Thomas Carper

Mr. CARPER

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I have come to the floor--I don't come to the floor every day, but every day that I come here you are presiding. Either I am coming here more often than I thought or you are presiding more than most people do. Maybe you just drew the short straw, but at the end of the day, I enjoy having these conversations with you, even when most of our colleagues have packed up and headed for places near and far--mostly far. I have a couple of charts here today I would like for us to go over. The first one is--I like these bar graphs. This is an interesting one. We have Great Britain on this axis right here. We have information about the relative amount of fuel taxes countries have. Great Britain is the world champ. They have the biggest fuel taxes of anybody, and they have had for quite a while. All the way over here is the U.S.A. There is an outfit called the OECD, which I would say is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It doesn't have 41 nations; maybe it has about 37 or 38. They are arrayed right here. There are Russia, India, and Brazil. This gives you some sense of how different nations pay for their transportation infrastructure. A bunch of nations, like Great Britain, use their fuel taxes to help balance the budget. Great Britain is here, and then we have these other countries--Luxembourg, Spain, Argentina. You get all the way down here, and there is Brazil. They are like off the charts. They must not have any fuel taxes to pay for their transportation infrastructure at all. We are pretty close to them. We are right here, the United States. We are right between Canada and Mexico. I wanted to show that to give people a sense of--people think: Boy, we charge a lot of money for a gasoline tax and diesel tax. Well, as it turns out, not so much. Some people think we spend a lot of money in the Federal budget on foreign aid. A lot of time in my townhall meetings, people complain and say: Well, we spend way too much money on foreign aid. I say: Well, what percentage of the budget do you think actually goes to foreign aid? People say about 20, 25 percent. And the answer is 1 percent. So that is a misperception. I think the perception here is that we charge very high fuel taxes compared to the rest of the world. No. We have among the very lowest fuel taxes when you combine State and local with all of the developed nations of the world. Let's see what is next here. It says: How much do we pay in fuel taxes? This is the cost of regular gasoline right here, August 2015, about a month and a half ago. This right over here is diesel fuel in about August of this year, a month and a half ago. The retail price at that time, I guess on average across the country, was about $2.64 for gasoline, and the retail price for diesel was about the same, $2.60 a gallon. It is interesting to see how much tax is collected in a $2.64 gallon of gas. In our State, in Delaware, I pulled up for gas last week. I went to Wawa. I paid about $2.11 for gas. There are a bunch of stations--probably 1,000 or more--several thousand stations across the country last week where people paid less than two bucks a gallon. But this was the average. We have a couple of big States where the prices are higher, California among them. Anyway, what makes up the price of gas at $2.64? This was back in August. About 40 percent of that was the cost of crude oil. About another 25 percent of that $2.64 was attributable to refining costs. Another almost 20 percent--19 percent, actually--was for the cost of distribution, for distributing and marketing. Add that all up, and it adds up to about 82 percent, 83 percent of the cost of gasoline was crude oil, and refining, distribution, and taxes was about 17 percent. Again, when you look at our taxes in this country, State and local, we have among the lowest in the developed world. We just saw that in our first chart. The numbers on diesel are pretty much the same--40 percent of the cost of the diesel when you fill up tanks if you have a car or a truck that uses diesel. It is about 18 percent for refining and another 22 percent. So about 80 percent of the cost for a gallon of diesel fuel 1\1/2\ or 2 months ago was, again, crude oil, the cost of crude, the cost of refining, and the cost of distribution and marketing. Let's see what is on our next chart. It strikes me that gasoline prices are going down nationwide. Well, are they or are they not? Let's look. The average price of gas on October 5, 2015--what is today? Today is October 8, my sister's birthday. Three days before that birthday-- October 5--gas nationwide was about $2.32 a gallon. Compared to last year, it is down by 98 cents again. On the east coast, the price of gas where I come from in Delaware--I said I bought gas last week at Wawa for $2.11. The average price up and down the east coast is about $2.17 a gallon, and that is down by over $1 from a year ago. In New England, the price is just about the same as the Northeast--$2.23 a gallon. The Central Atlantic is pretty much Virginia, Maryland, and maybe North Carolina and South Carolina. In the Central Atlantic, it is $2.22 a gallon. These are all down by over $1 a gallon from last year. The Lower Atlantic is pretty much the same. The Midwest is a little bit more. Gulf Coast States--down very close to $2 here. The gulf coast is down to $2.03 a gallon. That is down by roughly $1 from a year ago. Go out to the Rocky Mountain States--if you move farther to the West, prices go up a little bit. The Rocky Mountain States are $2.47, $2.48. That is down by $1. The west coast is about $2.79. That is almost $1. Finally, the Pacific Northeast is about $2.50, again, down by $1. So I would say prices are down by about a third across the country. I like this poster. For folks who can't read it, there are a couple of guys who are sitting in a gas station. The passenger says to the driver, ``I just found some loose change in the cup holder.'' And the driver says, ``Awesome. Fill 'er up.'' Well, we are not quite at that point, but we are getting a lot more for the loose change we find in our cup holder than used to be the case. Now the question is, Is that going to continue? Look at this next chart and see what it shows. It shows that the global price of oil continues to drop. Again, keep in mind that about 40 percent of the cost of gas--40 percent at the pump, 40 percent of the cost of diesel at the pump--is attributable to the price at the wellhead. This is the price of crude oil over a few years--2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Here we are. This is starting at about the middle of 2014. There is a precipitous drop, some recovery, and then another precipitous drop. This is even better. This is the price of crude oil over the past 6 months. There is a big drop starting about in June. You see what we have down here. It is about midforties per barrel. That is history. The question is, Looking forward, what can we expect prices to look like? I don't have a magic solar ball or anything like that, but I do know this: The world in which we live is awash in oil, and the United States has been a big contributor to that because of what we are bringing up out of the ground, on the land, and in the seas beside us, beside our country. But there is another country that is, I think, No. 4 in the world in terms of their strategic reserves compared to the rest of the world. It is a country that has not been pumping a lot of late, but it is a country that has the ability to pump a lot of oil, and that country is Iran. Today, this month, next month, they can pump maybe 100,000 barrels a day, maybe 200,000 barrels a day. But if they abide by the agreement we struck with them, the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, and us--if the Iranians keep their agreement, which is designed to ensure they don't end up with a nuclear weapon--if they keep that agreement and the sanctions are lifted, they will be able to, probably starting more next year than this, begin to pump more oil out of the ground. They have a lot of it to pump. They have a big reason to want to pump a lot of it because, as bad as our transportation and infrastructure is, theirs is a whole lot worse. They need to generate the money, and one of the ways they are going to do it is to pump a lot of oil. Looking forward, can we say the price of gasoline is going to go down? Is it going to stay the same? I would just say this: One of the big factors for us to consider is that the fourth biggest oil reserve country in the world is going to start--all things being equal, they are going to start pumping a lot of oil, and that is going to come into a world market of oil where, frankly, we are awash in oil. It is not going to drive the price up, I can assure you. It may keep it steady. It could actually drive it down further. All right. Let's take a look at the next chart. This is a chart that focuses on what we are investing as a nation in our transportation systems, our roads, our highways, our bridges. We are looking at, actually, some numbers provided by an outfit called the American Society of Civil Engineers. These are people who make a living by building infrastructure and helping design and figure out what we should build and how we should build it. It is not just transportation, it is all kinds of infrastructure, but it certainly includes transportation. They actually grade how we are doing on transportation in this country on roads, highways, and bridges. I think the last time I saw, the grade they gave us was a D-plus. The only thing I can say was good about that is it was not a D-minus. But it hasn't been a C or even a C- minus for a long time. It certainly hasn't been a B for a lot longer. And one of the things that happens is when you have a transportation system--when our investments are at about a D-plus--``d'' as in ``dog''--we end up spending a lot of time in traffic just sitting there. Every year, Texas A&M comes up with a study that says how much time we spend in traffic just pretty much sitting there, barely moving. The average across the country for the average driver is 42 hours a year. Think about that. That is pretty much almost 2 days that you just sitting there, maybe moving a little bit but not much. For the bigger cities, such as Washington, DC; Houston, TX; Dallas; Denver; or L.A., the numbers are more like 82 hours per year. That is almost 4 days just sitting there in traffic in your car, truck, van, big truck, your diesel, rig, whatever, waiting to move. The American Society of Civil Engineers says our investment needs are about $228 billion. Is that per year? That is per year. That is a lot of money. If we were pumping that kind of money into roads, highways, and bridges in our transit system, we wouldn't have a D-plus anymore; we would have a B-plus--``b'' as in ``bravo'' as opposed to ``d'' as in ``dog.'' So that is what $228 billion a year would get us. That would be new revenues on top of the current revenues we are already generating from roads, highways, and bridges. Over at the U.S. Department of Transportation, they have said their magic number is $171 billion per year. They are talking about $171 billion per year. They say that is just enough to begin to improve our transportation system. Instead of seeing it continue to be degraded, if we put in about $171 billion, we would see that is just enough to begin to improve our transportation system. Over here, these are our civil engineers. These are smart people who help design roads. This is the U.S. Department of Transportation. One says we need to put in about $228 billion a year and the U.S. Department of Transportation says about $171 billion a year. Our current highway trust fund spending out of our trust fund is $50 billion a year. It is not even 20 percent, maybe not even 25 percent of what the engineers who build these systems are telling us, and it is not even a third of what the Department of Transportation says we ought to be doing. We could begin--just begin to improve our transportation system. What this chart says to me is we are going nowhere fast and we are woefully underfunding. If we want to get better; if we want to reduce the amount of time we are just sitting, going nowhere; if we want to reduce the amount of money we are spending to replace our tires or have our front ends aligned and other repairs on our vehicles--that adds up to about, on average, between $350 to $500 per driver. That is what we are spending now. Let's see what this poster says: The U.S. highway trust fund running out due to political gridlock. Where the highway ends. Let me just say that we have had over the last, I don't know, 5, 6, 7, 8 years any number of blue ribbon commissions that have been commissioned. We commissioned them in the Transportation bill we passed maybe 6 years ago. We said to all these smart people: We want you to go out and figure out how we ought to pay for transportation. They came back and said: Well, here is why we think a big part of it ought to be user fees, some for tolling and some for figuring out how many miles are actually traveled, vehicle miles traveled, kind of migrating toward that of system, but for the most part it should be user fees. A big piece of that, at least for now, should be user fees for the amount of gas we buy and for the amount of diesel fuel we buy because that generally ensures that the folks who are using our roads, highways, and bridges are actually paying for them. So there has not really been a lot of question among people a lot smarter than I and even smarter than my colleagues--most of them, at least--the folks who are most knowledgeable about this say this is the way we ought to pay for it, and it should be a user-fee approach. The reason we are not doing that is because of political courage--not an overabundance of that; maybe a lack of it. All right. Let's see what is next. The TRAFFIC Relief Act, which is the Tax Relief And #FixTheTrustFund For Infrastructure Certainty Act of 2015--that is a mouthful--was introduced by a fellow from Illinois named Senator Durbin and a fellow from Delaware. That would be me. Dick Durbin and I came to Washington. I was a Navy guy for many years before I was treasurer of Delaware, Congressman for a while, Governor, and now in the Senate. Dick came to Washington in 1982. We both were elected to the House in 1982. We found out on the first day on the job--we were sworn in January 3, 1983--the Social Security trust fund was about to run out of money, I mean entirely. But in 1983 we were not going to be talking about reducing Social Security benefits by 5 percent, 10 percent, or 20 percent; by the end of 1983, we were going to run out of money and we wouldn't be able to pay anything for Social Security benefits. Fortunately, in 1982 some very smart people got together. A blue ribbon commission was chaired by Alan Greenspan, who went on to became Federal Reserve Chairman. They said: Here is how we ought to pay for it. Dick Durbin and I--a lot of Democrats and a lot of Republicans--all of us together said: That makes sense. Let's do it. It was a combination of reductions in benefits and additional revenues. We got the job done. Social Security is not set forever, but it has lasted for another 30 years, 40 years. We need to do some more to fix it, but that is the kind of bipartisan resolve we need. The legislation Senator Durbin and I introduced in this instance-- maybe a little more than a month ago--raises about $220 billion for the highway trust fund over 10 years, and that is on top of the amount of money we are already going to spend anyway over the next 10 years. I think that would be another maybe $400 billion, roughly, $450 billion, $350 billion. Add that to $220 billion, and that gives us $570 billion. Does this get us from D-plus to an A or A-minus or even a B-plus? No, it doesn't, but it moves us in the right direction. It moves the needle in the direction it needs to go. It provides for $90 billion to fully fund the highways and transit programs and about $130 billion for new investments in repairs and upgrades. We need to do those new investments, and we certainly need to do the repairs and upgrades. Let me close by thanking Senator Durbin for joining me in this effort. People vote for us to come to Congress and to make tough decisions. People expect us to work together. People especially expect us to get things done. People especially expect us to do things that help strengthen the economic recovery, which is underway, to make it more robust going forward in the future. We can do that. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how. A lot of smart people on these blue ribbon commissions have been telling us for years that the way to do it is move toward tolling, eventually move toward some kind of vehicle-miles-traveled system where based on the actual miles we travel we pay some find of fee. But they have also said for now, because those other two ideas are not fully realized--and especially for vehicle miles traveled, we are not going to be there for probably 10 years, 20 years. In the meantime, we have all this work that needs to be done and to be paid for, and they have said the best way to do it is to ensure that we pay--those of us who are using the roads, highways, and bridges pay for that, and we have been using gas taxes and diesel taxes to do that. I will close with this. I am not a big coffee drinker, but I stopped by a carryout we have downstairs in the basement. They are open whenever we are in session, and you can go get a sandwich or some soup or yogurt or something, and they also sell coffee. Some days, especially when we are in session late at night--we have not been doing that much lately--but at night when we are in session late, they sell a lot of coffee. The coffee is anywhere from the smallest cup costing like 70 cents, and the middle-sized maybe $2, $2.50, and the largest cups are maybe $3 or something like that. If you go to Starbucks you pay a lot more for a cup of coffee than that. You pay as much as $5 at Starbucks, I am told by a friend of mine who buys his coffee there, but I bought a cup of coffee here today and it was a little more than $2 for a middle-sized cup of coffee. As it turns out, if we actually raised the user fee--the gas tax and the diesel tax--for 4 cents a year, which is what Dick Durbin and I are calling for, 4 cents a year for 4 years, and the Federal gas tax has been 18 cents for 22 years. Since 1993 it has been 18 cents. It is not worth 18 cents anymore because of inflation. It is worth less than a dime. The diesel tax is about 23 cents. It is not worth 23 cents anymore. It has been that since 1993. It is worth less than 15 cents. In the meantime, the price of concrete is up, asphalt is up, steel is up, labor is up, and the major way, the principal way we pay for roads, highways, bridges, and transit frankly has greatly diminished in value. If we were to actually raise, as Senator Durbin and I are suggesting, the price of these user fees--gas tax, diesel tax--by 4 cents a year for 4 years, that would add 16 cents to the price of gasoline. For the average driver, that turns out to be on a weekly basis just about the price of a cup of coffee. It works out to be just about the price of a cup of coffee. Here is a question I would ask. I think if we asked most drivers in this country of ours today when they are sitting in traffic trying to get someplace--whether here in the Mid-Atlantic area, up in the Northeast, out on the West Coast or other places--would you be willing, 4 years from now, to be paying an amount of money equal to the price of a cup of coffee in order to spend a lot less time sitting in traffic going nowhere or running into potholes that destroy your tires and your front-end alignment? Would you be willing to pay on a weekly basis the amount of money you spend on a cup of coffee? My guess is most people would say that doesn't seem like a bad deal. You know what. They would be right because it is not a bad deal. I will close with this. I am from Delaware. People here are from all over the country representing their States. Guess what 12 of the 50 States have done in the last 2 years--2013, 2014--and those States are mostly red States, with Republican Governors and Republican legislatures. One dozen of those States have raised their user fees. They have raised their user fees and not by a dollar all at once or even a half dollar or a quarter, but they have raised them in some places by pennies, a nickel or more over a couple of years. Then last November in those 12 States they had elections. This is an interesting story. Guess what happened to the State legislators who voted to raise their user fees to actually pay for their roads, highways, and bridges. When they ran for reelection they got reelected. Amazing. They showed political courage. They did the hard thing. Ninety-five percent of them, Republicans, who were running for reelection last November, in those States where they raised the user fees--gas tax, diesel tax--they got reelected. Do you know who didn't get reelected in some of those States? The legislators who voted against raising the user fees, who did not support making investments in transportation. How about the Democrats in those States? Well, the Democrats in States where they raised the user fees to pay for their transportation investments, almost 90 percent of them won their primary last November, won the general election, and they got reelected too. They did better than the legislators who voted against those increases. Think about that. I like to quote Thomas Jefferson from time to time, and Jefferson used to say: If people know the truth, they won't make a mistake. I would like to think the same thing is true here. If my colleagues and I know the truth, we won't make a mistake either. People think it is political suicide to vote to raise these user fees and you can't get reelected by doing the right thing. But you know what. You can. You can, and there is a lot of evidence to show it can happen. I will close not with the words of Jefferson but of Mark Twain, who said a lot of things--a lot of funny things--and one of the things he said that I think is especially appropriate is: In the end, tell the truth. You will confound your critics and amaze your friends. The truth is we need to make these investments. The other truth is this is not political suicide. At the end of the day, we are actually going to get, I think more often than not, rewarded for doing the hard thing and the right thing. My hope is we will do that, and I will continue to make that case. One last great quote, Mr. President. Wayne Gretzky--I don't know if you play much hockey down your way, we play some in Delaware--but Wayne Gretzky said a lot of memorable things in his life--a great hockey player, now retired--and when people would say to him: Mr. Gretzky, why are you such a good hockey player? He would say: I go where the puck will be, not where the puck is. Think about that. I go where the puck will be, not where the puck is. One of the other things Wayne Gretzky said that I especially like is: I miss 100 percent of the shots--talking about taking a shot on the goal--he said: I miss 100 percent of the shots that I never take. Think about that. I miss 100 percent of the shots I never take. I am convinced this is a shot worth taking. I am going to push very hard to make sure somebody is here, and Dick Durbin and my guess is some others, too, will come along and will encourage folks to join us in this effort. This is a just cause. I don't see anybody else waiting in line to speak, so with that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I am pleased to follow my colleague and friend from Missouri. I just want to mention--although I didn't come to the floor to talk about what we are doing for veterans, let me take a minute or two to talk about what we are doing that we are actually proud of and then maybe touch on a couple of areas where we can do a better job. I myself am a veteran, a Navy midshipman out of Ohio State who studied economics for 4 years and went on to become a naval flight officer. I served for 5 years in Southeast Asia as a naval flight officer and then as a P-3 aircraft mission commander for another 18 years until the end of the Cold War. I loved the Navy. I loved serving. I got an education--undergraduate and graduate school--and feel very privileged. I had the opportunity at the end of my Active-Duty tour to use the VA hospital very close to Wilmington, DE, in northern Delaware. I remember the first time I went there. I was offered some dental benefits, and my dentist--a young dentist who was right out of dental school--told me the morale was pretty bad, and he said they didn't do very good work. It was place where they had 16-bed wards. They didn't do much in the way of outpatient surgery. The pharmacy was a mess. I said: Wouldn't it be great to be in a position to do something about that and transform this place so it can be a health care delivery facility we can be proud of today? Do they do everything perfectly? No, they don't. We have two satellite operations in Delaware. We have one in the Dover area, in the middle of our State, and we have another one in the southern part of the State, in Sussex County, which is Georgetown. I am very proud of those health care facilities. We call them outpatient clinics, CBOCS. The reason I mention that is because I was also eligible--coming out of the Vietnam war, along with other Vietnam veterans--to get an education, to go to college, and in my case graduate school on the GI bill. In my generation, we received about $250 a month. At the time, I was happy to have every bit of it. I continued to fly with my Reserve squadron for another 18 years, and it was great to have that benefit. A couple weeks ago, our congressional delegation--Senator Coons, Congressmen Carney, and Governor Jack Markell--sent 300 Delaware National Guard men and women off to Afghanistan. We had a big sendoff ceremony for them. Their families were there. We had about 1,000 people. It was a big sendoff. As they left, I told them: When you come back, you are going to be eligible for a GI benefit that dwarfs what my generation received. They won't get 250 bucks a month. If they serve a total of 3 years on Active Duty and serve in Afghanistan or Iraq for a period of time, here is what they will be eligible for: They can come back and go for free to the University of Delaware, Delaware City University, Wilmington University--pretty much any public college or university in America; tuition, books, and fees paid for; and if they need tutoring, that is paid for as well. On top of all that, they get a housing allowance of $1,500 a month. We received a GI benefit of $250. Not surprisingly, at the end of World War II, when my dad and my uncle served--in the Korean war, when my uncle served, and at the end of the Vietnam war, scam artists emerged to take advantage of the GI and tried to separate the GI coming back from combat--tried to separate the GI cash value benefits from the GI and sometimes not to provide them with a very good education but to take advantage of the GI and the taxpayers. In about 1952, something called the 85-15 rule was passed whereby at least 15 percent of the students enrolled in a for-profit college or university had to be there--their tuition paid for by some source other than the Federal Government. As it turns out, the 85-15 rule became the 90-10 rule, so that 90 percent of those who were enrolled were paid for by the Federal Government, but another 10 percent had to be paid for by someone else other than the Federal Government. Over time, that changed so that 90 percent of the revenues of a for-profit college or university could come from the Federal Government but not the other 10 percent--except for the money that came from the GI bill to a college or university or from tuition assistance for people on Active Duty. That didn't count against the 90 percent. At the end of the day, a for- profit college or university could get 100 percent of its revenues from the Federal Government. I don't think that is a good thing. The system that was designed early on with the 85-15 rule and later the 90- 10 rule was designed to try to make sure there were market forces that ensured taxpayers and the GIs, the veterans would get a fair deal, get a good education, make sure they were treated the way we would want them to be treated. There is a huge loophole in the 90-10 rule, and it is a loophole we need to fix. We need to fix it. My colleagues who talked here earlier today--including my colleague from Missouri--about the quality of VA health care--I want to say that we are providing the best health care by far in the history of our country. For too long, a number of our for-profit colleges and universities and postsecondary-training programs have been taking advantage of GIs, taking advantage of the taxpayers, and it should stop. It should stop. Having said that, there are a number of for-profit colleges and universities and training programs that do a great job. They are not all bad actors. Some of them wear white hats. For them, good for you, and for those who are not, you need to change your ways. I didn't come here to talk about that, but in the spirit of making sure we look out for our veterans, I thought I would mention that. Transportation Infrastructure Funding Let's take a look at some of the posters here this afternoon. The first one looks like my State. It probably also looks like the Presiding Officer's State. It could look like any of the States our pages are from. But this is a traffic jam. It is a traffic jam that occurs almost every day, almost every business day, and frankly a lot of weekends on highways across America from coast to coast. We spend a lot of time sitting in traffic. It is actually quite a substantial cost that inures to our Nation's economy. The cost this year is believed to be about $160 billion, a hit on our national economy. I will talk in just a second about what that includes. Part of the waste that is reflected in our Nation's economy is--you see right here it says ``82 hours wasted in big city traffic.'' That is per person, per driver, on average, across the country, big cities, people sitting--pretty much sitting in traffic. They could be in a minivan, they could be in a small car, a large car, they could be in a truck, but we are talking about 82 hours a year just pretty much sitting in traffic. The average across the country, when you take in the more rural parts of the country and suburban areas, is about 42 hours. That is a whole lot of time. Time is money. So just think about that. Here is one with a sense of humor. This is not Delaware. I am not sure where this is, but for those who can't read this, it says--the traffic sign that is up here says: ``You'll never get to work on time. Haha.'' It is some kind of construction program. You see the orange cones out there. Someone had a good sense of humor there. My guess is, the folks who maybe were working on the project had a good sense of humor. My guess is that for a moment it made the drivers smile but not for long, especially if they sat in traffic long enough. Eighty-two hours a year, that is long enough. Not only is it expensive, a waste of time and money for us as individuals to sit in traffic for a long time, another part of the cost is caused by potholes and other problems with our roads. I think this is probably a bridge. It looks like it might be a bridge, but it is a construction project someplace. Here is a pothole. That is a bad pothole. In other parts--not too much in Delaware--I have seen in other States at least that bad and worse. What is going to happen, vehicles will come along, they will hit that pothole, and may damage their tires, they may have to replace a tire or two, they may have to get their front end realigned. That costs money. How much? Actually, believe it or not, just like Texas A&M has actually figured out on average we waste 82 hours a year as drivers, somebody else actually spent the time to figure out how much we spend on our cars, trucks, and vans in order to fix them during the course of the year because of potholes like this and other problems, whether it is the surface of the roads we travel on or the surface of the bridges we travel on. It is over $350. I have seen the range of anywhere from $350 per year to $500 per year. Let's say it is just $350 a year. That is a lot of money. That is part of the cost of the damage to our economy. The other thing I would say, our economy today, as we all know, is a ``just in time'' economy. I will give you a good example. We have a port in Wilmington that sits right on the Delaware River. As you come up the Delaware Bay, it becomes the Delaware River. The port that is closest to the Atlantic is the Port of Wilmington. Ships are coming in and out of there throughout the day, nights, and weekends. The ships don't come in and spend a week. Ships don't come into the Port of Wilmington and spend a day. They may come in for 4 hours, they may come in for 6 hours, but they are there and then they are gone, because when a ship is sitting in the Port of Wilmington or any other port, the shipper, whoever owns that boat, that ship cannot make any money. So they want to be in and they want to be out. That is the way they do their business. It is important for whoever is coming in using a truck to bring goods to put on that ship to send around the world, there may be a very short window of time to get there. If you are stuck in traffic, the kind of traffic we saw early on, you may miss that window when the ship is in the port, whether it is Wilmington or some other port. That is another reason why, in a ``just in time'' economy, these kinds of delays mean time is money. Again, someone else with a sense of humor--if you cannot read this, it looks like a husband and wife driving along in their car. His wife says: ``Finally someone fixed that pothole.'' Here is the pothole. There is a car down there. The guy driving looks like he is having a bad day, not just a bad hair day, a very bad day. A little humor there but not if you happen to be this guy, frankly-- probably not if you happen to be this guy, because if you are running over somebody else's car in a pothole like this, the guy is going to spend a lot more than 350 bucks to repair his car and get it going again. We are not making this stuff up. There is a national association, I think it is civil engineers, people who spend their life's work on transportation projects. Every year for years, they have given us a grade on what kind of shape our roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems are in. They could give an A, A-plus, A-minus, they could give a B, B-plus, B-minus, they could give a C, C-plus, C-minus or they could give a D-plus, D, D-minus. The last couple of years we have been right around D to D-plus. I think we are probably going down rather than going up. So what everybody knows--just about anybody who drives in our country these days knows we are not investing in our roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems the way we need to. Look around the rest of the world, travel around the rest of the world. You can see in a lot of countries we compete with that they do. One of the components of certain investments we need to make in our country in order to strengthen our economy, to better ensure the jobs are going to be created or preserved--there a lot of things we can do to make sure businesses have access to capital, make sure the cost of energy is affordable, make sure the cost of health care is affordable, make sure we have public safety, make sure the people who are coming out of our schools can read, write, and have the skills that are needed in the workforce. I know the big one is to make sure we have the ability to move people and goods where they need to go, when they need to go. Here is our current plan. It is pretty well summed up in this sign. It is meant to be funny. I suppose it is. But I like this part of the plan: ``Good luck.'' That is not a plan. That is not a plan that is going to get us where we need to go as a nation. For those who may be unable to read this, there is a big traffic jam. A lot of people are saying--you see those little bubbles there--``I'd pay to be anywhere but here.'' I was Treasurer of Delaware. I studied economics, got an MBA, and was Treasurer of Delaware when I was 29. I had a chance to serve in the house for a while and then as Governor. I was very much involved in the National Governors Association in trying to make sure we invested in our transportation infrastructure across the country. In the Senate, I am on the Environment and Public Works Committee. The last time I was privileged to serve as chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure. So I thought a fair amount about these issues. If you think about the way we pay for roads, highways, bridges, and transit, what we have used for years is a user pay system. The people, the businesses that use our roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems, we pay for them. In some places, we have sort of gotten away from that. There is an unwillingness to ask people to pay for what they want to use. Everybody wants to have better transportation systems. There seems to be a lot of reluctance to pay for that. When I was Governor of Delaware, three times I asked for modest--very modest--increases, just a couple of cents in the fee for gas and diesel tax. I think out of three efforts, we succeeded one time. Not a whole lot was raised, but we cobbled together some other money from other user fees and we were able to continue to fund transportation funding. For a number of years in the Nation, we have had a transportation trust fund. Most of the money for that transportation trust fund comes from user fees, and two primary user fees are a gas tax. It has been about 18.3, 18.4 cents since, I think, 1993. It has been a little bit over 18 cents since 1993. It has not changed. The cost of concrete has gone up. The cost of asphalt has gone up. The cost of steel has gone up. The cost of labor has gone up. What has not gone up is the user fee we are asking people to pay to have better roads, highways, bridges, and transit to get people off our roads, highways, and bridges. If we can do that, we can save a lot of money. We have a tax on diesel--a Federal tax. It has been about 24 cents per gallon. It has been at that level since 1993--since 1993. Again, concrete, asphalt, steel, and labor have all gone up, but in 22 years we have not changed the user fee, if you will, on diesel. The money we collect from the gas and diesel tax does not go to pay for health care, it does not go to pay for wars, it does not go to pay for agriculture and other things. The money we collect from these user fees goes to pay for roads, highways, bridges, and to some extent for transit systems, to get people off our roads, highways, and bridges so the rest of us will have some extra room to maneuver. I will go back in time. Thomas Jefferson said a lot of things that are worth remembering. My favorite Jefferson quote is this: ``If the people know the truth, they won't make a mistake.'' If the people know the truth, they won't make a mistake. The truth is, we are not investing in our transportation infrastructure in this country the way our competitors are and the way we ought to be. To do so does not mean we have to raise--in some places they have gas taxes or diesel taxes that are $4 or $5 a gallon. We don't have that. It is 18 cents, and 24 cents for gas and diesel combined. If we had increased them by the rate of inflation in the past, the gas tax would be not 18 cents; it may be even closer to twice that. The diesel tax would not be 24 cents; it might be closer to twice that. But we have not changed them. Here is the way we pay for transportation improvements: We don't pay for them. We don't raise anything, in some cases. We just simply go out and borrow money for the transportation fund from the Federal general fund. When the general fund runs out of money, we borrow money from countries around the world like China and other places and replenish the general fund, and use that to replenish the transportation fund. I think that is pretty foolish, especially to be beholden to the folks in China for our transportation system. It does not make a whole lot of sense to me, maybe it does not to you either. There are other things we do--we have these--I call them cats and dogs, sort of sleight of hand. One of the more recent examples, we do something called pension smoothing, where--I will not get into how that works, but it is just an awful idea to mess with, muck with people's pensions in order to be able to provide funds for road improvements. That does not make much sense. Another thing we do is we maybe raise the TSA fees when people want to fly. Instead of using that to make our friendly skies safer, we put a little of that money in roads, highways, and bridges or maybe we sell some of the oil we have in our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We paid a lot of money several years ago to buy gas, to buy oil when it was expensive. People think it would be a smart thing to sell that oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, when prices are low, to help pay for roads, highways, and bridges. Remember the old saying ``buy low, sell high.'' Well, this is really buy high and then put that oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and then sell low. That is insanity. We can do a lot better than this. For a number of years, some have encouraged us to do what we have been doing for years, to actually be honest and pay for improvements to our roads, highways, and bridges. And that is to raise the user fees--not all at once, not by $1 or $2 or anything like that, but by 4 cents a year starting next year for 4 years. Then after that index--then index the fees and the taxes on gas and diesel according to the rate of inflation. If we did that, I think we would have a combined State and Federal user fee, if you will, for gas. I think it would be at that time 53 cents. It would be about 53 cents. Compared to what? Compared to pretty much any other developed nation in the world, we would have the lowest combined Federal, State, and local user fees on gas and diesel. It is the lowest as far as I can tell. We can actually double that. We are not going to do that. We could actually double it again--we are not going to do that--from 53 cents to $1.06 per gallon. Again, I don't suggest we would do that, but if we did, we would still be among the lowest compared to the rest of the world. Sometimes we say: Well, 16 cents--what could I buy with that? If I didn't have to pay 4 years from now an extra 16 cents when I buy a gallon of gas, what would that add up to in a week for the average driver? I will tell you this--maybe brings it home--basically the price of a cup of coffee a week is the cost that would be incurred by the average driver even after the full increase, the 4 cents times 4 years. That is what it is worth. That would be the out-of-pocket expense for the average driver, the price of a cup of coffee a week. We saw earlier from some of these charts that, on average across the country, people are sitting in traffic for 42 hours per year. We saw some of the graphics with the pothole and were reminded that the cost of damage to our cars, trucks, and vans is anywhere from $350 to some estimates as high as $500. We are learning that for the price of a basic cup of coffee, if we invest that money instead--people can still drink coffee, but if we put that in our roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems, we can have a transportation system we can be proud of. Those four pennies add up over time, and they add up over the next 10 years to $220 billion to have for investments. So instead of having roads or potholes that look like the one I saw and the kinds of traffic jams we see here from coast to coast, we can have a transportation system again in this country we can be proud of. We just have to have the will to do it. Again, Thomas Jefferson reminded us that things that are worth having are worth paying for, and if people know the truth, they won't make a mistake. Roads, highways, bridges, transit--that is what we are paying for. The truth is, it doesn't have to break us. It doesn't have to break our banks or our budgets. We can have those roads, highways, and bridges again that we can be proud of. I hope we will do that. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and I have introduced legislation to essentially do that, to raise the user fees by 4 cents a year for 4 years, at a time when the price of oil is as low as it has been for some time and is expected to stay low for the foreseeable future. If the Iranians work with us and the other five nations that negotiated the Iranian agreement in order to gradually lift sanctions from their economy, they will be able to start producing oil and selling it across the world as long as they agree not to create that nuclear weapon. We are going to make sure they don't. But it turns out that Iran is the No. 4 nation in the world in oil reserves. Think about that. We live in a world that is awash in oil. Very soon, the Iranian oil will be added to the oil that is available to consumers to use on this planet of ours. All that oil will not push up the price of oil or gasoline or diesel; it will push it down--supply and demand. Let's keep that in mind. With that, I have spoken for long enough. I see one of my colleagues has been waiting patiently, and I will bid you all adieu. Have a good weekend. Thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Madam President, I don't know that I will say anything profound, but I appreciate the chairman of our committee saying that. Madam President, and fellow native West Virginian, I will show a map of the United States in just a minute, and there are some States that are delaying and some States that are cutting back on transportation projects. One of them is West Virginia. One of them is Delaware. I want to talk a little bit about that. Before I do, I would like to go back in time 10 months to the election of last year. I am reminded of the message I heard from the electorate that came out of that election. To simplify it, there were three things they were trying to tell us. No. 1, they want us to work together; No. 2, they want us to get things done; and, No. 3, they want us to get things done that will actually strengthen our economic recovery. If you go back in time to the January--the week Barack Obama and Joe Biden were inaugurated as President and Vice President, 628,000 people filed for unemployment insurance in that 1 week in January of 2009. Any time that weekly number of people filing for unemployment insurance is over 400,000, we are losing jobs in this country and in the economy. Last Thursday we got a number from the Department of Labor. Last week's number was about 265,000 who filed for unemployment. That was last week. There is a new number today--I am not sure what it was, but for the last 28 weeks that number of people filing for unemployment insurance has been under 300,000. I think that is the longest that we have been keeping track, where we had 28 consecutive weeks where fewer than 300,000 people in this country were applying for unemployment insurance. That number is way under 400,000, so we are adding jobs, and we are expecting to continue to add jobs in this country. There are still people looking for jobs in my State, there are in West Virginia, and other States as well, but when you consider the unemployment rate was about 10 percent in the early part of 2009 and today it is a little over 5 percent, we are making progress, but we can make a lot more progress. One of the ways we can make progress is by dealing with our fiscal plan and not hold the Nation's economy hostage with our inability to pass a spending plan. And God help us if we drop the ball on this again and have another shutdown. I sure hope we come to our senses and avoid doing that. My hope is that we will. One of the other ways we can strengthen our economic recovery--and it is right out there for us to seize and do--is to make sure that in a nation where roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems are deteriorating, where we need to make improvements and we need to build, frankly, new projects--new highways, bridges, roads and transit systems--at the very least we need to maintain the quality of what we have or improve the quality of road safety, surfaces, potholes, you name it. There is a lot of work to be done, and there are a lot of people who would like to do the work. The McKinsey Global Institute, an arm of the national consulting firm McKinsey, looked at what we could do for our growing GDP in this country if we fully funded a 6-year transportation plan, what we could do for an employment opportunity if we funded a 6-year transportation plan, and the numbers are remarkable--I think amazing. We were told that fully funding a 6-year transportation plan would grow our GDP by approximately 1.5 percent per year--not for 1 year but for the life of the transportation plan that we funded--probably 6 years at 1.5 percent a year. When you consider the GDP growth over the last couple years, even though it is better than it was, adding 1.5 percent of the GDP growth would help our economy grow in a robust way. We are told by McKinsey & Company's study that a 6-year transportation plan robustly funded would put about 1.8 million people to work. A lot of folks would like to be building roads, highways, and transportation systems, and they don't have employment opportunities because we are not funding them. We are not funding them. Let's take a quick look at this map if we could. The States that are gray are States, as far as we know, that are not planning to delay or cancel projects. They are not even considering delaying projects, but the States that are in red, including Delaware over here, are States that have delayed or cancelled projects. The States that are in yellow, including West Virginia, are States that are considering project delays. That is not good. I have not counted the number of States--it looks like seven--that are in red. Those are the States that have delayed projects. More than that, probably 10, are considering doing that. Why is it important for us to fully fund at the Federal level--do our share for roads, highways, bridges, transit funding? It is because about half of the money that our States spend through their departments of transportation, half their money comes from Federal user fees--largely Federal user fees--primarily, not entirely, but primarily user fees on the sale of gasoline. It has been unchanged in 23 years--not since 1993--22 years. The user fee on diesel has been unchanged for some 22 years, right where we were. The price of everything else goes up. Concrete goes up, asphalt goes up, steel goes up, and labor goes up. We have more energy-efficient vehicles. They are not using as much gas or diesel. That is a good thing, but it is also a bad thing for having funding for transportation projects. So I want to look at a map and would invite all of us to consider it. I don't anybody who says--any economist worth their salt--who does not say: Fully funding a multi- year transportation plan, not for 6 months or 3 months, something like that, but fully funding it--robustly funding it for 6 years--will do great things for our economy. The reason we end up with job growth of something like 1.8 million people, according to McKinsey and Company, is because the economy works far more efficiently if roads, highways, bridges are operating and working well. So I just want to share that and start off my remarks today. I have some numbers here that I would like to share. So far in 2015, this year, four States--Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Wyoming--have shelved some $805 million in projects due to the uncertainty over Federal funds. Again, the uncertainty is over roughly half the money that they are going to spend on roads, highways, and bridges. It comes from Federal user fees, Federal taxes. Our transportation system--at least the way we fund it--has been broken since 2008. Since that time, in the last 5 or 6 years, we have passed I think 12 short-term patches to the tune of nearly $74 billion. How do we pay for them? We pay for them with budget gimmicks. That is how we do it. And we pay for them with debt. When we issue debt, we borrow money. We sell Treasury securities, and we sell them around the world. Among the countries that buy them are China and the Chinese people. We are then beholden to them as our creditors. It puts us in a situation that I do not find too comfortable. My guess is some of you don't either. There are better alternatives to fund our Nation's transportation system. I only mentioned a couple of them. I feel as if I have not a magic wand but the ability to see into the future. Twenty years from now, I think there is a pretty good chance that we will have figured out how to pay for roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems by figuring out how to make sure those folks who use transportation pay for it. One of the ways we are trying to do that--they have been trying to do that in Oregon for almost 10 years. They have something called road user charge. Some people have heard of that term. More people have heard of something called vehicle miles traveled, and the ability to say your vehicle--I don't care what kind of vehicle it is, but we know how many miles that vehicle travels on a road, highway or bridge in the course of a year. There is fee that is attached to that. Some people are uncomfortable with that because it has implications on privacy. I can understand that. In Oregon they are trying to figure it out. They have got about 5,000 vehicles--at least--in their system. They are sort of--I like to say States are laboratories of democracy. In this case, Oregon is trying to be the laboratory. I believe California is looking at being another laboratory to figure out we make something like vehicle miles traveled work in a State. Oregon is good-sized state, and California is a very big State. If they can do that, then we will learn from them, not just at the State level but perhaps at the Federal level as well. I think we will be funding projects--not just now but in the future, 20 years from now--through tooling. When I travel back to my native State of West Virginia, I go through West Virginia and I pay tolls. When I was a little kid and they first built the turnpike, we would have to stop and find change--whatever--stop every 5 or 10 miles. You don't do that anymore. We don't do that anymore in Delaware either, because we have--in Delaware and I think in West Virginia--highway- speed E-ZPass. It is an express E-ZPass. You go through, and it is charged to your credit card that you have already established when you establish your E-ZPass plan. Also, we now have the technology that even if folks don't have an E- ZPass--in some tolling operations around the country, a person drives through in their vehicle, car, truck, van, whatever the system--when you go through the toll plaza, they don't collect a toll. They have a highly accurate camera with the ability to take pictures of the vehicle and great pictures of your license plates, and then they send a bill to the owner of that vehicle. So you don't even have to have high-speed E- ZPass. But a combination of those two, systems like E-ZPass and systems like the one I just described where people drive through with no E- ZPass or a similar system, but they actually get billed for it later on. They do not get billed and fined; they just get billed for it. If you don't pay it, then I am sure something will happen. But I think 20 years from now we will have something that looks a lot like that. My guess is we will also have user fees, but not everybody likes tolling. As it turns out, Oregon has been working on road user charge, also known as vehicle miles traveled. They have been working on it for 10 years, and they have got 5,000 people in the plan. So this is not going to happen in 5 years or 10 years, but maybe 20 years for both a combination of tolling and vehicle miles traveled. There is another idea out there that is used in some places around the country. It is called 3P or P3. When I first heard that, I thought they were talking about P-3 airplanes. I spent a lot of years of my life as a naval flight officer in P-3 aircraft. I used to command them, but they were not talking about airplanes when they were talking about P3. They were talking about public-private partnerships. We have some pretty good examples of where that is working. We can learn from those in different States. I think that can be part of the future. It ought to be. Put the three of them together, is that a comprehensive plan? Not entirely, but it is pretty good approach. It is a heck of a lot better than what we have been doing: pension smoothing, increasing fees for TSA. Instead of improving aviation safety, we put the money in the transportation trust fund. Raising Customs fees--instead of putting the money in ways to make our borders most robust and so forth, we put some of that money in the transportation trust fund. We sell oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve--I think probably at a bad time to sell it, when the price is really low. They say: Buy low, sell high. Well, if we are going to sell petroleum out of the petroleum reserve--the price of oil is about as low right now as it has been in a long, long time. I am told that--I don't know if it was last week or the week before-- there are 10,000 gasoline stations across the country where they are selling gasoline for less than $2 a gallon. I don't know what they are charging in West Virginia, but I filled up my Chrysler Town and Country minivan, which has 403,000 miles on it, and I paid $2.15 a gallon. There are some places in Delaware where people are paying less and in neighboring New Jersey where they are paying less. But right now, it does not make much sense to sell oil out of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. There are some people who want to and who want to use that money to go into the transportation trust fund. I think that is foolish. We have to be smarter than that. I have another chart I want us to take a look at. I want to thank ``Vanna White'' here for putting up these charts. I will pay for that later. This chart talks about legislation--it is kind of ironic. That is S. 1994. I mentioned earlier how the last time we raised the Federal gasoline and diesel tax or fee was in 1993 when we raised it to 18 cents for gas and about 23, 24 cents for diesel. They have been there for 22 years. One of the things I have done is introduce legislation, and I have done so with Dick Durbin, who used to serve on the Bowles-Simpson Commission--remember the Bowles-Simpson Commission. I thought it was a great approach to figure out how to seriously address our Nation's deficit in a variety of ways. One of the ways that Bowles-Simpson said we should address our deficit situation--I will say our budget deficits are down--topped out, I think, in 2009 at $1.4 trillion. This year we are down about $400 billion. Is that an improvement? Yes, it is. Do we have some ways to go? We sure do. What Bowles-Simpson suggested is that we raise the gas or diesel tax at the Federal level by a penny each quarter, a penny every 3 months for 15 quarters. So effectively you would be raising the gas or diesel tax by 3 or 4 cents a year for 4 years and index it going forward. What Senator Durbin and I have introduced is actually something quite similar to that, which a majority of the Bowles-Simpson Commission voted for. It is called the Traffic Relief Act. What it calls for is an annual 4 cent gas increase in gas and diesel. That would be for a total of about 4 years--4 cents a year for 4 years. After that, we would index those user fees, those taxes, to the rate of inflation. The rate of inflation is pretty low lately, so they would not go up very much if the rate of inflation stays where it is. If the rate of inflation rears its head again, then that would be different. A fellow who was a member of my staff back in Wilmington, DE--when we introduced this bill, the price for gas at a station in the neighborhood where his family buys gas--in the space of 2 days, the price of gas either went up or went down by 13 cents. It went up in 2 days, 13 cents. As we know, the price of oil moves up and down all of the time. My own belief is--and I have heard this from a lot of people--there are a lot of days or a lot of weeks where the price of gas or diesel goes up a lot more than 4 cents. Right now our world is not literally awash in oil but certainly figuratively awash in oil. One of the reasons the price at the pump for gas and diesel is so low--as I said earlier, a couple of weeks ago there were 10,000 gas stations across the country selling gas for less than two bucks a gallon. One of the reasons it is so low is because the United States is producing a lot more than we have for some time, and so are a bunch of other countries, including the OPEC nations. With the approval of the Iran agreement, as the Iranians comply with the agreement--my hope is that they will comply in spirit and in letter, and then as a result of that, they will be in a position to begin selling. They have only been selling some of their oil products to customers, including I think India, maybe Japan, China, but they will be able to sell more products. A world that is already awash in oil is going to find that Iran, which I think has the fourth greatest oil reserves in the world, is going to be back in the market and selling their own products. I believe that will keep the prices from rising anytime soon. And I think there is reason to believe that the price at the pump, which is already quite low, might even go down further. Time will tell. I have one last poster board here I wish to look at for just a moment. Our legislation--this is a typo here. It says that it restores $240 billion for the highway trust fund. It is not $240 billion, it is $220 billion. Still, compared to what? Compared to nothing. Compared to doing nothing, it is a whole lot. If we had a status quo, any kind of a status quo increase--a highway bill or a transportation bill--we would use maybe half of that. So what we are talking about is double, just getting by, And we have such a backlog of work to do, that it doesn't make sense just to push enough money to these projects to get by. This would provide roughly twice that amount of money and would maybe not raise our GDP by 1.5 percent, but it would sure raise it. It may not put 1.8 million people to work over the next year, but it would put a lot of people to work and people who like to do these jobs. The money would fully fund the Federal highway and transit programs in our country. It would increase investments in upgrades and in repairs as well. It would do it in a way that doesn't drop a huge burden on users of these products--gasoline and diesel--all in one fell swoop. It is like 4 cents a year over 4 years. After 4 years, there will be a 16-cent increase. People say: Well, what is that in terms of practical impact? What does that actually mean for somebody? I am told that it is actually--I don't drink a lot of coffee, but my friends who do get a small coffee over in the Dirksen Building across the street. They pay $1.70, and if they get a medium-sized coffee, it is like $2.50, and a really big one is maybe a little bit over $3. This is not really fancy coffee but just a regular cup of coffee with cream and sugar, and the price is maybe $2 or $3. Literally for the price of a cup of coffee a week, for those of us who use roads, highways, bridges, who buy gas, who buy diesel, we could have a much better transportation system. This isn't $10 a week or $20 a week or $30 a week. That increase over 4 years--4 cents a year for 4 years--without the data for the average driver, that is about a cup of coffee a week. Is that too much to pay for roads, highways, bridges, and a good transit system? I don't think so. There is an interest in offsetting some of these increases with a regressive tax, but there is an interest in offsetting some of that by making some tweaks like Michigan is going to do with their State earned-income tax credit with a Republican Governor and Republican legislature. I think there is maybe a lesson or something we can do there to help address the regressive nature of this tax. I close by saying I come to this floor from time to time and I mention one of the things I love to do. I don't know if you ever do this, Madam President, but I love to ask people who have been married a long time ``What is the secret for being married for a long time?'' I have done it for years. I have asked this question of hundreds of people who are older folks who have been married 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, 60 years, 70 years. I ask them ``What is the secret?'' I get hilarious answers. I get some that are very poignant and others are just plain memorable for a lot of reasons. But the best answer I have ever gotten is there are two C's. What are the two C's? Communicate and compromise. That is not only the secret for a vibrant marriage between two people, it is also the secret for a vibrant democracy, to communicate and compromise. I would add a third C, and that is to collaborate. What the American people said to us last November--whether they are Republicans, Democrats, or Independents--is that they want us to communicate, they want us to compromise, and they want us to collaborate, and we need to do that. One idea I have not mentioned here bears mentioning. It was an idea that was endorsed last year by the administration and was endorsed last year by the immediate past chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, with whom our President served, Dave Camp. He retired earlier this year as a Congressman from Michigan, a very good person. What they proposed is international tax reform. What both Chairman Camp at the time and the administration said is that there are about $2 trillion in overseas profits of American companies. They are just keeping it over there and they are not that anxious to bring it back because they don't want to have to pay--I don't know--35 percent, 33 percent, 32 percent, 29 percent. They are looking for a lower tax break and then to bring it back when it makes sense. The administration and Dave Camp said: Let's deem it repatriated. The Treasury said: All right. You have money over there, American companies. Bring it back. It is going to be taxed at about 10 percent. That was the proposal. The administration said: American companies that have money over there, we want you to bring it back. You won't be taxed at 35 percent or 25 percent, but you will be taxed at about 14 percent. That is an idea, and it is an interesting idea. It doesn't solve the problem forever. It provides one-time money--quite a bit of it--for roads, bridges, rail, and for airports as well. It doesn't solve the problem permanently, but it surely gives us a lot of money. Not every company likes that idea, and not everybody who serves here likes that idea, but it is a serious idea, and it is one that deserves a lot of consideration, and I hope we will do that. Let me just say this. At the end of the day, if we come to the end of this calendar year--when we run out of money yet again for roads, highways, and bridges and we say ``Well, what are we going to do now?''--we will have not just the States I pointed out here in yellow and red that are bailing on projects, delaying and stopping them in some cases, we will have a lot more yellow and a whole lot more red on the map I had up earlier. What do we do about it? Do we just do what we have done for 5 years and kick the can down the road yet again and look for cats and dogs and wherever we can find a few bucks and sort of throw them at the problem for a while, not make a real committed effort? Frankly, we are not giving the voters in this country any reason to feel encouraged about our courage. I hope we don't do that. If at the end of the day we don't do some kind of international tax reform, good ideas such as expanding tolling, vehicle miles traveled, and public-private partnerships--those are all good ideas, and I hope we grow them all. We are not going to have them all in place in the kind of scope we need by the end of this year. If we find ourselves at a time and place where we run out of money, where the States are looking to us and we are running out of money at the Federal level--and the price of gas is two bucks a gallon at gas stations across America--my hope is people will say: You know, for the price of a cup of coffee, I could have good roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems again. For the price of a cup of coffee a week, I could have that. Forty cents a week, maybe. Maybe that is not a bad deal for their family or for our country. I want people to think about that. In the weeks to come, I am going to be talking a lot about this proposal. My hope is that as time goes buy, people will say--like my dad used to say in West Virginia when my sister and I were little kids growing up and they were in West Virginia--my dad used to say to my sister and me after we had done yet another boneheaded stunt: Just use some common sense. He said that a lot. He did not say it that nicely. But I think this may be an opportunity for us to use some of that common sense here, and I know he would approve, and at the end of the day, so would the voters of America. There are a number of States that have actually done what I am talking about. They have raised their user fees, and in some cases they have phased them in over a couple of years. It is interesting what happened in the elections last year where the State legislators had voted to do that, where they raised the user fees in order to would pay for roads, highways, and bridges. Interestingly enough, the legislators who voted for that--Republicans--didn't get thrown out of office. Ninety-five percent of them were reelected. They won their primaries, they won their general elections, and they were reelected. The Democrats who voted for those modest user fees increases didn't get thrown out of office either. In the States that raised the money locally to make the improvements that were needed in transportation, 90 percent of the Democrats won their primaries and they won their general elections. They were reelected. People want us to make hard choices here. They don't want us to continue to kid them or fool them; they want us to do the real thing. They want us to work together. They want us to get things done. They want us to strengthen our economic recovery, and this is not a bad way to do that. With that, I see a great American from New Mexico has joined us. He is somebody who has worked with the Senator from Louisiana and the Senator who was just here before, Mr. Inhofe, the chairman of the EPW Committee, to try to find a good way for us to strengthen the economic recovery and at the same time to further clean our air, promote public health, and do good things for our public environment. I wish to say to Tom Udall how proud I am to be his colleague and how much I appreciate his leadership position on a very important issue, an environmental law that hasn't been updated in almost 40 years and, frankly, doesn't work. It has never worked, and we need to do something about it. Under his leadership, along with our other two colleagues, my hope is that we will. I look forward to what he has to say. I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER. If I may respond to my colleague's question, I don't care if the majority leader is a Republican or a Democrat--they are always trying to figure out how do we have time on the calendar to get this stuff done. They are always looking at ways. And one of the best ways to ensure legislation actually fits into a reasonably small period of time is to line up bipartisan support. I tell my colleague, I have been here in the Senate for a while, and this is almost a picture-book way to pass legislation: Work it up through the grassroots--Democratic Lautenberg and Republican Vitter and now with your role and others. There are not many bills in the Senate that have 26 or 27 Democrats and an equal number of Republicans. Has everything been worked out? No. Is there a need for amendments? Yes. Is there a need for a filibuster? No. We should bring it to the floor. I think we should go to the majority leader and visit with him early and often and continue to remind him. And those who believe in this, whether they happen to be on the environmental side or happen to be folks in the health care arena or maybe on the manufacturing side--and we thank those who have helped us draft this--we ask for them not to be silent about it but to urge not just us but the leadership to find time--a couple of days--to bring this bill to the floor and just get it done. With that, I say to my colleague and the Presiding Officer, if I put down my microphone and pack up my bag, I can have dinner with my wife in the First State of Delaware, and that is my goal. So I will bid you adieu.

Mr. CARPER. If I could respond to my friend, I have a friend who-- when you ask him ``How are you doing?'' he says ``Compared to what?'' And when we talk about the legislation initially introduced by Senator Lautenberg, Senator Vitter, and now coauthored by you, Senator Vitter, and Senator Inhofe, with input from a number of us, I always say: Well, compared to what? The idea here is to ensure that the EPA does its due diligence on toxic substances in this country. And there are thousands or tens of thousands of chemicals--you know better than I do--that exist in our environment--in our air, our ground, in water--tens of thousands. Are they all toxic? No. But my recollection--correct me if I am wrong in this, but I think that out of those thousands, tens of thousands, I believe the EPA in the last 38 years has actually done their due diligence on really fewer than 200, maybe even fewer than 10 when you get down to it, maybe even just 5. And you say: How long has this bill been around, this law been around? Thirty-eight years. And they have now finished work on five highly toxic substances? If we can't do better than that, we ought to quit, and this is not the time to quit. It is sort of like football. You take the kickoff, and you are in your own territory and you start marching down the field. You get into the other team's territory, get down to the 20-yard line, and you are in the red zone--not in the end zone, but you are in the red zone. I think with your leadership and that of our colleagues, we are in the red zone. We need to bring this onto the floor with 53 cosponsors equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. There is a lot of interest in the House, and I think there is support from the administration. We ought to get this done. Thank you.

Mr. CARPER. Well, it is not the last train to Clarksville, but it is the next train to Wilmington.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Will the Senator from Arizona yield for a moment?

Mr. CARPER. First, let me thank Senator Flake for a very thoughtful statement. It reminds me a little bit of what Senator Reid has been asking for by unanimous consent for a week or two; that is, to actually forgo cloture votes and that sort of thing. Let's just go to a final vote, but we want a 60-vote threshold. I think the expectation has been for months that there would be a 60-vote threshold. If the Senator from Arizona is comfortable with forgoing all of this parliamentary procedure and to going to an up-or-down vote with a 60- vote threshold, I think that is the way to do it. That is the way we ought to do this. I applaud the Senator for what he said.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, going back to the elections of last November, there are three takeaways--enduring takeaways--for me from that election: No. 1, people want us to work together; No. 2, they want us to get things done; No. 3, they want us to find ways to further strengthen the economic recovery of our country. Today the Department of Labor released the most recent weekly information on filers of unemployment insurance in this country. They do it every Thursday. They have been doing this for years. Today the number is 264,000 people. It sounds like a lot--well, compared to what? The week that Barack Obama and Joe Biden were inaugurated as President and Vice President, that number was not 264,000, it was 628,000. Anytime that number is over 400,000 we are losing jobs. Anytime the number is under 400,000 per week, we are adding jobs. That number has been under 300,000 for the last 28 straight weeks. I don't know that there has ever been a time when we have seen a number that low for that long. We are strengthening the economic recovery. We ought to continue to do that. There are a number of things we ought to do on this floor to further strengthen the economic recovery. We need to avoid a budget shutdown. We need to put in place a responsible spending plan for the next year. Our country is under cyber attack 24/7--companies, businesses of all kinds and shapes. We need to have tax certainty. We need to put in place a tax plan for our country rather than stop and go. We need to fully fund a 6-year transportation plan. Those are just some of the things we can do to further strengthen the economic recovery. Are we dealing with those? No, we are not. We are coming back again to vote--really--on the same thing we voted on before. Let me just say, with all due respect, do I want the hostages released? You bet. Have I let the Iranian officials, senior officials whom I know, know that? You bet, every time I talk to them and meet with them. The best way to make sure the hostages are released, the best way to hasten the day that Israel has a kind of relationship with Iran that they had not all that many years ago is to put in place and to fully implement the plan that is before us, one that will make it very difficult for the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapons program and ensure that if they do, we know about it. My message to Zarif--the Foreign Minister of Iran who has been the lead point person on their negotiations for the last 2 years--this is my message to him and to the Iranian officials: No. 1, you could have a stronger economy; No. 2, you could have a nuclear weapons program. You cannot have both. There is a whole new generation of people who have grown up in that country, 78 million people. The average age is 25. Does the Revolutionary Guard like the agreement? No, they don't. They want to kill it. How about the young people who have grown up in that country who like Americans, who want to have a better relationship with us, what do they want?

Mr. CARPER. They want us to take yes for an answer, and I would take no for an answer with the measure that is before us today.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, literally every month of this year, I have come to the Senate floor to do something that one of our former colleagues, Ted Kaufman, who served as our Senator for 2 years after Joe Biden became Vice President--Ted used to come to the floor not on a monthly basis but even more frequently than that to talk about what was being done by any number of Federal employees across our country, to draw attention to the fact that these are not nameless, faceless bureaucrats, these are people who do important work for each of us in a variety of ways. What I have tried to do in the last several months--I think most of this year--is to come to the floor to recognize the work not of the Federal employees at large but the work of a few of the many exemplary Department of Homeland Security employees and to thank them for their dedication to their mission and their service to our Nation, which is an important one. And the reason I have particular interest in this is that I have been the senior Democrat on homeland security the last couple of years, and I worked with Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. The two of us were privileged to lead the committee. In June I spoke about several outstanding officers in the U.S. Coast Guard, one of them a petty officer, a woman named Joscelyn Greenwell, who is stationed at Coast Guard Station Indian River Inlet in southern Delaware, which is just a little bit north of Bethany Beach and just south of Rehoboth. In July I had the opportunity to actually visit Petty Officer Greenwell and 30 of her colleagues to learn more about how she and her unit serve and how they protect the rest of us. It is not just Delawareans who seek recreation--fish, boat, and swim--in the inland bays in Delaware or in the Atlantic ocean; people from all over the country and actually all over the world do that, and we are grateful. But the devotion of Petty Officer Greenwell and her colleagues to their mission is shared by thousands of men and women serving with the U.S. Coast Guard and throughout the Department of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard used to be part of Treasury, as I recall, but today it is, since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, part of DHS. Well, today I want to just take just a few minutes to recognize the service of and say thanks to two other exemplary public servants who work at the Department of Homeland Security, not in the Coast Guard, but in this case, in the Science and Technology Directorate. While many at the Department of Homeland Security put their lives on the line along our borders, at our ports of entry, and our airports or in response to disasters, some are working behind the scenes to secure our homeland against new threats or better respond to those we face today. This is what happens every day at the Science and Technology Directorate. They give their all to provide frontline personnel the best tools and tactics that are available. Essentially, the role of the Department's Science and Technology employees is to keep our homeland security efforts a step ahead of the ever-evolving threats we face as a nation. They do this through state-of-the-art research and development issues performed by some of our Nation's top engineers, top scientists, top researchers. The product of their work is deployed across the Department. From cyber security, to biological defense, to border security, Science and Technology's research, development, and science work is truly vital to all of us. Science and Technology employees work closely with the trade and travel industry and with many academic groups as well. They also work closely with other research and scientific agencies across all levels of government to meet the needs of first responders, to enhance strategy and analysis, and to bolster operations and capability. Among the threats that science and technology seeks to address are the threats to our agricultural system. Agriculture is, of course, vital to our Nation's economic stability and our security. In Delaware, agriculture remains one of the key industries at the heart of the State's economic activity. I think of Delaware as a three- or four- legged stool--at least our economy sits on a three- or four-legged stool. One of the strong legs, in Southern Delaware especially, is agriculture. In Sussex Country Delaware, we produce more chickens than any county in America. In Sussex County, Delaware--we only have three counties. The biggest--Sussex County is the third largest county in Delaware, but they produce more chickens in Sussex County than any county in America. We raise more soybeans in Sussex County, Delaware, and we feed it to the chickens, along with corn and other things. But biological and manmade threats to our food, whether it is poultry, avian influenza, and so forth, whether manmade threats to our food or animal agriculture system could have devastating impacts to our economy and to our day-to-day lives. It certainly poses a great threat to the Delmarva Peninsula and other places where we raise poultry--and turkeys for that matter. That is why the Department of Homeland Security has a number of employees at Science and Technology whose mission is to prevent and protect against threats to our agricultural infrastructure. In July, I held a hearing, alongside my colleague, Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. We held the hearing to examine the threat that avian influenza poses to public health and also to our poultry industry. In recent months, parts of the poultry industry across our country have been grappling with the devastating outbreak of avian influenza. Although the spread of this disease has slowed, and most of the areas that were affected were in the central part of our country, including Wisconsin, including Iowa, many States have lost millions of chickens and turkeys to this disease. As a result, the economic losses our farmers and businesses are dealing with in those parts of the country are staggering. The Presiding Officer probably does not know this--maybe he does--but there are roughly 300 chickens for every person in Delaware, as I said. I mentioned we raise more chickens in Sussex County than any county in America, but our poultry farmers create--ready for this--more than $2.7 billion in State economic activity each year and account for about 70 percent of our State's agricultural exports. We have cows we milk, dairy cattle, we have pigs, we raise a lot of lima beans and that kind of thing, but poultry is the 800-pound gorilla in the room in our economy. Luckily for our poultry farmers in the Delmarva Peninsula and across the country, public servants like Dr. Michelle Colby are working at the Department of Homeland Security on cutting-edge research to protect against potential disease outbreaks like the avian influenza, the avian flu. Here she is right now, Dr. Michelle Colby. I will talk a little bit about Michelle, if I may. She is the Branch Chief of Agriculture Defense at the Science and Technology Directorate. Her mission is to develop tools, including vaccines and diagnostics, to prevent livestock from natural and manmade disease threats. Michelle works closely with the Department of Agriculture to help develop and support research projects, track their progress, and stay ahead of existing and emerging threats. She has also the critically important responsibility of making sure research and development programs across our Federal Government are well coordinated, not duplicated, and always ready to respond to disease outbreaks. A primary part of this woman's job is to make sure Science and Technology, where she works within DHS, uses the lessons learned from previous disease outbreaks to inform research and prevent or better control future outbreaks. In fact, information gathered during the last few years as part of another project at Science and Technology is currently being used by Michelle's team to help the Department of Agriculture in its response to the avian influenza outbreak I just mentioned. Michelle and her team were also instrumental in helping combat another recent threat to our Nation's agricultural industry and to us, foot-and-mouth disease. In May of 2012, they secured a conditional license to a Department of Homeland Security foot-and-mouth disease vaccine for use in cattle. This was the first foot-and-mouth disease vaccine ever licensed in the United States--ever licensed in the United States. The conditional license was renewed in May of last year and is now valid through I think May of next year. Michelle and her team's important work did not go unnoticed. They were finalists for the Partnership for Public Service to America Medal for their efforts. According to her colleagues, Michelle is ``one of the most respected scientists in the area of Veterinary Science.'' Her colleagues tell me she never loses sight of her critical mission and that she is a dedicated public servant of the highest integrity. Michelle earned her bachelor of science degree in animal science from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. That is on the Delmarva Peninsula. She is our neighbor just to the south of us. She has also a doctor of veterinary medicine degree from Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. She also has a master of science in epidemiology from the University of Maryland College Park. Interestingly enough, her graduate work focused on the Delmarva poultry industry. While some of the important work at--let me just say: Michelle, thank you for what you do, not just for Delmarva, not just for those who are involved in the poultry industry but thank you for what you do for our country and all of us who, frankly, enjoy eating poultry and for all of us who are involved in exporting and selling poultry around the world. It used to be that 1 out of every 100 chickens we raised in America we exported, then it was 5 out of 100, 10 out of 100, and now it is 20 out of 100. We are negotiating a new transpacific trade partnership with 11 other countries that will encompass about 40 percent of the world's markets. We want to make sure on Delmarva, and frankly in a lot of other places around this country, that we can use this trade agreement to sell that which we are really good at; that is, raising chickens. While some of the important work at Science and Technology happens in the lab, some scientists and engineers there team up with other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security to get a firsthand look at how to enhance capabilities and operations on the frontlines. For Jonathan McEntee--known as Jon--Jon's Science and Technology work has taken him into the field of joint missions with the Coast Guard, with Customs and Border Protection, and with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Public service is nothing new to Jon. In fact, it runs in his family. Jon was born on a U.S. Air Force base, not in Dover, DE, but in the United Kingdom of all places, in a place called Lakenheath, United Kingdom. He is the proud son of a retired linguist and the grandson of a 50-year GE chemical engineer and World War II veteran. He continues his family's history of service to our country today through his work ensuring the security and economic prosperity of the United States in his role at Science and Technology. Since 2007, the last several years, Jon has worked at the Borders and Maritime Security Division at Science and Technology within the Department of Homeland Security. It is called Security Advanced Research Projects Agency. This component is responsible for the research, for the development, for the testing and evaluation needs for the Department's land borders, ports of entry, and maritime mission environments. Since becoming the division's Deputy Director in 2011, Jon has managed several projects, developing maritime, border, and cargo security initiatives. He is responsible for managing the congressional, financial, and technical oversight of operations, along with its 30 employees. On any given day, Jon is juggling 40 projects on a wide range of activities all across the Department. According to his colleagues, Jon believes technology is the key to remaining competitive and relevant in an ever-changing global environment. So it is no surprise that he helped establish the technology innovation center within the Coast Guard, to help deliver technical capabilities for the Department's operators in a faster and more efficient process. Jon also helps in the efforts to build a more cohesive and unified Department of Homeland Security. They have a saying over there, ``One DHS.'' He is part of that. He regularly represents Science and Technology on Department-level projects to help improve coordination and make the best use of science resources. Efforts like Jon's are supporting Secretary Jeh Johnson's Unity of Effort Initiative, an effort to help the Department operate more efficiently and effectively. That is something I think we can all get behind. Colleagues say that Jon looks at solutions to problems not only from a security aspect but also while thinking about how they impact the overall economic interest of our country. He believes all solutions must have a positive return on investment over existing methods and practices. Jon is well known for his let's-find-a-way attitude and always encourages his colleagues to be a part of the solution rather than add to the problem. I like to say: ``No'' means find another way. The work ethic he embodies and his leadership can be credited for his work building partnerships to promote our Nation's economic growth. Specifically, he helped facilitate a partnership that included Customs and Border Protection, Mexican and Canadian Customs, General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, Honda Manufacturing, Pacific Union, and Ferromex Rail to successfully conduct a cargo security technology demonstration that operates four U.S.-bound supply chain routes originating from Mexico and originating from Canada. That achievement earned him wide praise, including the Department of Homeland Security and Technology Under Secretary's Award in 2014. Jon earned his master's in business administration from Salisbury University and a bachelor of science degree in finance from Frostburg State University. He and his wife Heather, an Air Force veteran, have three children: Sage, Myra, and Jack. I just want to say to Sage, Myra and Jack: Thank you for sharing not just your mom but your dad as well with the people of our country. Thank you. The efforts of Michelle and Jon provide just a glimpse into the important work being done by hundreds of thousands of individuals across the Department of Homeland Security every single day. These men and women are dedicated. They are exemplary public servants. They are unsung heroes who walk among us every day. More often than not, their good work goes unnoticed--not today. These are not nameless, faceless bureaucrats. These are people with great educations, a great desire to serve our country, and who every day make a difference for us in this country with the work they do. Michelle and Jon, right here--Jon, thank you. For Michelle, whose picture was up here just a moment ago, we want to thank you for what you do. We want to thank as well the 200,000 men and woman you work with at the Department of Homeland Security. We are a safer country because of your service and I think we are a better country too. As we say in the Navy when people do especially good work, we say two words: One of them is ``Bravo'' and the other is ``Zulu.'' So, Michelle and Jon, Bravo Zulu. God bless you. Job Creation Mr. President, if you will bear with me, I wish to talk for a little bit about another important issue, if I could, and I don't see anybody else on the floor, so I will forge ahead. I actually said this earlier today when we were having a discussion on the Iran agreement, but it bears repeating. When I go back to the elections of last November, I have three messages that are takeaways that I continue to come back to. The first takeaway for me last November was this: The American people are sending us a message. They said they want us to work together. The second message is they want us to get stuff done, things that we need to get done for the good of our country, and they especially want us to get things done that will help strengthen our economic recovery. On the good-news side, the Department of Labor reported today that the number of people who filed for unemployment insurance this past week--this number comes out of the Department of Labor every Thursday that is not a Federal holiday, and they have been doing this for years. The week Barack Obama and Joe Biden were inaugurated as President and Vice President--that week in January of 2009--628,000 people filed for unemployment insurance. Anytime that number is over 400,000 people filing for unemployment insurance in a week, we are losing jobs. At the beginning of 2009, we were losing a lot of jobs. We lost 2.5 million jobs in this country in the last 6 months of 2008. We lost 2.5 million more jobs in this country in the first 6 months of 2009. And as we went through 2009, that number--628,000 people filing for unemployment insurance every week--frankly didn't come down a lot. After a year or so, it began to trend down. Finally, it went down to 600,000, eventually to 500,000, and finally it dipped below 500,000 after a couple of years. Several years ago, that number came down to 400,000. The reason 400,000 is an important number in terms of people filing for unemployment insurance is when that number drops on a weekly basis below 400,000, we are starting to add jobs back--or at least our economy is. For the last 28 straight weeks, the number of folks filing for unemployment insurance in this country has been under 300,000. One of the reasons we are adding, in most months, 200,000 to 250,000 is because not nearly as many people are losing their jobs, and that is a very good thing. Even though the economy is arguably better than it was--I think the unemployment rate in this country in January of 2009 was heading toward 10 percent. The unemployment rate today is closer to 5 percent. Is that too high? Sure it is. Can we do better than that? We have to do better than that. So one of the things I always focus on is trying to figure out how we--when I was Governor of Delaware and chairman of the National Governors Association, I always was interested in how we could create a more nurturing environment for job creation and job preservation. In the 8 years I was privileged to be Governor of Delaware, I am told that more jobs were created in those 8 years than any year maybe in Delaware history--any 8-year period in Delaware history. I didn't create a one of them. Governors don't create jobs. Mayors don't create jobs. Senators--however good we are--don't create jobs. Presidents don't create job. What we do is help create a nurturing environment for job creation. What does that include? Access to capital. People starting businesses usually have to raise money. A world-class workforce with the kinds of skills that will help businesses be successful. Transportation to move people and business services where they need to go and when they need to go. Public safety. Reasonably priced energy. Reasonably priced health care. You name it. A lot of things go into creating a nurturing environment for job creation and job preservation. (The remarks of Mr. Carper pertaining to the introduction of S. 2051 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'') Still seeing no one else on the floor, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, one of the factors in creating a favorable environment for job creation and job preservation is, of all things, something that has been around for 200 years to 225 years, and that is the U.S. Postal Service. Not many people think of the Postal Service as part of the engine that helps drive our economy, but it is. There are 7 to 8 million jobs that flow directly from work directly involved or indirectly involved with the Postal Service--7 to 8 million jobs. For a number of years, the Postal Service has been losing money. There are a lot of questions about whether they will be able to make it, whether they will be able to survive, whether they are going to contribute or simply fold up and go away. So I would note that another priority of mine for years has been postal reform. My dance partner on this for a number of years was Senator Susan Collins, a Republican and a very capable leader, and for the last several years Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma--Dr. Coburn--who retired at the end of last year. We have worked with a lot of folks--Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate--in the last couple of years to try to find a way not just to make the Postal Service relevant but to enable them to be successful. And one of our real challenges has been how to take a 200-plus-year-old network--a legacy delivery network that goes to every mailbox in this country, business or residential--and enable them to make money in a digital age in the 21st century. A lot of us are buying stuff differently than we used to. We are paying our bills differently than we used to. We don't send a whole lot of first-class mail the way we used to. When I was a naval flight officer in Southeast Asia for three tours, the best day of the week was when the mail came. We would get all kinds of letters from home. We would get all kinds of postcards, birthday cards--you name it--Father's Day cards, and Valentine's Day cards. We would get magazines, and we would get newspapers. It was the best day of the week. Today, our folks in the Armed Forces are deployed to Afghanistan or other places around the world, and they still get mail, but it is not as important for them as it was for us because they have Skype, they have cell phones, and they have the Internet. They have other ways to communicate. The challenge for the Postal Service has been, in a day and age where we communicate very differently than we did during the last war--than we do, say, in the war we have been involved in in Afghanistan for some time now--how do they make money? How do they remain relevant? They are starting to get it. The Postal Service today--I think it was at 3 a.m. this morning--the Postal Service, in 33 ZIP Codes in San Francisco, delivered groceries. They use vehicles that otherwise would have been used between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. The folks who work for the Postal Service have access to apartments and high rises to actually deliver groceries. And I think they are delivering for Amazon in those 33 ZIP codes. I think they have been trying it out for a while, and things are going pretty well. The Postal Service has turned around and has contacted 100 other grocery chains around the country. They said: This is what we are doing for Amazon, and we could probably do this for you and help you and help serve customers in a different kind of way. This morning, in a place in Delaware, just around Middletown, DE, which is north of Dover, the Postal Service, literally during the middle of the night--or rather Amazon with the Postal Service in the middle of the night combined to take items from that Amazon distribution center in Middletown, DE, and literally drop off, all over the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic--all over the region--drop off items that are going to be delivered today. These are all kinds of products that were ordered through Amazon yesterday on the Internet, by phone, and so forth, and they are being delivered literally today. The Postal Service has a big hand in that. Also, we have FedEx and UPS. A lot of folks think of FedEx and UPS as competitors of the Postal Service, and in a way they are, but they are also very good partners together. It works this way. FedEx doesn't want to deliver to every mailbox in the country, especially in the more rural areas where there is a lot of separation and, frankly, it is costly to do that. FedEx doesn't want to do it, and UPS doesn't want to do it. But guess who goes every day--6 days a week, sometimes 7--to pretty much every mailbox in the country? It is 6 days a week. Well, it is the Postal Service. So there has been a partnership for a number of years now where the Postal Service delivers for UPS and for FedEx the last mile, the last 2 miles, the last 5 miles, 10 miles, the last 20 miles. The Postal Service makes some money doing that, and it helps FedEx and UPS maybe save some money. And when the Postal Service sends its packages by air mail, it actually will partner with FedEx or UPS in order to be able to move its products around the country in an expeditious way. So those are some things that are happening around the country that most people aren't thinking about or mindful about, some ways the Postal Service is becoming more involved in the digital age. Christmas is still 3 months or so away, but as people start thinking about Christmas shopping, holiday shopping, in a lot of cases they are going to get on the phone and get on the Internet and order. Those packages they are ordering are going to have to be delivered by somebody, and the Postal Service is one of those somebodies. I think the last time we saw the numbers--while first-class mail continues to trend down by a couple of percent per year, what is going up--I think the last time we saw 12 to 14 percent a year--is delivery packages and parcels. So the Postal Service is finding out how to be relevant even in the digital age in ways they haven't thought about before. There are other things they could do. Among those things is they could deliver wine and beer. UPS does that, and FedEx does that. The postal service does that in Australia. I think they make maybe $5 billion a year doing that. I would like to say Australia doesn't have as many people as we do; they just drink more. But there is lots of money to be made by the Postal Service here, and I don't know of any reason why we shouldn't allow them to be involved in that business as well, with appropriate safeguards and as long as States approve of that activity. Those are some things I would mention about the Postal Service. The other thing I would say is that over the past couple of years, even though we found it difficult to pass legislation, one of the things the Postal Service has done on their own is they have tried to rightsize the enterprise to reflect the delivery--less--of first-class mail and the delivery of a little bit lower amounts of what we call standard mail, which could be nonprofits using the mail, it could be for-profits, it could be all kinds of stuff, but it is not first-class mail. But one of the things the Postal Service has sought to do is to look at their workforce and say: In a day and age when we have to deliver a lot less mail, do we still need the same number of full-time employees? They decided the answer is no, and I think their full-time equivalents are I would say down by a third from where it was about a decade ago. The number of mail-processing centers across the country is down by about half, from maybe 600 to 300. The number of post offices really hasn't changed a whole lot. They have over 30,000, maybe closer to 40,000 post offices around the country, some active, large, vibrant, and some small, rural, not a lot of activity, but important to those communities. What the Postal Service has done with a number of their smaller post offices is basically they have said to the communities: You know, there is not a lot going on in your post offices. Are the amount of stamps and revenues generated by post offices really enough to make it worthwhile to run this post office 6 days a week, 8 to 10 hours a day? What they have done is they have sort of presented a menu--the Postal Service has presented a menu to communities and said: You can't have a 6-day-a-week, 8- to 10-hour-a-day post office in your community, but you can have a post office if you want, maybe 4 hours a day, 6 hours a day. The person running it would be maybe a contract employee, maybe not a full-time employee with full benefits but someone maybe making $15 an hour. For some people, that is pretty good money. And then the communities would still end up with their post offices. Or maybe the post office should be a rural letter carrier driving around on his or her route in the rural part of a county or a State. It would literally be a post office on wheels, a little bit like a bookmobile was when I was a kid growing up. Everybody on that route would know that rural letter carrier was going to be here or there throughout the day and be there to take packages or to provide stamps or to send mail or to provide services that you would normally get in a post office in a more urban, suburban area. But long story short, the Postal Service has done a fair amount to reduce--I am tempted to call it--the size of their enterprise and the cost of their enterprise. There are fewer full-time-equivalent employees, fewer mail-processing centers. And while they still have a lot of post offices, a number of them--maybe one out of every five or so, one out of every four--is a post office that may be open 2 hours a day, 4 hours a day, 6 hours a day instead of 8 hours a day or 10 hours a day. Today I am introducing legislation that seeks to enable the Postal Service, which is still--actually, if you didn't consider one factor, which is that the Postal Service is required by law to put money aside to meet a liability that most private companies and almost every State and local government and the Federal Government, too, have not addressed, and that is the health care liability of their pensioners. Back in the late 1990s when I was Governor of Delaware--we had worked for years--Governor Pete DuPont, Governor Mike Castle, and my administration--to move from the State with the worst credit rating in America to a State with an AAA credit rating. In my next to last year as Governor, 1999, Delaware--in 1977 we had the worst credit rating in the country, and in 1999 we earned AAA credit ratings across the board--Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch. It was a day of great jubilation. But even after they awarded us our AAA credit ratings, they said to us: You have a problem, Delaware. And as it turned out, so did 49 other States. That is because while we had a fully funded pension fund, we had not set aside any money for a significant cost of the pensioners, and that is their health care costs once they reached the age of 65. And most employers in the country, those employers of any consequence, when their retirees reach the age of 65, and DuPont company is a great example--my wife had a wonderful 27-year career with them, but when DuPont's retirees reach the age of 65, the DuPont company doesn't say: To heck with you. We are going to forget you. They still try to meet their moral obligation to provide their employees a pension and access to health care. Part of that is Medicare. DuPont, and frankly almost any company of any consequence, says to their employees reaching the age of 65: Alright, you are 65, you are eligible for Medicare Part A, Medicare Part B, Medicare Part D, and we expect retirees 65 or older to use it--to sign up and use it. It is a requirement. And if that doesn't cover all their medical needs-- and it probably will not--a lot of companies will continue to provide a wraparound supplemental program to fill in the holes that are left unfilled by Medicare Part A, Part B, and Part D. Well, as it turns out, postal retirees, when they reach the age of 65 and are eligible for Medicare, most of them sign up for Medicare Part A, a majority sign up for Medicare Part B--one of those is hospital care and the other inpatient and the other outpatient doctor care--but almost none of them sign up for Medicare Part D, as in ``delta.'' Part D is a drug program for Medicare that has been around for close to 13, 14 years now. It has been a huge success--a huge success. But while the postal service pays into Medicare, I think more than maybe any other employer in the country--they pay more money, I think, than any other employer in the country. I think the postal service is their No. 1 or No. 2 business in terms of full-time employees. And while they pay a ton of money into Medicare, they do not get full value. In fact, in effect, the postal service is actually overpaying to bring down the Medicare costs for other employers, including FedEx and UPS and DuPont, for that matter. So the question is: Is that right? Is that fair? Is that equitable to the postal service? Is it fair to their employees and their pension? I don't think so, and neither did Dr. Coburn in the last Congress when we offered legislation that said this should be fixed. The postal service ought to be treated like other companies. They ought to be able to get full value for the contributions they make into Medicare. That is something that should be part of postal reform legislation. It is part of the legislation I am introducing today, and it was part of the legislation we introduced a year ago. Another important part of the legislation we are introducing today deals with the rates the postal service can charge. There was something after the last recession called an exigent rate case. The postal service's businesses were badly damaged. A lot of businesses that used first-class mail fled first-class mail and found a way to use the Internet and to replace the use of first-class mail, which had a severely damaging impact on the postal service. The postal service asked for an exigent rate case, which gave them an opportunity or a way to raise their rates a bit. The question is, Is that going to be forever or is it going to go away? We have been negotiating, with the help of a guy named John Kane, a member of our staff on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, an agreement with the postal service and with some mailers and others that are interested in these issues to enable the exigent rate case to stay in place for a couple more years, and then we will go through a new process or an existing process to establish a new postal rate for the postal service to charge. But this provides some stability over the next couple of years. I will not go through the whole bill, but let me just say that the idea behind our legislation is to enable the postal service to have reasonable revenues to be successful, to enable them to be treated fairly and I think equitably with respect to their payments into Medicare for their retirees, to also enable them to be more creative, and to find ways to use that 200-plus-year-old distribution network in order to make money--in order to make money. There are lots of other ideas as well, with the kind of stuff that happened this morning in those 33 zip codes in San Francisco and the kind of work that will happen tonight at the Amazon distribution center in Middletown, DE, and a lot of other places on this side of the United States. This is legislation I am introducing on my own. We have worked with stakeholders, which includes certainly the postal service, certainly includes a lot of the customers--not every one of their customers--and includes the employee groups--the unions, the groups that represent postmasters--and other people as well--regular customers, residential customers, business customers. So we are introducing legislation, and my hope is that it will serve as a catalyst for a good conversation and a much needed consensus to say this is where we are headed on postal reform in 2015 and beyond. I have never introduced a perfect bill, and I am not introducing probably a perfect bill now. But I think it is a pretty piece of legislation. We have listened to a lot of folks, and we have listened to a lot of folks who serve here with us in the Senate--Democrats, Republicans, folks on the committee and off the committee--and it is my hope we will have a chance to kick the tires on this new piece of legislation I have introduced and somewhere fairly soon be able to have a hearing so folks can come and say: This is what I like about it or don't like about the legislation, and they will decide ways to make it even better. I like to say that everything I do I know I can do better. But as it says in the Constitution, ``in order to form a more perfect union''--in the preamble of the Constitution, ``in order to form a more perfect union''--our goal will be to form a more perfect postal service and hopefully form a more perfect piece of legislation. The real goal is to enable the postal service to be more successful--to enable them, and not be running them down all the time. We have great people who work for the postal service. They deliver mail in my neighborhood and probably yours as well. There are folks who are going to work right now in the postal service. They will be up late tonight sorting mail and making sure it will be ready to be delivered tomorrow. We have people who will be working tomorrow and Saturday delivering the mail. We will have folks delivering some mail, priority mail, some of it on Sunday. The postal service is not just a 6-day operation today. They deliver a lot of packages and parcels now on Sunday. Our legislation is designed to enable those folks to be more innovative, to unleash the innovative spirit within the postal service, and to bring ideas in from a lot of other folks to help the postal service in that regard. I think that pretty well covers my talking points. Mr. President, I ask that, after you have had a chance to get a good rest this weekend, to maybe take a look. I will come and visit you, maybe tell you what we are doing here, and see if you would like to join us somewhere down the road as a cosponsor or at least be a constructive critic. Either role would be very welcome. Today I am introducing the Improving Postal Operations, Service and Transparency Act of 2015, known as the iPOST Act. As my colleagues here in the Senate know, the way we communicate as a society has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Instead of sending a letter to loved ones overseas, we send a Facebook message or Skype. Instead of sending our bills every month, we go online and enter our billing information. Instead of flipping through a catalogue, we visit the retail store's website. But while the way we communicate and conduct business has changed, we still require a vibrant, financially sound, and sustainable postal system. The United States Postal Service continues to be a critical enabler of communications and commerce that maintains a unique delivery network that connects every community, town, and city in this country and with posts around the world. The Postal Service is a more than 200 year-old institution that today serves as the linchpin of a $1 trillion dollar mailing industry employing more than 8.4 million people. It is the nexus between consumers and businesses as diverse as Hallmark, Amazon, small town newspapers, and mail-order pharmacies. Over the years, the Postal Service has been a resilient institution that has consistently adjusted with the times and adapting when necessary to remain a vital part of our Nation's economic infrastructure and really our everyday lives. Many would agree that, though much has changed in our country and our economy since the formation of the Postal Service, the need for an efficient and secure transfer of communications and goods has not. Nevertheless, the growing trend toward digital communication, the Postal Service's significant long-term financial liabilities, and the continued decline of First Class mail volume are threatening the future viability of this federal establishment enshrined in the Constitution. Thus, it is incumbent upon Congress to give the Postal Service the tools necessary to address its growing costs and modernize so it can remain relevant for generations to come. Two American industries that have also undergone major disruption in the past and survived to live another day offer parallels to the Postal Service's current predicament. The U.S. freight rail industry faced disruption from the trucking industry and had significant overcapacity beginning in the 1950s. Three interrelated components helped the freight rail industry recover: a focus on improving productivity, containing costs, and generating revenue. Likewise, the U.S. auto industry has faced similar challenges: overcapacity, too many suppliers, and a declining market share. The freight rail and auto industries both have come roaring back to life and profitability. But it's important to note that they did so in part thanks to helpful legislative reform. While containing costs, generating revenue, and improving productivity are certainly part of the postal reform equation and something postal management must continue to focus on, we must do our part to bring badly needed structural reforms to the Postal Service's business model and ensure long-term stability in the years to come. Originally, the Postal Service was a federal department that required annual appropriations from Congress. In 1971, Congress passed legislation to make the Postal Service an ``independent establishment of the executive branch,'' designed to run as a self-sustaining entity that would cover its operating costs with revenues produced through sales, including postage and related products and services. Hence, the modern version of the Postal Service was born. As time passed, Postal Service reforms became necessary to create stability in the agency and to ensure that the American taxpayer and the business community would continue to benefit from its products and services. In an effort to address these needs, Congress enacted the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, PAEA. When PAEA was signed into law a decade ago, First-Class Mail volume was peaking at 213 billion pieces, the postal workforce was composed of almost 700,000 career employees and the e-commerce market was in its infancy with a value of just over $100 billion annually. Unfortunately, passage of the PAEA came at the cusp of immense change in the mailing industry, and also our economy as a whole. The significant advancement in digital communication that continued through the recession, the steady decline in First-Class Mail and Standard Mail volume, and the rising costs associated with longstanding healthcare and retirement obligations created a tumultuous relationship between Postal Service revenues and costs. In the decade since passage of PAEA, total Postal Service mail volume has fallen some 27 percent to 155 billion pieces, the career workforce is 30 percent smaller and the booming domestic e-commerce market is now valued at more than $300 billion. The effects of the Great Recession in 2008 had a tremendous impact on the mailing industry, and by extension the Postal Service's bottom line. To combat these effects, the Postal Regulatory Commission approved a temporary emergency rate increase, which has been the primary reason for the Postal Service's positive operating income over the past 2 years. I have worked on postal issues with various colleagues for a large part of my time in the United States Senate. Further, I have been working on postal reform diligently since 2010 when it became apparent that the future of the Postal Service was in jeopardy. Last Congress, former Senator Tom Coburn and I introduced a package that we felt moved the Postal Service forward and solved the long term problems that plague it. Unfortunately, that bill did not pass and in January the Postal Service was forced to change its delivery standards. Since then, service has noticeably declined. I have worked diligently with my colleagues and a wide range of postal stakeholders including postal consumers, the mailing industry, postal labor unions, and Postal Service leadership for the last eight months on a compromise proposal. The legislation I have introduced is a starting point in making sure the Postal Service remains relevant in the digital age by achieving financial viability and better meeting our communication and commerce needs. I will continue to work with all interested parties, my colleagues in the Senate and the House, including Chairman Ron Johnson of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and the Administration to build on, perfect, and revise this legislation going forward. I am confident that the Postal Service can turn this corner and remain relevant in the decades to come, but it is going to take collaboration, communication, and compromise from all stakeholders and Congress to make that happen. The Improving Postal Operations, Service and Transparency Act, iPOST Act, will set the path to make solvency possible and fix the Postal Service's financial and other challenges for the long-term. In particular iPOST Act would ensure that our federal pension systems recognize the differences between the postal and non-postal federal workforce to prevent the Postal Service from paying more than it owes into the federal retirement systems, as has happened in the past. The iPOST Act would restructure the way the Postal Service funds its remaining liability for retiree healthcare by scrapping the existing, unaffordable payment schedule and replacing it with a system with realistic payment goals that would allow the Postal Service to invest over the next 10 years in a more lucrative TSP-like account. Combined, these provisions would help the Postal Service and taxpayers by paying down the Postal Service's long-term retiree health obligations sooner. The iPOST Act would create a Postal Service Health Benefits Program, PSHBP, within the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan, FEHBP, and require that all Medicare-eligible postal annuitants and employees enroll in Medicare parts A, B, and D. This would ensure better coordination between PSHBP and Medicare than we see with FEHBP and Medicare today and allow the Postal Service to reap the full benefit of the resources it and its employees pay into Medicare. The iPOSTAct would require an independent analysis of the recent network changes put into place by the Postal Service and how service can be improved, particularly in rural areas. The bill further proposes a pause in the Postal Service's network optimization efforts for 2 years for plants and 5 years for post offices to ensure a stabilization of service for all postal customers. The iPOST Act would provide customers big and small with better transparency into how the Postal Service performs for them regardless of whether they live in a large city, a suburban development, or a remote rural area. The iPOST Act would makes the current temporary emergency rate increase permanent while freezing any further rate increases until a new rate system can be established by the Postal Regulatory Commission by January 1, 2018. The iPOST Act would allow the Postal Service, based on meeting certain conditions, to introduce new non-postal products and services, ship beer, wine and distilled spirits, and partner with State and local governments in providing government services. In introducing this bill, I invite all interested stakeholders from around the country, whether they happen to be residents of rural, urban, or suburban communities, businesses that use the mail broadly or individual customers of the Postal Service, to come to the table and work with Congress on a viable path forward. I encourage the mailing industry, the postal unions, and Postal Service management to continue to discuss reform measures and to view this bill as a possible path forward to consensus. To my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I look forward to working with you to make what I think is a good bill even better. Again, introduction is the first step in this process. I am committed to working together to find consensus on this legislation and fix the serious, but solvable challenges facing the Postal Service.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, one of the factors in creating a favorable environment for job creation and job preservation is, of all things, something that has been around for 200 years to 225 years, and that is the U.S. Postal Service. Not many people think of the Postal Service as part of the engine that helps drive our economy, but it is. There are 7 to 8 million jobs that flow directly from work directly involved or indirectly involved with the Postal Service--7 to 8 million jobs. For a number of years, the Postal Service has been losing money. There are a lot of questions about whether they will be able to make it, whether they will be able to survive, whether they are going to contribute or simply fold up and go away. So I would note that another priority of mine for years has been postal reform. My dance partner on this for a number of years was Senator Susan Collins, a Republican and a very capable leader, and for the last several years Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma--Dr. Coburn--who retired at the end of last year. We have worked with a lot of folks--Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate--in the last couple of years to try to find a way not just to make the Postal Service relevant but to enable them to be successful. And one of our real challenges has been how to take a 200-plus-year-old network--a legacy delivery network that goes to every mailbox in this country, business or residential--and enable them to make money in a digital age in the 21st century. A lot of us are buying stuff differently than we used to. We are paying our bills differently than we used to. We don't send a whole lot of first-class mail the way we used to. When I was a naval flight officer in Southeast Asia for three tours, the best day of the week was when the mail came. We would get all kinds of letters from home. We would get all kinds of postcards, birthday cards--you name it--Father's Day cards, and Valentine's Day cards. We would get magazines, and we would get newspapers. It was the best day of the week. Today, our folks in the Armed Forces are deployed to Afghanistan or other places around the world, and they still get mail, but it is not as important for them as it was for us because they have Skype, they have cell phones, and they have the Internet. They have other ways to communicate. The challenge for the Postal Service has been, in a day and age where we communicate very differently than we did during the last war--than we do, say, in the war we have been involved in in Afghanistan for some time now--how do they make money? How do they remain relevant? They are starting to get it. The Postal Service today--I think it was at 3 a.m. this morning--the Postal Service, in 33 ZIP Codes in San Francisco, delivered groceries. They use vehicles that otherwise would have been used between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. The folks who work for the Postal Service have access to apartments and high rises to actually deliver groceries. And I think they are delivering for Amazon in those 33 ZIP codes. I think they have been trying it out for a while, and things are going pretty well. The Postal Service has turned around and has contacted 100 other grocery chains around the country. They said: This is what we are doing for Amazon, and we could probably do this for you and help you and help serve customers in a different kind of way. This morning, in a place in Delaware, just around Middletown, DE, which is north of Dover, the Postal Service, literally during the middle of the night--or rather Amazon with the Postal Service in the middle of the night combined to take items from that Amazon distribution center in Middletown, DE, and literally drop off, all over the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic--all over the region--drop off items that are going to be delivered today. These are all kinds of products that were ordered through Amazon yesterday on the Internet, by phone, and so forth, and they are being delivered literally today. The Postal Service has a big hand in that. Also, we have FedEx and UPS. A lot of folks think of FedEx and UPS as competitors of the Postal Service, and in a way they are, but they are also very good partners together. It works this way. FedEx doesn't want to deliver to every mailbox in the country, especially in the more rural areas where there is a lot of separation and, frankly, it is costly to do that. FedEx doesn't want to do it, and UPS doesn't want to do it. But guess who goes every day--6 days a week, sometimes 7--to pretty much every mailbox in the country? It is 6 days a week. Well, it is the Postal Service. So there has been a partnership for a number of years now where the Postal Service delivers for UPS and for FedEx the last mile, the last 2 miles, the last 5 miles, 10 miles, the last 20 miles. The Postal Service makes some money doing that, and it helps FedEx and UPS maybe save some money. And when the Postal Service sends its packages by air mail, it actually will partner with FedEx or UPS in order to be able to move its products around the country in an expeditious way. So those are some things that are happening around the country that most people aren't thinking about or mindful about, some ways the Postal Service is becoming more involved in the digital age. Christmas is still 3 months or so away, but as people start thinking about Christmas shopping, holiday shopping, in a lot of cases they are going to get on the phone and get on the Internet and order. Those packages they are ordering are going to have to be delivered by somebody, and the Postal Service is one of those somebodies. I think the last time we saw the numbers--while first-class mail continues to trend down by a couple of percent per year, what is going up--I think the last time we saw 12 to 14 percent a year--is delivery packages and parcels. So the Postal Service is finding out how to be relevant even in the digital age in ways they haven't thought about before. There are other things they could do. Among those things is they could deliver wine and beer. UPS does that, and FedEx does that. The postal service does that in Australia. I think they make maybe $5 billion a year doing that. I would like to say Australia doesn't have as many people as we do; they just drink more. But there is lots of money to be made by the Postal Service here, and I don't know of any reason why we shouldn't allow them to be involved in that business as well, with appropriate safeguards and as long as States approve of that activity. Those are some things I would mention about the Postal Service. The other thing I would say is that over the past couple of years, even though we found it difficult to pass legislation, one of the things the Postal Service has done on their own is they have tried to rightsize the enterprise to reflect the delivery--less--of first-class mail and the delivery of a little bit lower amounts of what we call standard mail, which could be nonprofits using the mail, it could be for-profits, it could be all kinds of stuff, but it is not first-class mail. But one of the things the Postal Service has sought to do is to look at their workforce and say: In a day and age when we have to deliver a lot less mail, do we still need the same number of full-time employees? They decided the answer is no, and I think their full-time equivalents are I would say down by a third from where it was about a decade ago. The number of mail-processing centers across the country is down by about half, from maybe 600 to 300. The number of post offices really hasn't changed a whole lot. They have over 30,000, maybe closer to 40,000 post offices around the country, some active, large, vibrant, and some small, rural, not a lot of activity, but important to those communities. What the Postal Service has done with a number of their smaller post offices is basically they have said to the communities: You know, there is not a lot going on in your post offices. Are the amount of stamps and revenues generated by post offices really enough to make it worthwhile to run this post office 6 days a week, 8 to 10 hours a day? What they have done is they have sort of presented a menu--the Postal Service has presented a menu to communities and said: You can't have a 6-day-a-week, 8- to 10-hour-a-day post office in your community, but you can have a post office if you want, maybe 4 hours a day, 6 hours a day. The person running it would be maybe a contract employee, maybe not a full-time employee with full benefits but someone maybe making $15 an hour. For some people, that is pretty good money. And then the communities would still end up with their post offices. Or maybe the post office should be a rural letter carrier driving around on his or her route in the rural part of a county or a State. It would literally be a post office on wheels, a little bit like a bookmobile was when I was a kid growing up. Everybody on that route would know that rural letter carrier was going to be here or there throughout the day and be there to take packages or to provide stamps or to send mail or to provide services that you would normally get in a post office in a more urban, suburban area. But long story short, the Postal Service has done a fair amount to reduce--I am tempted to call it--the size of their enterprise and the cost of their enterprise. There are fewer full-time-equivalent employees, fewer mail-processing centers. And while they still have a lot of post offices, a number of them--maybe one out of every five or so, one out of every four--is a post office that may be open 2 hours a day, 4 hours a day, 6 hours a day instead of 8 hours a day or 10 hours a day. Today I am introducing legislation that seeks to enable the Postal Service, which is still--actually, if you didn't consider one factor, which is that the Postal Service is required by law to put money aside to meet a liability that most private companies and almost every State and local government and the Federal Government, too, have not addressed, and that is the health care liability of their pensioners. Back in the late 1990s when I was Governor of Delaware--we had worked for years--Governor Pete DuPont, Governor Mike Castle, and my administration--to move from the State with the worst credit rating in America to a State with an AAA credit rating. In my next to last year as Governor, 1999, Delaware--in 1977 we had the worst credit rating in the country, and in 1999 we earned AAA credit ratings across the board--Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch. It was a day of great jubilation. But even after they awarded us our AAA credit ratings, they said to us: You have a problem, Delaware. And as it turned out, so did 49 other States. That is because while we had a fully funded pension fund, we had not set aside any money for a significant cost of the pensioners, and that is their health care costs once they reached the age of 65. And most employers in the country, those employers of any consequence, when their retirees reach the age of 65, and DuPont company is a great example--my wife had a wonderful 27-year career with them, but when DuPont's retirees reach the age of 65, the DuPont company doesn't say: To heck with you. We are going to forget you. They still try to meet their moral obligation to provide their employees a pension and access to health care. Part of that is Medicare. DuPont, and frankly almost any company of any consequence, says to their employees reaching the age of 65: Alright, you are 65, you are eligible for Medicare Part A, Medicare Part B, Medicare Part D, and we expect retirees 65 or older to use it--to sign up and use it. It is a requirement. And if that doesn't cover all their medical needs-- and it probably will not--a lot of companies will continue to provide a wraparound supplemental program to fill in the holes that are left unfilled by Medicare Part A, Part B, and Part D. Well, as it turns out, postal retirees, when they reach the age of 65 and are eligible for Medicare, most of them sign up for Medicare Part A, a majority sign up for Medicare Part B--one of those is hospital care and the other inpatient and the other outpatient doctor care--but almost none of them sign up for Medicare Part D, as in ``delta.'' Part D is a drug program for Medicare that has been around for close to 13, 14 years now. It has been a huge success--a huge success. But while the postal service pays into Medicare, I think more than maybe any other employer in the country--they pay more money, I think, than any other employer in the country. I think the postal service is their No. 1 or No. 2 business in terms of full-time employees. And while they pay a ton of money into Medicare, they do not get full value. In fact, in effect, the postal service is actually overpaying to bring down the Medicare costs for other employers, including FedEx and UPS and DuPont, for that matter. So the question is: Is that right? Is that fair? Is that equitable to the postal service? Is it fair to their employees and their pension? I don't think so, and neither did Dr. Coburn in the last Congress when we offered legislation that said this should be fixed. The postal service ought to be treated like other companies. They ought to be able to get full value for the contributions they make into Medicare. That is something that should be part of postal reform legislation. It is part of the legislation I am introducing today, and it was part of the legislation we introduced a year ago. Another important part of the legislation we are introducing today deals with the rates the postal service can charge. There was something after the last recession called an exigent rate case. The postal service's businesses were badly damaged. A lot of businesses that used first-class mail fled first-class mail and found a way to use the Internet and to replace the use of first-class mail, which had a severely damaging impact on the postal service. The postal service asked for an exigent rate case, which gave them an opportunity or a way to raise their rates a bit. The question is, Is that going to be forever or is it going to go away? We have been negotiating, with the help of a guy named John Kane, a member of our staff on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, an agreement with the postal service and with some mailers and others that are interested in these issues to enable the exigent rate case to stay in place for a couple more years, and then we will go through a new process or an existing process to establish a new postal rate for the postal service to charge. But this provides some stability over the next couple of years. I will not go through the whole bill, but let me just say that the idea behind our legislation is to enable the postal service to have reasonable revenues to be successful, to enable them to be treated fairly and I think equitably with respect to their payments into Medicare for their retirees, to also enable them to be more creative, and to find ways to use that 200-plus-year-old distribution network in order to make money--in order to make money. There are lots of other ideas as well, with the kind of stuff that happened this morning in those 33 zip codes in San Francisco and the kind of work that will happen tonight at the Amazon distribution center in Middletown, DE, and a lot of other places on this side of the United States. This is legislation I am introducing on my own. We have worked with stakeholders, which includes certainly the postal service, certainly includes a lot of the customers--not every one of their customers--and includes the employee groups--the unions, the groups that represent postmasters--and other people as well--regular customers, residential customers, business customers. So we are introducing legislation, and my hope is that it will serve as a catalyst for a good conversation and a much needed consensus to say this is where we are headed on postal reform in 2015 and beyond. I have never introduced a perfect bill, and I am not introducing probably a perfect bill now. But I think it is a pretty piece of legislation. We have listened to a lot of folks, and we have listened to a lot of folks who serve here with us in the Senate--Democrats, Republicans, folks on the committee and off the committee--and it is my hope we will have a chance to kick the tires on this new piece of legislation I have introduced and somewhere fairly soon be able to have a hearing so folks can come and say: This is what I like about it or don't like about the legislation, and they will decide ways to make it even better. I like to say that everything I do I know I can do better. But as it says in the Constitution, ``in order to form a more perfect union''--in the preamble of the Constitution, ``in order to form a more perfect union''--our goal will be to form a more perfect postal service and hopefully form a more perfect piece of legislation. The real goal is to enable the postal service to be more successful--to enable them, and not be running them down all the time. We have great people who work for the postal service. They deliver mail in my neighborhood and probably yours as well. There are folks who are going to work right now in the postal service. They will be up late tonight sorting mail and making sure it will be ready to be delivered tomorrow. We have people who will be working tomorrow and Saturday delivering the mail. We will have folks delivering some mail, priority mail, some of it on Sunday. The postal service is not just a 6-day operation today. They deliver a lot of packages and parcels now on Sunday. Our legislation is designed to enable those folks to be more innovative, to unleash the innovative spirit within the postal service, and to bring ideas in from a lot of other folks to help the postal service in that regard. I think that pretty well covers my talking points. Mr. President, I ask that, after you have had a chance to get a good rest this weekend, to maybe take a look. I will come and visit you, maybe tell you what we are doing here, and see if you would like to join us somewhere down the road as a cosponsor or at least be a constructive critic. Either role would be very welcome. Today I am introducing the Improving Postal Operations, Service and Transparency Act of 2015, known as the iPOST Act. As my colleagues here in the Senate know, the way we communicate as a society has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Instead of sending a letter to loved ones overseas, we send a Facebook message or Skype. Instead of sending our bills every month, we go online and enter our billing information. Instead of flipping through a catalogue, we visit the retail store's website. But while the way we communicate and conduct business has changed, we still require a vibrant, financially sound, and sustainable postal system. The United States Postal Service continues to be a critical enabler of communications and commerce that maintains a unique delivery network that connects every community, town, and city in this country and with posts around the world. The Postal Service is a more than 200 year-old institution that today serves as the linchpin of a $1 trillion dollar mailing industry employing more than 8.4 million people. It is the nexus between consumers and businesses as diverse as Hallmark, Amazon, small town newspapers, and mail-order pharmacies. Over the years, the Postal Service has been a resilient institution that has consistently adjusted with the times and adapting when necessary to remain a vital part of our Nation's economic infrastructure and really our everyday lives. Many would agree that, though much has changed in our country and our economy since the formation of the Postal Service, the need for an efficient and secure transfer of communications and goods has not. Nevertheless, the growing trend toward digital communication, the Postal Service's significant long-term financial liabilities, and the continued decline of First Class mail volume are threatening the future viability of this federal establishment enshrined in the Constitution. Thus, it is incumbent upon Congress to give the Postal Service the tools necessary to address its growing costs and modernize so it can remain relevant for generations to come. Two American industries that have also undergone major disruption in the past and survived to live another day offer parallels to the Postal Service's current predicament. The U.S. freight rail industry faced disruption from the trucking industry and had significant overcapacity beginning in the 1950s. Three interrelated components helped the freight rail industry recover: a focus on improving productivity, containing costs, and generating revenue. Likewise, the U.S. auto industry has faced similar challenges: overcapacity, too many suppliers, and a declining market share. The freight rail and auto industries both have come roaring back to life and profitability. But it's important to note that they did so in part thanks to helpful legislative reform. While containing costs, generating revenue, and improving productivity are certainly part of the postal reform equation and something postal management must continue to focus on, we must do our part to bring badly needed structural reforms to the Postal Service's business model and ensure long-term stability in the years to come. Originally, the Postal Service was a federal department that required annual appropriations from Congress. In 1971, Congress passed legislation to make the Postal Service an ``independent establishment of the executive branch,'' designed to run as a self-sustaining entity that would cover its operating costs with revenues produced through sales, including postage and related products and services. Hence, the modern version of the Postal Service was born. As time passed, Postal Service reforms became necessary to create stability in the agency and to ensure that the American taxpayer and the business community would continue to benefit from its products and services. In an effort to address these needs, Congress enacted the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, PAEA. When PAEA was signed into law a decade ago, First-Class Mail volume was peaking at 213 billion pieces, the postal workforce was composed of almost 700,000 career employees and the e-commerce market was in its infancy with a value of just over $100 billion annually. Unfortunately, passage of the PAEA came at the cusp of immense change in the mailing industry, and also our economy as a whole. The significant advancement in digital communication that continued through the recession, the steady decline in First-Class Mail and Standard Mail volume, and the rising costs associated with longstanding healthcare and retirement obligations created a tumultuous relationship between Postal Service revenues and costs. In the decade since passage of PAEA, total Postal Service mail volume has fallen some 27 percent to 155 billion pieces, the career workforce is 30 percent smaller and the booming domestic e-commerce market is now valued at more than $300 billion. The effects of the Great Recession in 2008 had a tremendous impact on the mailing industry, and by extension the Postal Service's bottom line. To combat these effects, the Postal Regulatory Commission approved a temporary emergency rate increase, which has been the primary reason for the Postal Service's positive operating income over the past 2 years. I have worked on postal issues with various colleagues for a large part of my time in the United States Senate. Further, I have been working on postal reform diligently since 2010 when it became apparent that the future of the Postal Service was in jeopardy. Last Congress, former Senator Tom Coburn and I introduced a package that we felt moved the Postal Service forward and solved the long term problems that plague it. Unfortunately, that bill did not pass and in January the Postal Service was forced to change its delivery standards. Since then, service has noticeably declined. I have worked diligently with my colleagues and a wide range of postal stakeholders including postal consumers, the mailing industry, postal labor unions, and Postal Service leadership for the last eight months on a compromise proposal. The legislation I have introduced is a starting point in making sure the Postal Service remains relevant in the digital age by achieving financial viability and better meeting our communication and commerce needs. I will continue to work with all interested parties, my colleagues in the Senate and the House, including Chairman Ron Johnson of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and the Administration to build on, perfect, and revise this legislation going forward. I am confident that the Postal Service can turn this corner and remain relevant in the decades to come, but it is going to take collaboration, communication, and compromise from all stakeholders and Congress to make that happen. The Improving Postal Operations, Service and Transparency Act, iPOST Act, will set the path to make solvency possible and fix the Postal Service's financial and other challenges for the long-term. In particular iPOST Act would ensure that our federal pension systems recognize the differences between the postal and non-postal federal workforce to prevent the Postal Service from paying more than it owes into the federal retirement systems, as has happened in the past. The iPOST Act would restructure the way the Postal Service funds its remaining liability for retiree healthcare by scrapping the existing, unaffordable payment schedule and replacing it with a system with realistic payment goals that would allow the Postal Service to invest over the next 10 years in a more lucrative TSP-like account. Combined, these provisions would help the Postal Service and taxpayers by paying down the Postal Service's long-term retiree health obligations sooner. The iPOST Act would create a Postal Service Health Benefits Program, PSHBP, within the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan, FEHBP, and require that all Medicare-eligible postal annuitants and employees enroll in Medicare parts A, B, and D. This would ensure better coordination between PSHBP and Medicare than we see with FEHBP and Medicare today and allow the Postal Service to reap the full benefit of the resources it and its employees pay into Medicare. The iPOSTAct would require an independent analysis of the recent network changes put into place by the Postal Service and how service can be improved, particularly in rural areas. The bill further proposes a pause in the Postal Service's network optimization efforts for 2 years for plants and 5 years for post offices to ensure a stabilization of service for all postal customers. The iPOST Act would provide customers big and small with better transparency into how the Postal Service performs for them regardless of whether they live in a large city, a suburban development, or a remote rural area. The iPOST Act would makes the current temporary emergency rate increase permanent while freezing any further rate increases until a new rate system can be established by the Postal Regulatory Commission by January 1, 2018. The iPOST Act would allow the Postal Service, based on meeting certain conditions, to introduce new non-postal products and services, ship beer, wine and distilled spirits, and partner with State and local governments in providing government services. In introducing this bill, I invite all interested stakeholders from around the country, whether they happen to be residents of rural, urban, or suburban communities, businesses that use the mail broadly or individual customers of the Postal Service, to come to the table and work with Congress on a viable path forward. I encourage the mailing industry, the postal unions, and Postal Service management to continue to discuss reform measures and to view this bill as a possible path forward to consensus. To my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I look forward to working with you to make what I think is a good bill even better. Again, introduction is the first step in this process. I am committed to working together to find consensus on this legislation and fix the serious, but solvable challenges facing the Postal Service.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Madam President, I thank the Democratic whip for yielding time to me and for his extraordinary leadership on this issue and tell him how proud I am of him and my other colleagues, no matter where we come down on this issue. I have a little bit of a different approach to the serious matter that is before us. During the first week or two of the August recess, I did something that I suspect none of my colleagues did; I actually read the Iran deal and a lot of the materials that relate to the agreement. After putting it down, my mind wandered back to another time and place where there was an intense effort to end years of hostility and mistrust in the Middle East. As Governor of Delaware and chairman of the National Governors Association, I led a trade delegation in 1999 of business leaders, government officials, and citizens mostly from Delaware, many of them Jewish, and we went to Israel in the summer of 1999. We went looking to strengthen economic and cultural relations between Delaware and Israel. Briefed by U.S. Department of State officials before departing on our mission, I also went looking for an opportunity to encourage Israeli and Palestinian leaders to seize the day and change the leadership in Israel in order to try and negotiate the two-state solution that always seemed just out of reach. Those opportunities came sooner than I ever expected. Shortly after we landed there, we were whisked off in Israel to a sprawling outdoor Fourth of July celebration that was hosted by the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Among the guests there that day were former General Ehud Barak, who was about to become Prime Minister of the country, and Bibi Netanyahu, the man he defeated. The other guests included the widow and daughter of the late Yitzhak Rabin, Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, General Ariel Sharon, and a remarkable assemblage of who's who in Israel. I spoke briefly that day with Ehud Barak and at length with him several days in his office after he had officially assumed his new duties as Prime Minister. The second conversation focused on the negotiations which lay ahead with Yasser Arafat, shepherded by the Clinton administration, to try to reach a land-for-peace deal once and for all with the Palestinians. Ironically, a few days later, our delegation was invited to Ramallah to join Arafat and members of his leadership team for an extended lunch. Over that meal, I sat with Arafat and I shared with him the new Prime Minister's earnest desire to complete the work begun by former Prime Minister Rabin before his assassination. I urged Arafat to set aside generations of conflict and distrust in an effort to find common ground with the Israelis that would ultimately provide greater security for Israel and better relations with its neighbors in return for Palestinian statehood. The conversation seemed to go well. A few days later back in the States, I shared as much with the Clinton administration. The negotiations that ensued over the course of the next year ultimately presented Arafat with the best land-for-peace proposal the Palestinians would ever receive. In the end, they turned it down. Dennis Ross, who played a key role in the negotiations for the administration, would later tell me that ``Arafat simply could not take yes for an answer.'' Sixteen years have passed since then. Another transformative opportunity has presented itself, and this time to America and to our five negotiating partners--the British, the French, the Germans, the Russians, and the Chinese as well as the people of Iran. We have a chance to ensure that the Iranian hopes of developing a nuclear weapon are put on the shelf for years--maybe forever. The Iranians have a chance to bring to an end the crippling economic sanctions that the coalition we lead has imposed on Iran for years, and the Iranians have another opportunity; that is, to shed their status as a pariah among the nations of this world and assume a position worthy of their history and their culture. Over the past 2 years, I have had countless meetings with people from Delaware and beyond our borders who fall on both sides of this issue. Some are vehemently opposed to any deal with Iran and others believe we absolutely must have a deal in order to avoid a war. I came to support this agreement only after considering all of these points of view, reviewing the text of the deal again and again, hundreds of additional pages of supporting documents, and taking in dozens of briefings from experts on Iran and nuclear proliferation. Two years of negotiations have produced an agreement that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and most of our Republican colleagues denounced almost as soon as the ink was dry on it and well before they ever read it. They said America should reject the deal and negotiate a better one. Well, to that I think you say: Good luck. Last month, along with a number of my colleagues, I met here in Washington with ambassadors and representatives of the five nations that were our negotiating partners. To a person they argued-- persuasively I thought--that this is a deal we should not reject. In effect, they urged us to learn from Arafat's mistake and this time take yes for an answer. They are not the only ones who believe we should support this deal. There are dozens of former Israeli national security and military officials, including retired Israeli Navy Admiral Ami Ayalon. He is pictured here. He was effectively the CNO of the Israeli Navy--the person in charge of the Navy in the last decade. I am an old Navy guy. I am a retired Navy captain. I spent 23 years in the Navy. I was interested in what he had to say when he came to my State. Here is what he said, among other things: ``The Iran deal is the best possible alternative from Israel's point of view given the other available alternatives.'' Now, look, he is one significant Israeli leader who believes this is the right thing for Israel. As it turns out, there are dozens, and actually scores, of former Israeli military leaders and intelligence leaders who agree with him--not all but a lot, and we should listen to their voices. I have certainly listened to him. To those who think there are dangerous people in Iran who want this deal so they can exploit it, I remind them that the Revolutionary Guard is vehemently opposed to this deal. A lot of people I have talked to in Delaware in recent weeks think that, well, the Revolutionary Guard, the bad guys and hardliners in Iran, if you will, are for it. As it turns out, they are not for it. It is quite the opposite. Here is a photograph of Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. He said: ``We'll never accept it.'' That is not exactly a voice of endorsement for this agreement. I think this is all the more reason we should vigorously enforce this agreement through the intrusive inspections regime it mandates for the International Atomic Energy Agency to make for years to come, in order to ensure that the Iranians comply with every element required of them by this deal. This deal blocks four pathways to a bomb. I will mention what they are: first of all, the uranium facility in Natanz, blocked; the uranium facility at Fordow, blocked; weapons-grade plutonium, blocked; covert attempts to make a bomb, blocked; intrusive and uncomfortable inspections; sanctions relief only after Iran meets its obligations. If they cheat, the harsh economic sanctions snap back. Who can snap them back like that? We can, the United States, and any of our negotiating partners as well. We don't need their concurrence. We can do it alone. Iran currently has 10,000 kilograms of enriched uranium and nearly 20,000 centrifuges, that puts them 2 or 3 months away with a nuclear bomb. Without a deal, it stays that way. With a deal, however, that enriched uranium stockpile must shrink to 300 kilograms and Iran must cut their number of centrifuges by two-thirds. And the ones they end up with are not the advanced centrifuges, they are actually the most elementary centrifuges. That change blocks their pathway to a bomb, keeping them at least 1 year away for the next 15 years or maybe longer. Our negotiating partners also made the following critical points repeatedly. If at the end of the day the agreement is implemented and the Iranians violate its provisions later on, we will know it. We will know it by virtue of our own intelligence, the intelligence of our partner nations, and the intelligence of the Israelis as well. If it becomes apparent that the Iranians have cheated, any of the six of our nations can mandate the reimposition of an international economic sanctions regime against Iran, the same crippling sanctions that brought them to the table 2 years ago and to this hard-fought agreement today. Madam President, 35 years ago, the United States imposed sanctions against Iran that were largely unilateral. It was just us. Then we began ratcheting it up over time. Unilateral sanctions by the United States were clearly a nuisance to Iran, but they did not bring Iran to the table. Only sustained, multilateral sanctions, joined in by our five negotiating partners and others around the world, succeeded in bringing Iran to the table in a mood to talk. In fact, under the agreement that has been negotiated, if necessary, they could be set up by the United States in their entirety at our request--our request--if we are convinced the Iranians are cheating. This agreement guarantees that if they are ever needed again, any of the six of us could pull the trigger and reimpose them. Conversely, if the United States rejects this agreement, we not only lose the ability to know that the Iranians are pursuing the development of a nuclear weapons capability, we will also lose the support of the rest of the world in reimposing sanctions in the event that a future government in Iran elects to pursue a nuclear weapons program. I don't know about my colleagues, but that makes no sense to me--no sense. It also makes no sense to our negotiating partners. Almost every American who was alive on 9/11, which we will commemorate tomorrow, remembers the horrifying images of that tragedy. To make matters worse, we had to endure the spectacle throughout the day and night of tens of thousands of Arabs across the world taking to the streets to celebrate the death of thousands of Americans. Lost among those images, however, was a remarkably different gathering that took place in another nation. It took place in, of all places, Tehran, the capital of Iran. There that night, thousands of Iranians came together in a candlelight vigil in solidarity with the United States. Most Americans have no idea that ever happened. I have never forgotten it. A half-dozen years later in New York City, I would meet an Iranian leader named Javad Zarif, living there with his family. He was the Iranian ambassador to the U.N. We didn't have relations with them and we still don't. But the Iranians have for some time had an ambassador there to the U.N. and he lives in New York City. Zarif was educated, it turns out, at San Francisco State University and the University of Denver. I remember thinking when I met him that he spoke flawless English--better than I--and he knew more about Americans than most Americans. I think his kids were educated here as well. Impressed, later on, after I came back to Washington, DC, I spoke to him and I said: Why don't you come to Washington and meet some of our colleagues to give them a chance to get to know you and to have a dialogue. He said: The George W. Bush administration won't let me come. They won't let me leave New York City. So I said: Well, that is easy to fix, and I met with the Bush administration. Well, it wasn't easy to fix, and they wouldn't relax their travel ban. So I later would ask Zarif in a conversation we had--this is when Ahmadinejad was the President of Iran, saying the holocaust was a figment of the imagination and the leaders of Israel should be blown off the face of the Earth. I said to Zarif: How do you get along with your President Ahmadinejad, and his response was: Not good. He said: Ahmadinejad doesn't trust me. I am not going to be here much longer. And he was right. The next time I reached out to him, he was gone. He was gone, seemingly without a trace. I found out years later he had been recalled to Iran and had returned to private life writing, lecturing, and largely staying out of sight. As Ahmadinejad's second and final term began to wind down, a campaign to determine who would replace him ensued. A reformer named Rohani put his hat in the ring. Most people had never heard of him, at least not here. And most people in Iran said he would never have a chance to even get elected or run. Well, he got to run, and not only did he get to run, he won more votes than the other five candidates combined. In the end, he did serve. Later on, the question was what kind of cabinet would he put together to surround himself as the leader of Iran. And what he did--we were watching to see who would be minister of this or that over there. So when Rohani submitted the names of the Iranian parliament, his submission for Foreign Minister was my friend, Zarif. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I never saw it coming, never imagined it would come. The man who had gone on to lead the Iranians in negotiations with our five negotiating partners over the past 2 years is a man I have known for a half a dozen years or more. Our negotiating team has been led superbly by Secretary of State John Kerry. By his side, however, for much of the past year has been a less well-known Cabinet Secretary, our Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz, who would end up playing a key role among all of the members of a very talented and dedicated team. Dr. Moniz has never sought elected office. I first met him almost a decade ago at MIT where he was a leader and a professor in physics. He was regarded as one of the world's experts on all things nuclear. He testified one day at a field hearing I held at MIT focusing on spent fuel rods from nuclear plants. Later, I came back and people said: What is he like? And I said: This guy Moniz is a genius. And by God he is. It turns out he is not just a genius; he leads a bunch of these national labs where people who are just as smart as he is know all kinds of information, including all things nuclear--more so than any other country in the world. As it turns out, they were harnessed to help us in this negotiation--the national labs--led by Ernie Moniz. As it turned out, ironically, among the graduate students at MIT during Dr. Moniz's distinguished career, there was a young Iranian named Akbar Salehi. Later Salehi would return to his country and, as fate would have it, ultimately become Dr. Moniz's Iranian counterpart in the negotiations with the U.S.-led team. As it turns out, Salehi's thesis adviser at MIT was one of Ernie Moniz's closest friends at MIT, and thus was created maybe not a bond, but a connection, and a shared trust that went back to both Ernie Moniz, a former professor at MIT, and a former graduate student, Salehi at MIT. It didn't take long for Secretary Moniz to make a profound impression during the negotiations. Shortly after he joined the team earlier this year, he gave the Iranians what several members of the U.S. team would later describe to me as a tutorial in all things nuclear, making it clear that the Iranians had ``more than met their match.'' Adding Ernie Moniz to our team was I think a stroke of genius, not only bringing him here, but the national labs as well. In the countless meetings he has participated in with House and Senate Members, he has bolstered the credibility, probably as much as anybody, of the agreement--and the confidence of many in it--in ways that almost no other American could do. Much has been made of whether we can trust the Iranians to do what they have committed to do. John Kerry, Ernie Moniz, and the other members of our team have made clear that the agreement they and our five partners from the other nations have hammered out with Iran is not based on trust. Let me say that again: It is not based on trust. It is based, as we have already heard on this floor, on mistrust. We realize that some future Iranian regime may well ponder whether to violate the agreement and launch another pilot program to develop another nonpeaceful nuclear capability. If they actually attempt to do that, the key questions are these: Will we know it? Are the consequences for Iran severe enough to deter them from going forward with it? I am convinced the answer to both those questions is yes. Today, Iran has much more than the hardline Revolutionary Guard whose influence has begun to wane. Iran today is a nation of 78 million people. Their average age is 25. Most of them were not alive in 1979 during the Iranian revolution. They don't remember the brutal Shah we propped up for years and allowed to come to our country when his regime fell. This new generation of Iranians is ready to take yes for an answer. I think we should too. This is a good deal for America and our allies, and that certainly includes Israel, one of our closest allies. I think it beats the likely alternative that there could well be war with Iran, hands down. I will close with this brief conversation. About a year and a half ago I was up in New York in a house that Senator Durbin had actually visited with me, as well as a couple of others where Zarif used to live. We had the opportunity to talk about the upcoming negotiations. I said: Zarif, you and Iran have a choice. You can have a strong, vibrant economy for your country again, or you can have a nuclear weapons program. You cannot have both. And we are not going to accept a nuclear weapons program. We have the ability to know if they cheat. If they cheat, we have the ability to put right back in place these same crippling economic sanctions. If that doesn't do the job, we have other alternatives at our disposal. Nothing is off the table. Sometimes around here we talk about voting our fears or voting our hopes. I am prepared to vote my hopes, for our Nation and the Iranians as well. Thank you.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Madam President, colleagues, I want to hearken back to last November's election. I thought for some time--and the Presiding Officer has heard me say this once or twice--that for this Senator there are three takeaways from that election. No. 1, the American people want us to work together in the Senate here in Washington; the American people want us to get things done; and most especially, the American people want us to get things done that actually strengthen our economic recovery. My own view is that one of the things we can do to strengthen our economic recovery is to increase exports. We work very hard in this Chamber, in the Senate and with the House and the President, to try to pave the way to create a large new trading block consisting of the United States and 11 other countries which, when put together, comprise about 40 percent of the world's customers. This is the trading block we call the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is something that is sought by the President and is supported by myself, by Democrats, and by Republicans, and it is still being negotiated. But it is an important part in growing and strengthening our economic recovery. One of the other related areas is how do we finance exports. One of the ways we have done that for years in this country is through the Export-Import Bank. We have reached a point where the authorization of the Export-Import Bank has expired. The legislation that has passed the Senate would renew that authorization, and my hope is that when we finally find our way through the transportation gauntlet, we will also reauthorize the Export-Import Bank to again make available financing for business--not for every business large and small, but for quite a few. Other nations with whom we compete help finance their exports, and for us not to do the same puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Another thing we can do to strengthen our economic recovery is to better protect our international property--research and development-- whether it is from cyber security attacks, data breaches, or whether it is through simply the way we combat patent trolling. Folks come up with ideas and they are delayed. They end up in court, and research and development is stymied in some cases as a result of all that. We have worked in the Environment and Public Works Committee for years now on something called the Tax Exceptions Control Act which provides predictability and certainty for businesses, especially in the chemical industry, but also at the same time works to protect our health as human beings, especially among the most vulnerable--the young, the old--and at the same time it is good for the environment. That legislation may be coming before us as soon as next week. Many of us have sought to provide some certainty for businesses on the tax side through international tax reform, which is an idea supported by the President, by the House Republican and Democratic leadership, and by the Finance Committee working group led by Senators Portman and Schumer. It is not comprehensive tax reform, but it is a big piece of it that at least provides some certainty and predictability and would also provide, frankly, a couple hundred billion dollars over the next 10 years to be used for roads, highways, bridges, transit, rail, and so forth. The last thing I will mention in terms of strengthening our economic recovery is transportation. There is an outfit called McKinsey which is a major consulting company. They have something called the McKinsey Global Institute. Not long ago they reported that if we were to make the kind of robust investment in infrastructure sought by the President and supported by House Republican and Democratic leadership, and supported by our bipartisan working group on the Finance Committee--if we were actually to do that, we would grow, according to McKinsey's employment estimates, by as much as 1.5 million jobs over the next several years. A lot of these jobs are for people who are either not working or are working part-time. They would like to build something or rebuild something, and they could work on highways, bridges, our transit systems, and so forth. The folks at the McKinsey Global Institute go even further to say that if we were to make this kind of robust investment in transportation at large, we would not only put a lot of people back to work, but we would grow our GDP by as much as 1.5 percent. That may not sound like a lot, but I think our GDP growth in the first quarter was zero. We struggled through a tough winter. It has bounced back nicely in the second quarter, but it is still only 2.5 percent. The idea of being able to add 1.5 percent to that would give us a 4-percent GDP growth, and that is as strong as we have seen in a while. It would translate into a lot more jobs for people other than just building highways, bridges, and roads in our country. I have been asked, why would our GDP grow so much by making these investments in transportation? In one of several meetings I have had with industry groups, someone from a company said: We move a lot of our products overseas in order to sell our products. We don't export by air, but by ship. Most of the exports leaving this country go by way of ship. He went on to say: We send our products to ports and we have a narrow window of time. In his particular case it was a timeframe of 4 hours. The ships coming into this particular port needed to pick up their goods and products within 4 hours. He said if they met that window, they were good. If they missed that window, they were not good. As it turns out, there are enormous delays in moving not just people in this country but in moving products and freight. One of the great things about the Environment and Public Works Committee's 6-year transportation reauthorization legislation was a freight provision. I give a lot of credit to Senators Boxer and Inhofe for including--we were among the people who strongly recommended it--a strong freight provision in the Transportation bill in order to help grow GDP to help grow jobs. As it turns out, part of the reason why it is difficult to get anything done around here on transportation is the issue of how we are going to pay for all these investments, although I have referenced some pretty good ideas. I mentioned one. One of the reasons it is difficult to pass legislation through is that multiple committees have jurisdiction over transportation. The Environment and Public Works Committee in which I serve is led by Senators Inhofe and Boxer. We have jurisdiction over roads, highways, and bridges. That is a big piece of our transportation system, but it is not all of it. The Banking Committee has jurisdiction over transit, which is significant. The Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over freight rail and interstate passenger rail and jurisdiction over safety in a lot of instances. They also have jurisdiction over a fair amount of what happens in the air for our country. Then the Finance Committee, which I am also privileged to serve on--which is called the Ways and Means Committee in the House--is heavily involved in how to pay for all the improvements we need to make--and how badly we need to make them. As it turns out, there are some folks who actually study the amount of time that we are delayed either sitting in traffic or moving very slowly in this country. The folks at Texas A&M put out an annual report on congestion in our country. They found the average U.S. commuter wastes 38 hours every year because of traffic congestion. There is an industry group that has something called The Road Information Program. They estimate the average driver in the United States pays $377 each year in additional vehicle costs as a result of poor road conditions. The World Bank, in a related report, has found that when a road is allowed to deteriorate from good to poor, each dollar we fail to invest in road maintenance will increase vehicle operating costs by between $2 and $3. So among the many reasons we want to make these investments is No. 1, to grow employment for the many folks who are actually building and working on these projects--a lot of people. We want to grow our gross domestic product. We want to reduce the amount of time spent sitting in traffic or traveling very slowly in traffic. The 38 hours wasted in congestion are hours we lose in our lives every year. Lastly, we want to reduce the amount of money we spend on our own vehicles. I know my own vehicle, my Chrysler Town and Country minivan, went over 400,000 miles this week as we were driving in from Delaware the day before last. We were coming across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge last week when it topped out at 400,000 miles. Along the way people have asked: How do you get a vehicle to go that many years and that far? I tell them that every other week we wash it. That is pretty much all I do. Well, I actually do a lot more than that. I have replaced a lot of tires. There are a lot of potholes, causing a lot of realignments, and it adds up. The average is almost $377 a year, but the money adds up for us as it does for other people as well. I mentioned earlier that the Environment and Public Works Committee has jurisdiction over roads, highways, and bridges. The commerce committee has jurisdiction over ground transportation, including freight rail, passenger rail, and air; the banking committee has jurisdiction over transit; and the Finance Committee has jurisdiction over finance and how we actually finance these investments. That is one of the reasons it is difficult to put a package together with all the different pieces to find common ground and to come to an agreement on how to fund it. One of the other difficulties is--and I am not a huge advocate of earmarks, but one of the reasons people were willing to vote year after year, decade after decade, for a 6-year transportation bill was because they could point to certain specific provisions in the Transportation bill which helped their congressional district or their State. It is more difficult now for a representative or Senator to say these are the specific provisions that are good for my State or my district, and this is one of the reasons why I am supporting this legislation. It doesn't mean we ought to go back to earmarks, but it is one of the reasons why it is harder to build a super majority to move legislation like this through the Senate. So where are we? The House has passed legislation that says for the next 3 months we are going to fund transportation projects in this country--roads, highways, bridges, and transit. They have outlined a couple of ways to pay for that. They do not have enough money to pay for projects over the next 5 months. They have authorized the actual construction of those projects for the next 3 months. That is their bill, and I think they have pretty much passed it and said, kind of, take it or leave it. Previously, they said they wanted to extend for 5 months the authorization and the appropriations for roads, highways, bridges, and transit until sometime in December to give us time between now and December to come to agreement on the administration's earlier idea embraced by House Democratic and Republican leadership and embraced by the working group in the Senate Finance Committee about international tax reform, which some would deem repatriation. We passed out of here today a different plan that I do not support but a plan that would appear to authorize projects for a 6-year transportation bill. As it turns out, the money is good for maybe 3 years, not for 6. It comes from a lot of different sources, some that I would deem inappropriate. Others may differ with that. It is not the way I think we should do business, but it is the way we have done business. We passed a bill. We have different perspectives as to what we ought to do. My expectation is that the Senate will agree with the House- passed bill and we will, in the meantime, go back to the drawing board. One of the things that I think has value in the House-passed bill is it sets the stage for us to get serious about the administration's proposal, again embraced by the House Democratic and Republican leadership, and by our bipartisan working group in the Finance Committee. It gives us time to actually find out if we can do that. There are some people who don't like that idea. Some people in pretty powerful positions around here don't like that idea, but there are others in equally high positions who think that is a very good idea. Among the benefits that it would provide--it doesn't address our transportation needs forever, but it certainly would provide a lot of money for the next 6 years. Why might that be a good idea? I think ultimately--and while for years we have used user fees, gas taxes, diesel taxes, to fund most of our road construction at the national level and for our road repairs-- to be honest with you, over time, our cars, trucks, and vans have been more energy efficient. My Chrysler minivan that I mentioned earlier gets about 24 miles per gallon on the highway, but there are vehicles today, including minivans, including trucks, that do a whole lot better than that. We have smaller passenger cars that routinely get 40 and even 50 miles to the gallon. To say that the diesel tax and the gas tax are forever the sole solution is probably not realistic. We have some vehicles on the road that are pretty much all electric. They do not buy any gas. They do not buy any diesel fuel. When they need a refill, they pull up and recharge their batteries. We have some folks who buy vehicles that are powered by fuel cells. They run on hydrogen or natural gas, methane. So given the changing mix in the way we move ourselves and goods and services around the country, that sole reliance on user fees, by a gas tax and diesel tax, forever is not a good idea. Among the other ideas that are out there is tolling. People who come through my State on I-95 pay a toll. A lot of them use E-ZPass. They can go through our State on the highway using E-ZPass so they don't have to sit in line and wait. Their credit card accounts get charged for their travel. We have a similar kind of arrangement on State Route 1, where a lot of people come through our State from I-95 heading south to our beaches or to Dover Air Force Base. We have highway-speed E- ZPass there too. So tolling is part of the future. Another idea that is being experimented with by the States--it is referred to in different ways--but I think of it as vehicle miles traveled. Is there a way we can actually figure out how much, in terms of a true user--how many miles we are actually traveling in our vehicles and assess some kind of fee at the Federal level or maybe at the State level on those who are driving cars, trucks, and vans. Folks in Oregon have been working on this the longest. I think they started this effort about 10 years ago. They call it a road user charge. That is another way of saying vehicle miles traveled. I think at the end of the day--not the end of the day but in 10, 15, 20 years, we will have figured out how to actually do vehicle miles traveled/road user charges in a cost-effective way that is protective of people's rights to privacy. The other area that I think we will do a better job in is tolling, moving to more things like the highway-speed E-ZPass, so people who want to use a particular road will pay a toll and do so in a way that still expedites movement of traffic as we do through highway-speed E- ZPass. Having said that, if we are unable to come to an agreement at the end of this year, if we are unable to come to an agreement on some kind of international tax reform, the idea of using a lot of cats and dogs to fund transportation improvements for the next 2 or 3 years--I don't think that is a good outcome. I am not a Congress of one. If I were, I would go back and say we should look at--at least for the next 6 years--user fees. We have been using user fees or taxing gas and diesel for a long time to provide for most of the Federal share for these transportation construction projects and improvements. I think the last time we raised the Federal gas tax was 1993. We raised it to 18.3 cents per gallon. We raised, at the same time, the diesel taxes to 24.3 cents per gallon. We have not raised either of those for over 22 years. Since that time, the cost of asphalt, the cost of concrete, the cost of labor, the cost of steel have all gone up, but the user fees, the gas tax and diesel tax, have not gone up at all. George Voinovich--former Governor, former U.S. Senator--and I worked together about 5 or 6 years on the Bowles-Simpson Commission to suggest an increase in the gas and diesel tax by a penny every quarter, by a penny every 3 months, for about 15 quarters. We were roughly saying 3 or 4 cents a year for 4 years and then index the gas tax after that to the rate of inflation so we did not have to come back and re-address it every year or every 2 or 3 or 4 years. That is an idea that was actually adopted in the Bowles-Simpson report, but much of what the Bowles-Simpson report included has not been enacted. One of the things I am going to be doing--and I hope colleagues in the House as well as in the Senate--in the next day or two is introducing an increase in the gas and diesel tax of 4 cents a year for the next 4 years--that will be 16 cents over the next 4 years--and then indexing the gas tax and diesel tax to the rate of inflation. What would that cost the average family, the average driver in this country? On a weekly basis, it would be about $2, actually less than $2. I don't know what people pay for a cup of coffee, but I am told you can buy--I bought a cup of coffee today for $1.70. Some people buy it for less. Some people buy it for $2 or more. But for roughly a cup of coffee a week, we could have better roads, highways, bridges--a whole lot better. By doing that, we would raise, over the next 10 years, $180 billion, maybe even more, to be able to provide for our construction needs, roads, highways, bridges, and transit. We have the system in place. We know how to do it. The price of gasoline--I bought gas the other day in Central Delaware, in Dover. I paid $2.53 a gallon. It was down by about 20 cents over the last month. If the Iran deal actually goes through and is approved, the Iranians are expected to add to a world already awash in oil. So the price of oil is coming down. The Iranians would add, I am told, about another half billion barrels of oil to the marketplace and probably continue to push down the price of oil. I ask us to keep that in mind. Some people say we will never be able to get the votes for an increase in the gas or diesel tax, even if it is phased in for 4 cents a year for 4 years. But there were six States last year across the country--most of them with Republican Governors and Republican legislatures--that did something like this. They did not raise the gas tax by $1 or 50 cents or even 25 cents, but they raised it, in some cases, over several years. The question is, Can State legislators or Members of the Congress actually vote to meet our transportation needs? Can they actually vote for this stuff and get reelected? As it turns out, 95 percent of the Republicans in these six States and State legislatures--95 percent of the Republican legislators who voted for these user fee increases won their primaries last year and they won their generals. They were reelected. Among the Democrats who voted in those six States last year to raise user fees, 90 percent of them won their primaries, they won the general election. They were reelected. For people who say you cannot vote to do a tough thing and still get reelected, I would just say look at those six States from last year. Other States are going to follow in those footsteps this year as well. So the long term--I will wrap it up at this point in time. I see Senator Grassley is on the floor. But long term, the worst option is to do nothing. The worst option is to do nothing. I have a glass of water here. I am going to ask the pages to bring me a couple more glasses, just empty glasses, if they will quickly. Senator Grassley is waiting to talk. Bear with me. This is show-and-tell on the Senate floor. I don't think this is against the rules, but if it is, maybe the Presiding Officer will cut me a break. We will say this glass of water that is sitting right here is world capital markets, a lot of money, trillions of dollars. Some of it is from sovereign nations, some of it is from trust funds, pension funds, and so forth. This glass is empty. This is the U.S. transportation trust fund. It is empty. When we run out of money and we don't raise taxes or revenues to fill it, we turn to the general fund. We say let's take money out of the general fund and put some of it into the transportation trust fund. This glass is empty too. Our debt is down, our deficit is down--our debt is not down--our deficit is down, but we still are running a big deficit. There is no money in the general fund to refill the transportation trust fund these days. So what we do is we go out into the world capital markets--here, where there is a lot of money--and we borrow. We sell Treasury securities. So as it turns out, one of the best buyers for those Treasury securities is China. So we ask China: How about buying some of our Treasury securities? They do. Then when the Chinese turn around and start pushing around the Vietnamese or the Filipinos in the South China Sea, around the Spratly Islands and places I used to fly as a naval flight officer years ago--when the Chinese--and I don't think they are doing this so much anymore, but they manipulate their currency. When the Chinese are trying to maybe dump some of their products in this country illegally and we say you can't do that, China, you can't do that, for the Chinese, it is very easy to say I thought you wanted to borrow money, and it puts us in a very awkward position as a nation. If things are worth having, they are worth paying for. I don't think the pay-fors that were used in the--not the 6-year authorization bill that passed here--the Transportation bill is really a 3-year. I don't think the idea of taking money away from Customs fees and different other sources to use for purposes for which it was never intended--for transportation purposes--I don't think that is the way to do this. The good news is this: The House is in one place, the Senate is in another. We have several months to figure this out. I hope we use these several months to drill down real hard on the idea of international tax reform, the deemed repatriation, which will provide hundreds of millions of dollars for transportation over the next 6 years. If that does not work, I want us to look at some other alternatives. The worst alternative is to get to December and say: Well, let's just borrow some more money or let's come up with some cats and dogs and patch this and kick the can down the road again. So I am going to work very hard as a member of the Finance Committee on the international tax reform piece. I know Senator Grassley, if I am not mistaken, is the senior Republican on the Finance Committee and somebody who is a key participant in trying to find common ground. He is good at that. I look forward to working with him on that. I will close with this. To me, the message from the American people in the elections from last November was threefold: People want us to work together. They want us to get important things done, and among the most important is to further strengthen an already strengthening economy. A big piece of that can be transportation. The American people expect us to make tough decisions. This is a tough negotiation, but it is one we have to have. We have to have a good outcome in the end. With that, I thank my friend from Iowa for his patience. I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

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

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. I withdraw my objection.

Mr. CARPER. I object.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I wish to begin by talking about two subjects. The first of those is the nuclear agreement that our Nation and five other nations are seeking to negotiate with Iran, and the second is I wish to do something we don't do often enough and thank some people, people who serve all of us, some folks in the Coast Guard. But I wish to start with the agreement that we and part of the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus one--Germany--are attempting to negotiate with the country of Iran. We are closing in, I hope, on a historic nuclear agreement with Iran. Today, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, and Germany are hard at work trying to hammer out a final nuclear deal with Iran that will hopefully put an end to that country's pursuit of nuclear weapons. We have a key role to play in the fate of this potential nuclear deal. If the P5+1 and Iran can forge a final deal, then Congress will have its chance to support or reject it by voting on a resolution that would prohibit lifting the sanctions against Iran. So it is my great hope that when Congress comes back from our Fourth of July recess--holiday recess--we will be returning to the news that the negotiators have succeeded in striking what they believe to be a fair deal. We will then begin our job of considering whether that deal represents the best path forward for our Nation's security and the security of other nations, including our allies. Should this agreement come together, I will assess the final nuclear deal on how it implements three key requirements that were articulated in last April's nuclear framework. Let me just take a moment and explain these three requirements. First, any final agreement must block all of Iran's pathways to developing a nuclear weapon. The Iranians will have to agree to measures that prohibit them from acquiring weapons-grade plutonium, enriching enough uranium to build a bomb and developing a covert nuclear program. Fortunately, as part of April's nuclear framework, the P5+1 agreed in principle to close off Iran's four pathways to a nuclear weapon, and here is how. Iran would no longer have a source of weapons-grade plutonium, as the framework requires Iran's heavy water reactor to be redesigned so that it no longer generates a plutonium byproduct needed for a bomb. Iran would lose one path to acquiring enough enriched uranium to build a bomb by being forced to reduce its current centrifuge inventory of almost 20,000 down to 5,000 units. Moreover, the remaining 5,000 centrifuges would be Iran's oldest and least capable variants, making it almost impossible for Iran to restart weapons-grade enrichment activities. Under the framework, Iran would lose its other path to acquiring enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. Iran will be required to dramatically reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium from 10 tons to just 300 kilograms and will not be able to enrich above 3.7 percent. Lastly, the framework eliminates the ability of Iran to covertly develop a nuclear weapon by monitoring not just the declared facilities but also subjecting the country's entire nuclear supply chain to inspections and continuous surveillance. If a final agreement makes good on these promises in a verifiable way--in a verifiable way--then it will earn my support. Some have argued that a final agreement must require Iran to dismantle its entire nuclear infrastructure so that it cannot enrich uranium even for peaceful nuclear energy. This is an unnecessary requirement on Iran in my view. If that country agrees to these four roadblocks to a nuclear weapon, then Iran should be able to maintain an enrichment program that is verifiably limited to producing only peaceful nuclear energy. That brings me to my second requirement. In any final agreement, Iran must submit to uncomfortable and intrusive inspections. If weapons inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency identify a facility they suspect of housing illicit nuclear activity, then these inspectors should be granted access to these undeclared sites. If Iran fails to grant access to the inspectors, then Iran should be in violation of the agreement, and that should trigger expedited and appropriate consequences for Iran. In the weeks since the announcement of the April framework agreement, we have heard some contradictory claims coming from Iran's Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei. He has said that Iran will not allow inspections of military sites. Well, perhaps the Supreme Leader is only playing to a hard-line domestic audience in Iran. Perhaps he is attempting to return and to rhetorically walk back on the concessions his negotiating team promised to the P5+1 nations or perhaps he is just not being honest. Whatever the case may be, I certainly do not trust the Iranian Supreme Leader nor do I want my acceptance of a deal to be based solely on his rhetoric. To borrow a phrase from President Reagan--a phrase we have heard in this Chamber hundreds of times since I came here 14 years ago--final deals should not be predicated on the mantra ``trust but verify.'' Rather they should embody the principle of ``distrust and verify.'' To that end, the final deal must have a system of consequences and incentives in place to ensure that Iran complies with its promises to submit to inspections. Third, any lifting of sanctions against Iran must be conditional on the Iranians meeting and implementing core requirements of the nuclear deal. Iran must prove to us they are serious about following through on their commitments. If they live up to their promises, only then should they be rewarded with phased sanctions relief. Fortunately, the administration has made this a sticking point in the negotiations. As the President said upon the announcement of the nuclear framework on April 2, ``[Sanctions] relief will be phased in as Iran takes steps to adhere to the deal. If Iran violates the deal, sanctions can be snapped back into place.'' Additionally, after announcing the nuclear framework, Secretary Kerry made clear that the Iranians will not get sanctions relief until they have implemented their obligation to the satisfaction of the international inspectors and the United States. These are the words of Secretary Kerry: Iran has a responsibility to get the breakout time to the one year . . . . When that is done and certified by the IAEA that [Iran] has lived up to that nuclear responsibility, and we make that judgment with them, at that point we would begin the phasing of sanctions relief. Now, Secretary Kerry and President Obama are right to insist on this point. They are right to insist on this point. I imagine this is one of the details still being worked out in talks. But if Iran is serious about abandoning its nuclear weapons ambitions--I hope they are--they must agree to take action before being rewarded with sanctions relief. For 2\1/2\ years--2\1/2\ years--our negotiating team has been working tirelessly to strike a deal with Iran that strengthens our Nation's security, our allies' security, and the security of the broader Middle East. Whatever the outcome next week, we owe these negotiators a debt of gratitude for their service and their dedication. At the end of the day, however, I feel confident that we will reach a deal that blocks Iran's pathways to a bomb, subjects Iran to intrusive inspections, and only provides sanctions relief after Iran takes action. If the final deal includes these three key provisions, then it will certainly have my support. Moreover, I think if each Senator and Representative evaluates this deal on its merits, forgets about the rhetoric, forgets about the preconceived notions and considers the alternatives, then this deal will enjoy broad support in this Congress. Mr. President, I want to set these remarks aside now. Before our current Presiding Officer took the Chair, I mentioned to our colleague before him that I had a two-part address. This is like a day-night doubleheader.

Mr. CARPER. I ask unanimous consent to proceed for an extra 6 minutes. May I prevail on the Senator from Ohio?

Mr. CARPER. I thank the Senator from Ohio for his kindness.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, over the past few months I have been coming to the floor to recognize the work of a few of the outstanding employees of the Department of Homeland Security. There are over 200,000 men and women who work at the Department's 22 components. They secure our borders and secure our skies. They respond to natural disasters. They protect us in cyber space. Few other Federal agencies touch the lives of Americans on a daily basis more than the Department of Homeland Security. Although the jobs they do every day may be diverse, all DHS employees go to work with one critical mission, and that is to ensure our country is a safe, secure, and resilient place where the American way of life can thrive. Today I recognize the outstanding service of several officers from the U.S. Coast Guard. As a law enforcement agency and one of our Nation's five armed services, the Coast Guard has safeguarded our interests on the high seas for over two centuries. The thousands of brave men and women who honorably serve our Nation at the Coast Guard dedicate their lives to its important missions. These missions range from maritime law enforcement and military operations to search and rescue and environmental protection. Max Kaczmarek, Chris Leon, and Matthew Worden Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson recognized three individuals from the Coast Guard for their valor: Petty Officer Max Kaczmarek, Petty Officer Chris Leon, and Petty Officer Matthew Worden. In pictures right here next to me are Petty Officer Matt Worden, Petty Officer Max Kaczmarek, and Petty Officer Chris Leon. These three brave individuals have each demonstrated outstanding courage in the face of perilous circumstances, acting selflessly and without hesitation to render lifesaving aid to their fellow Americans. Simply put, they were, in the words of the Coast Guard motto, ``Semper Paratus''--``Always Ready.'' I want to extend my congratulations to these three officers, Petty Officers Kaczmarek, Leon, and Worden, and to all of the recipients of this year's DHS Valor awards. These devoted public servants are an inspiration for me, and I think for all of us, and I encourage my colleagues to learn more about their heroic stories. Joscelyn Greenwell For the 42,000 Active-Duty Coast Guard men and women, their mission may take them to ports and waterways across our country and around the globe. For Petty Officer Joscelyn Greenwell, her service with the Coast Guard has taken her from California to Hawaii to my home State of Delaware. Originally from Cape Canaveral, FL, Petty Officer Greenwell, pictured here to my left, has served our country for over 7 years at three different Coast Guard units and stations. She first spent 3 years on the high endurance cutter Hamilton and home ported in San Diego, CA. While aboard the Coast Guard cutter Hamilton, Petty Officer Greenwell was one of our many brave servicemembers assigned to provide disaster relief following the catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake, which we all remember. In Haiti, Petty Officer Greenwell and her fellow crew members transported clean drinking water and other resources to the island to save lives. She received a Unit Commendation award for her outstanding efforts in that mission. After her time in San Diego, Petty Officer Greenwell spent 2 years aboard the patrol boat Galveston Island, home ported in Honolulu, HI. Today Petty Officer Greenwell calls Lewes, DE, her home and now serves at the U.S. Coast Guard Station Indian River Inlet in Rehoboth Beach, DE. With summer in full swing, Delawareans and people from across the country--actually, from around the world--are flocking to our Nation's pristine five-star beaches. Thankfully, day and night, Petty Officer Greenwell and her crew stand diligent watch over parts of Delaware Bay, Rehoboth Bay, Indian River Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. We Delawareans can rest assured that Petty Officer Greenwell and her unit stand ready to answer our call, if ever we need their assistance. According to her superiors, Petty Officer Greenwell takes ownership of her responsibilities and is committed to the safety of the public. Her colleagues say that she always goes above and beyond what is expected of her. For example, in addition to her usual responsibilities, Petty Officer Greenwell received her certification as a boat operator, or coxswain, in just 1 year--a process that normally takes about a year and a half. Her colleagues say that she demonstrated an outstanding level of skill and professionalism throughout the rigorous certification process. She has also served as a mentor to junior personnel and assisted multiple shipmates in receiving their qualifications as watch standers, boat crew members, boarding team members, and as coxswains. Petty Officer Greenwell's commitment to her team and the public she serves every day exemplifies--truly exemplifies--the Coast Guard's core values of honor, respect, and devotion to duty. Petty Officer Greenwell, I just want you to know tonight that your service to our Nation has taken you around the world, and I know you will continue to go far--both literally and figuratively--in all your endeavors. Every day, you help to ensure the safety of your fellow Americans and the security of our Nation. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for your tireless dedication, your invaluable service to the State and the Nation that we call home, and as we say in the Navy, ``Bravo Zulu.'' Finally, to the thousands of brave men and women across the Department of Homeland Security who dedicate their lives to serving and protecting America and Americans, please know that what you do every day is important. I hope it fills your work with meaning and your life with happiness. On behalf of the people we all serve together, thank you for your service. Sometimes we ask people--whether the Coast Guard or Department of Homeland Security, any part of the Federal Government--what they would like. Sometimes people say they would like more money, they would like more of this, or they would like more of that. What more than half the people say, though, is, I would just like to be thanked. So to all the people I mentioned tonight and those with whom they serve at the Department of Homeland Security, thank you, and God bless you. I especially thank my colleague from Ohio for his generosity and kindness tonight. To the leader, good work. ``Bravo Zulu'' on the good work done here this week. I yield the floor.