Al Franken

Mr. FRANKEN

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. FRANKEN. Madam President, I rise today to join my colleagues in calling on the Senate to pass an extension of emergency unemployment insurance. I am deeply disappointed and frustrated that millions of hard-working Americans are now wondering how they will put food on their family's table and a roof over their heads because Washington has been unable to extend critical unemployment insurance. A few weeks ago we had a bipartisan vote to move forward with debate on the extension of what is called emergency unemployment compensation. I hope we can build on that vote and move forward as quickly as possible to restore this vital lifeline before more Americans who have worked hard and followed the rules their entire lives slip from middle class into poverty. The expiration of emergency unemployment insurance is an urgent problem for tens of thousands of Minnesotans and for millions of Americans. At the end of this past year, unemployment insurance expired for 1.3 million Americans, including 8,500 Minnesotans. If we don't renew that unemployment insurance over the next year, this lifeline will run out for another 3.6 million Americans, including 65,500 Minnesotans. These are real people. These are fathers and mothers. They are people whose families and local communities are struggling. As I have traveled around Minnesota, I have had the chance to speak with many of the Minnesotans who are affected by the expiration of unemployment insurance. It is not the fault of these people or these workers who have lost their jobs. Very often, these workers were just unlucky enough to be working in the wrong sector of the economy at the wrong time. Sometimes they were from communities that lost a large employer. A few weeks ago I held a roundtable with unemployed workers who have been helped by unemployment insurance. These are long-term unemployed. There were also some workforce professionals who are helping these folks and others find jobs in today's recovering economy. The unemployed women I spoke with--Ann, Amy, and Robin--had been working and paying taxes for unemployment insurance for decades. One of them is in her forties, a mom with two kids, one a 3-year-old. The other two women are older workers, one in her fifties, the other in her early sixties. The one in her fifties was a meeting planner. When the recession hit, businesses cut costs by holding fewer meetings, and she couldn't find a job in her field but is trying to find a job in any field. These women had all been skilling up, getting the skills they could to try to get an office job and be more conversant in Excel or some computer program. All the Minnesotans I have spoken with have been working hard to find jobs, but they face a tough situation in our economy. In November the Labor Department reported that for every job opening there are almost three people seeking jobs. That doesn't mean you will get a job if you apply for three jobs. A few weeks ago a job counselor in Minnesota told me that there are often hundreds of applicants for every good job posting and that these jobs are often filled internally. I am glad businesses are hiring from within or promoting from within, but it is stories such as these that highlight why we need emergency unemployment--to help those workers who were working in a sector that has experienced a major downturn or live in a community where it is particularly hard to find a job and particularly if they are of a certain age. One of the women I met at the roundtable, Ann from Eden Prairie, had also written me. What she told me really illustrates the situation so many Minnesotans are facing. Ann wrote: I have been extremely active in my job search, but have regrettably not found new employment. My Minnesota Unemployment Insurance ran out last week and I applied for Federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation just this past week . . . I ask you to please ask yourself what you would do to provide for your family. I have a 9 year old daughter . . . and a 3 year old son. I am the sole provider for my family . . . I am not looking for a handout, nor do I believe that staying on unemployment insurance is in my best interest. But the $483 a week it provides will at least allow me to make my mortgage payment. Ann is remarkably articulate. She volunteers at her son's school, partly because she wants to be involved in her son's life but also to network. One of the counselors there said: The hardest job there is is looking for a job. Minnesotans such as Ann and the millions of Americans around the country in the same situation have worked for decades. Every one of these women had worked and been paying into unemployment insurance for decades. They don't deserve to be punished or to lose their homes because they are unable to find a job within 26 weeks. Often, they need unemployment insurance so they can put gas in the car to look for a job or so they can keep their phone. The economy is recovering, but things are still tough for many people. Now is not the time to cut off unemployment insurance. Not only is unemployment still above average, but the long-term unemployed-- workers who have been looking for work for at least 6 months--make up 37 percent of today's unemployed. Congress has never allowed extended unemployment insurance to expire when the long-term unemployment rate is as high as it is today. Today the 2.5-percent long-term unemployment rate is nearly double the level it was when previous emergency benefits were allowed to expire, and the current unemployment rate of 6.7 percent is 1.1 percentage points higher than when George W. Bush signed the current round of emergency unemployment compensation into law. We know the unemployment crisis is not over. It remains a significant issue for workers, especially older workers, who experience longer periods of unemployment than younger workers when they lose their jobs. Extending unemployment insurance also makes economic sense. In 2011 the Congressional Budget Office stated that aid to the unemployed is among the policies with ``the largest effects on output and employment per dollar of budgetary costs.'' CBO estimates that extending benefits through 2014 would help expand the economy and contribute to the creation of an additional 200,000 jobs. The Council of Economic Advisers estimates that without a full-year extension, the economy will generate 240,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2014. Unemployment insurance has been shown to help people stay in the workforce, allowing them to contribute to our economic recovery rather than slip into poverty. The Census Bureau estimates that unemployment benefits have kept 2.5 million people who are trying to stay in the workforce out of poverty in 2012 alone and have kept 11 million unemployed workers out of poverty since 2008. Extending unemployment insurance for those who need it is far from the only thing we should be doing to help people get back to work. I have spoken many times about one of my highest priorities in this area--addressing the skills gap by supporting workforce training partnerships between businesses and community and technical colleges. There are other things we should be doing, such as rebuilding our infrastructure. But it would be a tremendous mistake to fail to renew the unemployment insurance that has lapsed. People such as Ann and Robin and all those I meet around the State of Minnesota, and the millions of others around the country, when they are looking really hard for work, are spending hours a day looking for work, almost 24 hours a day because they keep their phones on. They are thinking about it constantly. Let's not pull the rug out from under them now. They are trying to catch up in an economy that is recovering but still has a long way to go. We shouldn't be jeopardizing their families' economic security and we shouldn't be jeopardizing our Nation's economic recovery with a shortsighted decision like letting this critical safety net expire. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. FRANKEN

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

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I am very pleased that we were able to vote on and pass a badly needed and long-overdue 5-year farm bill today and that we are finally on the verge of enacting the legislation into law with the President's signature. With one in five jobs in Minnesota connected to agriculture, passing this bill has been a top priority of mine. I have been working on it for over 2\1/2\ years, along with a large number of my colleagues, and I have gone all around Minnesota talking to farmers and businesses. They tell me not only did they want a 5-year farm bill, but they needed a 5-year farm bill so they could plan for the future. Well, we finally have gotten it done. There are so many important pieces to this bill, and I want to speak about a few of them today. When I meet with farm leaders and visit farms all across Minnesota, I hear over and over about the importance of providing farmers with a strong safety net. There is a lot of uncertainty when it comes to farming. Once a farmer puts his crop into the ground, the crops are vulnerable to drought, to too much rain, to disease, and different kinds of pests and to other natural disasters. In 2012, for example, we witnessed a terrible drought that devastated the Nation's corn and soybean crops and forced ranchers to cull their livestock. All of these safety net programs in the bill are important because they protect our farmers and ranchers, and they also protect American consumers by making sure families have a reliable, domestically produced supply of food. The bill provides disaster assurances for livestock producers. It contains a dairy program so our dairy producers have the certainty they need. It contains a sugar program to help protect our sugar growers, American sugar growers. Minnesota is home to a large number of beet sugar growers, and the sugar industry provides thousands of good-paying jobs, American jobs, and billions of dollars to the economy of our region. I fought to make sure we kept this vital program in place. This bill also includes crop insurance so farmers have certainty with respect to their planting decisions. One of the things the farm bill does, which was very important to me and to so many people, is to link the crop insurance program to conservation. Minnesota farmers are good stewards of the land and understand how critical conservation is, and so do our hunters and our anglers. With this provision in the farm bill, when our farmers receive the crop insurance benefits, they also agree to implement conservation practices that are good for our land and for our water. In addition to a strong safety net in the conservation provisions, the bill also contains many provisions that are very important to Minnesota agriculture. For example, I pushed to include provisions to support beginning farmers. With the average age of farmers in Minnesota approaching 60, we need to invest in a new generation of farmers and ranchers. That is why the beginning farmer and rancher program has been a priority of mine. This important program will support training and education for beginning farmers, and it will help new farmers overcome the steep financial hurdles they often face when starting. I am also very proud of the comprehensive energy title of the bill, which I helped to author. The energy sector in agriculture produces jobs and supports rural communities in Minnesota and across the country. The energy title includes programs such as the Rural Energy for America Program--or REAP--which provides farmers and rural business services with loans and grants so they can invest in energy efficiency and renewable energy to reduce their energy bills. It also includes programs to help rural America develop advanced biofuels that will help wean the Nation off of foreign oil. It also includes programs to help move the Nation away from a foreign petroleum economy, the way products are increasingly made out of homegrown renewable biomass. Those are only some of what I fought for in the bill. The bill does all of these critically important things while also reducing the deficit by billions of dollars. Like all bipartisan compromises, the bill is not perfect. In particular, I am not happy with the cuts to the nutrition program on which so many low-income families rely. I am somewhat relieved in the end these cuts were closer to what was in the original Senate bill than the draconian cuts the House of Representatives had called for and passed in their bill. I appreciate the tough job, though, my colleagues had on their hands to arrive at a final compromise. At the end of the day, this is an incredibly important piece of legislation that I and many colleagues on both sides of the aisle have been working to get over the finish line. I am pleased we have finally come together to pass a bipartisan 5-year farm bill that will make needed reforms and give farmers the certainty they need to plan for the future. The bill we passed will not only support rural America but our entire Nation. I yield the floor.

Mr. FRANKEN

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I rise in support of the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Extension Act. I am pleased a 3-month extension of unemployment insurance for millions in Minnesota and across the country was able to clear its first hurdle in the Senate, but our work of course is not finished. I urge my colleagues in the House and the Senate to pass an extension to renew these critical benefits so hard-pressed families in Minnesota and across our Nation can keep their heads above water while they search for work. As I have traveled around Minnesota, I have heard from a lot of Minnesotans who wish to work. On Friday I had a roundtable conference. There were three women and some workforce professionals. These women are looking hard and have been looking. They are part of the long-term unemployed. These are women who were working: one is in her forties with two kids--one little kid, a 3-year-old child, a single mom; one was in her fifties; and one was about my age, in her early sixties. While they are looking for jobs--and we had a professional there who said one of the hardest jobs is looking for a job. They need the unemployment insurance to stay in their homes and to put food on the table for their families. In the wake of the worst recession since the Great Depression, too many people had good jobs and worked their entire lives--all of these women who had worked their entire lives had 20-, 30-, and 40-year careers and now they are out of work and remain out of work. Unemployment remains high, and the long-term unemployment rate among workers who have been looking for work for at least 6 months has weighed down our economy. Today more then 4 million Americans, 37 percent of the unemployed, have been out of work for 6 months. This is the worst long-term unemployment since the Great Recession. That is why we need to extend the emergency unemployment compensation. These workers, the millions throughout the country, are worried they will lose their ability to pay for a roof over their heads and put food on the table for their families, for their children. For most Americans, State-funded unemployment insurance runs out after 26 weeks. Yet the average unemployment spell now lasts over 2\1/ 2\ months longer. Emergency unemployment benefits provide for up to an additional 47 weeks of unemployment insurance for those Americans who need it while they are looking for a job. When I talk about high long-term employment, these women, every one of them I talked to, were working very hard every day. One woman described it as saying: I am looking 24 hours a day. I have my smartphone, and I am hoping 24 hours a day that I get something, a response, an interview. Right now we have three people looking for every job opening, but that doesn't mean that when someone applies for a job, there are only two other people looking. These women were telling me every time they applied for a job there were several hundred people looking. Very often they will apply for a job that a company announces, and the company will hire someone from inside the company, which is great for that person. But this is not about people waiting for their unemployment to run out and then look for a job. That is not what it is about. After Christmas, 1.3 million Americans lost their jobs and who are looking for work, including 8,500 Minnesotans. They lost this critical lifeline of unemployment compensation. Remember, these women I talked about paid in. I am talking about 20 years of working, 30 years of working, 40 years in the workforce. If we don't renew these benefits over the next year, that lifeline will run out for another 3.6 million people, including 65,000-plus Minnesotans. While Minnesota has been fortunate to have a lower unemployment rate than other States, I believe the 65,000 Minnesotans who will lose benefits without an extension deserve our support as they are looking for work. Congress has never allowed special extended unemployment benefits to expire when the long-term unemployment rate is as high as it is today. In fact, at 2.5 percent, the long-term unemployment rate is nearly double the level when previous emergency benefits were allowed to expire. The current unemployment rate of 6.7 percent is far above nearly all previous rates seen at expiration and is 1.1 percent higher than when President George W. Bush signed the current round of benefits into law. As I said, on Friday I met with several unemployed Minnesotans. Two out of the three were affected by our not extending the emergency unemployment insurance. I wish to share a little bit of their stories but also people who have written in, Minnesotans who have reached out to me about how failing to extend unemployment insurance will affect them. John from Cushing, MN, wrote in December: I am a 58 year old sales and marketing professional that was laid off due to a force reduction and have been unemployed for a year. I have not been able to find even part time work. I have exhausted my severance package and most of my liquid savings just to cover financial obligations and essentials such as food and utilities. Additionally, I do not have any health care coverage as my income has been limited to unemployment compensation. Now that the Federal Extension is about to expire, beginning next week I will have zero income and no job offer pending. I would appreciate your support in doing what you can to re-instate the Federal Unemployment Extension in Minnesota as for me personally, it is of extreme need and I would expect many others around the country may also be in such dire straits. Almost half--I believe it is the majority of Americans--sometime in their lives hit a hard patch and our job is to be there for them. Debbie from White Bear Lake wrote: There are many of us out here who will run out of benefits next year and are still unable to find a decent job. I have been out of work for over 4 months and am spending at least 5-6 hours a day (EVERY day) looking for a job. While this may not seem that long, I am already concerned about my state unemployment running out and having nothing. . . . The people that actually work are the ones that spend money to help the economy. She is right. We know from CBO that if we extend unemployment insurance these people spend the money and it goes immediately out in the economy and actually the CBO says this will sustain about 200,000 additional jobs. If we don't do this, we will create 200,000 less jobs over the next year. On Friday I met with Ann from Eden Prairie, who wrote: I have unfortunately been unemployed since being downsized from a small consulting organization in April, 2013. . . . I have been extremely active in my job search-- Boy, has she. I will say all of these women were upgrading their skills. Some of them had gone back to school to upgrade their skills and are still not being successful in finding work. She continues: --but have regrettably not found new unemployment. My Minnesota Unemployment Insurance ran out last week and I applied for Federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation just this past week. I understand it's going to expire at the end of the month. She wrote to me in December. I ask you to please ask yourself what you would do to provide for your family. I have a 9 year old daughter . . . and a three year old son. I am the sole provider for my family. I volunteer extensively at the school and elsewhere in my community. . . . She is a volunteer. She does that, but she also volunteers looking for a job. She is networking in her volunteer work. She is volunteering for her kids' school, for her 9-year-old's school. She told me the 3-year-old went to preschool 5 days a week, then 4 days, then 3 days, then 2 days, and now 1 day a week--and how hard is it to look for a job with a 3-year-old. She continues: ``I am not looking for a handout, nor do I believe that staying on unemployment insurance is in my best interest.'' But she says it ``will at least allow me to make my mortgage payment.'' Doug, from Bloomington, wrote that he and his family will lose their home if we allow benefits to expire. He says: I unfortunately lost my job due to the economy last March . . . each position that I apply for has at least 500 candidates applying for the same position. If the Federal unemployment extension is not approved, my family and I will be homeless within a month! I have even tried to apply for ``temporary positions,'' however, they always reply that I am overly qualified! We talked about this in the roundtable. We also had professionals there who are professional workforce people and are counselors. These people are working it. There was a woman in her fifties who said: They will not take me at McDonald's because they figure if I get some other job I will leave and it costs to train them. It truly troubles me that those who have worked and contributed to our society the longest, I am saying 20, 30, 40 years, have been particularly hit hard by long-term unemployment; in other words, older workers who lose their jobs have experienced longer periods of unemployment than younger workers. Part of that is age discrimination. That age discrimination has made it more difficult for older workers to bounce back when they lose their jobs. According to AARP, 34 percent of older workers seeking work reported they had experienced, or know someone who has experienced, age discrimination in the past 4 years. This was the experience of all three of the women I talked to. Extending unemployment insurance isn't just the right thing to do to help our fellow Americans who are out of work and searching for a job, it is also the smart thing to do for our economy. As I said, in 2011, the Congressional Budget Office said that aid to the unemployed is among the policies with ``the largest effects on output and employment per dollar of budgetary cost.'' CBO estimates that extending benefits through 2014 will help expand the economy and contribute to the creation of an additional 200,000 jobs. The Council of Economic Advisers estimates without a full-year extension, the economy will generate 240,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2014. We know unemployment benefits work. The Census Bureau estimates that unemployment benefits kept 2.5 million people who are trying to stay in the workforce out of poverty in 2012 alone and have kept over 11 million unemployed workers out of poverty since 2008. Countless local businesses feel the positive effects when the unemployed are able to keep buying their basic necessities--food, utilities, gas, so they can drive to look for a job. Unemployment insurance isn't the only thing we should be doing to help the unemployed either. There are lots of things we can and should be doing. There are more than 3 million jobs in this country that could be filled today if there were workers who had the right skills. With too many Americans unemployed, we have to find a way to fill those jobs, to train those workers. We should be helping workers get the training they need to fill the high-tech jobs that are growing in Minnesota and across the country--in Maine, in Alabama, in the State of every Senator I talk to in this Chamber when I talk about the skills gap and manufacturing returning to this country--but we don't have the skilled workers, and this at a time of such high long-term unemployment. We need to be training a workforce for the 21st century. Sometimes these jobs are in advanced manufacturing. Sometimes this training takes 2 years, but we need to do it. We should be helping connect these people to educational programs that link them with employers, and that is why I have introduced the Community College to Career Fund Act. Under this program, businesses and community colleges would apply for grants based on how many jobs that partnership would create, the value of the jobs to those hired and to the community, and how much skin the businesses have in the game. There is a lot we should be doing to create jobs. We should be addressing our infrastructure deficit. You know, when you don't repair our infrastructure, when you don't create new infrastructure, that is a deficit too, and we need to get people into work that we need to be doing. But failing to extend emergency unemployment doesn't make sense. We shouldn't be punishing people such as John and Debbie and Ann and Doug who are looking for work and can't find jobs. We shouldn't be pulling the rug out from under them and millions of others who support the small businesses and local retailers in our cities and our towns. Extending these benefits is something we should do now to jump-start and to continue this recovery. But we shouldn't stop there. I will continue to press this Congress to work to create jobs through investments in infrastructure, in innovation and education so that the unemployed can get back to work at good jobs that sustain long-term economic growth. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. FRANKEN

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet in executive session on Monday, January 13, 2014, at 5:30 p.m. in room S-214.

Mr. FRANKEN

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

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

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I rise to speak about some of the important work we can be doing to help strengthen our economic recovery and to get more Minnesotans and more Americans across the country into jobs. During the government shutdown in October, I came to the floor to talk about how the shutdown was preventing us from doing the work that people sent us here to do. Every day we spent on the shutdown was a day we weren't working together to create jobs and to rebuild the middle class. The budget deal we passed this week is far from perfect, but it is my hope it will enable us to stop lurching from crisis to crisis and focus on the work we were sent to do. This agreement means businesses will have the stability and certainty they need to create jobs and strengthen our economy, and it allows us to focus on educating our kids, creating a 21st century workforce, and putting people back to work. As I said, this budget deal is far from perfect; it is a compromise and, as with any compromise, it has elements I like, elements I don't like, and elements others like and don't like that may be different. In addition to providing some budgetary certainty for the next 2 years, the budget deal undoes some of the extreme across-the-board cuts of the sequester that will enable us to make more of the critical investments we need to make in education, research and development, and infrastructure. We will make those investments while replacing the irrational cuts of the sequester with more responsible debt and deficit reduction. In fact, the bill ultimately reduces the debt by about $20 billion more than under the previous budget that included the full sequester. At the same time, I am very troubled by the fact that the bill pays for undoing some of the extreme, across-the-board cuts of the sequester in part by reducing some military pensions. That was something pushed for by the lead Republican negotiator, and I am not happy about it. I believe there are cuts we can make to defense spending, but cutting military pensions is not one of them. That is why I am cosponsoring a bill authored by Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire that would replace those cuts to military pensions by closing an indefensible and wasteful corporate tax loophole, and I hope we can get that done before the cut to military pensions goes into effect. I am also very troubled that the budget deal does not include an extension of critical emergency unemployment insurance. Extending this unemployment insurance is one of the things we need to be doing for the economy. Too many Americans remain unemployed, and those who have been unemployed the longest are facing the expiration of their unemployment insurance when they need it the most. There are 65,000 workers in Minnesota and millions throughout our country who may need this extended unemployment insurance in 2014. These folks are struggling. They are struggling to find jobs and to support their families. Not extending unemployment insurance will also put the brakes on our economic recovery. In 2011, the CBO wrote that aid to the unemployed is among the policies with ``the largest effects on output and employment per dollar of budgetary cost.'' Without an extension the Council of Economic Advisers estimates the economy will generate 240,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2014. That is why I have been working to continue the extension of unemployment insurance and I will keep pushing for the Senate to take up and pass an extension when we return in the new year. Another thing we should do to strengthen the economy and help working Americans is to raise the minimum wage. We established a minimum wage because we believed that no one should work full-time, contributing to society, and live in poverty. Americans value work. We work more hours on average than citizens in other developed countries. The minimum wage is supposed to help guarantee that if a person works hard and plays by the rules, they at least will have a roof over their head and be able to put food on the table. This year marks 75 years with a Federal minimum wage. However, today, because the minimum wage is too low, it is not doing what it is supposed to do. Today, a minimum wage worker making $7.25 an hour or about $15,000 per year falls below the poverty line, even though they work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. Inflation has eroded the value of the minimum wage. If the minimum wage had simply kept pace with inflation since 1968--not raised in real terms but just kept pace with inflation--it would be at $10.75 an hour today. That is a wage that would at least keep a family of three above the poverty line. What has happened to the minimum wage is part of a larger trend for American workers. Over the past 50 years, American workers have increased their productivity by 135 percent--a 135-percent increase. But the value of their wages has not changed, and the real value of the minimum wage has dropped by 33 percent over that same time. Over just the past few years, costs have climbed. Americans are paying more for electricity, rent, auto repair, food, childcare, and many others things. Yet most wages for workers have stagnated and the minimum wage has fallen. That is why I think one of the most important ways we can boost our economy and help workers and families is to increase the minimum wage. Americans agree. Americans strongly favor boosting the Federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. In a recent survey, 63 percent supported raising the minimum wage to $10.10 from the current $7.25 rate. Moreover, the support for increasing the minimum wage is broad-based: The rich, the poor, Republicans and Democrats all believe we should raise the minimum wage. Increasing the minimum wage will be good for Minnesota, and there is a parallel effort at the State level to increase the State minimum wage. If we increase the Federal minimum wage to $10.10, it will affect 462,000 Minnesota workers over 3 years. That is 18 percent of Minnesota's workforce. It will increase our State's GDP by $400 million. That is something we must fight for. Extending unemployment benefits and increasing the minimum wage are crucial things we can be doing to support the American value that if you work hard, you should be able to support yourself and your family. There is more we can be doing. I am part of the Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative that several of my colleagues in the Senate, and headed by the Presiding Officer, have undertaken. As part of that initiative, I wish to speak about an issue I have spoken about on the floor before--an issue I hear about from manufacturers all over Minnesota--the skills gap. What is the skills gap? Recent studies have shown that between one-third and one-half of manufacturers in my State of Minnesota have at least one job they can't fill because they can't find a worker with the right skills to fill that job. That is the skills gap in Minnesota, but it is not just Minnesota. This is a nationwide phenomenon. As I roam this floor to talk to my colleagues, every one of them knows of this phenomenon in their State. A 2011 survey by Deloitte found that there were 600,000 manufacturing jobs nationwide that were unfilled because of a skills shortage. It is not just manufacturers either. There is a skills gap in information technology, in health care, and in other sectors that have jobs sitting there waiting for skilled workers to fill them. There are more than 3 million jobs in this country that could be filled today if there were workers who had the right skills. With too many Americans unemployed, we have to find a way to fill those jobs. The thing is we know how to solve this problem. We are taking steps to solve it in communities in Minnesota and around the country through partnerships between businesses and community and technical colleges that are training up workers and getting them into high-demand jobs right away. Let me talk briefly about an innovative program to bridge the skills gap in Minnesota. I recently visited the Right Skills Now Program at the Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis and the South Central Community and Technical College in Mankato. Those two institutions are working on this together. At South Central I sat with about 8 to 10 manufacturers who had helped fund and design their program that gives workers the skills they need to operate a computer numerical control, or CNC, machine. They told me that between 8 or 10 of them they had more than 50 job openings they could fill that instant. At Dunwoody, their current placement rate from the Right Skills Now Program is 91 percent. You will have a hard time finding a more effective program. Dunwoody likes to emphasize that its students often come into the program after having just been laid off or that they are the long-term unemployed we hear about. After going through the program, they are placing 91 percent of them into good jobs in a growing industry here in this country. They told me about a student who had a successful career as a massage therapist. He was doing just fine until he began to experience pain from pre-arthritic symptoms. That spells trouble for a massage therapist. So he researched technical programs and joined Right Skills Now, and after going through the program he relaunched his career as a machinist. Careers are different from what they were a generation ago. Very few people stay working in one job for one company for their entire life anymore. Whether it is because of changing life circumstances such as the massage therapist turned machinist, or because of new technologies, most workers have many different jobs over the course of their working life now, and those jobs require many different skills. We need a workforce development system that is agile enough to keep up with those changing demands. That is essential not just so workers will be able to get the different skills they need over the course of their working lives; it is also going to be one of the keys to the United States remaining globally competitive. If our workers cannot adapt to the new industries that are constantly forming, we will lose those jobs to our global competitors. There is no better way to anticipate and to react to these changes than to connect businesses directly with our schools to get workers exactly what they need. This is also about college affordability. I have talked before about Erick Ajax, the CEO of EJ Ajax and Sons, a metal stamping and sheet metal fabrication company in Fridley, MN, that was founded by Erick's grandfather in 1945. Erick and other manufacturers partnered with Hennepin Technical College in Hennepin County to set up M-Powered, a fast-track training program to get workers what they need for entry- level advanced manufacturing jobs. Erick gave me an example of one of his workers that I found exciting. This is what excites me, and not because it is extraordinary; it is because it is something we can duplicate over and over in this country. When he hires employees from these business-technical college partnerships, the way he looks at it is that they are on a career ladder that would otherwise not be available. He told me about one such hire, who was really good at his job. So Erick sent him back to school to get his associate's degree. The guy came back to work, continued to be a star, and a few years later Erick paid for him to go to the University of Minnesota, where he got his bachelor's degree. The guy is now head of quality control for EJ Ajax, an incredibly high-skilled job at an advanced manufacturing company. Now, understand, this guy graduated from college with no debt--zero debt--with a great job. When I think about college affordability, I think about that story. As I have said, we have a skills gap problem in manufacturing and other industries, and we have these partnerships that are successfully working to close that gap. So where do we come here in Congress? Well, I have gone around to Minnesota's community and technical colleges and talked to businesses, I have had roundtables, and I have talked to national experts in our State and from around the country, and the fact is we are not doing this fast enough. Sometimes these partnerships could do a lot more, train up a lot more people, with some extra funding--maybe to buy a really sophisticated machine or to hire an instructor with very specialized skills. So what I am proposing is a competitive grant program in a bill called the Community College to Career Fund Act. Under this program, businesses and community colleges would apply for grants based on how many jobs their partnership would create, what the value of those jobs would be to those hired, to their company, to the community, and how much skin do the businesses have in the game or maybe how much the community colleges and the businesses and the State have in the game. We have millions of open jobs that cannot be filled because of a skills shortage, and we know these partnerships are the most direct way to fill those jobs. We know that existing partnerships are not doing enough and cannot do enough, and they need more resources in order to truly meet the need that exists. So that is exactly what my bill would address. As we move forward with this budget deal, let's build on the progress it represents and set our sights a little higher. Let's support working families and help people who are struggling to find a job in today's slowly recovering economy. Let's help students and young people who have been held back by slow job growth get a foothold in the economy. Let's support partnerships between businesses and community and technical colleges to fill the jobs that are out there. Let's make this coming year the year that Congress works for Americans and puts Americans back to work. Thank you.

Mr. FRANKEN. It is an honor for me to acknowledge that the Senator has stolen my idea.

Mr. FRANKEN. I thank the Senator. And in Illinois the Senator is free to say it is his idea.

Mr. FRANKEN

Mr. FRANKEN. Madam President, I would like to talk for a few minutes about a subject that will affect all of us at some point in our lives; that is, the safety of our medicine. If my child or wife urgently needed medicine, I would have a number of questions: Will my loved one get well? What is going to happen? But I should never have to ask a question about whether the medicine my family takes is safe and whether it is what the doctor says it should be. More than 1,000 patients and their families across Minnesota found it necessary to ask that question last year during the meningitis outbreak. They had to ask that question because the contaminated medicine they received could have caused them enormous harm. More than 700 patients across the country got sick and more than 60 died after receiving these contaminated injections produced by a large-scale compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts that was essentially an unregulated drug manufacturer. In Minnesota we specialize in medical innovation. We have some of the best doctors and health care systems and biomedical pioneers anywhere in the world. Our Nation has an incredible capacity for innovation and development in this field. There is no possible explanation that can justify the fact that more than 17,000 vials of contaminated medicine were shipped to providers throughout the country. That should simply not be happening. That is why the legislation we are set to pass, which I helped to write, is so important. It will go a long way toward making compounded medication safer and preventing another outbreak like the one we had a little over a year ago. Many people don't know what pharmacy compounding is--including many patients who have received compounded medicine. Compounding is a traditional practice of a pharmacy where a pharmacist makes a new drug or takes an existing one and changes it based on a particular patient's needs. If a patient needs a drug and is allergic to one ingredient in it, the pharmacy can remake the drug, or compound it, without that ingredient based on a doctor's prescription. Pharmacists and pharmacies are regulated by the States. This practice of tailoring medications for individual people is incredibly important, and it has always been a part of practicing pharmacy. It will continue under the bill we have written. But that is not what happened in Massachusetts last year; instead, a facility exploited a legal loophole to make thousands of doses of a product that was not FDA approved and sold it to hospitals and clinics across the country without receiving a prescription. As I said, more than 700 patients got sick after receiving that medicine and 64 people died. That is why my colleagues and I have worked so hard over the past year to develop the bill before us today, the Drug Quality and Security Act, which takes important steps for preventing this kind of outbreak in the future. I would like to take a moment to thank my friends on both sides of the aisle and in both the Senate and the House who have worked so hard on this legislation. I thank chairman Tom Harkin for his leadership and for the bipartisan HELP Committee staff process that was crucial to producing this legislation. I thank ranking member Lamar Alexander and Senator Pat Roberts for their commitment to getting this bill right. I thank the staff who worked so hard on this bill. Specifically, I thank members of Senator Harkin's staff: Jenelle Krishnamoorthy, Elizabeth Jungman, and Nathan Brown. I also thank Senator Alexander's staff: Mary Sumpter-Lapinski and Grace Stuntz, as well as Jennifer Boyer, who works for Senator Roberts. Their hard work and dedication helped to develop this important legislation. I also thank Hannah Katch, a member of my staff, who has worked tirelessly on this bill. I thank Chairman Upton and Ranking Member Waxman and their colleagues in the House for their work, as well as the many stakeholders who have worked productively with us to develop and improve this proposal. In particular, I counted on input from the Minnesota Board of Pharmacy, the Minnesota Pharmacist Association, Thrifty White Pharmacy, and many other experts and pharmacists in Minnesota who helped us get this bill right. Is our legislation perfect? No. There were a number of provisions in the bill that we passed out of the HELP Committee that would have provided additional safety and quality assurances for patients, but in order to come to a compromise with the House of Representatives, our legislation changed. Although the final bill does not include everything I would have liked, the bill before us today will take an enormous step forward for patient safety. The bill will reinstate the law that allows the Food and Drug Administration to regulate large-scale compounders that have exploited a loophole in the law in order to act effectively as unregulated drug manufacturers. It will also give hospitals and health systems the option of buying compounded products from facilities that are inspected by the FDA and are complying with the FDA's quality standards. And it will do all of that without changing the rules for traditional pharmacies, which will continue to be regulated by their State boards of pharmacy. Specifically, our bill creates a new option for facilities that want to provide compounded drugs to hospitals and health centers. These entities, called ``outsourcing facilities,'' will be inspected by the FDA and will have high quality standards. The hospitals that buy from these facilities will be able to trust that the compounded medicine they buy from outsourcing facilities is safe. If a compounder chooses not to be either a traditional pharmacy or an outsourcing facility, the FDA will be responsible for making sure that compounder complies with the normal requirements for pharmaceutical manufacturers. Those are the options. Unlike what we saw in Massachusetts, these facilities will no longer be able to occupy an unregulated no man's land. So under the new law, there will be traditional pharmacies, which will continue to be regulated at the State level; outsourcing facilities, which the FDA will oversee; and pharmaceutical manufacturers, which will be regulated by the FDA, as they have been. I am also pleased that the bill we wrote on compounding is paired today with another bill on the drug supply chain, which is aimed at making sure that the FDA-approved medicine that patients receive is safe and has not been tampered with. By creating a national system to track drugs from the time they leave the manufacturer until they are dispensed to patients, this legislation will provide certainty that our medicines are what they say they are. My colleagues, Senators Bennet and Burr, have been working on this proposal for more than 2 years, and I thank them for their work and congratulate them on this important achievement. My home State of Minnesota is a model for pharmacy practice nationwide. Not only does our State have important protections for compounding pharmacies that have kept the medicine made in Minnesota safe, but Minnesota pharmacists have also led the Nation in developing innovative new ways of helping their patients get the right medicine at the right time. For example, pharmacists at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis found that when a pharmacist reviewed the prescriptions for patients with complex conditions before they were discharged from the hospital, those patients had fewer problems related to their medicine and were 50 percent less likely to be readmitted to the hospital. So it saved a lot of money. It cost HCMC about $112,000 for pharmacists to provide this service, and it saved the hospital nearly $600,000. This is exactly--exactly--the kind of innovation that we are known for in Minnesota, and our pharmacists are on the front lines of this kind of reform and discovery. The pharmacists at HCMC, and those around Minnesota, do incredibly important work. They provide access to needed medicine for thousands of patients every day. Those pharmacists and their patients must be able to trust that the medicine is safe and it will work. The Drug Quality and Security Act will take an important step toward preventing another outbreak like the one we saw last year, and I urge my colleagues to join me in passing the Drug Quality and Security Act into law. Thank you, and I yield the floor.

Mr. FRANKEN

Mr. FRANKEN. I can see my colleague from Indiana.

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I rise today in strong support of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. In many towns, cities, and States across our country, it is still perfectly legal to fire someone simply because they are gay. One can be a hard worker who shows up on time and gets exemplary performance reviews, but if a person's boss discovers that he or she is gay or transgender or suspects it, he can fire a person for being who they are or for whom they love, and there is nothing the person can do about it. That is a terrible injustice for Americans who happen to be LGBT. It violates the principle that we are all equal under the law. We all deserve the chance to work hard and to prove ourselves, regardless of our race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Many Americans do not realize it remains legal to discriminate against LGBT Americans in the workplace. In one recent poll, eight in ten Americans believe it is already illegal under Federal law to fire or refuse to hire someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Doesn't that tell us something about how obviously right ENDA is? The debate we are having in the Senate today is about whether we should ensure LGBT Americans don't suffer discrimination in the workplace. I have long been a supporter of ENDA, and enacting it into law is something we should have done a long time ago. In fact, 17 years ago, it came within one vote of passing in the Senate. Making ENDA law will be the next significant step in the fight for equality for LGBT Americans. After decades of struggle, we have achieved a number of huge victories in rapid succession: ending don't ask, don't tell; overturning the Federal ban on same-sex marriage recognition; the achievement of marriage equality in more and more of our States, including my home State of Minnesota. While we are debating ENDA in the Senate today, equality in the workplace is, in fact, something we achieved in Minnesota over two decades ago. In 1993, the Minnesota State legislature amended our State's human rights act to protect Minnesota's workers from discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. At the time only a few States prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation, and Minnesota was the first State to include protections for transgender workers. We have had this law in effect now for over 20 years in Minnesota, and what has been the result? Well, for LGBT Minnesotans it has meant they do not have to live in fear of being fired or discriminated against in hiring just because of who they are or because of whom they love. That is a big deal. But if you are not an LGBT Minnesotan, very little has changed. Some people, including House Speaker Boehner, are opposing ENDA because they claim it will cause frivolous lawsuits and be bad for business. The Minnesota experience shows these fears are unfounded. There has not been a flood of lawsuits because the rights of LGBT Minnesotans are wisely respected. And with 19 Fortune 500 companies, Minnesota has become an ever better place to work and do business. Minnesota is basically the same as it was before this law was passed, except that it is better because LGBT Minnesotans are free from discrimination at work. Let me give you one example. Last year, a vice president from General Mills--the Minnesota-based company that is one of the world's largest food companies and which currently employs 35,000 people and makes Cheerios--spoke at a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing about General Mills' support for making sure that the same legal protections people have in Minnesota are extended to workers all across the United States. The General Mills vice president spoke about how the company's policy of inclusion has contributed to its innovation and growth. He said: Employees who are members of the GLBT community are incredible contributors to our enterprise. Absent their unique perspectives, talents, and gifts, we would be less competitive and successful. Simply said, talent matters. Now more than ever, American business needs to leverage the ingenuity of all sectors for our nation. Discriminatory barriers to top talent just don't make business sense. And there are many other large employers headquartered in Minnesota-- Target, Supervalu, U.S. Bancorp, Xcel Energy, Medtronic, 3M, Cargill, Best Buy, and many others--who have put in place companywide policies against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation wherever their other factories or businesses or stores may be. Minnesota's small businesses have also reported on the positive effects of Minnesota's human rights law. For instance, Nancy Lyons is the owner of a small 70-person Minneapolis business that develops software. Nancy says the protections and peace of mind her employees get from not living in fear positively impact every aspect of their lives, from their productivity at work to their family lives. It is long past time that LGBT employees around the country be guaranteed the same rights they have had in Minnesota for 20 years. In Minnesota, our law has given LGBT Minnesotans peace of mind and freedom from discrimination at work and improved the overall climate in our State for those individuals, for families, and for businesses. I look forward to the Senate passing this bill, and I hope the House will take it up and pass it as well. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Mr. FRANKEN

Mr. FRANKEN. I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the cost of the Federal Government shutdown, including a cost we don't talk about-- the opportunity cost. The fact is we are paying a huge price for what we are not doing here in Washington while so much of our time and energies are spent on this totally unnecessary shutdown. Americans are rightly looking at Congress and saying: What are you guys doing? Why are you hurting people? Why are you hurting families? Why are you impeding our economic recovery? They are also asking: Why aren't you working on what we send you there to do--on creating jobs, on improving our educational system, on addressing our Nation's long- term fiscal sustainability? Last weekend, I came to the floor to talk about the effect of this shutdown on individual Minnesotans. I receive e-mails from people who are hurting. Let me read from a few. I will not read them in full because of time. Charlotte from Duluth writes: Senator Franken: Veterans' benefits are important to me, and I want to tell you my story. I have three children and my spouse who currently attends college, we just got into the hud-vash program. The HUD-VASH program is a program that provides housing assistance and support services for homeless veterans and their families. Charlotte continues: We thought it was a miracle to not be homeless. Now we are facing the same thing, no check, no schooling. My family will be homeless without food, clothes, a vehicle if this government shutdown is not resolved. I am praying for a miracle in this situation; my son is turning 1 year old next month, I don't want to remember his first birthday with us losing everything we have worked so hard for. My daughter just started head-start. She loves it, but it is the last thing on my mind now. I am thinking, how will I get her to school? How will I provide a home for her to live in? What is she going to eat? This is not a joke. I have never been one to take a hand out from anyone. These are things I have earned; and are now being taken away from me because someone in Washington wants to prove a point. What point is everyone trying to make? That you have the power to do this? Timothy from Bloomington writes: My daughter is a single mother who cannot afford her home. She has wisely decided to sell the house. She has persevered and now has a sale pending. She is in a financial crisis and needs this sale to go through or she will risk falling into foreclosure. And now the government shutdown is threatening to prevent the sale from going through because a branch of the IRS that prints income tax transcripts is closed. At the very least the situation will cost my daughter more than $1,000 if she has to continue making payments, at worst she may fall into foreclosure. Last weekend, I also talked about the way the shutdown threatens to deprive our seniors of vital nutrition programs, such as Meals-on- Wheels. Here is what Millie Hernesman from Hibbing, MN, told the Hibbing Daily Tribune about Meals-on-Wheels: I'd hate to see it disappear. It offers a variety of important meals that cover every facet--from protein to fiber--and it comes right to my door. I like it a lot. Sandra, a Head Start director in southern Minnesota, wrote me about Head Start. She writes: Dear Senator Franken, Thank you for your ongoing support for Head Start. If the federal budget is not settled by November 1st, the HS programming in Olmsted and Freeborn Counties will have to shut down. Our federal grant is from 11/1-10/31. As the HS Director, I know the devastating impact this would have on our families and staff. Now let me talk a little about Head Start. Because of the sequester, we have seen children in Minnesota lose slots in Head Start. If this shutdown continues through the end of October, programs serving about 2,500 children could be affected by the lack of Head Start funding. You know, kids are only 3 years old once. They are only 4 years old once. The learning experiences they would be missing at that age because their Head Start Program is shuttered due to this shutdown or that they are missing now because their program has already been shuttered because of the sequester can never be replaced. We are just hurting our communities and our Nation when those little children lose that opportunity. We know from study after study that a quality early childhood education such as Head Start returns between $7 and $16 for every $1 invested. Why? Because a child who has had a quality early childhood education is less likely to be referred to special ed, is less likely to be left back a grade, and has better health outcomes. Quality early childhood programs can help reduce the rates of adolescent pregnancy. Kids who have had a quality early childhood education are more likely to graduate high school, more likely to go to college, more likely to graduate from college, more likely to have a good job and pay taxes, and they are less likely to go to prison. If we really cared about our Nation's long-term fiscal sustainability, we would be investing more in Head Start, not less. And we have been investing less because of the sequester and are now because of the shutdown. So that is just an example of the entirely counterproductive nature of this shutdown and the tremendous price we are paying for it. But I rise today also to talk about the price we are paying for what we are not doing here in Congress, for the unmet needs which we are not turning our attention to because of the time we are wasting with this shutdown and the threat of default on our debt. We have a skills gap in Minnesota. What is a skills gap? Well, recent studies have shown that between one-third and one-half of manufacturers in my State have at least one job they cannot fill because they can't find a worker with the right skills to fill that job. This is a nationwide phenomenon and it is not just manufacturers, it is information technology, health care, and other businesses that have jobs sitting there waiting for skilled workers to fill them. There are more than 3 million jobs in this country that could be filled today if there were workers who had the right skills--more than 3 million jobs today. The thing is, we know how to train people for these jobs. We know it because we have done it. We have done it in Minnesota and we have done it elsewhere in this country. I have seen partnerships in my State between businesses and community and technical colleges that have been wildly successful. Take, for example, Hennepin Technical College in Hennepin County. A number of manufacturers needed workers skilled in precision machine tooling. They worked with Hennepin Technical College to create a curriculum, and they then donated machines for the students to work on. At a roundtable at HTC I learned they had graduated over 300 students from the program and 93 percent of those graduates had permanent jobs. One of the manufacturers at the roundtable was Erick Ajax, CEO of EJ Ajax and Sons. It is a metal stamping and sheet metal fabrication company in Fridley, MN, that was founded by Erick's grandfather in 1945. I love what Erick has done with his company and how he has worked with HTC--Hennepin Technical College--and the University of Minnesota to train his workforce and provide them with good high-tech jobs and pays for them to continue their education. Erick gave me an example of one of his workers that I find so exciting--not because it is extraordinary but because it is something we can duplicate over and over in this country. He hired a guy who had completed a certification program at a community and technical college. The guy was really good at his job, so Erick sent him back to continue his education and get his associate's degree. The guy continued to work for Erick, continued to be a star, and a few years later Erick paid him to go to the University of Minnesota to get his bachelor's degree, and he got it. Now the guy is head of quality control for EJ Ajax, an incredibly high-skilled job at an advanced manufacturing company. Now, understand, this guy graduated from college with no debt--zero debt--and with a great job. This brings me to what I want to be working on here. A number of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle know how enthusiastic I am about incentivizing partnerships between businesses and community and technical colleges to fill the skills gap. As I said, I have seen many successful models in my State. I have seen it at Alexandria Technical and Community College in Alexandria, MN, which is sometimes referred to as the Silicon Valley of packaging machines. I have seen it at South Central Community and Technical College in Mankato, MN, where about 8 to 10 manufacturers, who had helped fund and had given machines to the school's Right Skills Now Program, sat with me and told me that between them they had about 50 job openings they could fill that instant. In the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, of which I am a member, we had a hearing a couple of years ago on workforce boards that had successfully responded to the great recession and created jobs in the face of it. We had four workforce boards testify from four different States: Virginia, Wisconsin, California, and Washington. Every model had been essentially the same: A business--manufacturing, IT, health care--had worked with a community and technical college to train unemployed workers for jobs they needed to fill. These are public-private partnerships. The businesses have skin in the game. Where do we come in here in Congress? Well, I have gone around Minnesota to community and technical colleges and talked to businesses, and I have talked to national experts in our State and around the country, and the fact is we aren't doing this fast enough. Sometimes these partnerships could do a lot more, train a lot more people with some extra funding--maybe to buy a very expensive machine or to hire an instructor with very specialized skills. What I am proposing is a competitive grant program. Businesses and community colleges would apply for grants based on how many jobs their partnership would create, what the value of those jobs would be to those hired and to the community, and how much skin the businesses have in the game. Let me tell you why I think we have to do this, just in terms of global competitiveness. Manufacturing is moving back to the United States. That is because of a number of factors. Manufacturing these days is a lot more capital intensive because of the investments in machine and technology. So labor as a piece of the pie has gotten smaller, but skilled labor as a piece of the labor pie has grown. It is a much bigger piece. That is why, if we are going to be competitive with the rest of the world, we need skilled labor. Filling the skills gap is a national imperative. I go to high schools, junior high schools, and middle schools with manufacturers all the time. I let the manufacturer describe what the work is like at their factory. It is not dark, dirty, and dangerous, as people think it is, or as it used to be. It involves advanced technical skills, critical thinking, creativity, and teamwork. These jobs, good, skilled, well-paying jobs, are available with the education you can get at a 2-year community and technical college. One of the concerns I hear is that people often think of a 2-year education as a ceiling, and I understand that. But a 2-year education doesn't have to be a ceiling. That is not how they think of it in some European countries. They think of a 2-year education as a platform. And if you think about it, with the pace of technological advancement accelerating as it is now, and no doubt will continue, the idea that you will have the same job in the workplace for the 40 or 50 years of your working life is kind of ridiculous, especially in any field involving technology. So it makes perfect sense to go to a 2-year community technical college and get an education that trains you in the kind of skills that will get you a good-paying job. Then, as Erick Ajax does with his employees, the business you work for can send you back to school and pay for it, often while you continue to work and draw a good paycheck. We just came through a big debate in Congress about student debt. Think about getting a job after 2 years or even after a credentialed degree and then having your continuing education paid for by your employer. Think about that as a piece of an evolving approach to the issue of college affordability. Jobs, economic growth, global competitiveness, college affordability, how we think about education, aren't these the things we should be spending our time on in the Senate, in Congress? That is why I came here. That is what I get excited about. That is what I get excited about working on. Let's end the shutdown. Let's commit to not defaulting on our debt. Then let's discuss how we strengthen our economic recovery. Let's talk about which investments we make that are smart and will lead to economic growth and which ones have outlived their usefulness. Every day the government stays shut down, every day we wake up under the threat of default, every day we spend focused on something that isn't working together to create jobs and rebuild the middle class is, in my mind, a tragedy. It is an insult to all the people who are struggling and it is a huge missed opportunity for our country. This nonsense would be ugly enough even if we didn't have work to do, but we do. We have so much work to do. It is time for Congress to stop creating problems and start solving them again. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. FRANKEN

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

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 20 minutes.

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about reopening the government. We are now 5 days into a government shutdown that should never have happened. Minnesotans do not want a government shutdown. They want us to do our jobs, not refight the same old political battles over and over. With each day of the shutdown I hear more and more reports about how it is affecting Minnesotans, as I am sure the Presiding Officer hears about how it is affecting the people of Maine. Minnesotans seeking basic government services are being turned away. Hundreds of people go to the Minneapolis Social Security office each day to get Social Security cards. But on the first day of the shutdown, according to the Minneapolis StarTribune, those Minnesotans--some of whom took time off from work and drove long distances--arrived to find the card center closed. Minnesota's small businesses are also feeling the impact. Small businesses in Minnesota receive an average of $1.8 million in loans every day under the Small Business Administration's Guaranteed Loan Programs in 2012. With the government shut down, these programs will no longer take new applications and our businesses have to put their plans on hold. It is not just businesses that are facing problems getting access to loans. Minnesota is home to a lot of great, smaller financial institutions. We have the second most community banks in the country. It is the home of a lot of credit unions, and I talk with them regularly. Earlier this week, I met with folks from some Minnesota credit unions, and they explained to me that as a result of the shutdown, they are having problems approving mortgages because the Social Security Administration can't verify Social Security numbers. That is not just bad for those Minnesotans who are trying to buy or sell a home, it is also bad for the economy. This week my office heard from one of those Minnesotans who is in the process of buying a home. Jesse is using a USDA Rural Development loan. His banker now has all of the documentation compiled and ready to be submitted to Rural Development for approval, but they are shut down. Jesse was originally supposed to close on October 11, next Friday, and the sellers were scheduled to close on another property right after closing on the property they are selling to Jesse. Jesse and his family are now living with his in-laws, and they have all of their possessions in storage. He doesn't know whether he will be able to close on his new home--all because some people thought it was a good idea to insist on shutting down the government to repeal the health care law, which isn't going to happen and never was going to happen. Jesse is really frustrated and disappointed. He felt compelled to let me know how this is affecting him and other people. He asked me to do whatever I could possibly do to end this shutdown quickly. The shutdown is also affecting other Minnesotans who depend on vital programs, such as Federal nutrition programs. An estimated 125,000 Minnesota mothers and mothers-to-be depend on the Women, Infants, and Children Program, or WIC, so they can buy healthy food for their families. With the shutdown no new Federal funds are available to support WIC. That puts the program in Minnesota, and the women and children it serves, at risk. Hopefully, we can avoid any terrible consequences by getting the government up and running as quickly as possible. But in some other States, such as Utah--according to Forbes--they have already stopped accepting new participants. In a shutdown the Administration for Community Living in the Department of Health and Human Services can't fund senior nutrition programs such as Meals On Wheels. Seniors who rely on Meals On Wheels face uncertainty. If the shutdown goes on, State and local agencies will not be able to replace Federal funding and that will result in an outright inability to access the program. That is why I will be donating my salary during the shutdown to Second Harvest Heartland. It is a great hunger relief organization which works throughout Minnesota to help people who need to get food. Meanwhile, Minnesota's farmers cannot get the resources they need. Susan Magadenz, a constituent of mine from Eden Valley, MN, works at the USDA Farm Service Agency. She wrote me to say: This shutdown has cut off services to thousands of American farmers. They cannot get grain checks released and are missing access to funds they require to carry out their operation. The shutdown is hitting Minnesotans in many other ways as well. The shutdown means that the National Institutes of Health is not awarding any new funds or making payments on recently awarded grants. The Mayo Clinic receives 40 percent of its research funding from NIH grants. By the way, this is one of the many reasons we are going to have to address the sequester. This sequester has hit vital NIH funding really hard, even though this is an agency that some people seem not to have noticed until the shutdown. Speaking of the effects of the shutdown compounding the damage from the sequester, tribal schools are being hit even harder because they get a substantial part of their funding from the Federal Government in what is called Impact Aid. Impact Aid is Federal money that goes to school districts where Federal property or Federal activities significantly reduce the local tax base. The biggest recipients are the schools on military bases and on Indian reservations. We have 11 tribes in Minnesota, and some of them get about one-third of their school funding from the Federal Government. I am on the Indian Affairs Committee, and I can tell you that the sequestration has been hitting them even harder than it has been hitting other people. These are some of the most vulnerable kids in the country. Their afterschool programs are being canceled because of the sequester. And now, on top of that, Impact Aid is at even greater risk because of the shutdown. That is not right. It is just wrong. Some veterans services, through the Department of Veterans Affairs, are already being curtailed, and if the shutdown goes on for very much longer, VA will not be able to process benefit claims and payments, aggravating the claims backlog we have been working so hard to address. These are just some of the effects the shutdown is having on Minnesotans. People are suffering. Minnesotans who have written and called my office want Congress to get things done, do our work, and not shut down government. More than a week ago, I voted--with the Presiding Officer and a majority of my colleagues in the Senate--to pass the bill to keep the government open and prevent the damage that a shutdown does to our country and to our economy. The House could take up that bill and pass it in a matter of hours, and it would reopen the government immediately. It has been widely reported that enough Republicans and Democrats support that bill for it to pass in the House if Speaker Boehner would only put it up for a vote in the House. That is all he needs to do. Let the full House vote on the continuing resolution. But the House hasn't done that. Instead, a faction of the Republicans in the House has decided that rehashing old political fights and political brinkmanship are more important than getting back to the job we were sent here to do, which is putting Americans back to work, improving education, and strengthening our economic recovery. Earlier this week I was asked what I would be working on if there were no shutdown. I would be working to pass my Community College to Career Fund Act. This legislation is aimed at closing what is called the skills gap. What is a skills gap? Recent studies in Minnesota show that about one-third to one-half of all manufacturers in our State have jobs they need filled, but they can't fill them because they don't have people with the skills to fill them. There are more than 3 million of those jobs across the country that are going unfilled because of the lack of workers with the right skills. My bill would help those companies that have open positions. It would help workers find jobs, and it would help our country be more competitive globally. It would address college affordability. It is the kind of thing we need to be doing. I have seen partnerships between businesses and community colleges in Minnesota that work--at Hennepin Technical College in Hennepin County, for example. A group of manufacturers worked with the school, Hennepin Technical College, and created a curriculum where students could get credentials. I went to a roundtable there and they told me they had put over 300 students through this course and 93 percent of them had permanent jobs. The manufacturers who are involved in this partnership had skin in the game. They gave Hennepin Tech machines and helped design the curriculum. Now they have people filling the jobs that need to be filled. I have seen this model work throughout Minnesota, and I have seen it work throughout our country. However, we still have a skills gap. That is why my bill would create a competitive grant program to incentivize partnerships between businesses and community colleges. This isn't just manufacturers; it is in health care, it is in IT. It would incentivize businesses and community colleges to create programs targeted at getting workers the skills they need to fill these jobs. This is what I want to be working on. This is what the Presiding Officer wants to be working on for the people of Maine. This is the kind of thing Americans sent us to do. Americans want us to learn from strategies that are succeeding in our States--in Minnesota and in Maine--and then work together to make our country more prosperous and stronger. What else are we supposed to do? That is why they sent us. I recognize we have political differences we have to work through, but brinkmanship and crises can't be the rule; they should be the exception. After the debt ceiling crisis in 2011, Standard & Poor's downgraded our Nation's credit rating and they cited the dysfunction in Congress as a main reason. After that, people thought--I thought and I believe most people in this country thought--OK. We have learned our lesson. We are not going to govern by crisis and brinkmanship. In fact, this year, in March, the Senate passed a budget through the regular process, through regular order. The House passed a budget--a different budget, but that is the way it works--and then we are supposed to get together for a conference. We have sought for months to have a conference with the House to resolve the differences in regular order. But we were blocked by the same Senators who thought it was a good idea to shut down the government and to defund the Affordable Care Act. The House has simply refused to go to conference; instead, they waited for the government shutdown and then sought to go to conference on a 2\1/2\-month continuing resolution that would delay the health care law for 1 year. That is irresponsible. Minnesotans and Americans want us to govern responsibly. Brenda Gregorich from Duluth wrote me on Wednesday about her husband, a disabled veteran whose disability benefit is now further delayed due to the shutdown. She says: We would rather do without, than have you give in to delaying the Affordable Care Act. Please stand strong and do not let anyone change or delay this. We will sit tight without income while you work towards this. Overwhelmingly, Americans do not want us to shut down the government to stop the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Earlier this week, Minnesota's health care exchange opened and, according to Minnesota Public Radio, received approximately 100,000 Web hits on its first day--the second highest number of hits in any State. Believe me, we are not the second largest State. So the shutdown is not actually stopping the implementation of the health care law; instead, the shutdown is threatening to do serious damage to our economy. Today, jobless claims are close to a 5-year low. The second quarter of 2013 marked nine consecutive quarters of economic growth. The private sector has created 7.5 million jobs over the last 42 months. There are more people on private, nonfarm payrolls than at any time since September of 2008. But the shutdown is putting our still fragile economic recovery in jeopardy. Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi testified before the Senate a few weeks ago that a shutdown lasting just a few days would cost the economy approximately 0.2 percent of GDP, and a longer shutdown could cost it as much as 1.4 percent. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has called on Congress to keep the government open stating: It is not in the best interest of the U.S. business community or the American people to risk even a brief government shutdown that might trigger disruptive consequences or raise new policy uncertainties washing over the U.S. economy. This shutdown is painful for our constituents and it is damaging the economy. Everyone should understand this is costing the government money. Some people may think at least if the government is shut down, we are saving money. But, actually, the very opposite is the case. Recently, in the New York Times, they had an editorial that detailed some of the reasons shutdowns end up being very expensive. A shutdown government cannot collect fines and fees, contractors build in the cost of the shutdown and the added probability of future shutdowns to how much they charge the government. Furloughing government workers means lost productivity. Lost economic output means lower tax revenue for Federal, State, and local governments. This shutdown is unnecessary and it is irrational. Please, let's reopen the government and get back to the work the people elected us to do. I thank the Chair.

Mr. FRANKEN

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my staffer Ed Shelleby be allowed floor privileges.

Mr. FRANKEN

Mr. FRANKEN. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. FRANKEN. Madam President, I wish to talk a little bit about health reform. Soon over 1 million Minnesotans will have the opportunity to buy their health insurance on MNsure, Minnesota's health insurance marketplace. Minnesotans who buy their own insurance in the health insurance marketplace, including Franni and me, will have the opportunity to compare plans and choose the coverage that works best for their families. Not only will MNsure make the options clearer and more accessible, but the health care reform law is also making sure that Minnesotans feel secure in their health care coverage. That is because insurers can no longer cap the amount of benefits you can get over the course of your lifetime, they can't drop you if you get sick, and they cannot discriminate against you based on a preexisting condition. There is a lot in the health care reform law that a lot of Americans don't even know about yet. For example, I championed a couple of key provisions that are improving the quality and the value of health care coverage that we all rely on. I authored a provision requiring health insurers to provide a good value for your premium dollars, and I helped to establish a national fund for health care prevention. Why is this especially important right now? Because the House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution to fund the budget that also defunds the health care reform law. So before we decide on that measure, I wish to make sure we remember what is in this important law. First, we are requiring insurance companies to give their customers good value for their premium dollars. One thing many Americans don't know is that millions of Americans are getting rebates from their health insurance companies when those companies don't provide that value. I wrote the provision that does this. It has the catchy name ``medical loss ratio,'' which is sometimes called the slightly more catchy 80/20 rule. Because of my medical loss ratio provision, which is based on a Minnesota State law, health insurance companies must spend at least 80 percent of their premiums on actual health care--not on administrative costs, not on marketing, not on profits, not on CEO salaries. If insurance companies don't meet the 80 percent for individual and small group markets or the 85 percent for large group policies, then the insurance company has to rebate the difference. The fact is my provision is working. Last year, nearly 13 million Americans benefited from checks from their insurers, and this year about 8\1/2\ million Americans benefited from rebates that were sent out in July of this year. That is a good thing--fewer people getting rebates. This year is a good thing because that means insurers were saving you money on the front end instead of rebating you the money on the back end. That is part of why health care costs have risen in the last 3 years at a slower rate than at any time in the last 50 years. Is that entirely due to the Affordable Care Act? No. But in contrast with what is being put out here and there, we are not seeing the cost of health care spike. In fact, the opposite is true. I will say it again: Health care costs have gone up less--have risen at a slower rate--in the last 3 years than at any other time in the last 50 years. The bottom line is that my provision is making insurance companies more efficient at helping keep health care costs in check for people, and I am very proud of that. People also don't know how much we did to improve access to preventive health care in health care reform. Anyone who has ever gotten a flu shot knows an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Along with former Republican Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana, I fought to get the National Diabetes Prevention Program included in the health care reform law, and it exemplifies the benefit of this kind of reform to our health care system. This program, which was piloted in St. Paul, MN, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, involves structured nutrition classes and exercise at community-based organizations such as the YMCA. It has been shown to reduce the likelihood that someone with prediabetes will be diagnosed with full-blown type 2 diabetes by nearly 60 percent. That is pretty good. The program doesn't just make people healthier, it also saves everyone money. The Diabetes Prevention Program costs about $400 per participant, as compared to treating type 2 diabetes which costs more than $7,000 every single year. That is why United Health, the largest private insurer in the country--that also happens to be headquartered in Minnesota--is already providing the program to its beneficiaries. In fact, the CEO of United Health told me that for every $1 they invest in the Diabetes Prevention Program, they save $4 on health care costs later on. This homegrown program is funded out of the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which is another program in the health care reform law that is designed to invest in evidence-based health care prevention in communities across the country. In Minnesota, the Prevention and Public Health Fund has supported tobacco cessation programs, it has helped to prevent infectious diseases, and it has expanded our desperately needed primary care workforce. Preventing disease while saving money-- preventing disease while saving money--is smart reform. We did a lot of other things in the health care law too. I worked with several of my colleagues to develop a value index which will change the way Medicare pays physicians to take into account the quality of the care the doctor provides--reward quality instead of quantity. My home State of Minnesota is the leader in delivering high-value health care at a relatively low cost. Yet, traditionally, we have been woefully underreimbursed for it. For example, Texas gets reimbursed almost 50 percent more, on average, per Medicare patient than Minnesota. This isn't about pitting Minnesota against Texas or Florida. It is about rewarding those States to become more like Minnesota. Imagine if we brought Medicare expenditures down by 30 percent around the country. It would bring enormous benefits not just to Minnesota but across the country because it will bring down the cost of health care delivery nationwide. I am working very hard to make sure health care reform works for Minnesota. The implementation of any major reform is going to be a challenge, but I don't think Minnesotans or Americans want us to keep looking backward. They want us to move forward and to implement the law as best we can. They do not want the House of Representatives to waste precious time and vote to repeal the law--for the 42nd time. The fact is, if the law is repealed, a lot of things Americans like will be taken away from them. Americans don't want seniors' prescription drugs to go back up. They do not want children with preexisting conditions to be kicked off their health plans. Those are just a couple of things that would happen if the law were repealed. Last year, more than 54,000 seniors in Minnesota got a 50-percent discount on their covered brand-name prescription drugs when they hit the doughnut hole in Medicare Part D. This discount resulted in an average savings of $644 per person and a total savings of more than $34 million in Minnesota alone and we are not done. By 2020, the doughnut hole will be closed completely. But the closing of the doughnut hole would go away if we repealed the health care reform law. Thanks to a provision that allows young adults up to the age of 26 to stay on their parents' health insurance, 35,000 young people in Minnesota and more than 3 million young people nationally were able to keep their health care coverage. Those young people would be kicked off of their coverage if we repealed the health care law. Health care reform also ended insurance companies setting lifetime limits on the amount of care an individual can receive. So if you or a loved one gets sick, you can never be told by your health insurer: That is it, no more coverage for you. Go ahead and file for bankruptcy. Guess what. If Congress repealed the health care reform law, that would go away too. I am not saying the law is perfect. But if there are problems, the American people want us to work together to fix them, not refight old fights. That is what I hope to do--move forward by implementing the law, making any changes we need to make along the way. Millions of Americans across the country are already experiencing the benefits of this law. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting the implementation of the important provisions I have outlined. I yield the floor.

Mr. FRANKEN

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

Mr. FRANKEN

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss a problem I have spoken about many times over the past 3 years, beginning with debate on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill. That bill, which Congress passed in July 2010, contained a provision I authored with my Republican colleague Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi. Our provision gave the Securities and Exchange Commission the authority to issue rules to address the conflicts of interest inherent in the credit rating industry--conflicts of interest which contributed mightily to our recent financial collapse and which have continued to plague that industry through today. I am speaking about this issue again because even though the conflicts continue to put our economy at risk, the SEC still has not proposed meaningful reforms. The SEC has studied the issue, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has studied the issue, and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has studied the issue. Now it is time to move forward and take action on the issue. Let me start off by briefly reminding everyone what this conflict of interest is about and why it is important. In the years leading up to 2008 financial collapse the credit rating agencies were enjoying massive profits and booming business. There is nothing inherently wrong with massive profits and booming business, but there was one fundamental problem: Booming business was coming at the expense of accurate credit ratings, which is supposed to be the entire reason for the existence of the credit rating agencies. Credit rating agencies were and still are paid to issue ratings directly by the big Wall Street banks issuing the paper and requesting the ratings. If a rating agency--let's say Moody's--does not provide the triple-A rating the bank wants, the bank can then just take its business over to Fitch or S&P. That is called ratings shopping, and it continues to this day. The opportunity for ratings shopping creates an incentive for the credit raters to give out those triple-A ratings even when they are not warranted, and that is exactly what happened with the subprime mortgage-backed securities that played such a crucial role in the financial crisis--and it happened over and over. It became ingrained in the culture of the industry. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Levin, took a close look at the big three rating agencies, examined millions of pages of documents, and released an extensive report detailing the internal communications at Moody's, S&P, and Fitch. Among the many troubling e-mails, there is one in particular from an S&P official that sums up the prevailing attitude quite nicely: ``Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.'' With all the risky bets in the financial sector--and bets on those bets--our financial sector indeed became a house of cards. But without the conduct of the credit raters, the house of cards would have been just one card tall. Two years after that e-mail was written, that house of cards did not just falter, it collapsed. Because that house of cards had grown several stories high, when it collapsed it brought down the entire American economy with it. The financial meltdown cost Americans $3.4 trillion in retirement savings. It triggered the worst crisis since the Great Depression with its massive business failures and mass foreclosures and job losses and the explosion of our national debt. The crisis profoundly affected the everyday lives of millions of Americans in so many negative ways, including in Minnesota. People lost their homes, their jobs, their retirement savings, and their health insurance. I have previously shared on the floor the story of my constituent Dave Berg from Eden Prairie, MN. He testified at a field hearing I had in May of 2010 and told his story about having to start over--finding a new job and rebuilding his retirement savings--at 57 years of age. His reflections on his experience in the recession mirror those of millions of other Americans. He said: The downturn of the economy, caused in part by the abuses on Wall Street, led to the loss of my retirement security. Reforming the way Wall Street operates is important to me personally, because I have a lot of saving yet to do--and I simply cannot afford another Wall Street meltdown. I need to have confidence in the markets--and I need to know there is accountability to those who caused a financial crisis. It is hard to overestimate the extent to which the credit rating agencies contributed to the financial crisis in which millions like Dave Berg lost their jobs, their homes, and far too many Minnesotans had their hopes for the future dashed. These Americans are not necessarily seeking retribution from Wall Street. They just need to be assured it will not happen again. They know there is a problem and the problem needs to be fixed. We do not need further proof of that, but we get it in the February complaint filed by Department of Justice against S&P in which DOJ alleges--as it stated when it filed the complaint--that the credit rating agency ``falsely represented that its ratings were objective, independent, and uninfluenced by S&P's relationships with investment banks when, in actuality, S&P's desire for increased revenue and market share led it to favor the interest of these banks over investors.'' The complaint highlights the patently problematic way the credit rating agencies habitually did business. One e-mail obtained in that investigation from a high-level S&P official reads: We are meeting with your group this week to discuss adjusting criteria for rating CDO's of real estate assets . . . because of the ongoing threat of losing deals. CDOs--collateralized debt obligations--are one of those derivatives, or bets, that added stories to the house of cards. This official had apparently become so comfortable with the culture of conflicts of interest that he appeared to have no reservations about putting it in writing. In fact, a while ago, S&P asked the judge in the case to throw out the Justice Department lawsuit against them by pointing to a previous decision made by a U.S. district court judge in an earlier securities fraud case against them. That earlier suit against the S&P had been filed by shareholders who said they had bought their shares believing that S&P's ratings were independent and objective--as the S&P had long declared. But the judge in the earlier case dismissed the shareholders' suit, finding that the S&P's statements that their ratings were independent and objective were ``mere puffery.'' In other words, no one could take S&P's statements about their ratings objectivity and independence seriously. It was just puffery and advertising that no one could believe. Very recently, S&P tried to use--in the Department of Justice's case against them in their filing--the earlier ``puffery'' ruling to try to get the Justice Department suit thrown out against them. So S&P's legal argument was that no one could reasonably think that they had a reputation for producing independent and credible ratings. Thankfully, earlier this month, the judge in the DOJ suit ruled that the DOJ suit could go forward and said last week he found S&P's puffery defense to be ``deeply and unavoidably troubling.'' S&P's rationale should strike us all as deeply and unavoidably troubling because their legal defense--this is S&P's legal defense-- said no one could possibly rely on their ratings. But their job is to provide independent, objective, and accurate ratings. Millions of Americans lost their jobs because S&P didn't do its job. S&P didn't do their one job. They have one job and that is to provide accurate ratings. They didn't do their one job. They have no other job. I am glad the Department of Justice is pursuing this case, but DOJ's action is not enough. It is backward-looking and addresses past harms. My concern is that the conduct continues to this day.

Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 5 more minutes.