming. He used to say this about integrity: If you have it, nothing else matters. If you don't have it, nothing else matters. When you look up the word ``integrity'' in the dictionary--and ``courage'' as well--you see John Glenn's picture. Thank you for your kind and wonderful words about John Glenn and Annie. Thanks for letting me say a few words as well. Tribute to Federal Employees Mr. President, I have been coming to the floor, as the Senator from Ohio knows, for months--a couple of years, actually. I come maybe once a month. The Presiding Officer and I serve together, along with Senator Portman, on a committee called Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Part of our job is to do oversight over the Department of Homeland Security. I started doing something a couple of years ago. Instead of coming to the floor to talk about some controversy or things we disagree on with our colleagues across the aisle, I came to the floor for a different purpose. I came to the floor in order to say thank you to some of the 240,000-some men and women who are part of the Department of Homeland Security, who work hard to help secure our country and make it safer in many ways. Over the last 4 years, I have been privileged to serve with our Presiding Officer and a number of others--Senator Portman and others-- as the senior Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, first as chairman for a couple of years with Tom Coburn from Oklahoma as our ranking member and for the last 2 years as ranking member of the committee while Ron Johnson has been our chairman. I am incredibly proud of the fact that our committee is filled with hard-working men and women, Democrats and Republicans, who work across the aisle and party lines to bolster our national security and to help agencies and programs across government work better. We follow what I call the three C's: Communicate. Compromise. Collaborate. Those are things we do in Delaware, and on our committee I am happy to report that the three C's hold forth as well. Serving as the senior Democrat on our committee has truly been one of the great honors of my 16 years in the Senate. During my time as chairman and ranking member, I have had literally thousands of Department of Homeland Security employees--I have seen firsthand the exceptional work they do 240 hours a day--it probably feels that way-- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week across our country and even around the world. I am pictured here with some of them. They do extraordinary things that some of us don't even know about. What we do is every week we come to the floor, and one of the best things you can do when people do great work is thank them. That is what I like to do. Since my first speech on this front a couple of years ago, I have come to the floor almost every month the Senate has been in session just to say thanks to a lot of deserving individuals, to teams, even entire agencies at the Department of Homeland Security that are doing extraordinary work quietly, behind the scenes, without a lot of attention, to enable the Department to carry out its vital missions-- actually its many vital missions. To everyone who has allowed me to share their stories with our colleagues here in Congress and the American people, thank you so much. To all of those folks at DHS who I have not had an opportunity to talk about or any agency I have missed, I want you to know that the work you do every day makes a real difference and is truly appreciated. While some of your accomplishments are hard to measure, they are nonetheless important. They are reflected in lives saved, tragedies prevented, and a sense of security that Americans feel as they go about their day. Across the Department of Homeland Security, there is so much good work going on each and every day that if I stood here every day for the next 2 years, I would have no shortage of remarkable public servants to highlight. As some of you may recall, the Department of Homeland Security employs over 240,000 Americans doing everything from securing our cyber network from cyber attacks, to guarding our ports of entry, to helping communities recover from natural disasters. Their mission is one of the most diverse and challenging, I think, of any agency, any department in the Federal Government. The diversity of the employees I have highlighted these past many months is the best illustration of the challenges facing the Department of Homeland Security every day and facing our country every day. Last month, I highlighted a U.S. Secret Service officer named Codie Hughes, who patrols the White House grounds as a uniformed Secret Service officer, and also Special Agent Tate Jarrow, who protects Americans from cyber criminals and financial schemes that are designed to cheat those Americans out of their hard-earned dollars. In January, I highlighted a fellow named Milo Booth who serves as the Federal Emergency Management Agency's tribal affairs officer, ensuring our Native American communities are prepared for natural disasters too. In September, I thanked Tito Hernandez, who travels around this country--and he does that about 9 months out of the year--in the aftermath of natural disasters to coordinate the support of State and local officials as they work through some of the most trying situations. Last year, last July, I spoke of the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate and the state-of-the-art research work being done by Dr. Michelle Colby and Jon McEntee, who are researching how to protect us against, among other things, emerging diseases, such as avian flu and foot-and-mouth disease, while helping the Department develop the technologies of tomorrow. This past July, I thanked LCDR Tiana Garrett and Ingrid Hope with the Office of Health Affairs for their work to prepare our border agents, doctors, medical professionals, and first responders for the emerging threats posed by the Zika virus. From the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which tracks radiological materials across our country, to the National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center, which monitors cyber security attacks and coordinates Federal cyber security efforts with the private sector, the Department of Homeland Security is truly remarkable in its ability to work together as one cohesive unit to achieve its common mission. While it has not always been easy, the Department of Homeland Security has matured by leaps and bounds in order to become more than the sum of its parts in the 14 years since its creation. The Department remains the youngest Cabinet-level agency in the Federal Government. It is also the third largest agency in our Federal Government, behind only the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. It was created by bringing together more than 22 different Federal agencies. Let me say that again--22 agencies sort of glommed together a dozen or so years ago into one big Department, DHS. The sheer scope of the extraordinary challenge DHS and its employees face means that leadership across the Department is vital to the success of that organization, as it is to any other organization but especially one this large and unwieldy. I have always said that the key to success for any organization, no matter what size, is leadership. Just like integrity--if you have it, nothing else matters; if you don't have it, nothing else matters. Secretary Jeh Johnson Thankfully, the Department of Homeland Security has been blessed with enlightened, committed leaders since its creation. I, for one, cannot begin to say enough about the leadership shown these past 3 years by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, pictured here on my left. Soon after being sworn in, Secretary Johnston immediately made clear that his highest priority would be management reform--he called it the Unity of Effort Initiative--intended to promote the coordination and cohesion throughout the Department. He also focused on employee engagement and the Department's hiring practices. He wanted to make sure that the good work at the Department was not going unnoticed. Through his steady leadership, DHS has begun to slowly but surely turn--kind of like an aircraft carrier in the Navy--improving morale by 3 percent across the Department in the last year alone--the first increase in the Department I think in some 6 years. We are happy to see them bottom out and the improvement of the morale--the Department is heading in the right direction again. Jeh Johnson and his team deserve a lot of credit for that. I think, frankly, so does our committee, the Homeland Security Committee, and the good work we have done to try to make sure there is a good leadership team in place at DHS and that we convoy clearly our gratitude to those men and women who work there-- 240,000 of them. Being a change agent in the Federal Government can oftentimes be difficult, but I am confident that Secretary Johnson's dedication and his perseverance will make a lasting impact on the agency's greatest assets--its dedicated employees. To Secretary Johnson, to his family, to his bride, I just want to say thank you for your extraordinary service. Every American is safer thanks to your leadership and your tireless efforts. Thank you, Jeh. Alejandro Mayorkas Until recently, Secretary Johnson's right-hand man was a fellow named Alejandro Mayorkas, a native of Cuba who came here a long time ago with his family, on the run, if you will. I like to call him Ali; so do most other people. Ali recently stepped down as Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security--that is the No. 2 slot there--but for 7 years, including one-third or so as the No. 2 person, Ali was working tirelessly to improve the security of our Nation and improve the operations of the Department before he became Deputy Secretary. In that role, he was instrumental in strengthening the Department's cyber security policies, as well as developing critical immigration programs that cut down on fraud and helped promote economic growth. Ali was a dedicated and thoughtful leader. His impact on the Department will continue to be felt for years to come in streamlined DHS operations that allow employees to spend less time on paperwork and more time on protecting Americans. Russ Deyo When Ali left the Department a month or two ago to return to the practice of law, the Department's Under Secretary for Management, a fellow named Russ Deyo--rhymes with Rio--stepped in to fill his shoes. As Under Secretary for Management, Russ has proved to be an effective leader also. With a strong but quiet demeanor, he is not afraid to make tough decisions. Russ has been responsible for overseeing the Department's efforts to get the Department off of GAO's high-risk list. What is that? Well, the high-risk list is something the GAO puts out every other year. It is a high-risk list of wasting taxpayer money. DHS, as well as a lot of other agencies, has been on it for quite a while. Russ has made very clear, with the support of Jeh Johnson and Ali Mayorkas, that they want to get off of that list the best they can. I think one of the greatest accomplishments may have been overseeing the creation of employee satisfaction programs in each and every component. I think they also got a clean audit. I think the Department of Defense, which has been around since the late 1940s, has never gotten a clean financial audit. I think for each of the last 4 years, the Department of Homeland Security has set a great example. It has gotten a clean financial audit. I wish to say if you can't manage your finances, how do you expect to manage your whole department? That is just one aspect of the improvements being made. With this information, Secretary Johnson and his leadership team across the Department can ask every single DHS employee: How are we doing? How can we help? What can we do better? Craig Fugate Another DHS leader whom we all admire for his leadership and steady hand during some of those challenging times is the Administrator of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His name is Craig Fugate and he hails from Florida. For the last 8 years, Administrator Fugate has admirably led Federal responses and efforts through numerous disasters, including Superstorm Sandy, which landed a direct hit on the east coast, including a hit to my own State of Delaware. Throughout his tenure, Craig has used his whole community approach to strengthen our national resiliency and help millions get back on their feet after a disaster. I know I speak for countless Americans when I say: Craig, thank you for your dedication to the mission of FEMA, for your years of leadership to our country, and the leadership you provided for a very good team across America. Peter Neffenger At the Transportation Security Administration, affectionately called TSA, retired Coast Guard VADM Peter Neffenger has helped his agency respond quickly and effectively to a historic surge in airline travel and navigate some of the busiest travel days in American history. Last month, over the course of just 7 days, TSA helped 16.5 million Americans travel safely to visit family and friends over the Thanksgiving holiday. His continued efforts to innovate while ensuring uniform training for all TSA officers--we call them TSOs--have streamlined security screening at our airports and ports of entry without compromising passenger security. The millions of Americans who travel through our airports each week are measurably safer, thanks to Vice Admiral Neffenger's service and that of the men and women he leads. I just wish to say about the folks at TSA that whenever I go through airport security, I always thank them. I tell them who I am, tell them who the Senator is--the junior Senator from Nebraska--and tell them how much we appreciate the work they do. When you see people doing a good job, when you are going through an airport, just take a minute and thank these folks. Thank these men and women. It goes a long way. They have had a very tough job because over the course of Thanksgiving weekend, they had 16.5 million people trying to get through security-- actually, get to the airport, get their families packed up, in their vehicles, cab, Uber, or a transit bus, and try to get to the airport, get a place to park, get through security, get on a plane--make their plane. For the folks at TSA, their job is to make sure that nobody with malintent gets through security. You have all these people trying to get through as fast as they can, get on their plane, and get going. Then you have folks at TSA who are trying to make sure that nothing tragic happens in the meantime. That is a tough job. It is a tough job, and I urge you to give them a little bit of love and thank them for what they are doing from time to time. Every time I speak on the floor about TSA, I encourage people to say thank you, and I have just done it one more time. Our Nation is truly fortunate to have the Department of Homeland Security we have today. The few men I mentioned just now are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to truly great public servants at the helm of DHS. There are many more. A number of them are charged with organizations that work behind the scenes, quietly accomplishing their missions so that the rest of us can go about our lives uninterrupted every day. Suzanne Spalding and Phyllis Schneck At something called the National Protection and Programs Directorate, Under Secretary Suzanne Spalding works with her great team to protect our Nation from ever-evolving cyber attacks. Her diligent team includes her deputy at the Directorate, Deputy Under Secretary Phyllis Schneck. I kid her. She is from Georgia Tech. I call her ``Ramblin Wreck''-- Phyllis Schneck, the Ramblin Wreck from Georgia Tech. She is a dynamo. She left the private sector where she was making a lot of money to come to serve her country and help lead the cyber security efforts of the Department of Homeland Security. Joseph Clancy Also over at the Secret Service, we have a Director named Joe Clancy, who leads an organization of men and women who performed flawlessly as the agency has protected dozens of officials during the recent election season. Kathy Brinsfield Over in the Office of Health Affairs, Chief Medical Officer Kathy Brinsfield leads some of the best and brightest scientists in the world in their cutting research into emerging diseases. Reggie Brothers At the Science and Technology Directorate, Reggie Brothers has led efforts across the Department to make smart investments in research and development for DHS and their State and local partners. To all of you and to your agencies, again, a big thank you. These are just a few of the incredible leaders at the Department of Homeland Security, just a few. Sarah Saldana, Gil Kerlikowske, Leon Rodriguez, Admiral Paul Zukunft There are so many more who deserve our thanks for steady leadership, leaders such as Sarah Saldana, who leads Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. Gil Kerlikowske at Customs and Border Protection is a terrific leader. Leon Rodriguez--I call him ``Leon Red Bone''--is director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. We have the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, ADM Paul Zukunft, whom everyone understandably simply calls ``Admiral Z.'' We say a very big thank you to all of you for your service and the hard work of those across your agencies. A retired Navy captain salutes the Coast Guard. After 4 years as the lead Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, having met thousands of DHS employees, I believe our country is in many more ways more secure today than it was yesterday. However, given the evolving nature of the threats we face, this is not the time to spike the football; this is not the time to become complacent. We need to remain vigilant, continue to work smarter, and continue to work harder. With that thought in mind, I close by expressing the gratitude of all Americans to the Presiding Officer and to everyone at the Department of Homeland Security. I wish you and your families a very merry Christmas and a joyous holiday, as well as a more peaceful New Year for all of us. Keep up the good work. We are proud of you. Stay safe. God bless you all. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, a few minutes ago, I sent up a note to you that I handwrote that said: ``Flattery won't hurt you if you don't inhale, so don't breathe too deeply up there.'' I also recall walking into a hearing with EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy not too long ago in the House of Representatives, a joint House-Senate hearing. A lot of people had been there asking questions, and she was in the seat for 4 hours. It finally became my turn to ask a question, and I said to her: Is there any question, Administrator McCarthy, that you have not been asked today? She said: I wish somebody had asked me if I needed a bathroom break. There are 30 more Senators in the cloakroom who want to come out and speak. If you need one, let us know and one of the pages or somebody will take your spot up there. It has been a joy to sit here and listen to all these stories. John Carney, our Congressman, Governor-elect, has been here and come and gone. He has gone back to the House to go into session. He used to work for you, and you are one of his great mentors. He wants you to know he was here, in case you didn't. I want to say to Chris Coons, who put this all together, making possible a wonderful tribute, this is the Senate at its best. It is wonderful to see some of our still young colleagues who have come back to visit us and to be with us on this special, special day. Over the years, people have asked me why I have had some success in my life, and I say that my sister and I picked the right parents. My sister and I picked the right parents. Joe Biden and his brother and sister picked the right parents. I have had the privilege of knowing them both. When your dad was sick and in the hospital, I visited and spent time with him, just the two of us. Joe, I want to say for those who maybe didn't know your parents, they valued education and made sure you got a good one, along with his brother and sister. Val is up there somewhere. I want to say hi to Val. They valued education and people of faith. I am Protestant, and Joe and his family are Catholic, but he doesn't wear it on his sleeve. I will tell you this, nobody believes in the Golden Rule of treating other people the way you want to be treated any more than Joe Biden. Nobody adheres to Matthew 25, the ``Least of These,'' any more than Joe Biden. Nobody does a better reading of James 2: ``Show me your faith by your words, and I will show you my faith by my deeds.'' He doesn't just talk a good game. He doesn't talk a whole lot about his faith, but he sure lives it. From his family--from his mom and dad--he learned the importance of family and the importance of loyalty to his family and, frankly, to his friends--his multitude of friends. He learned there is a difference between right and wrong and figure out what it is and do right. Do it all the time. He learned a little bit about common sense. My dad used to say to my sister and me when we did some boneheaded stuff, just use some common sense. I think your dad said that to you once or twice as well. One of the things your mom used to say to you was, if you are knocked down, get up--the idea you just never give up. You know you are right, never give up. That is Joe Biden. People say to us in this Chamber I am sure every day that they wouldn't want our job. I wouldn't want your job. I know you heard that a lot of times. I think we are fortunate to have these jobs and responsibilities to serve. An even tougher job is to be married to one of us. Several people talked about Jill and your bride--for how many years? Almost 40 years. Is that possible? I first saw Jill Biden when I was a graduate student when I was just out of the Navy. I was a graduate student at the University of Delaware. I happened to see her on campus. I thought then, and I would say now, one of the two loveliest people I think I have ever seen. The other being Martha Carper. Not only is she lovely--as Joe knows--on the outside, really lovely on the inside. She is a person with deep caring, a person with incredible warmth and compassion. She is a terrific educator. She taught in our State in public schools. She taught in a hospital for folks with special needs. She taught at Delaware Technical Community College when it was selected as the best technical community college in the Nation during the time that she was on the faculty there. She continued as Second Lady to continue to critique, but she started off in a place called Willow Grove, PA. There is a naval air station there where I used to fly P-3 aircraft--mission commander--out of there. I retired as a Navy captain in 1991. She was just down the road, growing up with her four sisters, Jill Jacobs and the Jacobs girls. I am sure they broke a lot of hearts. In the case of Jill Biden, she helped to mend one. As much as anybody, Val and your family are hugely supportive and helped you get through a terribly tough time, but I think Jill perhaps made you whole. She got her undergrad, I believe, from the University of Delaware. She has two master's degrees--a Ph.D. focused on how to increase retention in community colleges around the country. She got those advanced degrees while working and raising a family, three kids that any of us would be proud to claim as our own. Last week, I happened to be in a classroom in a school where the Vice President probably has been before, Mount Pleasant Elementary School, right down the road from the high school. I was in a classroom of a woman by the name of Wendy Turner, who is the Delaware Teacher of the Year. I had a chance to be with her and her grade school kids. We all gathered around together, and I sat on a stool. They gathered around me. There were about 20, 25 kids. I said: Why is she such a great teacher? Talking about Wendy Turner, Teacher of the Year. They said: She loves kids. She loves us. They said: She knows her stuff. She really knows what she is talking to us about. She knows how to make clear why it is important, like when we leave school, and why it is important we learn these things. She believes everybody can learn--everybody can learn. I thought about her, and I think about Jill Biden today. She is that kind of educator as well, continues to be that kind of educator as well. A lot has been said today of the Cancer Moonshot that Joe has been leading with great skill and success here, especially today. Before there was Cancer Moonshot, there was Joe Biden's breast health initiative, which helped thousands of young women to learn about the importance of early detection for breast cancer. Beau went into the military, Delaware National Guard, deployed to Iraq. Some people would send cookies and packages to their kids and maybe write emails or Skype with them. Jill decided she was going to take that experience and create something with Delaware Boots on the Ground to look out for families. Later on, as Second Lady, working with Michelle Obama, she created something they called Joining Forces, which focuses on education for military families--education, employment opportunities, access to wellness services. She even managed to write a book. She wrote a book from a child's point of view of having a loved one in their family deployed overseas in the military. As I said earlier, she helped raise three terrific kids. Sometimes I like to quote Maya Angelou, who sang at the second inauguration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and she passed away not long ago. Maya Angelou said something that I think is appropriate for all of us today when she said: People may not remember what you said, people may not remember what you do, but they will remember how you made them feel. One of the threads through everything that has been said here today really reminds me of what Maya Angelou said because people may not remember what we said. They may not remember what we do, but there are not just thousands, not just tens of thousands, not just hundreds of thousands, but there are millions of people in this country who will remember how you and Jill made them feel--cared for, important, loved. I know our Vice President likes music, and as a Boomer he later on liked a British group. I forget what their Fab Four was called. I think it might have been the Beatles, and maybe the best rock 'n' roll album ever, ``Abbey Road,'' ends with these lyrics--the last part of Abbey Road, side two, was largely written by Paul McCartney. The last words on ``Abbey Road'' were these words: ``The love you take is equal to the love you make.'' You are going to take a lot of love with you, and Jill as well, far from here and for the rest of your lives. God bless you. Mr. President--I have always wanted to call you Mr. President. With that, Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, today I wish to express my profound appreciation and best wishes to my friend, Alejandro Mayorkas, who recently stepped down as the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. During his 7 years of public service at DHS, Ali has been a dedicated and thoughtful leader and was instrumental to the advancement and accomplishments at the Department. Ali arrived at DHS in 2009 with an already impressive record in public service which included over 20 years of distinguished service in law enforcement. As an assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, he aggressively prosecuted drug traffickers, human smugglers, and violent criminals. As U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, he led the largest Federal judicial office in the United States and was appointed by then Attorney General Janet Reno to serve on her advisory committee on ethics and government. Ali continued his public service as the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS, where he oversaw a $3 billion annual budget and led a workforce of 18,000 individuals. To that end, Ali's accomplishments as the USCIS Director included the development of the special parole program which worked to rescue children who tragically lost their parents to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. He continued his humanitarian efforts and dedication to help orphan children by creating a program that allowed international adoption of orphans in Guatemala. These stunning achievements have been widely praised by many who have had the honor to work alongside Ali. In his most recent role as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Ali served as the second-in-command of the third largest Department in the U.S. Government. In this role, Ali ensured that a $60 billion budget was spent wisely and effectively, while at the same time leading a workforce of nearly 230,000 individuals. Like a true leader, Ali understands the importance of taking care of the Department's employees and recognizes that they are its greatest asset. He worked tirelessly to increase employee morale and, for the last few years, was particularly focused on improving employee engagement with senior leaders. His steadfast dedication to this effort, along with those of Secretary Jeh Johnson, resulted in rising employee satisfaction at DHS this past year. Ali's commitment to making the Department a more unified entity is yet another example of his extraordinary ability to mobilize, manage, and lead people with integrity and selflessness. Ali's achievements are not limited to domestic operations. As the highest ranking Cuban American in the Obama administration, Ali secured the first homeland security agreement with the Government of Cuba, allowing increased trade, sea and air travel, and tourism between the two nations. His work to facilitate international trade, redesign the Nation's refugee admissions process, and enhance the Visa Waiver Program has resulted in many successful international partnerships. In order to ensure our Nation's protection in cyber security, Ali has worked closely with international leaders to promote cyber security research and innovation, which has ultimately created a more reliable and effective cyber space at home and abroad. For instance, Ali led delegations in negotiating a cyber security partnership with the State of Israel, as well as the Department's negotiation of a cyber security agreement with China. These efforts and others have been fundamental to the protection of our Nation's cyber community. Under his leadership, the Department's key counterterrorism efforts have been significantly strengthened. Ali improved national security vetting protocols, enhanced aviation and border security, and distributed counterterrorism intelligence to State, local, and tribal law enforcement. This collaboration has enhanced the Federal Government's national security partnership with first responders and has allowed for a more reliable and fruitful system. During a time filled with constant threats and endangerments, Ali has continually proven to be a vital leader of DHS operations, ultimately ensuring that our Nation is a safe and secure place. I wish Ali, his wife, Tanya, and their family all the best in this next chapter in their lives. I sincerely thank him for his invaluable service to the Department and to our Nation.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, most people are not familiar with the Jefferson-Lincoln Awards, but they are given out every year to different people, Democrats and Republicans, usually to people who are in public life. One of the recipients was Bob Mueller, a former FBI Director--and Sam Farr, who is stepping down from Congress after about 28 years there and a life of service. He succeeded Leon Panetta in Leon's House seat all those years ago. They present these awards to people who want to get things done. That is pretty much it--people who use common sense, are collegial, work across the aisle, and just get things done. It was an honor to be there with my colleague and the Panettas as well. It was a great evening. Mr. President, I am happy to yield the floor as soon as the majority leader comes.

Mr. CARPER. While she is still here, I want to congratulate the Senator from Alaska and the chair of the Energy Committee on being named one of the recipients of the Jefferson-Lincoln Award this year in California and just say how proud I was to sit there in the audience and say that I know her and have the opportunity to work with her. So congratulations.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I come to the floor maybe once a month when we are in session to talk about folks who are a part of the team at the Department of Homeland Security. There are about 225,000 of them. What I do every month is pick on a couple of them. We pick on a part of the Department of Homeland Security that maybe doesn't get a lot of attention. Before the Presiding Officer leaves, I just want to say ``Happy Thanksgiving'' to him. Tonight, if I can, in the time that I have, I will start off by--I have been doing this now for 2 years, coming to the floor and talking about people in the Department of Homeland Security who have done amazing things for all of us. If you will recall, the Department of Homeland Security didn't even exist when I first came here in 2001. It was created on the heels of 9/ 11. We took about 22 disparate agencies and glommed them together. They all had something to do with Homeland Security. The Department has struggled at times to try to be a coherent, collegial, productive organization. I think they are hitting their stride, and I am proud of the work they do. There are more than 230,000 employees in the Department of Homeland Security around the country and around the world. They do some of the most difficult and some of the most diverse work that is done in the Federal Government, anything from protecting against cyber attacks--we have plenty of that going on--to helping communities recover from natural disasters. Unfortunately, we have a lot of that going on as well with FEMA helping out--to securing our borders, our ports of entry. The Department of Homeland Security faces great challenges as it carries out its mission of protecting all of us as we go about our daily lives. As most people know, the U.S. Secret Service is charged primarily with protecting the President and the Vice President and their families 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. When I was a kid growing up, I thought that was all they did. As it turns out, there is a whole lot more that they do. It is a huge challenge, especially in a Presidential year like this when you have all these people running for President--mostly in the Republican Party, but some in our party too. As all the candidates are traveling around this Nation and going hither and yon, the Secret Service is trying to keep them and their families safe and doing it on a regular basis. This part of their job becomes a lot harder during a Presidential election. The men and women of the Secret Service worked this year thousands of hours of overtime in this campaign cycle in order to provide protection for every candidate who needed it, whether Republican or Democrat. The Secret Service did this while continuing to perform other special protection duties, such as the massive task of securing the United Nations General Assembly. In September, converging on New York City at the United Nations, we had leaders of over 100 different nations around the world, and the job of protecting them and keeping them safe fell largely--not entirely, but largely on the Secret Service. For many agents, this required significantly long hours and weeks at a time on the road and away from their homes, all while standing ready at a moment's notice to thrust themselves into harm's way should their duty require it. I am enormously proud of the Secret Service in this election season. Their work to ensure our candidates' personal safety and protect them from harm also helps protect our democracy, ensuring that the American people have the final say on who will be our next President and next Vice President. The Secret Service agency is a critical part of ensuring the peaceful transition of power from one duly elected leader to the next. For all these reasons it is urgent that the Congress do what it needs to do to ensure that the Secret Service agents who have worked so hard in recent months receive the pay that they have earned and deserve. The pay limit in current law prevents that from happening at the moment for those agents who are owed overtime compensation. I support efforts in this year's House and Senate appropriations bills to address that issue and to make our Secret Service agents whole. I'm hopeful that a fix to this problem can be included in any final spending bill that we take up during the final week of this year. The demanding work done by the men and women of the Secret Service exemplifies the term ``public servant,'' as they put their lives on the line every day to protect our President, Vice President, and the candidates for those offices, regardless of party or politics. Even during the busy Presidential campaign like the one we have just gone through, every division of the Secret Service, despite the added strains, continues to exceed expectations through their ongoing work. While many of us know of the Secret Service's duty to protect the President, relatively few of us know of the important work done behind the scenes by countless others across the Secret Service, two of whom I am proud to highlight tonight. One is called the Secret Service Uniformed Division, and they protect the White House and its grounds 24/7. They ensure that the people's house is secure for the President and their families, for their guests, staff, and visitors. I have no idea how many people visit the White House every year, but I know it is in the hundreds of thousands, maybe more, maybe even in the millions--but a lot of people go there from all over the world and visit. One of the things that the Secret Service Uniformed Division does is help to make sure that when visitors go there, they are safe. One uniformed division officer who has lived her entire life in the service of others is Codie Hughes. Officer Hughes joined the Secret Service 12 years ago. Here is a photo of her with the Secretary and Deputy Secretary Mayorkas. As a uniformed officer with the White House branch, Officer Hughes is charged with securing one of the most iconic public buildings in the world, the White House. In the past 3 years alone, she made more than 45 arrests while patrolling the area around the White House, including one person who was wanted by the FBI for previously making threats against law enforcement officers. Since 2013, Officer Hughes has helped save the lives of not one but three people who needed her help. When a man collapsed in the White House before a meeting with the President, Officer Hughes administered CPR before the man was revived with a defibrillator. Similarly, earlier this year, when Officer Hughes found a man collapsed on the street outside the White House without a pulse, she administered CPR until medics arrived. And last year, most remarkably, when Officer Hughes happened upon two detectives in her hometown of Leesburg, VA, administering CPR to an unconscious man, she quickly identified herself as a Secret Service agent and offered to help. Along with the detectives, Officer Hughes administered CPR until the medics could respond. This is her picture. As I said earlier, she is shown here with the Secretary of the Department, Jeh Johnson, who has done a great job, and the Assistant Secretary, Ali Mayorkas, who has also done a terrific job, and the fellow who has been the Director of the Secret Service for several years now, Joe Clancy, who by everybody's acknowledgment has done a very good job providing wonderful leadership. This photograph represents a time not long ago when she received the Secretary's award from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. It is, I think, the highest honor that can be presented by the Secretary of the Department. It is the Exceptional Service Gold Medal for her ``extraordinary bravery saving numerous lives both on and off duty.'' It is a well-deserved award for an exemplary public official. Codie, congratulations. Officer Hughes currently serves as an instructor at the Secret Service training academy, teaching new agents how to respond to stressful situations while maintaining their composure at all times. I can think of few people better prepared to serve in this position than Codie Hughes. When Officer Hughes is off duty, she continues her service as a volunteer with the Leesburg, VA, fire company. For 10 years she has worked on her own time to make a difference in her community and protect her neighbors during fires and other emergencies. So to Codie, we say thank you for the example you have set for so many others at the Department of Homeland Security, in your community in Leesburg, and across our country. Thank you, Codie. Another true public servant within the Secret Service is a fellow named Tate Jarrow, a special agent. Tate is pictured here to my left. He looks like a young fellow, but after graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Special Agent Jarrow served 5 years as an Army infantry officer, achieving the rank of captain before joining the Secret Service. Mr. President, as an old Navy guy, a retired Navy captain--he is an Army captain--I feel I should say ``Navy salutes Army,'' and the Navy does salute the Army. I like to say to people--I like to kid folks in the different services, and we take shots at one another in a fun- loving way, but I would say to my friends in the Army kidding me about the Navy, ``different uniforms, same team.'' So we are lucky that we are on the same team with this fellow. Tate is a special agent in the New York Electronic Crimes Task Force. He has worked to protect millions of Americans from large-scale financial fraud. While fraud and counterfeit investigations are one of the Secret Service's lesser known tasks, the growth, scope, and scale of cyber crimes makes Agent Jarrow's work more important than ever. After one of the largest data breaches in history compromised the information of nearly 100 million people, Special Agent Jarrow worked with forensic investigators and the FBI to track down the hackers and stop them from using the information to perpetrate a large-scale stock manipulation scheme. Special Agent Jarrow's work brought to justice three men who not only stole this information but were stealing more than $100 million using various illegal enterprises that preyed on innocent people around the world. In another case, Special Agent Jarrow shut down a criminal enterprise that used investment fraud, credit card fraud, identity theft, and computer hacking to steal more than $250 million--$250 million--from some 600,000 Americans and thousands of other people around the world. His work helped put away the culprits, sending the ring leader to jail for 20 years or more. Special Agent Jarrow has been described by his colleagues as ``one of the most preeminent cyber investigators in the Federal Government.'' That is really saying something, because we have some terrific ones in the NSA, or the National Security Agency, and in the Department of Homeland Security and elsewhere. So that is high praise. While they say that Special Agent Jarrow is quiet, they say he is humble in person, and he is dogged. He is dogged in his pursuit of the bad guys. Unfortunately, there are plenty of them out there. The American people, their information, and their hard-earned savings are all safer thanks to Tate's efforts to go after the bad guys who prey on hard-working Americans online. This October, about a month ago, Special Agent Jarrow was honored by Secretary Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, with the Secretary's Silver Medal Award for his work with the New York Electronic Crimes Task Force. Shortly after that, the Partnership for Public Service awarded Special Agent Jarrow with the Call to Service Award, one of its prestigious ``Sammy'' awards that go to talented Federal servants for outstanding service to us, the American people. The Secret Service is full of women and men like Codie Hughes and Tate Jarrow, who have dedicated their lives to serving others on the job and off the job. The work done by them and others like them, especially over these past 18 months, and by thousands of men and women in the U.S. States Secret Service is a shining example of public service at its best. While many of us can get swept away in the politics of the day or the latest headlines and the last tweets, there are countless public servants across the Department of Homeland Security who wake up every morning, and they go to work on behalf of us, the American people. Their dedication, their service, and their sacrifice continue to move our country forward. So, to Officer Hughes, to Special Agent Jarrow, and to all their colleagues at the U.S. States Secret Service, we thank you for your unwavering dedication, your long hours, tireless service to our President, to our Vice President, to their families, and really to the American people. All of us here in this Chamber and countless others around the country are better servants thanks to your hard work and shining example. In closing, I should acknowledge the fact that, despite the excellent work I have detailed in these remarks, the Secret Service has faced its share of challenges in recent years. But this week the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security issued a new report praising a number of steps that the agency--the Secret Service--has been taking to make needed improvements. These improvements are thanks, in part, to the exceptional work of rank-and-file personnel like Officer Hughes and Agent Jarrow, and also to the strong leadership of Director Clancy, Secretary Johnson, Deputy Secretary Mayorkas, and others who have been committed to ensuring that the Secret Service remains the finest protection agency in the world. As I prepare to yield the floor and leave the building, I just want to take a moment to say, when a lot of American families gather on Thanksgiving Day across our country and enjoy a meal together--hopefully, a wonderful meal together with their parents and their moms and dads, their brothers and sisters, their children, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews--my hope is that when we give thanks, we will also remember to be thankful for the folks I talked about here today and the hundreds of thousands of people like them who are a part of the team at the Department of Homeland Security. One of the reasons we have the freedom we do as a nation is because of their vigilance and commitment to duty. So I extend that on behalf of all of the Members of the Senate to the folks who serve us in the Department of Homeland Security and throughout this government and to the folks who work in this building and who enable us by providing for Members and staff here in the Capitol and to the pages who are going to go home for a week or so and come back for maybe a week or so. We wish all of them a happy Thanksgiving, and we look forward to seeing all of you, including my friend the Presiding Officer in about 10 days. With that, the majority leader is here. I am happy to yield the floor to him and wish him a happy Thanksgiving a few days in advance. I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I understand that the majority leader is going to be coming on the floor, and I will be most happy to yield to him.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, as some of my colleagues know, nearly every month for more than 1 year now, I have come to the Senate floor regularly to highlight the diverse and difficult work performed by the men and women at the Department of Homeland Security. I have been privileged to be at times in recent years the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and today serve as the senior Democrat, the ranking member of that committee. The Department of Homeland Security is part of the government that we have direct jurisdiction over, and it is one that I have had a great privilege to work with and have had an opportunity to oversee the operation of that Department. The Department of Homeland Security has more than 230,000 employees stationed around our country at our ports of entry, major transit hubs, and in major cities and small communities alike. Each day the Department of Homeland Security performs some of the most challenging jobs in the Federal Government. From securing radiological material to protecting our cyber networks to responding to natural disasters such as floods, fires, and tornadoes, the Department of Homeland Security employees work around-the-clock to stay ahead of threats to our communities, our homes, and our families. I commend Secretary Jeh Johnson, Deputy Secretary Mayorkas, and their entire leadership team for their continued efforts to bring the entire department together and make the Department of Homeland Security more than just the sum of its parts. Last week, the 2016 Federal Employee Viewpoint survey was released with some good news. The annual survey is provided to hundreds of thousands of Federal employees every year to gauge their satisfaction with their jobs and their engagement with their agency as a whole. After 6 years of declining morale numbers, the tide has begun to turn at the Department of Homeland Security. That is a good thing. Since last year, morale has increased throughout the Department by some 3 percent. I think that is probably more than any other Department in the Federal Government--over the last year, a significant one-year improvement and a better result than the Federal Government average over the same period. Like turning an aircraft carrier, improving morale over a large Federal agency takes time. You can turn an aircraft carrier's course, but it takes a little while, and so does changing and improving the morale of a department with a quarter of a million people spread out all over the world. I believe this latest survey shows that the hard work done by Secretary Johnson and Deputy Secretary Mayorkas and their team has begun to put this ship on a better course for the future. While more work needs to be done to improve morale at the Department of Homeland Security, this effort does not fall on Secretary Johnson alone. Each Member of Congress and every American can help support the Department and its employees by simply acknowledging the good work that the employees do there every day. Whether we simply say thank you to a TSA agent or TSO officer the next time we pass through an airport or give an occasional speech on the Senate floor as I am doing tonight and have done on other occasions, our support makes a difference. Mr. President, each September, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which we affectionately call FEMA, marks National Preparedness Month. Throughout the month, FEMA encourages all Americans to prepare for natural disasters and emergencies. To continue highlighting National Preparedness Month and to continue to highlight the important work done by FEMA and its people, I want to take a moment tonight to thank just a few of the employees of FEMA, one of the 22 component agencies all told that make up the Department of Homeland Security. As my colleagues may know, just last month, historic flooding inundated much of the State of Louisiana. What some may not know is that even before the floodwaters had peaked, FEMA employees and personnel were on the ground there. They were setting up Incident Support Bases to provide supplies, coordinating with State and local officials, and supporting first responders in rescue efforts. FEMA also set up Disaster Recovery Centers to assist residents seeking Federal aid to get back on their feet in the aftermath of the storms. One of the first FEMA employees on the ground there more than a month ago was Justo Hernandez, and Justo's picture is right here. Justo goes by the nickname Tito and is a Team Leader of the East II National Incident Management Assistance Team. With 28 years' experience with FEMA, Tito leads his team in immediate response efforts to natural and manmade disasters whenever and wherever they occur. Ready at a moment's notice, Tito and his team are experts in disaster response, specializing in operations, logistics, planning, and recovery. They put their experience to use by supporting State and local officials as they work through the most trying of situations. Members of Tito's team say that he is by far the best manager and supervisor they have ever worked for. As a leader, Tito leads by example, not afraid to get his hands dirty and never turning down a task, large or small. With their team expected to be deployed nearly 9 months out of the year, Tito has a deep respect for his team members' personal time. When Tito does get some time back at home, I know he enjoys spending every moment with his wife and three children. His family is incredibly generous, and we are grateful to them for lending our Nation their husband and father so he may undertake this important work in many parts of America on behalf of all Americans. As a FEMA employee, Tito embodies the spirit of dedication and caring, shaking hands with each individual he comes into contact with, asking them, ``How are you doing?'' As with most of the men and women at FEMA, Tito doesn't stop there. He does all he can do to help people. Last month, I visited FEMA headquarters here in Washington, DC. I met a number of the thousands of dedicated employees who work there. This is a picture from FEMA. These are some of the exceptional people who help us in some of our darkest hours. While many of these men and women were not directly involved in the response effort in Louisiana, they felt obligated to do all they could for their colleagues who were on the ground in Louisiana or coordinating from around the country. In fact, FEMA headquarters established a backup call center in their offices, and dozens of FEMA employees volunteered--during or after their regular working hours--to man the phones and talk to people through some of the toughest situations imaginable. One FEMA employee who asked how she could help is Melissa Forbes. Melissa has a Ph.D. in public policy and serves as Director of Enterprise Resource Planning in FEMA's Office of Policy and Program Analysis. Melissa's day job is to ensure that FEMA has the resources needed for the challenges it expects to face in the months and years ahead. For 27 hours over the course of 5 days--that is more than five hours each day--Melissa put her regular work on hold and came to the call center. In those 27 hours, Melissa took countless calls, answering questions and connecting people with her colleagues at FEMA who could get them immediate help. In the Navy, when someone does a truly remarkable job, we say these words: ``Bravo Zulu.'' So, to Melissa and to all who worked and volunteered at FEMA headquarters, I would say a great big ``Bravo Zulu.'' As I mentioned earlier, FEMA is made up of thousands of men and women who ask every day: How are you? How are you doing? How can we help? While Tito, his team, and others from FEMA were on the ground in Louisiana, Melissa felt compelled to do all she could do to support them. More than a year ago, Secretary Johnson launched his Unity of Effort initiative to bring the Department of Homeland Security employees closer together in their shared mission. Last month, Melissa and Tito were reunited from a thousand miles away in their efforts to help the people of Louisiana. Every month I come to the Senate floor and highlight the amazing dedication of two or three people, in some cases entire teams of men and women who are united in their shared goal of keeping Americans safe. In closing, let me say that I don't think the results from this year's Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey are a fluke. I believe the improvement in morale that has been reported by the thousands of employees at the Department of Homeland Security represents the growing unity within the Department of Homeland Security, the youngest and third largest Cabinet Department in the Federal Government. I, for one, look forward to next year's viewpoint survey, as well as those in the years to come, because I believe they will continue to put on display an ever more united and effective department. So to Tito, to the East II team, to Melissa and the volunteers at FEMA headquarters, as well as to everyone at FEMA, we say a great big thank you. Thank you for coming together, not only by asking ``How are you doing?'' but by going to work to make things better for all of us. Keep up the great work that you are doing, and God bless you. I have been joined on the floor by the majority leader. Before I yield the floor, let me say to another person who has joined us, my colleague from New Hampshire, who is the ranking member Democrat on the Appropriations Subcommittee for Homeland Security that she and the chairman, former Governor Hoeven, Senator Hoeven now, do a wonderful job that is important to Homeland Security. On behalf of Melissa and Tito and all the hundreds of thousands of people who work with them in Homeland Security, thank you for being there for them.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I stand before my colleagues this evening as a veteran of the Vietnam War who returned to this country after a third tour in Southeast Asia. I moved from California to Delaware and enrolled there at the University of Delaware in their business school, in their MBA program. I was fortunate enough, along with many other Vietnam-era veterans, to receive a GI bill benefit; it was about $250 a month. College tuition was a lot less in those days. I was happy to have every penny of it. But today we offer a GI bill benefit that is far more robust and far more needed than it was when I came back from Southeast Asia. Today, veterans return often throughout the course of the year in Delaware. The Governor and our congressional delegation--Senator Coons, Congressman Carney, and I--will either send National Guard men and women off to deployments around the world or we might welcome them home. Whenever we welcome them home, I say to the returning National Guard men and women, the Army Guard and Air Guard: Welcome home to the best GI bill benefits in the history of the country. If they want to go to the University of Delaware, tuition is paid for; at Delaware State University or Delaware Community College, tuition is paid for. If they need books--they probably do--they are paid for, and fees are paid for. If they need tutoring, it is paid for, and they also receive roughly a $1,500-a-month housing allowance. That is a great benefit, and folks who go to those schools generally get a very good education, and they get a lot of help in job placement after they have completed their education. That is not always the case in some of our for-profit colleges and universities. Some of them do a good job; some of them don't. One of them that hasn't done a good job is called ITT Tech. We heard it talked about this evening on the Senate floor. There were about 7,000 veterans using the Post-9/11 GI bill benefits that ITT Tech took from them when the school suddenly collapsed earlier this month. This provided $22,000 a year in educational assistance to private nonprofit and private for-profit colleges. The Post-9/11 GI bill provides a housing allowance that our veterans depend on to support their families while they attend class. When ITT Tech closed its doors, it also meant that this housing allowance came to an abrupt halt. I urged the Department of Veterans Affairs to work closely with the Department of Education to ensure that ITT Tech student veterans had the same resources and guidance they need to transfer and continue their education at high quality institutions of learning. But some veterans will not be able to transfer to another school this month or next month. We want them to make smart decisions about their educational future. That is why passing this bipartisan bill or some similar bipartisan bill to restore lost educational benefits and temporarily--underline temporarily--extend the housing allowance for students who attend schools like ITT Tech that suddenly close is so critical to our Nation's veterans and their families. We want to make sure that the student veterans have enough time--not an endless period, but enough time--to decide whether it is best to transfer to another school, to discharge their student loans, or start over at another school, such as a community college. This legislation is really about making sure the veterans continue to receive benefits they have earned in service to our country. Our Nation's veterans did not cause ITT Tech to collapse. Our Nation's veterans and our Nation's taxpayers deserve better than they have received at the hands of ITT Tech. The least we can do is provide some very modest relief during this tough period of transition. I think passing this bill or something similar to this legislation is the least we can do. My hope is that after we return from the recess after the election we can start talking across the aisle about more help to our student veterans and folks on the Post-9/11 GI bill. It is ironic that folks who are not veterans but recipients of Federal aid for education are in a similar situation, and they essentially would be made whole, but that is not the case with our veterans. I am not comfortable with that situation, and I suspect a lot of my colleagues are not either. I will close this part of my remarks. I think most of us ascribe to the Golden Rule--treat other people the way you want to be treated. I have been a veteran myself. I got a great education, graduate school at the University of Delaware, but I know how I would want to be treated if I were in the shoes of these thousands of veterans who have been mistreated at the hands of ITT Tech. We need to do something about it, and I hope that when we return, we will.