Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I wish to announce that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will meet during the session of the Senate on February 6, 2013, at 10 a.m., in room SD-430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Supporting Children and Families through Investments in High-Quality Early Education.'' For further information regarding this meeting, please contact Aissa Canchola of the committee staff on (202) 224-2009.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, earlier this month we commemorated the 50th anniversary of President Johnson's declaration of ``unconditional war on poverty.'' That war on poverty was a massively successful initiative. It helped tens of millions of Americans lift themselves out of poverty, reduced hardship, empowered people to build new opportunities for themselves and their future. We see some of the residue of this. Today, food stamps ensure that children do not go to bed hungry at night. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act insisted that all children, regardless of background, can learn and have an equal opportunity for education. Legal Services helps people with limited resources seek protection from exploitation. Low- income families fight poverty in their own communities by helping to lead community action agencies. The war on poverty and the Great Society encompassed a tremendous list of achievements that I cannot even begin to do justice to today. However, we know we still have more work to do. Too many of those successful programs and policies have been reduced or rolled back under subsequent Presidents and Congresses. What is more, our economy has changed and in fundamental ways, with decades of waste, stagnation, and rising income inequality. Now we must urgently turn our attention to policies that will ensure that working families can still get ahead in America. We must recognize that tens of millions of working Americans struggle to put food on the table, a roof over their head, and pay their bills every month. This is a fundamental failing of our economy. It is something we not only have a moral obligation to fix but we have the ability to fix. We can do so first by raising the minimum wage, one of our Nation's simplest and most effective means of lifting working families out of poverty. I am so pleased President Obama has taken the first step in this effort. Last night at the State of the Union, he announced he would issue an Executive order that will require future Federal contracts to provide wages of at least $10.10 an hour to our Nation's contract workers for the Federal Government. I applaud President Obama's bold step to ensure that the Federal Government is a leader in promoting good jobs that pay fair wages. I think most Americans would agree that taxpayer dollars should not support companies that pay poverty wages. This Executive order is a strong step in the right direction. But now we in the Congress have work to do, to raise the minimum wage for the rest of American workers. Again, I am so grateful for President Obama taking a strong leadership position, as he did last night, in calling for Congress to expeditiously work to increase the minimum wage. We need to agree in this country that if you work hard and play by the rules you can earn enough money to support your family, keep a roof over your head, put some money away for a rainy day, have a secure retirement. The minimum wage played a critical role in doing that, which is why Presidents and elected leaders from both parties in the past have supported fair increases in the minimum wage. From time to time, we adjusted the minimum wage on a bipartisan basis to help working families keep up with inflation and the changing economy. But recently we have heard a new and disturbing set of talking points from our friends on the other side of the aisle. They claim that raising the minimum wage does not actually reduce poverty. They argue the minimum wage workers do not come from poor families or that no one stays at a minimum wage job long enough to be trapped in poverty. Those all sound good on the talk shows, but the facts simply prove those statements are not true. The fact is a majority of people who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage come from low-income households. Many of them have been trapped in jobs at or near the minimum wage for years and years at a time. Indeed, when you listen more closely, the offensive underlying premise of all these arguments is that anyone can rise out of poverty if they just work harder. Tell that to Nereida Castro of Des Moines. She and her husband both work minimum wage jobs in the fast food and construction industries. They have five children to support. But Nereida says they live day to day because of their bills and expenses. She said her family ``has to limit many things to give to our kids to only make rent, to cover expenses. We have to limit everything.'' A raise in the minimum wage would allow her to ``live a life where I don't feel like I'm drowning.'' Tell that tale about ``you just have to work harder'' to Nancy Salgado, 27-year-old single mother with two kids, ages 2 and 7. She worked at McDonald's for the past 10 years but makes only $8.25 an hour. That is the minimum wage in her own State of Illinois. She struggles to be able to pay for necessities such as milk and shoes for her kids. She recently confronted the president of McDonald's USA, saying: I'm a single mother of two. It's really hard for me to feed my 2 kids and struggle day to day. . . . Do you think this is fair, that I have to be making $8.25 an hour when I have been working at McDonald's for 10 years? For Senators and Representatives sitting comfortably here in Washington to preach to working mothers such as Nancy, struggling hard to get ahead, working 10 years at McDonald's--to tell them they are not working hard enough, that is beyond offensive. No one disputes that hard work is a big part of the path out of poverty, but you also need a basic foundation of economic security to start building that better life. How are you supposed to pay for a community college course on $7.25 an hour? How are you supposed to find a better job when you are standing in line at a food bank because your wages won't cover all your household expenses, and neither will your food stamps? How are you supposed to build a better life for your kids when you can't even find them safe childcare while you are at work? They just can't get ahead if their job traps them in poverty. It has not always been this way. We used to agree that minimum wage works. People who perform some of the most difficult and essential jobs in our society should not have to live in poverty. The minimum wage kept families above the poverty line in the 1960s and 1970s. In today's dollars, a minimum wage worker in 1968--when the minimum wage was 120 percent of the poverty line--took home $10.71 an hour or $22,000 a year working full time. Since the 1980s, the minimum wage has not kept up. Today the minimum wage is about 80 percent of the level of poverty. This is how far we have come down. The same family whose breadwinner worked at a job making minimum wage in 1968--look at where they are--would be way below the poverty line today. It is no wonder working people have to turn to the safety net of food stamps and all other kinds of things just to help them get by. A recent study found that our taxpayers have to pick up the tab for millions of working families to the tune of about $240 billion a year for food stamps, Medicaid/CHIP, earned-income tax credit, and temporary assistance to needy families. I wish to make it clear that these are not people sitting at home watching TV. These are people who work, but they are making minimum wage. What we want and what they want is not to have the Government and the taxpayers pick up the tab. They want to be able to support themselves with the jobs they have. We have to rectify this. My legislation, the Minimum Wage Fairness Act, which I introduced--along with Majority Leader Reid and Congressman George Miller on the House side--will raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour in three annual steps and will get it above the poverty line by 2016 for the first time in over 20 years. That is what we are talking about--getting this minimum wage up. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Senate on both sides of the aisle sometime soon so we can bring this bill forward. I hope we can do it on a bipartisan basis and recognize it is indeed time to get families--working families--out of poverty by paying them a decent minimum wage. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

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

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I was privileged to be in our capital city of Des Moines 2 days ago, on Monday, January 27, and I was privileged to visit a lot of my friends in the Iowa legislature. I was in the Iowa House on Monday morning when a resolution was brought up by Representative Dan Muhlbauer and read and adopted unanimously. It was a resolution requesting the U.S. Congress to immediately enact a new Federal food, farm, and jobs bill. I won't read it all, but ultimately I will ask unanimous consent to have this resolution printed in the Record. The resolution basically points out how much a farm bill means to our fellow Iowans. The resolution states: Be it resolved by the House of Representatives-- That is the Iowa House of Representatives-- that with the reconvening of the United States Congress after its holiday recess, the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate should enact a new food, farm, and jobs bill with all possible speed but no later than January 31 of 2014. I guess the good news I have now for Representative Muhlbauer and his colleagues on both sides of the aisle in the Iowa legislature is that we heard them. Under the great leadership of Senator Stabenow, we now have a farm bill ready to come to the floor after the House passes it, I hope sometime today. We hope to have it on the Senate floor maybe as early as tomorrow--if not, the first of the week--to get the job done. I think everybody has signed off on it. It is a good farm bill. It has taken a long time and a lot of hard work to get there, but a lot of good people worked together on both sides of the aisle in both the Senate and in the House to get it done. So I thank Representative Muhlbauer and his colleagues for holding our feet to the fire and sending us this resolution. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record House Resolution No. 102.

Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Chair and I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Patrick Miller-Bartley, Kyle Brewster, and Danielle Corley of my staff be granted the privilege of the floor for the duration of today's session.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I rise today to correct some unfortunate remarks made on the floor this month and reaffirm my long-standing support for the medical research programs at the Department of Defense, most of which fall under the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program, or CDMRP. This program has led to major scientific breakthroughs since its creation in 1992 and it is one of my proudest accomplishments here in the U.S. Senate. This program was created by me and together with my Defense Appropriations colleagues Senator Ted Stevens and Senator Daniel Inouye specifically in response to grassroots advocacy spearheaded by those who suffer from breast cancer, those who have survived it, and their families. The Department of Defense runs one of the largest health systems in the country, serving 9.6 million servicemembers, their families and military retirees, and as a result offered a unique opportunity to undertake Breast Cancer Research. Military families suffer from the same conditions and diseases that affect our society at large, and they also have disproportionate rates of some diseases as a result of their service. My colleagues and I believed that offering potentially lifesaving research specifically focused on this population was a logical step. So we started with Breast Cancer research in 1992. In the 22 years this program has been funded, we have spent almost $3 billion on Breast Cancer research, and $7.5 billion overall on important research on numerous conditions through the Department of Defense. Millions of Americans, including those who receive their health care from DOD, have been touched by conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis--or Lou Gehrig's disease--autism, lung cancer, multiple sclerosis, neurofibromatosis, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, tuberous sclerosis complex and many others. And what has that investment yielded? It has paid dividends, with breakthroughs in our understanding of breast cancer. It led to the development of the revolutionary drug Herceptin that is saving and prolonging the lives of millions of American women every day. DOD breast cancer research directly contributed to the discovery of a frequently mutated gene that contributes to several cancers and the OncoVue breast cancer risk assessment test. But this program's payoff has not been limited to breast cancer: Those who receive Coenzyme Q10 treatment for gulf war illness can thank DOD medical research. The prostate cancer treatment Zytiga received FDA approval in 2011 due to the rapid early-phase clinical testing funded by DOD. Research jointly funded by CDMRP, the National Institutes of Health--NIH--and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are creating advanced prosthetics that are accurately recreating the movement of the human hand--which in recent trial allowed a quadriplegic to feed herself for the first time in years. These are just a few small examples of the many research, diagnosis, and treatment breakthroughs this research has brought about. DOD medical research has also made direct contributions to the understanding and treatment of medical conditions that uniquely or acutely affect those who serve. In addition to the research on gulf war illness, servicemembers and veterans who suffer from traumatic brain injury, tinnitus, or vision problems know that they can receive the most advanced treatment possible thanks to this medical research. DOD medical research is also finding biomarkers to better treat mental illness, so individual servicemembers do not have to go through the trial and error of being prescribed psychotropic medications that may or may not be effective for them. These research programs are helping to provide a better quality of life for those who have recently served in Iraq and Afghanistan. For a number of years now, some in Congress have made the argument that this program does not belong at the Department of Defense, suggesting that these programs are duplicative and that this funding should be spent elsewhere. In fact, the medical research done at the Department of Defense is complementary to and coordinated with the research done at NIH, and other Federal agencies including the Department of Veterans Affairs. While the medical research done at DOD and NIH may have overlapping goals, including many research grants that have been jointly funded, CDMRP has a different mandate, uses different criteria in selecting grants, and uses a unique two-tiered review process that assures high quality of research. I simply say to those critics of the program, the outcomes speak for themselves. Any suggestion that I believe this program should have been created elsewhere or should be moved is incorrect, and I want to make sure the Record is clear on this point. I thank my colleagues on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Chairman Durbin and Ranking Member Cochran, and the chair and ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Mikulski and Senator Shelby, for providing $1.55 billion in funding for these critical and successful medical research programs in Fiscal Year 2014. I look forward to many more years of breakthrough medical research conducted by the DOD that will directly address the needs of our military members and that will have broad application to millions of Americans.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I wish to announce that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will meet in executive session on Wednesday, January 29, 2013, at 10 a.m. in room 430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to markup the nominations of David Weil, of Massachusetts, to serve as Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, Department of Labor; France A. Cordova, of New Mexico, to serve as Director of the National Science Foundation; Nomination of Steven Joel Anthony, of Virginia, to be a Member of the Railroad Retirement Board; James H. Shelton III, of the District of Columbia, to be Deputy Secretary of Education, Department of Education; Michael Keith Yudin, of the District of Columbia, to be Assistant Secretary for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, Department of Education; James Cole, Jr., of New York, to be General Counsel, Department of Education; Theodore Reed Mitchell, of California, to be Under Secretary of Education, Department of Education; and Ericka M. Miller, of Virginia, to be Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education, Department of Education; as well as any additional nominations cleared for action. For further information regarding this meeting, please contact the committee at (202) 224-5375.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I come to the floor to speak in favor of the Omnibus appropriations bill we now have before us. First and foremost, it is noteworthy that this is a bill, not a continuing resolution. For the first time in years, Congress has returned to regular order in the appropriations process. Senior members of the Appropriations Committee from both parties have come together to negotiate their priorities, program by program. As the chairman of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, I view this as a huge step onto a better path. The Labor-H bill, as it is sometimes called, has been in continuing resolution every other year since 2009. This is an irresponsible way to allocate $160 billion in taxpayer funds, and I am pleased that we are putting a stop to that kind of destructive trend today. For the past year I have had people come up to me and say: There is no way you are going to have an agreement on Labor-HHS. Labor-HHS will be left behind, and it will be folded into a continuing resolution. I guess no one could imagine that Democrats and Republicans would be able to sit down and come to a fair agreement on health and education issues. I think that attitude sold our subcommittee short. I am proud to say we have worked out a fair agreement with my ranking member Senator Jerry Moran from Kansas, as well as my colleagues on the House side, including Chairman Jack Kingston and ranking member Congressman Rosa DeLauro. No one got 100 percent of what they wanted in this bill, which is often a sign of a pretty good deal. Despite the fact that I wanted to do more to alleviate the disaster cuts for 2013, I would like to speak about a few of the essential investments in this bill that I hope my colleagues will join me in supporting. First, the bill advances my long-standing priority of shifting the American health care system--so-called--from a sick care system to a genuine health care system, emphasizing prevention, wellness, and public health. It provides a $1 billion increase for the National Institutes of Health, as well as major new funding for brain research and a new initiative to discover ways to prevent and cure Alzheimer's disease. In addition, this bill allocates nearly $1 billion from the Prevention and the Public Health Fund, which I created in the Affordable Care Act, title IV, which I was in charge of drafting. There has been some confusion about this fund in news reports, so I will correct the record. In the past years resources from the fund have been diverted to other health care purposes. This year, however, this omnibus allocates 100 percent of the resources from the fund to prevention and wellness activities. It has been reported that the omnibus cuts or eliminates the fund. I read that in the paper this morning. I read that the prevention and wellness fund was cut by $1 billion. Well, that is just not so. That is a misinterpretation. Believe me, if they cut $1 billion from prevention and wellness, I would not be here supporting the bill. Section 219 of division H of this bill allocates the money, so that is what we did. Far from eliminating the money, we identify where that money is to go, including $160 million for immunization programs, $104 million for cancer screenings, and $105 million for smoking cessation programs. On October 1, another appropriation of $1 billion will be deposited in the fund under the Affordable Care Act, and, again, I intend to allocate the fund just as we did in this omnibus. If there is any doubt in anyone's mind that the fund is alive and well and fulfilling the purpose for which it was intended, consider this: The American Public Health Association has praised this Omnibus bill specifically for allocating the prevention fund. They said: We are also pleased that the bill fully allocates available funds from the Prevention and Public Health Fund for the first time. As the author of that fund, I consider the allocation of these resources to prevention and wellness as a major achievement in this bill. This bill also includes significant new investments to support early learning initiatives. We included an increase of over $1 billion for Head Start, which will more than restore cuts from sequestration. Nearly half of that increase will be used to expand early Head Start for kids from birth through age 3. In addition, the bill provides $250 million which can be used to help States develop high-quality early learning programs for low- and middle-income 4-year-olds. Both of these investments improve access to high-quality early learning experiences for children from birth to kindergarten. I truly believe these investments lay the foundation for future prosperity by preparing America's next generation. One of the reasons it is important to reassess programs every year is to respond to current events and changing needs. The Nation was devastated by the tragic shootings that occurred last year in Newtown, CT. This bill provides increased resources for providing the mental health and school safety activities we have been talking about for over a year. The bill includes $140 million--an increase of $29 million--for specific activities that support safe school environments. The bill also provides $1.13 billion--an increase of $213 million--for mental health programs, such as mental health first aid training grants, the National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative, suicide prevention, and the mental health block grant. Other highlights of this bill: It supports the economic recovery by providing workers with job training and by protecting workers' rights. In education, it makes it possible for the maximum Pell grant to rise by an estimated $85, to $5,730 this year. It allocates an additional $700 million for community health centers, which is so important to my State of Iowa and, quite frankly, to every State in this Nation. It provides higher funding for activities that support safe and healthy workplaces and, as I said, school environments. Most in Washington know that the staff of the Appropriations Committee worked diligently on this bill all through the holidays. We all appreciate and commend their excellent work. I would like to thank these unsung heroes for all of the long days and nights and weekends they worked. I first wish to thank my clerk, the head of my group on Labor-HHS, Adrienne Hallett, and her team: Mark Laisch, Lisa Bernhardt, Mike Gentile, Robin Juliano, Kelly Brown, and Teri Curtin. On the minority side, I thank Laura Frih-Dell, Jennifer Castagna, and Chol Pak. I also thank Chuck Keifer and Gabriel Batkin--on the full committee-- for their hard work and diligence and for sticking with us through this to make sure we got it done. On the minority side, I thank Bill Duhnke for all his hard work. I also thank the two principals who are here today. First, I will thank my longtime friend, going back to our days in the House together, Senator Dick Shelby from Alabama. These were long and tough negotiations, but the one thing I have always appreciated about my friend from Alabama is that he is fairminded and willing to negotiate. He understands it is a two-way highway around here. You give a little, you take a little, and we work these things out. Again, I thank my friend for hanging in there and getting this hammered out. There are not enough accolades in my book or any book I know that has been written to say what a great job Senator Barbara Mikulski did. She gave it her all and really worked hard with Senator Shelby and her counterparts on the House side to bring this bill to fruition. There were a lot of doubters who said: No, we won't get it done; they are not going to be able to hammer it out. Barbara Mikulski never gave up. She was willing to stay there for long hours days on end to get this job done. Again, I think a lot of us who served on the Appropriations Committee for a long time--30 years for me--I guess in all the time I was on appropriations, we had four chairmen. We had John Stennis from Mississippi when I first got here and, of course, Senator Byrd, Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska, and Senator Dan Inouye from Hawaii. We think of them as sort of the giants of the Senate, which is a well-earned accolade or praise, I might say. People probably wondered what would happen now that they are gone. We had the sad passing a year ago of Dan Inouye. Well, I can tell you, no longer are they wondering who is going to take over the Appropriations Committee. Senator Mikulski has stepped in and pulled us all together-- I think on both sides of the aisle--and worked this out. Again, I give my highest compliments to Senator Mikulski for her hard work, her intellectual approach, and her rigor in working with others to make sure we got to this point. Most in Washington, as I said, know that our staff works very hard, but there is just one other person I want to single out. He is not here. In fact, he is not even on the Senate side, but I worked with him for a long time, going back to when Congressman Obey chaired the House committee on Labor-HHS back in the early 1990s. He has been a longtime member of the House appropriations staff. David Reich is currently the minority clerk for Labor-HHS. He is retiring once this bill passes. David has spent nearly his entire career working on the issues in this bill. He has been on or around the Labor-HHS subcommittee since 1996. His collaborative nature, his insightful questions, and his thoughtful approach to the drafting of this bill will be sincerely missed. I wish David well and thank him for his dedicated public service to our country and especially to this committee. In light of the investments I mentioned, plus many more that I simply don't have time to talk about, I urge all of my colleagues to support the Omnibus appropriations bill. Given the tight overall budget, these are all remarkable achievements. I have always taken pride in the fact that the Labor-HHS bill, as it is called--Labor, Health and Human Services, Education bill--is a bill where we invest in America's human infrastructure, and that is what this bill does. We have had to make some tough choices, but this new bill lives up to that high calling of investing in America's human infrastructure. Again, I thank my friend and colleague from Alabama. We were together on the Labor-HHS committee until he took the position as the ranking member on the full Appropriations Committee, but we always had good comity of working together, and I appreciate it very much. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, on January 11, 1964, 50 years ago this week, Dr. Luther Terry released the landmark Surgeon General's report-- the first of its kind--on smoking and health. The report established conclusive links between smoking and lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, coronary heart disease, low fetal birthweight among women who smoked during pregnancy, and an overall 70 percent increase in the early mortality rate of smokers over nonsmokers. Today I would like to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of Dr. Luther in issuing that report. I want to applaud the historic, life-saving accomplishments that stemmed from it. And yes, I want to call attention to the work we have remaining in front of us to end the scourge of tobacco use once and for all. Mr. President, this 50th anniversary gives us an opportunity to reflect on one of the monumental public health successes of our time. New research released just last week reports that, from 1964 to 2012, at least 8 million premature, smoking-related deaths were prevented. That's eight million Americans who otherwise may not have lived long enough to see their kids graduate from high school, to meet their grandchildren, or to enjoy retirement. In fact, among these 8 million people, they lived an extra 20 years, on average. Successful tobacco prevention programs have led to dramatic reductions in smoking rates. In 1964, about 42 percent of all American adults smoked tobacco on a regular basis. By 2012, that number plummeted to 18 percent. The Surgeon General's report also served as an important catalyst for new research at Federal agencies on the effects of smoking--agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. Thanks to this research, we now know that smoking can damage almost every organ in the body; is implicated in at least 18 different types of cancer; is a major contributor to heart disease; can cause complications with pregnancy and prenatal development; and contributes to and exacerbates a host of other medical conditions. We also better understand the addictive nature of tobacco, and how to support our friends and loved ones who want to quit--because we also know that 7 out of 10 current smokers want to quit. Because the Surgeon General's report brought into the American consciousness just how dangerous smoking really is, we have made great strides in elevating smoking prevention as a national priority. Thirty states, as well as Washington, DC, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, plus hundreds of cities and counties, have enacted strong smoke-free laws that include restaurants and bars. At times, the days of smoky airplanes and conference rooms seem a blessedly distant memory. In 1998, I was proud to introduce the first comprehensive, bipartisan bill to give the FDA authority to regulate tobacco--the precursor to the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which finally gave FDA that critical authority in 2009, along with banning candy and fruit-flavored cigarettes, and misleading health claims such as ``light'' and ``low-tar.'' Tobacco companies are now required to disclose the contents of tobacco products, and the FDA is empowered to require changes in tobacco products. There is perhaps nothing that will more significantly amplify our efforts to reduce tobacco use than FDA's full implementation of this historic legislation. The Affordable Care Act marked another turning point in the fight against tobacco, guaranteeing all Americans access to cost-free tobacco cessation services, and creating the Prevention and Public Health Fund--which has already supported more than $200,000,000 in lifesaving tobacco prevention and control work. I am proud of the work I did to include those provisions in the health reform law, and I am confident that we will continue to see decreases in the rates of smoking for years to come as a result. Yet even as we celebrate the success of these efforts, we cannot forget that our work is not done. In the last 50 years, at least 17.6 million deaths in this country were attributable to smoking, and 440,000 lives are claimed by smoking each year. In fact, smoking cigarettes kills more Americans than alcohol, car accidents, suicide, AIDS, homicide, and illegal drugs combined. Furthermore, more than 3,000 kids in the United States try their first cigarette every day, 700 of whom will become daily smokers into adulthood. In total, this results in more than 250,000 new underage daily smokers in the U.S. annually. The numbers are clear: the battle against the harm caused by tobacco use is far from over, and we need to do more to protect vulnerable youth from becoming addicted to tobacco. With these remaining challenges in front of us, it's never been more important that we continue to make strides in tobacco prevention through innovative approaches, bold policies and programs, and a strengthened and sustained investment in public health. Today, in both the public and private sectors, we are continuing to make progress by expanding the number of smoke-free environments, supporting cutting- edge research on the effects of smoking, cracking down on unethical marketing practices, and using technology and social media to help people quit smoking. Tobacco prevention simply must remain a top public health priority. As we reflect on these accomplishments on this 50th anniversary of the first Surgeon General's report on smoking and health, I urge my colleagues to continue this fight, so that 50 years hence, Americans will be able to look back on a full century of amazing progress in the fight against smoking and tobacco-related illnesses.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, first, I thank the Senator from Rhode Island and the Senator from Utah for agreeing to the way we worked this out so we could all have our time to speak on the Senate floor. I appreciate it very much. Extending unemployment compensation benefits is one of the most important things, vital things we should be doing right now in Congress, both for the people who are unemployed but also for our economy. Our economy is improving--slowly. There are still 20 million Americans either out of work or marginally employed who want to work. Almost 4 million of those have been out of work for over 6 months. So, faced with this, it is reprehensible that Congress failed to extend Federal unemployment benefits at the end of last year, 3 days after Christmas. To correct this failure, last week the Senate began considering a bill that was intended to extend those benefits, and I wholeheartedly support this effort. As our economy makes steady improvements on the long road of recovery from the great recession, we continue to support our fellow Americans who are out of work through no fault of their own. The way to do that is to restore Federal unemployment insurance programs for the long-term unemployed. But to garner the votes needed to pass the unemployment insurance extension, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle insisted we find a way to pay for it, through cuts to existing programs, cuts that one columnist for the Los Angeles Times said were Swiftian in their absurdity and cruelty. I refer to the January 10 issue of the Los Angeles Times by Michael Hiltzik. It is titled ``An awful idea: hammer the disabled to pay for unemployment benefits.'' The first paragraph says: It would take the pen of Jonathan Swift to fully describe Congress's willingness to beat up on the least fortunate members of society to protect the richest. The latest example is a plan to pay for a one-year extension of unemployment insurance by cutting Social Security benefits for the disabled. First of all, I wish to say I do not believe that an extension of Federal unemployment insurance benefits needs to be offset. We have done it before. We did it under the Bush administration and we have done it before and it has always been an emergency. It is just as if a hurricane hits or terrible storm; this is a terrible storm for people who are unemployed for long periods of time. Frankly, the recent budget deal we just passed reduced the deficit by $25 billion. I disagree with having to find extra money. But the other side--the Republicans--says we have to find offsets. I guess I am reluctantly willing to do so. However, the proposal before us would do so in one of the most pernicious ways possible. I guess the most positive comment I can make about it is it is comparatively less damaging than some of the amendments that have been filed by some of my Republican colleagues. But understand this. The proposal before us to extend unemployment benefits and to ``pay for it,'' what it would do is it would deny individuals who have a disability and who are receiving Social Security disability insurance--it would say that if someone gets unemployment compensation, their disability payments will be reduced, dollar for dollar, for every dollar they get in unemployment compensation. That is bad enough. I will get into that in a second. Amendments filed on the Republican side would go further, and they would say if someone gets $1 in unemployment compensation payments, they would lose all their disability rights, all their disability payments, and all their Medicare support that comes along with being approved for SSDI--Social Security disability insurance. The proponents of these policies say that people with disabilities who receive disability insurance payments and unemployment compensation payments are double dipping. They claim this is a loophole; that somehow people who receive both are scamming the system. This is not true. This is simply not true. SSDI, Social Security disability insurance, is designed to address the needs of people with disabilities. Unemployment insurance is designed as a partial, temporary replacement of income for people who lost jobs through no fault of their own. They are two separate programs with two separate designed benefits. It is possible for an individual to be eligible for both. How can this be? First of all, we have to disabuse ourselves of what we keep hearing on the Senate floor from my friends on the Republican side. They keep talking about disability insurance as though, if someone gets Social Security disability insurance, then they are unable to work. That is not true. That is simply not true. SSDI is set up as system to give some support while looking for work--or get a job and supplement that. Under the law, people who qualify for SSDI, Social Security disability--I will just say disability. People who qualify for disability insurance can work and are encouraged to work, and they can make up to $1,070 a month without losing their SSDI. Why is it? Because we want people to work to the best of their ability--especially when they have a disability. People with disabilities also want to work. Keep in mind the SSDI Program is not a freeloader program. When you work and get a paycheck, they take out FICA taxes, which is the Federal Insurance Contribution Act. There are three parts of it. You pay to an insurance program for Social Security, old age, and survivors. It is indemnity insurance so when you get old, you get a check. Most people think of it as Social Security. The second part is hospital insurance, or Medicare. The third part is disability insurance. If you don't work and you haven't paid your FICA taxes, you don't get SSDI. Listen to this. An adult becomes eligible for disability insurance compensation when they have worked at least 10 years. You have to work at least 10 years and at least 5 years prior to getting Social Security disability, and you have to have earned at least $4,800 a year. You have to earn at least $400 a month for 5 years before you even qualify. So this idea that I keep hearing about, oh, someone works for 4 weeks, and then they go out and file for disability and are on disability for the rest of their lives is nonsense. That is not true. Yet we keep hearing these stories going around and around. You will have worked at least 10 years and will have had earnings during at least 5 of the previous 10 years prior to receiving it, and you have to have made at least $4,800 a year before you qualify. Then let's say you do become disabled and file for disability. What is your chance of getting it? One out of three. For every three persons who file for Social Security disability insurance compensation, only one out of three actually gets it. Why is that? You have to go through a long evidentiary process--a medical evidentiary process--and the administrative law judge is going to send you back to get further opinions. So it is not something you just file and you get it. Only one out of three qualifies for it. That is why if a person works and pays taxes--your FICA taxes--and is then laid off, they can get unemployment. But if they also qualify for disability insurance, they should get that if they paid into the system. People with disabilities who work and pay into that system can also be eligible for unemployment compensation. Why shouldn't they get that? Listen to this. If we deny people with disabilities their right to the insurance they have paid for, we are discriminating against a group of people in a way that no other group is singled out. In other words, we are discriminating against you just because you are disabled. How do you like that? Is that what we are about? We are going to discriminate against you just because you are disabled. Because if you are not disabled, you won't be discriminated against. If you are not disabled, you will get your unemployment compensation. You might even be eligible for some other government programs, such as section 8 housing or something like that. We don't take that away. God forbid you become disabled and you are working--you are disabled, you get a disability check, and you go to work. You can work and make up to $1,070 a month. You are providing a little bit of extra income so you can live independently and maybe provide a few things for yourself. But you, and only you--if you get unemployment compensation, we are going to take away your disability payments. Only you. Nobody else. Nobody else is denied their full unemployment compensation. Under the bill we have, only people with disabilities will be affected. Let me provide a real-life example of what this means to a real person. I will call him Henry. This is a real person. Henry lives in the District of Columbia. Henry has a disability. He is deaf, and he has other health problems on top of being deaf. But Henry worked. He worked for 10 years. He worked and paid his taxes, but then in his thirties, because of other health reasons, he couldn't continue to work full time so he went on disability and qualified for it. So now he is making $740 a month on his disability insurance--$740 a month. Well, he can earn up to $1,070 a month, as I said, under the law and still get that. He can't work full time, but he likes to work. He wants to work. He wants to be a productive citizen, so he went out and got a part-time job consistent with his disabilities. He makes $950 a month. If you add $950 and $740, you get $1,690 a month. Big deal. But I can tell you what that $1,690 does for him. It allows him to live independently. It allows him to provide some payments for a support system. It allows him to sign up for cable TV. It allows him to go see a movie once in a while and maybe even go out and have a hamburger-- $1,690 a month. That is what Henry was doing. Henry became unemployed. But now mind you, every month he worked and made $950 a month, he paid his FICA taxes every month. Now he is unemployed. Well, what happens? He went on unemployment compensation and he gets $520 a month. He gets $740 for disability, $520 for unemployment, which adds up to $1,260 a month. It is a little over $400 and some less than what he was getting when he worked full time. Still, $1,260 a month allows him to live independently. It allows him to support himself. Under the amendment that is in this bill, here is what happens: He gets his $520 in unemployment, but his disability is reduced to $220 a month. Now Henry is getting $740 a month. What is he going to do? He won't be able to afford his apartment, let alone have cable TV. I don't know if Henry has cable TV. But $740 a month? No other person working in America and paying their FICA taxes is treated like that--no one. And they still aren't unless this amendment is adopted, and then we will discriminate against you simply because you are disabled. I mean, you wonder what people are thinking about. Yes, I have compassion for those who are unemployed. I would like to see our economy improve. We have to extend unemployment benefits but not at the expense of people who are on the lowest rung of our ladder-- people with disabilities, who have paid into the system, and who have become unemployed. Henry wants to work. He wants to work. He wants to make that $950 a month. Pernicious? Pernicious? That is just a fancy way of saying it is abominable that we would even consider it. Henry is not double dipping. He is not scamming the system. He is not a slacker. He is not defrauding anybody. He is only getting what is rightfully his because he paid into the program. If people with disabilities are earning income, as Henry was, and paying into the disability insurance program, they should be eligible for that just as any other citizen who paid into that program. Again, to do otherwise would be to discriminate against someone just because they are disabled. One of my proudest moments in my history here in the Senate--indeed, in the entire Congress--is when I stood on this floor as a chief sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. When we passed that and President Bush signed it into law, the cheers went up. It was passed 25 years after the passage of the great Civil Rights Act of 1965. That was sort of the emancipation proclamation for people with disabilities. Because of that law, we have encouraged people with disabilities to work. They want to work. Now we want to break down the barriers, provide for accommodations and transportation and ramps and widen doors and all the other factors that make it possible for people with disabilities to get a job and go to work. It changed the system. I can remember when we had the hearings. We had people come in and testify. Employers said they would hire people with disabilities, but sometimes they don't show up for work and this and that. Well, I looked into it, and I found out they couldn't get on the bus because the bus wasn't accessible. How are they going to get to work? They couldn't drive because they were in a wheelchair and they couldn't get on the bus. So we changed it. We made the buses and the metro accessible. Everything is accessible now. People with disabilities are working, and they want them to work. Now we are saying to them, you can work. Like Henry, you can work, and you should. If you qualify for disability insurance, you can get your disability insurance and make up to $1,070 a month because we would like you to work if you want to work. But if you are like Henry and pay into the system and become unemployed, you will go from $1,690 to $740 a month simply because we are discriminating against you. What kind of signal does that send? That is why this provision is opposed by members of the entire disability community, Arc, the National Disability Rights Network, the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives, American Association of People with Disabilities, and on and on and on. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the letter expressing opposition to this proposal from these groups be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks. I also ask unanimous consent that this article from in the L.A. Times be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks. As I pointed out, you hammer the disabled to pay for unemployment benefits? You sometimes wonder. I want to be clear about one thing: I don't ascribe bad motives to anybody in this body--not in the least. As a matter of fact, I am told there will be a motion to strike this provision when we vote on the cloture on this tomorrow, and that is good. I hope it is generally supported by everyone here. So I don't ascribe bad motives, but what happens sometimes is we don't think these things through. Someone starts this thing, and they say these people are double dipping and scamming the system, and all of a sudden it sounds--oh, my gosh, yes. But when you look into it and examine it, and you see these people have been paying their FICA taxes--they have been paying their taxes. But you say because you are disabled, you don't get it if you become unemployed. We are busy around here, and we look at different things, so there are no bad motives. I take the floor to set the record straight and to let everyone know just what is at stake. Do we really, truly want to discriminate against 117,000 Americans? That is what the General Accounting Office said in a study done a couple of years ago--that there were about 117,000 Americans at any one time who are getting disability insurance as well as unemployment. If Henry's health improved, and he was able to get a full-time job, he wouldn't get his disability. He would go back and start earning money full-time. So are we saying that somehow we are going to take away their incentive to work? No, I don't think so. I think it is just one of those things that comes up and people say they are double dipping and they are scamming the system. But, no, that is not what is happening at all. They pay into the system. It is insurance. They pay for it. They ought to receive it, and they shouldn't have their disability payments reduced because they are getting unemployment. They are two separate programs. So I hope two things happen. I hope we can get cloture on the bill to proceed to extend Federal unemployment benefits. But I also hope all of my colleagues will see the error of this part of the amendment and move to strike it. Fundamentally, it is the only right thing to do. So I hope we will do that. I hope we will begin to take a look more and more at disability insurance in terms of what it means, how it operates. The notion that, somehow, if a person gets disability insurance they cannot work--that is not true. A person can work. If a person is able to work, they can earn up to $1,070 a month without losing their disability payments. So I hope as we go forward, we will begin to shed more light and have a more enlightened discussion on this program and how it operates and why it is so essential to ensure that people with disabilities are not discriminated against in a manner that no other part of our society would be, if this provision were left in the bill.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, with that, I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I wish to announce that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on January 16, 2013, at 10:00 a.m., in room SD- 106 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Strengthening Federal Access Programs to Meet 21st Century Needs: A Look at TRIO and GEAR UP.'' For further information regarding this meeting, please contact Aissa Canchola of the committee staff on (202) 224-2009.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Gregory Shanahan and Lemi Tilahun of my staff be granted floor privileges for the duration of today's proceedings.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, first I want to thank our leader and our assistant leader for their great leadership and for their eloquence here on the floor today and for correctly stating what the issue is. It is not rules; it is justice. I am going to speak about that myself. Mr. President, 50 years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson came before Congress and spoke these bold words: ``This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.'' Lyndon Johnson, as we all know, was born and raised in stark poverty in the Texas hill country, coming of age during the Great Depression. From hard personal experience, he understood how poor schools, empty stomachs, and bad health make a mockery of America's promise of equal opportunity for all. When President Johnson delivered that historic State of the Union address, our Nation was enjoying unprecedented post-war prosperity. We had become, in John Kenneth Galbraith's famous words, the ``affluent society.'' However, in the midst of this Nation of prosperity and plenty, there was also ``the other America'' as author Michael Harrington told us. Fully one-fifth of our population was trapped in poverty. Across Appalachia, in urban ghettos, in large swaths of rural America, millions of American children were being raised in shacks and slums, going to bed hungry, attending grossly substandard schools. Worse, experts described this poverty as ``intractable.'' Experts warned that despite the Nation's overall prosperity, poverty was growing more widespread, because as one study put it, the poor were ``not part of the economic structure.'' A report then by the President's Council of Economic Advisors asserted that, ``future economic growth alone will provide relatively few escapes from poverty.'' Economic growth alone, they said, will not solve the issue of poverty. Of course, I must add, it is very much the same today. Economic growth alone will provide few escapes from poverty for people today if 95 percent of income gains are going to the top 1 percent, and if the rewards of productivity gains go to shareholders and not to the workers. So it was in this context that President Johnson--keep if mind, less than 2 months after he assumed the office after the terrible assassination of President Kennedy. It was in this context that he summoned the Nation so that the unconditional war on poverty could be waged. For LBJ, this was both an economic challenge and a profound moral challenge. It was about doing justice. In his speech to Congress he said: Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper, in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities and a lack of education and training and a lack of medical care and housing, and a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children. President Johnson continued: Our chief weapons will be better schools and better health and better homes and better training and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, to escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls, where other citizens help to carry them. In the months that followed this State of the Union address, President Johnson proposed specific programs to attack poverty and inequality. He articulated his broader vision for what he called a Great Society. There is no better place to appreciate the boldness and accomplishment of this era than at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, TX. My favorite part is a room--I have been there several times-- commemorating the Great Society with plaques and signing pens all along the wall, listing the incredible array of legislation that President Johnson had passed into law. Listen to these: The great Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Job Corps, VISTA, Upward Bound, the Food Stamp Program, legal services for the poor, the Community Action Program, community health centers, Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, Public Broadcasting, the National Mass Transportation Act, the Cigarette Labeling Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Wilderness Act. It takes your breath away, to think about all that was done. These Great Society programs have defined the modern United States of America as a compassionate, inclusive society, a genuine opportunity society where everyone can contribute their talents and abilities. Last month, on December 4, in his landmark speech on inequality, President Obama noted that these and other initiatives have helped to reduce the poverty rate by 40 percent since the 1960s--have helped reduce the poverty rate by 40 percent since the 1960s. President Obama said: ``These endeavors didn't just make us a better country, they reaffirmed that we are a great country.'' However, on this 50th anniversary of President Johnson's great address to Congress, I must acknowledge that there are some who profoundly disagree with this assessment on the war on poverty and the Great Society. They insist it was a great failure. Indeed, I have heard this claim from many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle since I first came to Congress in 1975. This supposed ``failure'' of the war on poverty, this failure of the Great Society, has indeed become almost an article of faith and dogma among conservatives. It is truly the triumph of belief over reality. As President Reagan said on May 9, 1983, ``The great expansion of government programs that took place under the aegis of the Great Society coincided with an end to economic progress for America's poor people.'' Wow. That is quite an assertion by President Reagan. So allow me, on this 50th anniversary, to take a few minutes to point out many of the ``failures'' of the war on poverty and the Great Society. Perhaps a good place to start is by pointing out the ``failure'' of Medicare. At the bill signing ceremony for the Social Security Amendments Act on July 30 of 1965, President Johnson enrolled former President Harry Truman as the first Medicare beneficiary and presented him with the first Medicare card. These days we talk about life after 65 as the golden years. I tell you, life after 65 used to be the nightmare years, with tens of millions of Americans unable to afford even basic medical care, condemned to live out their senior years in the misery of untreated or poorly treated illnesses. In 1959 the poverty rate among older Americans was 35 percent. Since the Great Society programs started, the poverty rate among seniors has fallen by nearly two-thirds. What a failure. What a failure. Medicare is especially personal to me. I remember my father, who was then in his late 70s, and never had access to any regular health care in his life. My father only had a sixth-grade education, worked in coal mines most of his life, and suffered from what they then called ``coal-miners lung.'' They always called it ``coal-miners lung.'' He would get sick all the time. If it were not for the compassion and the generosity of the Sisters of Mercy who would take care of him when he got sick and nurse him back to health, I do not know what would have happened to him. But I can remember, coming home from the military on military leave in late 1965, and my father had his Medicare card. For the first time in his life, for the first time in his life--and now he was approaching almost 80 years of age--he could go see a doctor without paying. Without taking charity. It gave him the dignity and the security of knowing that he could see a doctor if he needed to. The Great Society also gave birth to community health centers, as long as I am talking about health care. Community health centers provided essential medical care to the poor. The first two community health centers were opened in 1964, one in Boston, MA, and one in rural Mississippi. This model of providing basic health services to the uninsured and underserved was an enormous success. Listen to this. From that modest beginning of two in 1964, community health centers have expanded to include more than 1,200 community health centers in more than 9,000 locations serving more than 22 million patients annually. What a failure. What a failure. I guess another failure of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We call it ESEA. Since Brown versus Board of Education, the decision of the Supreme Court in the mid 1950s, Americans acknowledged that we had two school systems, one for the middle class and the well off and a grossly inferior one for the poor. ESEA said that all children, regardless of their background and their circumstances at birth, can learn, and the Federal Government will provide resources to help create equity--equity among our schools. Educating children of poverty will always be challenging. We still have large achievement gaps that still persist. But Title I assistance to America's neediest schools has made a dramatic difference for the good of millions of low-income children. If it has been such a great failure, I would ask any Senator who wants to repeal Title I and defund it, please step forward. Speak up here on the Senate floor. Will any Senator who wants to do away with title I and defund it please step forward and speak up? I doubt there will be any takers. What about the failure of the Higher Education Act? In 1965, it was rare for young people from disadvantaged and low-income backgrounds to go to college. So President Johnson and Congress passed the Higher Education Act, creating need-based grants and loans with reduced interest rates. Today, Pell grants, created in the later version of the Higher Education Act, help more than 9 million low-income students gain access to higher education. The Higher Education Act has swung open the doors to college for countless Americans, creating new opportunities and access to the American dream. Again, I suppose some see this as another failure, another government handout that prevents people from standing on their own two feet. Decide for yourself if vastly expanding access to higher education constitutes a failure. But before we do, talk to a lower income student, striving to become a doctor, the first in her family to go to college, thanks to the TRIO Programs, Upward Bound, thanks to Pell grants, thanks to low-interest college loans. Ask her if she feels as though she is an undeserving taker, unwilling to stand on her own two feet. In August of 1964, again only a few months after declaring the war on poverty, Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Food Stamp Act. Prior to that act, hunger and malnutrition were shockingly widespread in America, particularly in our rural areas and urban ghettos. Today we still have millions of food-insecure people in America, but thanks to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the new name for the food stamp program, abject hunger in America is rare. Tens of millions of Americans, more than half of them children, are ensured a basic nutritional minimum. Is this another failure, food stamps? Apparently many Members of this body think so. In June of 2012, 33 Republican Senators voted to block grant the food stamp program and slash the funding by over $300 billion over 10 years. I ask Senators who voted for those cuts, have you ever talked to a first grader who is finally able to concentrate in class because she had a breakfast paid for by food stamps? Has anyone asked her whether she would prefer to tough it out without a meal to start the day? In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity created 269 local Legal Services offices across the country, providing legal assistance to low-income Americans. This later evolved into the Legal Services Corporation. As a proud former Legal Aid lawyer myself, I know firsthand what a difference this can make in so many circumstances for a struggling family facing foreclosure, a battered woman trying to leave an abusive marriage, a senior citizen victimized by a financial scam. I know that without access to an attorney the poor are often powerless against the injustices they suffer. Is the dedicated work of Legal Aid attorneys a failure? I vigorously disagree. The American Bar Association vigorously disagrees. It strongly supports Legal Services. Every Federal judge and Supreme Court Justice, in their oath of office, swears to ``administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich''--to do equal right to the poor and to the rich. It is Legal Services, and Legal Services lawyers, who helped to translate that ideal into a reality for poor people in courtrooms all over America. Our frontline soldiers in the war on poverty are the dedicated professionals and volunteers in Community Action Agencies, another Great Society program. These are funded by the Federal Community Services Block Grant. In 2012, these locally driven agencies served nearly 19 million low-income Americans, including more than 5 million children, more than 2 million people with disabilities, and 2.5 million seniors served by community action agencies. These agencies equip people with skills to return to work. They provide food, clothing, other emergency assistance. They administer Head Start Programs, other preschool programs, and do a lot more. People can decide if the Community Action Program, Community Action Agency, and Community Services Block Grant have been a failure. But before they do, drop in on a Community Action Agency in your State. See for yourself the amazing work they do in relieving poverty and helping people to escape. Speak to members of a local Community Action Agency board and people will find that they are local business people, bankers, lawyers, as well as people who receive the services. They will tell you how these agencies do so much with so little, performing indispensable services in their communities. Talk to them. I can spend hours citing some other Great Society initiatives, but let me mention just one more: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Prior to that act, African Americans faced open, legalized discrimination and segregation. We had our own American version of apartheid. In many parts of our country, including in Washington, DC, African Americans could not eat at the same lunch counter with Whites. They could not use the same bathrooms, the same swimming pools, the same water fountains. They literally were consigned to the back of the bus. Because of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, those Jim Crow laws and practices were ended in the United States of America. It became illegal to discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender, or national origin. Some apparently call that a failure--one of the Great Society's many ``failures.'' You may decide for yourself whether America is better off today, whether we are better as a society, stronger as a nation, because we did away with segregation. You decide. President Reagan, in his State of the Union Address in 1988, said that the Great Society ``declared war on poverty, and poverty won.'' It was one of President Reagan's catchy one-liners. But with all due respect to President Reagan, it simply is not historically accurate, not even close. From the time President Johnson took office in 1963, until 1970, as the full impact of the Great Society programs began to be felt, the number of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent--almost cut it in half. The poverty rate for African Americans fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27 percent in 1968. The poverty rate among the elderly, as I said earlier, fell by over two-thirds. The great shame is that this progress, this war on poverty of the Great Society, was cut short. The war on poverty gave way to the war in Vietnam. Then it gave way in retrenchment later on in later administrations, which cared less about giving a hand up to the poor than about giving handouts to the rich in the form of giant tax breaks and other advantages. What was started as a percolate-up economy under the Great Society became a trickle-down economic society under later administrations. On this 50th anniversary of President Johnson's great address to Congress, let me state unequivocally and factually--historically factually--the Great Society has been a historic success. However, I must note that 50 years later our Nation confronts a new set of economic challenges, societal challenges, challenges that are every bit as dangerous to our democracy, every bit as daunting and intractable as those confronted by President Johnson and the Congresses of his time. Our economy is still struggling to recover from the great recession. The sluggish recovery has left us with chronic unemployment and a middle class in crisis. Social mobility, the ability to work your way up the economic ladder, is now lower in the United States than in Europe. For the vast majority of American workers, incomes have been stagnant for decades, but the rich have grown fabulously richer. Think about this: Since the official end of the great recession in 2009, 95 percent of income gains in the United States have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent in the last 5 years--95 percent of income gains have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent. Unlike President Johnson's day, today it is not only the poor who are at risk, our great middle class is endangered. Millions of formerly middle-class Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their savings, their hopes for a decent retirement. For too many of our citizens, the American dream has become hopelessly out of reach. This is the crisis. This is the challenge of our day. Are we rising to meet this challenge as previous generations of Americans have done? No, I am afraid we are not. Inside the Washington bubble, too many of our political leaders have persuaded themselves that the biggest issue of the day is the budget deficit. Ignoring chronic unemployment and a struggling economy, this 113th Congress and the previous Congress pursued policies of relentless austerity, slashing budgets, defunding research and investment, destroying jobs, and even refusing to extend Federal unemployment benefits for long-term jobless, 1.3 million of whom lost their last lifeline of support only 3 days after Christmas. I am disturbed by the apparent shift of attitude by many elected leaders toward the ordinary people who do the hard day-in and day-out work that makes our country strong. I said it before, and I say it again. We are seeing an attitude of harshness. We used to agree that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they should be able to earn enough to support their families, keep a roof over their heads, put some money away for a rainy day, and have a secure environment. We used to agree that if someone loses their job through no fault of their own--especially at a time of chronic unemployment--they should have some support when they are looking for new work. We used to agree on both sides of the aisle that no child in this country should go to bed hungry at night. But in recent years these fundamental principles, values, and agreements have come under attack in our public discourse. For instance, recently on a Sunday talk show, the junior Senator from Kentucky said it would be a ``disservice''--a ``disservice''--to the long-term jobless to extend Federal unemployment insurance. I have his exact words right here. Senator Paul said: When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you're causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy. And while it seems good, it actually does a disservice to the people you're trying to help. When there are three people looking for every job; when in some areas, some States, unemployment is even worse than that, you would cut off their long-term unemployment insurance? Where are they going to get a job? Maybe what the Senator doesn't understand is that before you can even get unemployment benefits, you have to be actively looking for work. A disservice? I guess our new attitude is, tough luck. You are on your own. If you struggle, even if you face insurmountable challenges, well, it is your own fault. Tough luck. You are on your own. If you are a kid born into poverty or a single parent working for minimum wage, struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table, tough luck. You are on your own. If you are a 55-year-old worker who lost her job due to outsourcing or technological change, tough luck. You are on your own. If you are a person with a significant disability struggling to find work and independence and dignity, tough luck. You are on your own. Mr. President, there is a harshness among too many in powerful positions toward those Americans who have tough lives, who are ill- educated or marginally employed or who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own--a harshness among too many people in powerful positions toward these Americans. President Johnson would rebuke this harshness and this callousness, as he said in remarks 3 months after his war-on-poverty speech. Listen to what President Johnson said: God will judge his children not by their prayers and their pretensions, but by their mercy to the poor and their understanding of the weak. I tremble for our people if at the time of our greatest prosperity we turn our back on the moral obligations of our deepest faith. That was President Johnson. So today, 50 years later, I remind my colleagues that we are still a nation of great prosperity. We are the wealthiest Nation in the world. We are the wealthiest Nation ever in the history of the world. Our problem is this prosperity and wealth is concentrated at the very top. The workers who have created it are not getting their fair share. So on this 50th anniversary of President Johnson's war-on-poverty address, I cannot agree with those who say the budget deficit is our No. 1 priority. I am concerned about far more urgent and compelling deficits: the deficit of jobs and opportunity, the deficit of research and investment, the deficit of early education for all our children, the deficit of basic human understanding and empathy for those in the shadows of life. I am also concerned about the deficit of imagination today in Washington. I am concerned by our failure to confront today's economic challenges with the boldness and the vision that earlier generations of Americans summoned in times of national challenge. Indeed, our Republican friends reject the very possibility that the Federal Government can act to spur economic growth and create good middle-class jobs. This is their ideological position, and they are sticking to it. But this flies in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary across our Nation's history. One can go back to President Lincoln, who insisted that every American has a ``right to rise.'' To that end, he created the land- grant college system, provided for the transcontinental railroad, and established the Department of Agriculture with the mission of helping farmers boost their production and income and raise their standard of living. President Teddy Roosevelt fought for safe workplaces, the 8-hour workday, and busting up the trusts that were strangling opportunity for ordinary Americans. Think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who put to work millions of unemployed Americans, including my father, in the Works Project Administration, building roads and dams and bridges and schools, many of which still exist today. Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security to end the scourge of poverty in old age. Think of President Eisenhower, who championed investment in our infrastructure, beginning with the Interstate Highway System, which has expanded commerce and opportunity for nearly six decades now. As we are doing today, let's pay tribute to one of our greatest Presidents, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the enormous achievements of his war on poverty and the Great Society. Mr. President, I have not come to the floor today just to look back fondly and nostalgically or to try to correct the record about the achievements of the Great Society. I am here at the beginning of this legislative year to urge my colleagues to look with fresh eyes at the urgent economic and societal challenges confronting the American people today. We need to think more broadly and with more ambitious vision about how we in Congress can come together to create a greater society, an America of greater opportunity, greater economic mobility, greater fairness. We need to create what I call a new America. Let's dare to imagine a new America where every child has access to quality early learning. Let's dare to imagine public investments to create a truly 21st- century infrastructure, modernizing our roads, our bridges, ports, and canals, building high-speed rail systems from Maine to Miami and Seattle to San Diego--a new infrastructure for a new America. Let's dare to imagine retrofitting all of our buildings to make them energy efficient, making wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewables the main sources of our energy--yes, a renewable energy basis for a new America. Let's dare to imagine doubling our investment in the National Institutes of Health, making possible a real war on cancer and Alzheimer's and other devastating diseases. Think of that--a cancer- free, Alzheimer's-free new America. Let's dare to imagine a true health care system where wellness and prevention and public health are the first priority, keeping people healthy in the first place in this new America. Let's dare to imagine a new retirement system where every worker builds a private pension that can't be touched until they retire and a stronger Social Security System--solvent, secure--with increased benefits for the next 50 years. Think of it--a secure retirement for every citizen in this new America. These are the big challenges we in Congress should be addressing. I know that by all means there are issues demanding our immediate attention--again, beginning with the need to extend Federal unemployment insurance for the long-term jobless. We will be voting on that motion to proceed within the hour. As I said earlier, some 1.3 million Americans were cut off just a couple of weeks ago. Another 3.6 million Americans will be cut off over the course of 2014. These benefits are not much, but they make a critical difference for those with no other lifeline. So this is an immediate concern and must be our immediate priority in these initial days of this session. In addition, the Senate will soon take up my bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and to link it to future cost-of-living increases. Get this: Since the minimum wage peaked in 1968 as part of the Great Society, it has lost one-third of its buying power. So if you were making the minimum wage in 1968 compared to what you are making today, you could have bought one-third more than you can buy today. Over the decades, the minimum wage has become a poverty wage. Think about that. People go to work every day. They work hard, sometimes at two jobs, and they are still below the poverty line. No person in America who puts in a full day's work ought to have an income below the poverty line. These two are the immediate moral and economic issues we need to address. Yes, I say moral and economic issues. Today we do confront huge economic challenges. As Americans, we pride ourselves on our robust free-market system. Some say the unfettered free marketplace will solve all our problems. Just let it go. They glorify the ideas of Ayn Rand and academic theorists who say that greed is good, extremes of inequality are necessary, and poverty is deserved, which reminds me of the words of the philosopher Bertrand Russell nearly a century ago. He said: The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy--that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. I remind my colleagues that it is precisely the unrestrained, often run-amok free marketplace that has created so many of the problems we face today. Financial and real estate bubbles. Who suffered because of that? Ordinary Americans. Chronic unemployment. Who is suffering? Ordinary Americans. Stagnant wages. Who is suffering? Ordinary Americans. Gaping income inequality. Who is suffering? Not the few at the top. Disappearing pensions. Who is suffering? Ordinary working Americans. On and on. Like a busy highway system, our free marketplace only really works for all when all the players obey essential rules of the road--rules put in place by government to avoid crashes and bubbles, to rein in wasteful and dishonest money manipulators, and, yes, to provide for social and economic justice. And there are some things--big national undertakings--that the private sector simply is not capable of doing. At critical junctures going back to the beginning of our Republic, Congresses and Presidents have acted decisively to spur economic growth, foster innovation, and help create jobs. No question, that is where we are falling short today. Members of Congress and elected officials across America can learn from the successes of the war on poverty and the Great Society. We need a new generation of leaders with Lyndon Johnson's passionate commitment to improving education, expanding opportunity, and fighting inequality and discrimination. As I said, we need to come together to create a greater society, a new America. We need to act with boldness and vision. The war on poverty and the Great Society initiatives have defined the modern United States of America as a compassionate, inclusive society, a genuine opportunity society where everyone can contribute their talents and abilities. We see the Great Society all around us today--in cleaner air and cleaner water, young people from poor backgrounds attending college, seniors and poor people who have access to decent medical care, and people of color exercising their right to vote and to live in the neighborhoods of their choice. We see the great society in Head Start Programs, quality public schools, vocational education programs, college grants and loans, all those rungs on the ladder of opportunity which put the American dream in reach of every citizen, even those from humble, hardscrabble backgrounds like Lyndon Johnson himself. We might notice I said a ladder of opportunity. I didn't say an escalator. I think a lot of times my conservative friends say we just want to give everything to everybody, give everybody a free ride. I always talk about the ladder of opportunity. I don't talk about an escalator. An escalator is a free ride. With a ladder you still have to assert energy and initiative to get up. But there is one thing necessary: The rungs have to be there on that ladder, many of them put there by government and society acting together, things like affordable child care programs, early learning, quality of public schools, Pell grants, job training, and on and on. They provide those rungs on that ladder, and sometimes people fall off the ladder through no fault of their own. They lose their job, they become disabled or they contract a terrible illness. In those cases, it is the moral duty of government and society working collectively to provide a hand back up. Things like, yes, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, job training, and many others. Up until 1990, we looked around America and we saw that no matter how hard they tried, they could never climb that ladder of opportunity. These were Americans with disabilities. So in 1990 we passed the Americans with Disabilities Act. Again, we built a ramp of opportunity. We didn't build a moving walkway; that is a free ride. I have often pointed out, not one dime in the Americans with Disabilities Act goes to a person with disabilities. What we did is we broke down the barriers. We built the ramps to accessible buses and trains, provided accessible workplaces, widened doors in accessible bathrooms. We broke down the barriers so people with disabilities could exert their own energy and initiative to get up that ramp. Like every great leader in our Nation's history, Lyndon Baines Johnson brought us a giant step closer to achieving our highest ideals as a people. He fought passionately for social and economic justice for all Americans. He fought to put the American dream within reach of every citizen, and he saw this as a moral imperative. That is why I consider him one of our greatest Presidents. This is the legacy we salute today. This is the lesson we should learn as we move forward in this country. As we move from this 50th anniversary of President Johnson's great address to Congress, it is this spirit of ambitious public purpose that we should strive to emulate in the legislative year ahead and the legislative years to come. Fifty years ago today, Lyndon Johnson spoke to our deepest moral underpinnings. He didn't just couch it in terms of an economic solution. It was justice. It was making sure the American dream really was alive for all. We can't in our time become small-minded, looking upon just what is good for today or what are the economics of things. We have to think about it in terms of what our commitment is for moral, economic, and social justice for all Americans. That was the lesson of President Lyndon Johnson. That is what we should take from this 50th anniversary. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, we have the opportunity today to take care of some very important unfinished business. We left town last year without ensuring that millions of American jobseekers could retain access to vital unemployment insurance. I hope we correct this and restore the Federal unemployment program, the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which was allowed to expire on December 28. Unemployment insurance has helped tens of millions of Americans weather the storm of the difficult economy over the last several years. It has helped workers put food on the table, kept a roof over their heads, and kept millions out of poverty. But because Congress has so far failed to extend it, 1.3 million Americans were abruptly cut off from their vital unemployment insurance the week after Christmas. And over the course of this year, another 3.6 million Americans will be cut off from unemployment insurance as they exhaust their State benefits and have nowhere else to turn. That is a total of 4.9 million Americans--including 35,500 Iowans. They have spent 6 months or more trying to find new work, going out and pounding the pavement day after day, but must now worry about how they and their families and children are going to survive. How will they keep up with their heating bill, their rent, their car payment, or their mortgage? We used to all agree here in Washington that if you lose your job through no fault of your own, especially at a time of chronic unemployment, you should have some support while you're looking for new work. The American people certainly agree. A poll released last week shows that 55 percent of voters say that Congress should act to maintain the program. Unfortunately, some people in this chamber seem to think that the misfortune of losing a job means that these hardworking folks are to blame, or that they don't deserve this basic lifeline. Some here in the Senate have even called it a ``disservice'' to continue this program. That kind of harshness toward people who are trying to do the right thing but who are victims of circumstance is simply wrong. Jobseekers are not sitting around watching TV and collecting compensation they don't deserve. In fact, participation in the unemployment insurance program requires that workers have a significant work history--which means they have paid into the system and earned this insurance. Collecting on the insurance also requires workers to have lost their job through no fault of their own, and to be actively looking for work. Participants in the program are playing by the rules. It is now our responsibility to make sure that workers who are out of luck in this economy have some basic income to make ends meet. The fact is times are still tough and jobs are hard to come by. For every job opening there are three job seekers. That is why so many millions of workers have been searching for new work for such a long time. The American people know this, too. In last week's poll, 57 percent of voters said that the unemployed ``would rather work, but cannot find a job in today's economy.'' Although the payments under the Federal program were modest--after cuts due to sequestration, payments averaged just $269 per week--these funds were crucial for keeping households afloat. For many, this is their last lifeline. If Congress fails to restore the Federal program, millions of people will face real economic devastation. Also, we have to remember that unemployment insurance is not just a lifeline for families, but for our economy as a whole. After all, one of the best ways to grow our economy and to create jobs is to support spending power. And that is exactly what unemployment insurance does. When unemployed workers can continue to pay their bills, businesses can continue to make sales and provide services, and the economy grows. The Congressional Budget Office has found that unemployment insurance is one of the most efficient policy tools we have to improve economic growth. If the Federal unemployment insurance program is restored and extended through 2014, it will increase GDP by 0.2 percent and create 200,000 jobs. Those jobs will be lost if we do not act. Congress has a long history of acting to ensure basic security for working people during tough economic times. In the past, when the job market was this challenging, politicians on both sides of the aisle agreed that the Federal Government had an obligation to step in and help the long-term unemployed while they are struggling to find a work. Indeed, the current program of extended unemployment benefits was put in place in 2008 by President George W. Bush when the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. While unemployment is falling, it is still at a high rate, 7.0 percent. And that's just the official rate. Unofficially, when we include those folks who want to work full-time but can only find part-time work and those who have given up actively looking for work, the rate is actually 13.2 percent. Long-term unemployment has been at record highs for years. Currently 37 percent of unemployed workers have been looking for new work for at least 6 months. Congress has never allowed Federal unemployment insurance to expire when more than 23 percent of unemployed workers were long-term unemployed. Our economy is recovering, but we are not there yet. American jobseekers and their families still need Federal unemployment insurance. Our economy needs these families to have some basic means of survival. There is no justification for not restoring the current program. This is a modest, short-term extension of 3 months. I would prefer to see us approve a year-long extension, so that families who rely on the program have peace of mind that they will not be cut off from this lifeline again. But I am pleased that Senator Heller has joined with Senator Reed, myself, and others to put forward this proposal. Congress has an obligation to restore and continue the Federal unemployment insurance program to ensure that Americans and their families can survive while trying to get back on their feet and find new work. They are depending on us. I urge the Senate to act to restore the Federal unemployment insurance program.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, ensuring equal opportunities and equal rights for individuals with disabilities has been one of my highest priorities during my time in Congress. As the lead Senate sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act, I still remember the day that legislation was signed into law, July 26, 1990, as one of the proudest days of my legislative career. The Americans with Disabilities Act is one of the landmark civil rights laws of the 20th century--a long overdue emancipation proclamation for Americans with disabilities. The ADA has played a huge role in making our country more accessible and more inclusive, in raising the expectations of people with disabilities about what they can hope to achieve at work and in life, and in inspiring Americans to view disability issues through the lens of equality and opportunity. Before the ADA, life was very different for people with disabilities in Iowa and across the country. Being an American with a disability meant not being able to ride on a bus because there was no lift, not being able to attend a concert or ballgame because there was no accessible seating, and not being able to cross the street in a wheelchair because there were no curb cuts. In short, it meant not being able to work or participate in community life. Discrimination was both commonplace and accepted. Since then, we have made amazing progress. The ADA literally transformed the American landscape by requiring that architectural and communications barriers be removed and replaced with accessible features such as ramps, lifts, curb cuts, widening doorways, and closed captioning. More importantly, the ADA gave millions of Americans the opportunity to participate in their communities. The ADA stands for a simple, universal proposition--that disability is a natural part of the human experience and that all people with disabilities have a right to make choices, pursue meaningful careers, and participate fully in all aspects of society. One of the four great goals of the ADA is to assure equality of opportunity. The opportunity for an individual to be judged based on his or her talents, skills, and abilities rather than stigmatizing labels; to be included with non-disabled peers; and ultimately, the opportunity to be successful. That is the minimum that any individual with a disability should expect, and it is our responsibility to make that happen. More than two years ago I met Keith Nolan, a young man who is deaf and whose life goal is to be a military officer. Keith enrolled in and completed the first two levels of Army ROTC in California. As a ROTC cadet Keith participated in all classes, labs, and physical training. He had interpreters provided by his school program for classes and training, but not for physical training which he did without an interpreter. Still, he participated fully in a Fall Field Training Exercise where the cadets spent a weekend working on tactics. He also earned a German Army Forces Badge for Military Proficiency becoming the only cadet in his squad to get the highest decoration. Overall, he excelled in the ROTC program. However, Keith was not allowed to continue in ROTC due to Department of Defense rules that exclude individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. Keith has a master's degree, and if not for Department of Defense rules excluding individuals who are deaf, would have qualified for Officer Candidate School. My experience with Keith, as well as my long-standing advocacy to provide to persons with disabilities the same rights as every other American, have convinced me that individuals with disabilities can meaningfully contribute to our Armed Forces and should have the opportunity to do so. I know that there is some hesitation among the service branches in having individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing serve in the active military. But I know, just as we have found under the ADA for the last 23 years, people with disabilities can accomplish great things if they are provided with the same opportunities the rest of us take for granted. Keith Nolan is one exceptional young man, the kind the military would be proud to have among its ranks and I bet there are probably a few other Keith Nolans out there eager to serve. That is why today, on the day the Senate considers the National Defense Authorization Act, I am introducing legislation which would create a small demonstration program for 15-20 highly intelligent, deaf and hard of hearing men and women, in top physical condition, to enter the Air Force's Basic Officer Training course or the Commissioned Officer Training course at Maxwell AFB. The individuals who participate in this demonstration program will meet all the essential qualifications for accession as an officer in the Air Force--except for the one related to having a hearing impairment. I had filed this legislation as an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill; unfortunately, because that amendment process was cut short, I was not able to have it considered. But I am filing this legislation today to make clear that I intend to press forward in this effort to create a demonstration program. If this program is successful, as I believe it will be, then we will have created an opportunity for talented individuals like Keith Nolan in the military. We will have reiterated our commitment to equal opportunity for all Americans, including people with disabilities. I hope my fellow Members will join me as cosponsors of this small, but important, demonstration program. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, ensuring equal opportunities and equal rights for individuals with disabilities has been one of my highest priorities during my time in Congress. As the lead Senate sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act, I still remember the day that legislation was signed into law, July 26, 1990, as one of the proudest days of my legislative career. The Americans with Disabilities Act is one of the landmark civil rights laws of the 20th century--a long overdue emancipation proclamation for Americans with disabilities. The ADA has played a huge role in making our country more accessible and more inclusive, in raising the expectations of people with disabilities about what they can hope to achieve at work and in life, and in inspiring Americans to view disability issues through the lens of equality and opportunity. Before the ADA, life was very different for people with disabilities in Iowa and across the country. Being an American with a disability meant not being able to ride on a bus because there was no lift, not being able to attend a concert or ballgame because there was no accessible seating, and not being able to cross the street in a wheelchair because there were no curb cuts. In short, it meant not being able to work or participate in community life. Discrimination was both commonplace and accepted. Since then, we have made amazing progress. The ADA literally transformed the American landscape by requiring that architectural and communications barriers be removed and replaced with accessible features such as ramps, lifts, curb cuts, widening doorways, and closed captioning. More importantly, the ADA gave millions of Americans the opportunity to participate in their communities. The ADA stands for a simple, universal proposition--that disability is a natural part of the human experience and that all people with disabilities have a right to make choices, pursue meaningful careers, and participate fully in all aspects of society. One of the four great goals of the ADA is to assure equality of opportunity. The opportunity for an individual to be judged based on his or her talents, skills, and abilities rather than stigmatizing labels; to be included with non-disabled peers; and ultimately, the opportunity to be successful. That is the minimum that any individual with a disability should expect, and it is our responsibility to make that happen. More than two years ago I met Keith Nolan, a young man who is deaf and whose life goal is to be a military officer. Keith enrolled in and completed the first two levels of Army ROTC in California. As a ROTC cadet Keith participated in all classes, labs, and physical training. He had interpreters provided by his school program for classes and training, but not for physical training which he did without an interpreter. Still, he participated fully in a Fall Field Training Exercise where the cadets spent a weekend working on tactics. He also earned a German Army Forces Badge for Military Proficiency becoming the only cadet in his squad to get the highest decoration. Overall, he excelled in the ROTC program. However, Keith was not allowed to continue in ROTC due to Department of Defense rules that exclude individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. Keith has a master's degree, and if not for Department of Defense rules excluding individuals who are deaf, would have qualified for Officer Candidate School. My experience with Keith, as well as my long-standing advocacy to provide to persons with disabilities the same rights as every other American, have convinced me that individuals with disabilities can meaningfully contribute to our Armed Forces and should have the opportunity to do so. I know that there is some hesitation among the service branches in having individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing serve in the active military. But I know, just as we have found under the ADA for the last 23 years, people with disabilities can accomplish great things if they are provided with the same opportunities the rest of us take for granted. Keith Nolan is one exceptional young man, the kind the military would be proud to have among its ranks and I bet there are probably a few other Keith Nolans out there eager to serve. That is why today, on the day the Senate considers the National Defense Authorization Act, I am introducing legislation which would create a small demonstration program for 15-20 highly intelligent, deaf and hard of hearing men and women, in top physical condition, to enter the Air Force's Basic Officer Training course or the Commissioned Officer Training course at Maxwell AFB. The individuals who participate in this demonstration program will meet all the essential qualifications for accession as an officer in the Air Force--except for the one related to having a hearing impairment. I had filed this legislation as an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill; unfortunately, because that amendment process was cut short, I was not able to have it considered. But I am filing this legislation today to make clear that I intend to press forward in this effort to create a demonstration program. If this program is successful, as I believe it will be, then we will have created an opportunity for talented individuals like Keith Nolan in the military. We will have reiterated our commitment to equal opportunity for all Americans, including people with disabilities. I hope my fellow Members will join me as cosponsors of this small, but important, demonstration program. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN

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

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I want to take the floor today because I am very disturbed by the apparent shift in attitude by many elected leaders, including some in this body and in the House--the attitude towards people who do the work that makes this country run. They do not sit behind desks. They do not wear coats and ties every day or wonderful clothes. They do not sit in air-conditioned offices. They do not clip coupons. They just do hard work. They are the people you run into every day when you go into the local coffee shop and you order your latte. Maybe you see them when you go out and have lunch at a restaurant or you hail a taxi. Maybe you get on a bus or the subway. Maybe now, since it is near Christmas time, you go to a department store to do your Christmas shopping, and it is that person standing behind the counter. You think that person is only there for you when you go in there to buy your Christmas present. Think about it. She has probably been standing there all day long, and after you get out of there, she is still standing there to wait on somebody else. That is who I am talking about. They are not the big wheels in our society. They never thought of themselves as being big wheels, but they are the cogs and the inner workings that make our country run. There used to be fairly universal agreement that these people are the backbone of this country and the foundation of our economy; that our job as elected officials is to do all we can to ensure that all working Americans have a decent shot at the American dream. We used to agree that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they should be able to earn enough to support their family, keep a roof over their head, put some money away for a rainy day, and have a secure retirement. We used to agree that if one loses their job through no fault of their own, especially at a time of chronically high unemployment, they should have some support to get them through the rough patch while they are looking for new work. We used to agree not too long ago, on both sides of the aisle, that no child in this country should go to bed hungry at night. I say both sides. I remember McGovern and Dole, Dole and McGovern, and the great work they did on hunger in America. In recent years, it has been alarming to see how these fundamental principles and values are being attacked in our public discourse. For many, the new attitude is: You are on your own. If you struggle, even if you face insurmountable challenges, well, it is probably your own fault. It just seems to me that there is a harshness in our land, a harshness that I think of as sort of borne of a benign neglect toward those Americans who have tough lives, may be ill-educated, marginally employed or they are just down on their luck. It used to be we only heard harsh rhetoric such as that from radio talk show partisans trying to get their ratings up. Sadly, it has now become a part of our everyday conversation, even in the Congress. We hear how minimum wage workers don't deserve a fair increase because they are just not worth $10.10 an hour. We hear that unemployed workers should be cut off from unemployment insurance because they are becoming ``dependent.'' At a time when there are three job seekers for every job, we hear it is critical to take away food assistance from millions of individuals so that, supposedly, if we take away their food and take away their unemployment insurance, they will now somehow learn the redemptive power of work. As if young mothers working service jobs, laid-off factory workers delivering newspapers, unemployed families receiving SNAP benefits--that somehow they need to be lectured by Members of Congress about work. These people know what it is like to work. What happened to our respect--our respect for the people who do the work and want to work in our country? What happened to our values, basic moral truths that people shouldn't go hungry in the richest country in the world? Whence comes this harshness of ours, reminiscent of the late 19th century workplace in America? How did we get to the point where many of us value the work of day traders pushing paper on Wall Street, but we ignore the contributions of the people who work in our daycare centers, educate our kids, care for our elderly in the twilight of their lives? What about their value? I wish the people who are pushing this harsh rhetoric would talk to Terrence, a father of three in Kansas City, MO. He works 50 hours a week. Don't lecture him about working. Fifty hours a week, two jobs-- one at Pizza Hut and one at Burger King--to try to make ends meet. He can barely insure his 15-year-old car or purchase shoes for his three girls. Last year, he lost his house. He told the Washington Times: We work hard for companies that are making millions. We're not asking for the world. We want to make enough to make a decent living. We deserve better. If they respect us and pay us and treat us right, it'll lift up the whole economy. I will bet Terrence never got a degree in economics, but he says it better and understands it better than a lot of these economic thinkers down at our big banks and these economic think tanks. They should speak with Edward, a father in Illinois. Both he and his fiancee earn the minimum wage. He said: We have three children and our paychecks combined barely cover the necessities like a roof over our heads, gas and lights, and clothes for the kids. We wouldn't be able to make it without government assistance like food stamps and a medical card. There is constant stress because we are living paycheck to paycheck and never have enough money. Everyone needs help sometimes, especially since the economy is so bad and it has made life even harder for working people. This isn't about needing more money for luxury things, we need a raise in the living wage in order to survive. Edward and Terrence clearly are not lazy. They are doing exactly what we might expect them to do, what we have told them they must do to make it in this country. But they are slipping further and further behind, through no fault of their own. The fact is our economy has changed. It is not working for many families right now. We can't stick our heads in the sand and pretend it is not true. We shouldn't suggest it is Edward's and Terrence's fault or that their kids don't deserve to eat or to wear shoes. We as elected officials have an obligation to recognize the fundamental truths about the challenges working families face in America. We have a duty to support policies which will help these families both weather the continuing economic storm and also build a brighter future for their children. First, we have to acknowledge the truth that while we are slowly moving in the right direction, the economy has not recovered, especially for those at the bottom of the economic ladder, the Edwards and Terrences and others. Jobs are still scarce. Four million people have been pounding the pavement for at least 6 months looking for new work. There are three job seekers for every job. Our economy is still millions of jobs short of what we need. In the past when the job market was this challenging, politicians on both sides of the aisle agreed the Federal Government had an obligation to step in and help the long-term unemployed while they are struggling to find work. In fact, the current Federal Unemployment Insurance Program was put in place in 2008, under a Republican President, George W. Bush, and we did it when the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. Today the unemployment rate officially is 7 percent. We know it is higher. That is the official rate. But unofficially, if we include folks who want to work full time but can only find part-time work, those who have given up actively looking for work, the rate is actually 13.2 percent. That is the real unemployment rate in America. So given that the unemployment rate remains high in many parts of the country, my colleague Senator Jack Reed and I have introduced a modest proposal to extend the current system of federally funded extended unemployment insurance until the end of 2014. It is vitally important that we do so because it is going to expire in 2 weeks. Almost 5 million American workers will exhaust their State unemployment insurance and lose their last lifeline before the end of next year. We are their last lifeline. They are counting on us. How can we think about turning our backs on them? But instead of joining a call to action, some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are actually suggesting that an extension of unemployment insurance will hurt jobless Americans. I was rather shocked when I heard this from our colleague from Kentucky, Senator Paul, on a Sunday talk program. Here is what he said: When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you're causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed . . . group in our . . . economy, and . . . while it seems good, it actually does a disservice to the people you're trying to help. A disservice? I don't understand this kind of harshness for people who are out of work, who have paid into unemployment insurance and they are seeking now to get their insurance payments. First of all, this 99 weeks is not quite right. The maximum is 73 weeks, and that is only for those who have been unemployed the longest and it is only in two States. Only two States have 73 weeks. Those are the two States with the highest unemployment rates. The rest of the States have access to, at most, 63 weeks. In my State, Iowa, it is only 40 weeks, not 99. Secondly, unemployment insurance is a desperately needed program. Let's be clear, unemployed workers are not living high on the hog on these insurance payments which average about $310 per week nationally. If you are on it for 1 year, that averages about $15,000 per year. There are some that are less than that. Mississippi, for example, is $193 a week. The truth is they are barely subsisting, barely hanging on, not sitting around watching TV. Why? Because there is only one way you can collect unemployment insurance benefits. That is, No. 1, if you have worked and paid into the system. So you have already earned the right to access the insurance you paid for. Secondly, you can only collect on the insurance if you are actively looking for a job. So contrary to the statement of my colleague from Kentucky, it is not a disservice to provide this meager benefit to the long-term unemployed, a benefit which they have earned. The only disservice is to float this absurd myth that jobless Americans want to be unemployed. I think it is offensive to suggest they are lazy and don't want to work. To me, it is morally repugnant to conclude that they will somehow be miraculously better able to find a job if we simply let their kids go hungry. That same harsh kind of thinking has also crept into our national debate about the most fundamental aspect of our social safety net--food assistance. Millions of American families depend upon the SNAP program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It is what everybody thinks of as food stamps. Such a basic thing, having enough to eat, in this country. Again, many of these people are in working families. In 2011, 41 percent of SNAP participants lived in a household where someone was working. Over the last several years, my Republican colleagues have sought again and again to slash food assistance for these families. The House-passed farm bill, engineered by Republicans in the House, proposed cutting food stamps by $40 billion over the next 10 years. Contrast that to what we passed in the Senate. Under the leadership of Senator Stabenow, we passed a farm bill which made some cuts over 10 years of a little over $4 billion. That was supported by most people on both sides of the aisle. The House bill was only supported by the Republicans: Forty billion the Republicans wanted to cut versus $4 billion in the Senate. That would have cut 3.8 million individuals from the SNAP program next year. Other parts of their proposal would have cut off food stamps and benefits in the future for some of the poorest adults, many of whom SNAP is the only income assistance they have or it would result in throwing 210,000 children out of their free school meals program, raising the level so low-income kids would be cut out of their free lunch program. Yet another provision the House Republicans put into their bill would have provided strong financial incentives to States to kick people off the SNAP program. The House farm bill would allow States to cut off SNAP benefits to most adults receiving or applying for SNAP, including parents with children as young as 1 year old, if they are not working or participating in a work or training program for at least 20 hours a week. That was it. There was no exclusion for mothers with little kids. The House bill meant that mothers with young children still in diapers could be cut off from the SNAP program even if they don't have affordable childcare. Imagine that--forcing a mother to choose between employment and safe child care for her child. That is harsh. As I said, this is not realistic. We already said there are three job seekers for every job, and 48 States have a waiting list for our largest training program, the Workforce Investment Act. Are we going to tell a young mother with a child who can't get adequate childcare that she has to be in a job training program? The lists are so long that you can't get in. Are we then going to tell her that she has to work? There are three job seekers for every job. What is she going to do? Never mind reality. Somehow Republicans seem to think that denying food assistance will magically make people find jobs despite the fact that jobs don't exist. Getting people into the workforce will require a stronger, growing economy with real jobs and strong job-training programs that really will help people get ahead. Promoting draconian cuts to SNAP programs under this benign-sounding work label does not make the effect any less harsh. What we have seen in recent years with respect to the SNAP program are not concerted and sincere efforts to help people leave the SNAP programs because they have gained employment or because our economy is get stronger; quite the contrary. Many Republicans want to eliminate food assistance for families without regard for the true nature of the economy or the effect on those families. In addition to acknowledging the fundamental economic truth that our job market has not adequately recovered--and for many Americans, programs such as unemployment insurance and food stamps are essential to basic survival--we also have an obligation to face another, perhaps even more alarming, economic reality. For those at the bottom who are working and playing by the rules, it is not enough. Hard-working people who are working full time--sometimes multiple jobs--are not getting paid enough to make ends meet. Full-time workers are living in poverty. Families are living in poverty. They go to work every day. This is a fundamental failure of our economy. It is something I believe we have a moral obligation to address by fixing and raising the minimum wage in America. I have introduced a proposal that I have worked on for a long time with Congressman George Miller in the House--the Fair Minimum Wage Act. It would gradually raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, where it is now, to $10.10 an hour, then it would link the minimum wage to the cost of living in the future. It would be indexed. We would also provide a raise in the minimum wage for tipped workers, which has not been done in more than 20 years. Let's look at what happened to the minimum wage. If we kept the minimum wage at the same level when adjusted for inflation, and made that adjustment based on the minimum wage for 1968, which was a pretty good economic year, the minimum wage today would be $10.75 an hour. It is now $7.25 an hour. You wonder why there are more people on food stamps. Look at what's happened. By the way, these are people who are working, and they are people you see every day. You see them every day when you go in to get that coffee, go to that lunch counter or that department store. You see these minimum-wage workers every day. If you have daycare for your kids, you probably see them there too. Again, if we kept at this level, that family making minimum wage would have an additional $7,000 every year to spend on necessities. It is no wonder that working people turn to the safety net. In fact, a recent study found that taxpayers have to pick up the tab for millions of working families who are getting minimum wage. We have to pick up the tab to the tune of about $243 billion a year. Why? That is what we pay for food stamps, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program, the Earned Income Tax Credit Program, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Taxpayers are picking up the tab to the tune of about $243 billion. If you want to say who benefits from an increase in the minimum wage, it is not only the people who are making the minimum wage, taxpayers will benefit too because a lot of this would fall by the wayside because people wouldn't qualify any longer for the safety net programs. Businesses will benefit too. The biggest problems for businesses-- especially small businesses--is the lack of consumer demand and poor sales. If you put money back in the pockets of low-income workers, that will be a boon to small businesses, and it will be a boon to businesses on Main Street because that is where they will tend to shop. Many of these low-income workers don't drive out to the suburbs. A lot of them don't go online and buy at amazon.com, but they will go to their neighborhood stores, and that is where they spend their money. In a poll earlier this year two-thirds of small business owners said they support raising the minimum wage because they know it will help increase consumption and reduce pressure on taxpayer-funded public benefit programs. We always hear the claim that if you raise the minimum wage, it will cost jobs. That is just not true. The most sophisticated empirical economic research conducted over the last 2 decades has shown repeatedly that minimum-wage increases do not cause job loss--not generally, not among teenagers, and not among restaurant workers. In short, history shows us time and again that despite all the cries of doom and gloom from richly paid lobbyists and well-funded trade associations, there is simply no real negative economic consequences from an increase in the minimum wage. To the contrary, the benefits are enormous. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that our bill would pump an additional $22 billion into the gross domestic product, thereby supporting 85,000 new jobs, and giving workers an additional $35 billion to spend over the 3 years of the implementation, and, of course, more beyond that. Fourteen million children in America will have a parent who gets a raise because of increasing the minimum wage. Again, this makes a real difference in people's lives. They are not going to the Riviera. They are not taking vacations to the beach. Fifteen million women, 13 million men, 4 million African-American workers, 7 million Hispanic workers, and 7 million parents will get a raise. It is going to make a real difference in their lives. A boost to $10.10 would mean an extra $6,000 a year. Think about what that would mean for someone who is making the minimum wage, which puts them at $14,000 to $15,000. After 3 years of implementation, they would get $6,000 more a year, which amounts to 7 months of groceries, 6 months of rent, 1 semester at a 4-year public university or 1,600 gallons of gas. That is a real difference. I have heard some say that they think the Earned Income Tax Credit should be the answer to the problem of low wages. What this overlooks is that the Earned Income Tax Credit only helps families with children. Childless adults who work full time at the minimum wage actually earn too much to qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. The minimum wage is not enough for a single person to survive on. Moreover, just relying on the Earned Income Tax Credit would simply shift more costs to the taxpayers rather than requiring employers to pay a fair wage. It would actually incentivize employers to pay even less in wages, even to workers who don't qualify for EITC. The minimum wage raise we are proposing is particularly important for millions of tipped workers. They will receive a raise for the first time in 22 years. Workers who receive tips will get a raise in their base wage. These include not only restaurant servers, but also nail salon workers, pizza delivery drivers, coat checkers, parking attendants, and many more. Right now, under our current Federal law, employers are required to pay only $2.13 an hour to tipped workers. So rather than supplementing wages, tips have actually, over the last 20 years, replaced wages, which is insecure for workers. It often leaves them in poverty. There is no predictability when counting on tips. Often workers go home with only tips because tax deductions canceled out their cash wages. This is an actual copy of a real check made out to a restaurant worker in the District of Columbia. It is a paycheck. The check date is 8/5/2013, and it says $0.00. This is made out to a real person. She got a paycheck for $0.00. Why? After they took out her withholding and FICA taxes, she didn't make enough to get paid. Some people might say, well, she got tips. Maybe. But anyone who gets tips can tell you one day they are up and the next day they are down. Sometimes they are good; sometimes they are not. How do you budget on that? That is like saying the Earned Income Tax Credit. I have already pointed out the fallacy of that, but that only comes a year later. I am talking about--how do you live from paycheck to paycheck when your paycheck is zero? You can't make plans based on your budget, and you can't raise a family based on it. No one who works for a living should come home with a paycheck that says $0.00 when they have worked over 40 hours a week. My bill would establish a fair balance between wages and tips by slowly--over 6 years--lifting the base wage for tipped workers from $2.13 an hour to 70 percent of the minimum wage. That is more in line with how the wage for tipped workers worked in the decades that have since passed. The National Restaurant Association claims it can't afford to raise these wages. They say that every time we propose raising the minimum wage. The National Restaurant Association opposes any minimum wage increase at any time. But they can afford it. In fact, the last minimum wage increase from 2007 to 2009, which meant raises for workers such as bussers, kitchen staff, and others who don't regularly receive tips, didn't hurt the industry. But they said so at the time. Here is what they said in 2007. When we were here debating an increase in the minimum wage, here is what they said: ``A minimum wage increase will cost our industry jobs.'' That is what they said in 2007. Flash forward to 2012. Here is what the restaurant industry said: ``The restaurant industry not only provided much-needed job growth during the sluggish last decade, it also is poised to post steady growth well into the future.'' They can't have it both ways. This is the truth, that they provided job growth during that time. More power to them. But don't come and tell us that an increase in the minimum wage and an increase in the minimum wage for tipped workers is going to cost them jobs. That just doesn't hold. I will close with one more statement from a real worker whose life will be improved if we step up and support the people who work in our country. She has a lesson for us. Jackie Perkins works at a restaurant in Denver, CO, and she says: You are talking about real people. You sit in your ivory tower in the legislature and talk about economics, numbers, jobs, but what you don't understand is there are real jobs and real workers who have families that they need to support, and raising the minimum wage helps me support myself and my family and to advance and to achieve the American dream. So I believe in Jackie's dreams and those of all of these hard- working Americans, as I said earlier, who make the country work, who make it operate. As we look ahead to the Christmas season and the new year, I hope all my colleagues will take time over the holidays to think about all the blessings we have been given and all that we should be thankful for. I hope we put ourselves in the shoes of these working people who just want to build a better life for themselves and their children. Think about the minimum wage retail worker we see when we go into the store to shop for that Christmas present, who works hard running that cash register, standing on her feet all day, and she can't even afford to shop in her own store. Think of the unemployed worker who must go to the local food bank because he can't find a job. The food stamps have run out and he can't afford that nice big turkey and all the dressing and everything else for Christmas dinner. I will close where I started. We have to stop being so harsh and having these harsh attitudes toward people at the lower economic end of the spectrum. They have value too. Their lives have value. Their work has tremendous value. The country couldn't exist, couldn't operate without people such as they. So let's refine our public policies to be a little bit more considerate, a little bit more compassionate, a little bit more understanding of the tough lives some people have in our society. Let's have a compassion that is borne of an understanding that we are so privileged to live in the richest country in the world. We can afford to make sure people have enough food to eat. We can afford to make sure people who are unemployed get unemployment insurance benefits next year. We can afford that. We can afford to increase the minimum wage. We can afford these things, and we will be a better country socially and economically if we do so. We have a duty, I believe, to put ourselves in their shoes. We have a duty to make sure people who do the work such as that in our country get a fair chance to aspire to the American dream. So I hope we all have a good holiday season--Christmas and New Year's with our families and our friends. I hope we take time to pause and reflect also, as I said, on our blessings and our obligations toward people who may not be as fortunate as we are. I hope when we come back we will support a strong food assistance program, a deserved and long overdue increase in the minimum wage, and an extension of Federal unemployment insurance, and let's have a new year that is filled with less harshness and a little bit more compassion and understanding for our fellow Americans. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, as chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which holds jurisdiction over the servicing of our Federal student loan programs, it is my understanding that the intent of the budget agreement is to allow for the continuation of the existing not-for-profit servicer contracts and that they will be permitted to compete based on performance with the Department of Education's title IV servicers for additional accounts, so that students receive the best possible service and taxpayer funds are used efficiently.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Trenton White of my staff be granted floor privileges for the duration of today's proceedings.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I rise in enthusiastic support of the nomination of Chai Feldblum to serve a second term at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Commissioner Feldblum has served with distinction at the Commission since 2010. She is a respected professor of law, and one of America's premier experts on employment discrimination and civil rights laws. I have had the pleasure of working personally with Commissioner Feldblum first on the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, and more recently in 2008 on the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act. She was a tremendous help to me in both of those efforts. Chai Feldblum has a fierce intellect and a passionate commitment to ensuring equal opportunity for all. Perhaps the most important quality in a Commissioner at this critical agency, Commissioner Feldblum has the ability to listen to all sides and to make careful decisions about the allocation of the scarce resources that Congress provides to the EEOC. That ability to listen carefully, to search for compromise, and to forge consensus are skills that I have observed during our work together, and that I know she brings those skills to the EEOC. She has built close working relationships over the course of her career with both worker advocates and the business community. This explains why her nomination has broad bipartisan support here in the Senate and in the employment community as a whole. I have here letters of support from the Society of Human Resource Managers, the U.S. Business Leadership Network, and a letter signed by leading attorneys in the labor and employment bar. The signatories on that letter include five former GOP Commissioners and officers of the EEOC and the Department of Labor. Speaking of Ms. Feldblum, these attorneys say, and I quote, ``Commissioner Feldblum has been one of the leading lights in the employment law field. She is a tireless contributor to the employment law bar and to educating stakeholders on employment law issues.'' I ask unanimous consent that these letters be made part of the Record. I would also like to note the critical role the EEOC plays in ensuring that people with disabilities are protected from employment discrimination, and in interpreting and enforcing the employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA. My committee last year issued a report, Unfinished Business: Making Employment of People with Disabilities a National Priority, that focused attention on the fact that employment rates for people with disabilities remain far below the employment rates for any other group. The report noted that people with disabilities participate in the workforce at less than one- third the rate of the general population, and that workers with disabilities dropped out of the labor force at a much higher rate during our recent recession. Given these harsh realities, it is critical to have a Commissioner at the EEOC who understands disability law and is committed to enforcing the employment rights of people with disabilities. Given the role that Commissioner Feldblum played not only in passing the ADA and the ADA Amendments Act, but in the implementation of those laws, it is invaluable to have someone with her expertise at the EEOC. I am not alone in that view. I have a letter here signed by 38 separate disability organizations in support of her re-nomination. I ask unanimous consent that this letter be included in the Record. Commissioner Feldblum's confirmation will ensure that the EEOC has a full complement of members, and that the agency is able to move forward with the critical work of ensuring equality in the workplace. While much progress has been made in recent decades, discrimination in the workplace persists. Today, too many employment decisions are based on insidious stereotypes and prejudices rather than an employee's talent, ability and qualifications. Too many hardworking Americans face hiring discrimination, harassment, unfair treatment or even termination, not because of lack of skills or poor performance but because of their age, race, sex, disability or some other irrelevant factor. Commissioner Feldblum brings to the EEOC a determination to work on a bipartisan basis to craft practical solutions, and to work to make America's workplaces more fair and free from discrimination. The EEOC's mission is simple: to promote equality of opportunity in the workplace and enforce Federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination. Unfortunately, the agency must fulfill this broad mission without sufficient resources. The EEOC is constantly being asked to do more with less. Just in the past year, as the result of sequestration and across-the-board cuts, the EEOC has seen its budget drop from $360 million to $343 million. Meanwhile, the EEOC continues to handle an increasing number of complaints--almost 100,000 each in 2011 and 2012! At least in part thanks to strong management and setting clear priorities, in 2011 the agency managed to reduce its backlog for the first time in almost 10 years. Together with Chairman Berrien and the other members of the Commission, Commissioner Feldblum has played an important role in developing a strategic plan that allows the EEOC to create a system that rewards effective investigations and conciliations, and does not incentivize the closure of charges simply to achieve closures. I urge my colleagues to support the re-confirmation of this excellent, highly qualified nominee. I look forward to her confirmation and to her continued service on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I wish to announce that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will meet in executive session on Wednesday, December 18, 2013, at 10 a.m. in room 430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to mark-up S. 1417, Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2013; S. 1719/H.R. 3527, Poison Center Network Act; and the nominations of David Weil, of Massachusetts, to serve as Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, Department of Labor; France A. Cordova, of New Mexico, to serve as Director of the National Science Foundation; Steven Anthony, of the District of Columbia, to serve as a Member of the Railroad Retirement Board; and James H. Shelton III, of the District of Columbia, to serve as Deputy Secretary of Education; as well as any additional nominations cleared for action. For further information regarding this meeting, please contact the Committee at (202) 224-5375.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, today I wish to speak about one of the most important jobs the Senate must do before we go home for the holidays--extend Federal unemployment insurance benefits. This is a program that has helped tens of millions of Americans weather the storm of the difficult economy over the last several years. It has helped workers put food on the table, kept a roof over their heads, and kept millions out of poverty. But this program is at risk. If Congress fails to extend it, then just 3 days after Christmas on December 28, 1.3 million Americans will be abruptly cut off from their vital unemployment insurance benefits. But it does not stop there: by the end of next year another 3.6 million Americans will be cut off from unemployment insurance. That's a total of 4.9 million Americans--including 35,500 Iowans, who have spent 6 months or more trying to find new work, going out and pounding the pavement day after day, who will now have to spend this holiday season worrying about how they and their families and children are going to survive. How will they pay their heating bill, their rent, or their mortgage, much less afford gifts for their family? Congress has a moral responsibility to continue the Federal unemployment insurance program to ensure that Americans and their families can survive while trying to get back on their feet and find new work. It is simply unacceptable for us to return to our home States to celebrate the holidays without answering our constituents' call to keep this critical lifeline going. They are depending on us. Unfortunately, some people seem to think that the misfortune of losing a job means that these hardworking folks are to blame, or that they do not deserve this basic lifeline. But they are not. In fact, participation in the unemployment program requires that workers have a significant work history, which means they have paid into the system and earned these benefits. Collecting benefits also requires workers to have lost their job through no fault of their own, and to be actively looking for work. The fact is times are still tough and jobs are hard to come by. For every job opening there are three job seekers. That is why so many millions of workers have been searching for new work for such a long period of time. Our economy still needs more jobs, and in the meantime, we must make sure that workers who are out of luck in this economy have some basic income to make ends meet. We cannot abandon them now. These benefits are crucial for keeping households afloat. For many, this is their last lifeline. If Congress fails to act, millions of people will face real economic devastation. The Council of Economic Advisers found that in 2012 unemployment benefits kept 2.5 million people from falling below the poverty line, including 600,000 children. By helping families to make ends meet, unemployment benefits are a help not just to jobseekers and their families, but to our economy as a whole. After all, one of the best ways to grow our economy and to create jobs is to support spending power. And that is exactly what unemployment benefits do. When unemployed workers can continue to pay their bills, businesses can continue to make sales and provide services, and the economy grows. The Congressional Budget Office finds unemployment benefits to be one of the most efficient fiscal policies to improve economic growth. If Federal unemployment benefits are extended through 2014, it would increase GDP by 0.2 percent and create 200,000 jobs. Those jobs could be lost if we do not extend this program. It's important to remember who is most affected by long-term unemployment. Unfortunately, it is older workers. In a cruel state of affairs, those who have been working for decades, but who are not yet at retirement age, have the hardest time finding new work. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over half of jobseekers between ages 55 and 64 have been searching for work for over 6 months. That is compared to 42 percent of those between 25 and 54. These older workers can't yet afford the luxury of retirement. They need to continue working to support their families and hopefully one day save enough to retire with security. Congress has a long history of acting to ensure basic security for working people during tough economic times. Over the last 50 years, during seven different economic downturns, Congress has provided Federal unemployment benefit programs to assist workers when unemployment is high. The current program was put in place in 2008 by President George W. Bush when the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. While unemployment is falling, it is still at a high rate, 7 percent. Long-term unemployment has been at record highs for years. Currently 37 percent of unemployed workers have been looking for new work for at least 6 months. Congress has never allowed Federal unemployment benefits to expire while the long-term unemployment rate was above 23 percent. Our economy is recovering, but we are not there yet. While the duration of Federal benefits has appropriately been scaled back as the recovery has progressed, there is no question that American families are still depending on Federal unemployment benefits, and there is no justification for letting the current program expire now. We cannot let vulnerable Americans be cut off from their unemployment insurance during their time of need. We cannot turn the lights out on millions of Americans. Working families deserve peace of mind and our continued support while they look for jobs during these tough times. I urge the Senate to act to extend unemployment benefits, so that families do not have to wonder how they will survive in the New Year.