Richard Durbin

Mr. DURBIN

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, it is time for the Senate and the U.S. Department of Education to get serious about the student loan crisis in America. This is a crisis in Illinois. It is a crisis in Iowa, in Nevada. You pick the State. Student loan debt is now a larger debt in the United States than credit card debt. Add up all of the debt that Americans owe on credit cards, and it will not reach the amount of student loan debt that is carried by students and their families. More than 44 million Americans have student loan debt. The total amount is $1.5 trillion. As I mentioned, it is larger than America's cumulative credit card debt--second only to the mortgages that we owe on our homes across the United States. An American who graduated from college in 2015, with a 4-year degree, owed an average of $30,100. That debt is often much higher for many Americans if they decide to go on to graduate school or if they are unfortunate attendees at the for-profit colleges and universities. Across the United States, there are many of these for-profit institutions. You should remember them. It is 9 percent of young people who come out of high school who end up at for-profit colleges and universities, while 33 percent of all of the college students who default on student loans come out of the same schools--for-profit colleges. This is 9 percent and 33 percent. Why? It is that they are so darned expensive--dramatically more expensive than are community colleges or other universities. No. 2, they don't care if you finish. They would just as soon you didn't. No. 3, if you finish, you get a worthless diploma and can't find a job. So there you are, stuck with your debt. Yet this is about student loans in general, not just about for-profit victims. I hear from students, young and old, who have had to forgo homeownership and hold off starting families because of their massive student loan debts. Increasingly, I have been hearing from parents and grandparents who, in gestures of goodwill and kindness, cosign on the loans on behalf of those children or grandchildren who are students. Guess what. Grandma and Mom are now trying to pay off that student loan debt because the student can't. Earlier this year, Chairman Jerome Powell of the Federal Reserve said the student debt crisis absolutely could hold back economic growth in America--the student loan crisis. We need to take action on it. We rarely even try, but today I am going to try. Earlier this year, in March, I tried to offer an amendment on the Senate floor to help student borrowers. At that time, the Senate had a bill up to provide regulatory relief--breaks--to banks. I thought it was only fair that the Senate also consider taking a look at the student debt crisis. I was blocked from getting a vote on my amendment. I am not giving up. I am filing an amendment today to the Financial Services and General Government bill that is part of this appropriations package pending on the floor of the Senate. My amendment deals with an important part of the student loan problem--the treatment of student loans in bankruptcy. If you borrow money for a vacation house, lose your job, and have no money, you file bankruptcy, and your mortgage is discharged. If you borrow money for a car, and you can't pay off the car--you lose your job--you file for bankruptcy, and your auto loan is discharged. How about a boat? If you take out a loan to buy a boat and file for bankruptcy, it is discharged. I will tell you that there are only a handful of things you can borrow money for that you cannot discharge in bankruptcy no matter how bad things get, and one of them is student loans. Currently, most types of debts can be discharged in bankruptcy but not student loans. Up until 1976, all student loans were fully discharged in bankruptcy, but since then, the law has been changed. Now if you have student debt, you are going to carry it to the grave. You cannot discharge it in bankruptcy. In 1998, Congress determined that Federal student loans would be nondischargeable in bankruptcy unless the borrower could demonstrate that he or she faced an ``undue hardship''--that is a quote, ``undue hardship.'' But we didn't define it; we left it up to the courts. That is a problem. Most students don't even try to pursue the undue hardship exception because of the difficulty and expense of meeting the standard of proving undue hardship in bankruptcy court. Listen to what the Wall Street Journal said last month. It found that in 2017, only 473 student loan borrowers in the United States out of 44 million asked for relief from their student debt in bankruptcy--473 out of 44 million. The Journal found only 16 bankruptcy cases that year where a judge actually ruled on student loan debt--16 cases out of 44 million borrowers--and in only 3 of those cases did the judge cancel the debt. What do you think your odds are in taking your student loan debt to bankruptcy court when 3 out of 473--out of 44 million--actually had their debt discharged? A big reason the undue hardship path is difficult for student borrowers is because the Department of Education contracts out the collection of the debt to companies like Educational Credit Management Corporation. This is a student loan guaranty agency that collects on defaulted Federal student loans. This company is notorious for aggressively challenging and appealing borrower claims of undue hardship in bankruptcy court because it doesn't want to see the loans discharged. So many students don't even try to fight them because they know they are going to lose. Here is what my amendment does. My amendment would bar the use of Federal funds to pay contractors, such as the one I named, to contest undue hardship claims in bankruptcy court when the claims are brought by specific categories of borrowers who face severe undue hardship. Let me tell you the categories I am trying to protect. These are people who are deeply in debt with student loans and are coming to court asking for relief from their student loans. You tell me whether you think these Americans deserve a break when they go to bankruptcy court on their student loans. The first category is veterans who have been deemed unemployable because of a service-connected disability; No. 2, family caregivers of a veteran or an elderly or disabled family member; No. 3, people who are receiving Social Security disability or whose only income is Social Security; and No. 4, borrowers who have finished school but have spent at least 5 years with an income of less than $24,000 a year. Those are the four categories. Wouldn't you agree that you would start with groups just like these and say: Give them a break. This disabled veteran has reached a point where he can't pay back this loan. Don't have these agencies hounding this poor fellow for the rest of his life. By stopping these Federal loan guaranty agencies from contesting and litigating these undue hardship claims in bankruptcy court, we can at least give these hard-hit student borrowers a chance to seek an undue hardship discharge in bankruptcy. My amendment also includes a provision preventing Federal funds from being provided to a for-profit college if the college receives more than 85 percent of its revenue from Federal sources, including the Department of Veterans Affairs GI bill and Department of Defense tuition assistance funds. Currently, for-profit colleges are able to receive 90 percent of their revenue from Federal sources--the most heavily subsidized, private, for-profit companies in America. They can add the GI bill in on top of it, to add insult to injury. It makes no sense. It incentivizes for-profit colleges to aggressively recruit veterans and servicemembers in order to get extra money from the Federal Government and provide very little in return. Not only would this provision help protect students, it would result in long-term cost savings to the Federal Government. I say to my colleagues, I bet you have all given a speech on student loans. Haven't we all? When young people come in, burdened with debt, and say ``I don't know what to do with myself. I can't pay off this debt. I can't even buy a car. I am living in my parents' basement. I thought I was supposed to be a college graduate with a big life ahead of me. What are you going to do about it, Senator?'' if you say ``Well, I wish there were something we could do,'' you will get your chance today. There is something you can do. It is the amendment I am offering. This issue of student loan debt is challenging. Let's not run away from it. Let's face it honestly. Let's give at least these four groups, including disabled veterans and the caregivers who watch them, an opportunity to get their student loans discharged so they can get on with their lives. I am going to keep at this and keep raising this issue until we get the positive change the students and their families deserve. I yield.

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I would like to ask the Senator from Hawaii a question through the Chair. When the Senator is referring to the number of children who are currently forcibly separated from their parents by our government, is the Senator referring to the 2,551 children between the ages of 5 and 17 who were reported by this administration as of this past Monday?

Mr. DURBIN. Is the Senator referring to the fact that 1,634 families are possibly eligible for reunification, according to this administration?

Mr. DURBIN. And that leaves 917 families with children forcibly separated by our government from their parents, who, according to this administration, may not be eligible for reunification?

Mr. DURBIN. We are also told there are some 463 parents who are ``not in the United States''--children taken away from them, and they have been sent out of the United States?

Mr. DURBIN. Incidentally, the administration reported 37 children in its custody who have not been matched with a parent?

Mr. DURBIN. And we are being asked to reduce the standards of care for these children by this unanimous consent request?

Mr. DURBIN. I thank the Senator from Hawaii.

Mr. DURBIN. I object.

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I have a unanimous consent request.

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I am making clear to my friend from North Carolina, as well as to the other Members on the floor, that I would like to have this colloquy. I would like to make a formal unanimous consent request, and then we can enter into debate or colloquy, as the Chair would allow, if I may proceed. I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 3263 introduced earlier today; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate. This is a bill which embodies the Keep Families Together legislation by Senator Feinstein, A Fair Day in Court for Kids Act by Senator Hirono, and additional measures which I will then describe later when we go to colloquy and debate.

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I would like there to be some exchange, something even perilously close to a debate on the issue. I would be happy if the Senator would reframe his unanimous consent request for that purpose, and I would be happy to agree to it under those circumstances.

Mr. DURBIN. I object to the original unanimous consent request.

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, let me try to give this some perspective. Let me start with something I hope we all agree on. There are three things about immigration that Democrats and Republicans can agree on. Let's see if we can say those three things and all agree. We need border security in the United States. We cannot have open borders; we need border security. No. 2, if someone coming into America is dangerous, we don't want them here, and if there is someone undocumented in America who is dangerous, we want them to leave. Those two things I think both parties can agree on. The third thing really gets to the heart of it. We need comprehensive immigration reform. It is not a matter of solving the issue of the day; it is a matter of looking at all of our immigration laws and making them work. The Senator from North Carolina has probably heard what I have heard from our friends in agriculture. Whether it is ranching or dairy or picking fruit, they need migrant labor. Americans are many not stepping up to take that backbreaking work, and they need help. That is one example. We need comprehensive immigration reform. Let's take a look at the whole package. I spent 6 months with Senators John McCain, Chuck Schumer--four Democrats, four Republicans. We wrote a comprehensive immigration reform bill. From start to finish, it was a bipartisan bill. It passed on the floor of the Senate with 68 votes 5 years ago, and the Republicans refused to consider it in the House of Representatives. We still need comprehensive immigration reform. We ought to be working on that together. We ought to take that bill, reintroduce that bill, and make that our starting point. The last point I want to make is about the current issue we face. Let's put this issue into perspective. First, I am sorry, but I disagree with my friend from North Carolina and the Senator from Texas, who say that this is our job to fix or, as the Senator from Texas said, we created this problem in Congress. That is not true. The zero-tolerance policy that has led us to this moment of debate was created by President Trump, Attorney General Sessions, Stephen Miller, and others. It went into effect in April. We decided then, as official policy stated by the United States, that we would physically, forcibly separate children from their parents. We argued that they are all criminals if they show up at the border. That is not the case. Some people legitimately come to our borders seeking asylum status. They are not criminals, per se, and to treat them as such and take their kids away is unwarranted. But that was our policy. So 3,000 children were forcibly removed from their parents starting in April, and what happened next? These children were sent off into the system. The parents were sometimes held, sometimes tried, sometimes deported, and there was a furor that rose across the United States. People said: What are we doing? Why did we take that nursing child away from the mother? Why did we take that little toddler away from his father? What are we doing here? What is our goal? The opposition from both political parties--Republicans and Democrats--got so intense that this President did something he almost never does. He reversed his position. He said: We are not doing the family separation policy anymore. That is the end of it. But it wasn't soon enough. There were 3,000 kids at that point separated from their parents and spread across the United States. There was one I knew of in Chicago. A woman from the Congo was being held in California. Her 6-year-old daughter had been sent to Chicago. That is how I learned about the case. There are cases like that all over the United States. Then a Federal judge stepped in. We are here today because that Federal judge said: Enough--we want these parents reunited with their kids now. He set some deadlines. Four weeks ago, he said: All kids under the age of 5 need to be reunited with the parents they were taken away from. He set that goal with a deadline of 2 weeks ago. Our government identified only 103 out of the 3,000 who were under the age of 5, and they reunited fewer than 60 of them. As for the rest of them, it is uncertain what is going to happen to those kids under the age of 5 who were separated from their parents. Now there is a vast number beyond that; 2,500-plus kids are out there, and this judge from San Diego stated that as of tomorrow, July 26, all of those kids are to be reunited with their parents too. Guess what. We are in a position where that is not going to happen. It physically can't happen. Our government can't do it. Here is the heartbreaking secret that we now know: Our government separated these children from their parents without any means of reuniting them, without keeping information about where the parents were going to be, where the children are going to be when the day would come that the mother would get her baby back in her arms. We have no process for that. That, to me, is inexcusable and disgraceful. If you order a package on Amazon this afternoon, they give you a tracking number. Tomorrow, if you want to know where it is, you go to Amazon, put in the tracking number, and you will know where your package is. We sent infants, toddlers, and young kids all across the United States without a tracking number, and now we are trying desperately to reunite them. As I mentioned earlier to Senator Hirono, there are 37 kids out there about whom this government has admitted: We don't know where the parents are. We can't put this back together again. What are we going to do with these kids? That is why we are on the floor to talk about this current crisis. It wasn't a crisis created by Congress. It was created by the Trump administration with a zero tolerance policy. Attorney General Sessions and others were so proud of it, as they took the kids away from the parents, and they didn't keep records. They tossed these infants, toddlers, and children out into the bureaucratic sea and said: Start swimming or sink. I met some of these kids in Chicago. There were 10 of them. Kids will be kids. They looked like regular kids sitting around the table. Two little girls came in, and I thought at first they were twins because their hair was identical and they were about the same size. When I looked more closely, I saw that they weren't. We asked in Spanish: Are you sisters? The little girl said: No, amigas. No, we are friends. These two little girls had attached themselves to one another. One was from Honduras and one was from Chiapas, Mexico. They were holding on for dear life to one another's hand as they walked around this place because that was their connection; that was all they had to hang on to. They were taken away from their parents. I don't know what happened to those two little girls. As a grandfather of 6-year-old twins, I looked at those little girls and thought, I know kids just like them, and I love them to pieces. I can't imagine being physically, forcibly separated away from those kids by any government. That is what we have done. So I say to the Senator from North Carolina, let's find some things we can agree on. Let me suggest some things. Let's increase the number of immigration judges. Let's do it on a merit basis so that we can get professional people who know what they are doing--not political appointments. Secondly, let's say that every child who appears in an administrative hearing is going to have an attorney next to them. It is embarrassing to me as an American to think of a 6-year-old, 10-year-old, or 12-year- old standing before an administrative judge with an interpreter, trying to figure out what is about to happen to them. We are better than that in America. We ought to make sure we are going to do much better than that in America. Beyond that, we have to talk about what we do that is humane--that follows the Flores decision. Just wiping it away--there are no standards for humane treatment for those kids. We have to have standards. We have to make sure that they will be placed in areas we can be proud of, that they will be treated fairly, humanely, in the right way, which I am sure you want and I want too. Those are things we can work on. Several weeks ago, we met and sent a list of questions to the administration to start our bipartisan conversation. They never got back to us. I think it has been a month now. I think it is time. If you want to rekindle this bipartisan conversation, count me in, but let's do it with the information, and let's try to do it with a common purpose. The last point I will make is this. If you want to make sure that somebody shows up at a hearing, 95 percent of those who are supposed to show up for these hearings do show up if you do one of three things. If you provide them with an attorney who gives them advice, they will come back for the hearing. If you provide them with counseling services--for example, programs that have been run by the Lutheran family services or the Catholic family services--they will show up for the hearing. Or if you provide, in some cases, an ankle monitor, they will come back for a hearing. So it isn't a question of whether they are going to be lost in the system. We know this works. Let's make use of it. It is a heck of a lot more humane than separating families by thousands of miles. I yield the floor.

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Illinois (Ms. Duckworth) is necessarily absent.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the joint resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the joint resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, Senator Wicker of Mississippi and I have a bipartisan amendment that means a lot to thousands of people who use Amtrak. It has been 10 years since we asked the inspector general of Amtrak to do a study of on-time performance. On-time performance has a direct impact on the number of people who ride on Amtrak trains, how frequently they use them, and how much they rely upon them. There is a problem. Amtrak owns very few railway tracks in America. They share the tracks with freight trains, and the freight trains have been pushing ahead of them and making the Amtrak trains wait. How long did they wait? Between 2016 and 2017, in 1 year, there was 17,000 hours of delay on Amtrak trains directly attributable to freight trains that didn't yield the way to the Amtrak trains. That is just one factor. Senator Wicker and I have asked the inspector general to do a report on on-time performance that we can consider in making Amtrak more efficient, more profitable, and more popular with Americans. I hope our colleagues will support our bipartisan amendment.

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

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, you couldn't follow this President's tweets with a roadmap, a GPS, a flashlight, and a program. It is impossible to understand the policy of this administration for this country, and when you try to follow his actions instead of his words, it is even more confusing. Over the past few weeks, President Trump's conduct when it comes to foreign policy has been head-spinning, even for him. To recap, he insulted our best allies of 70 years and then turned around and lobbied for Russia at a recent G7 meeting and again bullied our key allies at a summit on NATO. He then met privately with Russian President Putin and then held a press conference with him in which President Trump blamed America and defended Putin's words over the expertise of his own government intelligence agencies. Keep in mind that he also inexplicably met privately with President Putin at the G20 summit in Hamburg last year--an event which he initially denied. Why all these private meetings between President Trump and President Putin? Why wouldn't he let his Secretary of State sit in the room? Why wouldn't he let his National Security Advisor witness the conversation? I don't know the answer to these questions, and neither does America. Then the President tried to backpedal from some of his most outrageous statements. At the end of the day, after trying that and deciding it wasn't worth the effort, he backed around again and decided to side with President Putin. It is impossible to keep track of where this President has been or is going. President Trump then questioned the bedrock NATO alliance, asking why the United States should come to the defense of one of its members. Incidentally, that is the heart and soul of the NATO alliance--article 5: We stand together. When the United States was attacked on 9/11, it was the NATO alliance that stood with us when we struck back at Afghanistan and al-Qaida. They stood by us because of article 5, the very basis of the NATO alliance, which this President has questioned. He said that no U.S. President has been harder on Russia than President Trump. He argued: ``I think President Putin knows that better than anybody.'' Then he said he wanted to invite President Putin to the United States as his special personal guest. Go figure. As President Trump weakens a great military alliance like NATO, bullies our allies of seven decades, cozies up to a foreign dictator, and talks in circles about his bizarre tweets and actions, what has been the priority of the Republican Party on the floor of the Senate since the summit--the disastrous summit--at Helsinki? Well, the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, has not spoken on the Senate floor on this issue since the Helsinki summit, not even one time. Why aren't we urgently moving legislation to protect America's membership in NATO, ensure the integrity of our upcoming election, and fully implement last year's Russian sanctions bill? I can't answer that. I don't think the Republican leader can answer it either. Those are national security priorities. Maybe it isn't surprising because when Senator McConnell was told about the Russian intervention in our last 2016 election by the top intelligence officials of the U.S. Government and asked to make a bipartisan statement condemning it, he declined. Why would a congressional leader not want to join in a bipartisan effort to warn a foreign power to stop its attack on democracy? Why the silence on this floor, on that side of the aisle, since the Helsinki summit conference? There is not absolute silence. I will commend my ailing but respected and often-quoted colleague John McCain in Arizona, who sends messages from his home to this Chamber, to the U.S. Senate. What did he call the Helsinki summit? ``[O]ne of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.'' John McCain has never been one to mince words. I have to say that quote hit the nail on the head. I want to put another word in here. Every time I hear politicians and all the smartest people on Earth on television referring to what happened in the 2016 election as the Russians meddling in our election--you heard that term, ``meddling'' in our election? If a seasoned criminal broke into your home to case it for a later burglary, would you say that burglar was just meddling? No. ``Breaking and entering'' might be the proper term. That is what happened with the Russians in the 2016 U.S. election. They broke and entered our election system across the United States. The reason I know that, one of the targets happened to be my home State of Illinois. They found a way to sneak into the computers of the Illinois State Board of Elections and, according to the Special Counsel's recent indictment, stole information related to approximately one-half million voters in my State of Illinois. The State discovered it and sent out warnings to voters whose registration data may have been accessed. Was that meddling? Not in Illinois. Those were fighting words. That was a cyber attack by the Russians on the State of Illinois Board of Elections, and they followed up by trying to hit 20 other States as well. Meddling? Give me a break. This is a cyber act of war by the Russians, and our intelligence officials of the Trump administration-- like Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence--have warned us, the red lights are blinking again. They are coming back. What are we doing about it? Nothing. There will be a chance for my Republican colleagues to join the Democrats in a bipartisan effort to take this seriously before it is too late. What do we have left, 105 days until the election? It is not much time. The question is whether we will do something to try to protect our election system. Every Member of this Chamber will have an opportunity to vote to ensure that State and local election officials have the resources to stop any other effort by the Russians to interfere in our election. Earlier this year, we came together and passed a bill--a bipartisan bill--that provided $380 million in fiscal year 2018 omnibus spending for States to modernize and secure their election systems. Funding gave the States flexibility to tackle the most critical priorities: replacing outdated voting machines, for example, that have no paper trail, updating election computer systems to address cyber vulnerabilities. The Election Assistance Commission reports that 55 different entities, including all the States and territories, have requested funding from this grant program. That was an important first step. It was bipartisan. It should be done. It was done, but it is not enough. After the 2000 election, and months of news coverage about hanging chads and butterfly ballots, Congress passed a Help America Vote Act to address the outdated election infrastructure in America. We authorized $3.8 billion to respond to this issue. A few months ago, we authorized one-tenth of that to respond to the Russian threat. We need to respond to that threat in a much more robust manner. I received a memo from our election authorities in Illinois specifying how they plan to spend their grant funds and what they need to do to be more certain that their election operations and machinery are intact, and virtually every State can provide me with a similar memo. We need to respond to this threat in a meaningful, robust manner. We know full well in Illinois what the Russians could have done to us. If they had taken 500,000 voter registration records and simply changed one number in the street address of each voter, let me tell you what would have happened. When I turned up to vote in Springfield, IL, and listed my home address, they would have said: No, that address doesn't match our records. You can vote a provisional ballot if you wish. We will look into it later. That could have happened thousands of times. Thank goodness it didn't, but that is the extent of our vulnerability. It is a suggestion of what we might face again from the Russians, according to our own Intelligence agencies. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security notified election officials in 20 other States that Russians attempted to hack into their systems, including Texas, Iowa, and Florida--Mr. President, your home State of Arizona--Oklahoma, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Alaska, Colorado, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Ohio. We have to make sure we are prepared for future attacks on our democracy. That is why I have joined Senator Leahy--who is on the floor with me today--and Senator Klobuchar, preparing an amendment to the appropriations legislation we are going to consider, offering an additional $250 million in election security grants to our States. When a similar amendment was offered at a committee markup last month, we heard it was too early to talk about additional funding; we need to wait and see how the $380 million earlier appropriated would be spent. We know the answer. At a recent Senate Rules Committee hearing, Cook County Director of Elections Noah Praetz explained that though the $380 million was greatly appreciated, more resources are desperately needed. He said: ``Given the costs of regular technology refreshes and support for human resources with cyber capacity, the needed investment is very large.'' Last week, when asked if the $380 million was enough to address the problem, the President of the National Association of Secretaries of State said: ``[N]o, to put it bluntly . . . Congress needs to come up with some kind of a funding mechanism that is sustainable and year-in, year-out, not once every 10 years.'' Just yesterday, a bipartisan group of State attorneys general asked Congress for increased funding because many States lack the resources and tools they need to protect their polling places. I urge the adoption of the Leahy-Klobuchar amendment. It is also time for the majority to heed former Senator Bill Frist's sage advice when he wrote recently in the Washington Post: ``[P]atriotism should always take priority over party.'' I say to the Presiding Officer, I know you know that, personally, and you have proven it. Senator Frist went on to say that ``staying silent is no longer an option.'' I yield the floor.

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, it is interesting--I listened to my colleague from Wisconsin, which is my neighboring State, talk about her personal and family experience with healthcare. I think every one of us has a story--it is our own personal story--or knows somebody in our family who has a medical history, tells a story of whether they had the proper care at the proper time, whether the family could afford it. And then there is the big question: Can you buy health insurance if you have a child with diabetes, if you have a wife who is suffering from cancer and survived? Can you buy health insurance? The interesting thing--I bet the Senator found this because I know she is traveling all over her State of Wisconsin--this issue doesn't go away because people's worry over it doesn't go away. They are worried about whether they can afford to buy good health insurance. They are worried about whether they can afford to buy prescription drugs. It is that insecurity, that economic insecurity about healthcare that really continues to make this the biggest issue year in, year out in America. I thank my colleague from Wisconsin for telling her story and for really giving my speech. So I am going to condense it and just say a few things she might not have touched on. And I thank her for her contribution earlier today. It happened in my life at a very early age. My wife and I got married. I was in law school. God sent us a beautiful little girl, and she had a very serious medical problem. We were living here in Washington, DC, and didn't have health insurance. I want to tell you that you have never felt more helpless in your life than to be a new father with that brand-new baby who desperately needs medical care and not have health insurance. I will never forget it as long as I live. I lived in such fear from that point forward of not having health insurance coverage that I did crazy things--getting health insurance at two different places of employment just to make sure I never lost it. It scared me that much, and I still remember that fear. I wonder if the people who are debating this issue about the Affordable Care Act ever lived through it themselves, because if they did, they wouldn't be standing here saying that we can do away with the Affordable Care Act. We know what happens if you eliminate the Affordable Care Act. Millions of Americans lose their health insurance. Millions of Americans find health insurance not affordable. Millions of Americans are desperate for protection, no longer have it, and can't access the most basic, quality healthcare that every American should expect. We had this debate. A new President came in and said: The first thing I am going to do is to get rid of ObamaCare, to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Well, the obvious question was this: Could he do it? It looked like he might be able to. The Republicans controlled the House and the Senate, and when they were in the majority with a Democratic President, at least on 50 or 60 different occasions, the House Republicans voted to abolish ObamaCare. It was pointless because the Senate wasn't going to take it up, and the President would never sign that bill into law, but you knew what the sentiment was. We are getting rid of it. We are getting rid of it. We heard about that year after year. We passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and for year after year all the Republicans could say was this: Get rid of it. Get rid of it. Then came that moment when, figuratively, the dog caught the bus, and they had an opportunity to present on the floor of the Senate an alternative. What is it that you want to replace the Affordable Care Act with? We said to our Republican friends: You are elected to this body as legislators. Let's see your legislation. It turns out that they didn't have any. They just wanted to make sure ObamaCare was gone, but they couldn't find a replacement, and they couldn't answer the basic question as to how they would provide health insurance--or affordable health insurance--for the millions of people who would lose coverage. I remember the night--it was early in the morning it was--when we had the vote--the vote--on whether to eliminate ObamaCare. Two Republican Senators had already voted with us, but the critical third vote walked in that door, and his name was John McCain. He stood in that well and give a ``no'' sign with his thumb, and that was it. The Affordable Care Act lived for another day. Thank goodness he did it. Thank goodness he and two of his colleagues had the courage to do it, to stand up and say: If you can't replace ObamaCare with something better, for goodness' sake, stick with it, fix it. That didn't happen. After that vote, there was a determined effort at every level of the Trump administration to do away with ObamaCare. If they couldn't kill it on the floor of the Senate, they were going to kill it in many different ways. They limited the period of time when you signed up to renew your health insurance. They wanted to have fewer and fewer days available, hoping fewer and fewer people would take advantage of it. They eliminated the navigators, the advisers who help people pick the right health insurance plan. They didn't want to give advice. They closed down the telephones to the agencies, where people would call saying: Well, what is my right under the Affordable Care Act? They did everything they could think of to eliminate ObamaCare and make it more difficult for people to sign up for it, but still people signed up. Many people realized it was their only chance--their only chance--to get health insurance. The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are determined to this day to get rid of it, and they have a new approach. If they can't kill it outright in the Senate and they can't kill it by President Trump's tweets, they are going to kill it in court. Here is what they decided to do. Twenty attorneys general, starting with Texas--and I see my friend from Texas on the floor; the leading attorney general is from Texas--filed a lawsuit. Here is what they said. It is unconstitutional to say that you cannot discriminate against people because they have preexisting conditions. Now, those are three negative words. So let me try to translate this Helsinki style into something you might understand. What they basically said is this: We don't believe the Constitution can stop an insurance company from discriminating against people with a medical history, and we are going to court to prove it. And they have, with the support of the Trump administration. They are trying to find a way to eliminate the protection of people with preexisting conditions so that they can buy affordable quality health insurance. What an amazing mission that is--that these attorneys general and this administration want to find a way to deny health insurance coverage to millions of Americans or make it so expensive that they could never afford it. What are they thinking? Don't they represent the same flesh-and-blood Americans as everyone else? Don't they represent families, as I do, and all of us do, who have someone in their family with a medical history? I guess a third of American families qualify for that. Yet they want to say that those people should be discriminated against. Why? Because of the misfortune they had of being born with a congenital birth defect or the problem they had because they conquered cancer but always worry about its coming back. These are the things that my Republican friends say: Well, that is the way it goes. Good luck in the insurance market. We are not going to protect you. They say what it is all about is choice. It is pretty easy to have good choices in life when you are healthy or wealthy. But if you don't fit in those two categories, your choices are extremely limited. People find themselves with only bad choices if they are not healthy or wealthy and they don't have the protection of the law. They find health insurance premiums they cannot afford. When they find a premium they can afford and start to look at the health insurance policy, it turns out that it doesn't cover much. They also find themselves in positions where, as I mentioned earlier, someone in the family has a medical history. The wife has a medical history and you can't buy a family plan that you can afford for the rest of the family. That is the reality of the world the Republicans envision us moving to. Oh, it may be some great economic market model, but it doesn't work in reality--not in the reality of people who are born with illnesses they have no control over and who spend their lives fighting them and need a helping hand. The Affordable Care Act gave them that helping hand. The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have been determined from the beginning to put an end to this protection, to eliminate health insurance for more and more Americans, and to make it unaffordable for so many families. Is that why they ran for Congress? Is that why they ran for the Senate--to go home and say: Well, sorry folks, but because of my principles, you don't get health insurance. You can't afford the health insurance being offered to you, or you can buy a junk policy that just will not be there when you need it. Is that what America is all about? This is interesting to me, and I will close with this. The Chicago Medical Society represents the doctors in the greater Chicagoland area. I have come to know it. It is one of the best medical associations in our State. It is more progressive than most and more thoughtful than most. I really salute them time and again. They did a poll of their members, and they asked them: Where do you think this is going? Well, first they said: We believe that people have a right to quality, affordable healthcare--these are doctors--a right to quality, affordable healthcare. Second, they said there are programs that work, like Medicare, programs that people trust. The premise behind Medicare is very basic. If you are of an eligible age, you get health insurance. We make sure of it. We guarantee to you that you are going to get quality care through a government-run insurance program. There are a lot of Republicans who would like to see Medicare and Medicaid go away, too, but America wouldn't. America believes in it. I believe in the principle behind both of those plans-- that, as Americans, we should care for one another, give each and every family a chance, and make certain that, at the end of the day, healthcare is not just a privilege for those who happen to be wealthy. I yield the floor.

Mr. DURBIN

Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Brown), is necessarily absent.