Amy Klobuchar

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss our country's relationship with Cuba. I have long advocated modernizing our relationship with Cuba. The current embargo has been in place for 50 years, and it has greatly constrained opportunities for American businesses by restricting commerce, by restricting our exports--things that are made in America--from going to a place that is only 90 miles off our shores and has 11 million people. That is why today I introduce the bipartisan Freedom to Export to Cuba Act with Senators Enzi, Stabenow, Flake, Leahy, and Durbin. This bill lifts the trade embargo on Cuba and knocks down the legal barriers to Americans doing business in Cuba. This bill will help open up new economic opportunities for American businesses, which will mean more jobs. It will also boost opportunities for farmers--something the Chair knows well coming from the State of North Dakota, as we know well in the State of Minnesota. This will also allow Cubans to have access to these products, which we believe is good for their country, good for their people so that they can become a different country. Freeing our businesses to pursue opportunities for development could greatly help the people of Cuba. Consider for example that Cuba only has a 2G cellular network and that only about one-fourth of the population has Internet access. Ultimately, I believe this legislation will help usher in a new era for Americans and Cubans shaped by opportunities for the future rather than simply a story of the past. The process the President has jump-started to normalize our ties with Cuba is a positive step forward. My home State of Minnesota exported about $20 million in agricultural products to Cuba in 2013. I think people are surprised by that, but as many of us know, there are humanitarian exceptions to the current embargo. So our country is already exporting, and my State alone exported $20 million in products. With the President's action alone, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture estimates that exports could increase by another $20 million. The United States is already the fourth largest source of imports to Cuba based solely on authorized shipments of agriculture and medical supplies. Over the past decade we have been one of Cuba's top suppliers of food products. So it is not as if we don't already do business there, but unlike every other country, including our own neighbor to the north, Canada, we hamstring our businesses seeking to export their products there. Export and travel restrictions have continued to prevent Americans from seeking opportunities in Cuba, and the embargo prevents Cubans from obtaining food and other goods we take for granted in our country. Cuban human rights activist Yoani Sanchez wrote: It is impossible for Cubans to buy staples like eggs or cooking oil without turning to the underground market. Rationing forces people to stand in line for hours for poultry and fish. On the Cuban government's 50th anniversary in 2009, it provided families with an extra half pound of ground beef, but that beef was not from the U.S. It was sponsored by the Venezuelan government . . . a meager gift nicknamed ``Hugo Chavez's Hamburger'' by everyday Cubans. I say it is time for America to stop ceding credit for the hamburger to Venezuela. It is time that we made our hamburger accessible in Cuba. The Freedom to Export to Cuba Act will help us do that. It is simply a targeted repeal of the provisions in current law that keep the embargo in place, including restrictions that prevent American businesses from financing their own exports to the island and requirements for American farms to seek special licenses for any transaction with Cuba. It is also important to emphasize what this bill does not do. There are many outstanding issues that many of my colleagues have discussed between our two countries that must be dealt with, especially our concerns about the Cuban Government's repressive policies. That is why this bill does not repeal provisions of current law that address human rights in Cuba or that allow individuals and businesses to pursue claims against the Cuban Government for property. None of us is under any illusion about the nature of the Cuban Government. The Cuban Government must take serious steps to reform politically and economically. It must free political prisoners and stop arbitrarily arresting people for political speech. It must also take steps to liberalize its state-centric economic system if it truly hopes to allow its people to prosper and to benefit from growing commerce with the United States. We do not minimize the importance of those issues, but we also know the embargo has not helped to solve them. Members on both sides of the aisle recognize that continuing along the same path with respect to Cuba has not achieved our objectives and in fact has constrained Americans' freedom to pursue business opportunities abroad. It has hindered our freedom to travel, which is why I also cosponsored the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act recently introduced by Senator Flake. Both that bill and the Freedom to Export to Cuba Act that I have introduced today with a bipartisan group of Senators shows that we can work together in this new Congress to support a commonsense relationship between the United States and Cuba. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation. It is a chance to build on our current progress and take additional actions to forge a practical and positive relationship with the people of Cuba and the people of America.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I come to the floor to join my colleagues to call for an end to any political gamesmanship being played over this bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security. I thank Senators Shaheen and Mikulski for their leadership on this issue. They have introduced legislation I am proud to cosponsor and that provides the critical resources the Department of Homeland Security needs today and for the remainder of 2015. The issue of funding the Department of Homeland Security has become particularly important to my State. It is important to every State. New Hampshire cares a lot about the Coast Guard and many of the other agencies involved in security. In Minnesota we have actually had active recruiting, a first from al- Shabaab that recruited young men in the State of Minnesota--and particularly in the Twin Cities--to go to Somalia and to fight, including becoming suicide bombers. We actually had 18 Federal indictments that came out of that. Half of those people have already been convicted because of the fact our community--our Somali community--has been able to work with the law enforcement positively. We have been able to get the information to prosecute those cases. Then we go to Syria, something our Presiding Officer knows a lot about and is an expert on. The first American who was killed fighting on the side of the terrorists was from Minnesota. There is active recruiting that has been going on there. I have seen the ads of some of the recruiting from the FBI that has been going on there. In fact, we had an indictment of people involved in going to fight for ISIS. So this is real for us. This isn't just something that is thousands of miles away. It is happening in our communities. Just last fall a young man from the Twin Cities area was arrested by the FBI at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport as he was trying fly to Turkey. The next day the young man's partner was able to board a flight for Turkey and is thought to be fighting with ISIS. These are real people, real terrorists. I think we all know when it comes to Homeland Security it is not just our national security that is at stake, it is also our economy. Our border with Canada stretches over 5,500 miles, the longest in the world. Over 400,000 people and nearly $2 billion in goods and services cross our borders every day. In Minnesota we understand the economic significance of cross-border commerce. Canada is our State's top international trading partner with over $19 billion in total business across the border. Think of that-- $19 billion. Over 1 million Canadians visit Minnesota every year--that is a lot of Canadians--contributing $265 million to our local economy. A lot of them visit the Mall of America in Bloomington. Many of them go fishing up north. That relationship relies on a seamless United States- Canadian border with U.S. Customs and Border Protection keeping that border secure and efficiently screening all cross-border traffic. We have made important strides in recent years with the trusted travel programs to make our northern border more secure while encouraging the cross-border tourism and commerce that is the lifeblood of so many Northern States, including Minnesota and New Hampshire. Withholding critical funding from DHS could threaten this progress, leading to a less secure border and also hindering economic opportunity. Withholding critical funding risks the safety of our people, the strength of our economy, and even our relationships abroad. At a time when other countries around the world are stepping up their security, we can't be standing it down. Even a cursory look at world headlines shows the threats the United States and our allies face--from the terrorist attacks in Paris and Sydney to cyber attacks by North Korea. We need to be stepping up our security. That is why it is so important we turn immediately to this bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, a bill we can all agree on. The funding bill introduced by Senator Shaheen and Senator Mikulski and that I am proud to cosponsor does just that. It would provide funding for security while keeping crossings open for business. It would support 23,775 Customs and Border Protection officers working at our country's 329 ports of entry. It would ensure that we keep 21,370 Border Patrol agents at work keeping our country safe. It funds cyber security initiatives that protect our critical infrastructure and allows us to track down and punish hackers who are responsible for cyber crimes. It provides over $1 billion for security-related grants to States--we are talking about firefighters and first responders--and localities to help ensure they are prepared to handle both manmade and natural disasters. No one knows this better than our State when we had a bridge fall down in the middle of a summer day on August 1 in Minneapolis, MN. An 8-lane highway right in the middle of the Mississippi River, 13 people died, dozens of people injured, dozens of cars submerged in the water after dropping 111 feet. No one knows this better than our State after we had the floods we shared with North Dakota across the Red River, floods that nearly swept away homes and resulted in a lot of economic loss. That happened in our State. No one knows better than our State, where we have had tornadoes similar to so many places in the Midwest, sweep across the prairies, taking everything in their path. That is when you know what FEMA is all about. That is when you know what Homeland Security is all about. That is why we must continue to fund this important Agency. It is my hope we can come together to pass the Shaheen-Mikulski Homeland Security appropriations bill. We should never play politics when it comes to protecting our homeland. That is why former Homeland Security Secretaries from the George W. Bush and Obama administrations have come together--Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff and Janet Napolitano-- and all agree on the need to pass a clean bill. Anyone who is watching C-SPAN and says, What is she talking about--a clean bill? Did it go through the laundry machine? This is a bill that focuses on what it is supposed to focus on, which is funding Homeland Security. It doesn't have other provisions in it that are better debated on other bills, that are comprehensive and focus on these issues. This bill should not have those kinds of things on it. This bill is about Homeland Security, and we shouldn't be shutting down our security over political fights. As Senators, chief among our responsibilities is to do everything we can do to keep Americans safe. As a Senator from Minnesota, no job is more important to me than keeping our State and our country safe. I was a prosecutor for 8 years. I know how much this means to people. I deeply respect the work of the Department of Homeland Security and what they do every single day to protect us. Those workers deserve the best. The people of America deserve the best. That is why we have to pass this bill. I urge my colleagues to pass the Shaheen-Mikulski bill without delay. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I am here today to talk about the President's speech from last night. I think it was very important. It was a major event. All Members of Congress were there. To me, it was a call to action. It wasn't just ideas, it was about how to turn ideas into action. It was a strong speech focused on the middle-class economy and how we can strengthen our economy. I thought there was a lot of energy. I know some of my colleagues in the last few months have predicted that the President was somehow going to slide down because of the actions he took on immigration or the actions he took on Cuba, and I think what we are seeing around the country is quite the opposite. I think people are excited that there is an energy, and they are certainly pleased we have seen some major improvements in the economy. I would say to my colleagues across the aisle, whom I take at their word when they say they want to work with us to govern this country, that I think we know--if we didn't know it before, after last night-- that the President is not going to be spending his next year-and-a-half slouched in an armchair planning his Presidential library. I think what we saw last night is a President who wants to get things done in his remaining time in office, and I think we see an energized country that also wants to get through the gridlock and move forward. First of all, I think the President did a very good job of laying out the status of the economy, and I think it is very important, when there are so many numbers out there and information and people throwing things out, that we step back and look at that. Because when we look at where we are going to move forward, we need to understand from where we came and how we ended up where we were a few years back in the midst of a recession. So as I look at these young pages--thinking about how difficult it was for so many years for young people to find employment and that we are now finally seeing hope for young people out in the job market and how we can build what we have got. So what do we know? We have had 58 straight months of private sector job growth. Our national unemployment is below 6 percent. In fact, in my State it is down to 3.7 percent. Our unemployment rate last year went down faster than in any other year we have seen since 1984. We are now No. 1 in oil. This fall we surpassed Saudi Arabia as the No. 1 oil and gas producer in the world. That is what our country has done because of the work in North Dakota--I see my friend Senator Hoeven over there--because of the work going on all over this country. As the President also pointed out last night, we also are increasing our renewable energy in wind. I would add, from the State of Minnesota, that the renewable fuel standard and the fact that we have better gas mileage standards--all of these things have helped to bring down our consumption and to raise our production, bringing these prices down in our country. I thought one of the most interesting statistics last night was a fact I had never heard before. Since 2010, America has put more people back to work than the combined countries of all of Europe, Japan, and all advanced economies across the world. That shows that our workers are so good--something we know. It shows that our businesses are so good. I think this is an opportunity we now have to finally in this Chamber govern from opportunity, not just be governing from a state of crisis. That is what we need to do. One of my favorite parts, of course, was Rebekah and Ben Erler from Minnesota, who were mentioned right near the beginning of his speech, sitting right up in the First Lady's gallery in the House, a woman who had gone through some hard times. Her husband had lost his job in the construction industry, but because of the strength of our State and the strength of her family, her personal strength to want to go back to work and go to a community college, her family is now stabilized. As the President pointed out, maybe their big treat is getting together for a pizza on Friday, but the point is that they have gotten through some very hard times, as have so many resilient people in this country. So the question we now have is this: How do we get ahead? How do we keep going? I am going to go through a few of the ideas that the President discussed last night that are near and dear to my heart. The first is community college. I would not be standing in the Senate right now if it wasn't for community college. My grandpa worked 1,500 feet underground in the mines in Ely, MN. He never even graduated from high school. At age 15 he had to quit school. Even though he was getting A's in math, he had to quit school to go and help support his family. Within a few years he was down in those mines. That is where he worked his whole life. He had dreamed of a life at sea. He had dreamed of a life in the Navy. He had dreamed of a life where he could use his education, but he worked in that mine because he believed, more than anything, in the American dream--in his two young boys, in his wife, in his family, in the nine brothers and sisters he raised because both of his parents died. That is why, at ages 15 and 16, he and his brother went to work. They went to work to help their family. When the youngest kid, Hannah, had to go to an orphanage for a year and a half, my grandpa borrowed a car a year and a half after that and went and got her back, as he promised. So what did he do for my dad? He saved money in a coffee can in the basement so he could send my dad to college, and my dad is a proud graduate of Ely Junior College, a 2-year community college. From there he was able to go to the University of Minnesota, get a journalism degree and interview everyone from Ronald Reagan to Mike Ditka, to Ginger Rogers. That is our family's story. My sister never graduated from high school. She had some trouble in high school. So what did she do? She was able to get her GED, go to a community college, and move on from there to finalize her 4-year degree and get an accounting degree. Those stories are all over America. The President's devotion to talking about these 2-year community colleges and using them as a launching pad for kids' careers is the right one. I am hoping, given the support I have seen from businesses across my State--where we don't have enough welders, we don't have enough people to work the technology in a lot of the factories. I am hoping my colleagues will join us because of the strong business support, because of the need we have in our country to get more people into these jobs. We have 5 million job openings. We have 8 million people who are unemployed. We need to match those two numbers. And the way we do it, I think, is by doing more with these 1- and 2-year degrees and doing more with kids in high school. The second topic I appreciated that the President talked about was the middle-class tax cut. We all know the numbers. We all know the facts that due to the widening gap we have seen in income distribution, about 80 percent of families have $1 trillion less in income than they did during the Reagan time--$1 trillion less than during the Reagan time. The top 400 people in the country have more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. So as we look at where we should be giving tax cuts and who we should be helping, it is clearly the middle class of this country. That includes help with childcare and childcare credits that the President talked about. We are the only advanced country, as he pointed out last night, in the world that doesn't have some kind of sick leave or paid maternity leave. When I go and talk to women all over my State and I ask them what they most want, so many of them say time. They want time to be able to be with their kids when they are sick. They want time to be able to be with their baby when their baby is born. That is the best thing for our country. So I don't believe the naysayers that say we cannot work across the aisle to start talking about these important middle-class issues. As the President pointed out, he is not running again, and he has nothing to do but to try to move forward with this country. I appreciated the words of so many of my Republican colleagues who talked about governance, who said they wanted to get back to the real business of government, which is governing. I also appreciated those who have put out innovative ideas on things such as infrastructure. The simple idea that perhaps we can get some of these foreign earnings that are stuck there overseas that are just sitting there, billions of dollars--why don't we do something to bring that money back and make sure a portion of it goes into infrastructure? No one knows that better than our State. Our State is a State where a bridge fell down in the middle of a summer day--not just a little bridge, an eight-lane highway eight blocks from my house; a highway my family would drive over every single day--down into the middle of the Mississippi River on a summer day. That is infrastructure and that is a problem. There are 75,000 bridges in this country that have been found to be structurally not efficient, not able to function. That is what is happening in this country right now. So I truly appreciated the fact that the President talked about, yes, we are going to be defending something, we are going to be arguing about things in this Chamber. That is what this is set up to do. That is democracy. That is government. But there are also some very clear areas of agreement, and one of them is helping the middle class. Let's move. Let's go forward. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, we are going to continue with the Minnesota theme, and I think Senator Harkin knows that our two States, Minnesota and Iowa, share more than just a border. We share a lot of people with relatives on either side of the border. I cannot tell you how many of my friends have their roots in Iowa and how many people in Iowa have their kids in Minnesota. We also share citizens who have a strong sense of involvement. We have some of the highest voter turnouts in the country. We both have notorious caucus systems where people like to turn out and make their views known, and our States have produced politicians such as Tom Harkin and Hubert Humphrey, who came up through that tradition and understand that you are there to represent the people of your State because when you go home, they actually come up to you in grocery stores, on the street, call you by your first name, and understand that you are there to represent them. We also share farming and we share this enormous belief in science. We actually share Norman Borlaug. There is a new statute--the Presiding Officer must go see it--of Norman Borlaug in Statutory Hall. He was born in Iowa and studied in Iowa, but also studied at the University of Minnesota. He created the Green Revolution, which has helped so many impoverished people in countries all over the world by reducing hunger. Tom Harkin has followed in that tradition. He believes in science, believes in investing in agriculture research, and believes in investing NIH. The other thing about Tom and me that I knew no other Senator would address is our Slovenian heritage. When Tom leaves--and I see Senator Brown is here--and with the former Senator from Ohio, Senator Voinovich, no longer here, I will remain, I think, as the only Slovenian Senator here. I am hoping someone will come forward and tell me they have Slovenian blood. For a while 3 percent of the U.S. Senate had roots in Slovenia, which is very interesting given how infinitesimal the population of the country is compared to the rest of the world. Tom loves his Slovenian roots. Like Tom, my ancestors came from Slovenia to America to work in the mines. It is a big part of our lives and what we believe in. One time Tom came to my Minnesota Morning breakfast and saw that every Thursday I serve potica to my constituents, and that is unique to Slovenians. It is a rolled dough with either apples or walnuts in it. My grandma used to make it. She would literally borrow card tables and roll the dough throughout her entire kitchen. I found a number of places on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, where my dad grew up, that make this potica, and we bring it in. Tom came and tried it and decided that for Christmas he would send a potica to every Member of the Senate for Christmas. He called my office and said they don't make it in Iowa. I said, let me give you the name of a baker on the Iron Range. He personally called this woman and said: This is Tom Harkin. I am the Senator from Iowa. I am calling to order 100 poticas from you, one for every Member of the Senate for Christmas. And in very gruff Slovenian fashion, she said: I am sorry, it is Christmas, and we are booked. We do not have the poticas to send to Washington, DC. Then he said: I don't know if you know who I am. I chair the Agriculture and Forestry Committee--big forestry area--of the Senate. And she said: I know exactly who you are, but we do not have the poticas to send to Washington. So at that moment, he called me. I gave him the names of a number of other bakers, he found one, and every Senator got a potica for Christmas. The last thing I will say about Tom that we share in common--we both represent States that believe in helping people who are the most vulnerable. He did that with his support for small farmers with the farm bill, and he did that in his support for the disability community. I was at the House this week talking about the ABLE Act with some of the Members, and to a tee, every Republican brought up--because Tom could not be there--Tom's work on the ABLE Act. They knew we would not have the bill that Senator Casey worked on without Tom Harkin, and, as you know, this is just the next step for the disability community. It will allow parents and grandparents and friends and neighbors to set up funds so that if they are not there when this young person grows up, there will be money set aside for them. Tom Harkin was Paul Wellstone's best friend in the Senate. Paul would say: Politics is about improving people's lives. That is what Tom has done every day in the Senate. Thank you, Tom.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, we have heard a lot of people honoring our wonderful colleague Senator Begich today. We are all going to miss him dearly. We are especially going to miss him in Minnesota. I have heard many positive statements about Alaska today, but no one can come from a State where they can say they have one of the main streets in Anchorage named after them; that is, Minnesota Street in Anchorage. That is because there are many Minnesotans. Believe it or not, it was not cold enough in Minnesota so they moved to Alaska. One of those people who moved to Alaska was Mark's dad. Mark's dad actually grew up about 30 miles away from my dad. It is rough-and-tumble country up in the Iron Range of Minnesota. Mark still has relatives in northern Minnesota, and particularly he has an uncle named Uncle Joe--Joe Begich--who served in the legislature for many years and also is a Korean War vet and was truly the heart and soul of the Iron Range delegation in the Minnesota State legislature. For any of our colleagues who think Mark Begich is a character, they should meet his Uncle Joe. I know Uncle Joe. I hope he is watching because nothing made him happier than the day Mark Begich got elected to the Senate. And when Mark once came up there with me and we were greeted by Uncle Joe, it was like a hero's welcome when Mark Begich appeared on the Iron Range of Minnesota. People came out, and we did an event with veterans. Then, of course, the problem was we went to a bar, and we could get no pictures that didn't have a Budweiser sign on them. But Mark is a hero up there, and he is a hero across our State just for the work he has done for rural communities. When I say we have rural communities in Minnesota, he always says we have extreme rural communities in Alaska. He has done work in conservation, which we care about so much. He has done work on tourism. We are cochairs of the tourism caucus, and I still remember the hearing we had right in the middle of the downturn, where every Senator came to talk about all of the things that were happening in their States with tourism. Mark was actually able to cite the price of cruises you could take in Alaska. It was written up in the Washington Post about all the Senators hawking their States, but no one was prouder to hawk Alaska. The other thing about Mark, which I know was mentioned, is he doesn't believe politics is about standing in the opposite corner of the boxing ring. He believes politics is about working together in the middle and trying to find common ground. The last thing I will say is how much we love Deborah and Jacob, and we know we will see them around and they are not going to go away. One time Deborah, Jacob, and Mark came over to our house for brunch. My daughter is about 6 years older now. She was about 13. Jacob and my daughter were playing a game in the other room, and the adults were talking over breakfast. I will never forget Jacob Begich. From the other room, he heard his dad talking about him and, as any politician's kid would do, he said: Stop talking about me, dad. So that kid has inherited that Mark Begich sense of fierce independence. When he left, my daughter said: I love that kid, mom. He knows how hard it is to be a politician's kid. So Mark has left here the legacy of Alaska, the legacy of good work, the legacy of a great staff, and the legacy of a great family. So we will see you around, and thank you for your service.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, you can see that Mary Landrieu has a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle, and that is because Mary has stood up and been a mentor to so many of us. She taught us how to fight for our own States because that is what she has done every day for Louisiana. I was thinking about our States earlier. Mary mentioned in her talk about how Minnesota is at the top of the Mississippi and Louisiana is at the bottom and how hard we fought for river issues and barges and locks and dams. We will actually have success at the end of the year with the ABLE Act, which is really important for other reasons, but we are going to finally start the funding for lock and dam improvements, and that kind of work would not have happened without Mary and the work and support she has provided with the RIVER Act. So a river doesn't divide us, it unites us, and Mary is a uniter and brings people together on so many issues. She said before that she was going to put some things on the Record about adoption, but I thought I would take the opportunity to fill people in. First of all, Mary established the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. If you have not gone to some of the events where she literally brings the angels--people who have adopted children in the most dire circumstances--to Washington to celebrate these adoptions and talk about the policy changes that need to be made. Anyone who has adopted one of the foster kids or brought them into an office and adopted them--the reason you can do that is because Mary Landrieu started that program so that foster children, who otherwise would not have the connections and wherewithal to be able to get a job for the summer, spring, or fall in Washington, DC, would be able to work, and then she has all of these kids to her house every single year. Mary doesn't just fight for adopted kids at home, she fights for them all over the world. I would hate to be the bureaucrat in Guatemala when Mary Landrieu shows up to fight them off. I see her staff, and some of them were probably with her on that trip. I think she knew the name of every child who was waiting to be adopted in Guatemala. How can we forget the meeting with the Russians when they started to use these poor little children as pawns in a political game? Mary stood up to them. As a result, as many of us know, she has now been banned from the country of Russia. I don't think everybody knows that the reason she was banned was because she was fighting for these kids who were waiting to be adopted. Many of the parents are in my State, and they actually have siblings and they are trying to adopt the other sibling. That is a very sad story and Mary stood up for them. In the words of her dad, Putin didn't like it, and so Mary was banned. I guess that is not where she is going on vacation after we are done here. The other thing about Mary I will never forget--how kind and sweet and fun she is for her friends in the Senate--is the time when we had a bet on the Saints-Vikings game in the playoffs. We bet some food from our States. If anybody remembers that amazing playoff game, the Vikings lost, and I had to wear a Drew Brees jersey and walk over to Mary's office with a pot of gumbo, which is really hard to make. When I got to her office, all of her New Orleans press was there, and when she tried that gumbo, she said, this is Minnesota gumbo. This gumbo just needs something special. She got out an enormous bottle of hot sauce from her desk drawer--as only a Louisiana Senator would have--and dumped it in my Minnesota gumbo. That is the spice that Mary has added to all of our lives. What we have learned from her we will never forget. As I said, she is a role model for so many of us on how to fight for our States. We see it in the eyes of those little adopted children and the great success we are starting to see on the coast because of all the recovery you brought to your State. We know you will never be forgotten and we want you to keep fighting. Thank you, Mary.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Veterans' Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on December 8, 2014, at the time immediately following the first vote of the day, in room S-219 of the Capitol Building.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. I am also here today to address something entirely different; that is, a bill we would like to get done before the end of the year in the Senate. It is a bill I have with Senator Cornyn, and it is called the Stop Exploitation Through Trafficking Act of 2013. It has 19 bipartisan cosponsors. I note the year is 2013. We have been waiting nearly 2 years to get this done. A version of the bill which is very similar to ours passed the House this summer. Senator Cornyn and I initially wrote the bill. We worked with all the sex trafficking groups. It is a very important bill, and their No. 1 priority this year is to get it done. I thank Majority Leader Reid for his work on this, as well as Senator Leahy for helping to get the bill to the floor. We have also been working with Senators Heitkamp and Kirk, and Senator Wyden has been an incredible partner on these issues. Senator Portman has been supportive. In the House, Congressman Paulsen called me to sponsor this bill. He took it on and, with the help of Representative Cantor and Representative McCarthy and the Speaker, was able to get that bill passed through the House. So this is one of those instances where people have come together and have been moving a very important bill. We have support from the National Conference of State Legislatures, and Cindy McCain--the wife of Senator McCain--and I and have done a lot of work on this issue. We spoke to their national conference this year. They have endorsed this bill. This bill is supported by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Fraternal Order of Police, Shared Hope International, National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, United Methodist Women, and the list goes on. It is time to get this done. There is a minor error in the House bill that we need to correct, and that is why we need to pass the Senate bill. We basically made the changes that are in the House bill. We also need to pass it in the Senate because this one includes the national sex trafficking strategy. We have Senator Cornyn working on his side of the aisle. There appear to be no objections. I will explain in a bit the amendments that passed out of Judiciary 18 to 0. That is his portion that is included in this bill. I was actually having trouble getting the bill through on its own, and so we have joined forces on this bill. Now it appears we could have some objections on our side, which I hope will get cleared up, because people are disappointed that they cannot get other bills on. I can't help people get these other bills through. I don't have that in my power right now. The 27 million people around the world who are victims of sex trafficking cannot help get that done, nor can all of the kids whom we see in Minnesota who get taken into sex trafficking--13 years old is the average age. They cannot do anything. They cannot be pawns in a game. It is my hope that we will be able to work this out and get this bill passed in the next day or two because then I have to get it over to the House. So I am under a major time constraint. This is an important bill which makes clear that girls and boys who are victims of sex trafficking should not be treated as criminals. The statistics, as I said, show that more than 27 million people around the world, whether it is Boko Haram--taking those little girls from their beds in the middle of the night in Nigeria, with their parents having nothing but bicycles to try to track down the people who stole them in the middle of the woods; whether it is a young girl on the oil patch in North Dakota--a major case going on there from the U.S. attorney's office; whether it is a young girl in Minnesota--this is happening in our country today. Over 80 percent of the victims we have in the United States are from the United States. So while we see this all over the world, we know we have our own problems in our own backyard. In terms of the increase, some of it has come because of the Internet. We love the Internet, but it has also provided ways for people to advertise for sex trafficking in ways that make it more difficult to track down. As I said, the average age of a child who is a victim of sex trafficking is 13 years old--not old enough to get a driver's license, not even old enough to go to a high school prom. We have seen problems in our own country. Eighty-three percent of sex trafficking victims in America are U.S. citizens. Despite all those numbers, we are not here just to talk about this bill. The reason I am going to make an enormous push for it this week, to get this done, is because I don't believe young kids--mostly girls-- should be pawns in a political game. We are here because of Tamara Vandermoon. She was only 12 years old--in Minnesota--when she was first sold for sex. She wasn't a teenager. She was just mad at her mom and ran away. A pimp found her and made all kinds of promises--promises that sounded pretty good to a scared kid away from home. She was taken advantage of when she was most vulnerable, before she had a chance to grow up and become an adult. That is why we are doing this bill. This bill is actually based on a model we have in about a dozen States right now, including Minnesota, that basically says to the States: We would like to incentivize you to use this model which is to help the victims of these sex crimes, which is to help them with services, and which is to not prosecute them as criminals because the only way we are really going to be able to go after the johns, the way we are going to be able to go after the people who lead these kinds of rings is if we are willing to give these victims the help they need to turn their lives around but also to get them to testify. It has worked very well in our State. In Ramsey County alone, we have had several prosecutions, including a 40-year sentence this last year against a guy who was running a major sex trafficking ring. If you don't think this is going on in towns such as St. Paul, MN, then you need to look in your own communities because it is going on. One of the main goals in the bill is to make sure kids sold for sex are not treated as criminals. According to a report from Polaris, 15 States across the country already have these State safe harbor laws and another 12 States are starting to make progress in the right direction. So we are not starting from scratch. It is not some crazy idea that someone tried in one State and it wasn't working. We know this works. The Cornyn and Klobuchar bill will give incentives to States when they apply for Federal grants, and they are going to be able to apply for Federal grants after they have a safe harbor bill in place. Our bill would also create a national strategy to combat human trafficking. Our national strategy will encourage cooperation and coordination among all the agencies that work on this problem--Federal, State, tribal, and local. It is a nationwide problem. I can tell you that these pimps and people running the rings do not care about local boundaries or county boundaries or State boundaries, and we need to be as sophisticated as they are when it comes to tackling this problem. We also need to be giving sex trafficking victims the right support, such as job training and skills building. The bill allows victims of sex trafficking to participate in the Job Corps program to help them get back on their feet. I am also pleased to include a provision Senators Whitehouse and Sessions have been working on to clarify the authority of the U.S. Marshals Service to assist local law enforcement agencies in locating missing children. As I said, I have been working closely with Senator Cornyn on the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, and this is also a bill with Senator Wyden which is included in this package. When you look at this bill, you have to think of the safe harbor provision, the provisions I just mentioned that make it easier for people who are victims of sex trafficking, for kids to be able to participate in job training; then you look at the provision from Senators Whitehouse and Sessions regarding the U.S. Marshals; and the last part is the work with Senator Cornyn and Senator Wyden on the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, which is included in this bill. It increases the fees and fines of perpetrators and should bring in nearly $30 million each year to pay for victim services. We know we have a lot of need in the States right now because this is a relatively new problem in terms of being on the increase. So shelters could apply for these grants from this fund. We think this is a very good provision, and I thank Senator Wyden and Senator Cornyn for working on it. I would also add that this is a provision that went through on an 18- to-0 vote as an amendment, so we know there was support out of the Judiciary Committee for this part of the bill. As a former prosecutor, I know how important this victim-centered approach can be. Sex trafficking victims are often afraid to talk to law enforcement. It makes sense. They are not sure they are going to help them. Are they going to give them shelter? Are they going to help them turn their lives around and give them a place to sleep? If they don't have this kind of trust, they go back to the pimp and go back to the guy who was giving them money and giving them a place to sleep and probably giving them drugs. If we focus on identifying those victims even though they may not tell us they are being trafficked, then it will help them to come forward, get help, and also to testify against the trafficker, leading to more convictions. We need to address the needs of the victim and make sure they have the support they need--housing, education, legal issues--to help break this cycle of violence and abuse. We have a great new shelter that opened up in St. Paul this year, and I was proud to be there with Cindy McCain and 180 Degrees--that is what it is called--at Brittany's Place in St. Paul. It provides special services for victims of sex trafficking to help them turn their lives around. We also need to use the tools available to go after such traffickers. If we cannot get them on the sex trafficking charges, we need to look at money laundering charges or enterprise corruption charges or other charges. While they are not directly related to trafficking, they target traffickers nonetheless. That will be important for law enforcement, and it is the reason State prosecutors are now partnering more with Federal prosecutors. We need to go after trafficking facilitators. These are people who know what is going on, but they are closing their eyes to it or actually letting it happen. There are some incredible businesses that have gotten out front on this issue. For example, Marilyn Carlson Nelson of Radisson Hotels in Minnesota has done training. There are a number of other hotel chains across our country that are working on this issue. Airlines--Delta, American Airlines, and others--have been doing work in this area, and it is actually exciting because we have businesses willing to say: We are on the frontline. We see when something is going on in our hotel or on our plane, and we are willing to train our employees so they know when to report an incident to law enforcement and stop things from happening on the frontline. This is happening right now in our country. We passed a similar bill in the House, and we all know we have to make some minor corrections on the Senate side. This is the bill that Senator Cornyn and I originally introduced. We have added some good provisions from Senators Whitehouse and Sessions, as well as Senator Wyden and Senator Cornyn, and that is what this package is. It is the kind of legislation we should pass. Again, the victims of these sex trafficking crimes are not the ones who can figure out how we negotiate in the Senate. There are States that have not yet done anything. They may open their eyes if they know they may get a grant if they change their laws a bit and find the best practices and what is working across the country. We should be focused on those victims and not what is going on here. I am supportive of a lot of these bills that people on our side of the aisle want out of the Judiciary Committee, but they are not in my control. What is in my control is this bill. I have garnered Republican support and passed a version of it in the House, and all I am asking from my colleagues is to be able to go forward with this bill. It would be sad indeed if we were not able to get this bill through because of Democratic objection. I plan to ask unanimous consent on this bill. If we are not able to work something out, I will keep at it until this session closes. This bill is named the Stop Exploitation Through Trafficking Act of 2013. I think 2 years is enough time. Two years is enough. A young girl's life was ruined at age 18. We can get this bill done. I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. I join my colleagues today in all the good words that are being said about my friend Senator Pryor. I got to know Senator Pryor best in the commerce committee, where early on he scored a major victory for the children of this country. That was at a time we learned that toys and children's products that contained lead were being brought in from all over the world. We actually had a young child in Minnesota whose mom went out and bought a pair of Reebok tennis shoes, and with the tennis shoes came a little charm. That little child swallowed that charm, and that little child died. He did not die from choking on the charm; he died over a period of days when the lead went into his system. That is just one example. Senator Pryor was heading up the consumer subcommittee, and we took a major vote to change the standards of lead in children's products, including jewelry and toys, and it was a huge bipartisan vote, a very important bill, what was called one of the most important pieces of consumer legislation in decades. Senator Pryor got that done. Later, while he was head of that subcommittee, we had a little girl in Minnesota named Abigail Taylor who died in a swimming pool. All she was doing was playing in a kiddie pool, and she happened to be sitting in the middle of the pool. The pool drain malfunctioned and basically sucked her insides out. She survived for a year. When Mark Pryor came to Minnesota, he met with that little girl and her dad. She later died after a surgery to try to save her life. We worked after that to get the bill passed--named after Howard Baker's grandchild, who had also died in a similar circumstance--to make sure that all these public pool drains--from apartments to YMCAs; you name it--were checked. There has been a decrease in the number of deaths. We do not hear about them on the news like we used to, and that is because of Mark Pryor's work in the Senate subcommittee. So I know the Taylor family--that was my proudest moment, standing back in the cloakroom and calling them. They believed after they met Mark Pryor that it would be easy to pass this bill, that we could get this done. It wasn't quite that easy. It took a few months. We had to end up putting it in the Energy bill to get it done. But being able to call Scott Taylor, who never gave up believing Congress could get something done--that is just one more example of the work Senator Pryor has done. So I thank him for that.

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

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

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

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, a lot of these adoptions wouldn't have happened without Senator Landrieu. When we go anywhere in this country on the adoption issue and mention her name, we see nodding of heads of so many parents because they actually know what she has done to fight for domestic adoptions and foster kids and also on the international level. There is so much more work to be done. Thank you so much. I will be there when you give your speech.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise in recognition of National Adoption Month, and I know our great colleague Senator Landrieu will be here to also address this important month. She has been such a great leader in fighting for this cause. She has literally gone to Guatemala to make sure that children who are awaiting loving homes in our country get to come to those homes. She literally knows the names of those kids and is hands-on every step of the way and has been the leader in Congress. She established the Congressional Coalition on Adoption, which has brought together Senators and Members of Congress on behalf of children who need loving homes and families who want to welcome them home. We are very pleased with her leadership. Senator Landrieu is joining us right now, and I will be able to flip it over to my friend at any time it is appropriate. But I do wish to speak about National Adoption Month. It is especially important in my home State of Minnesota. Many people don't know this, but Minnesota actually has the highest rate of international adoptions in the country. Minnesota families have opened their homes and their hearts to children from all over the world--from Vietnam to Guatemala to Nepal to Haiti. I have had the opportunity to witness the power of adoption firsthand. Before being elected to the Senate, I spent 8 years as Hennepin County attorney, the largest county in Minnesota. We had jurisdiction over foster care and adoption. I actually worked to speed up those adoptions. I remember saying we need to eliminate this delay and reduce the time it takes for a child who has been going from foster care home to foster care home in half, and we were able to do that because people understood the need for children to have a permanent home. I know Senator Landrieu is here right now and has a busy schedule, and I will turn it over to her as soon as I finish. In the United States, nearly 400,000 children are living without permanent families in the foster care system. Over 100,000 of these children are eligible for adoption, but too many of them will wait for years and years to be adopted. Some will not be adopted at all. Last night I attended an event called Kidsave. It is about children who are older and in other countries. This group has actually set up an incredible system where the kids come to our country for a few weeks and many of them end up being adopted. As the kids get older, it becomes harder and harder for them to become adopted. Senator Landrieu and I are aware that as some of these countries, such as Russia, completely close their doors to adoption, there will actually be more and more children who are older that will need to be adopted. We hope the system changes and they do eventually open up their doors. Around the world it is estimated that nearly 18 million orphans who have lost parents are living in orphanages or are on the streets and lack the care and attention required for healthy development. As a nation, we must open our arms to these children. Just last night at this event, I had the opportunity to hear the story of Jennifer Baumann, a 17-year-old girl from Colombia. She spent years in a broken home and then in a broken foster care system in that country. She was exposed to violence. She would go to bed hungry. At age 14, she was still in foster care and had lost hope for her future. She was considered too old to be adopted. As she said in her own words, she ``cried for a year.'' But then, miraculously, she had the chance to visit a family here in America as part of the program that Kidsave organized. The family fell in love with her, she fell in love with them, and in 2011 she was adopted into a loving home. We have seen this time and time again in my State, and that is why I got involved in legislation with my mentor, Mary Landrieu. One of the things we found out is--we had a family called the Makorises, and they were adopting nine children from the Philippines who had first lost their father, and their mother kept them together, and then their mother died, and it was the two oldest children who held those kids together. When they turned 16 and 17, they couldn't be adopted. The Makorises of Cambridge, MN, had to make a decision: Were they going to strand those two kids who held the family together, leave them in the Philippines, and take the other children? It was like Sophie's choice. That was their choice. They decided there was a better way. They came to Congress. I led the bill in the Senate with the help of Senator Landrieu, Senator Sessions, Senator Inhofe, as well as House Members, and we were able to pass a bill that allowed kids who had reached an age where they were not legally allowed to be adopted, to be adopted if a younger sibling had been adopted. That means that retroactively, thanks to the work of Senator Landrieu, 10 million children all across the world were allowed to be adopted into loving families. And how fun was it to be in the Makorises' living room and see all nine children, like some Minnesota version of ``The Sound of Music,'' with a place for all of their winter boots and their coats. They came from the Philippines in the middle of the winter to Minnesota; yet they were still as happy and as warm as can be because now they have parents who love them. The Senator from Maine understands how important adoption is because it has touched his own family. This has touched every Member of the Senate. As we focus on National Adoption Month, we have to continue to look at policies and changes we can make to our laws to make them better. We passed that law to allow those older siblings to be adopted. We passed a law to allow vaccinations to be allowed in our country to make sure they are safe and that they are actually done. But there is more work to do with these intercountry adoptions, and I can think of no one better to lead that charge than the Senator from Louisiana, Ms. Landrieu. So I am here to acknowledge the work we have done with the adoption tax credit, which we have gotten into law, and the work we have done to make sure it is easier for these international adoptions. Every single family out there knows there are problems right now with international adoptions. A lot of them stem from people such as Vladimir Putin. By the way, the reason Senator Landrieu was banned from going to Russia is because of the work she is doing for kids, being willing to take Putin on because of the fact that he was closing the doors to kids and using them as pawns for political gain. That is an amazing story, and that shows a fighter. (Mr. KING assumed the Chair.) I thank the Presiding Officer for his work with adoption and his personal story, as well as all the Members on both sides of the aisle who have devoted themselves to looking out for these kids who have no one else to look out for them. I yield the floor.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about the importance of closing the pay gap for women, and I thank my colleague from California, Senator Boxer, who has been working on this issue on the front line for so long as a leader on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help us get that done and as a leader again. I am a cosponsor on this bill and I urge my colleagues to join me in support of the Paycheck Fairness Act. People deserve a fair shot at the American dream. People deserve a fair working wage. That is why we need to raise the minimum wage. Equal work should get equal pay, and that is why we need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. I wish to thank the dean of the Senate women, Senator Barbara Mikulski, for leading this effort for equal pay for equal work in the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and keeping the focus on the need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. In 2009, we passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to make sure that workers who face pay discrimination based on gender, race, age, disability, religion, or national origin have access to the courts. In doing so we restored the original intent of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Pay Act. Now it is time to prevent that pay discrimination from happening in the first place. Women have made big strides in this economy. Women are getting advanced degrees. They are starting new businesses. They are leading major corporations. The Fortune 500 now has 24 women CEOs. Twenty-four out of five hundred there is still a lot of work to do, but that is so much better than where we were decades ago. Now we have a record 20 women in the Senate. Yet despite the progress we have made and all the gaps we have closed, women still make less money than men do. The pay gap has real consequences for American families in our entire economy. Two-thirds of today's families rely on the mother's income entirely or in part, and in more than one-third of families the mother is the main breadwinner. But women only earn more than men in exactly 7 of the 534 occupations listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is only seven occupations, and I know there is disagreement about what the pay disparity is, if it is just based on other factors. But the truth is when you look at the list of the occupations, in only seven do women make more than men. As Senate Chair of the Joint Economic Committee, I released a report showing how this pay disparity affects women's financial security, because I think a lot of times people are very focused on the here and now, what that means the wage differential, and what that means in the workplace. This report shows that lower wages impact women all throughout their working lives, and these lower lifetime earnings translate into less security and retirement. You have the fact that women live longer but yet they have less money to begin with. Women live longer than men on average and are more likely to spend part of their retirement on their own because they live longer. So women actually need to have more money for their years in retirement. According to our report, the average annual income--this is average annual income for women aged 65 and older--is about $11,000 less than it is for men. That is $11,000 less each year to buy groceries, to pay heating bills, to be able to see grandchildren. Lower lifetime earnings result in lower retirement benefits. Retirement security is often described as the three-legged stool-- Social Security, pension benefits, and personal savings. A woman's Social Security check is 78 percent of a man's check on average. Those are the facts. Again, it is about 80 percent of that of a man. The median income from company or union pension for women is 53 percent lower than for men. Finally, lower earnings also affect the ability of women to contribute to their own retirement plan. Women have less income to put aside and are less able to save money for their own retirement. They have smaller paychecks, they have smaller Social Security checks, smaller pension checks, and less savings in their retirement plans. They live longer and they worry all the time that they are going to outlive their savings. All this contributes to less retirement security. The pay gap is an especially large burden on women in the sandwich generation, juggling jobs, juggling their kids, and looking out for their aging parents at the same time. When two-thirds of the caregivers for aging parents are women, we need to make sure they have financial security. So make no mistake, the pay gap impacts women. But my point today is that it impacts women through the entire arc of their lives, and, if anything, it impacts older women who for now decades have been making less money in an even greater way than it impacts them when they are younger. Around 70 percent of our economy is consumer-based. If we don't have fair pay, if we don't have enough pay for middle-income families, then they are not going to buy things whether they are younger or older. That is yet another argument for not only having adequate minimum wages but also for addressing this pay gap. This legislation builds on the promises of the Equal Pay Act and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and gives women new tools and protections they need to guard against pay discrimination. I want to get this done, but I also want to work on the issue of long-term savings and how we can make it easier for women and men to save their money when they are working at jobs so they can help themselves. As we move forward, as we are living longer--which is great--we know it is going to get harder and harder. It was the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota who famously said, ``We all do better when we all do better.'' I still believe that is true, and so do my colleagues who have joined me today. We need to be focused on how we can help more women share in the economic dream because if we do, we will all be doing better. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting the Paycheck Fairness Act. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise today to speak in support of reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank. I am on the floor with the Senator from Washington, Senator Cantwell, who has been such a leader as head of the small business committee on this issue. As I heard the Senator from Maryland talk about the importance of student loans to our economy and the importance to our economy for having people being able to go out there and get the education and fill the jobs today, another piece of this is to make sure those markets are available, to make sure our businesses are able to compete internationally, both small and big, with companies from across the world. This means jobs in America. Exports are critical to the U.S. economy, and we need to help our businesses, small and large, boost their exports. When 95 percent of the world's customers live outside of our borders, there is literally a world of opportunity out there for U.S. business. It used to be we were just focused on Canada, especially in Minnesota, and Mexico, but we know there is a world of opportunity in emerging markets in places such as Asia and Africa, for us to finally be making things in America and having people buy them in other countries. As a Senator, I have been working to boost America's ability to compete in the global economy and to open up these markets. That is why I strongly support reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank. I thank Senator Cantwell for her efforts in leading this fight, and I thank leadership on both sides of the banking committee. As Senate chair of the Joint Economic Committee, today I am releasing a report on ``The Contribution of Exports to Economic Growth and the Important Role of the Export-Import Bank.'' According to one analysis, exports are projected to account for almost 40 percent of real U.S. GDP growth over this decade. We know we have stabilized the economy in America, but the only way we are going to be able to expand it, to add more jobs, to make sure people are working at their fullest potential, is to be able to export things to other countries with these emerging middle classes in places such as India and other countries where we can actually sell our goods. This report highlights that the Export-Import Bank plays a crucial role in supporting businesses, particularly small businesses, to find markets for their products. What does the report show? Well, first it shows the economy has expanded for the past 4 years and U.S. exports have been the ticket to that growth. Last year U.S. exports of goods reached an all-time high, $2.3 trillion or 13.5 percent of U.S. GDP, an increase of 35 percent since 2009. Think of the jobs that means in America. In 2013, U.S. exports of goods and services were responsible for 11.3 million jobs, an increase of 1.6 million jobs since 2009. Manufacturing and agricultural producers have also been able to increase their exports, supporting economic recovery and job growth. In the manufacturing sector, nearly 25 percent of production is exported and these exports are responsible for about 3 million jobs. I see this in Minnesota. In 2013, our goods and services exports rose to $20.7 billion, and Minnesota was ranked the fourth largest agriculture exporting State in 2012, up from sixth in 2011. Do you know what that means in real terms? Our unemployment rate is down to 4.5 percent. Our Twin Cities area has the lowest unemployment rate of any metropolitan area in the country, and it is very much about exports. Companies--not just the big ones, but the small ones--that have learned to export and are willing to use the tools to export, means using the Export-Import Bank. Yet U.S. exporters, as we all know, are competing with foreign producers in places such as Germany, France, and China, which are backed by their own countries' credit export programs and often receive other government subsidies. I ask my friends who are slowing down this reauthorization, how can we say to our U.S. companies, big and small, that we are going to allow 60 other countries, including the top 10 exporting countries globally-- that they can have credit export programs but our companies can't have them in the United States? I will show you what I mean by this report. I commend to colleagues the September 2014 Joint Economic Committee report, ``The Contribution of Exports to Economic Growth and the Important Role of the Export-Import Bank,'' that I referred to earlier. On the graph and report in figure 2 we show ``Comparison between U.S. and Other Countries' Export Credit Subsidies.'' What do these numbers show? This number is about ``New medium- and long-term official export credit volumes, 2013, billions of U.S. dollars.'' It shows that China's medium- and long-term credit export volumes are at $45.5 billion. That is what we are doing and that is why we see them--as Senator Cantwell will discuss--going into markets such as Africa and opening those markets up for their companies, because they are willing to help them out of their own version of the Export-Import Bank--$45.5 billion in China. Germany, a very successful economy, is at $22.6 billion in credit volume. Where is the United States? We are at $14.5 billion. We are above countries such as France, Italy, and Brazil, but we are below countries such as China, Germany, and South Korea. You can imagine the impact if we got rid of the Export-Import Bank. You can imagine--which we cannot allow to happen. The Export-Import Bank was first authorized in 1934. It supports U.S. businesses by providing financing that the private sector that may be unable or unwilling to do at competitive rates. The Export-Import Bank does this by providing loans, loan guarantees, and insurance policies to increase export opportunities. In 2013, as our study shows, the Export-Import Bank supported approximately 205,000 U.S. jobs and $37.4 billion in U.S. exports. It made 745 new loans and loan guarantees worth $21.8 billion. By issuing these loans, loan guarantees, and insurance policies, the Export-Import Bank helped provide funding for projects ranging from short-term investments to more complex and long-term transactions such as transportation and other infrastructure projects. The Export-Import Bank also steps in to provide credit to open up these new markets such as Africa, as I have focused on. For example, in the past 4 years the Export-Import Bank has provided authorization for more than $4 billion in support for U.S. export to sub-Saharan Africa, yet China is still ahead of us. The Export-Import Bank provides support to many industries, everything from gas and oil, to space and telecommunications, to agribusiness. The Export-Import Bank supports U.S. exports to more than 150 countries, small business. This is what I hear all across our State since 114 small Minnesota businesses have received financing over the past few years. The big businesses tend to have trade exports, right? They have exports they want to go to Uruguay or Kazakhstan or somewhere in the world. They can have some special person who knows the language and who can help them and hire a consultant in the country. How can a small business do that? Yet they know their product is going to sell in these other countries. That is where the Export-Import Bank comes in, because working with our foreign commercial service, they are able to get the tools they need, small businesses, to compete at the same level as big businesses. In August I visited Balzer, an agricultural equipment manufacturer based in Mountain Lake, MN, a town of about 2,000 people. Balzer currently employs 74 people in Mountain Lake, 74 people out of 2,000. It has made a real difference, the Export-Import Bank, for their company. Exports are approximately 15 percent of their sales. Or how about Superior Industries in Morris. There are 5,000 people in that town and 500 people employed at the company. They are now exporting, thanks to the Ex-Im Bank, to Canada, Australia, Russia, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil. How would they would get into Uruguay? Do we think their small community bank--which we love--is going to be able to help them figure out Uruguay financing? No. That is why we have the Ex-Im Bank. It helps these small businesses to make major decisions, to finance major products and major deals, so they can actually have jobs in the United States that are providing exports to these other countries. That is what this is all about. It is critical. We have to reauthorize this proven Ex-Im Bank and make sure our exporters are competing on a level playing field in a global market. I yield the floor.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. I wanted to follow up on the good words not only of Senator Boxer but my good friend Senator Whitehouse, as he took on some of the words we were hearing from our colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Inhofe, as he talked about collusion of the people in this area-- collusion. I guess he meant with the President of the United States. I looked at some of the names on this report--Hank Paulson, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under George Bush. I am trying to imagine him colluding with President Obama, and I just can't picture it right now. Gregory Page is someone I know, the former head of Cargill, the CEO of Cargill, a multinational company--the biggest company in the United States--based in Minnesota. The executive chairman of Cargill is a part of this report warning the business community, looking at what the risks are to the business community. I can tell you he is not colluding with the President of the United States. Olympia Snowe--talk about an independent--the former Senator from the State of Maine, is part of this group issuing this report. She is not colluding with the President of the United States. As Senator Whitehouse pointed out, all of these military branches and people from the branches of our military who look at this as a security risk are looking at this and literally following the oath. They are doing what they are supposed to do--their duty, their duty to protect our country--and they see this as a threat to national security, to the United States, a threat to our standing in the world and to the scarce resources we are seeing with water not only in the United States but all across the world--a threat. This is not collusion. This is science. These are facts. In my State we embrace science. We brought the world everything from the pacemaker to the Post-it note. We are the home of the Mayo Clinic. We believe in science. What this resolution does is it simply states the science, drafted by over 300 authors, the 2014 National Climate Assessment, extensively reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, with support, with the facts. From the Department of Defense, the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review of the Department of Defense states that ``the pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.'' All this says is let's get the facts straight. It is a sense of the Senate that global climate change is occurring and will continue to pose ongoing risks and challenges to the people and the government of the United States. That is all it says. We are going to have major debate on how to solve this problem. That debate is going on right now. But unless we can at least get a vote and some support in the Senate for this problem that is happening, when 63 percent of Americans know it is happening, we look silly. The people are in front of us again. The businesses are in front of us. The church groups are in front of us. The scientists are in front of us. The hunting groups in my State are in front of us. It is time that we acknowledge we have a problem and then move on to fix it. As Senator Boxer posed at the end of her remarks, yes, we will be back. I am someone who likes to get things done, and I believe the first thing we need to do is to get an agreement here on the fact that we have a problem. Once we have done that, we can move on and work on those solutions. Senator Whitehouse has been a leader in the Senate, has been to those coastal communities not only in Rhode Island but up and down the coast looking at that damage, seeing what is happening in Virginia, and seeing what is happening in Florida. I yield for the Senator from Rhode Island for closing remarks.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. I thank Senator Boxer. We now have 21 cosponsors. We are adding daily. We have cosponsors, of course, from coastal States. States such as Hawaii and Maine see the effect of the water all around them. Independent Senator Angus King is a cosponsor of this resolution. We have Colorado, with Senator Udall and Senator Bennet, who are cosponsors, who understand the risk of wildfire and what they see in their State with climate change. We have States in the Midwest, such as Iowa, with Senator Harkin; Michigan, with Senator Stabenow, the chair of the Agriculture Committee. They understand what drought means to farmers. This is not just a coastal problem; this is a problem across the United States as we are seeing the disruptions of climate change. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a link to a June 14 report called ``Risky Business, The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States.''

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise in support of a simple and straightforward resolution cosponsored by 20 of our colleagues that would simply express the sense of the Senate that climate change is occurring and that it will continue to pose ongoing risks and challenges to our citizens and to our country. That is all it says. We know we have a problem. We don't pretend to give every solution in this resolution; it simply gives us the point of saying we have a problem. I am pleased to be joined by two leaders on this issue, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse as well as Chairman Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee. We have an obligation to our constituents and to this country to address global climate change. We must tackle the challenge head-on. This is an issue facing all Americans--from farmers struggling with extreme weather from drought, to floods in seaside communities threatened by rising waters, to habitat changes that are impacting our hunting, fishing, and outdoor economy, to businesses trying to mitigate the financial risks posed by the effects of climate change. It is clear climate change poses a grave threat to food security, the environment, and our national security, as well as to our businesses. Yet achieving a commitment to at least admit this problem is going on in the Senate has fallen short. That is the point of our direct resolution that simply states the facts--the science--about climate change and the impact it is having on our country. The resolution draws from the 2014 National Climate Assessment which was drafted by 300 climate experts and extensively reviewed by a 60- member advisory committee and the National Academy of Sciences. The National Climate Assessment states the science very simply. The most recent decade was the Nation's warmest on record and U.S. temperatures are expected to continue to rise. The Department of Defense of this country, of the United States of America, our own Department of Defense 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review reiterates climate change has a destabilizing effect, stating: ``The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.'' And the Defense Science Board report concluded: ``Climate change will only grow in concern for the United States and its security interests.'' All the resolution says is that it is the sense of the Senate that global climate change is occurring and will continue to cause ongoing risks and challenges to the people and the Government of the United States. We know the costs. The 2012 drought was the worst drought since 1956 and caused over $30 billion in damage nationwide. The current drought in the Western and Southwestern States is estimated to cost billions and it remains ongoing. Last week there was a newspaper map showing that about 34 percent of the contiguous United States was in at least a moderate drought as of July 22. Those are the numbers. Those are the facts. We have seen heavy downpours increasing nationally. We have seen hurricanes increasing in intensity. If we continue on our current path, by the year 2050, between $66 billion and $106 billion worth of existing coastal properties will likely be below sea level nationwide, and $238 billion to $507 billion worth of property will be below sea level by the year 2100. So what are we hearing from the business community? We have conservative businesspeople such as former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under George Bush, Hank Paulson, speaking out. He, along with former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and eight other prominent business and policy leaders, recently released the first comprehensive assessment of the economic risks our Nation faces from the changing climate, including increased coastal storm damage, reduced productivity in some areas of the United States because they have become too hot for outdoor work, strained energy networks, and expanding public health impacts. This report represents an important first step toward a true accounting of the risks of climate change so the American business community can begin to work toward effective climate risk management. Just this past Thursday, former Clinton Treasury Secretary and cochair of the Foreign Relations Council Bob Rubin wrote an article in the Washington Post advocating that although it is clear that the U.S. economy faces enormous risks from unmitigated climate change, policy and business leaders are not taking into account the cost of inaction, which means decisions are being made based on the broad picture posed by climate change on our economy. So now we have scientists, business leaders, church groups, and outdoor groups all out in front of this issue. In fact, a recent poll found that 63 percent of Americans believe this is occurring. Sixty- three percent of Americans believe it is occurring. Yet where is the Senate? Where are we? We have an opportunity today, to pass this simple resolution saying it is the sense of the Senate that global climate change is occurring and will continue to pose ongoing challenges to the people and the Government of the United States. It should not be that hard for this Congress to simply say that. Think of what the Senate has done in the past. When we saw what was going on in South Africa, it was the Senate that overcame a Presidential veto to approve the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. It was the Senate that took the lead on civil rights legislation. It was the Senate that was willing to put partisan issues aside and take on the Watergate hearings. It was the Senate that took on consumer issues. It was the Senate that passed the Clean Air Act approved by 43 Democrats and 30 Republicans. We just have to take one step today; that is, to simply tell the world we know there is a problem. We are not here trying to give all the solutions. We know colleagues disagree with this in terms of what we should do, depending on where they are from or what States they represent. But to even start having those discussions, we have to admit there is a problem. I urge my colleagues to support this simple, straightforward resolution. I urge them to support it because it is so important to our country. I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 524, expressing the sense of the Senate regarding global climate change which was submitted earlier today; that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, we yield back time on all three nominations.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I come to the Senate floor today in support of the Not My Boss's Business Act. I thank Senator Murray and Senator Udall for introducing this legislation to help address the recent Supreme Court decision. Women have gone to the tops of the mountains and to outer space. Women are serving as CEOs, as scientists, and starting our own companies. Here in the Senate we have gone from no women to 20, and that is a great accomplishment. But for all of our progress--and there has been a lot--this stubborn fact remains: Women still struggle to attain the basic health care services that allow them to plan their families, protect their health, and contribute to our economy. This is fundamentally an issue of fairness and an issue of equality. I have always said that the Affordable Care Act is a beginning and not an end. I would like to see changes to that bill. I have sponsored changes to that bill. But the law does take significant steps forward on health care for women. One that is of particular importance to women is requiring that all health insurance plans cover FDA-approved forms of contraception. This decision was based on the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine. The Institute of Medicine had good reason to include contraception as an essential preventive service. We know that pregnancies that are planned are good for moms; they are good for babies. Better access to contraception prevents unintended pregnancies--something we can all agree we want. We do not want unintended pregnancies. We do not want to have abortions. So better access to contraception, as has been proven time and time again, brings down those numbers. And access to birth control is essential for women to meet their career and their education and their family goals. Not every employer was required to provide contraceptive coverage. Certain nonprofit religious employers were allowed an exemption. It protected the beliefs of religious nonprofits but could be implemented in a way that still ensured all women could receive the same preventive services in their health insurance. What I do not believe is sensible, however, is allowing any for- profit business to ask for an exemption. That, in practice, is what the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court ruling could do and what the bill we are considering today would correct. First, what this bill will not do: It will not force churches or religiously affiliated nonprofits to offer contraception coverage. This bill maintains their exemption. It will not force anyone to use contraception. That decision is and must remain with each person. What this bill will do, however, is to add a provision to the Affordable Care Act's requirements that would prohibit an employer from denying coverage of a health care service that is required under Federal law. It clarifies that this requirement applies even under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act--the law that the Supreme Court ruled was violated by the contraception coverage requirement. In other words, it says if you work for an American corporation, you can expect that your health insurance--which you work for and receive as part of your compensation--will cover the same basic preventive health benefits everyone else receives. It says that your boss-- regardless of his or her religious beliefs--cannot pick and choose what benefits your health insurance covers. This is common sense. A woman's decision about her birth control is between her and her doctor, not her employer. What she chooses to use her compensation for is really not her boss's business, whether we are talking about a salary or other compensation, including health insurance. There is no doubt that women have come a long way. But when a woman's boss can step in, as a result of this narrowly decided Court decision-- a 5-4 ruling--and prevent her from making the best health care decisions for her health, her career, and her future, it makes me wonder just how far we have actually come. Mr. President, that is why I urge you to support this bill. I urge my colleagues to support this bill. This important legislation will help preserve the rights of employees while protecting religious employers. It will help women access the preventive services they need and it will prevent unintended pregnancies and improve the health of both women and their children. That is not just good for women; that is good for families, that is good for business, that is good for our economy, and that is good for our future. Thank you. I yield the floor.

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I come to the Senate floor today to speak about the recent heavy rain storms in Minnesota that have caused significant flooding in our State. This was not a one-day disaster. This was not a sudden flash flood such as we saw in Duluth a few years ago or a tornado coming in. This was, in fact, a disaster that occurred over a series of weeks where we had rainfall after rainfall after rainfall. From International Falls on the Canadian border down to Luverne, MN, on the Iowa border, torrential rains have washed out roads, bridges, and culverts, damaged infrastructure and caused significant crop damage. In some of our counties, 40 percent of the farmlands are under water. These storms have led to states of emergency being declared for 51 of Minnesota's 87 counties. We have not seen anything like this for a while. It tended to be, in the past, that we had a corner of our State that would see trouble, but here we have 51 of Minnesota's 87 counties being declared a state of emergency. Over the past few weeks I have visited many of these affected areas and seen the damage firsthand. The city of Norwood Young America saw nearly 9 inches of rain in one night that caused more than $1 million in damage to its wastewater treatment facility. I saw how water-covered roads strained rural communities, how washed-out rail beds have caused another setback for our already-strained rail system, and how closed township bridges have further delayed shipments of agricultural products. In southwest Minnesota, along with Senator Franken and Governor Dayton, I met with farmers who were among those hardest hit by the storms. Up until a month ago, the same crop and pasture land in southern Minnesota that is now completely under water had been under drought conditions since 2011. And now not only are these farmers dealing with damage to crops, buildings, and fences due to the flooding, they also experienced losses in the past from a devastating hail storm. In Rock County in southwestern Minnesota initial estimates indicate 100,000 acres of corn and soybeans are damaged, and the official U.S. Department of Agriculture number will likely be even greater. The extent of the crop damage is really not yet known. Excessive moisture can kill crops altogether or stunt their growth or put them at risk of diseases at lower yields. This disaster has repercussions that will be felt for months to come. I talked with farmers in Luverne and in Mankato who are worried about how they will recover these losses and make ends meet. Farmers who were trying to finish planting now may have no hope of getting a crop into their flooded fields at all this summer, and those who did get a crop in are now watching their fields fill with water. U.S. Department of Agriculture officials are still assessing the damage, and crop insurance adjusters are out in full force so that accurate reports can be filed with county FSA offices. This is a critical step to ensure that farmers and ranchers are not left out of the disaster assistance process. Farmers operate at the mercy of the weather. Listening to stories of the great financial risk these small business owners face every single day--our State is a State of many small farms--it makes me proud of the work we did in the Senate and the work I did as a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee and conference committee to fight for permanent disaster programs with mandatory funding in the farm bill that we reauthorized earlier this year. If that were not in place, these farmers and, as a result, our food supply would be facing--Minnesota being one of the top agricultural producers in the country--a very uncertain future. These programs, in addition to the farm bill's improvements to crop insurance, will help provide a safety net for the farmers and the ranchers affected by the flood. Last week Secretary Vilsack visited our State. He was up in the Moorhead area, and Senator Hoeven, Senator Heitkamp, Congressman Peterson, and I met with him about some conservation issues up there with flooding. They are one of the areas of the State that have some flooding, but not as much right now; they usually have the most flooding. But when he was there he committed to me that the Farm Service Agency will do everything they can to provide any necessary resources and support for our farmers and ranchers. Just yesterday the Minnesota FSA executive director informed me that she has directed county FSA offices to immediately begin holding community meetings to ensure that farmers and ranchers impacted by these floodwaters have the information they need. Because here we have a new farm bill, and while it is very similar to the last one, there are new rules in place. They have to make critical decisions about if they replant, if they can get emergency loans; what they should plant, if their fields have been devastated, including cover crop; and what is going to be happening in the next few months. They need the information. Floods have a devastating impact not only on farmers but also on families and small businesses. The damage that these storms caused will not be undone overnight. There is still a lot of hard work ahead of us, and the long cleanup process has already begun. But we have already seen a swift and efficient response on the part of State and local officials. And in our State, FEMA may be a four-letter word, but it is a good four-letter word. When we saw what had happened in Grand Forks, the Nation was riveted many, many years ago by the flooding in North Dakota and Minnesota. That has recovered. Those are booming areas now. Fargo-Moorhead also experienced significant funding, and FEMA was involved and helped us there. We appreciate the work they are doing in assessing the damage now and the help we know will be coming. It is critical that the Federal Government do its part to ensure that the resources these families, businesses, and communities need are there to get them back on their feet. Two weeks ago I spoke directly with the President in the White House about the flood damage across the State, and he assured me there would be an immediate Federal response. That is why the action by Governor Dayton yesterday to formally request that the President issue a major disaster declaration was so important. That is why we sent a letter to the President--our entire congressional delegation; all of the eight House Members and the two Senators--urging swift approval of this request. Although work to assess the damage remains ongoing, so far nearly $11 million in eligible damages has been documented in just eight counties. That is just eight counties. One county alone, we know, has $9 million in damage. This is well above the $7.5 million threshold that Minnesota has to meet to get the 75-percent Federal match for those counties that have $3.50 per capita damage. So we imagine that a lot of these counties will be getting Federal help for infrastructure damage at that 75-percent mark. Believe me when I say Minnesotans just are not sitting around waiting for help. The hard work of assessing the damage continues this week and is even expected to extend into the following week. Even though the damage across the State has reached a level high enough to trigger eligibility, each county is doing its damage assessment. In some States, as I say, they have had problems with FEMA, but in our State for the most part we have been happy with the work they have done. In my time as a Senator, I have seen the 35W bridge collapse, I have seen the Federal Government step in with inordinate help to get that bridge rebuilt in less than a year. I saw a tornado come into Wadena, MN, and literally pick up a high school like it was in the ``Wizard of Oz,'' the bleachers landing a mile away. In that town--because of Federal assistance in alerting those citizens about how to use their emergency systems--because of an alarm system and a siren that worked, despite the fact that their high school looked like a bomb had hit it, a major, large high school--not one person was killed. There was a high school lifeguard watching over 40 little kids at a swimming pool. The sirens went off. The parents got there within 10 minutes and had them all gone, and the few kids that were left ran over with the lifeguard, who had the presence of mind to stay in a neighbor's basement who they did not even know. Not one person died because that siren system worked, because people had practiced, because they knew what to do, and because we had the emergency system in place. That high school is now rebuilt. Along with that high school being rebuilt, there is a beautiful new company that was rebuilt that is in the farming area, in the farm financing area. Their company was devastated. They did not have a basement. All they had was one safe that the man had bought, and he had joked that it was big enough to hold a few employees. That day when that tornado hit, there were four employees on duty. They went into that safe. That was the only thing that remained of that business. When that man rebuilt, he bought a big enough safe for all 20 of his employees--a true story. But this is how Minnesota responds to disasters. Few things are more humbling than standing in those kinds of wreckages. Natural disasters are humbling because they remind us that nature is still more powerful than all the technology we have. But they are also humbling because they bring out the best in our communities. From what I have seen in our State--from those emergency responders diving into the Mississippi River over and over to look for survivors in the 35W bridge disaster or what I saw in Fargo-Moorhead, where a man was volunteering to give out food and lunches at the emergency center and I said to him: Oh, thank you for volunteering. What brings you here? He said: I lost my entire house. I said: And you came to volunteer? He said: It is the best thing I could do with my time--those are the things that I remember. What I remember from these floods across the State--where, again, despite this incredible damage not one person died in our State from this flooding--I remember, again, those first responders and the normal citizens who just got up and helped their neighbors. We saw this spirit of solidarity when a 911 call came in from a woman who was driving home to Anoka, MN, from Sioux Falls, SD, when her car spun out of control and was swept away. Water was inching up to the windows. State Trooper Brian Beuning pushed through the rushing water when she called for help. He got her out of the car and held on to her until help arrived. The car ended up in a field a quarter of a mile away. A boat tried to rescue them, but the current was too swift. Finally, two firefighters from Luverne, MN, tied themselves to a semitruck and got the woman and the trooper to safety. Rather than running from disaster, those first responders bravely ran toward it; and that is my State for you. In the face of ice storms, historic floods, tornadoes, even the collapse of that bridge, Minnesota does not fall apart. Minnesota comes together. When disaster hits our State, we hit the ground running and do not stop until we have the resources in place to ensure our communities are made whole. That means local and State help, but that also means Federal help. Thank you. I yield the floor. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Ms. KLOBUCHAR

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I rise today to honor ``A Prairie Home Companion,'' which for 40 years has shared with its listeners the comings and goings of the good people of that most Minnesota of towns, Lake Wobegon--where as everyone knows, all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. Only 12 people were in the audience for that very first broadcast on July 6, 1974, at the Janet Wallace Auditorium at Macalester College in Saint Paul. If those dozen people got there by car, they paid 55 cents per gallon to fill the tanks of their Ford Pintos or Plymouth Valiants. If they stopped for a McDonald's burger afterward, they paid 30 cents. How things have changed--and not just the price of gas and burgers! Today, 40 years later, more than 600 radio stations carry ``A Prairie Home Companion'' to four million listeners every week from the historic Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul. It has won a Peabody Award and has broadcast from nations including Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany and Iceland and nearly every State in the Nation. It has inspired a movie by the same name, which won four international awards. It has helped make Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media household names. And it has certainly made its creator and host, Garrison Keillor, a household name! Mr. Keillor has won Grammy and George Foster Peabody awards, not to mention the National Humanities Medal. But one thing has not changed at all from that very first broadcast: This little variety program resonates with people. It has warmed our hearts with its stories, songs, poems and jokes. It has made us laugh, made us cry, and made us sing along. And it has given its millions of listeners a hometown they can call their own--right in the heart of Minnesota. Madam President, I would like to congratulate Minnesota Public Radio, American Public Media, and the cast and crew of ``A Prairie Home Companion'' on 40 years of radio excellence. This is one show that is most certainly above average.